MAY 9 CONCERT CANCELLED
For the health and safety of our musicians, staff, and audience, the May 9th concert has been cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns.
If you bought tickets to this concert, please email us at info@longwoodsymphony.org or call 617-987-0100 to donate, exchange, or refund your tickets.
Benefitting THRIVEGulu
Program Notes
Written by Steven Ledbetter
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
+ WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat for oboe, flute, horn, and bassoon, K.297b (Anh.C14.01)
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He evidently composed the Sinfonia Concertante in Paris in 1778, but there is a problem of authenticity discussed below. The original instrumentation calls for oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. Tonight's performance is of an arrangement subbing flute for clarinet. In addition to the solo instruments, the score calls for two oboes, two horns, and strings. Duration is about 32 minutes.
This Sinfonia concertante for winds poses a real problem. It may have been composed during Mozart’s 1778 visit to Paris—or it may not be by Mozart at all. Mozart arrived in Paris on March 23, 1778. There Jean Le Gros, a concert impresario, commissioned a work in the genre that was then all the rage in Paris, a symphonie concertante, a kind of multiple concerto with several soloists. Mozart knew the players for whom the piece was intended, and he admired their playing enormously. They included the most renowned masters of their day on flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon. Mozart was clearly excited at the possibility of getting a performance from such a quartet, and he fulfilled the commission in about two weeks. But then something happened, and the piece was not performed during Mozart’s stay in Paris; his original score is lost.
In 1862 the cataloguer of Mozart’s works, Ludwig von Köchel, found a manuscript (not in Mozart’s handwriting) containing a sinfonia concertante said to be by Mozart. But the solo instruments are not exactly the same as those in the lost Paris work; rather than flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon, this piece calls for oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. Is this an arrangement of Mozart’s lost work? The scholarly debate continues to rage. But the scholarly issues may be put aside, perhaps, while actually listening to the sinfonia concertante. It seems clear that there is genuine Mozart in the piece, even if every detail does not come directly from him. Robert Levin has proposed that the orchestral part is essentially Mozart’s, and that the wind parts were adapted by someone at a later date to fit a particular ensemble. Admittedly this is purely hypothetical, but the work remains to intrigue us.
Certainly, Mozart was an ideal composer for the genre of the “concertante symphony”: the prodigality of his invention, which also served him so well as an opera composer, was just what was required here, where each of several different solo instruments needed an opportunity to shine in competition with the others. Besides, his complete mastery of the possibilities of the wind instruments is demonstrated in score after score, so a work featuring flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon would be an invitation to delicious instrumental combinations.
Mozart designs themes especially well-suited to one instrument or another, giving each instrument its chance in the work, whether in the broadly laid out exposition of the first movement, or that movement’s extended development section; in the dialogue of the second movement, so redolent of chamber music; or in the variations of the finale, built on a simple whistleable tune that would surely have proved pleasing to the Parisian public—if in fact it was composed for them!
+ ALFRED SCHNITTKE Moz-Art à la Haydn
Alfred Schnittke was born in Engels, German Volga Republic, in central Russia, on November 24, 1934, and died in Hamburg, Germany, on August 3, 1998. He composed his Moz-Art à la Haydn in 1977; it was premiered on December 30, 1983, in the Large Hall of the Conservatory in Tbilisi, Georgia, dedicated to the violinists Tatyana Grindenko and Gidon Kremer. In addition to the two solo violins, the score calls for two small string orchestras (each consisting of three violins, viola, and cello), and double bass. Duration is about 12 minutes.
