The Peninsula Music Festival - Season 2009 Program Notes
Program 1 - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - Festival Opening - Fond Memories from Vienna
On the Beautiful Blue Danube, Op. 314
Johann Strauss, Jr. (1825-1899)
Composed in 1867.
Premiered on February 15, 1867 in Vienna, conducted by Johann Herbeck.
“The universe of the waltz can be epitomized in about fifteen minutes simply by playing On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” according to former New York Times critic Hans Fantel. “More eloquently, more concisely than any other work, it embodies the essence of the waltz in form and spirit.” On the Beautiful Blue Danube, however, almost sank beneath the waves at its launching. Johann Herbeck, director of the Vienna Men’s Chorus, asked Strauss if he could provide some music in a popular style for the concerts of his ensemble. Strauss was uneasy setting words during those years before he began composing for the stage, but he did send Herbeck a melody inspired by a line from a poem of Karl Isidor Beck: “On the Danube, on the beautiful, blue Danube.” Herbeck assigned Josef Weyl, a police clerk who sang in the chorus and a poet-manqué, to concoct some verses to fit Strauss’ exquisite melody. “Vienna, be gay! And what for, pray? The light of the arc! Here it’s still dark!” was the best that Weyl could do. (Fantel suggested that this doggerel may have been prompted by the carbon-electrode lights just beginning to sprout on Vienna’s street corners.) The members of the chorus almost mutinied at the prospect of mouthing such drivel, but were finally convinced by Herbeck to go through with the performance, which took place at the hall of the Imperial Riding School (home of the famous Lipizzaner stallions) on February 15, 1867. The press notices were not unkind, but Strauss judged the whole thing a marginal fiasco, and quietly tucked On the Beautiful Blue Danube in his desk. Later that year, Strauss was invited to take part in the International Exhibition in Paris that Napoleon III was staging in honor of himself. His music proved so successful in the French capital that he dusted off On the Beautiful Blue Danube, and displayed it to the delirious Parisians. Within weeks, demand for the work spread across the western world. During his visit to the United States in 1872 to take part in the “International Peace Jubilee” organized by Patrick S. Gilmore in Boston, Strauss conducted 20,000 singers and 10,000 instrumentalists (under the frantic guidance of 100 sub-conductors) in a gigantic performance of the work.
Symphony No. 2 in B-flat major, D. 125
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Composed in 1815.
Schubert's Second Symphony was last performed at the Peninsula Music Festival on August 20, 1977 conducted byMichael Charry.
Probably no individual composer has ever engendered such an avalanche of new music as flowed from Franz Schubert’s pen in 1815. There are almost 200 separate works from that one year: the Second and Third Symphonies, a string quartet, two piano sonatas and four other large piano works, two Masses, four choral compositions, five operas and 146 songs, eight coming in a single day in May. Schubert capped the year’s activities by producing Der Erlkönig on New Year’s Eve. He was eighteen.
A year earlier, in the autumn of 1814, Schubert had been exempted from compulsory thirteen-year (!) military service because of his short stature (barely five feet) and terrible eyesight. (Newman Flower, in his biography of the gentle-natured Schubert, assessed that “as a conscript it is very doubtful he would have been worth the price of his uniform to the nation.”) Though intent on becoming a composer, he reluctantly took up a position as a teacher in his father’s school in the Viennese suburbs to help out the family and to earn a modest living. (“Better an impoverished teacher than a starving composer,” Papa Schubert admonished.) He must have been just awful in the classroom. He cared not a jot about teaching, and planned his classes so that his students would spend as much time quietly writing as possible — they scribbled away at their lessons, he jotted down masterpieces. His only real concern at that time and, indeed, throughout his life was in composing and making music with his friends. (“The state should keep me,” he once told Josef Hüttenbrenner. “I have come into this world for no purpose but to compose.”) Within a couple of years, he had had his fill of teaching, quit, and lived a seemingly carefree, Bohemian existence for the rest of his too-few days.
Schubert’s interest in orchestral music first surfaced while he was a student at the Imperial Chapel. His talents were recognized not only by his teachers, Wenze Ruzicka (“I can’t teach him anything else, he learned it all from God himself”) and the famed Antonio Salieri (“You can do everything, you are a genius”), but also by his fellow students. Josef von Spaun, who became a life-long friend, wrote of their school days together, “I was leader of the second violins. Little Schubert stood behind me and fiddled. [Many orchestras, except for the cellists, performed standing until the mid 19th century.] Very soon, I noticed that the little musician far surpassed me in rhythmic surety. This aroused my interest and made me realize with what animation the lad, who seemed otherwise quiet and indifferent, gave himself up to the impression of the beautiful symphonies which we played.” The school orchestra tackled works by Haydn, Mozart (“You could hear the angels sing,” Schubert wrote of the G minor Symphony) and early Beethoven, as well as such lesser masters as Krommer, Kozeluch, Méhul and Weigl. Schubert wrote his First Symphony in 1813, the year his voice broke and he left the Royal Chapel.
