The Peninsula Music Festival - Season 2009 Program Notes
Program 6 - Saturday, August 15, 2009 - The Teacher and the Pupil
Mass No. 11 in D minor, Lord Nelson (Missa in Angustiis) for Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra, Hob. XXII/11
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Composed in 1798.
Premiered on September 23, 1798 in Eisenstadt, Austria.
Haydn’s personality traits read like a list of the seven virtues: honest, industrious, cheerful, thrifty, neat, practical, religious. His only blemish came in his middle years, when he fell into an affair with one of the singers from his opera company at Esterháza. Even this escapade is understandable, however, given the consistent reports characterizing his wife as a wildly untamed shrew and a pestering nag. In sum, Haydn was one of the happiest and most well-adjusted of all composers, and you would have enjoyed his company. His healthy outlook on life is reflected in his music, and two of his finest qualities — practicality and belief in God — are demonstrated by his Masses.
Haydn’s fourteen Masses fall into two groups, and for the most practical of reasons. He had composed a half dozen such works by 1783, when Emperor Joseph II brought Austria into line with the papal decrees banning the use of instruments in church, thereby putting Haydn out of business as a composer of Masses. But austerity in music is not a Viennese penchant, and Emperor Francis II repealed the earlier order in the mid-1790s, thereby reinstating the glorious musical pageants of which the Austrians are so fond. (The tradition continues today with the sumptuous Mass-concerts given by the Vienna Choir Boys as part of their regular duties at the Hofburg Chapel.) Haydn responded to the lifting of the ban by composing six masterful liturgical works between 1796 and 1802: the Masses titled Kettledrum, St. Bernardi, Lord Nelson, Theresa, Creation and Harmonie. They were written for the annual celebrations in Eisenstadt surrounding the nameday (September 8th) of Princess Marie Hermenegild Esterházy, one of the recent additions to the family that had employed Haydn for nearly a half century. In an age in which all music was written for specific occasions — art on demand — Haydn was the most practical and professional of composers.
Haydn’s other endearing trait displayed in the Masses is his simple and profound love of God. More than once accused of putting too happy a face on his church compositions, he responded, “I write according to the thoughts I feel. When I think upon my God, my heart is so full of joy that the notes dance and leap from my pen; and since God has given me a cheerful heart, it will be pardoned me that I serve him with a cheerful spirit.” Side by side with the passing acknowledgment of the old fugues and stock formulas that were traditional in the Mass settings of that time are movements that show Haydn’s long experience as an operatic and symphonic composer. Much of the fast music seems to dance; the slower portions have a loving, often even a sensual quality. Haydn’s late Masses, composed in the years after he had retired from the symphonic genre, speak not only of the mastery of his craft, but also of the fullness of his heart.
Haydn’s Mass in D minor was composed quickly at his home in the Viennese suburb of Gumpendorf between July 10 and August 31, 1798. It was an anxious time for Austria and, indeed, for all of Europe. Napoleon had taken charge of France’s campaign in Italy two years before, and he had transformed his ragged army into a juggernaut so formidable that it threatened to subject the entire Continent to French rule. (Haydn wrote his Mass “In Time of War” in 1796 in response.) Napoleon, fixed on bringing his formidable enemy across the English Channel to its knees, carried his expedition to Egypt in 1798 in order to sever Britain’s vital trade route with India. He won the Battle of the Pyramids, but lost his fleet in the Bay of Aboukir at the mouth of the Nile in a defeat by Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson on August 1-3, 1798, thus ending Napoleon’s plan of eastward conquest. Word of Nelson’s victory at the so-called Battle of the Nile reached Vienna just after Haydn had completed his D minor Mass, which he had subtitled “Missa in Angustiis” — “Mass in Strained [or Straitened] Times,” but the premiere, performed in the parish church of St. Martin in Eisenstadt on September 23, 1798 under Haydn’s direction (he probably also played the organ part), may have taken on the character of a celebration of the news of the British Admiral’s triumph. (Haydn, like his fellow Austrians, regarded Nelson as a hero, and he collected mementos of the Admiral’s Egyptian victory, including two portraits, a depiction of Napoleon’s burning ships at Aboukir, and a diagram of the battle, which were discovered among his effects after his death.) If the Mass was not already identified with Lord Nelson at the time of its first performance, it became indissolubly linked with him two years later, when he and his mistress, the beautiful and talented Lady Emma Hamilton, spent four days at Prince Esterházy’s palace in Eisenstadt in September 1800. In honor of the occasion, the D minor Mass — the “Lord Nelson” Mass — was performed at the Bergkirche on September 8th (the nameday of Princess Marie Hermenegild Esterházy) along with the premiere of Haydn’s splendid Te Deum in C major. During the visit, Lady Hamilton (who, according to one account, “did not budge from Haydn’s side for two days”) sang a cantata for soprano and piano titled Lines from the Battle of the Nile that Haydn had devised specially for her. Nelson showed his respect for Haydn (who was then, following his two visits during the preceding decade, the most popular musician in England) by asking for one of his pens, and the composer received the Admiral’s watch in return. Nelson and Lady Hamilton again paid their respects to Haydn at his home in Gumpendorf a few weeks later, when he presented her with a copy of his Spirit’s Song, upon which she inscribed, “Given to me by the admirable Haydn, November 1800.”
