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Nelson Mass
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Missa in Angustiis (Nelson Mass), H XXII:11Kyrie
Gloria
Credo
Sanctus and Benedictus
Agnus DeiJoseph Haydn spent the last fourteen years of his life in Vienna, in a house which he had bought with the proceeds of his two visits to London. He continued to hold the title of Kapellmeister, or director of music, to the Esterházy family, which had employed him for so long. But in his last years this was purely honorary, except that his Prince gave him a pension which allowed him a comfortable retirement. And even before that, although he had to spend some time at the family’s old palace at Eisenstadt, he was never required to travel to the massive summer palace of Eszterháza in the wilds of Hungary. The principal task which his position entailed was to compose and direct a new Mass each year to celebrate the name-day (the saint’s day corresponding to a person’s Christian name) of his patron’s wife Princess Marie Hermenegild. This duty he discharged in a series of six masterpieces composed every year except one between 1796 and 1802.
These late Masses are 'symphonic' in construction: instead of being divided into separate numbers as in Bach’s B minor Mass (and Mozart’s 'Unfinished' Mass in C minor), the five sections (with Kyrie and Christe combined, and also Sanctus and Benedictus) are treated as large-scale continuous entities. By the same token, the four soloists are not allocated separate arias, but emerge from the four-part chorus in short passages of solo and ensemble writing.
For the most part the music of these Masses reflects Haydn’s sincere, untroubled faith: a contemporary recorded him as defending their cheerfulness by saying that "at the thought of God his heart leapt for joy, and he could not help his music’s doing the same". But there is a greater seriousness and urgency about much of the third Mass in the series. It is the only one of Haydn’s late Masses in a minor key, D minor; and even its major-key music is often unusually stark – as in the first section of the Credo, with its orchestral introduction in octaves and its extended two-part canon in the voices.
The reason for this austerity – and for the title of Missa in Angustiis, or “Mass in time of peril” – lies in the date of the work’s composition. It was written during July and August 1798, for performance at the parish church in Eisenstadt in September. This was a time at which the Allies’ war against Revolutionary France was going badly, and much of Austria was occupied by the French. According to one contemporary account (which has been called into question by recent scholarship), the war also impinged on the work in a more specific way. Haydn, it is said, was at work on it when a courier arrived with the news of Admiral Nelson’s victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile (on 3 August 1798), and the announcement became translated into musical terms as the stirring trumpet fanfare at the end of the Benedictus section. The nickname of 'Nelson' Mass, however, stems not from this moment, but from a visit which Nelson, together with Sir William and Lady Hamilton, paid to Eisenstadt in September 1800 – a visit which is traditionally supposed to have included a performance of the Mass.
Haydn’s own scoring of the 'Nelson' Mass was for three trumpets, timpani, strings and organ – alternating between its traditional function as continuo accompanist and a written-out solo part. The organ in this obbligato role seems to have been no more than a makeshift replacement for woodwind and horns, which at that time had been removed from the Esterházy payroll in a wartime economy drive. Later – most probably for the 1800 performance – Haydn’s assistant and successor at Eisenstadt, Johann Nepomuk Fuchs (1766–1839), added parts for a wind section of flute, oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoon, which take over the organ’s solo passages and allow it to revert to its usual accompanying role. It is in this version, presumably authorised and supervised by Haydn himself, that the Mass will be performed this evening.
© Anthony Burton
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Scena di Berenice (H.XVIIa:10)Haydn’s compositions for his two triumphant visits to London included not only his last twelve symphonies, but also an opera and a number of smaller pieces both for instruments and for voice. Among them is this Scena, one of his finest vocal works, which was first performed at his final benefit concert on 4 May 1795. (The so-called 'London' Symphony, No 104, had its premiere in the same programme.) The piece was written for the celebrated prima donna Brigida Giorgi Banti, and her performance at the concert was generally admired – though Haydn wrote in his diary, in his delightful English (or perhaps recording a London witticism), that Signora Banti had sung "very scanty".
The text of Scena di Berenice is from Antigono, by the great librettist of baroque opera, Pietro Metastasio. The heroine, Berenice, has fallen in love with Demetrius, the son (by a previous marriage) of her husband Antigonus. Demetrius has decided to abandon Berenice and commit suicide, rather than dishonour the family name. Berenice struggles with her conflicting emotions, imagines her lover departing for the underworld, and calls on the gods to bring her life to an end.
Haydn set this text as a large-scale operatic scene, with a brilliant solo part, and a prominent role for the wind section of flute, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns in the accompanying orchestra. A striking and forward-looking feature of the work is its lack of a consistent key-centre, reflecting the heroine’s increasingly distracted state of mind. The opening recitative roves restlessly from key to key, though at Aspetta, anima bella it settles for a moment in C major for an oboe and bassoon melody of Gluck-like calm. The slow first aria, Non partir, bell’idol mio, in E major, breaks off for a further passage of recitative, leading to the fiery concluding aria, Perchè, se tanti siete, in F minor.
© Anthony Burton
- Haydn
Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony No 101 in D major 'The Clock' (1794)Adagio - Presto
Andante
Menuet: Allegretto
Finale: VivaceLong before he left rural Esterháza, where he was musical director for 24 years, Haydn’s services were in wide demand. His Seven Last Words from the Cross had been commissioned by Spain, his 'Paris' symphonies by France. His Op 50 quartets were composed for the King of Prussia, and even the fickle Viennese had their eye on him. Though he was now almost sixty, inspiration still flowed. In 1790, belatedly resident in Vienna, he was called upon in his rooms by an impresario who announced himself with famous words: “I am Salomon of England,” said the visitor, “and I have come to take you to London.” Far from showing Salomon the door, Haydn agreed to a commission for the series of masterpieces we know as the London symphonies, the performances of which he was to direct in person.
Between 1791 and 1795, Haydn travelled twice to London, taking more than a fortnight to get there and lingering a year and a half on each occasion. For a senior composer who had lived a mostly sheltered life, these journeys through Germany and France and across the Channel seemed greatly perilous. Before setting off the first time, he bade an emotional farewell to his dear friend and disciple, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who with uncanny premonition expressed the fear that they would never meet again – though in fact it was young Mozart who would die at home in Vienna and old Haydn who would prosper.
The 'Clock' symphony, launched during his second London visit, is a work with all the advantages – an attractive nickname, a wealth of melody, a constant sense of surprise, a Beethovenian assertiveness, and a stupendous finale, one of Haydn’s very best. The slow introduction, in the "wrong" key, holds things in suspense until the Allegro arrives in the 'right' key. The slow movement underpins its adorable theme with ticking bassoons and pizzicato strings, later replaced by battering and by no means comic brass. The Menuet has grandeur, except in the trio section where the players emulate a rustic band. But it is the finale, complete with an audaciously sotto voce double fugue, that forms the symphony's explicit destination. It shows what Salomon expected of Haydn, and Haydn of Salomon’s London orchestra.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- soprano
- mezzo-soprano
- tenor
- bass baritone
- -
Every year the SCO brings the world’s finest musicians, yet it is still a special thrill when an artist of the stature of Adam Fischer makes his debut with the Orchestra. Haydn is his passion: he created both a festival and an orchestra to perform the great man’s work. He comes to Scotland with a blockbuster programme to show Haydn in symphonic, operatic and grand styles.
