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New Year in Vienna
- New Year in Vienna
Programme note
Dancing on the Danube
Vienna and Budapest have more than the Danube in common. Less than 150 miles apart, the two cities have long been linked in all kinds of ways – politically, commercially, socially, artistically, not least musically. But the river has always been the direct physical connection between them. One of the greatest of all Viennese assets came by way of the Danube when, in about 1750, Johann Michael Strauss travelled up the river from the Hungarian capital to settle in the Austrian capital. His grandson Johann Baptist, who learned to love Viennese dance music in his father’s tavern in the suburb of Leopoldstat, was destined to become the founder of the Strauss musical dynasty – no fewer than four generations of composers, beginning with Johann I himself and including not only his three exceptionally talented sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard but also Eduard’s less talented son, Johann III, and Johann III’s nephew, Eduard II.
While Hungary had little to do with the early development of either the Viennese waltz or the polka, like most Austrian composers from Haydn onwards, Johann I and his sons were fascinated by Hungarian or, more precisely, Hungarian-gypsy music. Johann I wrote several Hungarian gallops and a waltz, Emlék Pestre, dedicated to “the noble Hungarian nation” after a visit to Pest in 1833. As for Johann II, as well as comparatively minor pieces like the Pesther Csárdás and the Éljen a Magyár Polka, he wrote a Hungarian-inspired operetta Der Zigeunerbaron and a comic opera, Ritter Pásmán, which is also set in Hungary. Music from both those works is included in the present programme.
If Ritter Pásmán was too ambitious a project for a composer of operettas, Der Zigeunerbaron proved to be second in popularity among Johann II’s many stage works only to Die Fledermaus – which indicates how much the Viennese public enjoyed the rhythmic zest and the exotic melodies and harmonies of Hungarian-gypsy music. So it is not entirely surprising that the gap in the Viennese operetta market left by the death of Johann II was most successfully filled by two Hungarian composers and long-term Viennese residents – Franz Lehár, who learned to be more Viennese than the Viennese while remaining as Hungarian as taste required, and Emmerich Kálmán, who combined the waltz with Hungarian-gypsy music in much the same way as Johann II in the trend-setting Ziegeunerbaron. That this was not true Hungarian folk music Béla Bartók, once a fellow student with Kálmán in Budapest, was later at considerable pains to demonstrate. But for the Viennese in the Strauss/Lehár era if it had come to the city by way of the Danube it was authentic enough for them.
Franz von Suppé (1819–1895)
Poet and Peasant (Dichter und Bauer): OvertureAlthough Johann Strauss II is the hero of Viennese operetta – in his lifetime he had no serious rival – its father figure was Franz von Suppé. It was Suppé who had the talent and the initiative to write pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes which threatened to monopolise the Viennese audience in the late 1850s, before Strauss came on the scene. If most of the dozens of operettas Suppé wrote for the Theater an der Wien and the Carltheater are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. Though written in 1846, years before he entered into competition with Offenbach, and though intended not for one of his operettas but for a play by Carl Elmer, the Poet and Peasant Overture – with its slow introduction, its lyrical cello solo, its rousing main theme and, of course, its elegant Viennese waltz tune – is a thoroughly characteristic example.
Joseph Lanner (1801-1843)
The Schönbrunn Waltzes (Die Schönbrunner Walzer) Op.200A few years older than Suppé, Joseph Lanner was with his near-contemporary Johann Strauss I one of the two great founders of the Viennese ballroom idiom. The reason why the name of Strauss rather than that of Lanner is now overwhelmingly associated with the Viennese waltz is not that Johann I was an overwhelmingly better musician. It’s largely because Johann Strauss had the good fortune to father three sons all of whom were more than capable of carrying on where he left off. Joseph Lanner on the other hand had one son, August, who had both the talent and the inclination to follow him but who died at the age of twenty-one.
Lanner’s most famous waltz, however, secured a new life nearly 70 years after it was written. One of its main themes is ingeniously echoed, along with another Lanner tune, in the waltz episode featuring the Ballerina in Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. In its original setting it is just one of several themes arranged, as was the Viennese custom by now, in a sequence of five waltz tunes that are briefly developed and recapitulated in a quasi-symphonic construction. Written in 1842 and named after the royal palace to the south-west of the city, The Schönbrunn Waltzes are a convincing demonstration that, while Lanner might not have been capable of writing a Blue Danube, the Viennese waltz would still have become an internationally popular dance form even if the Strauss family had never existed.
Johann Strauss I (1804–49)
Sighs (Seufzer) Galop, Op.9A forerunner and close relation of both the quick polka and the can-can, the galop was the most energetic – as well as the easiest to learn – of all ballroom dances in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before the polka overtook it in popularity the elder Johann Strauss wrote dozens of them, none more entertaining than Seufzer. In theory, there is no time to stand around sighing in the middle of a galop but, in practice, a resourceful composer can arrange anything. Suspending the apparently unstoppable trajectory of the dance – as Johann I does twice, indulging in four sighs each time – actually makes the momentum all the more exhilarating.
Franz Lehár (1870-1948)
The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe): Vilja Song (Viljalied)The most successful of all Lehár’s operettas – the most successful of all Viennese operettas next to Die Fledermaus – was, and still is, The Merry Widow, which was first performed in Vienna in 1905. Set partly in the Paris embassy of an imaginary, impoverished Balkan state, it skilfully exploits both the sophisticated amusements of the great city and the sentiment associated with the backward way of life in the Balkan state of “Pontevedro.” The most treasured Pontevedran asset is the merry widow herself, Hanna Glawari, who is not only beautiful but also so rich that the loss of her personal fortune through marriage to any but another Pontevedran would sink the the country’s whole economy. Her most popular number, the Vilja Song, established Lehár’s Balkand credentials at an early stage in his career. Performed at a glamorous party in her Parisian residence, it is a clever and highly attractive idea of what a “Pontevedran” folk song would sound like. It tells the story of Vilja, an irresistible wood nymph who allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . . Hanna proves to be similarly irresistible to the one Pontevedran she fancies and finally, unlike Vilja, commits herself to him
Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)
Die Fledermaus: CsárdásAmong the guests at magnificent ball thrown in Vienna by the Russian Prince Orlofsky are Rosalinde and her parlour maid Adele, neither of them invited in her own name and neither aware of the other’s presence. Rosalinde’s disguise as a Hungarian countess is so effective that it deceives even her own husband, Gabriel von Eisenstein, who is also incognito and is posing as a French marquis. It is in order to prove her Hungarian credentials that Rosalinde takes it upon herself to sing the longest and most elaborate aria in the whole score - a csárdás introduced by an authentic-sounding Hungarian gypsy clarinet and consisting of a characteristically nostalgic slow section and a brilliantly fiery ending. Gabriel, to his later embarrassment, is duly deceived
Josef Strauss (1827-1870)
Village Swallows from Austria (Dorfschwalben aus Österreich) Waltz, Op.164Like Johann II’s Bauern-Polka, his brother Josef’s Dorfschwalben aus Österreich offered Viennese good-time society a pleasure trip to the countryside – where, since it originated there as the Ländler folk dance, the waltz is not entirely out of place. Having set the scene in the opening bars with bagpipe drones on the strings and a yodelling clarinet, Josef introduces not only his first main theme but also, with the help of a bird whistle in the orchestra, his twittering swallows. Some of the tunes are more sophisticated than others but there are regular yodelling or droning reminders of the rustic setting. The swallows and the graceful tune, so characteristic of Josef, that goes with them are recalled just before the end.
Johann Strauss II
Out Hunting (Auf der Jagd) Polka, Op.373Just as the ballroom supplied operetta with some of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas, so operetta replenished the ballroom repertoire with selections of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas. The quick polka Auf der Jagd – a title which invites a particularly colourful use of horns and trumpets – comes from a Strauss operetta much admired by Brahms, Cagliostro in Wien.
Johann Strauss II
The Gypsy Baron (Der Zigeunerbaron): OvertureLike many Viennese musicians, Johann Strauss fancied himself as an exponent of the Hungarian idiom – or, to be more precise, the Hungarian-gypsy idiom, which was almost as popular in Vienna as it was in Budapest not so very many miles down the Danube to the East. The show-stopping status of Rosalinde’s Csárdás in Die Fledermaus is a good indication of the favoured position of that kind of music in Viennese society at the time. As it happens, although Johann II didn’t have much time to devote himself to the Hungarian idiom – waltzes and polkas were what the public wanted from him -– the most ambitious of his stage works, Ritter Pásmán, and one of the most successful, The Gypsy Baron, are both settings of Hungarian subjects.
The Overture to The Gypsy Baron offers a delightful sample of what the score as a whole – hung on the flimsiest of flimsy operetta plots – has to offer. Hungarian-gypsy melodic inflections, immediately evident in the aggressive beginning of the slow introduction, are put to most expressive use in the elegantly sustained line which eventually emerges on solo oboe over a quiet pizzicato accompaniment. Although the waltz which is the main interest of the second part of the overture is of the conventional Viennese kind, there is a wide variety of material here and much of it is of Hungarian inspiration, not least the syncopations so zestfully incorporated in the coda.
Josef Strauss
Blabbermouth (Plappermäulchen) Polka, Op.245The Plappermäulchen Polka – the title of which translates literally as “Blabbermouth” and which is not to be confused with another polka by Josef Strauss called Die Schwätzerin or “Chatterbox” – is subtitled “a musical joke.” It was written for the Viennese Carnival season of 1868 and, with its amusing instrumental repartee and its percussion rattling on, is a characteristically ingenious example of the novelty polka.
Robert Stolz (1880–1975)
The Favourite (Der Favorit): “You will be the emperor of my soul” (“Du sollst der Kaiser meiner Seele sein”)Robert Stolz – great-nephew of the famous Verdi soprano Teresa Stolz – was the last major survivor from the heyday of Viennese operetta. Although he died less than forty years ago, and although he was so much of our time as to win two Oscars for his work as a composer in Hollywood, he had been drafted into the service of operetta long before the First World War. And he went on writing for the stage until he was well into his eighties, completing no fewer than sixty-five operettas or musicals as well as hundreds of songs and dozens of film scores. Der Favorit was written in 1916 for the Komische Oper where it was such a flop that he wrote nothing more for Berlin until the 1920s, by when the German capital had taken over from Vienna as the centre of operetta. The one surviving number from Der Favorit, which otherwise disappeared without trace, is the soprano aria “Du sollst der Kaiser meiner Seele sein” which is so beautifully written for the voice, so melodious and so idiomatic that in Vienna it would surely have kept the whole work afloat.
Johann Strauss II
The Knight Pasman (Ritter Pásmán): CzárdásWhen Johann II’s Ritter Pásmán – a comic opera, which is a cut above operetta – was first performed at the Court Opera in Vienna on New Year’s Day in 1892 it was generally agreed that, although the score was respectable enough, the composer’s ambition had exceeded his ability. It was also agreed, however, that the ballet music in the third act – a polka, a waltz and a csárdás – represented him at his very best. Certainly, the csárdás with its passionately expressive slow introduction and the brilliantly stylish, increasingly vigorous dance that follows is as exciting as anything the Danube had brought from Hungary to Vienna.
Johann Strauss II
Tittle-Tattle (Tritsch-Tratsch) Polka Op.214Tritsch-Tratsch has always been one of the most popular of Viennese polkas. After its first performance in 1858 there was such a demand for it that the sheet music was sold out within a few days of its publication and was hastily reprinted – to the delight no doubt of the owners of the recently issued Tritsch-Tratsch magazine from which it takes its name. A brilliant example of the quick polka, it demonstrates just how swiftly and how irresistibly chit-chat or tittle-tattle can get round a crowded ballroom.
Johann Strauss II
By the Beautiful Blue Danube (An der schönen blauen Donau) Waltz, Op.314The Blue Danube waltz is not only the last word in flattery – the Danube in Vienna is a muddy brown in most lights – but also the ultimate example of the concert waltz. In company with some of the most distinguished examples of its kind, it consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections, each one of them based on two different themes. Clearly, as the composer of well over a hundred waltzes (not including those in his operettas), Johann II was a uniquely resourceful melodist. Written for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867, this most familiar of Viennese waltzes was originally scored for chorus and orchestra and in that form it has achieved something like the status of a national anthem. The choral version, however, doesn’t have the splendid coda which in the orchestral version recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. It flows just as easily as the Danube itself, and far more colourfully.
© Gerald Larner
- conductor
- soprano
Is there any finer way to greet the New Year than with a sparkling, traditional Viennese gala concert? Lovely singing, irresistible Strauss waltzes, polkas and overtures, and, of course, the essential favourites: The Blue Danube and Radetsky March. This is music to brighten up the darkest days and send you off with a spring in your step.
New Year in Vienna
- New Year in Vienna
Programme note
Dancing on the Danube
Vienna and Budapest have more than the Danube in common. Less than 150 miles apart, the two cities have long been linked in all kinds of ways – politically, commercially, socially, artistically, not least musically. But the river has always been the direct physical connection between them. One of the greatest of all Viennese assets came by way of the Danube when, in about 1750, Johann Michael Strauss travelled up the river from the Hungarian capital to settle in the Austrian capital. His grandson Johann Baptist, who learned to love Viennese dance music in his father’s tavern in the suburb of Leopoldstat, was destined to become the founder of the Strauss musical dynasty – no fewer than four generations of composers, beginning with Johann I himself and including not only his three exceptionally talented sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard but also Eduard’s less talented son, Johann III, and Johann III’s nephew, Eduard II.
