(This essay was originally published in a 2016 Salzburg Festival programme.)
Theatrical
Symphony and Symphonic Theatre
JOSEPH
HAYDN • Symphony no.49 in F minor, Hob. I:49, “La Passione”
WOLFGANG
A. MOZART • Symphony no. 25 in G minor, K. 183
JOSEPH
HAYDN • Overture to azione teatrale, L'Isola
disabitata, Hob. XXVIII:9
LUDWIG
V. BEETHOVEN • Symphony no. 4 in B-flat major, op. 60
The
nicknames of Haydn’s symphonies are at least as arbitrary as any other musical
nicknames, few of them holding even the slightest claim to ‘authenticity’. They
have often helped popularise particular symphonies, whilst helping leave others
in relative obscurity, yet the homely implications of the ‘Hen’ or the ‘Clock’ have
tended to further a patronising myth of genial, ‘Papa’ Haydn, denying the
composer the true measure of his radicalism and historical stature. The
so-called La Passione Symphony,
no.49, in F minor, presents a somewhat different case; however ‘inauthentic’,
its title has at least suggested something to be taken with Sturm und Drang seriousness. However, it
seems, as Elaine Sisman revealed in a 1991 article (‘Haydn’s Theater
Symphonies’), that the title refers to the particular circumstances of a Holy
Week performance in Schwerin in 1790 rather than to the work itself.
The
‘traditional’ view certainly seems to chime with the work’s Baroque
near-archaism: Haydn’s final essay in the slow-fast-slow-fast sonata di chiesa form, likewise with the
relentless march of F minor, the minuet’s F major trio offering only momentary
relief. Sturm und Drang
characteristic – syncopation, counterpoint, ‘profundity’ of expression – seem
undeniable. HC Robbins Landon, very much in this tradition, described the work
as ‘dark-hued, sombre – even tragic’. Sisman’s research, however, has suggested
a very different provenance and thus perhaps interpretation; a Viennese source
calls the work ‘Il Quakuo di bel’humore’; a theatrical context seems likely.
Sisman argues that the celebrated ‘rapid-fire repeated notes and imitiations of
the second group’ in the Allegro di molto
‘achieve a light-heartedness that belies the “tragic” minor-mode
associations, and recall [the composer, Georg Joseph] Vogler’s remarks about
the importance of rhythm in the mood-defining attributes of comedy and
tragedy’. Waggish Quaker – at least on the surface – or Christ crucified? How
to reconcile? Should we try? Sisman rightly points to discrepancy between
compositional intention and appropriation of a symphony or a movement
therefrom, also to a ‘substantial disparity in contemporaneous views’ of
Haydn’s language, his ‘broadly dramatic style … designed to serve a variety of
ends’. We might conclude that the tragicomedy of Haydn’s symphony’s is more
all-embracing, even Shakespearean, than condescending ideas of ‘geniality’,
occasionally interrupted by ‘seriousness’, would ever have permitted. We can,
perhaps should, still hear Passion-like onward tread in the first and third
movements, grief-laden, wordless drama(s); likewise Sturm und Drang leaps, disjunctures,
even violence in the second and fourth. Let us do so, however, on account of
the music and its performance rather than the nickname – and let us not forget
the theatre entirely, which, after all, is no stranger to tragedy.
Tragedy is, of
course, indelibly associated with Mozart’s so-called ‘little’ G minor Symphony,
no.25, just as it is with its ‘great’ successor in the same key, no.40. There
is no need to deny a ‘special’ quality both to Mozart in the minor mode – this
is, after all, his first minor-key symphony – and indeed to Mozart specifically
in G minor. Albert Einstein called it Mozart’s ‘key of fate’: his equivalent,
if you like, but also his contrast, to Beethoven in C minor. If Romanticism
colours that judgement, that need not be a bad thing, although it is always
worth, as with Haydn, interrogating lazy assumptions. As Wolfgang Hildesheimer
noted, the ‘game of key speculation … is fruitful and open to all; everyone can
play and, by sharing his experiences, can consider himself a winner.’ Let us
then, play the game, albeit without claim to interpretative exclusivity.
Sturm und Drang syncopated
outbursts play their role here too; indeed, they are the very opening material
of the Allegro con brio (a marking
more readily associated with Beethoven than with the seventeen-year-old Mozart).
So does an important, even prophetic, role for bassoons, no longer ‘just’ part
of the basso continuo. Chromatic
disorientation, just as we experience in the first movement of its
first-movement successor in the ‘great’ G minor Symphony, marks the onset of
development here too. Bearing in mind Haydn’s symphony, though, as well as
Mozart’s operatic experience and future, there is eighteenth-century
theatricality as well as Romantic promise in the plunging diminished sevenths
of this movement. So too, is there, in the songfulness of the slow movement,
its E-flat major consolation in keeping with the expressivity of the ‘love
aria’. (Mozart had just written Lucio
Silla.) Muted violins heighten the
sense of emotional bonds almost, yet not quite, burst. There is almost
neo-Classical austerity in the stark unisons of the Menuetto, the G major Harmoniemusik of its Trio serving as an
all-too-brief vision of another, brighter, warmer world, but it is to G minor
that we return for the tragic vehemence of the finale. There is no Beethovenian
journey from darkness to light here, it is as if Gluck, in his Orfeo ed Euridice, had been able to dispense with the wretched operatic
convention of the lieto fine (happy
ending). Jens Peter Larsen was probably right to caution against viewing the
work, Romantically, as ‘self-confession’; yet, if we take that caution on
board, why not, at least a little?