Goerne sings Schubert
- Bach (arr. Webern)
Programme note
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Orchestration of Bach's Fuga (Ricercar)
[arr. Webern]Anton Webern (the disciple of Schönberg and his ‘Twelve-tone School’) orchestrated the Fugue from Bach’s Musical Offering in 1935 “to bring the music out of its esoteric abstractness and make it alive and comprehensible, to bring it closer to the listener”. (Don't forget this was before any hint of the early music ‘authentic’ school that has shown how ‘alive’ Bach’s music can be without artificial aids.) “My orchestration attempts ... to reveal the interrelation of motifs. This was not always easy. It seeks, of course, in addition, to show how I see the character of the work.” The result, then, is a fascinating insight into how one of the twentieth century’s more provocative musical minds ‘heard’ this grandest of Bach’s fugues. Of interest is not only how the notes are placed among the instruments of the orchestra (for a visual simile think of the pointillism of artists such as Seurat), but also how these sounds highlight the phrasing and articulation of Bach’s invention. Then reflect on how different the end result is from those contemporary elephantine transcriptions of Bach that Stokowski made so famous in his Philadelphia Orchestra recordings.
© David Gardner
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Eight songs arranged for voice and orchestraAn Silvia, D891 (arr.Spindler)
Memnon, D541 (arr. Brahms)
Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, D396 (arr. Brahms)
Der Wegweiser, from Winterreise, D911 (arr. Webern)
Greisengesang, D778 (arr. Brahms)
Im Abendrot, D799 (arr. Reger)
Tranenregen, from Die schone Mullerin, D795 (arr. Webern)
Erlkonig, D328 (arr. Reger)Schubert’s songs - like those of Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, Wolf - are essentially partnerships between a singer and a pianist, the voice part never more important than the “accompaniment,” the piano part as vital and expressive as the vocal line. Occasionally, in longer songs, an extra instrument - a clarinet in The Shepherd on the Rock, a horn or cello in Auf dem Strom - was added by the composer, but, except in his operas and his incidental music to Rosamunde, Schubert seems to have regarded the orchestra as an encumbrance to the intimacy of his songs.
Mahler, born 63 years later, was different. For him the orchestra was an essential, often deeply emotional part of a song’s texture - think of his Kindertotenlieder and his Knaben Wunderhorn settings - and when, as can happen in small-scale surroundings, Mahler’s often sizeable orchestra is replaced by a piano a major element of the experience is audibly missing. In this respect Mahler could be called the obverse of Schubert; and though orchestral transcriptions of Schubert songs - prevalent in the nineteenth century, when there were determined moves to take the music out of the recital room and into the concert hall - may never actually seem necessary or revelatory, they do sometimes cast fresh and interesting colours upon a song, depending on the abilities of the arranger, and on the singer’s relationship with the orchestral accompaniment, as we shall hear this evening.
When the arranger has possessed an ear as acute as Anton Webern’s at the start of the twentieth century, something happens to Schubert’s music. The result, disclosing Webern’s famous flair for instrumental timbre, could at times almost be listened to as a new song, at least to the extent that, in the process, Schubert’s attitudes seem in some way to have altered. In choosing - while still a student - two of Schubert’s most heart-rending songs, from the Winterreise and Schone Mullerin cycles, Webern knew he was facing a challenge, which he resolved with exquisitely fragile results.
Other arrangers, in an effort to avoid imposing too much of themselves on the music, have preferred to provide versions of a sort which, they believed, Schubert himself might have favoured. Yet their desire to prevent the orchestral accompaniment from getting in the way of a song has sometimes proved to have the opposite effect, so that Schubert’s edge has been dulled, his music too conspicuously inflated.
Between these extremes lie a variety of approaches, successful or less successful. Liszt, Berlioz, Britten, Offenbach, Luciano Berio all transcribed Schubert. And the young Anton Webern’s four Schubert songs should remain high on anybody’s list, their tendencies towards precise, pure-toned instrumental colouring - the art of Klangfarbenmelodie or “sound-colour melody,” as it has been called - have already been heard this evening in his version of Bach’s Ricercar.
Brahms, who adored Schubert and edited his symphonies, brought all his sensitivity to his song arrangements, as his melancholy, richly textured, darkly tolling transcription of Memnon - one of Schubert’s settings of words by his suicidal friend Johann Mayrhofer - profoundly proclaims with the support of a Brahmsian quartet of horns. The slow, sad Greinengesang, to words by Ruckert, could be called a Brahmsian (as well as Schubertian) foretaste of Mahler, and the arrangement of Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, to words by Schiller, is a stormy seascape, with persistent bassoons, pulsating strings and, towards the end, fierce kettledrums. Overkill? Only in a bad performance.
Matthias Spindler, a busy modern arranger and recording co-ordinator, has worked for Deutsche Grammophon and other companies. Pattering violins and violas, plucked cellos and basses, keep his version of An Silvia light and springy. Max Reger, a magisterial German contrapuntalist of the late nineteenth century, sought to tone down his turgidity in numerous Schubert arrangements. Though gentle woodwind and a final trailing flute bring a sunset glow to Im Abendrot, his treatment of Erlkonig carries a strong whiff of Wagner, suggestive of the storm at the start of Die Walkure or else the Ride of the Valkyries - perhaps the sort of sound the teenage Schubert was here reaching towards. In Reger’s hands, the music comes as a reminder of what a great opera composer Schubert might have become, if ever he had had the opportunity to find the right libretto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mahler
Programme note
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Adagietto from Symphony No 51901/2. A new century. A new beginning: new ideas, marriage, a fifth symphony. All breaks with the past. Gone were the extensive quotations from his songs, especially from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn) that featured so prominently in his first four symphonies; gone the associated detailed programmatic themes – man’s struggle against Fate (Symphony No 1); Resurrection (No 2); the pantheism of Symphony No 3; the indestructibility of innocence (No 4). Symphony No 5 was a new departure: absolute music – a purely symphonic argument based on two great opposites in man’s pantheon of emotions – tragedy and joy. That was not a new idea, but the originality of Mahler’s treatment was to eschew any attempt at transformation: there is no resolution of tragedy into joy. Instead, Mahler seems set on showing that these two extreme emotions exist simultaneously like a coin faced with the masks of Tragedy and Comedy – always apart, always together.