While Hungary had little to do with the early development of either the Viennese waltz or the polka, like most Austrian composers from Haydn onwards, Johann I and his sons were fascinated by Hungarian or, more precisely, Hungarian-gypsy music. Johann I wrote several Hungarian gallops and a waltz, Emlék Pestre, dedicated to “the noble Hungarian nation” after a visit to Pest in 1833. As for Johann II, as well as comparatively minor pieces like the Pesther Csárdás and the Éljen a Magyár Polka, he wrote a Hungarian-inspired operetta Der Zigeunerbaron and a comic opera, Ritter Pásmán, which is also set in Hungary. Music from both those works is included in the present programme.
If Ritter Pásmán was too ambitious a project for a composer of operettas, Der Zigeunerbaron proved to be second in popularity among Johann II’s many stage works only to Die Fledermaus – which indicates how much the Viennese public enjoyed the rhythmic zest and the exotic melodies and harmonies of Hungarian-gypsy music. So it is not entirely surprising that the gap in the Viennese operetta market left by the death of Johann II was most successfully filled by two Hungarian composers and long-term Viennese residents – Franz Lehár, who learned to be more Viennese than the Viennese while remaining as Hungarian as taste required, and Emmerich Kálmán, who combined the waltz with Hungarian-gypsy music in much the same way as Johann II in the trend-setting Ziegeunerbaron. That this was not true Hungarian folk music Béla Bartók, once a fellow student with Kálmán in Budapest, was later at considerable pains to demonstrate. But for the Viennese in the Strauss/Lehár era if it had come to the city by way of the Danube it was authentic enough for them.
Franz von Suppé (1819–1895)
Poet and Peasant (Dichter und Bauer): OvertureAlthough Johann Strauss II is the hero of Viennese operetta – in his lifetime he had no serious rival – its father figure was Franz von Suppé. It was Suppé who had the talent and the initiative to write pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes which threatened to monopolise the Viennese audience in the late 1850s, before Strauss came on the scene. If most of the dozens of operettas Suppé wrote for the Theater an der Wien and the Carltheater are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. Though written in 1846, years before he entered into competition with Offenbach, and though intended not for one of his operettas but for a play by Carl Elmer, the Poet and Peasant Overture – with its slow introduction, its lyrical cello solo, its rousing main theme and, of course, its elegant Viennese waltz tune – is a thoroughly characteristic example.
Joseph Lanner (1801-1843)
The Schönbrunn Waltzes (Die Schönbrunner Walzer) Op.200A few years older than Suppé, Joseph Lanner was with his near-contemporary Johann Strauss I one of the two great founders of the Viennese ballroom idiom. The reason why the name of Strauss rather than that of Lanner is now overwhelmingly associated with the Viennese waltz is not that Johann I was an overwhelmingly better musician. It’s largely because Johann Strauss had the good fortune to father three sons all of whom were more than capable of carrying on where he left off. Joseph Lanner on the other hand had one son, August, who had both the talent and the inclination to follow him but who died at the age of twenty-one.
Lanner’s most famous waltz, however, secured a new life nearly 70 years after it was written. One of its main themes is ingeniously echoed, along with another Lanner tune, in the waltz episode featuring the Ballerina in Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. In its original setting it is just one of several themes arranged, as was the Viennese custom by now, in a sequence of five waltz tunes that are briefly developed and recapitulated in a quasi-symphonic construction. Written in 1842 and named after the royal palace to the south-west of the city, The Schönbrunn Waltzes are a convincing demonstration that, while Lanner might not have been capable of writing a Blue Danube, the Viennese waltz would still have become an internationally popular dance form even if the Strauss family had never existed.
Johann Strauss I (1804–49)
Sighs (Seufzer) Galop, Op.9A forerunner and close relation of both the quick polka and the can-can, the galop was the most energetic – as well as the easiest to learn – of all ballroom dances in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before the polka overtook it in popularity the elder Johann Strauss wrote dozens of them, none more entertaining than Seufzer. In theory, there is no time to stand around sighing in the middle of a galop but, in practice, a resourceful composer can arrange anything. Suspending the apparently unstoppable trajectory of the dance – as Johann I does twice, indulging in four sighs each time – actually makes the momentum all the more exhilarating.
Franz Lehár (1870-1948)
The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe): Vilja Song (Viljalied)The most successful of all Lehár’s operettas – the most successful of all Viennese operettas next to Die Fledermaus – was, and still is, The Merry Widow, which was first performed in Vienna in 1905. Set partly in the Paris embassy of an imaginary, impoverished Balkan state, it skilfully exploits both the sophisticated amusements of the great city and the sentiment associated with the backward way of life in the Balkan state of “Pontevedro.” The most treasured Pontevedran asset is the merry widow herself, Hanna Glawari, who is not only beautiful but also so rich that the loss of her personal fortune through marriage to any but another Pontevedran would sink the the country’s whole economy. Her most popular number, the Vilja Song, established Lehár’s Balkand credentials at an early stage in his career. Performed at a glamorous party in her Parisian residence, it is a clever and highly attractive idea of what a “Pontevedran” folk song would sound like. It tells the story of Vilja, an irresistible wood nymph who allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . . Hanna proves to be similarly irresistible to the one Pontevedran she fancies and finally, unlike Vilja, commits herself to him
Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)
Die Fledermaus: CsárdásAmong the guests at magnificent ball thrown in Vienna by the Russian Prince Orlofsky are Rosalinde and her parlour maid Adele, neither of them invited in her own name and neither aware of the other’s presence. Rosalinde’s disguise as a Hungarian countess is so effective that it deceives even her own husband, Gabriel von Eisenstein, who is also incognito and is posing as a French marquis. It is in order to prove her Hungarian credentials that Rosalinde takes it upon herself to sing the longest and most elaborate aria in the whole score - a csárdás introduced by an authentic-sounding Hungarian gypsy clarinet and consisting of a characteristically nostalgic slow section and a brilliantly fiery ending. Gabriel, to his later embarrassment, is duly deceived
Josef Strauss (1827-1870)
Village Swallows from Austria (Dorfschwalben aus Österreich) Waltz, Op.164Like Johann II’s Bauern-Polka, his brother Josef’s Dorfschwalben aus Österreich offered Viennese good-time society a pleasure trip to the countryside – where, since it originated there as the Ländler folk dance, the waltz is not entirely out of place. Having set the scene in the opening bars with bagpipe drones on the strings and a yodelling clarinet, Josef introduces not only his first main theme but also, with the help of a bird whistle in the orchestra, his twittering swallows. Some of the tunes are more sophisticated than others but there are regular yodelling or droning reminders of the rustic setting. The swallows and the graceful tune, so characteristic of Josef, that goes with them are recalled just before the end.
Johann Strauss II
Out Hunting (Auf der Jagd) Polka, Op.373Just as the ballroom supplied operetta with some of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas, so operetta replenished the ballroom repertoire with selections of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas. The quick polka Auf der Jagd – a title which invites a particularly colourful use of horns and trumpets – comes from a Strauss operetta much admired by Brahms, Cagliostro in Wien.
Johann Strauss II
The Gypsy Baron (Der Zigeunerbaron): OvertureLike many Viennese musicians, Johann Strauss fancied himself as an exponent of the Hungarian idiom – or, to be more precise, the Hungarian-gypsy idiom, which was almost as popular in Vienna as it was in Budapest not so very many miles down the Danube to the East. The show-stopping status of Rosalinde’s Csárdás in Die Fledermaus is a good indication of the favoured position of that kind of music in Viennese society at the time. As it happens, although Johann II didn’t have much time to devote himself to the Hungarian idiom – waltzes and polkas were what the public wanted from him -– the most ambitious of his stage works, Ritter Pásmán, and one of the most successful, The Gypsy Baron, are both settings of Hungarian subjects.
The Overture to The Gypsy Baron offers a delightful sample of what the score as a whole – hung on the flimsiest of flimsy operetta plots – has to offer. Hungarian-gypsy melodic inflections, immediately evident in the aggressive beginning of the slow introduction, are put to most expressive use in the elegantly sustained line which eventually emerges on solo oboe over a quiet pizzicato accompaniment. Although the waltz which is the main interest of the second part of the overture is of the conventional Viennese kind, there is a wide variety of material here and much of it is of Hungarian inspiration, not least the syncopations so zestfully incorporated in the coda.
Josef Strauss
Blabbermouth (Plappermäulchen) Polka, Op.245The Plappermäulchen Polka – the title of which translates literally as “Blabbermouth” and which is not to be confused with another polka by Josef Strauss called Die Schwätzerin or “Chatterbox” – is subtitled “a musical joke.” It was written for the Viennese Carnival season of 1868 and, with its amusing instrumental repartee and its percussion rattling on, is a characteristically ingenious example of the novelty polka.
Robert Stolz (1880–1975)
The Favourite (Der Favorit): “You will be the emperor of my soul” (“Du sollst der Kaiser meiner Seele sein”)Robert Stolz – great-nephew of the famous Verdi soprano Teresa Stolz – was the last major survivor from the heyday of Viennese operetta. Although he died less than forty years ago, and although he was so much of our time as to win two Oscars for his work as a composer in Hollywood, he had been drafted into the service of operetta long before the First World War. And he went on writing for the stage until he was well into his eighties, completing no fewer than sixty-five operettas or musicals as well as hundreds of songs and dozens of film scores. Der Favorit was written in 1916 for the Komische Oper where it was such a flop that he wrote nothing more for Berlin until the 1920s, by when the German capital had taken over from Vienna as the centre of operetta. The one surviving number from Der Favorit, which otherwise disappeared without trace, is the soprano aria “Du sollst der Kaiser meiner Seele sein” which is so beautifully written for the voice, so melodious and so idiomatic that in Vienna it would surely have kept the whole work afloat.
Johann Strauss II
The Knight Pasman (Ritter Pásmán): CzárdásWhen Johann II’s Ritter Pásmán – a comic opera, which is a cut above operetta – was first performed at the Court Opera in Vienna on New Year’s Day in 1892 it was generally agreed that, although the score was respectable enough, the composer’s ambition had exceeded his ability. It was also agreed, however, that the ballet music in the third act – a polka, a waltz and a csárdás – represented him at his very best. Certainly, the csárdás with its passionately expressive slow introduction and the brilliantly stylish, increasingly vigorous dance that follows is as exciting as anything the Danube had brought from Hungary to Vienna.
Johann Strauss II
Tittle-Tattle (Tritsch-Tratsch) Polka Op.214Tritsch-Tratsch has always been one of the most popular of Viennese polkas. After its first performance in 1858 there was such a demand for it that the sheet music was sold out within a few days of its publication and was hastily reprinted – to the delight no doubt of the owners of the recently issued Tritsch-Tratsch magazine from which it takes its name. A brilliant example of the quick polka, it demonstrates just how swiftly and how irresistibly chit-chat or tittle-tattle can get round a crowded ballroom.
Johann Strauss II
By the Beautiful Blue Danube (An der schönen blauen Donau) Waltz, Op.314The Blue Danube waltz is not only the last word in flattery – the Danube in Vienna is a muddy brown in most lights – but also the ultimate example of the concert waltz. In company with some of the most distinguished examples of its kind, it consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections, each one of them based on two different themes. Clearly, as the composer of well over a hundred waltzes (not including those in his operettas), Johann II was a uniquely resourceful melodist. Written for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867, this most familiar of Viennese waltzes was originally scored for chorus and orchestra and in that form it has achieved something like the status of a national anthem. The choral version, however, doesn’t have the splendid coda which in the orchestral version recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. It flows just as easily as the Danube itself, and far more colourfully.
© Gerald Larner
- conductor
- soprano
Is there any finer way to greet the New Year than with a sparkling, traditional Viennese gala concert? Lovely singing, irresistible Strauss waltzes, polkas and overtures, and, of course, the essential favourites: The Blue Danube and Radetsky March. This is music to brighten up the darkest days and send you off with a spring in your step.
Tickets:
The Midsteeple, High Street, Dumfries DG1 2BH (Box Office open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm)
New Year in Vienna
- New Year in Vienna
Programme note
Dancing on the Danube
Vienna and Budapest have more than the Danube in common. Less than 150 miles apart, the two cities have long been linked in all kinds of ways – politically, commercially, socially, artistically, not least musically. But the river has always been the direct physical connection between them. One of the greatest of all Viennese assets came by way of the Danube when, in about 1750, Johann Michael Strauss travelled up the river from the Hungarian capital to settle in the Austrian capital. His grandson Johann Baptist, who learned to love Viennese dance music in his father’s tavern in the suburb of Leopoldstat, was destined to become the founder of the Strauss musical dynasty – no fewer than four generations of composers, beginning with Johann I himself and including not only his three exceptionally talented sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard but also Eduard’s less talented son, Johann III, and Johann III’s nephew, Eduard II.
While Hungary had little to do with the early development of either the Viennese waltz or the polka, like most Austrian composers from Haydn onwards, Johann I and his sons were fascinated by Hungarian or, more precisely, Hungarian-gypsy music. Johann I wrote several Hungarian gallops and a waltz, Emlék Pestre, dedicated to “the noble Hungarian nation” after a visit to Pest in 1833. As for Johann II, as well as comparatively minor pieces like the Pesther Csárdás and the Éljen a Magyár Polka, he wrote a Hungarian-inspired operetta Der Zigeunerbaron and a comic opera, Ritter Pásmán, which is also set in Hungary. Music from both those works is included in the present programme.