The D minor Mass must be counted among Haydn’s greatest achievements. “The ‘Lord Nelson’ Mass consistently reaches a level of inspiration which is perhaps above and beyond that of his best instrumental music,” wrote Christa Fuhrmann-Landon. “In any case, there is no work in all Haydn which is more perfect in composition and execution, more unified in form and steadfast purpose.” The work possesses a spaciousness of utterance and a breadth of sonority that belies its limited and unusual scoring for just strings, three trumpets, timpani and organ, a consequence of the dismissal of all the wind players from the Esterházy musical establishment by Prince Nicolaus II several years before. (Haydn sanctioned transferring the organ part to winds, though this expedient considerably thickens and sweetens the original stark orchestral texture.) The vocal writing is superb, with the bulk of the text entrusted to the chorus; the soloists, rather than being allotted separate arias, are largely treated as a quartet or used for changes of tone color. Noting the primacy of the chorus and the vibrancy of its music, Roger Fiske called the “Lord Nelson” Mass, “Haydn’s supreme masterwork in the choral field.”
Haydn spread the five items of the ancient liturgical text across ten movements in his D minor Mass — the Gloria and Credo are each divided into three sections, and the closing line (Dona nobis pacem) is made the subject of a separate final chorus. The somber opening Kyrie, the only movement of the composition in the nominal key of D minor except for the remarkable Benedictus, follows the form of a symphonic first movement, with the solo soprano’s elaborate roulades on the words “Christe eleison” serving as the second theme, while the development section is a choral elaboration of the “Kyrie” motive. The opening and closing sections of the large three-part form of the Gloria (Gloria and Quoniam tu solus), whose D major brilliance recalls the many episodes of jubilation heard in The Creation, premiered triumphantly in Vienna just three months before Haydn began this Mass, are each based on the same motive, which was said to have been derived from an old Gregorian plainchant melody. The central section, Qui tollis, provides contrast with its hymnal melody, majestic gait and distant B-flat tonality. The Credo, based on another old Gregorian melody, is arranged as a strict canon between soprano-tenor and alto-bass. “The Et incarnatus,” observed H.C. Robbins Landon, “consists of the customary lyrical section in a major key (G) and in a relaxed tempo (Largo): when the clause ‘Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato’ (‘For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate’) is reached, the music turns to G minor, and trumpets and timpani enter with six bars of fanfares on the single note D, a striking association of Pontius Pilate with the war-mongering and equally anti-Christian Napoleon.” The Et resurrexit is music of blazing D major intensity which pauses for the soprano’s tender introduction of the words “et vitam venturi seculi” (“and the life of the world to come”) before reaching its grand conclusion. The Sanctus is a compact movement in two parts (Adagio — Allegro) which closes with an imitative setting of the Osanna in excelsis (“Hosanna in the highest”). The Benedictus returns to the somber D minor tonality of the first movement, but near its end suddenly stops and shifts into the startling key of B-flat major, a modulation marked by apocalyptical fanfares in the trumpets and drums, a scene of almost visionary power in which one critic claimed to see “the Almighty enthroned before vast ranks of the Heavenly Host.” The Osanna that closed the Sanctus is repeated to round out the movement. The stately Agnus Dei serves as preparation for the brilliant chorus on Dona nobis pacem (“Grant us peace”) which caps this magnificent and profound affirmation of the dynamic symbiosis of music and religious faith by the late-18th-century’s greatest composer of liturgical music.
Arianna a Naxos (“Ariadne on Naxos”) for Mezzo-Soprano and Strings
Joseph Haydn
Arranged by Paul Hodges
Composed in 1789.
Though the cantata is today most readily associated with the German-language, sacred masterpieces of Johann Sebastian Bach, the form’s origin and major historical development were in Italy. For more than a century after its introduction in the 1620s at the musically sophisticated courts of northern Italy, the cantata was the principal genre of vocal chamber music. Its most common realization was as a series of two or three arias for a solo singer accompanied by chamber ensemble; each aria was prefaced by a recitative. The texts were taken from (or written anew in the style of) existing opera librettos, so that the Italian cantata was, in effect, a small-scale solo operatic scene. The form reached its peak of popularity in the decades around 1700; Alessandro Scarlatti (father of the celebrated keyboard composer, Domenico) wrote at least 600 examples.