Although ostensibly in five movements, Symphony No 5 is at the same time tripartite. The first movement (a funeral march) acts as a greatly extended slow introduction to the second movement. Together, as Part I, they essay the depths of grief and tragedy, with vehement protests along the way. The gargantuan Scherzo (Part II) is a total and abrupt contrast. By its sheer size it also carries the main weight of the symphony. It is an exuberant dance, a dance of life, a Ländler with contrasted trios. The famous Adagietto then serves as the introduction to the final movement: together they form Part III. However, the Adagietto (not the full blown, weighty slow movement we might have expected) also acts as an introspective interlude between the exuberant spirits of the Scherzo and the equally exuberant goings on of the finale. Thus, the first three movements present the tragic and joyous faces of life’s coin and constitute the major thrust of the symphony’s argument. Then follows the Adagietto before the joie de vivre of the Scherzo is celebrated as a formal, abstract pageant in the finale.
The Adagietto is entrusted entirely, and surprisingly (given the brilliant orchestration of the other movements), to just divided strings and harp. It is a movement of great sensuousness, beauty and eloquence. The Adagietto has long had a separate existence from the rest of the symphony. Sir Henry Wood conducted it at a 1909 Proms concert just five years after Mahler gave the première of the entire symphony in Cologne. And, of course, it gained wide public recognition when Luchino Visconti used the Adagietto in the sound track of his 1971 film based on Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
© David Gardner
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 5 in B flat major, D485 (1816)Allegro
Andante con moto
Menuetto: Allegro molto
Allegro vivaceSchubert’s Fifth is not like Beethoven’s Fifth. Though written in the same city, it takes the progress of the Viennese symphony backwards rather than forwards, but does it so entrancingly that nobody should care. Schubert was, after all, only nineteen when he composed it, and the players at his disposal were members of what has been called a “neighbourhood” orchestra, with Schubert himself playing viola.
Not until his 'Unfinished', in 1822, did Schubert produce a genuinely vanguard symphony. Yet to suggest that the Unfinished displayed a wholly new side of his personality would be misleading. The signs were already there, in the volatile energy of the second and third symphonies and in the implications of the 'Tragic' (No 4 in C minor). In No 5, he poured some of his airiest melodies into a limpidly classical mould, half Haydn and half Mozart, yet made it sound utterly Schubertian.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s famous essayist, called it “a pearl of great price”, adding that no academic criticism had yet been produced that could pick holes in this “little” symphony. But was Tovey’s use of the word “little” not in itself a criticism? And perhaps somewhat patronising? Symphony orchestras take pains to preserve the special lightness of the music, luminously scored for one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings – which once won it the nickname (a further gibe?) of the “Symphony without trumpets and drums.”
It is, in fact, a chamber symphony, as the finely balanced string and wind textures suggest. The first movement and finale are short, but have a vitality behind their grace which makes up for their brevity. The slow movement, especially if its repeated sections are included, is certainly not brief, but it is very beautiful. Though the main theme, according to Tovey, is “Schubertised Mozart” (yet another criticism?) it goes through modulations that are deeply Schubertian.
The third movement – more of a scherzo than a minuet – opens starkly in G minor before proceeding to a lilting waltzlike trio section in the major. It may recall Mozart’s 40th symphony, one of Schubert’s favourite works, but the fingerprints are again Schubert’s own.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- baritone
Robin Ticciati brings a programme with Vienna at its heart: the magnificent, musical city that was home to so many of these composers. Mahler loved Schubert, and Ticciati pairs their Fifth Symphonies. Webern pays tribute to Bach and Matthias Goerne, one of today’s finest exponents of lieder, performs Schubert songs orchestrated by Webern, Brahms and Reger.
Goerne sings Schubert
- Bach (arr. Webern)
Programme note
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Orchestration of Bach's Fuga (Ricercar)
[arr. Webern]Anton Webern (the disciple of Schönberg and his ‘Twelve-tone School’) orchestrated the Fugue from Bach’s Musical Offering in 1935 “to bring the music out of its esoteric abstractness and make it alive and comprehensible, to bring it closer to the listener”. (Don't forget this was before any hint of the early music ‘authentic’ school that has shown how ‘alive’ Bach’s music can be without artificial aids.) “My orchestration attempts ... to reveal the interrelation of motifs. This was not always easy. It seeks, of course, in addition, to show how I see the character of the work.” The result, then, is a fascinating insight into how one of the twentieth century’s more provocative musical minds ‘heard’ this grandest of Bach’s fugues. Of interest is not only how the notes are placed among the instruments of the orchestra (for a visual simile think of the pointillism of artists such as Seurat), but also how these sounds highlight the phrasing and articulation of Bach’s invention. Then reflect on how different the end result is from those contemporary elephantine transcriptions of Bach that Stokowski made so famous in his Philadelphia Orchestra recordings.
© David Gardner
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Eight songs arranged for voice and orchestraAn Silvia, D891 (arr.Spindler)
Memnon, D541 (arr. Brahms)
Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, D396 (arr. Brahms)
Der Wegweiser, from Winterreise, D911 (arr. Webern)
Greisengesang, D778 (arr. Brahms)
Im Abendrot, D799 (arr. Reger)
Tranenregen, from Die schone Mullerin, D795 (arr. Webern)
Erlkonig, D328 (arr. Reger)Schubert’s songs - like those of Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, Wolf - are essentially partnerships between a singer and a pianist, the voice part never more important than the “accompaniment,” the piano part as vital and expressive as the vocal line. Occasionally, in longer songs, an extra instrument - a clarinet in The Shepherd on the Rock, a horn or cello in Auf dem Strom - was added by the composer, but, except in his operas and his incidental music to Rosamunde, Schubert seems to have regarded the orchestra as an encumbrance to the intimacy of his songs.
Mahler, born 63 years later, was different. For him the orchestra was an essential, often deeply emotional part of a song’s texture - think of his Kindertotenlieder and his Knaben Wunderhorn settings - and when, as can happen in small-scale surroundings, Mahler’s often sizeable orchestra is replaced by a piano a major element of the experience is audibly missing. In this respect Mahler could be called the obverse of Schubert; and though orchestral transcriptions of Schubert songs - prevalent in the nineteenth century, when there were determined moves to take the music out of the recital room and into the concert hall - may never actually seem necessary or revelatory, they do sometimes cast fresh and interesting colours upon a song, depending on the abilities of the arranger, and on the singer’s relationship with the orchestral accompaniment, as we shall hear this evening.
When the arranger has possessed an ear as acute as Anton Webern’s at the start of the twentieth century, something happens to Schubert’s music. The result, disclosing Webern’s famous flair for instrumental timbre, could at times almost be listened to as a new song, at least to the extent that, in the process, Schubert’s attitudes seem in some way to have altered. In choosing - while still a student - two of Schubert’s most heart-rending songs, from the Winterreise and Schone Mullerin cycles, Webern knew he was facing a challenge, which he resolved with exquisitely fragile results.