If Ritter Pásmán was too ambitious a project for a composer of operettas, Der Zigeunerbaron proved to be second in popularity among Johann II’s many stage works only to Die Fledermaus – which indicates how much the Viennese public enjoyed the rhythmic zest and the exotic melodies and harmonies of Hungarian-gypsy music. So it is not entirely surprising that the gap in the Viennese operetta market left by the death of Johann II was most successfully filled by two Hungarian composers and long-term Viennese residents – Franz Lehár, who learned to be more Viennese than the Viennese while remaining as Hungarian as taste required, and Emmerich Kálmán, who combined the waltz with Hungarian-gypsy music in much the same way as Johann II in the trend-setting Ziegeunerbaron. That this was not true Hungarian folk music Béla Bartók, once a fellow student with Kálmán in Budapest, was later at considerable pains to demonstrate. But for the Viennese in the Strauss/Lehár era if it had come to the city by way of the Danube it was authentic enough for them.
Franz von Suppé (1819–1895)
Poet and Peasant (Dichter und Bauer): OvertureAlthough Johann Strauss II is the hero of Viennese operetta – in his lifetime he had no serious rival – its father figure was Franz von Suppé. It was Suppé who had the talent and the initiative to write pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes which threatened to monopolise the Viennese audience in the late 1850s, before Strauss came on the scene. If most of the dozens of operettas Suppé wrote for the Theater an der Wien and the Carltheater are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. Though written in 1846, years before he entered into competition with Offenbach, and though intended not for one of his operettas but for a play by Carl Elmer, the Poet and Peasant Overture – with its slow introduction, its lyrical cello solo, its rousing main theme and, of course, its elegant Viennese waltz tune – is a thoroughly characteristic example.
Joseph Lanner (1801-1843)
The Schönbrunn Waltzes (Die Schönbrunner Walzer) Op.200A few years older than Suppé, Joseph Lanner was with his near-contemporary Johann Strauss I one of the two great founders of the Viennese ballroom idiom. The reason why the name of Strauss rather than that of Lanner is now overwhelmingly associated with the Viennese waltz is not that Johann I was an overwhelmingly better musician. It’s largely because Johann Strauss had the good fortune to father three sons all of whom were more than capable of carrying on where he left off. Joseph Lanner on the other hand had one son, August, who had both the talent and the inclination to follow him but who died at the age of twenty-one.
Lanner’s most famous waltz, however, secured a new life nearly 70 years after it was written. One of its main themes is ingeniously echoed, along with another Lanner tune, in the waltz episode featuring the Ballerina in Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. In its original setting it is just one of several themes arranged, as was the Viennese custom by now, in a sequence of five waltz tunes that are briefly developed and recapitulated in a quasi-symphonic construction. Written in 1842 and named after the royal palace to the south-west of the city, The Schönbrunn Waltzes are a convincing demonstration that, while Lanner might not have been capable of writing a Blue Danube, the Viennese waltz would still have become an internationally popular dance form even if the Strauss family had never existed.
Johann Strauss I (1804–49)
Sighs (Seufzer) Galop, Op.9A forerunner and close relation of both the quick polka and the can-can, the galop was the most energetic – as well as the easiest to learn – of all ballroom dances in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before the polka overtook it in popularity the elder Johann Strauss wrote dozens of them, none more entertaining than Seufzer. In theory, there is no time to stand around sighing in the middle of a galop but, in practice, a resourceful composer can arrange anything. Suspending the apparently unstoppable trajectory of the dance – as Johann I does twice, indulging in four sighs each time – actually makes the momentum all the more exhilarating.
Franz Lehár (1870-1948)
The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe): Vilja Song (Viljalied)The most successful of all Lehár’s operettas – the most successful of all Viennese operettas next to Die Fledermaus – was, and still is, The Merry Widow, which was first performed in Vienna in 1905. Set partly in the Paris embassy of an imaginary, impoverished Balkan state, it skilfully exploits both the sophisticated amusements of the great city and the sentiment associated with the backward way of life in the Balkan state of “Pontevedro.” The most treasured Pontevedran asset is the merry widow herself, Hanna Glawari, who is not only beautiful but also so rich that the loss of her personal fortune through marriage to any but another Pontevedran would sink the the country’s whole economy. Her most popular number, the Vilja Song, established Lehár’s Balkand credentials at an early stage in his career. Performed at a glamorous party in her Parisian residence, it is a clever and highly attractive idea of what a “Pontevedran” folk song would sound like. It tells the story of Vilja, an irresistible wood nymph who allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . . Hanna proves to be similarly irresistible to the one Pontevedran she fancies and finally, unlike Vilja, commits herself to him
Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)
Die Fledermaus: CsárdásAmong the guests at magnificent ball thrown in Vienna by the Russian Prince Orlofsky are Rosalinde and her parlour maid Adele, neither of them invited in her own name and neither aware of the other’s presence. Rosalinde’s disguise as a Hungarian countess is so effective that it deceives even her own husband, Gabriel von Eisenstein, who is also incognito and is posing as a French marquis. It is in order to prove her Hungarian credentials that Rosalinde takes it upon herself to sing the longest and most elaborate aria in the whole score - a csárdás introduced by an authentic-sounding Hungarian gypsy clarinet and consisting of a characteristically nostalgic slow section and a brilliantly fiery ending. Gabriel, to his later embarrassment, is duly deceived
Josef Strauss (1827-1870)
Village Swallows from Austria (Dorfschwalben aus Österreich) Waltz, Op.164Like Johann II’s Bauern-Polka, his brother Josef’s Dorfschwalben aus Österreich offered Viennese good-time society a pleasure trip to the countryside – where, since it originated there as the Ländler folk dance, the waltz is not entirely out of place. Having set the scene in the opening bars with bagpipe drones on the strings and a yodelling clarinet, Josef introduces not only his first main theme but also, with the help of a bird whistle in the orchestra, his twittering swallows. Some of the tunes are more sophisticated than others but there are regular yodelling or droning reminders of the rustic setting. The swallows and the graceful tune, so characteristic of Josef, that goes with them are recalled just before the end.
Johann Strauss II
Out Hunting (Auf der Jagd) Polka, Op.373Just as the ballroom supplied operetta with some of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas, so operetta replenished the ballroom repertoire with selections of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas. The quick polka Auf der Jagd – a title which invites a particularly colourful use of horns and trumpets – comes from a Strauss operetta much admired by Brahms, Cagliostro in Wien.
Johann Strauss II
The Gypsy Baron (Der Zigeunerbaron): OvertureLike many Viennese musicians, Johann Strauss fancied himself as an exponent of the Hungarian idiom – or, to be more precise, the Hungarian-gypsy idiom, which was almost as popular in Vienna as it was in Budapest not so very many miles down the Danube to the East. The show-stopping status of Rosalinde’s Csárdás in Die Fledermaus is a good indication of the favoured position of that kind of music in Viennese society at the time. As it happens, although Johann II didn’t have much time to devote himself to the Hungarian idiom – waltzes and polkas were what the public wanted from him -– the most ambitious of his stage works, Ritter Pásmán, and one of the most successful, The Gypsy Baron, are both settings of Hungarian subjects.
The Overture to The Gypsy Baron offers a delightful sample of what the score as a whole – hung on the flimsiest of flimsy operetta plots – has to offer. Hungarian-gypsy melodic inflections, immediately evident in the aggressive beginning of the slow introduction, are put to most expressive use in the elegantly sustained line which eventually emerges on solo oboe over a quiet pizzicato accompaniment. Although the waltz which is the main interest of the second part of the overture is of the conventional Viennese kind, there is a wide variety of material here and much of it is of Hungarian inspiration, not least the syncopations so zestfully incorporated in the coda.
Josef Strauss
Blabbermouth (Plappermäulchen) Polka, Op.245The Plappermäulchen Polka – the title of which translates literally as “Blabbermouth” and which is not to be confused with another polka by Josef Strauss called Die Schwätzerin or “Chatterbox” – is subtitled “a musical joke.” It was written for the Viennese Carnival season of 1868 and, with its amusing instrumental repartee and its percussion rattling on, is a characteristically ingenious example of the novelty polka.
Robert Stolz (1880–1975)
The Favourite (Der Favorit): “You will be the emperor of my soul” (“Du sollst der Kaiser meiner Seele sein”)Robert Stolz – great-nephew of the famous Verdi soprano Teresa Stolz – was the last major survivor from the heyday of Viennese operetta. Although he died less than forty years ago, and although he was so much of our time as to win two Oscars for his work as a composer in Hollywood, he had been drafted into the service of operetta long before the First World War. And he went on writing for the stage until he was well into his eighties, completing no fewer than sixty-five operettas or musicals as well as hundreds of songs and dozens of film scores. Der Favorit was written in 1916 for the Komische Oper where it was such a flop that he wrote nothing more for Berlin until the 1920s, by when the German capital had taken over from Vienna as the centre of operetta. The one surviving number from Der Favorit, which otherwise disappeared without trace, is the soprano aria “Du sollst der Kaiser meiner Seele sein” which is so beautifully written for the voice, so melodious and so idiomatic that in Vienna it would surely have kept the whole work afloat.
Johann Strauss II
The Knight Pasman (Ritter Pásmán): CzárdásWhen Johann II’s Ritter Pásmán – a comic opera, which is a cut above operetta – was first performed at the Court Opera in Vienna on New Year’s Day in 1892 it was generally agreed that, although the score was respectable enough, the composer’s ambition had exceeded his ability. It was also agreed, however, that the ballet music in the third act – a polka, a waltz and a csárdás – represented him at his very best. Certainly, the csárdás with its passionately expressive slow introduction and the brilliantly stylish, increasingly vigorous dance that follows is as exciting as anything the Danube had brought from Hungary to Vienna.
Johann Strauss II
Tittle-Tattle (Tritsch-Tratsch) Polka Op.214Tritsch-Tratsch has always been one of the most popular of Viennese polkas. After its first performance in 1858 there was such a demand for it that the sheet music was sold out within a few days of its publication and was hastily reprinted – to the delight no doubt of the owners of the recently issued Tritsch-Tratsch magazine from which it takes its name. A brilliant example of the quick polka, it demonstrates just how swiftly and how irresistibly chit-chat or tittle-tattle can get round a crowded ballroom.
Johann Strauss II
By the Beautiful Blue Danube (An der schönen blauen Donau) Waltz, Op.314The Blue Danube waltz is not only the last word in flattery – the Danube in Vienna is a muddy brown in most lights – but also the ultimate example of the concert waltz. In company with some of the most distinguished examples of its kind, it consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections, each one of them based on two different themes. Clearly, as the composer of well over a hundred waltzes (not including those in his operettas), Johann II was a uniquely resourceful melodist. Written for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867, this most familiar of Viennese waltzes was originally scored for chorus and orchestra and in that form it has achieved something like the status of a national anthem. The choral version, however, doesn’t have the splendid coda which in the orchestral version recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. It flows just as easily as the Danube itself, and far more colourfully.
© Gerald Larner
- soprano
- conductor
Is there any finer way to greet the New Year than with a sparkling, traditional Viennese gala concert? Lovely singing, irresistible Strauss waltzes, polkas and overtures, and, of course, the essential favourites: The Blue Danube and Radetsky March. This is music to brighten up the darkest days and send you off with a spring in your step.
New Year in Vienna
- New Year in Vienna
Programme note
Dancing on the Danube
Vienna and Budapest have more than the Danube in common. Less than 150 miles apart, the two cities have long been linked in all kinds of ways – politically, commercially, socially, artistically, not least musically. But the river has always been the direct physical connection between them. One of the greatest of all Viennese assets came by way of the Danube when, in about 1750, Johann Michael Strauss travelled up the river from the Hungarian capital to settle in the Austrian capital. His grandson Johann Baptist, who learned to love Viennese dance music in his father’s tavern in the suburb of Leopoldstat, was destined to become the founder of the Strauss musical dynasty – no fewer than four generations of composers, beginning with Johann I himself and including not only his three exceptionally talented sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard but also Eduard’s less talented son, Johann III, and Johann III’s nephew, Eduard II.
While Hungary had little to do with the early development of either the Viennese waltz or the polka, like most Austrian composers from Haydn onwards, Johann I and his sons were fascinated by Hungarian or, more precisely, Hungarian-gypsy music. Johann I wrote several Hungarian gallops and a waltz, Emlék Pestre, dedicated to “the noble Hungarian nation” after a visit to Pest in 1833. As for Johann II, as well as comparatively minor pieces like the Pesther Csárdás and the Éljen a Magyár Polka, he wrote a Hungarian-inspired operetta Der Zigeunerbaron and a comic opera, Ritter Pásmán, which is also set in Hungary. Music from both those works is included in the present programme.
