Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 1 in E flat major, K16 (1864)
Allegro molto
Andante
Presto
The thought that Mozart actually composed a Symphony No 1, employing (at the age of eight) a theme which would reappear in the Jupiter symphony, requires what can only be called suspension of disbelief. Did his influential father have a hand in it? Was it written by Mozart at all? Was he, wunderkind though he was, even capable of writing it? His second and third symphonies, as we now know, were the work of other people, but all the evidence points to the authenticity of K16. True, the music itself does not tell us as much. How could it be expected to do so? Even the reiterating and quite recognisable anticipation of the Jupiter symphony, which dominates the slow movement, is just an eighteenth-century tag, consisting of the notes do-re-fa-mi in sol-fa notation. Mozart employed it more than once in the course of his career, before bringing it to its apotheosis in the finale of his last symphony. Yet the way the horns play it, or underline it, in this boyhood work seems nothing if not significant, even though, in suggesting as much, we are merely being wise after the event.
Or are we? Mozart himself was presumably thinking along ambitious lines when, in writing the piece, he asked his sister Nannerl to remind him to give the horns "something special to do." Moreover the circumstances in which he composed it, during the famous family visit to London when he met Johann Christian Bach and performed for King George III, were curiously, indeed mysteriously, Mozartian, with his father lying in bed, seemingly dying of pneumonia but in fact suffering from no more than a cold, and with the children under orders not to make the slightest noise. Instead, said Nannerl of her brother, "he composed his first symphony for all the instruments of the orchestra – but especially for trumpets and kettledrums."
Though the absence of trumpets and drums from the score may suggest that it was a different symphony she was copying for him as she sat beside him in Leopold Mozart's sickroom, the parts for these instruments (not for the only time in a work by Mozart) may simply have been lost. Certainly the fanfares of the first movement sound ceremonial enough to imply their presence, even if it would be going too far to suggest, as one authority has done, that the stuttering rhythm is an anticipation of Papageno in The Magic Flute. The slow movement in C minor, however, is surely an early manifestation of sombre Mozartian poignancy, swept aside by the breezy concluding presto.
© Conrad Wilson
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Piano Concerto in D, Hob XVIII (1784)
Vivace
Un poco Adagio
Rondo all’Ungarese - Allegro assai
Haydn’s long working life corresponded almost exactly to the period which saw the piano supersede the harpsichord as the pre-eminent keyboard instrument. Though many commentators believe that the earliest of Haydn’s surviving keyboard concertos were conceived for the organ, by the time he came to write tonight's D major Concerto (sometime in the early 1780s), pianos were increasingly being viewed as the keyboard instrument of choice. Certainly, writing in 1784, Haydn urged his friend Marianne von Genzinger to sell her harpsichord and buy a piano. Three years later he asked his publishers, Artaria, to advance him some funds so that he could buy a new piano to use while composing a set of three piano trios.
Unlike Mozart, Haydn did not compose his keyboard concertos to showcase his own abilities as a performer. His proficiency at and appreciation for the keyboard are abundantly evident from his output of wonderful keyboard sonatas and piano trios, but he was no virtuoso. Like many composers, he used the keyboard as a tool, as he explained to his friend and biographer Georg Greiseinger: “I sit down at the keyboard, and begin to improvise, sad or happy according to my mood. Once I have seized on an idea, my whole endeavour is to develop and sustain it, always in keeping with the rules of art."
The D major Concerto was almost certainly the last keyboard concerto Haydn wrote. It was first published by Artaira in 1784, and it rapidly became one of his most popular works. When, in 1787, Haydn offered it to an English publisher, he learnt that pirated editions had already appeared in London. Indeed, by the time of Haydn’s death, the Concerto was being sold by no fewer than eight different publishing houses in five different countries.
It is Haydn’s lively and original voice, rather than conspicuous virtuosity, which marks out this concerto; and the piece overflows with thematic material which Haydn manipulates with typical skill and cleverness. It culminates in a tour-de-force Gypsy Rondo Finale, based on an old Croatian dance; an exotic novelty which must have surely delighted the Esterházy court.
© Stephen Strugnell
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Overture, The Creatures of Prometheus, Op 43
The reputation Beethoven enjoyed by his 30th birthday can be measured by the fact that he was invited to write The Creatures of Prometheus. The ballet was to be performed before Maria Teresa of Naples and Sicily, the most powerful woman in Vienna. Holy Roman Empress, Queen of Germany, Archduchess Consort of Austria, Queen Consort of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia… Need I go on? We live in an age when what remains of empires are breaking down so it is harder for us to imagine a Europe so utterly dominated by the Hapsburg family as it was in 1801. To be commissioned to write music for ears as important as Maria Teresa’s was an honour for any young composer, even a hot-head republican like Beethoven.
The plot of the ballet was drafted by Neapolitan choreographer Salvatore Viganò, - a major Viennese celebrity in his own right. It tells the tale of Prometheus bringing civilization to humanity in the shape of two statues that come to life. As well as enlightening them himself, he recruits many of the Olympian gods and the muses of Parnassus to teach them the arts, especially music and dance. The ballet is said to have opened with Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods and then fleeing – hence the jarring discord at the start of this overture, and the subsequent energetic scurrying.
© Svend Brown
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 8 in F Op 93 (1812)
Allegro vivace e con brio
Allegretto scherzando
Tempo di Menuetto
Allegro vivace
To call Symphony No 8 “the little one”, as Beethoven himself once did, is to ignore the fact that it is also the most explosive of the nine. In no other Beethoven symphony is a movement so peppered with abrupt chords and rip-roaring outbursts than the first movement of this work. In fact, Beethoven’s Symphony No 8 is “little” only in the sense that it is compact. Completed in 1812, along with the Symphony No 7, it possesses the same furiously creative drive in even more concentrated form. Beethoven himself preferred the Eighth to the Seventh. When told that its brevity had disappointed its first audience, he replied that that was because it was “so much better”.
The first movement’s well-clinched opening theme gives an immediate idea of the tautness of the music. Yet the theme’s sublime jollity seems constantly threatened by the volatile quality of so much of the rest of the movement. When – after a development section which has been essentially one huge crescendo – it returns on the cellos and basses at the start of the recapitulation, it has to struggle to make itself heard through the noise of the rest of the orchestra.
The slow movement is a tease, in that it is not a slow movement at all, any more than it is a scherzo, despite its scherzando marking. The origin of its ticking rhythm lay in a canon Beethoven wrote for Johann Maelzel, inventor of one of the metronomes of the period. Here Beethoven’s touch is at its lightest, even when small explosions interrupt the ticking.
Something similar happens in the minuet – the opening bars are so syncopated that the dance-like nature of the music is intentionally concealed. Beethoven obviously had no cause to write anything as retrogressive as a minuet at this stage in his career, and the music has little to do with minuets of the sort he produced in his youth. In a sense, this is an anti-minuet, written in reaction to the huge, circling scherzo of the Symphony No 7. The trio section, with its genial horns and grunting cellos, is as charming as it is humorously grotesque.
The exhilaratingly swerving finale does not avoid head-on collisions between one key and another. Indeed it positively savours them. The momentum hardly relaxes even for the lyrical second subject on the woodwind, or for the profound impulse of what is one of Beethoven’s biggest and greatest codas. culminating in virtuosically pounding kettledrums.
© Conrad Wilson
The boy Mozart opens this programme with a piece written at the age of eight, while mature Beethoven closes it. Hearing their two symphonies together dramatically highlights how two generations of composers transformed the symphony – and the language of music itself – from the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Romanticism.
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.

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