Other arrangers, in an effort to avoid imposing too much of themselves on the music, have preferred to provide versions of a sort which, they believed, Schubert himself might have favoured. Yet their desire to prevent the orchestral accompaniment from getting in the way of a song has sometimes proved to have the opposite effect, so that Schubert’s edge has been dulled, his music too conspicuously inflated.
Between these extremes lie a variety of approaches, successful or less successful. Liszt, Berlioz, Britten, Offenbach, Luciano Berio all transcribed Schubert. And the young Anton Webern’s four Schubert songs should remain high on anybody’s list, their tendencies towards precise, pure-toned instrumental colouring - the art of Klangfarbenmelodie or “sound-colour melody,” as it has been called - have already been heard this evening in his version of Bach’s Ricercar.
Brahms, who adored Schubert and edited his symphonies, brought all his sensitivity to his song arrangements, as his melancholy, richly textured, darkly tolling transcription of Memnon - one of Schubert’s settings of words by his suicidal friend Johann Mayrhofer - profoundly proclaims with the support of a Brahmsian quartet of horns. The slow, sad Greinengesang, to words by Ruckert, could be called a Brahmsian (as well as Schubertian) foretaste of Mahler, and the arrangement of Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, to words by Schiller, is a stormy seascape, with persistent bassoons, pulsating strings and, towards the end, fierce kettledrums. Overkill? Only in a bad performance.
Matthias Spindler, a busy modern arranger and recording co-ordinator, has worked for Deutsche Grammophon and other companies. Pattering violins and violas, plucked cellos and basses, keep his version of An Silvia light and springy. Max Reger, a magisterial German contrapuntalist of the late nineteenth century, sought to tone down his turgidity in numerous Schubert arrangements. Though gentle woodwind and a final trailing flute bring a sunset glow to Im Abendrot, his treatment of Erlkonig carries a strong whiff of Wagner, suggestive of the storm at the start of Die Walkure or else the Ride of the Valkyries - perhaps the sort of sound the teenage Schubert was here reaching towards. In Reger’s hands, the music comes as a reminder of what a great opera composer Schubert might have become, if ever he had had the opportunity to find the right libretto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mahler
Programme note
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Adagietto from Symphony No 51901/2. A new century. A new beginning: new ideas, marriage, a fifth symphony. All breaks with the past. Gone were the extensive quotations from his songs, especially from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn) that featured so prominently in his first four symphonies; gone the associated detailed programmatic themes – man’s struggle against Fate (Symphony No 1); Resurrection (No 2); the pantheism of Symphony No 3; the indestructibility of innocence (No 4). Symphony No 5 was a new departure: absolute music – a purely symphonic argument based on two great opposites in man’s pantheon of emotions – tragedy and joy. That was not a new idea, but the originality of Mahler’s treatment was to eschew any attempt at transformation: there is no resolution of tragedy into joy. Instead, Mahler seems set on showing that these two extreme emotions exist simultaneously like a coin faced with the masks of Tragedy and Comedy – always apart, always together.
Although ostensibly in five movements, Symphony No 5 is at the same time tripartite. The first movement (a funeral march) acts as a greatly extended slow introduction to the second movement. Together, as Part I, they essay the depths of grief and tragedy, with vehement protests along the way. The gargantuan Scherzo (Part II) is a total and abrupt contrast. By its sheer size it also carries the main weight of the symphony. It is an exuberant dance, a dance of life, a Ländler with contrasted trios. The famous Adagietto then serves as the introduction to the final movement: together they form Part III. However, the Adagietto (not the full blown, weighty slow movement we might have expected) also acts as an introspective interlude between the exuberant spirits of the Scherzo and the equally exuberant goings on of the finale. Thus, the first three movements present the tragic and joyous faces of life’s coin and constitute the major thrust of the symphony’s argument. Then follows the Adagietto before the joie de vivre of the Scherzo is celebrated as a formal, abstract pageant in the finale.
The Adagietto is entrusted entirely, and surprisingly (given the brilliant orchestration of the other movements), to just divided strings and harp. It is a movement of great sensuousness, beauty and eloquence. The Adagietto has long had a separate existence from the rest of the symphony. Sir Henry Wood conducted it at a 1909 Proms concert just five years after Mahler gave the première of the entire symphony in Cologne. And, of course, it gained wide public recognition when Luchino Visconti used the Adagietto in the sound track of his 1971 film based on Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
© David Gardner
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 5 in B-flat major, D485 (1816)Allegro
Andante con moto
Menuetto: Allegro molto
Allegro vivaceSchubert’s Fifth is not like Beethoven’s Fifth. Though written in the same city, it takes the progress of the Viennese symphony backwards rather than forwards, but does it so entrancingly that nobody should care. Schubert was, after all, only nineteen when he composed it, and the players at his disposal were members of what has been called a “neighbourhood” orchestra, with Schubert himself playing viola.
Not until his Unfinished, in 1822, did Schubert produce a genuinely vanguard symphony. Yet to suggest that the Unfinished displayed a wholly new side of his personality would be misleading. The signs were already there, in the volatile energy of the second and third symphonies and in the implications of the 'Tragic' (No 4 in C minor). In No 5, he poured some of his airiest melodies into a limpidly classical mould, half Haydn and half Mozart, yet made it sound utterly Schubertian.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s famous essayist, called it “a pearl of great price”, adding that no academic criticism had yet been produced that could pick holes in this “little” symphony. But was Tovey’s use of the word “little” not in itself a criticism? And perhaps somewhat patronising? Symphony orchestras take pains to preserve the special lightness of the music, luminously scored for one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings – which once won it the nickname (a further gibe?) of the “Symphony without trumpets and drums.”
It is, in fact, a chamber symphony, as the finely balanced string and wind textures suggest. The first movement and finale are short, but have a vitality behind their grace which makes up for their brevity. The slow movement, especially if its repeated sections are included, is certainly not brief, but it is very beautiful. Though the main theme, according to Tovey, is “Schubertised Mozart” (yet another criticism?) it goes through modulations that are deeply Schubertian.
The third movement – more of a scherzo than a minuet – opens starkly in G minor before proceeding to a lilting waltzlike trio section in the major. It may recall Mozart’s 40th symphony, one of Schubert’s favourite works, but the fingerprints are again Schubert’s own.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- baritone
Robin Ticciati brings a programme with Vienna at its heart: the magnificent, musical city that was home to so many of these composers. Mahler loved Schubert, and Ticciati pairs their Fifth Symphonies. Webern pays tribute to Bach and Matthias Goerne, one of today’s finest exponents of lieder, performs Schubert songs orchestrated by Webern, Brahms and Reger.