By the years of Joseph Haydn’s maturity, the solo cantata had slipped largely out of fashion. Among the half-dozen of his such works is the splendid Arianna a Naxos (“Ariadne on Naxos”), composed at the end of 1789. The motivation for the work’s creation is uncertain. It was published the following year in Vienna by Artaria as “Cantata a voce solo, accompagnamento del clavicembalo [harpsichord] o fortepiano,” so it may just have been written on speculation, but biographical evidence suggests that it was more likely composed for sixteen-year-old Josepha von Genzinger, then a voice student of Haydn. The girl’s father, Dr. Peter Leopold von Genzinger, was the personal physician of Haydn’s employer, Prince Nicholas Esterházy, and he and his wife, Marianne, became close friends of the composer. The Genzingers not only hosted one of Vienna’s most fashionable musical salons, with Mozart, Albrechtsberger and Dittersdorf as frequent guests, but they also provided Haydn with an emotional fulfillment that had long been missing from his childless marriage to his shrewish wife (“the household dragon,” he called her, privately). He developed a genuine affection for Marianne, not least because of her considerable talent as a keyboard player (the Piano Sonata in E-flat major, H. XVI:49, was composed for her in 1789), and she became the most important correspondent of his later years. Josepha is known to have performed Arianna at the Genzingers’ home in 1790; on March 14th, Haydn wrote to her mother, “I am delighted that my favorite Arianna is well received at the Schottenhof.” That further performances there were anticipated is suggested by his postscript: “Please tell Fräulein Pepperl [Josepha’s family nickname] to articulate the words very clearly, especially the passage ‘chi tanto mai.’”
Haydn took the cantata with him when he went to London in January 1791, and it created a sensation when the noted castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti performed it (with Haydn at the keyboard) on February 18th. “They speak of it in rapturous recollection,” the reviewer from the Morning Chronicle reported of Arianna’s auditors, “and Haydn’s cantata will accordingly be the musical desideratum for the winter.” Closely attuned to commercial opportunity, the London publisher John Bland issued a new edition of the score a few weeks later for the delectation (and purchase) of English music lovers. Arianna enjoyed great popularity in public and private performances from Venice to London to Vienna during the following years; when Lord Nelson spent four days at Prince Esterházy’s palace in Eisenstadt in September 1800 to hear a performance of the Mass partly inspired by his successful exploits against Napoleon in Egypt, his mistress, the beautiful and talented Lady Emma Hamilton, gave her rendition of the cantata for the composer.
In a letter to Bland, Haydn stated that he intended to orchestrate Arianna, but never did; the present arrangement for strings and harpsichord is by the English singer, record producer and computer engineer Paul Hodges.
In the ancient tale on which an unknown writer based the cantata’s text, Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete, has been abandoned on the island of Naxos by her former lover Theseus, whom she has helped to slay the dreaded Minotaur of Crete by playing out a skein of thread to allow him to find his way out of the labyrinth that was the monster’s lair. The two paired recitatives and arias in Arianna a Naxos express Ariadne’s love for Theseus, her anxiety at his disappearance, and the stunning realization that he has deserted her. Arianna is among Haydn’s finest and most moving vocal creations. Rossini declared it the “prime example of Haydn’s gifts as a vocal writer,” and the words of the London Morning Chronicle’scritic still ring true: “It abounds with such a variety of dramatic modulations and is so exquisitely captivating in its larmoyant [tearful] passages, that it touched and dissolved the audience.”
Fantasy for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra
in C minor, Op. 80
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Composed in 1808.
Premiered on December 22, 1808 in Vienna, with the composer as soloist.
Everybody likes a bargain, but the music-loving Viennese who attended Beethoven’s concert on December 22, 1808 got almost more than they wanted. The dates available at the theaters in Vienna for instrumental concerts were few and far between in Beethoven’s day because the houses were booked almost constantly with plays, operas and other entertainments. When he finally managed to reserve the Theater-an-der-Wien for a single concert, he had a drawerful of new works to put on display. That memorable evening heard not only the first presentation of the Choral Fantasy and the premieres of both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, but was rounded out by the concert aria Ah! Perfido, three movements from the Mass in C major, and some improvisations at the piano by Beethoven. Certainly the patrons could not complain of being short-changed, and one Johann Reichardt recalled that he “found by experience that one might have too much even of a good thing.”
The Choral Fantasy, written especially for the concert as a grand closing number, was put together so quickly in the days before the premiere that some of the players found the ink still wet on their parts at the first rehearsal. It is one of the few works that Beethoven composed continuously, without setting it aside for later consideration and revision. He did not even have a text for the closing chorus when he began, and a writer (probably the then-popular poet and playwright Christoph Kuffner, though this is not certain) was drafted to devise some appropriate verses. The poem praises the powers of music — a fitting sentiment at the end of a four-hour concert. Beethoven described the work as a “Fantasy for the Pianoforte which ends with the gradual entrance of the entire orchestra and the introduction of choruses as a finale.” At the performance, the opening section was actually an extended improvisation by the composer at the keyboard. He wrote down a few pages of his extemporization after the concert, and this passage seems today more like an extended introduction than a separate movement. It was undoubtedly much longer under Beethoven’s fingers in 1808; it is also the only portion of the Fantasy in the nominal tonality of C minor. The orchestra enters, rather tentatively at first, to begin a large set of spirited variations on a song titled Gegen-liebe (WoO 118), which Beethoven wrote in 1794. After an Adagio section and a snappy march variation, the choral forces are trotted out to warble their praise of the art in Beethoven’s most robust village harmonies. The Choral Fantasy, open-faced and thoroughly enjoyable, makes an absolutely splendid noise.
©2009 Dr. Richard E. Rodda