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Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 2 in D major, Op 36 (1802)

Adagio - Allegro con brio
Larghetto
Scherzo: Allegro
Allegro molto

Few pieces of music can more directly disprove the notion that the emotional character of a composition reflects the inner moods of the composer while he was writing it than Beethoven’s second symphony. In 1802, Beethoven was facing a personal and artistic crisis brought on by his impending deafness. On the advice of his doctor, who suggested that the rural quiet of a village might improve his hearing, he went to live for several months in Heiligenstadt, northwest of Vienna. But when no improvement was forthcoming, Beethoven fell into a suicidal despair and, in October 1802, gave vent to his emotions by writing what is now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament – a passionate outburst expressing his unhappiness. “What a humiliation when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing. Such occurrences brought me to the verge of despair. As the leaves of Autumn fall and are withered, so too, my hope has dried up. Oh, Providence, let a single day of untroubled joy be granted to me!”

Despite Beethoven’s mental torment, the works sketched and completed at Heiligenstadt that summer – especially the second symphony – remained vigorous and energetic in an unmistakable early Beethoven manner. The second symphony is in the traditionally sunny key of D major and follows classical symphonic form – even beginning with an extended Haydn-like Adagio. And yet for all its harking back to classical models, the music abounds in abrupt dynamic contrasts, unexpected  harmonic modulations and propulsive rhythms.

Symphony No 2 was premiered in April 1803, along with Piano Concerto No 3 and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, at a concert in the Theater an der Wein where Beethoven had recently been appointed as one of the resident composers. He made a substantial profit of 1800 florins on the concert, but the critics were somewhat equivocal. The sheer size of the last movement and its extended coda clearly unsettled one critic who wrote: “Beethoven’s second symphony is a crass monster, a hideously writhing wounded dragon that refuses to expire, and though bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect.”

© Stephen Strugnell

Programme note

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 9 in D minor, Op 125 (1824)

Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso
Molto vivace - Presto - Tempo I
Adagio molto e cantabile – Andante moderato
Finale: Ode to Joy 

Beethoven’s ninth and last (or last completed) symphony was never called 'The Choral' by its composer, even though that was the name by which generations of music-lovers came to know it. Beethoven himself preferred the longer and more accurate title, Symphony with final chorus on Schiller’s Ode to Joy, but today that would seem too much of a mouthful. In fact, to call it simply 'The Ninth”'is sufficient to imply whose ninth is being referred to. It was the prototype of all the other great ninth symphonies - Schubert’s, Dvorák’s, Bruckner’s, Mahler’s - which followed.

Fragments of what would become Beethoven’s biggest, most complex and ambitiously orchestrated symphony had been in his mind for years. As a boy in Bonn and young man in Vienna, he already knew Schiller’s Ode to Joy. A startling foretaste of the symphony’s opening theme can be found, in the same key, in the introduction to his Second Symphony, written in 1802. The Choral Fantasia in 1808 displayed the finale of the Ninth in embryonic form. A fugue subject, jotted in his notebook in 1815, found its way into the work’s scherzo. The sound of military bands, heard by Beethoven during his walks in the Viennese Prater, is reflected in the zing-boom of cymbals and drums in one episode of the finale.

Not until 1823, however, did composition of the Ninth begin in earnest. His plan to write a purely orchestral finale, employing material later transferred to the A minor String Quartet, was swept aside by the masterstroke which was the Ode to Joy. To a friend, Beethoven reputedly exclaimed, “I’ve got it”. By May 1824, the work was ready for its premiere in Vienna’s Karntnertor Theatre. The deaf composer conducted it, or at any rate set the tempi, while a deputy held the performance together. Franz Schubert, aged 27, was in the audience.

The epic scale of the symphony, which Wagner would later find so inspirational, is immediately suggested by the gradual mobilising and establishing of the first movement’s main theme. The volcanic recapitulation, which erupts with an intensity never heard before in symphonic music, shows how far Beethoven was now prepared to take symphonic form, and the sonorously funereal coda confirms the grandeur of this score.

The succeeding scherzo, with its galvanising kettledrums, sustains the work’s vast momentum. Not even the rustic trio section can slow things down - indeed the pace grows even faster - and only the arrival of the slow movement ultimately brings a sense of peace. With its two gloriously alternating themes and its atmosphere of hushed tenderness, the music could almost belong to one of Beethoven’s last string quartets, which perhaps shows why his original ideas for the finale were so easily transferred to one of these works.

But the blaring, pounding discords of the finale’s opening fanfare, bursting in on the serenity of the adagio, reassert the symphony’s sweeping sense of orchestral drama and suspense. What is happening here? There are terse exclamations from the strings, suggestive of operatic recitative. There are brief quotations from the three preceding movements, followed by a hint of something different - the theme of what will become the Ode to Joy.

The music is now finally on track. The hymnlike theme, which has become modern Europe’s great unifying international anthem, is gradually unfurled and welcomed by a man’s solo voice. The vocal portion of the finale has arrived, proclaiming Schiller’s ode in the Beethovenian guise of a set of variations. These incorporate, with the resourcefulness of Beethoven at the height of his powers, a heroic march, a double fugue, an ecstatic slow section with the men’s voices underpinned by trombones, a tribute to God (this was the period of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis), an exquisite cadenza for the solo quartet and a coda frenzied in its climactic outpouring of joy.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904)
Czech Suite, Op 39 (1879)

Preludium (Pastorale): Allegro moderato
Polka: Allegretto grazioso
Sousedska (Minuetto): Allegro giusto
Romanza: Andante con moto
Finale (Furiant): Presto

Dvořák, like his father and grandfather before him, might have become a village butcher. Instead, thanks to his conspicuous musicality, he became a viola player in the orchestra of the Prague National Theatre. What he learned in the pit - with Wagner and Smetana among his conductors - served him in good stead as a composer who merged the folk idioms of his homeland with the symphonic music of Vienna and elsewhere. Music flowed from him with a fecundity soon to be rivalled by that of the young Richard Strauss, and the first of his two serenades, the E major, Op 22, for strings, brims with glowing viola tone.

After the major-key sweetness of that work and minor-key pungency of the succeeding wind serenade, Op 44, Dvořák contemplated a third serenade, scored for wind and strings, which would complete an intended triptych. Failing to make headway on it, he produced instead his Czech Suite in D major, a potpourri of orchestral dances and other movements with a misleadingly early opus number, culminating in a swinging, ambitiously symphonic Furiant.

More varied in colouring than its predecessors, the Czech Suite contains material - notably in the central minuet - from the abandoned third serenade, but otherwise goes its own leisurely and idiosyncratic way, incorporating rustic bagpipe imitations as part of the pastoralism of the prelude. The succeeding polka possesses a faintly melancholy Dvorakian charm and the minuet, which he preferred to call a sousedska, is a Czech “neighbours’ dance,” of a sort reputedly aimed at elderly villagers for whom other Czech dances were deemed too lively.

The romantic fourth movement, with its atmospheric woodwind interplay, evokes the soft moonlit radiance of Rusalka, the water-nymph opera Dvorak wrote two decades later,. Finally the suite is exhilaratingly energised by a Furiant, a type of Czech dance famed for its furious syncopations, filled with rhythmic tension, minor-key leanings, and abruptly braying horns.

Though heard less frequently than the two popular serenades, the music represents Dvořák at his most thoroughly nationalistic. The work established itself in the SCO’s repertoire in the 1970s, when it was vivaciously championed by the orchestra’s earliest conductor Roderick Brydon.

Conrad Wilson