Programme essay for Beethoven violin sonatas - 'Approaching and Attaining Maturity'

(This essay was originally published in the programme for a concert given at the 2014 Salzburg Festival by Frank-Peter Zimmermann and Christian Zacharias.)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

Violin Sonata No. 1 in D major op. 12/1

Violin Sonata No. 3 in E flat major op. 12/3

Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major op. 12/2

Violin Sonata No. 5 in F major ‘Frühlingssonate’ op. 24

 

All but one of Beethoven’s ten numbered violin sonatas – strictly, sonatas ‘for piano and violin’ – were written between 1797 and 1803, when the ‘Kreutzer’ op. 47 was composed, the sole exception being the final G major Sonata op. 96, composed in 1812. The four sonatas heard in this programme originate from a shorter period still, 1797 to 1801, only the ‘Spring’ Sonata op. 24 postdating the composer’s First Symphony. In the conventional typology, then, these are all ‘early’ works, though that need not lessen their stature.

Voice, temperament and ambition

 

The three op. 12 sonatas, dedicated as a set to Antonio Salieri, were not in fact Beethoven’s first works for violin and piano. He had already written a fragmentary work in A major at the beginning of the 1790s, though what we have amounts to about four minutes’ worth at most. More importantly, we have a subsequent set of variations on Mozart’s ‘Se vuol ballare’ from Le nozze di Figaro, a Rondo in G major and Six German Dances. The sonatas, however, were works on a different scale, clearly with roots in earlier music, above all that of Mozart, and yet equally clearly works of the younger composer. Denis Matthews summarized this first, op.12 set: ‘Unlike the continuo sonatas of the Baroque period, with Bach as a notable exception, the sharing of interest was now a first essential, though Beethoven’s textures were already more robust and less delicately poised than Mozart’s, and the scent of battle never far away’. There is doubtless a role played here by the swift pace of technological development, especially with respect to the piano, Beethoven stretching his Stein instruments to the limit and perhaps beyond; more decisive still, however, would be Beethoven’s personal voice, temperament and ambition.

Allegro con brio is an assuredly Beethovenian marking, assigned to the first movement of the First Sonata in D major. ‘Brio’ there is certainly to be heard from the outset. Unison D major arpeggios in both parts are emphatically insisted upon, briefly continued in ‘accompaniment’ role by the piano, primacy soon alternating or co-existing between parts. We may notice even at this early stage a formal dynamism particular to Beethoven; within the bounds of the forms he had inherited, there is nevertheless a sense, if not so strong in every case, of continuous development, most notable of all in transitions. Boundaries between first and second subjects – if a relatively old-fashioned formulation may be permitted – are by no means always clearcut and Beethoven’s contrapuntal combination of themes complicates the matter further. ‘Learned, learned, always learned, no naturalness, no melody’, claimed the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung; for all that we may disagree, it was probably such practice, also disdained by many critics and audiences in late Mozart, which elicited such a response. Moreover, for all the talk one sometimes hears of Schubert’s different, tripartite path, provocatively diverging from Beethoven’s binary dialectics, the evidence here suggests otherwise; for neither composer is form a formula. So-called subsidiary themes will often, as here, receive developmental treatment in the ‘development’ section proper, relatively brief though that may be in this instance.

The second movement, in A major, is a set of variations. Again Mozart seems to be the starting point, but few would confuse the two composers, a common if far from identical lyricism notwithstanding. The move to the tonic minor in the third variation, while also common practice in the variation forms of Mozart, Haydn and other Classical composers, has a vehemence that is characteristically Beethoven’s. Likewise the sforzandi in the compound duple time Finale, which might otherwise be heard with post-Mozartian ‘hunting’ ears. Likewise also the tonal distancing of the episode that opens in F major; it parallels, far from coincidentally, a similar move in the first movement. For there is a delight in surprising the listener here, a delight which owes more than a little to Haydn, but which again never quite sounds ‘like’ that of Beethoven’s teacher.

The E flat major Sonata, the third of the op. 12 set, also opens with the fundamental building block of a tonic arpeggio. Extrovert ebullience in the piano part – this is a splendid key for pianistic display – meets not with violin accompaniment but with an instrument which, again to quote Matthews, ‘reinforces the opening phrases’. So involved does the game of catch-up become in this delightfully playful movement, both instruments urging each other on to new deeds, that one quite loses sight or care of which has ‘priority’, sure enough evidence that the question is not the right one to ask. Syncopations, a Beethoven trademark, add further to a sense of dislocation that is not disconcerting but delightful and a sense of slight tipsiness, instrumental hiccoughs and all, is far from unwelcome. We trip up, too, sent down blind tonal alleys, only to be told abruptly, yet in good humour, that the joke is on us: a Haydnesque practice put to new ends. The slow movement is the first Adagio in Beethoven’s series, con molto espressione. As that might suggest, this C major movement is very much the emotional core of the work, its aria style certainly suggestive of Mozart, but far from interchangeable. Interestingly the tonal relationship of the movement to the whole is the same as that of the E flat major Piano Sonata op. 7. The closing Rondo is closer to Haydn in character, perhaps even with a hint of the ‘Hungarian’ side of that composer’s music. High spirits are generally though not entirely unalloyed, yet they never pall.

