Night in Vienna
Saturday, August 5, 2006

Program 3

Overture to The Merry Wives of Windsor
Otto Nicolai (1810-1849)

Composed 1846-1849.
Premiered on March 3, 1849 in Berlin, conducted by the composer.

Otto Nicolai was one of the Whiz Kids of 19th-century music. Born at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in 1810, the same year as Chopin (who was also to die only 39 years later) and Schumann, he was the son of a musician and the product of a failed marriage. Left alone with the boy, Nicolai’s father exploited his talented son as a prodigy so heartlessly that Otto ran away from home at sixteen. He ended up in Berlin, where a civil servant subsidized his education, including study with Goethe’s friend and musical advisor, Carl Zelter. In 1833, Nicolai accepted the post of organist to the Prussian embassy in Rome, gathering there a reputation as a piano virtuoso. With determined Teutonic thoroughness, he devoured Italian art, classic literature and Renaissance polyphony for three years, but then became smitten with the theater, and turned his attention from Palestrina to the opera house. He was unable to obtain an opera commission in Italy, however, and in 1837 became a singing teacher and Kapellmeister at the Court Theater in Vienna, where he proved himself to be an excellent conductor but a poor politician: his one-year contract was not renewed because of spats with the management. (The critic Hanslick once noted his “pronounced self-confidence.”) A second stint in Italy proved more successful than the first, and he produced four operas there between 1838 and 1841. The Vienna Court Opera asked to perform one of these pieces in 1841, Nicolai happily acceded, and enjoyed such a success with it that he was named principal conductor of that house. He created a sensation there with his very first production, Beethoven’s Fidelio, by introducing the Leonore Overture No. 3 as an entr’acte. Intent on continuing his success with a series of Beethoven symphonic concerts in the spring of 1842, he moved the opera orchestra out of the pit, billed the new ensemble as the Vienna Philharmonic, and thus founded one of the world’s great orchestras. In 1846, he began a new opera for Vienna based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, but the theater refused to mount the piece, and Nicolai quit in 1847. The next year he returned to Berlin as conductor of the opera and director of the cathedral choir. The Merry Wives of Windsor was staged with rousing success in Berlin on March 9, 1849, but Nicolai did not live long enough to reap its benefits. Two months and two days later, drained by overwork and excessive responsibility, he suffered a stroke and died. He never learned that the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin had elected him a member that same day.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is Nicolai’s only German opera. His contract with the Vienna Court Opera called for him to compose such a work, but he had difficulty settling on a subject. When a friend proposed Falstaff, he demurred, saying that “Shakespeare could only be matched by Mozart.” However, he eventually accepted the idea, and set Hermann Mosenthal, later also the librettist for Goldmark’s Queen of Sheba, to creating the verses. Work went well on the opera, but he could not finish it by the contract deadline, and he was unable to overcome the intrigues that broke out against him as a result. After he moved to Berlin in January 1848, he arranged for The Merry Wives of Windsor to be staged there under his direction, which it was with fine success.
Mosenthal’s libretto follows closely the progress of Shakespeare’s play, including Falstaff’s romantic intrigues, his ignoble toss into the Thames and his midnight retribution in Windsor Park. The evergreen Overture that precedes the opera begins with the lovely moonlit music of this last scene as introduction. The main theme that initiates the new tempo accompanies Falstaff’s bedevilment in the ensuing action. The complementary melody is not heard again in the opera, though Richard Wagner so admired it that he borrowed it for an episode in Act III of Die Meistersinger.

Violin Concerto
Alban Berg (1885-1935)

Composed in 1935.
Premiered on April 19, 1936 in Barcelona, Spain, conducted by Hermann Scherchen with Louis Krasner as soloist.

During the 1930s, the violinist Louis Krasner, born in Russia but living in the United States from childhood, was a champion of modernism who was convinced that Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system represented the path to the musical future. (He premiered Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto in Philadelphia in 1940.) It was for this reason that, when Krasner decided to commission a concerto for his instrument, he turned not to Stravinsky or Bartók or Hindemith but to the modern Viennese School, and specifically to Alban Berg, whom he felt could best combine the technical requirements of dodecaphony with the essentially lyrical nature of his instrument. He traveled to Vienna early in 1935 to present his proposal to Berg. Berg, immersed in work on Lulu at the time, was reluctant to accept the offer, but he found Krasner’s payment too generous to refuse, and agreed to put aside his opera and take on the commission. Berg at first thought that the piece would be essentially an abstract work, in the manner of Beethoven and Brahms, and he became a regular attendee at violin recitals and concerts around the city to hear the classical literature for the instrument. He also asked Krasner to visit him at home and improvise so that he could learn about the violinist’s preferred techniques and expressive devices. Plans for the piece proceeded, and on March 28th, after Krasner had returned to America, Berg wrote to him, “With joy, I hear that you want to return and work in Europe for the summer. From May on I will be at Lake Wörther in Carinthia (diagonally opposite Pörtschach, where Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto) composing ‘our’ concerto, so perhaps we can keep in touch with one another while the work is being written.” Berg intended to start the Concerto as soon as he arrived at Lake Wörther.