If Ritter Pásmán was too ambitious a project for a composer of operettas, Der Zigeunerbaron proved to be second in popularity among Johann II’s many stage works only to Die Fledermaus – which indicates how much the Viennese public enjoyed the rhythmic zest and the exotic melodies and harmonies of Hungarian-gypsy music. So it is not entirely surprising that the gap in the Viennese operetta market left by the death of Johann II was most successfully filled by two Hungarian composers and long-term Viennese residents – Franz Lehár, who learned to be more Viennese than the Viennese while remaining as Hungarian as taste required, and Emmerich Kálmán, who combined the waltz with Hungarian-gypsy music in much the same way as Johann II in the trend-setting Ziegeunerbaron. That this was not true Hungarian folk music Béla Bartók, once a fellow student with Kálmán in Budapest, was later at considerable pains to demonstrate. But for the Viennese in the Strauss/Lehár era if it had come to the city by way of the Danube it was authentic enough for them.
Franz von Suppé (1819–1895)
Poet and Peasant (Dichter und Bauer): OvertureAlthough Johann Strauss II is the hero of Viennese operetta – in his lifetime he had no serious rival – its father figure was Franz von Suppé. It was Suppé who had the talent and the initiative to write pieces just as entertaining as the Offenbach opéras bouffes which threatened to monopolise the Viennese audience in the late 1850s, before Strauss came on the scene. If most of the dozens of operettas Suppé wrote for the Theater an der Wien and the Carltheater are now remembered only by their overtures, it is not so much because the operettas are inferior as because the overtures are so very good. Though written in 1846, years before he entered into competition with Offenbach, and though intended not for one of his operettas but for a play by Carl Elmer, the Poet and Peasant Overture – with its slow introduction, its lyrical cello solo, its rousing main theme and, of course, its elegant Viennese waltz tune – is a thoroughly characteristic example.
Joseph Lanner (1801-1843)
The Schönbrunn Waltzes (Die Schönbrunner Walzer) Op.200A few years older than Suppé, Joseph Lanner was with his near-contemporary Johann Strauss I one of the two great founders of the Viennese ballroom idiom. The reason why the name of Strauss rather than that of Lanner is now overwhelmingly associated with the Viennese waltz is not that Johann I was an overwhelmingly better musician. It’s largely because Johann Strauss had the good fortune to father three sons all of whom were more than capable of carrying on where he left off. Joseph Lanner on the other hand had one son, August, who had both the talent and the inclination to follow him but who died at the age of twenty-one.
Lanner’s most famous waltz, however, secured a new life nearly 70 years after it was written. One of its main themes is ingeniously echoed, along with another Lanner tune, in the waltz episode featuring the Ballerina in Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. In its original setting it is just one of several themes arranged, as was the Viennese custom by now, in a sequence of five waltz tunes that are briefly developed and recapitulated in a quasi-symphonic construction. Written in 1842 and named after the royal palace to the south-west of the city, The Schönbrunn Waltzes are a convincing demonstration that, while Lanner might not have been capable of writing a Blue Danube, the Viennese waltz would still have become an internationally popular dance form even if the Strauss family had never existed.
Johann Strauss I (1804–49)
Sighs (Seufzer) Galop, Op.9A forerunner and close relation of both the quick polka and the can-can, the galop was the most energetic – as well as the easiest to learn – of all ballroom dances in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before the polka overtook it in popularity the elder Johann Strauss wrote dozens of them, none more entertaining than Seufzer. In theory, there is no time to stand around sighing in the middle of a galop but, in practice, a resourceful composer can arrange anything. Suspending the apparently unstoppable trajectory of the dance – as Johann I does twice, indulging in four sighs each time – actually makes the momentum all the more exhilarating.
Franz Lehár (1870-1948)
The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe): Vilja Song (Viljalied)The most successful of all Lehár’s operettas – the most successful of all Viennese operettas next to Die Fledermaus – was, and still is, The Merry Widow, which was first performed in Vienna in 1905. Set partly in the Paris embassy of an imaginary, impoverished Balkan state, it skilfully exploits both the sophisticated amusements of the great city and the sentiment associated with the backward way of life in the Balkan state of “Pontevedro.” The most treasured Pontevedran asset is the merry widow herself, Hanna Glawari, who is not only beautiful but also so rich that the loss of her personal fortune through marriage to any but another Pontevedran would sink the the country’s whole economy. Her most popular number, the Vilja Song, established Lehár’s Balkand credentials at an early stage in his career. Performed at a glamorous party in her Parisian residence, it is a clever and highly attractive idea of what a “Pontevedran” folk song would sound like. It tells the story of Vilja, an irresistible wood nymph who allows a huntsman to fall in love with her and then, to his inconsolable despair, disappears . . . . Hanna proves to be similarly irresistible to the one Pontevedran she fancies and finally, unlike Vilja, commits herself to him
Johann Strauss II (1825-1899)
Die Fledermaus: CsárdásAmong the guests at magnificent ball thrown in Vienna by the Russian Prince Orlofsky are Rosalinde and her parlour maid Adele, neither of them invited in her own name and neither aware of the other’s presence. Rosalinde’s disguise as a Hungarian countess is so effective that it deceives even her own husband, Gabriel von Eisenstein, who is also incognito and is posing as a French marquis. It is in order to prove her Hungarian credentials that Rosalinde takes it upon herself to sing the longest and most elaborate aria in the whole score - a csárdás introduced by an authentic-sounding Hungarian gypsy clarinet and consisting of a characteristically nostalgic slow section and a brilliantly fiery ending. Gabriel, to his later embarrassment, is duly deceived
Josef Strauss (1827-1870)
Village Swallows from Austria (Dorfschwalben aus Österreich) Waltz, Op.164Like Johann II’s Bauern-Polka, his brother Josef’s Dorfschwalben aus Österreich offered Viennese good-time society a pleasure trip to the countryside – where, since it originated there as the Ländler folk dance, the waltz is not entirely out of place. Having set the scene in the opening bars with bagpipe drones on the strings and a yodelling clarinet, Josef introduces not only his first main theme but also, with the help of a bird whistle in the orchestra, his twittering swallows. Some of the tunes are more sophisticated than others but there are regular yodelling or droning reminders of the rustic setting. The swallows and the graceful tune, so characteristic of Josef, that goes with them are recalled just before the end.
Johann Strauss II
Out Hunting (Auf der Jagd) Polka, Op.373Just as the ballroom supplied operetta with some of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas, so operetta replenished the ballroom repertoire with selections of its most successful numbers, usually in the form of waltzes or polkas. The quick polka Auf der Jagd – a title which invites a particularly colourful use of horns and trumpets – comes from a Strauss operetta much admired by Brahms, Cagliostro in Wien.
Johann Strauss II
The Gypsy Baron (Der Zigeunerbaron): OvertureLike many Viennese musicians, Johann Strauss fancied himself as an exponent of the Hungarian idiom – or, to be more precise, the Hungarian-gypsy idiom, which was almost as popular in Vienna as it was in Budapest not so very many miles down the Danube to the East. The show-stopping status of Rosalinde’s Csárdás in Die Fledermaus is a good indication of the favoured position of that kind of music in Viennese society at the time. As it happens, although Johann II didn’t have much time to devote himself to the Hungarian idiom – waltzes and polkas were what the public wanted from him -– the most ambitious of his stage works, Ritter Pásmán, and one of the most successful, The Gypsy Baron, are both settings of Hungarian subjects.
The Overture to The Gypsy Baron offers a delightful sample of what the score as a whole – hung on the flimsiest of flimsy operetta plots – has to offer. Hungarian-gypsy melodic inflections, immediately evident in the aggressive beginning of the slow introduction, are put to most expressive use in the elegantly sustained line which eventually emerges on solo oboe over a quiet pizzicato accompaniment. Although the waltz which is the main interest of the second part of the overture is of the conventional Viennese kind, there is a wide variety of material here and much of it is of Hungarian inspiration, not least the syncopations so zestfully incorporated in the coda.
Josef Strauss
Blabbermouth (Plappermäulchen) Polka, Op.245The Plappermäulchen Polka – the title of which translates literally as “Blabbermouth” and which is not to be confused with another polka by Josef Strauss called Die Schwätzerin or “Chatterbox” – is subtitled “a musical joke.” It was written for the Viennese Carnival season of 1868 and, with its amusing instrumental repartee and its percussion rattling on, is a characteristically ingenious example of the novelty polka.
Robert Stolz (1880–1975)
The Favourite (Der Favorit): “You will be the emperor of my soul” (“Du sollst der Kaiser meiner Seele sein”)Robert Stolz – great-nephew of the famous Verdi soprano Teresa Stolz – was the last major survivor from the heyday of Viennese operetta. Although he died less than forty years ago, and although he was so much of our time as to win two Oscars for his work as a composer in Hollywood, he had been drafted into the service of operetta long before the First World War. And he went on writing for the stage until he was well into his eighties, completing no fewer than sixty-five operettas or musicals as well as hundreds of songs and dozens of film scores. Der Favorit was written in 1916 for the Komische Oper where it was such a flop that he wrote nothing more for Berlin until the 1920s, by when the German capital had taken over from Vienna as the centre of operetta. The one surviving number from Der Favorit, which otherwise disappeared without trace, is the soprano aria “Du sollst der Kaiser meiner Seele sein” which is so beautifully written for the voice, so melodious and so idiomatic that in Vienna it would surely have kept the whole work afloat.
Johann Strauss II
The Knight Pasman (Ritter Pásmán): CzárdásWhen Johann II’s Ritter Pásmán – a comic opera, which is a cut above operetta – was first performed at the Court Opera in Vienna on New Year’s Day in 1892 it was generally agreed that, although the score was respectable enough, the composer’s ambition had exceeded his ability. It was also agreed, however, that the ballet music in the third act – a polka, a waltz and a csárdás – represented him at his very best. Certainly, the csárdás with its passionately expressive slow introduction and the brilliantly stylish, increasingly vigorous dance that follows is as exciting as anything the Danube had brought from Hungary to Vienna.
Johann Strauss II
Tittle-Tattle (Tritsch-Tratsch) Polka Op.214Tritsch-Tratsch has always been one of the most popular of Viennese polkas. After its first performance in 1858 there was such a demand for it that the sheet music was sold out within a few days of its publication and was hastily reprinted – to the delight no doubt of the owners of the recently issued Tritsch-Tratsch magazine from which it takes its name. A brilliant example of the quick polka, it demonstrates just how swiftly and how irresistibly chit-chat or tittle-tattle can get round a crowded ballroom.
Johann Strauss II
By the Beautiful Blue Danube (An der schönen blauen Donau) Waltz, Op.314The Blue Danube waltz is not only the last word in flattery – the Danube in Vienna is a muddy brown in most lights – but also the ultimate example of the concert waltz. In company with some of the most distinguished examples of its kind, it consists of as many as five distinct waltz-time sections, each one of them based on two different themes. Clearly, as the composer of well over a hundred waltzes (not including those in his operettas), Johann II was a uniquely resourceful melodist. Written for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association in 1867, this most familiar of Viennese waltzes was originally scored for chorus and orchestra and in that form it has achieved something like the status of a national anthem. The choral version, however, doesn’t have the splendid coda which in the orchestral version recalls and briefly develops the main themes of four of the five sections, referring back to the leisurely introduction and effortlessly completing a perfectly integrated construction. It flows just as easily as the Danube itself, and far more colourfully.
© Gerald Larner
- soprano
- conductor
Is there any finer way to greet the New Year than with a sparkling, traditional Viennese gala concert? Lovely singing, irresistible Strauss waltzes, polkas and overtures, and, of course, the essential favourites: The Blue Danube and Radetsky March. This is music to brighten up the darkest days and send you off with a spring in your step.
The Great C Major
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Coriolan Overture, Op 62Allegro con brio
Like Beethoven's overtures to Egmont, Leonore and The Ruins of Athens, the Coriolan Overture was originally written for the theatre. It was composed in 1807 for a performance, not of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, but of Heinrich von Collin's Coriolan. Collin was a minor official in the Austrian government, and his play appears to have had sufficient merit to enjoy sporadic appearances in Vienna during the early years of the century. Whether his friend Beethoven saw any of these productions, or merely read the play, is unknown. What is certain is that the composer wrote this overture five years after the play's premiere, and that there is only one recorded instance of the overture being presented in connection with a production of the play: at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 24 April 1807.
The historical Coriolanus was a rebellious Roman general who lived in the fifth century BC. According to Plutarch, Coriolanus, during a time of famine, argued that grain should not be distributed to the plebian masses unless they abolished their newly-established Tribune. For this, he and his family were banished from Rome and took refuge among the Volsci - whom Coriolanus eventually aided in their war with the Romans. His mother, Volumnia, and wife, Virgilia, pleaded with him to spare the city of his birth. This he did, but was killed by the Volsci for his treachery.
Coriolanus's frustrated rage, and the conflicts he confronts, are fully explored in the overture, and give rise to some of the most explosive and violent music Beethoven ever wrote. The opening loud chords represent Coriolanus's brash and unbending defiance, and the rising theme which follows, in the significant, tragic key of C minor (the key of the Fifth Symphony), shows his struggle with destiny. In contrast, the plaintive second theme is in the key of E flat major, the heroic key of the Eroica Symphony. Its descending structure and more lyrical quality would seem to represent Volumina as she pleads with her son to spare Rome. The interplay between these two diametrically opposed themes creates a tension that finds its resolution only in Coriolanus's inevitable downfall. Three final fading pizzicato notes mirror the overture's triumphant opening.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)
Piano Concerto No 1 in G minor, Op 25Molto allegro con fuoco –
Andante –
Presto – Molto allegro e vivaceThe first of Mendelssohn’s two piano concertos was a work of his early twenties, written hastily in 1831 – in a letter to his father he described it as “a thing quickly thrown off” – and first performed in Munich in October that year. He took the solo part on that occasion, and indeed had devised the work as a vehicle for his own playing. But he dedicated it to a young Munich-based pianist, Delphine von Schauroth, whose playing and person he seems to have found equally attractive.