There
is no questioning the theatrical origin of the Overture, also in G minor, to
Haydn’s L'Isola disabitata. The only
Metastasio libretto set by Haydn, this 1779 opera opens with an orchestral
movement veritably breathing the world (now past – or future?) of Sturm und Drang, although let us once
again remind ourselves that our æsthetics are not necessarily to be identified
with Haydn’s. The starkness of the opening Largo
material recalls in (very) slow motion, albeit unknowingly, that of
Mozart’s Minuet, preparing the way, as is the general manner of Haydn’s introductions,
for the musical theatrics of the vehement G minor symphonic storm, which leaves
our two sisters, Constanza and Silvia, abandoned on a desert
island. A curtain-raiser, then, to a curtain-raiser: who says that Haydn, when
compared to Mozart, lacks a sense of theatre?
Lack of ‘theatricality’ is an
absurd accusation that long bedevilled reception of Beethoven’s Fidelio, some commentators unable to
accept that the opera’s concern is freedom itself, or at least the highest
bourgeois instantiation of that idea, rather than Mozartian characterisation.
That said, there is no denying the symphonic sublation of the ‘merely’
theatrical in Beethoven’s symphonic and
operatic work. By the same token, however, the Fourth Symphony, just as much as
any of its still-more-celebrated companion works, shows that the relationship
between symphony and theatre is properly dialectical. Taking its leave from
Haydn, and yet also showing its distance, the B-flat minor introduction to the B-flat major first movement is dark,
spacious, flowing in a fashion, which, if Wagner had been more sympathetic to
this work, which he rarely conducted, might have suggested: ‘Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit’:
‘Here time becomes space’. Just as it had done, we might add, in Haydn’s
‘Representation of Chaos’ for the opening of The Creation. It is in this symphony as a whole, Donald Tovey
argued, that ‘Beethoven first fully reveals his mastery of movement. He had
already shown his command of a vastly wider range of musical possibilities than
… Mozart or Haydn … But now he shows that these [new] resources can be handled
in such a way that Mozart’s own freedom of movement,’ which we might with equal
justice call symphonically theatrical or theatrically symphonic, ‘reappears as
one of the most striking qualities of the whole’. It has sometimes been said
that, in this movement, Beethoven’s melodic gift, however extraordinary, is
placed firmly at the service of rhythmic propulsion. Analysis and performance
alike will reveal that there is no such hierarchy; one is inconceivable without
the other, and above all without the grounding of harmony. Just one instance,
in which the timbral, often neglected in Beethoven, plays a crucial part in all
these respects: listen to his use of the timpani, as theatrical as it is
structurally dynamic. Whilst the development section declines for some time to
leave the rare, distant key of B major, timpani B-flats urge the music on,
enabling and underlying the orchestral crescendo through which the point of
return will eventually come. Not, however, as soon as we might have been led to
expect, for struggle and suspense have work yet to do.
The second movement
is in rondo form, the leisure of its Adagio-progress
both contrasting with and seemingly necessitated by the neo-Haydnesque ‘“spin”
of the whole [first] movement’ (Tovey again). Ghosts of the musical past – the Eroica, late Haydn – haunt its sterner
moments, yet inescapably Beethovenian humanity in the present always wins through, or will do in a comprehending
performance that takes Beethoven’s dialectics as a musico-theatrical
invitation. Teleology, Beethoven’s fabled ‘goal orientation’ is just as strong
as in the first movement; means are both different and yet strongly related. The
scherzo – in form, if not in name – is a successor to the heroic funeral games
of the Eroica, the apparent primacy
of rhythm again enabled, indeed intensified, by the equal primacy of melody and
harmony. Beethoven’s abridgement of the final scherzo repeat elicited these
words of praise from Tovey: ‘Never have three short bars contained more meaning
than the coda in which the two horns blow the whole movement away.’ That is
precisely how it feels.
If Schumann’s
perception, however well-meaning, of ‘a slender Greek maiden between two Norse
giants’ belittles this symphony as nicknames do those of Haydn, it is perhaps not
entirely wide of the mark in pointing to the continuing relevance of Haydn’s
humour. That is nowhere more so the case than in the finale. It is not a perpetuum mobile, although its opening
suggests that that might be what we are in for; there is rather a Shakespearean
quality, taking leave from both Haydn and Mozart, and which ought also to have
attracted Wagner’s attention. The apparently tentative slowing down, just
before the close, of the movement’s principal theme teases us and our
expectations; music breathes the air of ‘all the world’s a stage’, albeit of an
aural, invisible theatre. To return to Tovey, ‘Those who think the finale of
the Fourth Symphony “too light” will never get nearer than Spohr (if as near)
towards a right understanding of the Fifth, however much they may admire it.’