On April 22, 1935, shortly before he was to leave for his summer cottage, Berg was stunned by news of the death of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler by her marriage to the architect Walter Gropius. Manon, a girl of rare beauty and a promising actress not yet nineteen years old, succumbed to infantile paralysis, and Berg felt the loss almost as keenly as did her parents. So moved was he that he vowed to abandon the original conception of the Violin Concerto and make it instead a programmatic portrayal of his friend — a “Requiem for Manon”; he inscribed the title page “In Memory of an Angel.” The Concerto’s first part would “translate characteristics of the young girl’s nature into musical terms,” according to the composer, while the concluding section would evoke her suffering and transfiguration.

Berg began the Concerto at Lake Wörther immediately after Manon’s death, and worked at it with unaccustomed speed. “I was so dead tired after an almost thirteen-hour work day that I was incapable of absorbing any more music, so I went to bed,” he wrote to his friend and fellow-composer Anton Webern on July 15th. “For on that day [July 12th] I had practically completed the composition of the Violin Concerto [i.e., the sketch, not the completed orchestration] and I had been sitting at the piano or at my desk from seven that morning until nine o’clock that night almost without interruption. I hope to complete the orchestration during the next six or seven weeks so that then I can resume work on the score of Lulu.” Again to Webern, on August 7th, he wrote, “At the moment I am working like a madman at my full score [of the Violin Concerto] in the hopes of finishing it by the middle of August, and therefore I have put everything else aside.” When Willi Reich visited Berg on August 10th he read through the completed work with the composer, just four months after it was begun — Berg customarily needed up to two years to write a major score. “I have finished the composition of our Violin Concerto,” he wrote to Krasner. “I was keen on it as I have never been before in my life and must add that the work gave me more and more joy. I hope — no, I am confident — that I have succeeded.”

The Concerto was scheduled for its premiere at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Barcelona, Spain the following spring; Krasner, of course, would be soloist and Webern was enlisted to conduct. Berg, however, was not to hear the performance. Sometime before he returned to Vienna in the late summer of 1935, Berg received an insect bite at the base of his spine. It became infected, but treatment temporarily relieved the symptoms. Berg’s health was never robust, however — he was subject to debilitating attacks of asthma and was in and out of hospitals and sanitariums all his life — the infection persisted, and he became weaker during the last months of the year. With Lulu still unfinished, in late December he was admitted to the Rudolf Hospital in Vienna, where incurable blood poisoning was diagnosed. He died at 1:15 a.m. on Christmas Eve morning, at the age of fifty. Anna, the daughter of Alma and Gustav Mahler, made the death mask. The Concerto was premiered on April 19, 1936. Webern, too shaken by Berg’s recent death to conduct his friend’s last work, was replaced on the podium by Hermann Scherchen.

Berg allowed many streams of musical influence, old and new, to flow into his Violin Concerto. The work was conceived and realized according to Schoenberg’s modernist twelve-tone theory, yet in its expression it is one of the most beautiful and moving — indeed, one of the most Romantic — compositions in the entire orchestral literature. Along with Schoenbergian tone rows, the Concerto incorporates a Bach chorale, a Viennese waltz and a Carinthian folksong, subtle references to the music of Gustav Mahler and to Berg’s own operas, Wozzeck and Lulu, and perhaps even a veiled allusion to the composer’s secret, long-standing love affair, all brought together in a sort of grand symphonic poem for violin and orchestra inspired by the tragedy of Manon Gropius.