In form, the Concerto represents a reconciliation between the three-movement classical concerto form of Mozart and Beethoven and the much freer structure of shorter display pieces such as Weber’s Konzertstück for piano and Spohr’s Gesangszene for violin – a union that was to be cemented the following decade in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, and to have a profound influence on the genre throughout the nineteenth century. What Mendelssohn did was take the outline of the classical concerto, but make the three movements roughly equal in length, instead of giving the first movement the lion’s share, and link them into a continuous whole. He also increased the fluidity of the form within each movement, by dispensing with most of the classical concerto’s clear-cut divisions between solo and tutti sections.
For a start, the first movement lacks the long opening tutti of the classical concerto. Instead, the piano muscles in on the in-tempo introduction after a few bars, and takes the lead in presenting the two main themes, respectively assertive and lyrical, of the compact first movement. Horn and trumpet fanfares help make the link to the Andante, an intimate ‘song without words’ in E major with a reduced orchestra (bassoon, horn and lower strings with divided cellos, joined towards the end by flutes and four-part tremolando violins). And more fanfares launch the introduction to the finale, an ebullient major-key rondo based on a melody related to the first theme of the first movement, and including further backward glances shortly before the end.
© Anthony Burton
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 9 in C major, D944 ‘The Great’ (1825-6)Andante – Allegro ma non troppo
Andante con moto
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Allegro vivace
There was a time when Schubert’s Great C major symphony, as we have come to call it, was deemed unplayable. Performers were daunted not merely by what Schumann described as its "heavenly lengths," but also by the energy needed to keep the music airborne. Mendelssohn, who conducted its premiere in Leipzig a decade after Schubert’s death, prudently chose to abbreviate it. When he later took it to London, the players, faced with the equestrian string figuration in the finale, shamefully laughed him off the platform, thereby delaying its first British performance for another twelve years. Other orchestras proved equally scornful. Hornists – who in this work are the immediate recipients of one of Schubert’s greatest themes – dismissed it as tuneless.Yet the Great C major is nothing if not melodious, as well as masterly in its structural sweep. The entire work displays a discernibly progressive approach to symphonic form. The opening horn theme is spacious enough to occupy the whole slow introduction, just as the scherzo’s central trio section consists of a vast single melody, gloriously unfurled.
Out of the first movement's slow introduction springs an emphatically rhythmic, jerky theme, pummelling rather than songlike, followed by a swerve from major to minor for a quieter, more lyrical second subject on the woodwind. The momentum is never disrupted. The use of pianissimo trombones is a famous example of Schubert’s flair for instrumental colouring. From time to time the music explodes with vitality, nowhere more so than in the coda, in quicker tempo, which brings back the opening horn theme in exhilaratingly high relief.
The andante, with its wistful oboe theme, anticipates the trudging pulse of Schubert’s Winterreise cycle. Abrupt trombone chords add an air of impatience and the whole fabric of the movement is later torn apart by the unexpected violence of its climax – an example of what has been called Schubert’s "volcanic temper," a side of the composer only recently identified. After a stunned silence and some hesitant pizzicati, the flow of the music uneasily resumes.
The succeeding scherzo is a Viennese dance on a grand scale, relentless in its spinning energy and stamping rhythms, shot through with wisps of melody that keep getting thrust aside by the ceaseless motion. The finale sustains the momentum, galloping like a ride to the abyss. Not even the serene woodwind theme that forms the second subject provides respite, because the strings keep the rhythm constantly on the boil. A stupendous coda, filled with huge anvil strokes, brings the symphony to a fitting close.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Begin 2013 in the company of two brilliant and charismatic young artists. David Afkham’s awards, prizes and plaudits make impressive reading: he has captured the attention of musicians and public alike, and makes his SCO debut with a typically ambitious bill. Schubert’s ‘Great C major’ is not for the faint-hearted; for most of the 19th century it was considered unperformable. Now a firmly established favourite, it remains an epic musical journey. Piemontesi returns to the SCO, a pianist as charming as he is formidable.
The Great C Major
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Coriolan Overture, Op 62Allegro con brio
Like Beethoven's overtures to Egmont, Leonore and The Ruins of Athens, the Coriolan Overture was originally written for the theatre. It was composed in 1807 for a performance, not of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, but of Heinrich von Collin's Coriolan. Collin was a minor official in the Austrian government, and his play appears to have had sufficient merit to enjoy sporadic appearances in Vienna during the early years of the century. Whether his friend Beethoven saw any of these productions, or merely read the play, is unknown. What is certain is that the composer wrote this overture five years after the play's premiere, and that there is only one recorded instance of the overture being presented in connection with a production of the play: at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 24 April 1807.
The historical Coriolanus was a rebellious Roman general who lived in the fifth century BC. According to Plutarch, Coriolanus, during a time of famine, argued that grain should not be distributed to the plebian masses unless they abolished their newly-established Tribune. For this, he and his family were banished from Rome and took refuge among the Volsci - whom Coriolanus eventually aided in their war with the Romans. His mother, Volumnia, and wife, Virgilia, pleaded with him to spare the city of his birth. This he did, but was killed by the Volsci for his treachery.
Coriolanus's frustrated rage, and the conflicts he confronts, are fully explored in the overture, and give rise to some of the most explosive and violent music Beethoven ever wrote. The opening loud chords represent Coriolanus's brash and unbending defiance, and the rising theme which follows, in the significant, tragic key of C minor (the key of the Fifth Symphony), shows his struggle with destiny. In contrast, the plaintive second theme is in the key of E flat major, the heroic key of the Eroica Symphony. Its descending structure and more lyrical quality would seem to represent Volumina as she pleads with her son to spare Rome. The interplay between these two diametrically opposed themes creates a tension that finds its resolution only in Coriolanus's inevitable downfall. Three final fading pizzicato notes mirror the overture's triumphant opening.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)
Piano Concerto No 1 in G minor, Op 25Molto allegro con fuoco –
Andante –
Presto – Molto allegro e vivaceThe first of Mendelssohn’s two piano concertos was a work of his early twenties, written hastily in 1831 – in a letter to his father he described it as “a thing quickly thrown off” – and first performed in Munich in October that year. He took the solo part on that occasion, and indeed had devised the work as a vehicle for his own playing. But he dedicated it to a young Munich-based pianist, Delphine von Schauroth, whose playing and person he seems to have found equally attractive.
In form, the Concerto represents a reconciliation between the three-movement classical concerto form of Mozart and Beethoven and the much freer structure of shorter display pieces such as Weber’s Konzertstück for piano and Spohr’s Gesangszene for violin – a union that was to be cemented the following decade in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, and to have a profound influence on the genre throughout the nineteenth century. What Mendelssohn did was take the outline of the classical concerto, but make the three movements roughly equal in length, instead of giving the first movement the lion’s share, and link them into a continuous whole. He also increased the fluidity of the form within each movement, by dispensing with most of the classical concerto’s clear-cut divisions between solo and tutti sections.
For a start, the first movement lacks the long opening tutti of the classical concerto. Instead, the piano muscles in on the in-tempo introduction after a few bars, and takes the lead in presenting the two main themes, respectively assertive and lyrical, of the compact first movement. Horn and trumpet fanfares help make the link to the Andante, an intimate ‘song without words’ in E major with a reduced orchestra (bassoon, horn and lower strings with divided cellos, joined towards the end by flutes and four-part tremolando violins). And more fanfares launch the introduction to the finale, an ebullient major-key rondo based on a melody related to the first theme of the first movement, and including further backward glances shortly before the end.
© Anthony Burton
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 9 in C major, D944 ‘The Great’ (1825-6)Andante – Allegro ma non troppo
Andante con moto
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Allegro vivace
There was a time when Schubert’s Great C major symphony, as we have come to call it, was deemed unplayable. Performers were daunted not merely by what Schumann described as its "heavenly lengths," but also by the energy needed to keep the music airborne. Mendelssohn, who conducted its premiere in Leipzig a decade after Schubert’s death, prudently chose to abbreviate it. When he later took it to London, the players, faced with the equestrian string figuration in the finale, shamefully laughed him off the platform, thereby delaying its first British performance for another twelve years. Other orchestras proved equally scornful. Hornists – who in this work are the immediate recipients of one of Schubert’s greatest themes – dismissed it as tuneless.Yet the Great C major is nothing if not melodious, as well as masterly in its structural sweep. The entire work displays a discernibly progressive approach to symphonic form. The opening horn theme is spacious enough to occupy the whole slow introduction, just as the scherzo’s central trio section consists of a vast single melody, gloriously unfurled.
Out of the first movement's slow introduction springs an emphatically rhythmic, jerky theme, pummelling rather than songlike, followed by a swerve from major to minor for a quieter, more lyrical second subject on the woodwind. The momentum is never disrupted. The use of pianissimo trombones is a famous example of Schubert’s flair for instrumental colouring. From time to time the music explodes with vitality, nowhere more so than in the coda, in quicker tempo, which brings back the opening horn theme in exhilaratingly high relief.
The andante, with its wistful oboe theme, anticipates the trudging pulse of Schubert’s Winterreise cycle. Abrupt trombone chords add an air of impatience and the whole fabric of the movement is later torn apart by the unexpected violence of its climax – an example of what has been called Schubert’s "volcanic temper," a side of the composer only recently identified. After a stunned silence and some hesitant pizzicati, the flow of the music uneasily resumes.
The succeeding scherzo is a Viennese dance on a grand scale, relentless in its spinning energy and stamping rhythms, shot through with wisps of melody that keep getting thrust aside by the ceaseless motion. The finale sustains the momentum, galloping like a ride to the abyss. Not even the serene woodwind theme that forms the second subject provides respite, because the strings keep the rhythm constantly on the boil. A stupendous coda, filled with huge anvil strokes, brings the symphony to a fitting close.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- piano
Begin 2013 in the company of two brilliant and charismatic young artists. David Afkham’s awards, prizes and plaudits make impressive reading: he has captured the attention of musicians and public alike, and makes his SCO debut with a typically ambitious bill. Schubert’s ‘Great C major’ is not for the faint-hearted; for most of the 19th century it was considered unperformable. Now a firmly established favourite, it remains an epic musical journey. Piemontesi returns to the SCO, a pianist as charming as he is formidable.
The Little C Major
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Overture, The Creatures of Prometheus, Op 43The 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
- Dussek
Programme note
Jan Ladislav Dussek (1731-1812)
Piano Concerto in G minor Op 49Allegro
Adagio
Rondo: Allegro non troppoDussek was a colourful character, whose remarkable life might make a very successful novel about the early years of the Romantic age. Born in what was then Bohemia, he travelled widely and was at different times a favourite of both Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette; he was in Paris right before the Revolution and then in London when Haydn came visiting. While there he worked closely with Broadwood on the development of the piano as an ever larger and grander instrument. Vain, he was among the first to perform side on to his audience, the better for them to admire his profile. Following the break down of his marriage (a remarkable tale in its own right) he returned to Paris and ended his days there a widely respected teacher as well as composer and teacher. Remarkable.
Dussek wrote 16 piano concertos, yet, in most histories of the genre he is something of a footnote. Most writers trace a line from the Bach sons to Mozart and (to a lesser degree) Haydn; Beethoven, of course, and then (after a short bald patch) Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt and onwards to Brahms. It is a narrative that works well – but Dussek’s piece suggests that it is not enough. The reason that this piece makes one sit up and pay attention is that it was written in 1801 – by which date Beethoven had completed his first 2 concertos and was at work on the 3rd. Beethoven’s first concertos extend a Mozart/Haydn idea of a concerto, but only in the 3rd concerto did he increasingly explore the Romantic possibilities of the form: the concertos grow longer, more rugged; they acquire more expressive massiveness and weight and a heroic rhetoric to match. All those characteristics are already here in Dussek’s 1801 concerto. Even in the relatively unassuming opening bars, Dussek signals his quasi-symphonic intent in the broad phrases of his melody. His choice of key, dramatic dark G minor colours it further, adding heft.
We cannot say that Beethoven heard a Dussek concerto and immediately felt include to follow in his footsteps. Rather, it may be that both Dussek and Beethoven shared expressive intentions (perhaps widely with other composers in the early 19th century: Hummel and Clementi). Yet we fundamentally understand Beethoven’s concertos in relation to Mozart and Haydn simple because those are the composers whose piece are most often heard today. Perhaps we could all do with hearing a little more Dussek, Hummel and Clementi.
© Svend Brown
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert 1797-1828
Symphony No 6 in C major, D589 (1817-18)Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Scherzo: Presto
Allegro moderatoSchubert’s first six symphonies are lovely works, not to be routinely slighted as 'early' Schubert or dismissed as schoolboy precursors of the more mature style of the 'Unfinished' or the 'Great' C major. Each has its own distinct personality, and it is the Sixth Symphony’s hard luck that it is in the same key as the 'Great' C major, thus causing it to be nicknamed the 'Little' C major for identification purposes. In fact it is not little at all, and although Schubert was only 21 when he wrote it, it is a self-confidently original work; emphatic, muscular, creatively alive to musical events of the period, not least the Rossini fever that had recently hit Vienna.