Goerne sings Schubert
- Bach (arr. Webern)
Programme note
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Orchestration of Bach's Fuga (Ricercar)
[arr. Webern]Anton Webern (the disciple of Schönberg and his ‘Twelve-tone School’) orchestrated the Fugue from Bach’s Musical Offering in 1935 “to bring the music out of its esoteric abstractness and make it alive and comprehensible, to bring it closer to the listener”. (Don't forget this was before any hint of the early music ‘authentic’ school that has shown how ‘alive’ Bach’s music can be without artificial aids.) “My orchestration attempts ... to reveal the interrelation of motifs. This was not always easy. It seeks, of course, in addition, to show how I see the character of the work.” The result, then, is a fascinating insight into how one of the twentieth century’s more provocative musical minds ‘heard’ this grandest of Bach’s fugues. Of interest is not only how the notes are placed among the instruments of the orchestra (for a visual simile think of the pointillism of artists such as Seurat), but also how these sounds highlight the phrasing and articulation of Bach’s invention. Then reflect on how different the end result is from those contemporary elephantine transcriptions of Bach that Stokowski made so famous in his Philadelphia Orchestra recordings.
© David Gardner
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Eight songs arranged for voice and orchestraAn Silvia, D891 (arr.Spindler)
Memnon, D541 (arr. Brahms)
Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, D396 (arr. Brahms)
Der Wegweiser, from Winterreise, D911 (arr. Webern)
Greisengesang, D778 (arr. Brahms)
Im Abendrot, D799 (arr. Reger)
Tranenregen, from Die schone Mullerin, D795 (arr. Webern)
Erlkonig, D328 (arr. Reger)Schubert’s songs - like those of Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, Wolf - are essentially partnerships between a singer and a pianist, the voice part never more important than the “accompaniment,” the piano part as vital and expressive as the vocal line. Occasionally, in longer songs, an extra instrument - a clarinet in The Shepherd on the Rock, a horn or cello in Auf dem Strom - was added by the composer, but, except in his operas and his incidental music to Rosamunde, Schubert seems to have regarded the orchestra as an encumbrance to the intimacy of his songs.
Mahler, born 63 years later, was different. For him the orchestra was an essential, often deeply emotional part of a song’s texture - think of his Kindertotenlieder and his Knaben Wunderhorn settings - and when, as can happen in small-scale surroundings, Mahler’s often sizeable orchestra is replaced by a piano a major element of the experience is audibly missing. In this respect Mahler could be called the obverse of Schubert; and though orchestral transcriptions of Schubert songs - prevalent in the nineteenth century, when there were determined moves to take the music out of the recital room and into the concert hall - may never actually seem necessary or revelatory, they do sometimes cast fresh and interesting colours upon a song, depending on the abilities of the arranger, and on the singer’s relationship with the orchestral accompaniment, as we shall hear this evening.
When the arranger has possessed an ear as acute as Anton Webern’s at the start of the twentieth century, something happens to Schubert’s music. The result, disclosing Webern’s famous flair for instrumental timbre, could at times almost be listened to as a new song, at least to the extent that, in the process, Schubert’s attitudes seem in some way to have altered. In choosing - while still a student - two of Schubert’s most heart-rending songs, from the Winterreise and Schone Mullerin cycles, Webern knew he was facing a challenge, which he resolved with exquisitely fragile results.
Other arrangers, in an effort to avoid imposing too much of themselves on the music, have preferred to provide versions of a sort which, they believed, Schubert himself might have favoured. Yet their desire to prevent the orchestral accompaniment from getting in the way of a song has sometimes proved to have the opposite effect, so that Schubert’s edge has been dulled, his music too conspicuously inflated.
Between these extremes lie a variety of approaches, successful or less successful. Liszt, Berlioz, Britten, Offenbach, Luciano Berio all transcribed Schubert. And the young Anton Webern’s four Schubert songs should remain high on anybody’s list, their tendencies towards precise, pure-toned instrumental colouring - the art of Klangfarbenmelodie or “sound-colour melody,” as it has been called - have already been heard this evening in his version of Bach’s Ricercar.
Brahms, who adored Schubert and edited his symphonies, brought all his sensitivity to his song arrangements, as his melancholy, richly textured, darkly tolling transcription of Memnon - one of Schubert’s settings of words by his suicidal friend Johann Mayrhofer - profoundly proclaims with the support of a Brahmsian quartet of horns. The slow, sad Greinengesang, to words by Ruckert, could be called a Brahmsian (as well as Schubertian) foretaste of Mahler, and the arrangement of Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, to words by Schiller, is a stormy seascape, with persistent bassoons, pulsating strings and, towards the end, fierce kettledrums. Overkill? Only in a bad performance.
Matthias Spindler, a busy modern arranger and recording co-ordinator, has worked for Deutsche Grammophon and other companies. Pattering violins and violas, plucked cellos and basses, keep his version of An Silvia light and springy. Max Reger, a magisterial German contrapuntalist of the late nineteenth century, sought to tone down his turgidity in numerous Schubert arrangements. Though gentle woodwind and a final trailing flute bring a sunset glow to Im Abendrot, his treatment of Erlkonig carries a strong whiff of Wagner, suggestive of the storm at the start of Die Walkure or else the Ride of the Valkyries - perhaps the sort of sound the teenage Schubert was here reaching towards. In Reger’s hands, the music comes as a reminder of what a great opera composer Schubert might have become, if ever he had had the opportunity to find the right libretto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mahler
Programme note
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Adagietto from Symphony No 51901/2. A new century. A new beginning: new ideas, marriage, a fifth symphony. All breaks with the past. Gone were the extensive quotations from his songs, especially from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn) that featured so prominently in his first four symphonies; gone the associated detailed programmatic themes – man’s struggle against Fate (Symphony No 1); Resurrection (No 2); the pantheism of Symphony No 3; the indestructibility of innocence (No 4). Symphony No 5 was a new departure: absolute music – a purely symphonic argument based on two great opposites in man’s pantheon of emotions – tragedy and joy. That was not a new idea, but the originality of Mahler’s treatment was to eschew any attempt at transformation: there is no resolution of tragedy into joy. Instead, Mahler seems set on showing that these two extreme emotions exist simultaneously like a coin faced with the masks of Tragedy and Comedy – always apart, always together.
Although ostensibly in five movements, Symphony No 5 is at the same time tripartite. The first movement (a funeral march) acts as a greatly extended slow introduction to the second movement. Together, as Part I, they essay the depths of grief and tragedy, with vehement protests along the way. The gargantuan Scherzo (Part II) is a total and abrupt contrast. By its sheer size it also carries the main weight of the symphony. It is an exuberant dance, a dance of life, a Ländler with contrasted trios. The famous Adagietto then serves as the introduction to the final movement: together they form Part III. However, the Adagietto (not the full blown, weighty slow movement we might have expected) also acts as an introspective interlude between the exuberant spirits of the Scherzo and the equally exuberant goings on of the finale. Thus, the first three movements present the tragic and joyous faces of life’s coin and constitute the major thrust of the symphony’s argument. Then follows the Adagietto before the joie de vivre of the Scherzo is celebrated as a formal, abstract pageant in the finale.