 

In between these two works comes the A major Sonata. Its first movement is of different character – more affable, wittier – its compound duple metre perhaps more often found in a finale. The piano finds itself a little more often in an ‘accompanying’ role, though there is still a great deal of friendly give-and-take. Perhaps Mozart’s A major Violin Sonata K. 526, its opening movement also in compound duple time, offers something of a model, but here, perhaps surprisingly, it is Beethoven’s mood that is lighter. That should not, however, be taken to imply any lack of purpose; the derivation of so much material from an opening two-note tag binds together the movement at least as closely as any other heard this evening. A songful, almost Schubertian slow movement ensues in the tonic minor, its tender longing in context quite disarming. Chromaticism tends to be melodic rather than harmonic, yet offers just the right degree of pathos. The Finale marks something of a return to the good-natured opening, Allegro piacevole denoting pleasure rather than fire. It too is in rondo form, a fine equilibrium struck between the variation of its episodes and the welcome return of the principal theme, though Beethoven’s move to the close also benefits from an element of modulatory surprise. While it is difficult for us to imagine to what negative contemporary observations concerning ‘forced modulations’ and ‘hostile entanglements’ in these three sonatas might have referred, perhaps it was to those very aspects which delight us and which distinguish Beethoven from his models. 

 

Nature and beyond

 

Beethoven wrote two sonatas in 1800 and 1801, op. 23 in A minor and the ever-popular – it is tempting to reach for the clichéd ‘evergreen’ – ‘Spring’ Sonata in F major op. 24. Both works were dedicated to the composer’s Viennese patron, the banker and art collector Count Moritz von Fries (also the dedicatee of the C major String Quintet and the Seventh Symphony). For all the virtues of the op. 12 set, these two sonatas signal an advance in technical and emotional means, a greater ease with the form and thus the prospect of expanding its possibilities. In short, they offer more than occasional intimations of the composer’s ‘middle period’. Although it would be perverse to quarrel with the nickname of the ‘Spring’ Sonata, there are certainly sterner moments to this vernal work. Yes, the opening lyricism is touching in a fashion that can hardly but recall Mozart, yet the transition to the second group – note that once again we are thinking of transition – and much of the development have the listener sit up and notice; the landscape does not always gently undulate and, generally, sunny climes are not without their clouds. That said, it is difficult not to hear intimations of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony’s birdsong in the B flat major Adagio alongside a continuation, even sublimation of the serenity of much of the first movement. Communion with nature, and perhaps with something beyond, seems unarguably to be the point here. Melodic elaboration, sometimes on one instrument, sometimes on the other, sometimes simultaneous, offers an ethereal and yet ‘pastoral’ sense of heightened magic, without disruption to the movement’s flow. This rather enhances that general progress, approaching, perhaps even attaining the sublimity we associate with ‘middle period’ Beethoven. Again, the Sixth Symphony in particular comes to mind.

 

We nearly did not have the Scherzo at all, or at least not as it now stands. Beethoven’s initial conception of it was as a minuet, prior not only to its speeding up but also to the introduction of its madcap syncopations. Its brevity is striking; so is the sense of violin and piano sparking ideas off and inciting one another. Moreover, the composer considered omitting it, perhaps unsure as to whether the form required the full complement of four movements. Its welcome injection of kinetic energy, of a febrile intensity we more readily associate with late Beethoven, even with Bartók and Webern, would be sorely missed. At any rate, it fits perfectly between the slow movement and the post-Mozartian Rondo with which the Sonata concludes. The sheer generosity of melodic profusion has much in common with Beethoven’s greatest predecessor in the form and stands as a contrast to Beethoven’s more typical practice. A darker side offers ample dramatic contrast – the minor mode is more prevalent than this Sonata’s reputation might suggest – but not so as to detract from what, qualifications aside, remains one of Beethoven’s sunniest collaborative creations. 

 

Programme Essay for Mozart's Symphonies 39-41: 'A Drama of the Soul'

(This essay was originally published in the programme for a performance of these symphonies by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Concentus musicus Wien, at the 2014 Salzburg Festival.)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

 

Symphony No. 39 in E flat major K. 543

Symphony No. 40 in G minor K. 550
Symphony No. 41 in C major ‘Jupiter’ K. 551

Programming, properly understood, is fun but difficult. Thoughtful performers have long taken it upon themselves to present music by Mozart and Schubert in tandem with works by composers of the Second Viennese School. All-Mozart programmes have become rarer than they should; opportunities to hear Mozart’s last three symphonies in sequence, apparently a post-Romantic conception that would not have been his, are now infrequent. Yet, although we may draw comparisons and contrasts, perhaps even considering them à la Mahler as part of a greater meta-symphony, concentrated listening nevertheless continues to suggest, to eyes and to ears, tendencies pointing towards Mozart’s Austro-German successors (and back to his predecessors: the Bachs, Fux, and Handel).