The Concerto is divided into four movements, paired two and two. The first movement, the musical depiction of Manon, is characterized by sweet, ethereal instrumental lines built around the open intervals of the violin’s unstopped strings. The second movement, which follows without pause, is in the nature of a scherzo; one of its episodes is in the style of a waltz and another quotes a traditional Carinthian Ländler, Ein Vogerl auf’m Zwetschgenbaum. This folksong is first given by the horn, in a nostalgic setting that recalls Mahler’s off-stage posthorn writing in his Third Symphony, and then is briefly taken over by the soloist. (Berg used a key signature at this point in the score for the instruments playing this theme, the first one to appear in his works since the Four Songs of 1908-1910.) The third movement, essentially an accompanied cadenza for the soloist, represents Manon’s death struggle. Its music becomes more furious and impassioned as it progresses until it achieves an ultimate, violent outburst at the place Berg marked “Höhepunkt” — “High Point.” It is here that Berg used a rhythm similar to that associated with the death scenes in his operas, Wozzeck and Lulu. The terror subsides, and the closing movement enters as the violin plays the chorale melody Es ist genug! from J.S. Bach’s Cantata No. 60, O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort of 1723. The original melody, written by Rudolf Ahle in 1662, is something of a curiosity in that its opening four notes are all separated by whole steps (B-natural – C-sharp – D-sharp – F-natural), exactly the intervals that end the tone row upon which the Concerto is based. Berg said that he discovered this coincidence only after the work was begun, but that the text of the chorale (“It is enough! Lord, if it is Thy pleasure, relieve me of my yoke!”) so perfectly suited the piece that he felt fated to include it. (One other incidental item about these closing pitches of the tone row: Berg may have intended them as a tribute to the Prague socialite Hanna Fuchs, with whom he was secretly in love for many years. Her initials are the same as the first and last of these four notes — “B-natural” in German is designated as “H.”) The chorale is played in Bach’s original harmonization by a choir of clarinets, and then becomes the subject of two variations. An episode recalling the Carinthian folksong is given by the horn “as if from a distance” before the chorale returns to bring this beautiful and poignant Concerto to a transcendent close.

Symphony No. 2 in B-flat major
Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942)

Composed in 1897.
Premiered on March 5, 1899 in Vienna, conducted by the composer.

“I’ve always firmly believed that he was a great composer, and I still do,” wrote Arnold Schoenberg about Alexander Zemlinsky in 1949. “I owe almost all of my knowledge of the technique of composing to him.” Zemlinsky and Schoenberg first met in 1895, when Zemlinsky, recently graduated from the Vienna Conservatory, took over the conductorship of an amateur orchestra called Polyhymnia, at whose rehearsals Schoenberg was trying to decipher the mysteries of music by teaching himself to play the cello. The two budding musicians, both born in Vienna (Schoenberg was three years younger), became friends, and Zemlinsky gave Schoenberg lessons in counterpoint for a few months and advised him on some early compositions; it was Schoenberg’s only formal musical instruction. Zemlinsky deemed himself qualified for this activity by virtue of his having studied composition with the brothers Robert and Johann Fuchs at the Vienna Conservatory, and having been awarded a prize for his Piano Trio, Op. 3 by a jury that included none other than the redoubtable doyen of Viennese music, Johannes Brahms, who persuaded his publisher, Fritz Simrock, to issue the score of the work. The relationship between Zemlinsky and Schoenberg deepened when Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde, in 1901, and the two co-founded the Vereinigung Schaffender Tonkünstler (“Society for Creative Musicians”) three years later to promote the performance of new music.

Zemlinsky tried to live as a composer for a few years, producing his Second Symphony, Quartet No. 1, several sets of songs and the opera Sarema (premiered at the Munich Court Opera in 1897; Schoenberg made the piano arrangement), but by 1899, he had to take a job conducting at Vienna’s Karlstheater. He thereafter followed parallel careers as conductor and composer. His friend Gustav Mahler, appointed director of the Court Opera in 1897, premiered Zemlinsky’s second opera, Es war einmal … (“Once Upon a Time …”), with that company in 1900, and scheduled the first performance of Die Traumgörge (“Görge the Dreamer”) seven years later, but that production was scrapped when Mahler quit his post after a decade of cabals against him. From 1904 to 1911, Zemlinsky conducted at the Vienna Volksoper, whose traditional fare of operetta he expanded to include both standard repertory works and such novelties as his own Kleider machen Leute (“Clothes Make the Man”), Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (“Ariadne and Blue Beard”) and Strauss’ Salome, which he led in their Viennese premieres. He also nurtured the talent of the breathtaking prodigy Erich Wolfgang Korngold during that time, and orchestrated the eleven-year-old’s ballet, Der Schneemann (“The Snowman”), which was staged at the Court Opera at the command of Emperor Franz Josef.