The Adagietto is entrusted entirely, and surprisingly (given the brilliant orchestration of the other movements), to just divided strings and harp. It is a movement of great sensuousness, beauty and eloquence. The Adagietto has long had a separate existence from the rest of the symphony. Sir Henry Wood conducted it at a 1909 Proms concert just five years after Mahler gave the première of the entire symphony in Cologne. And, of course, it gained wide public recognition when Luchino Visconti used the Adagietto in the sound track of his 1971 film based on Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
© David Gardner
- Schubert
Programme note
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No 5 in B-flat major, D485 (1816)Allegro
Andante con moto
Menuetto: Allegro molto
Allegro vivaceSchubert’s Fifth is not like Beethoven’s Fifth. Though written in the same city, it takes the progress of the Viennese symphony backwards rather than forwards, but does it so entrancingly that nobody should care. Schubert was, after all, only nineteen when he composed it, and the players at his disposal were members of what has been called a “neighbourhood” orchestra, with Schubert himself playing viola.
Not until his Unfinished, in 1822, did Schubert produce a genuinely vanguard symphony. Yet to suggest that the Unfinished displayed a wholly new side of his personality would be misleading. The signs were already there, in the volatile energy of the second and third symphonies and in the implications of the 'Tragic' (No 4 in C minor). In No 5, he poured some of his airiest melodies into a limpidly classical mould, half Haydn and half Mozart, yet made it sound utterly Schubertian.
Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s famous essayist, called it “a pearl of great price”, adding that no academic criticism had yet been produced that could pick holes in this “little” symphony. But was Tovey’s use of the word “little” not in itself a criticism? And perhaps somewhat patronising? Symphony orchestras take pains to preserve the special lightness of the music, luminously scored for one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings – which once won it the nickname (a further gibe?) of the “Symphony without trumpets and drums.”
It is, in fact, a chamber symphony, as the finely balanced string and wind textures suggest. The first movement and finale are short, but have a vitality behind their grace which makes up for their brevity. The slow movement, especially if its repeated sections are included, is certainly not brief, but it is very beautiful. Though the main theme, according to Tovey, is “Schubertised Mozart” (yet another criticism?) it goes through modulations that are deeply Schubertian.
The third movement – more of a scherzo than a minuet – opens starkly in G minor before proceeding to a lilting waltzlike trio section in the major. It may recall Mozart’s 40th symphony, one of Schubert’s favourite works, but the fingerprints are again Schubert’s own.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor
- baritone
Robin Ticciati brings a programme with Vienna at its heart: the magnificent, musical city that was home to so many of these composers. Mahler loved Schubert, and Ticciati pairs their Fifth Symphonies. Webern pays tribute to Bach and Matthias Goerne, one of today’s finest exponents of lieder, performs Schubert songs orchestrated by Webern, Brahms and Reger.
Das Lied von der Erde
- Haydn
Programme note
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony no. 60, in C major, ‘Il Distratto’ (1774)I: Adagio - Allegro di molto
II: Andante
III: Menuetto - Trio
IV: PrestoV: Adagio
VI: Finale: PrestissimoWithout doubt, the defining point of Haydn’s career was his decision to accept the position of Vice Kappellmeister with one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the Austrian empire – the Esterházys. He spent nearly thirty years here (having been promoted to Kappellmeister after the death of his predecessor, Gregor Werner) and it was during this period that Haydn wrote some of his most popular and important works. His original contract stated that nothing he wrote for the court was to be used elsewhere, and so it was that his output grew to such an immense size, as each commission that Haydn accepted had to be for a brand new work. This apparent restriction proved immensely beneficial to Haydn’s development as a composer, for with each new commission came the chance to try something different. As a result, his musical language changed and matured considerably during these thirty years, gradually moving away from the techniques of the high Baroque and galant style to fully-fledged classicism.
The regular series of events at the Esterházy court was rich and varied, and alongside the many musical and theatrical performances given over the course of the year, Prince Nicolaus also invited the celebrated Carl Wahr Troupe for a brief residency every summer from 1772 to 1777, during which they performed plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Haydn was often invited to compose music to accompany these visiting theatrical performances, and it is likely that much of his music from this period was either originally destined for the stage or later adapted for this purpose. His Symphony No 60 in C major began life as incidental music for a performance of the play Der Zerstreute (‘The Absent-Minded Man’), a translation of Le Distrait by Jean François Regnard, or ‘Il Distratto’ in Italian, as Haydn wrote on the manuscript.
A light-hearted farce, with equally comical music to match, the play tells the tale of an absent-minded man called Leandre, whose forgetfulness sees him end up in all kinds of trouble. Both the play and Haydn’s music were a hit with the critics, with one newspaper reporting: ‘The connoisseurs are amazed on the one hand, whilst the rest of the public is simply enchanted. For Haydn knows how to satisfy both. From the most affected pompousness he drops into doggerel, and thus Haydn and Regnard vie with each other to see who can produce the most whimsical absentminded entertainment.’ Evidently pleased with the result, Haydn later turned the music into a six-movement symphony, but its theatrical beginnings left their mark. The symphony is notable not only for breaking the traditional four-movement format but also for its ‘violations’ of traditional symphonic rules, such as unclear recapitulations, disruption of conventional tonal and formal progressions and passages of unconnected melodic content, all of which are a reflection of the absurdity of the play’s plot.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Mahler (arr. Cortese)
Programme note
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) [arr. Cortese]
Das Lied von der Erde (1909)I: Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde
II: Der Einsame im Herbst
III: Von der Jugend
IV: Von der Schönheit
V: Der Trunkene im Frühling
VI: Der AbschiedNowhere is the oscillation between the public and private spheres captured more meaningfully than within the music of Gustav Mahler, whose whole output treads a fine balance between the quiet, private moment and the magnitude of the world around us. Mahler believed in taking inspiration from the sounds that surrounded him in daily life – birdsong, the sound of cow bells, folk song and hunting calls – and incorporating these elements of the everyday into his works. A symphony, he believed, ‘must be like the world. It must embrace everything’. But unlike most of his contemporaries, Mahler composed very little across different genres: with the exception of a few early works, he confined himself entirely to the song and the symphony. While they may appear to be polar opposites, these two genres co-exist in Mahler’s works in a way never before witnessed in the music of any other composer – the symphonies embrace the intimacy of song, while the songs grasp at the magnitude of the symphony.
While Mahler’s orchestral songs expand the genre to new proportions, at their heart they may also be heard as responses to Schubert’s own Lieder. It was through Schubert’s Lieder that Mahler learned to combine the intimacy of the miniature with the splendour of the larger cycle, but it was through Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that Mahler received the ‘permission’ to introduce the voice to the symphony. Mahler had already included movements for voice in his second, third, fourth and eighth symphonies, but the first fully-integrated partnering of song and the symphony came with his orchestral song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde (‘The Song of the Earth’), later termed a ‘song-symphony’. Although the work calls for a large orchestra, Mahler uses the instrumentation in a chamber-like way, at times paring down the scoring to pairs of woodwinds and only deploying the full force of the orchestra sparingly at key moments. It is this sense of restraint that preserves the intimacy of song within the grandeur of the symphony, creating a truly unique new genre.