Schubert maintained many of his school friendships by taking part as violist and pianist in informal amateur musical soirées which ranged from intimate evenings of song to concerts for full orchestra. It was apparently for just such gatherings that he wrote his Second and Third Symphonies during those stolen hours at the schoolhouse. The works clearly show the influence of the Classical models that formed the basis of his education, while at the same time looking forward to some of the qualities of the encroaching Romantic era. Formally, they are indebted to Haydn and Mozart. Their harmonic language, however, shows an expanded range and fluidity, and their instrumental treatment, especially of the woodwinds, points toward later developments, not least in Schubert’s own works. This is music of grace, warmth and youthful good humor which reflects the composer’s style as surely as do any of his other compositions. While they lack the insight and profundity of his later realizations of the genre, there is nothing immature or ill-considered about the early symphonies. They are bright, melodious and ingratiating, and almost too easy to love.
Schubert’s Second Symphony is surprisingly large in conception and daring in its harmonic experiments. It opens with a stately slow introduction reminiscent of that which begins Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major (K. 543). The main body of the movement is a prolix and tonally unconventional sonata form propelled by an almost incessant rhythmic motion in the strings. (A similar excitement is generated in the finale of the magnificent Ninth Symphony by a comparable, if more sophisticated, moto-perpetuo device.) The fleet main theme enters in the first violins, and is repeated immediately by the full orchestra. Moving by way of the key of C minor, the music spills into E-flat major, in which tonality the lyrical second theme appears. It is several pages before the expected dominant key of F major makes its entry, and when it finally arrives, it carries with it not a new melody but another foray by the main theme, now serving to round out the exposition. The brief development section combines the rhythmic bustle of the main theme with the lyrical melody of the subsidiary theme. The recapitulation begins plainly enough, with quiet strings followed by a full orchestral repetition of the main theme. Its key, however, is not the expected tonic of B-flat major, but is rather the persistent E-flat major carried over from the exposition’s second theme. After further peregrinations, B-flat is finally achieved with the return of the second theme. Once again the main theme is heard, maneuvered into B-flat major, as a bubbling close to this most enjoyable and unusual movement.
The slow movement is a set of variations (in E-flat) whose spirit and style have much in common with the comparable movement of Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony. There are five variations, variation IV being an excursion into C minor; the last variation is followed by a tranquil coda. The blustery Scherzo, yet another harmonic surprise, is in the stormy key of C minor (a close relative to E-flat major). The lightly scored central trio is entrusted to the woodwinds with a delicate string underscoring. The finale, which cracks along at a furious pace, mirrors the form of the opening movement: main theme in B-flat, second theme in E-flat, main theme repeated at the end of the exposition in F major. Unlike the first movement, however, the recapitulation occurs here in the expected tonic key of B-flat. The rousing closing section of the Symphony stays firmly rooted in the home key, except for two brief detours through G-flat major. Solid cadential harmonies set against energetic rhythmic activity bring this buoyant and charming work to an end.
Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Composed in 1854-1859.
Premiered on January 22, 1859 in Hanover, conducted by Joseph Joachim with the composer as soloist.
Brahms' First Piano Concerto was last performed at the Peninsula Music Festival on August 22, 1998 with John Browning, soloist and Victor Yampolsky conducting.
In 1854, Brahms set out to produce a symphony in D minor as his first major orchestral work, and, to that end, he sketched three movements in short score. The first movement was orchestrated, but Brahms was not satisfied with the result, and he decided to transform his short score into a sonata for two pianos, but this still did not fulfill his vision — the ideas were too symphonic in breadth to be satisfactorily contained by just pianos, yet too pianistic in figuration to be completely divorced from the keyboard. He was quite stuck. In 1857, the composer Julius Otto Grimm, a staunch friend, suggested that his 24-year-old colleague try his sketch as a piano concerto. Brahms thought the advice sound, and he went back to work. He selected two movements to retain for the concerto and put aside the third, which emerged ten years later as the chorus Behold All Flesh in The German Requiem. Things proceeded slowly but steadily and only after two more years of work was the Piano Concerto No. 1 ready for performance.
The stormy first movement of the D minor Concerto is among the most openly passionate and impetuous of all Brahms’ works. This movement follows the Classical model of double-exposition concerto form, with an extended initial presentation of much of the important thematic material by the orchestra alone (“first exposition”). The soloist enters and leads through the “second exposition,” which is augmented to include a lyrical second theme, not heard earlier, played by the unaccompanied piano. The central section of the movement begins with the tempestuous main theme, a truly Romantic motive filled with snarling trills and anguished melodic leaps. The recapitulation enters on a titanic wave of sound, as though the crest of some dark, brooding emotion were crashing onto a barren, rocky shore. The lovely second theme returns (played again by the solo piano), but eventually gives way to the foreboding mood of the main theme.
The Adagio is a movement of transcendent beauty, of quiet, twilight emotions couched in a mood of gentle melancholy — of “something spiritual” in Clara Schumann’s words. The music’s principal emotion is one of deep tranquillity untouched by life’s vicissitudes.
The finale, perhaps modeled on that of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, is a weighty rondo. Its theme is related to the lyrical second subject of the opening movement by one of those masterful strokes that Brahms used to unify his large works. Among the episodes that separate the returns of the rondo theme is one employing a carefully devised fugue that grew directly from Brahms’ study of the music of Bach. After a brief, restrained cadenza, the coda turns to the brighter key of D major to provide a stirring conclusion to this Concerto, a work of awesome achievement for the 26-year-old Brahms.
©2009 Dr. Richard E. Rodda