Born to a German family in a part of the Soviet Union, Alfred Schnittke’s originality and modernist turns made him a figure that the Soviet musical authorities tried to keep out of the limelight, often only allowing premieres to take place far from the major cultural centers. Yet the ardent promotion of his works by a few artists—especially the violinist Gidon Kremer—outside of Russia meant that he could not be completely suppressed. By the time of his 50th birthday he was regarded as one of the most significant modern masters in his native country. For a festival of his music in Vienna on that occasion, he wrote a whimsical autobiographical statement that says much about his outlook:
*"I was born on November 24, 1934, in Engels on the Volga, in the Saratov province. I have my German name from my parents: my father, a Jew born in Frankfurt-am-Main, came to the Soviet Union in 1926 with his parents—who were, however, of Russian origin—and there married a German woman born in Russia. From childhood on I have spoken German—the “Volga German” of my mother. Later this was somewhat revised through a two-year stay in Vienna, 1946 48; my father, who was on the staff of a German-language Soviet newspaper appearing in Vienna, took his family there with him. In Vienna I had my first piano lessons and immediately tried to compose in a style of high pathos. After my return to the U.S.S.R. I continued my musical education, in part privately, in part in academies. After graduation from the Moscow Conservatory in 1960 I joined the Composer’s Union.
My musical development took a course similar to that of some friends and colleagues, across piano concerto romanticism, neoclassic academicism, and attempts at eclectic synthesis (Orff and Schoenberg), and took cognizance also of the unavoidable proofs of masculinity in serial self-denial. Having arrived at the final station, I decided to get off the already overcrowded train. Since then, I have tried to proceed on foot."
Despite its whimsy, this self-description was remarkably accurate. Schnittke’s work ranged over the whole history of musical styles and drew upon whatever he liked for any given piece. It would be difficult to imagine a more unlikely partnership than the styles of Orff with Schoenberg! This openness to experiment tended to unsettle musical officialdom in Moscow, where—as in any repressive regime—the power of the artist working freely is considered dangerous. Partly because of its unlikely mixture of musical approaches, Schnittke’s work was sought after by listeners eager for fresh ideas. In 1990 Schnittke was able to move to Hamburg, where he lived his last years (mostly in failing health from an old heart problem) inverting the condition of his birth by dying as a Russian in Germany.
Schnittke’s free-wheeling “structural collage” drew upon many composers and styles; it was designed (in the composer’s words) “freely to evoke contemporary tensions without attempting to arrive at false solutions.” He composed a series of works inspired by Mozart with variants on the whimsical title “Moz-Art.” Between 1975 and 1990 he returned several times to the same Mozartean fragment as the basis for Moz-Art (1975, for a mixed ensemble of ten musicians), a tiny Moz-Art (1976,for two violins) the work to be performed here, Moz-Art à la Haydn (1977); version for six instruments (1980), and Moz-Art à la Mozart for eight flutes and harp, in 1990.
He composed Moz-Art à la Haydn for violinists Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko, to whom the score is dedicated. In this work (and each of the other “Moz-Art” compositions, he draws from a rare Mozart source—a set of musical fragments for a pantomime (K. 446 [416d]) for which only the first violin part survives (and even that lacks its beginning and ending), though it is clear from a letter Mozart wrote to his father in 1783 that he actually finished and performed the work. On the basis of this Mozartean original, Schnittke composed a charming and playful collage.
The work has a “theatrical” character, beginning and ending in the dark. At the opening, the strings are improvising in the darkness, but the lights go up on a loud tremolo and the orchestra begins with the first of Mozart’s ideas (Allegretto), with the players overlapping one another in canon. During the course of the piece, the second violinist must detune the lowest string on the instrument. Soon after this moment, the lights start to fade again. And what about the reference to Haydn in the title? As the lights fade, the musicians re-enact the gesture of Haydn’s players two centuries earlier and gradually leave the stage. But Schnittke knows that in our time, there is also a conductor (in Haydn’s time the concertmaster directed the performance). After the players have left, he instructs the conductor to continue beating for a few bars of silence!
+ LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Opus 93
Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. He composed the Eighth Symphony in 1812; it was first performed, in Vienna, on February 27, 1814. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani and strings. Duration is about 26 minutes.
Beethoven composed his Eighth Symphony in tandem with the Seventh. Some of the sketches for both works appear together in a manuscript known as the Petter sketchbook. He apparently liked the challenge and the change of pace that comes with working on two very different pieces at the same time. Indeed, he had already done the same thing with the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. But though the two new symphonies were finished almost together, the Seventh was premiered on December 8, 1813, about two months before the Eighth, which was not heard until February 27 following (unlike the Fifth and Sixth, which had been premiered on the same concert in 1808).