Nikolaus Harnoncourt is not the only present-day conductor to wish to redress the balance. Simon Rattle and Daniel Barenboim have recently performed the hallowed final triptych in single concerts. Nevertheless, Harnoncourt remains different, avowedly wishing to present the symphonies as having been planned not just by him, but also by Mozart, as an intégrale, possessing its own architecture. Harnoncourt even considers the celebrated finale to the ‘Jupiter’ as a finale to all three works – which can certainly be our experience in performance. In the conductor’s view, this is an oratorio without words, a drama of the soul (he employs the German Seelendrama ),which in some senses may be understood to mirror, to dramatise the life of that soul, perhaps looking forward to Haydn’s The Seasons as well as to the works of CPE Bach and Handel, Mozart having re-orchestrated some of the latter’s essays in the genre. Perhaps liberated by the technical capabilities of instruments vis­-à-vis voices and indeed, by the lack of concrete words, such is the typically provocative conception of Mozart Harnoncourt wishes to present.

There remain surprising lacunae in our knowledge of Mozart’s life (not the least of temptations towards romanticizing). Little is known of the circumstances of composition and performance of these symphonies, in stark contrast to the acclaim received by the preceding ‘Prague’ Symphony. We know, even if we cannot quite believe the astonishing fact, that Mozart wrote all three within a six-week-period during the summer of 1788, yet have no certain evidence of performance. The old seductive idea that he therefore wrote them as a statement for posterity no longer garners acceptance. Perhaps they were written for subscription concerts ‘in the Casino’ on Spiegelgasse in Vienna’s Innere Stadt. The second version of the G minor Symphony (without clarinets), however, suggests a particular performing imperative, perhaps for a 1791 Tonkünstler-Societät concert, at which Salieri conducted an unidentified Mozart symphony. Or they may have been written with a visit to London in mind. Posterity has nevertheless made them its own. Brahms, keen to distinguish between novelty and ‘inner value’, remarked in 1896 that, although Beethoven’s First Symphony had offered a ‘new outlook […] the last three symphonies by Mozart are much more important!’ That once-heretical judgement now sounds uncontroversial. 

Unlike the famously minuet-less ‘Prague’, all three works are in four movements. The 39^th Symphony is the only one to follow on from the ‘Prague’ in having a slow introduction, its E flat major grandeur presaging that of Die Zauberflöte, but all the opening movements are unsurprisingly in sonata form. Contrast between first and second groups remains an important guiding principle, yet so does dynamic propulsion, the tension between those principles providing part of an operatic, formal and musical drama. Indeed, the second group of the ‘Jupiter’ takes us unmistakably into the realm of opera buffa, incorporating a quotation from Mozart’s insertion arietta ‘Un bacio di mano’ (K. 541). It offers a perfect foil to the trumpets and drums of earlier material, replete with resonances of the traditional Missa solemnis figuraliter and the seria pomp-to-come of La clemenza di Tito. Dramatic tension of a proto-Romantic order is overriding in the 40^th Symphony; its opening lower string throbbing presents an on-going scene of ‘accompaniment’ prior to the entry of the first subject above. (Harnoncourt points to the lack of a ‘beginning’ as such, comparing the movement to a Vivaldi Adagio.) Its nagging semitonal fall prepares us, if only slightly, for one of Mozart’s most disorienting chromatic explorations. The opening of the development shocks us by yanking first-group material into the remote key of F sharp minor and then attempting, though not succeeding, its Mephistophelian negation through harmonic and contrapuntal means. Not for nothing was Schoenberg drawn to its analysis in his Harmonielehre.

Slow movements now carry greater emotional weight than had generally been Mozart’s symphonic practice, perhaps influenced by his piano concertos. If the slow movement of Symphony No. 39 lacks a development section, at least as conventionally understood, that is only because development – hints of the ‘developing variation’ Schoenberg discerned in Brahms and his own music – continues throughout the recapitulation. All is transformed by what has come before. Chromaticism again haunts the slow movement of the 40^th Symphony; if we are in the major mode, it is hardly at its most affirmative. Complexity, whether harmonic or formal, reaches a new level in the slow, sarabande-like movement of the ‘Jupiter’. It may not be lengthy but it is powerfully concentrated.

Minuets (and Trios) retain their origins in dance, though are entirely symphonic in conception.  There is certainly an aristocratic grandeur to the Minuet of No. 39 that would not have been out of place in Vienna’s Redoutensaal, yet its woodwind luxuriance marks it out as something more. The Trio transports us to a ravishing serenade-like Elysium, pointing towards Così fan tutte. Mozart’s G minor daemon drives home cross-rhythms in the 40^th Symphony that serve to demonstrate our distance from the ballroom. Perhaps most extraordinary of all is the chromaticism of the initially ‘simple’ if sinuous Minuet of the ‘Jupiter’. Ultra-chromatic subversion of the tonic results in a passage of just six beats which includes every pitch class save that of C. Yet however much that has us peer into the Schoenbergian future, Mozart’s chromaticism retains a great deal, though certainly not all, of its meaning by virtue of its relationship to a fundamental diatonic tonality. ‘Home’ remains a place to which Mozart returns, though who knows where a longer life might have taken him.