In 1911, Zemlinsky moved to Prague to become opera conductor at the Deutsches Landestheater, a post he held for the next sixteen years while also teaching composition at the Deutsche Akademie für Musik in that city and establishing the Prague branch of the new music society he had set up in Vienna with Schoenberg. From 1927 to 1933, he worked in Berlin as an assistant conductor to Otto Klemperer at the path-breaking Kroll Opera and professor at the Musikhochschule; he also filled numerous guest-conducting engagements in Europe and Russia during those years. When the Nazi takeover in 1933 forced him back to Austria, Zemlinsky hoped to devote himself to composition in order to add to the short list of works that he had managed to complete during the two preceding busy decades: a pair of one-act operas, Eine florentinische Tragödie (“A Florentine Tragedy”) and Der Zwerg (“The Dwarf”), both after Oscar Wilde, and a third titled Der Kreidekreis (“The Chalk Circle”), on a play by Klabund; incidental music for a Mannheim production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline; the Lyric Symphony; the second and third (of four) string quartets; and a few songs. However, the increasingly tense political situation in Austria — Zemlinsky had some Jewish blood — allowed him to complete only his final string quartet, write a few songs, and draft the opera Der König Kandaules (“King Candaules,” after André Gide), which was completed by Antony Beaumont many years later and premiered in Hamburg in 1996. By the time of the Nazi Anschluss, in 1938, Zemlinsky was ill and incapable of creative work. He fled first to Prague, and made his way to the United States when hostilities erupted the following year. His death, in Larchmont, New York on March 15, 1942, drew little notice.

Zemlinsky’s music synthesized the dominant strains of musical life in his native Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century. The combination of his conservatory training in the Classical masterworks and the influence of Brahms provided the foundation for his early compositions. By the turn of the century, he had integrated the ripe chromaticism and expansive expression of Wagner and Strauss into his musical speech, and then went on to try out some of the avant-garde techniques of Schoenberg and his followers, but he remained more conservative than his colleague and never eschewed traditional tonality with the serialists’ diligence. Though his works were enthusiastically praised by Mahler and his Viennese colleagues, Zemlinsky had become largely a footnote in the history of Late Romantic music by the time of his death, his compositions almost unknown. He remained in eclipse until the late 1970s, when British radio stations and a few German opera houses sponsored revivals of his music. Many of his works, including several of the operas, have since become available in recordings and scattered performances, and Alexander Zemlinsky’s full stature is finally being recognized by the musical world.

In 1893, as soon as he graduated from the Conservatory, Zemlinsky joined the Wiener Tonkünstlerverein (“Vienna Composers’ Society”), of which Johannes Brahms was honorary president. Zemlinsky took part in the Society’s concerts as pianist and composer, and a number of his early works were performed under its auspices, including his String Quartet No. 1 of 1896. The following summer Zemlinsky spent a working holiday at Payerbach an der Rax, forty miles south of Vienna in the foothills of the Austrian Alps, and there composed his Symphony No. 2 in B-flat major, actually his third attempt at the venerable genre, following an abandoned student sketch in 1891 and the Symphony No. 1 in D minor of 1893, his graduation thesis; Brahms attended that work’s first reading, by the Conservatory orchestra. Zemlinsky finished his Second Symphony in September 1897, just four months after Brahms had died, and its classical forms, breadth of expression, harmonic language and instrumental technique demonstrate the influence that he had had on his young colleague. The following year the Symphony won the Tonkünstlerverein’s prestigious Beethoven Prize, which Brahms had founded and helped to fund; it was premiered under the composer’s direction at a special concert of the Vienna Philharmonic on March 5, 1899. The score was not published until 1977.

The Second Symphony opens with a spacious introduction in which the horns present the falling motive and the noble, fanfare-like strain that provide the thematic kernels for the movement. Rushing scales lead to the main sonata-form body of the movement, whose principal theme is built from the falling motive and the fanfare strain from the introduction; two lyrical themes, one initiated by the oboe, the other by the violins, provide formal and expressive balance. The exposition is rounded out with a vigorous motive reminiscent of the Slavonic Dances by Brahms’ Bohemian protégé, Antonín Dvorák. Both of the main theme’s motives as well as the oboe’s lyrical subject are developed with considerable skill and fluidity in the movement’s central section, which is capped by a stentorian, full-orchestra restatement of the fanfare strain to mark the arrival at the recapitulation. The remaining materials from the exposition, somewhat compressed, return in due course before a vigorous coda derived from the Dvorák-inspired theme brings the movement to a sonorous close.

Echoes of the monumental scherzos of Anton Bruckner, who was still teaching at the Vienna Conservatory when Zemlinsky entered the school in 1887 and died just a year before this Symphony was written, resonate in the muscular rhythms, broad structural paragraphs and chorale-like central trio of the second movement. The three-part Adagio takes a melody of almost fairy-tale dreaminess as the theme for its outer sections; an episode of anxious emotion occupies the movement’s middle portion. The finale is an homage to Brahms, which, like the closing movement of that master’s Fourth Symphony of 1885, is a “passacaglia,” a set of continuous variations on a short, repeating theme. The eight-measure theme in Zemlinsky’s Symphony is presented quietly by violas and cellos in pizzicato notes following a series of bold introductory chords, and subjected to a wide range of treatments in the thirty variations that follow. The work culminates in a triumphant declamation of the fanfare theme with which it opened.

©2006 Dr. Richard E. Rodda