As the title suggests, like much of Mahler’s music this work is inspired by the natural world, with each of its six movements tracing a different aspect of life and our small part in it. Composed following one of the most difficult years in Mahler’s life, Das Lied von der Erde is at times deeply melancholic, probing questions of death and our place in the circle of life, with every mood from drunken hedonism (as in the fifth movement scherzo) to meditative serenity (in the thirty-minute ‘farewell’) finding its place. Based on excerpts from Hans Bethge’s volume of ancient Chinese poetry rendered into German, Die Chinesische Flöte (‘The Chinese Flute’), it was for Mahler ‘probably the most personal composition I have created thus far’. However, the work was not performed until after Mahler’s death in 1911, partly due to Mahler’s own reluctance to bring the work before the public. ‘Won't people go home and shoot themselves?’, he asked.
© Jo Kirkbride
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
- tenor
"The most personal utterance among Mahler's creations, and perhaps in all music…”. The view of Mahler’s friend, the conductor Bruno Walter, who gave the premiere in 1911 and lived to conduct Das Lied at the very first Edinburgh Festival in 1947. Inspired by Chinese poetry, the music veers between earthly passions and eternal longings, ultimately dissolving into sublime nothingness. This acclaimed new chamber orchestra version was premiered at the BBC Proms. Ticciati has preceded it, playfully enough, with perhaps Haydn’s most theatrical and mad – literally mad – symphony.
Das Lied von der Erde
- Haydn
Programme note
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony no. 60, in C major, ‘Il Distratto’ (1774)I: Adagio - Allegro di molto
II: Andante
III: Menuetto - Trio
IV: PrestoV: Adagio
VI: Finale: PrestissimoWithout doubt, the defining point of Haydn’s career was his decision to accept the position of Vice Kappellmeister with one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the Austrian empire – the Esterházys. He spent nearly thirty years here (having been promoted to Kappellmeister after the death of his predecessor, Gregor Werner) and it was during this period that Haydn wrote some of his most popular and important works. His original contract stated that nothing he wrote for the court was to be used elsewhere, and so it was that his output grew to such an immense size, as each commission that Haydn accepted had to be for a brand new work. This apparent restriction proved immensely beneficial to Haydn’s development as a composer, for with each new commission came the chance to try something different. As a result, his musical language changed and matured considerably during these thirty years, gradually moving away from the techniques of the high Baroque and galant style to fully-fledged classicism.
The regular series of events at the Esterházy court was rich and varied, and alongside the many musical and theatrical performances given over the course of the year, Prince Nicolaus also invited the celebrated Carl Wahr Troupe for a brief residency every summer from 1772 to 1777, during which they performed plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Haydn was often invited to compose music to accompany these visiting theatrical performances, and it is likely that much of his music from this period was either originally destined for the stage or later adapted for this purpose. His Symphony No 60 in C major began life as incidental music for a performance of the play Der Zerstreute (‘The Absent-Minded Man’), a translation of Le Distrait by Jean François Regnard, or ‘Il Distratto’ in Italian, as Haydn wrote on the manuscript.
A light-hearted farce, with equally comical music to match, the play tells the tale of an absent-minded man called Leandre, whose forgetfulness sees him end up in all kinds of trouble. Both the play and Haydn’s music were a hit with the critics, with one newspaper reporting: ‘The connoisseurs are amazed on the one hand, whilst the rest of the public is simply enchanted. For Haydn knows how to satisfy both. From the most affected pompousness he drops into doggerel, and thus Haydn and Regnard vie with each other to see who can produce the most whimsical absentminded entertainment.’ Evidently pleased with the result, Haydn later turned the music into a six-movement symphony, but its theatrical beginnings left their mark. The symphony is notable not only for breaking the traditional four-movement format but also for its ‘violations’ of traditional symphonic rules, such as unclear recapitulations, disruption of conventional tonal and formal progressions and passages of unconnected melodic content, all of which are a reflection of the absurdity of the play’s plot.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Mahler (arr. Cortese)
Programme note
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) [arr. Cortese]
Das Lied von der Erde (1909)I: Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde
II: Der Einsame im Herbst
III: Von der Jugend
IV: Von der Schönheit
V: Der Trunkene im Frühling
VI: Der AbschiedNowhere is the oscillation between the public and private spheres captured more meaningfully than within the music of Gustav Mahler, whose whole output treads a fine balance between the quiet, private moment and the magnitude of the world around us. Mahler believed in taking inspiration from the sounds that surrounded him in daily life – birdsong, the sound of cow bells, folk song and hunting calls – and incorporating these elements of the everyday into his works. A symphony, he believed, ‘must be like the world. It must embrace everything’. But unlike most of his contemporaries, Mahler composed very little across different genres: with the exception of a few early works, he confined himself entirely to the song and the symphony. While they may appear to be polar opposites, these two genres co-exist in Mahler’s works in a way never before witnessed in the music of any other composer – the symphonies embrace the intimacy of song, while the songs grasp at the magnitude of the symphony.
While Mahler’s orchestral songs expand the genre to new proportions, at their heart they may also be heard as responses to Schubert’s own Lieder. It was through Schubert’s Lieder that Mahler learned to combine the intimacy of the miniature with the splendour of the larger cycle, but it was through Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that Mahler received the ‘permission’ to introduce the voice to the symphony. Mahler had already included movements for voice in his second, third, fourth and eighth symphonies, but the first fully-integrated partnering of song and the symphony came with his orchestral song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde (‘The Song of the Earth’), later termed a ‘song-symphony’. Although the work calls for a large orchestra, Mahler uses the instrumentation in a chamber-like way, at times paring down the scoring to pairs of woodwinds and only deploying the full force of the orchestra sparingly at key moments. It is this sense of restraint that preserves the intimacy of song within the grandeur of the symphony, creating a truly unique new genre.
As the title suggests, like much of Mahler’s music this work is inspired by the natural world, with each of its six movements tracing a different aspect of life and our small part in it. Composed following one of the most difficult years in Mahler’s life, Das Lied von der Erde is at times deeply melancholic, probing questions of death and our place in the circle of life, with every mood from drunken hedonism (as in the fifth movement scherzo) to meditative serenity (in the thirty-minute ‘farewell’) finding its place. Based on excerpts from Hans Bethge’s volume of ancient Chinese poetry rendered into German, Die Chinesische Flöte (‘The Chinese Flute’), it was for Mahler ‘probably the most personal composition I have created thus far’. However, the work was not performed until after Mahler’s death in 1911, partly due to Mahler’s own reluctance to bring the work before the public. ‘Won't people go home and shoot themselves?’, he asked.