Thematic economy marks the E flat major Finale, the second theme a development of the first. The movement seems over in a flash, a quicksilver operatic resolution. Tragic complexity continues to rule in the G minor. One passage of chromatic and rhythmic disjuncture delineates a sequence of all 11 pitches, save for the tonic; this may in a sense be the most radical of all Mozart’s finales and meaning is again imparted partly through contrast between such exploration and the tonality of ‘home’, however uncomforting. In Georg Knepler’s words, this Symphony ‘clings relentlessly to the minor mode’. It was, Knepler noted, not an unusual practice for Mozart, though Mozart’s other G minor masterwork, the String Quintet K. 516, does turn to the tonic major. Tragedy is preferred over a Beethovenian-Romantic journey from ‘darkness to light’ or even the Classical dramatic happy ending. Mozart never confuses sentiment with sentimentality; catharsis shakes us to the core.

 

Simplicity and complexity

In his article on the Trio of the 40^th Symphony, Leonard B. Meyer argued that the belief to which he had earlier subscribed that ‘complexity was at least a necessary condition for value’, was ‘if not, entirely mistaken, at least somewhat confused’, since what was crucial in music, as exemplified by this Trio, was ‘relational richness, and such richness (or complexity) is in no way incompatible with simplicity of musical vocabulary and grammar’. He proceeded to argue that it was possible for the listener to discern the Trio’s complexities ‘precisely because these arise out of uncomplicated, unassuming tonal means’. Meyer was certainly right to point to that possibility, though the issue of ‘relational richness’ quite rightly complicates – in his sense as well as others – given that the ‘relative’ simplicity of the Trio’s ‘tonal means’ may be understood to acquire some of its meaning from its contrast with complexity elsewhere. There would not be a sense of relaxation were it not for the nigh Schoenbergian extremity of some of Mozart’s writing beforehand. Harnoncourt speaks even of the ‘destruction’ of tonal melody and harmony.

Mozart’s compositional style, here and elsewhere, offers something quite extraordinary, akin to a dialectic in equilibrium, in which simplicity and complexity seem on the one hand to be held in balance and, on the other, dialectically to depend upon one another and to find themselves in dramatic conflict with each other. We may offer all manner of possible explanations for that. Mozart’s experience as an opera composer certainly informs his symphonic writing – sometimes to the chagrin of those who, like Wagner, wish that Mozart’s conception of sonata form had conformed more closely to expectations conditioned by Haydn and Beethoven. The composer’s historical position is another factor. The stage at which Mozart’s musical language finds itself is somewhat analogous to the world of Newtonian physics, then in its popular heyday, a tonal universe extending its bounds almost rationally, tonal relations, remote and close, almost yet not quite classifiable. And yet there remains a ‘progressive’ imperative, ineluctably urging him on towards chromatic dissolution.

 

Harmonic language is not the only element one may consider in such a fashion. One can learn a great deal from Mozart’s irregularity of phrase length. It is, however, perhaps the most important or at least the most readily apparent. Moreover, as with Schoenberg, the potential, if not yet the realization, of harmonic dissolution necessitated a more rigid form of musical organization. What could be more ‘organized’ than a fugue, or at least fugal writing, in the case of the Finale of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony fused with sonata form?

The sense of a finale offering the culminating achievement of the work, its telos or goal, is not the least of Mozart’s legacies. For the ‘finale problem’ experienced by Beethoven and every German Romantic symphonic composer – a good few non-Germans too – may, with a little exaggeration, find its origin in Mozart’s tour de force. A requirement of Classical balance and the scope for throwaway finale humour – always more Haydn’s thing than Mozart’s – have been dealt a blow by a teleology throwing the greatest weight upon a climactic final movement. Lest that seem Romantic sentimentalism, there is a great deal of evidence to indicate that the Finale of the ‘Jupiter’ was understood as such at the time. Vincent Novello would recount a conversation with Franz Xaver Mozart, Wolfgang’s son: ‘he considered the Finale to his father’s sinfonie in C – which [Johann Peter] Salomon [the impresario who commissioned Haydn’s London Symphonies] christened the Jupiter – to be the highest triumph of instrumental composition, and I agree with him.’ Complexity is triumphantly reinstated, if ever it had gone away, yet the coda’s quintuple invertible counterpoint – all the movement’s themes are combined in mind-boggling combination and permutation – is all the more miraculous for how lightly-worn the learning is. Yes, there is triumph, but there is no sense of forcibly welding the themes together (as, say, in Wagner’s Meistersinger counterpoint). Mozart’s Finale is the product of an 18^th-century art that conceals art, offering the apparent paradox of effortless climax. It is, moreover, difficult not to feel some sense of signing off, of culmination to more than a single work. Had Mozart lived longer, he would certainly have composed other symphonies longer, but he did not; Harnoncourt’s thesis of an ‘instrumental oratorio’ may yet shed new light upon the particularity of this climax.

Programme Essay for Mozart and Weill: 'Opera and the Symphony - Mutually Informing'

(This essay was originally published in a Salzburg Festival programme for a concert in which Marc Minkowski conducted the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra. The programme was slightly altered at late notice, owing to a change of soloist, but I have given the original version here.)

