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| FANTASTIC FRENCH FAVORITES |  |  | | | | Ludwig van Beethoven | | | 1770-1827 | | |
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15
The Piano Concerto No. 1 is among the works the young Beethoven composed after he had moved in 1792 from his native Bonn to Vienna. Like Mozart when he left Salzburg, also for Vienna, Beethoven had outgrown the musical establishment of his patron in Bonn, the elector Maximilian Franz. He came to the Imperial capital to study composition with Franz Joseph Haydn. At the end of 1793 Haydn wrote to the elector on his student’s behalf for an advance in salary, enclosing five compositions “of my dear pupil Beethoven,” who he predicted would “in time fill the position of one of Europe’s greatest composers.” The parsimonious elector was unimpressed.
Nevertheless, Beethoven quickly acquired a glowing reputation as both a pianist and composer. He had come already provided with important aristocratic connections that greased the way into the highest social circles, where noblemen were in competition with each other for the best in-house musical establishment. The period between 1792 and 1795 was probably the happiest in the composer’s life. Signs of his deafness had not yet appeared, and his passionate nature – even affability – signaled a young lion, rather than the irascible, slovenly and sickly misanthrope of his middle and later years.
Originally composed in 1795, revised in 1798 and again before publication in 1800, this concerto is actually not the first Beethoven wrote, although it was the first to be published. What is known today as No. 2 preceded it by a year. A much earlier concerto in E flat Major, WoO 4, was composed in 1784 when Beethoven was 14 years old but was not published in its entirety until 1890.
Beethoven himself was the pianist at the premiere of the original version of this Concerto in Vienna in 1795, but the manuscript was barely finished before the concert. His close friend, the physician Franz Wegeler, described the scene: “Beethoven did not write the rondo... till the afternoon of the day before the concert...Four copyists sat in the room outside, and he gave them the pages one by one as they were finished.”
By Beethoven’s own admission, the First Concerto still reflects the styles of Mozart and Haydn much more than his own. It begins with a lengthy and formal orchestral opening, ceremonial in style, after which the soloist makes his entry in a classic double exposition.  The piano, however, enters with a new theme that harmonizes with the main theme instead of eactly repeating it. The second theme is presented differently in the first and second expositions. & The interplay between the two is strongly reminiscent of the Mozart concerti, in which the orchestra provides quiet background accompaniment for the soloist when both play together. This lighter accompaniment was, of course, acoustically necessary since the pianos of the time lacked the power of those even in the first part of the nineteenth century.
The slow movement, again, harks back to the Mozart model. Even the themes are Mozartean. & If in the first movement soloist and orchestra are partners, in the second it is the piano that dominates and develops and embellishes the themes, often aided by the clarinet, its special orchestral partner throughout this movement, in a chamber music-like interplay. The rhythmic and sparkling rondo finale is a true orchestral romp, in which the soloist and orchestra try to outdo one another. Beethoven handles the rondo in a regular manner as a refrain between contrasting episodes of new thematic material.
A note about the cadenza to the first movement: Only incomplete fragments remain of the cadenza that Beethoven used at the premiere. By 1809, the composer’s hearing loss prevented him from performing in public, and he wrote three new cadenzas of differing lengths and difficulty for pianists of varying abilities.
In the years 1798 to 1809, the piano underwent a rapid development, not in small part as a result of Beethoven’s demands and specifications. While the concerto was written for a piano of five octaves, like Mozart’s, by the time Beethoven composed the cadenzas in 1809, he was writing for a piano of 5 1/2 octaves and commensurate power and sound to match. Consequently, a piano corresponding to Beethoven’s 1798 instrument for which the concerto was written, would not be able to play the 1809 cadenzas he wrote for it.
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| | | Hector Berlioz
Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14
Being a rebel without independent means makes life difficult for an artist. Hector Berlioz, the son of a physician, was sent by his family to Paris to study medicine, but at 21 gave it up to become a musician. To make ends meet as a composer, he became a prolific writer on music, musicians, conducting and orchestration, as well as a sharp-tongued music critic for Paris newspapers.
Berlioz was a master of orchestration. He freed the brass, making it the equal of the other orchestral sections. He experimented with new instruments, such as the bass clarinet and the valve trumpet, and pioneered the use of the English horn as one of the orchestra’s most expressive solo instruments. He was the first to use divided strings. He paid only lip service to musical forms and was the foremost advocate of the idea of program music. Every one of his compositions is programmatic – either the setting of a text, or describing a text, story or event. This approach to art was the natural outcome of his belief in the kinship of music and ideas. For Berlioz, music and literature were inextricably connected, both expressions of the human imagination and emotion.
The Symphonie fantastique is the first example of a narrative symphony. Berlioz composed it in 1830 as a musical symbol of his infatuation with the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson. He eventually married her, only to find that reality usually does not meet the expectations of fantasy – the marriage was a disaster.
The symphony is united by an Idée fixe, a theme meant to depict the beloved, which is introduced in the first movement. The accompanyment on the strings of this first appearance of the Idée fixe gives the effect of a gradually increasing, and even irregular, heartbeat. The movement describes a young musician seeing his ideal woman for the first time. His fervor is so great that by the end of the movement the theme turns religious.
The second movement describes a ball, with the artist's beloved dancing and frolicking. Amidst the hubbub, he becomes conscious of his beloved’s presence, with the sudden reappearance of the Idée fixe in a completely incongruous key.
In the third movement the artist goes for an outing in the pastoral country, in the midst of which he suddenly remembers his beloved. There is a violent storm, with the thunder symbolizing and foreshadowing the disastrous denouement of the affair. Is it an inner or real storm? This movement provides the first orchestral solo opportunity for the English horn, an instrument that Berlioz championed and which, through his direct and indirect influence, became the quintessential expression of languid melancholy. In this passage, the English horn is echoed by its sister double reed, the oboe.
By the fourth movement the artist's desperation grows, as does his irrationality. In an opium fantasy, he kills his beloved and is condemned to the guillotine, whence he is quick-marched in a parody of the solemnity of the occasion. Before the knife falls, the Idée fixe is imprinted on his memory.
The finale describes an after-death experience, the Witches’ Sabbath, the spirits portayed by the upper woodwinds. The Idée fixe comes in grotesquely, the beloved becoming an object of scorn. At this point the Dies irae, the Gregorian chant for the dead, makes its appearance in the low brass. Following a fugue on the witches' theme – at one point in which the string players beat the wood of their bows above the bridge of their instruments – Berlioz's lets loose with one of his favorite contrapuntal tricks, the outcome of his literal combination of music with program or text. He called it “The reunion of two themes,” where two themes are heard first separately and then combined, no matter how different they are. In the last movement the witches’ dance is combined with the Dies irae and the work ends in a wild orchestral extravaganza. |
| | | | Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2008 |
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July 2010
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