Clearly Schubert was as intoxicated as anyone else by the witty effervescence of the Italian composer, but he reacted to it in his own way. In a work that has been called a “meeting point of manifold influences”, we encounter a near-quote from Haydn at the start of the first movement’s Allegro section, some mock Beethoven in the scherzo, and Rossinian scales for the woodwind in the finale, yet everything sounds so utterly Schubertian that the result never seems merely derivative.
So if the first movement has a slow introduction of a sort Mozart might once have written, it is Schubert's Rosamunde incidental music that is brought first and foremost to mind. Phrases are turned and coloured in a wholly characteristic manner, and the sudden acceleration at the end of the movement is like a dry-run for the equivalent passage in the 'Great' C major. It is also a brilliant coda in its own right.
The slow movement, with its songlike main theme, swinging middle section and pounding drums, keeps veering into genuinely comic Schubert. The racy scherzo, apart from its Beethovenian flashbacks, not only anticipates the 'Great' C major but has a genially lurching trio section in slower tempo that could come from nobody but Schubert. And if the finale is a tribute to Rossini, it is Rossini placed within the sort of rhythmic pulsation which, once again, would be heard in the 'Great' C major.
© Conrad Wilson
- Conductor/Fortepiano
Between classics by Schubert and Beethoven, SCO Associate Artist Richard Egarr introduces one of their contemporaries who deserves to be far better known. Dussek certainly had a colourful life: his brilliance as pianist and composer won him the favour of Catherine the Great of Russia and Napoleon Bonaparte among others. It also won him favours of another kind, and he had to flee several countries with angry husbands on his heels. He left eighteen captivating and unusual piano concertos - hugely enjoyable to listen to, and fascinating for us looking back to that time because, in them, you can so clearly hear the future – the piano styles of Liszt, Chopin and Schumann.
The Little C Major
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Overture, The Creatures of Prometheus, Op 43The 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
- Dussek
Programme note
Jan Ladislav Dussek (1731-1812)
Piano Concerto in G minor Op 49Allegro
Adagio
Rondo: Allegro non troppoDussek was a colourful character, whose remarkable life might make a very successful novel about the early years of the Romantic age. Born in what was then Bohemia, he travelled widely and was at different times a favourite of both Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette; he was in Paris right before the Revolution and then in London when Haydn came visiting. While there he worked closely with Broadwood on the development of the piano as an ever larger and grander instrument. Vain, he was among the first to perform side on to his audience, the better for them to admire his profile. Following the break down of his marriage (a remarkable tale in its own right) he returned to Paris and ended his days there a widely respected teacher as well as composer and teacher. Remarkable.
Dussek wrote 16 piano concertos, yet, in most histories of the genre he is something of a footnote. Most writers trace a line from the Bach sons to Mozart and (to a lesser degree) Haydn; Beethoven, of course, and then (after a short bald patch) Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt and onwards to Brahms. It is a narrative that works well – but Dussek’s piece suggests that it is not enough. The reason that this piece makes one sit up and pay attention is that it was written in 1801 – by which date Beethoven had completed his first 2 concertos and was at work on the 3rd. Beethoven’s first concertos extend a Mozart/Haydn idea of a concerto, but only in the 3rd concerto did he increasingly explore the Romantic possibilities of the form: the concertos grow longer, more rugged; they acquire more expressive massiveness and weight and a heroic rhetoric to match. All those characteristics are already here in Dussek’s 1801 concerto. Even in the relatively unassuming opening bars, Dussek signals his quasi-symphonic intent in the broad phrases of his melody. His choice of key, dramatic dark G minor colours it further, adding heft.
We cannot say that Beethoven heard a Dussek concerto and immediately felt include to follow in his footsteps. Rather, it may be that both Dussek and Beethoven shared expressive intentions (perhaps widely with other composers in the early 19th century: Hummel and Clementi). Yet we fundamentally understand Beethoven’s concertos in relation to Mozart and Haydn simple because those are the composers whose piece are most often heard today. Perhaps we could all do with hearing a little more Dussek, Hummel and Clementi.
© Svend Brown
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert 1797-1828
Symphony No 6 in C major, D589 (1817-18)Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Scherzo: Presto
Allegro moderatoSchubert’s first six symphonies are lovely works, not to be routinely slighted as 'early' Schubert or dismissed as schoolboy precursors of the more mature style of the 'Unfinished' or the 'Great' C major. Each has its own distinct personality, and it is the Sixth Symphony’s hard luck that it is in the same key as the 'Great' C major, thus causing it to be nicknamed the 'Little' C major for identification purposes. In fact it is not little at all, and although Schubert was only 21 when he wrote it, it is a self-confidently original work; emphatic, muscular, creatively alive to musical events of the period, not least the Rossini fever that had recently hit Vienna.
Clearly Schubert was as intoxicated as anyone else by the witty effervescence of the Italian composer, but he reacted to it in his own way. In a work that has been called a “meeting point of manifold influences”, we encounter a near-quote from Haydn at the start of the first movement’s Allegro section, some mock Beethoven in the scherzo, and Rossinian scales for the woodwind in the finale, yet everything sounds so utterly Schubertian that the result never seems merely derivative.
So if the first movement has a slow introduction of a sort Mozart might once have written, it is Schubert's Rosamunde incidental music that is brought first and foremost to mind. Phrases are turned and coloured in a wholly characteristic manner, and the sudden acceleration at the end of the movement is like a dry-run for the equivalent passage in the 'Great' C major. It is also a brilliant coda in its own right.
The slow movement, with its songlike main theme, swinging middle section and pounding drums, keeps veering into genuinely comic Schubert. The racy scherzo, apart from its Beethovenian flashbacks, not only anticipates the 'Great' C major but has a genially lurching trio section in slower tempo that could come from nobody but Schubert. And if the finale is a tribute to Rossini, it is Rossini placed within the sort of rhythmic pulsation which, once again, would be heard in the 'Great' C major.
© Conrad Wilson
- Conductor/Fortepiano
Between classics by Schubert and Beethoven, SCO Associate Artist Richard Egarr introduces one of their contemporaries who deserves to be far better known. Dussek certainly had a colourful life: his brilliance as pianist and composer won him the favour of Catherine the Great of Russia and Napoleon Bonaparte among others. It also won him favours of another kind, and he had to flee several countries with angry husbands on his heels. He left eighteen captivating and unusual piano concertos - hugely enjoyable to listen to, and fascinating for us looking back to that time because, in them, you can so clearly hear the future – the piano styles of Liszt, Chopin and Schumann.
The Little C Major
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Overture, The Creatures of Prometheus, Op 43The 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
- Dussek
Programme note
Jan Ladislav Dussek (1731-1812)
Piano Concerto in G minor Op 49Allegro
Adagio
Rondo: Allegro non troppoDussek was a colourful character, whose remarkable life might make a very successful novel about the early years of the Romantic age. Born in what was then Bohemia, he travelled widely and was at different times a favourite of both Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette; he was in Paris right before the Revolution and then in London when Haydn came visiting. While there he worked closely with Broadwood on the development of the piano as an ever larger and grander instrument. Vain, he was among the first to perform side on to his audience, the better for them to admire his profile. Following the break down of his marriage (a remarkable tale in its own right) he returned to Paris and ended his days there a widely respected teacher as well as composer and teacher. Remarkable.
Dussek wrote 16 piano concertos, yet, in most histories of the genre he is something of a footnote. Most writers trace a line from the Bach sons to Mozart and (to a lesser degree) Haydn; Beethoven, of course, and then (after a short bald patch) Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt and onwards to Brahms. It is a narrative that works well – but Dussek’s piece suggests that it is not enough. The reason that this piece makes one sit up and pay attention is that it was written in 1801 – by which date Beethoven had completed his first 2 concertos and was at work on the 3rd. Beethoven’s first concertos extend a Mozart/Haydn idea of a concerto, but only in the 3rd concerto did he increasingly explore the Romantic possibilities of the form: the concertos grow longer, more rugged; they acquire more expressive massiveness and weight and a heroic rhetoric to match. All those characteristics are already here in Dussek’s 1801 concerto. Even in the relatively unassuming opening bars, Dussek signals his quasi-symphonic intent in the broad phrases of his melody. His choice of key, dramatic dark G minor colours it further, adding heft.
We cannot say that Beethoven heard a Dussek concerto and immediately felt include to follow in his footsteps. Rather, it may be that both Dussek and Beethoven shared expressive intentions (perhaps widely with other composers in the early 19th century: Hummel and Clementi). Yet we fundamentally understand Beethoven’s concertos in relation to Mozart and Haydn simple because those are the composers whose piece are most often heard today. Perhaps we could all do with hearing a little more Dussek, Hummel and Clementi.
© Svend Brown
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Peter Schubert 1797-1828
Symphony No 6 in C major, D589 (1817-18)Adagio - Allegro
Andante
Scherzo: Presto
Allegro moderatoSchubert’s first six symphonies are lovely works, not to be routinely slighted as 'early' Schubert or dismissed as schoolboy precursors of the more mature style of the 'Unfinished' or the 'Great' C major. Each has its own distinct personality, and it is the Sixth Symphony’s hard luck that it is in the same key as the 'Great' C major, thus causing it to be nicknamed the 'Little' C major for identification purposes. In fact it is not little at all, and although Schubert was only 21 when he wrote it, it is a self-confidently original work; emphatic, muscular, creatively alive to musical events of the period, not least the Rossini fever that had recently hit Vienna.
Clearly Schubert was as intoxicated as anyone else by the witty effervescence of the Italian composer, but he reacted to it in his own way. In a work that has been called a “meeting point of manifold influences”, we encounter a near-quote from Haydn at the start of the first movement’s Allegro section, some mock Beethoven in the scherzo, and Rossinian scales for the woodwind in the finale, yet everything sounds so utterly Schubertian that the result never seems merely derivative.
So if the first movement has a slow introduction of a sort Mozart might once have written, it is Schubert's Rosamunde incidental music that is brought first and foremost to mind. Phrases are turned and coloured in a wholly characteristic manner, and the sudden acceleration at the end of the movement is like a dry-run for the equivalent passage in the 'Great' C major. It is also a brilliant coda in its own right.
The slow movement, with its songlike main theme, swinging middle section and pounding drums, keeps veering into genuinely comic Schubert. The racy scherzo, apart from its Beethovenian flashbacks, not only anticipates the 'Great' C major but has a genially lurching trio section in slower tempo that could come from nobody but Schubert. And if the finale is a tribute to Rossini, it is Rossini placed within the sort of rhythmic pulsation which, once again, would be heard in the 'Great' C major.
© Conrad Wilson
- Conductor/Fortepiano
Between classics by Schubert and Beethoven, SCO Associate Artist Richard Egarr introduces one of their contemporaries who deserves to be far better known. Dussek certainly had a colourful life: his brilliance as pianist and composer won him the favour of Catherine the Great of Russia and Napoleon Bonaparte among others. It also won him favours of another kind, and he had to flee several countries with angry husbands on his heels. He left eighteen captivating and unusual piano concertos - hugely enjoyable to listen to, and fascinating for us looking back to that time because, in them, you can so clearly hear the future – the piano styles of Liszt, Chopin and Schumann.
Romantic Century
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Trumpet Overture, Op 101 (1826, revised 1833)Though one of the first masters of the art of the concert overture - as The Hebrides, The Fair Melusine, and Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage all consummately testify - Mendelssohn did not win sustained acclaim for every work he composed in the new-fangled format which eventually developed into the Lisztian symphonic poem. His so-called Trumpet Overture in C major, written just before the teenage ravishments of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, remains a fiery rarity which has still to gain its deserved place in the orchestral repertoire.
Yet Christopher Hogwood’s modern Urtext edition of a work unpublished in its composer’s lifetime provides impressive scope for the music at last to make its way in the world. Its title, referring to the brassy opening fanfare and its numerous recurrences, may not be specially Mendelssohnian or even thoroughly authentic. Eduard Devrient, the nineteenth-century German baritone, recalled the piece’s first appearance at one of the Mendelssohn family’s Sunday afternoon parties and how “we gave it the name of Trumpet Overture” (his use of the first person plural suggesting that Mendelssohn was not necessarily responsible for it). But the title appeared to become fixed in the course of performances in various places, including Berlin, where the work was included in a festival commemorating the 300th anniversary of Albrecht Durer’s death; Dusseldorf, where it served as prelude to Handel’s Israel in Egypt with Mendelssohn as conductor; and London, where it was heard at the time of the premiere of the Italian symphony, a score for which the composer inexplicably had considerable misgivings.
But if the symphony soon established itself internationally (even though Mendelssohn only conducted it once) the overture before long fell by the wayside. Just why is hard to say. Though filled with conspicuous foretastes of The Hebrides - even the recurring fanfare looks forward to the later work - the music perhaps suffered from having no story to tell, no picture to convey, no person to commemorate. As a tone painting it remains entirely abstract, which is not necessarily a drawback if we take into account its dramatic sweep, intensity of utterance, lyrical imagination, and mysterious suggestion that somewhere beneath its surface lies a hidden message.
In the work’s poetic detail, the Hebrides unquestionably looms large, even if Mendelssohn had yet to visit Fingal’s Cave. Even in a version shorn - maybe beneficially - of its original trombones, it is music that makes all its Mendelssohnian points, and is all the better perhaps for letting the listener decide what, if anything, it evokes.