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

Symphony No. 33 in B flat major K. 319

‘Parto inerme’ from La Betulia liberata K. 118

‘Ombra felice’ – ‘Io ti lascio’ K. 255

‘Venga pur, minacci e frema’ from Mitridate, re di Ponto K. 87

Kurt Weill (1900–1950)

Symphony No. 2

Deviation and dialectic

Mozart’s Symphony No. 33, dating from 1779, would prove to be his penultimate Salzburg symphony. Initially it was a three-movement work, its Minuet and Trio added five or six years later, most likely for a specific performance in Vienna, where audiences tended to expect, and in this case therefore received, a symphony in four movements. Whereas the first of the symphonies written upon returning home from Paris, No. 32 in G major K. 318, very much bore the marks of Mozart’s experience in the French capital – its three sections in one movement clearly modelled after the overture style of opéra comique – this three-movement work conformed to the Italianate model most popular in Alpine Salzburg, though, interestingly, the later Minuet and Trio offer no hint of stylistic incongruity. (Hans Keller begged to differ, suggesting an element of undue contrivance in its ‘fit’, but that seems a dubious case of wisdom after the event.) Whether the smaller orchestra – no flutes and two horns rather than four – reflects a response to audience reaction, the orchestral forces available or simply a matter of the composer’s inclination remains, in the absence of documentation, a matter of conjecture.

 

Perhaps the most strikingly ‘forward-looking’ feature of a work which erroneously, if understandably in the light of ‘reversions’ such as orchestral size and number of movements – is the high level of motivic cohesion, not only within movements but between them too. The first, third and fourth movements all open with a downward octave leap, B flat to B flat, a unifying correspondence the least tutored of ears might readily recognize. This being Mozart rather than Haydn, the generative variety of melodic profusion following each of those opening statements is, however, more striking still. A familiar yet typically finely crafted balance between fundamentally diatonic harmonic rhythm and sinuous melodic chromaticism characterizes the first movement. So does the startling – with hindsight – appearance of a four-note contrapuntal tag which would make its most celebrated reappearance in the Finale of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. It is perhaps more immediately relevant to this Symphony, however, to consider its previous appearance in the Credo of Mozart’s Mass in F major K. 192 and more generally as reflective of an Austrian and South German contrapuntal tradition born of Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum.

 

Experimentation may not be so overt in this Symphony as in some of its immediate predecessors and is, in any case, rarely a prevailing characteristic of Mozart’s symphonism. Nevertheless, the reversal of events in the slow movement’s recapitulation, the second subject preceding the return of the first, offers a formal ‘deviation’, albeit one with precedent in earlier works, as satisfying as it is surprising. More noteworthy still however is the movement’s serenade-like grace, serenity and warmth. The ‘reduced’ wind section shows in a well-nigh perfect blend of the harmonic and contrapuntal that we need not wait for the Viennese Mozart to experience delights both sensuous and intellectual. Such a dialectic also informs the ‘Viennese’ third movement, the ready cliché of Trio ‘relaxation’ undoubtedly true in the brief serenade sandwiched between two hearings of the Minuet. The latter’s sternness in miniature seems almost to prefigure the neo-classicism of La clemenza di Tito, even Beethoven. In the Finale, we hear ebullience, contrapuntal mastery, hints of Parisian orchestral virtuosity allegedly left behind and, perhaps most important, an operatic sense of characterization, oboes and horns again taking a leading role, in which all the world is truly a stage. Indeed, in 1786, the year of Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart would sell a copy of this Symphony, together with Nos. 34 and 36 and three piano concertos, to the Donaueschingen court, attesting to a more extended after-life than was typical for his Salzburg symphonies.

 

Precocious dramatic sensibilities

It would generally take longer for the wider world to appreciate the charms and, in many cases, the profundities of Mozart’s early vocal works. Mitridate, re di Ponto gained considerable success with its 26 initial performances, but then went unperformed until the early 20^th century. In the case of the 1771 oratorio La Betulia liberata, commissioned by Don Giuseppe Ximenese, Prince of Aragon, the music seems originally never to have been performed at all, notwithstanding Mozart’s unfulfilled idea over a decade later to rework material for a commission from Vienna’s Tonkünstler-Societät. This azione sacra, a setting of Metastasio’s 1734 libretto, drawn from the Book of Judith, is stylistically very much in the mould of opere serie such as Mitridate, written the previous year for Milan. Both castrato arias, the oratorio’s ‘Parto enerme, e non pavento’, sung by Judith herself, and the opera’s ‘Venga pur, minacci e frema’ speak of a dramatic sensibility belying the composer’s tender years. Some of the luxuriance of the Salzburg symphonies is present. So also, however, is considerable single-mindedness in pursuit of dramatic truth, doubtless partly born of Mozart’s admiration for and imitation of Gluck. The righteous determination of a biblical heroine may thus be understood, historically as well as in the context of this concert, to be informed by that of Mitridate’s treacherous son, Farnace.

 

Not, of course, that we may not discern in those arias a genuine delight in the capabilities of the voice as such. The same may be said of the contrasting, mostly tender scena ‘Ombra felice’ and aria ‘Io ti lascio’, wherein we hear what to us is a strikingly familiar Mozartian voice of compassion, prior to an ‘operatically’ brilliant conclusion. We also hear startling freedom of form within the rondeau structure of repeated refrain, not at all what Metastasian traditionalists would have expected. Perhaps some at least, though, were beguiled, even inspired. For already, without being entirely fanciful, we hear in all three arias intimations, if not yet fully formed, of the mature Mozart’s Shakespearean ability to abstain from judgement, to permit characters to speak for themselves rather than didactically to be commanded. Such is apparent in an ‘edifying’ oratorio, in a more overtly ‘dramatic’ operatic ‘entertainment’, and in this ‘insertion’ aria for Metastasio’s Arsace, an aria which seems in fact never to have been ‘inserted’ and was probably intended instead for castrato concert performance in 1776. At any rate, it offers Mozart’s sole example of a concert aria for alto, irrespective of gender.