The premiere of the Seventh had been one of the most successful concerts of Beethoven’s life, establishing him without question as the greatest living composer—though the work that truly ignited the audience’s enthusiasm on that occasion was the potboiler Wellington’s Victory, also being heard for the first time. When Beethoven premiered the Eighth two months later, he sandwiched it between repeats of the Seventh and Wellington’s Victory. Under the circumstances, the Seventh, a far longer work, overwhelmed the new score with its sheer visceral energy. A letter in which Beethoven offered both symphonies to an English publisher seems to patronize the later work somewhat, since he describes them as “a grand symphony in A major (one of my most excellent works) and a smaller symphony in F major.” But size alone is not the central factor here. If Beethoven could call the Eighth a smaller work, he surely meant so only in the objective sense of the number of measures contained within it. When Czerny once remarked that the Eighth was much less popular than the Seventh, Beethoven replied gruffly, “That’s because it’s so much better.”
Surprisingly enough this jovial symphony was composed in large part during a period of family strife, when Beethoven went to Linz to interfere in the private life of his thirty five-year-old brother Johann, who had recently allowed his young housekeeper to move in with him. Beethoven, a complete puritan in matters sexual (and possibly jealous, since he never had a woman in his life), was outraged by the situation and obtained a police order that the girl return to Vienna by a certain date. Johann evaded the issue by marrying her, but not before there had been an ugly confrontation between the two brothers. During this tense period, Beethoven was finishing the jovial Eighth!
The opening movement is small in length compared to its sibling, the Seventh, but it is full of events. The opening phrases form a complete melody (how rare that is for Beethoven!), but immediately after the cadence the next phrases open out and grow in the most astonishing way. False leads cheerfully undermine the tonal solidity that Beethoven had been at such pains to establish in the opening bars, seeming to settle in to the highly unorthodox key of D major (instead of the dominant, C) for the secondary theme. But scarcely has the theme started before it falters, suddenly aware of its faux pas, and swings around to the expected dominant.
The development is one of Beethoven’s most masterful demonstrations of musical timing. At first, he simply marks time with a rhythmic vamp in the violas, jumping up and down an octave. The basic melodic idea turns out to be the very first measure of the symphony, unheard since its single earlier appearance. Now it dominates the discussion. The development is a long crescendo over its entire length. The volume increases gradually; at the same time phrase lengths become progressively shorter, so that things appear to be moving faster and faster, until the movement culminates in the blazing return to the home key, while the bass instruments proclaim the principal theme. The recapitulation is quite straightforward until the coda, when a bassoon (recalling the leaping octaves heard at the beginning of the development) leads into a new harmonic world, another crescendo, and a new version of the main theme in the wrong key. After a solid return to the tonic, the orchestra fades out delightfully, leaving one final salute to the first measure in the bass at the very last instant.
The second movement is a humorous homage to Beethoven’s friend Mälzel, the inventor of the metronome, a device that Beethoven found invaluable in giving composers, for the first time, a way to specify precise tempos for their music. The cheerful, jesting movement is filled with humorous touches (including a suggestion at the end that the mechanical marvel has broken down). Its scherzando marking makes it rather faster than a slow movement was expected to be.
Beethoven compensates by making his next movement—for which we expect a rollicking scherzo—Tempo di Menuetto, a marking he had long since ceased using in his symphonies. This movement particularly is responsible for the symphony’s reputation as a Haydnesque “throwback.”
Having held his horses back, so to speak, for three movements, Beethoven lets them have their head in the merry rush of the rondo like tune that seems about to come to a close on an normal dominant C when it is suddenly jerked up to C sharp, only to have the unexpected note drop away as quickly as it had arrived, apparently without consequence. The same thing happens at the recapitulation, and though the bubbling high spirits leave us little time to worry about details, the sheer obtrusiveness of that note lingers in the ear, demanding consideration. The questions are answered in the immense coda, where the obtrusive C-sharp note returns with harmonic consequences, generating a new and distant tonal diversion that must be worked out before we can return safely home. At this pace, Beethoven’s wit can only leave us breathless with delight at his exhilarating wit.
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