© Conrad Wilson
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Cello Concerto in A minor, Op 129 (1850)Nicht zu schnell (not too fast)
Langsam (slow)
Sehr lebhaft (very lively)Schumann, it used to be said, composed only one great concerto – the masterpiece for piano and orchestra in A minor – of which the two subsequent works were pale shadows. The Cello Concerto, being in the same key, easily laid itself open to this sort of criticism, and the Violin Concerto in D minor fell into the sad musicological category known as "not worth performing."
Yet it is the Cello Concerto’s links with the Piano Concerto that make it such a fascinating follow-up. No less lyrical than its predecessor, it is no less resourceful in its employment of thematic integration. The continuity of its three movements – the entire work is designed to be played without a break – may have been an idea already employed by Mendelssohn, but Schumann gives it added coherence through his cyclic use of the main theme. Moreover, and not unimportantly, it was the first cello concerto to have been written by a major composer in more than half a century.
Why, then, has one of Schumann’s most established British biographers dismissed this concerto as "lacking real driving power"? The desire to give the solo instrument space to flower can admittedly make the music sound directionless, but only if the performers fail to resolve the resultant tempo problems. Impatiently speeding through the purely orchestral passages can too easily sound like escaping from a traffic jam.
Yet a degree of contrast between orchestral vitality and soloistic reflection does form part of the work's natural structure, as also of Schumann's own split musical personality, represented by the (extrovert) Florestan and (introvert) Eusebius characterisations he employed in so much of his music. In this respect, however, another of the work's problems could seem to lie in its date of composition, 1850 being supposedly one of the less happy turning points in Schumann's life, signifying waning genius if not yet the plunge into mental collapse which followed a few years later.
Nor did Schumann’s own modest description of the work as really "a Concertstuck [Concert Piece] for cello with orchestral accompaniment" do the music any favours. It merely prompted listeners to assume that it was something less than a concerto, and that the cello part was all that counted. In fact the three opening chords for woodwind and pizzicato strings are no less important than the cello’s wide-spanning theme which follows. They certainly pervade the tender slow movement, which may seem little more than an extended bridge passage – though being by Schumann a typically poetic one, calling for a second solo cello – between the first movement and finale.
The lead-in to the latter is a passionate, recitative-like version of the first movement’s opening cello theme, and the finale itself is structurally remarkable for its inclusion of a delayed cadenza, performed in tempo and accompanied by the orchestra as introduction to the coda. It was an idea which Elgar would later use with profit near the end of his Violin Concerto.
Despite Clara Schumann's enthusiasm for the music (“it seems to me to be written in true cello style”) the work did not receive its first performance, by an undistinguished soloist, until 1860, four years after the composer's death. But its important position in Schumann’s output has at last been recognised. In the repertoire of cello concertos, it is a major work.
© Conrad Wilson
- Martinsson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 1 in C major, Op 21 (1800)Adagio molto - Allegro con brio
Andante cantabile con moto
Menuetto: Allegro molto, e vivace
Adagio - Allegro molto e vivaceMendelssohn was just sixteen when he composed his sensational String Octet and Mozart nineteen when he transcended boyhood felicity in his G major Violin Concerto, K216, suddenly producing one of his first real masterpieces. Beethoven, however, waited until he was almost thirty before unveiling his First Symphony, which holds a similar position in his output. It was a work that changed the face of music. Eight years earlier, his benefactor Count Waldstein had persuaded him to leave his native Bonn and settle in Vienna, where he would "receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn". The phrase was nicely turned, even if what Beethoven received from Haydn's hands was no more than a bit of tuition which seemed not to have greatly pleased either of them.
On the other hand, what he received from the city where Haydn still lived and Mozart had recently died was inspirational encouragement of a sort which, within a few years, set him on course to produce the greatest, most vanguard symphonies of his time.
Though much of his Symphony No 1 was clearly modelled on Haydn and Mozart, the unmistakable sounds of Beethoven’s audacity and originality were apparent in the very opening bars, whose disorientating modulations (provocatively side-stepping the symphony’s home key of C major) must have perplexed the audience who attended its Viennese premiere, conducted by the composer in a vast benefit concert in April 1800. Since this was Beethoven’s first public concert in his adopted city, the shock waves were surely all the greater. C major, for Beethoven, was never the simple key it was traditionally thought to be, and as his C major piano concerto of the same period similarly underlined. Both works supply that mixture of robust energy and romantic tenderness, of serenity and explosiveness that were to be the hallmark of all his later music.
So if, as Edinburgh's distinguished musical essayist Sir Donald Tovey suggested, the First Symphony represents "Beethoven’s fitting farewell to the eighteenth century," it is by no means merely retrospective. Though he composed it for the same classical-sized orchestra for which Haydn scored his last symphonies, its novelty value and wealth of ideas - evenly spread through each of the four movements - were immediately recognised.
Thus the first movement’s off-key opening leads to a startlingly punchy allegro, filled with sudden key changes and detached, hammered rhythms. The blend of woodwind and string tone in the andante may sound Mozartian, but the persistent soft tapping of the kettledrums - a sensational effect in 1800 - could only be Beethoven. The taut, urgently syncopated minuet is already a Beethoven scherzo in all but name, with a witty interplay of wind chords and string scales in the concentrated trio section. After this model of brevity, the rondo finale echoes the opening movement with a slow introduction, each phrase groping its way teasingly towards the succeeding allegro, and showing how Beethoven could bring his own sense of humour to a trick of a kind Haydn enjoyed. Scales, so often a feature of this work, play a last special part in the coda to this movement.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- cello
Now established as an exceptionally fine conductor, Andrew Manze is a musician of great range and curiosity. In this programme, he typically takes a familiar work – in this case Beethoven’s First Symphony – and gives it an intriguing context: Mendelssohn is in very Beethovenian form in the little known overture and Schumann meltingly Romantic in the Cello Concerto. Rolf Martinsson’s reflection on Schoenberg’s ultra-Romantic Verklärte Nacht may last only ten minutes, but it makes a powerful, memorable impression, paving the way for the youthful blaze of Beethoven’s symphony.
Romantic Century
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Trumpet Overture, Op 101 (1826, revised 1833)Though one of the first masters of the art of the concert overture - as The Hebrides, The Fair Melusine, and Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage all consummately testify - Mendelssohn did not win sustained acclaim for every work he composed in the new-fangled format which eventually developed into the Lisztian symphonic poem. His so-called Trumpet Overture in C major, written just before the teenage ravishments of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, remains a fiery rarity which has still to gain its deserved place in the orchestral repertoire.
Yet Christopher Hogwood’s modern Urtext edition of a work unpublished in its composer’s lifetime provides impressive scope for the music at last to make its way in the world. Its title, referring to the brassy opening fanfare and its numerous recurrences, may not be specially Mendelssohnian or even thoroughly authentic. Eduard Devrient, the nineteenth-century German baritone, recalled the piece’s first appearance at one of the Mendelssohn family’s Sunday afternoon parties and how “we gave it the name of Trumpet Overture” (his use of the first person plural suggesting that Mendelssohn was not necessarily responsible for it). But the title appeared to become fixed in the course of performances in various places, including Berlin, where the work was included in a festival commemorating the 300th anniversary of Albrecht Durer’s death; Dusseldorf, where it served as prelude to Handel’s Israel in Egypt with Mendelssohn as conductor; and London, where it was heard at the time of the premiere of the Italian symphony, a score for which the composer inexplicably had considerable misgivings.
But if the symphony soon established itself internationally (even though Mendelssohn only conducted it once) the overture before long fell by the wayside. Just why is hard to say. Though filled with conspicuous foretastes of The Hebrides - even the recurring fanfare looks forward to the later work - the music perhaps suffered from having no story to tell, no picture to convey, no person to commemorate. As a tone painting it remains entirely abstract, which is not necessarily a drawback if we take into account its dramatic sweep, intensity of utterance, lyrical imagination, and mysterious suggestion that somewhere beneath its surface lies a hidden message.
In the work’s poetic detail, the Hebrides unquestionably looms large, even if Mendelssohn had yet to visit Fingal’s Cave. Even in a version shorn - maybe beneficially - of its original trombones, it is music that makes all its Mendelssohnian points, and is all the better perhaps for letting the listener decide what, if anything, it evokes.
© Conrad Wilson
- Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Cello Concerto in A minor, Op 129 (1850)Nicht zu schnell (not too fast)
Langsam (slow)
Sehr lebhaft (very lively)Schumann, it used to be said, composed only one great concerto – the masterpiece for piano and orchestra in A minor – of which the two subsequent works were pale shadows. The Cello Concerto, being in the same key, easily laid itself open to this sort of criticism, and the Violin Concerto in D minor fell into the sad musicological category known as "not worth performing."
Yet it is the Cello Concerto’s links with the Piano Concerto that make it such a fascinating follow-up. No less lyrical than its predecessor, it is no less resourceful in its employment of thematic integration. The continuity of its three movements – the entire work is designed to be played without a break – may have been an idea already employed by Mendelssohn, but Schumann gives it added coherence through his cyclic use of the main theme. Moreover, and not unimportantly, it was the first cello concerto to have been written by a major composer in more than half a century.
Why, then, has one of Schumann’s most established British biographers dismissed this concerto as "lacking real driving power"? The desire to give the solo instrument space to flower can admittedly make the music sound directionless, but only if the performers fail to resolve the resultant tempo problems. Impatiently speeding through the purely orchestral passages can too easily sound like escaping from a traffic jam.
Yet a degree of contrast between orchestral vitality and soloistic reflection does form part of the work's natural structure, as also of Schumann's own split musical personality, represented by the (extrovert) Florestan and (introvert) Eusebius characterisations he employed in so much of his music. In this respect, however, another of the work's problems could seem to lie in its date of composition, 1850 being supposedly one of the less happy turning points in Schumann's life, signifying waning genius if not yet the plunge into mental collapse which followed a few years later.
Nor did Schumann’s own modest description of the work as really "a Concertstuck [Concert Piece] for cello with orchestral accompaniment" do the music any favours. It merely prompted listeners to assume that it was something less than a concerto, and that the cello part was all that counted. In fact the three opening chords for woodwind and pizzicato strings are no less important than the cello’s wide-spanning theme which follows. They certainly pervade the tender slow movement, which may seem little more than an extended bridge passage – though being by Schumann a typically poetic one, calling for a second solo cello – between the first movement and finale.
The lead-in to the latter is a passionate, recitative-like version of the first movement’s opening cello theme, and the finale itself is structurally remarkable for its inclusion of a delayed cadenza, performed in tempo and accompanied by the orchestra as introduction to the coda. It was an idea which Elgar would later use with profit near the end of his Violin Concerto.
Despite Clara Schumann's enthusiasm for the music (“it seems to me to be written in true cello style”) the work did not receive its first performance, by an undistinguished soloist, until 1860, four years after the composer's death. But its important position in Schumann’s output has at last been recognised. In the repertoire of cello concertos, it is a major work.
© Conrad Wilson
- Martinsson
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 1 in C major, Op 21 (1800)Adagio molto - Allegro con brio
Andante cantabile con moto
Menuetto: Allegro molto, e vivace
Adagio - Allegro molto e vivaceMendelssohn was just sixteen when he composed his sensational String Octet and Mozart nineteen when he transcended boyhood felicity in his G major Violin Concerto, K216, suddenly producing one of his first real masterpieces. Beethoven, however, waited until he was almost thirty before unveiling his First Symphony, which holds a similar position in his output. It was a work that changed the face of music. Eight years earlier, his benefactor Count Waldstein had persuaded him to leave his native Bonn and settle in Vienna, where he would "receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn". The phrase was nicely turned, even if what Beethoven received from Haydn's hands was no more than a bit of tuition which seemed not to have greatly pleased either of them.
On the other hand, what he received from the city where Haydn still lived and Mozart had recently died was inspirational encouragement of a sort which, within a few years, set him on course to produce the greatest, most vanguard symphonies of his time.
Though much of his Symphony No 1 was clearly modelled on Haydn and Mozart, the unmistakable sounds of Beethoven’s audacity and originality were apparent in the very opening bars, whose disorientating modulations (provocatively side-stepping the symphony’s home key of C major) must have perplexed the audience who attended its Viennese premiere, conducted by the composer in a vast benefit concert in April 1800. Since this was Beethoven’s first public concert in his adopted city, the shock waves were surely all the greater. C major, for Beethoven, was never the simple key it was traditionally thought to be, and as his C major piano concerto of the same period similarly underlined. Both works supply that mixture of robust energy and romantic tenderness, of serenity and explosiveness that were to be the hallmark of all his later music.
So if, as Edinburgh's distinguished musical essayist Sir Donald Tovey suggested, the First Symphony represents "Beethoven’s fitting farewell to the eighteenth century," it is by no means merely retrospective. Though he composed it for the same classical-sized orchestra for which Haydn scored his last symphonies, its novelty value and wealth of ideas - evenly spread through each of the four movements - were immediately recognised.