 

Three night scenes

It may seem something of a distance to travel from Mozart to Kurt Weill, and it would in most respects be vain to pretend otherwise, especially with respect to the mature and ‘late’ Weill of Brecht and Broadway. Weill’s Second Symphony is no early work, hailing instead from the period immediately following his 1933 flight from Germany, of Die sieben Todsünden, that ballet-cantata interrupting the Symphony’s composition. The Symphony nevertheless seems in retrospect to hark back to a greater seriousness more readily associated with Weill’s teacher, Ferruccio Busoni, far from the least in his generation of Mozart’s disciples. Indeed a good deal of Weill’s melodic and harmonic language here is strikingly close to Busoni’s and would surely be more generally recognized as such, did Busoni’s music not continue to languish in such neglect. The first movement’s introduction, arguably more balletic, even operatic, than symphonic in the Classical-Romantic sense, leads into a sonata-form movement whose scurrying, fantastical qualities might almost have leaped out from a discarded sketch for Doktor Faust. A neo-Lisztian Mephistopheles certainly seems at work in the transformational techniques both within and between movements. Without labouring the point, and certainly without wishing to ascribe ‘influence’, we may also recall Mozart’s practice here.

 

Amidst the debris of the once all-conquering Neue Sachlichkeit, orchestral wind proffer a satirical edge, harsher, more ironic than Mozartian seduction. Hindemith’s Kammermusik may be a reference point here, but far from the only such point, or even, surface impressions notwithstanding, the most important one. For there beats, perhaps surprisingly, a heart not entirely distant from that of another great symphonist: Gustav Mahler. The second of the 1924 Violin Concerto’s three movements, Notturno – Cadenza – Serenata, has provoked comparisons with the central, three-movement sequence, Nachtmusik – Scherzo – Nachtmusik, of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. The unhappy reception accorded Weill’s Symphony upon its 1934 Amsterdam premiere by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Bruno Walter even drew from the composer an alternative title, Drei Nacht-Szenen (Three Night Scenes), recalling Mahler’s example, enduringly strong with Willem Mengelberg’s orchestra. That said, as ever with Weill, as with Mahler, things are not so simple. If we consider the central Largo funereal, then it can only be so in a markedly detached sense: certainly not without wit and difficult to describe as tragic in a Mahlerian or indeed any other sense (even, that is, when we invoke the nocturnal ambivalence of the Mahler of the Seventh Symphony). Hints, sometimes more, of jazz, even of show tunes, permeate the whole, most of all in the Finale, which seems concerned as much to step aside from as directly to combat grandiloquent, Romantic expectations of symphonic climax and fulfilment.

 

And yet, even though Weill’s speaking at times both of a ‘symphonic fantasy’ and of a ‘nocturne’ reveals important truths, this is no anti-symphony. The recurrence and questioning of the first movement’s march rhythms in the Finale imparts a degree of conventional cyclical unity even as its expectations undergo a degree of deconstruction. Weill, like Mozart, was above all a musical dramatist and such in a sense was the deconstructive drama of his exile: more defiant, perhaps, less sardonic than that of his Weimar-era coming to maturity, but the Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect) was always more Brecht’s conception than that of his sometimes uneasy collaborator. The composer’s final orchestral work is now, alongside the Violin Concerto, generally and rightly considered as significant in their way as Weill’s collaborations with Brecht. Perhaps it is helpful to think of the composer as analogous to Prokofiev: enamoured with the stage, not always the most ‘natural’ of symphonists, but an interesting symphonist nonetheless, the interest of his contribution being partly a consequence of a more oblique relationship to this weightiest of forms and traditions.

 

 

Programme essay for Haydn's Creation: 'A Unique Event'

(This essay was published in the 2014 Salzburg Festival programme for a concert in which Bernard Haitink conducted the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. I reviewed the concert here.)

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)

Die Schöpfung Hob XXI:2

 

The seeds of Die Schöpfung were sown during Haydn’s visits to England in the early 1790s. Though Haydn was acquainted with a surprisingly large number of Handel’s oratorios through the Sunday morning performances given by his librettist, Gottfried van Swieten, nothing had prepared Haydn for the Handel Festival ‘by command and under the patronage of their Majesties’ held at Westminster Abbey in 1791, which boasted over a thousand performers. Haydn resolved to write a successor work at the first opportunity.

According to a letter from Swieten to the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung:

Now a few words on the poem that you choose to call my Creation. My part in the work, originally written in English, was certainly more than translation; but it was far from being […] my own. […The libretto] is by an unnamed author who had compiled it largely from Milton’s Paradise Lost and had intended it for Handel. What prevented the great man from making use of it is not known, but when Haydn was in London, it was sought out and handed over to him with the request that he set it to music. […] He then showed it to me and […] I recognized immediately that so exalted a subject would allow Haydn the opportunity […] to express the full power of his inexhaustible genius; I therefore encouraged him to take the work in hand and […] I resolved to clothe the English poem in German garb.