© Jo Kirkbride
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
- tenor
"The most personal utterance among Mahler's creations, and perhaps in all music…”. The view of Mahler’s friend, the conductor Bruno Walter, who gave the premiere in 1911 and lived to conduct Das Lied at the very first Edinburgh Festival in 1947. Inspired by Chinese poetry, the music veers between earthly passions and eternal longings, ultimately dissolving into sublime nothingness. This acclaimed new chamber orchestra version was premiered at the BBC Proms. Ticciati has preceded it, playfully enough, with perhaps Haydn’s most theatrical and mad – literally mad – symphony.
Das Lied von der Erde
- Haydn
Programme note
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony no. 60, in C major, ‘Il Distratto’ (1774)I: Adagio - Allegro di molto
II: Andante
III: Menuetto - Trio
IV: PrestoV: Adagio
VI: Finale: PrestissimoWithout doubt, the defining point of Haydn’s career was his decision to accept the position of Vice Kappellmeister with one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the Austrian empire – the Esterházys. He spent nearly thirty years here (having been promoted to Kappellmeister after the death of his predecessor, Gregor Werner) and it was during this period that Haydn wrote some of his most popular and important works. His original contract stated that nothing he wrote for the court was to be used elsewhere, and so it was that his output grew to such an immense size, as each commission that Haydn accepted had to be for a brand new work. This apparent restriction proved immensely beneficial to Haydn’s development as a composer, for with each new commission came the chance to try something different. As a result, his musical language changed and matured considerably during these thirty years, gradually moving away from the techniques of the high Baroque and galant style to fully-fledged classicism.
The regular series of events at the Esterházy court was rich and varied, and alongside the many musical and theatrical performances given over the course of the year, Prince Nicolaus also invited the celebrated Carl Wahr Troupe for a brief residency every summer from 1772 to 1777, during which they performed plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Haydn was often invited to compose music to accompany these visiting theatrical performances, and it is likely that much of his music from this period was either originally destined for the stage or later adapted for this purpose. His Symphony No 60 in C major began life as incidental music for a performance of the play Der Zerstreute (‘The Absent-Minded Man’), a translation of Le Distrait by Jean François Regnard, or ‘Il Distratto’ in Italian, as Haydn wrote on the manuscript.
A light-hearted farce, with equally comical music to match, the play tells the tale of an absent-minded man called Leandre, whose forgetfulness sees him end up in all kinds of trouble. Both the play and Haydn’s music were a hit with the critics, with one newspaper reporting: ‘The connoisseurs are amazed on the one hand, whilst the rest of the public is simply enchanted. For Haydn knows how to satisfy both. From the most affected pompousness he drops into doggerel, and thus Haydn and Regnard vie with each other to see who can produce the most whimsical absentminded entertainment.’ Evidently pleased with the result, Haydn later turned the music into a six-movement symphony, but its theatrical beginnings left their mark. The symphony is notable not only for breaking the traditional four-movement format but also for its ‘violations’ of traditional symphonic rules, such as unclear recapitulations, disruption of conventional tonal and formal progressions and passages of unconnected melodic content, all of which are a reflection of the absurdity of the play’s plot.
© Jo Kirkbride
- Mahler (arr. Cortese)
Programme note
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) [arr. Cortese]
Das Lied von der Erde (1909)I: Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde
II: Der Einsame im Herbst
III: Von der Jugend
IV: Von der Schönheit
V: Der Trunkene im Frühling
VI: Der AbschiedNowhere is the oscillation between the public and private spheres captured more meaningfully than within the music of Gustav Mahler, whose whole output treads a fine balance between the quiet, private moment and the magnitude of the world around us. Mahler believed in taking inspiration from the sounds that surrounded him in daily life – birdsong, the sound of cow bells, folk song and hunting calls – and incorporating these elements of the everyday into his works. A symphony, he believed, ‘must be like the world. It must embrace everything’. But unlike most of his contemporaries, Mahler composed very little across different genres: with the exception of a few early works, he confined himself entirely to the song and the symphony. While they may appear to be polar opposites, these two genres co-exist in Mahler’s works in a way never before witnessed in the music of any other composer – the symphonies embrace the intimacy of song, while the songs grasp at the magnitude of the symphony.
While Mahler’s orchestral songs expand the genre to new proportions, at their heart they may also be heard as responses to Schubert’s own Lieder. It was through Schubert’s Lieder that Mahler learned to combine the intimacy of the miniature with the splendour of the larger cycle, but it was through Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that Mahler received the ‘permission’ to introduce the voice to the symphony. Mahler had already included movements for voice in his second, third, fourth and eighth symphonies, but the first fully-integrated partnering of song and the symphony came with his orchestral song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde (‘The Song of the Earth’), later termed a ‘song-symphony’. Although the work calls for a large orchestra, Mahler uses the instrumentation in a chamber-like way, at times paring down the scoring to pairs of woodwinds and only deploying the full force of the orchestra sparingly at key moments. It is this sense of restraint that preserves the intimacy of song within the grandeur of the symphony, creating a truly unique new genre.
As the title suggests, like much of Mahler’s music this work is inspired by the natural world, with each of its six movements tracing a different aspect of life and our small part in it. Composed following one of the most difficult years in Mahler’s life, Das Lied von der Erde is at times deeply melancholic, probing questions of death and our place in the circle of life, with every mood from drunken hedonism (as in the fifth movement scherzo) to meditative serenity (in the thirty-minute ‘farewell’) finding its place. Based on excerpts from Hans Bethge’s volume of ancient Chinese poetry rendered into German, Die Chinesische Flöte (‘The Chinese Flute’), it was for Mahler ‘probably the most personal composition I have created thus far’. However, the work was not performed until after Mahler’s death in 1911, partly due to Mahler’s own reluctance to bring the work before the public. ‘Won't people go home and shoot themselves?’, he asked.
© Jo Kirkbride
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
- tenor
"The most personal utterance among Mahler's creations, and perhaps in all music…”. The view of Mahler’s friend, the conductor Bruno Walter, who gave the premiere in 1911 and lived to conduct Das Lied at the very first Edinburgh Festival in 1947. Inspired by Chinese poetry, the music veers between earthly passions and eternal longings, ultimately dissolving into sublime nothingness. This acclaimed new chamber orchestra version was premiered at the BBC Proms. Ticciati has preceded it, playfully enough, with perhaps Haydn’s most theatrical and mad – literally mad – symphony.
Early Evening Concerts 2012/13 - March
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra is Orchestra in Residence at the University of St Andrews. As part of this partnership, the two organisations are collaborating on a number of projects to complement the Orchestra’s concert season at the Younger Hall. One such collaboration is featuring SCO players and associates in the Early Evening Concert Series.
For details visit www.st-andrews.ac.uk/music, call 01334 462226 or drop in to the University Music Centre at the Younger Hall.
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