Thus the first movement’s off-key opening leads to a startlingly punchy allegro, filled with sudden key changes and detached, hammered rhythms. The blend of woodwind and string tone in the andante may sound Mozartian, but the persistent soft tapping of the kettledrums - a sensational effect in 1800 - could only be Beethoven. The taut, urgently syncopated minuet is already a Beethoven scherzo in all but name, with a witty interplay of wind chords and string scales in the concentrated trio section. After this model of brevity, the rondo finale echoes the opening movement with a slow introduction, each phrase groping its way teasingly towards the succeeding allegro, and showing how Beethoven could bring his own sense of humour to a trick of a kind Haydn enjoyed. Scales, so often a feature of this work, play a last special part in the coda to this movement.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- cello
Now established as an exceptionally fine conductor, Andrew Manze is a musician of great range and curiosity. In this programme, he typically takes a familiar work – in this case Beethoven’s First Symphony – and gives it an intriguing context: Mendelssohn is in very Beethovenian form in the little known overture and Schumann meltingly Romantic in the Cello Concerto. Rolf Martinsson’s reflection on Schoenberg’s ultra-Romantic Verklärte Nacht may last only ten minutes, but it makes a powerful, memorable impression, paving the way for the youthful blaze of Beethoven’s symphony.
MacMillan Oboe Concerto
- Stravinsky
Programme note
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Pulcinella SuiteSinfonia (Overture): Allegro moderato
Serenata: Larghetto -
Scherzino - Allegro - Andantino -
Tarantella -
Toccata: Allegro
Gavotta con due variazioni: Allegro moderato
Vivo
Minuetto: molto moderato -
Finale: allegro assaiThe most significant developments in musical history are not necessarily inspired by the most significant composers - or even by composers at all. The neo-classical taste, which had a strong influence on music for twenty years or more, was formed as much by Diaghilev, ballet impresario and no musician, as any one else. It was he who sensed how public taste would change after the first world war, and it was he who commissioned Tommasini to arrange Scarlatti's music for The Good-Humoured Ladies, Respighi to arrange Rossini's for La Boutique Fantasque, and Stravinsky to arrange Pergolesi's for Pulcinella. With choreography by Massine for all three ballets and designs by (respectively) Baskt, Derain, and Picasso they could scarcely fail to arouse the interest of the public.
As for Stravinsky, he would surely not have thought of creating a ballet score from music by (or attributed to) Pergolesi if Diaghilev had not asked him. He provided Stravinsky with the Pegolesi scores and with an early eighteenth-century comic libretto, based on the commedia dell'arte character of Pulcinella, to go with them. The several months of concentrated work on Pergolesi in 1919 and 1920 had a profound influence on Stravinsky and on the development of his music up to The Rake's Progress and beyond. Pulcinella was, he said, "my discovery of the past". The instrumentation of the ballet is an indication of how much he had absorbed even at this stage - no clarinets, not one of the percus¬sion instruments so prominent in his wartime scores, the strings divided in concerto grosso style into concertino and ripieno groups. The sound he wanted is no pastiche, however, even if some of his methods are characteristically eighteenth-century. The Overture is a delightful example of Stravinsky's use of the neo¬classical orchestra, with blocks of tutti sound alternating with a series of differently coloured solo groups.
In the ballet the curtain rises on a Neapolitan serenade from Pergolesi's II Flamino, sung by a tenor in the orchestra pit. In the suite, the principal vocalists are solo oboe and violin, set against a remarkably delicate and nocturnal texture of strings and wind harmonics, trills, and repeated notes. The Scherzino accompanies a scuffle on the stage between the two unwelcome serenaders, Florindo and Coviello, and the father of one of the ladies. It leads directly into the Allegro, to which Pulcinella enters playing a virtuoso violin. The violin solo, which is Stravinsky's addition to the Pergolesi original, succeeds where the serenade failed and attracts the two ladies (Prudenza and Rosetta) out into the street where, in the Andantino, they make amorous advances to Pulcinella.
The middle part of the ballet, in which Pulcinella is apparently killed by his two rivals, is omitted from the suite. The next movement, the Tarantella, in which the apparently dead Pulcinella is brought back to life, must have been comparatively easy for Stravinsky to arrange, since it comes from a work for string orchestra. The Toccata, on the other hand, is a brilliant realisation of a harpsichord piece. Similarly, the Gavotte and the two variations, in which the two ladies dance with the two lovers only because both the latter are disguised as Pulcinella, is a highly imaginative and attractive rescoring for wind instruments of what was originally harpsichord music. The section marked vivo is from a sinfonia for cello and double bass. Stravinsky retains the solo double bass but pairs it with a loud trombone, which is both witty and dramatically effective - for this is the scene in which Pulcinella gets his own back on Florindo and Coviella by ducking them in the fountain.
However, all the problems are settled in the Minuetto, which comes from the opera Lo Frate Innamorato and is obviously a song rather than a dance. Florindo and Coviello are united with Prudenza and Rosetta, and Pulcinella is reunited with his own Pimpinella - to the general rejoicing indicated in the racy Finale.
© Gerald Larner
- MacMillan
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Symphony No 4 in A major, Op 90, 'Italian' (1833)Allegro vivace
Andante con moto
Con moto moderato
Saltarello: PrestoMendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ symphony was the major product of his second ‘grand tour’ of Europe, undertaken at the age of 21. Savouring, as he put it, the “supreme delight in life” displayed by the Italians, he vowed to pay symphonic homage to their vivacity. The result, he declared, was the most cheerful piece of music he had yet composed, though he insisted that it was far from being a piece of nineteenth-century musical landscape painting.
Be that as it may, its Italian features are unmistakable and remain part of its charm. Though the theory that his ‘Scotch’ symphony was interchangeable with his ‘Italian’ no longer cuts much ice, there seems no doubt that the slow movement has nothing to do with Italy but was intended to commemorate Goethe and Zelter (Mendelssohn’s teacher, whose Goethe-inspired Konig in Thule it quotes), both of whom had recently died. What the ‘Scotch’ and ‘Italian’ symphonies do quite strikingly have in common are aspects of the key of A, the ‘Scotch’ beginning in A minor and ending in A major, the ‘Italian’ beginning in A major and ending in A minor. In this respect the one could be called the obverse of the other, though whether this was intentional is hard to say.
What is easier to identify is the instant sunshine of the first movement of the ‘Italian’ and the southern swirl of the finale, which Mendelssohn took pains to entitle Saltarello, in tribute to the leaping Italian dance it relentlessly evokes. In comparison, the source of the slow movement is surely the allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, another study in the relationship between A minor and major. As for the elfin grace of the third movement – a Mendelssohnian evocation of a classical minuet – its poetic trio section, filled with magical horn calls, could easily come from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Strangely, Mendelssohn never really liked his Italian symphony and substantially revised three of its four movements, changing the colouring of the andante, adding fresh touches of poetry to the third movement, and considerably extending the finale. But if these were his last thoughts, they were never acted upon and have only recently been issued in an optional performing version. Though they seem unlikely to replace the original – which, as usual, is what we shall hear tonight – they shed interesting light on a masterpiece which Mendelssohn himself, because of his incomprehensible lack of faith in it, conducted only once.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- oboe
“James MacMillan’s new Oboe Concerto is a corker…” – The Times’ verdict at its first performance. Even if contemporary music is not really your thing, we urge you not to miss this Scottish premiere given by the sensational François Leleux. Framing it, two perennial favourites: visits to Italy in the company of a distinguished Russian and a youthful German.
MacMillan Oboe Concerto
- Stravinsky
Programme note
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Pulcinella SuiteSinfonia (Overture): Allegro moderato
Serenata: Larghetto -
Scherzino - Allegro - Andantino -
Tarantella -
Toccata: Allegro
Gavotta con due variazioni: Allegro moderato
Vivo
Minuetto: molto moderato -
Finale: allegro assaiThe most significant developments in musical history are not necessarily inspired by the most significant composers - or even by composers at all. The neo-classical taste, which had a strong influence on music for twenty years or more, was formed as much by Diaghilev, ballet impresario and no musician, as any one else. It was he who sensed how public taste would change after the first world war, and it was he who commissioned Tommasini to arrange Scarlatti's music for The Good-Humoured Ladies, Respighi to arrange Rossini's for La Boutique Fantasque, and Stravinsky to arrange Pergolesi's for Pulcinella. With choreography by Massine for all three ballets and designs by (respectively) Baskt, Derain, and Picasso they could scarcely fail to arouse the interest of the public.
As for Stravinsky, he would surely not have thought of creating a ballet score from music by (or attributed to) Pergolesi if Diaghilev had not asked him. He provided Stravinsky with the Pegolesi scores and with an early eighteenth-century comic libretto, based on the commedia dell'arte character of Pulcinella, to go with them. The several months of concentrated work on Pergolesi in 1919 and 1920 had a profound influence on Stravinsky and on the development of his music up to The Rake's Progress and beyond. Pulcinella was, he said, "my discovery of the past". The instrumentation of the ballet is an indication of how much he had absorbed even at this stage - no clarinets, not one of the percus¬sion instruments so prominent in his wartime scores, the strings divided in concerto grosso style into concertino and ripieno groups. The sound he wanted is no pastiche, however, even if some of his methods are characteristically eighteenth-century. The Overture is a delightful example of Stravinsky's use of the neo¬classical orchestra, with blocks of tutti sound alternating with a series of differently coloured solo groups.
In the ballet the curtain rises on a Neapolitan serenade from Pergolesi's II Flamino, sung by a tenor in the orchestra pit. In the suite, the principal vocalists are solo oboe and violin, set against a remarkably delicate and nocturnal texture of strings and wind harmonics, trills, and repeated notes. The Scherzino accompanies a scuffle on the stage between the two unwelcome serenaders, Florindo and Coviello, and the father of one of the ladies. It leads directly into the Allegro, to which Pulcinella enters playing a virtuoso violin. The violin solo, which is Stravinsky's addition to the Pergolesi original, succeeds where the serenade failed and attracts the two ladies (Prudenza and Rosetta) out into the street where, in the Andantino, they make amorous advances to Pulcinella.
The middle part of the ballet, in which Pulcinella is apparently killed by his two rivals, is omitted from the suite. The next movement, the Tarantella, in which the apparently dead Pulcinella is brought back to life, must have been comparatively easy for Stravinsky to arrange, since it comes from a work for string orchestra. The Toccata, on the other hand, is a brilliant realisation of a harpsichord piece. Similarly, the Gavotte and the two variations, in which the two ladies dance with the two lovers only because both the latter are disguised as Pulcinella, is a highly imaginative and attractive rescoring for wind instruments of what was originally harpsichord music. The section marked vivo is from a sinfonia for cello and double bass. Stravinsky retains the solo double bass but pairs it with a loud trombone, which is both witty and dramatically effective - for this is the scene in which Pulcinella gets his own back on Florindo and Coviella by ducking them in the fountain.
However, all the problems are settled in the Minuetto, which comes from the opera Lo Frate Innamorato and is obviously a song rather than a dance. Florindo and Coviello are united with Prudenza and Rosetta, and Pulcinella is reunited with his own Pimpinella - to the general rejoicing indicated in the racy Finale.
© Gerald Larner
- MacMillan
- Mendelssohn
Programme note
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Symphony No 4 in A major, Op 90, 'Italian' (1833)Allegro vivace
Andante con moto
Con moto moderato
Saltarello: PrestoMendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ symphony was the major product of his second ‘grand tour’ of Europe, undertaken at the age of 21. Savouring, as he put it, the “supreme delight in life” displayed by the Italians, he vowed to pay symphonic homage to their vivacity. The result, he declared, was the most cheerful piece of music he had yet composed, though he insisted that it was far from being a piece of nineteenth-century musical landscape painting.
Be that as it may, its Italian features are unmistakable and remain part of its charm. Though the theory that his ‘Scotch’ symphony was interchangeable with his ‘Italian’ no longer cuts much ice, there seems no doubt that the slow movement has nothing to do with Italy but was intended to commemorate Goethe and Zelter (Mendelssohn’s teacher, whose Goethe-inspired Konig in Thule it quotes), both of whom had recently died. What the ‘Scotch’ and ‘Italian’ symphonies do quite strikingly have in common are aspects of the key of A, the ‘Scotch’ beginning in A minor and ending in A major, the ‘Italian’ beginning in A major and ending in A minor. In this respect the one could be called the obverse of the other, though whether this was intentional is hard to say.
What is easier to identify is the instant sunshine of the first movement of the ‘Italian’ and the southern swirl of the finale, which Mendelssohn took pains to entitle Saltarello, in tribute to the leaping Italian dance it relentlessly evokes. In comparison, the source of the slow movement is surely the allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, another study in the relationship between A minor and major. As for the elfin grace of the third movement – a Mendelssohnian evocation of a classical minuet – its poetic trio section, filled with magical horn calls, could easily come from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Strangely, Mendelssohn never really liked his Italian symphony and substantially revised three of its four movements, changing the colouring of the andante, adding fresh touches of poetry to the third movement, and considerably extending the finale. But if these were his last thoughts, they were never acted upon and have only recently been issued in an optional performing version. Though they seem unlikely to replace the original – which, as usual, is what we shall hear tonight – they shed interesting light on a masterpiece which Mendelssohn himself, because of his incomprehensible lack of faith in it, conducted only once.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- oboe
“James MacMillan’s new Oboe Concerto is a corker…” – The Times’ verdict at its premiere. Even if contemporary music is not really your thing, we urge you not to miss this Scottish premiere given by the sensational François Leleux. Framing it, two perennial favourites: visits to Italy in the company of a distinguished Russian and a youthful German.
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