The ‘original’ author has never been identified. We can certainly see, however, a fortunate similarity of outlook between mid-18^th-century England and later-century Austria, offering a splendid opportunity, wondrously taken, both to reach summation in and, as war ravaged Europe, to bid farewell to a vision of Enlightenment religion Swieten had long attempted to propagate. That he did as Joseph II’s education minister – his policies often coming into conflict with the Emperor’s more utilitarian concerns – as custodian of the Imperial Library and as librettist for both of Haydn’s late oratorios, this and Die Jahreszeiten (derived also from an English source, James Thomson’s The Seasons).

 

The opening ‘Vorstellung des Chaos’ is justly the most celebrated number in the oratorio, its chromatic extremity approaching Wagner. Sketches render clear Haydn’s unprecedented pains over its composition. ‘Chaos’ does not begin in C minor but with an emphatic unison C: length and tonality indeterminate. Such is the earth ‘without form and void’ from which tonality evolves and which the deed of Creation will change in the twinkling of an eye. As Haydn’s musical conception develops, so do intimations of life. Such was recognized in contemporary reviews, for example that in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung: ‘single notes come forth, spawning others in turn. […] Movement begins. Powerful masses grate against each other and begin to gestate. […] Unknown forces, swimming and surging, […] bring tidings of order.’ As the Spirit of God moves upon the waters, life figurations multiply and subdivide themselves, the seeds of order sown before we return to the void, awaiting the first words of this sacred drama.

           

Soon sotto voce choral chanting of the chorus (‘Und der Geist Gottes schwebte auf der Fläche der Wasser’) engenders a further, crucially verbal sense of expectation and tension. A generation before the choral Finale to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, we have impressed upon us the necessity of the word – and the Creator’s primal, enlightening Word at that. The groundwork is thus prepared for Haydn’s greatest coup de théâtre, ‘Und es ward Licht’ (And there was light). This conception of courageous simplicity, the famous fortissimo C major chord, is entirely Haydn’s own: he ignored Swieten’s advice that the darkness should ‘gradually disappear’. It is a passage whose stunning effectiveness has never palled. Of the London premiere, on 28 March 1800, Charles Burney observed that ‘the generality of the subscribers were unable to disentangle the studied confusion in delineating chaos’. Yet ‘the composer’s meaning was felt by the whole audience in this passage; there followed an instant interruption of rapturous applause’. Light was a symbol that few in Haydn’s first audiences would have failed to recognize at some level; it was not simply a representation of the sublime, but also the quintessential symbol of Enlightenment. Swieten had written in 1774 of the need for ‘light’ in politics; a ‘blind’ people could readily be put to bad use. Haydn edified, enlightened his audience through musical means.

 

Such splendour cedes to radiant A major in the second number, ‘Nun schwanden vor dem heiligen Strahle’. Milton is not completely expelled from this new (or old) heaven, the central section plunging us back into distant, ‘chaotic’ C minor, an abrupt tonal wrench, as Hell’s spirits sink into endless night. Yet unlike Paradise Lost, that is the sole reference made in the work to the fallen angels; the abiding memory is of restitution of unsullied A major: ‘Und eine neue Welt entspringt auf Gottes Wort’ (A new created world springs up at God’s command). Disorder once again yields to fair ‘order’, stressed throughout, as befits a persistent Enlightenment preoccupation. ‘Order is Heav’n’s first law’, Alexander Pope had written in his Essay on Man; here it is firmly, eternally established. Milton returns, but to evoke idyllic nature.

 

Such evocation takes up the bulk of the narrative passages, as opposed to the great, neo-Handelian choruses of praise, prior to the creation of man. The loving care with which Haydn depicts the ‘limpid brook’, the ‘healing plant’, the ‘nightingale’s delightful notes’ and the ‘nimble stag’ possessed definite theological content for his audience. God’s Creation is extolled, just as in ‘natural philosophy’, or what we should call ‘science’. This naive tone painting, at odds with 19^th-century sensibilities – it made Berlioz ‘want to murder somebody’ – is no crowd-pleasing extra; it is an integral part of the composition and its message. Haydn’s audience was to be improved as well as entertained.

           

Without man, though, Creation would remain incomplete. For however heavily the Augustinian tradition might weigh down upon the Church, it had never been able to deny that ‘God created man in his own image’. The scene is thus set for Uriel’s aria, ‘Mit Würd’ und Hoheit angetan’, in which God’s quickening breath and man, the most astounding progeny of that breath, stand as almost equally worthy of praise and wonder. One feature of Haydn’s setting is particularly noteworthy in this context. Instead of returning conventionally from the dominant, G major, as he had done the first time around, Haydn uses the chord at the moment of God’s ‘breath’, as an augmented-sixth pivot to modulate, quite breathtakingly, to the distant key of A flat major. Far from coincidentally, this number is in C major, the key of Light. Having employed this tonality extensively during Part I, it is the first and only example of its use in Part II.

 

Having thus been created, it remains a human duty, indeed the greatest such duty, to praise the Creator. Thus Adam and Eve, having investigated the wonders of Paradise, join with the Heavenly Host in the great hymn, ‘Heil dir, o Gott!’ (Hail, bounteous Lord!). For the final time, Haydn’s long-range tonal plan has elevated the music to the key of Light, having previously taken us as far away as possible, to G flat major, so as to heighten the tonal drama and climax of restoration. Interestingly, this third and final part of the oratorio no longer quotes from the Bible. Indeed the hymn’s conclusion, chanting obeisance ceding to rapturous acclamation, harmonizes remarkably well with various contemporary outlooks. We stand close to the inhabitants of Voltaire’s Eldorado, who ‘have nothing to ask of God’, yet nevertheless ‘thank Him unceasingly’ for everything He has given them and ‘worship God from morning till night’. We stand close to the mystical, Masonic world of Die Zauberflöte. Yet we also stand close to the world of Haydn’s late Te Deum, also in C major. All those worlds and their concerns focus upon praise for the Creator and His Creation.

 

But then the angels take their leave and we are left with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This second half of Part III has often elicited adverse criticism for providing an anti-climax. The somewhat dampened tone is, however, an integral part of the drama. For the listener is immediately plunged back to earth with the only recitativo secco of any length in the entire work. There follows a lengthy duet: charming, yet definitely between mortals. To underline this, the music falls to the key of E flat major. This is the world of commedia dell’arte – as Siegmund Levarie has suggested, the hymn’s action is repeated in parody, the realm of Singspiel. Indeed the opening horn duo of the final Allegro exchange exhibits almost every characteristic of contemporary Viennese popular song. Phrases are symmetrical groupings of four bars, in stark contrast to the hymn’s more complex phrase structure. Horns and fiddling response are rustic. Rhythm is that of the écossaisse. Following a brief recitative, pointing with haste, suggesting near embarrassment at the serpentine temptation that is to come, Haydn concludes with a final chorus of praise in B flat major.

 

But why, in a work whose overarching tonality is that of C major? The central issue here is not, as in Milton, original sin, but man’s distance from God. Man may possess attributes of the divine, yet falls far short. That is made clear in Pope’s Essay, itself most likely an important influence upon the ‘original’ libretto, as well as a celebrated work in later-century Austria. The Heavenly Host has left the scene, the final chorus of praise left to mortals. Soloists are not the previous three archangels, but merely soprano, tenor and bass, joined for the first and last time by an equally anonymous alto. Die Schöpfung ends as it does at least partly so as to emphasize the enduring gulf between human and divine. Such is the lesson of the second Biblical account of man’s creation (Genesis 2:ii–viii): God rested from His works and created man that they might be perpetuated. Yet continue to create though man may, the Creation would remain a unique event. Die Schöpfung remains perhaps its uniquely impressive musical depiction.

 

(To read, and/or to download as a PDF, my essay published in the 2008 Austrian History Yearbook: 'Haydn's "Creation" and Enlightenment Theology, please click here.)



 

Prom 59 - BBC SO/Bychkov - Elektra, 31 August 2014

 

Images: BBC/Chris Christodoulou
Dame Felicity Palmer as Klytemnestra

 

 

Royal Albert Hall

Elektra – Christine Goerke

Chrysothemis – Gun-Brit Barkmin

Klytemnestra – Dame Felicity Palmer

Orest – Johan Reuter

First Maid – Katarina Bradić

Second Maid – Zoryana Kushpler

Third Maid – Hanna Hipp

Fourth Maid – Marie-Eve Munger

Fifth Maid – Iris Kupke

Overseer – Miranda Keys

Young Servant – Ivan Turšić

Orest’s tutor – Jongmin Park

Aegisth – Robert Künzli

Justin Way (stage director)

BBC Singers (chorus master: Paul Wiegold)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

 

Anti-Strauss sentiment, Strauss-scepticism, call it what you will: it still runs high. In some ways, that is not a bad thing: the ‘case of Strauss’, which I have written about before and which I shall discuss further in a chapter of my new book, to be published next month, is complex and fascinating, and is certainly not to be resolved with a one-liner here or an affirmation or otherwise there. Strauss’s æstheticism, perhaps ironically, given its insistence upon the value of art as art, leads us to greater consideration of æsthetic questions than the work of many other composers. That holds even when, perhaps particularly when, one is not of a prosecuting party ranging from Karl Kraus (‘certainly more of a stock company [Aktiengesellschaft] than a genius’) to Stravinsky  (‘I would like to admit all Strauss’s operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant vulgarity. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today.’) However, even those who disdain much of Strauss’s later work – often, to my mind, for less than convincing reasons – will admit their admiration for Elektra. It may not be many people’s ‘favourite’ Strauss opera, but most, I suspect, will consider it his greatest. Adorno, who went to the extreme of claiming that ‘everything that follows Rosenkavalier  is either applied or commercial art,’ and who, in my view, quite wrongly, even took Strauss to task for the ‘entire final section of Elektra, [in which] banality is dominant,’ admitted the opera to a line of development ‘from Tristan to Elektra to Schoenberg’s Erwartung’.

 

And so, whilst in principle it was somewhat depressing that the Proms elected to perform the three most popular of Strauss’s operas for his anniversary season – surely if we were to hear, for instance, Friedenstag anywhere in this country, it would be here – it was difficult, both in principle, and certainly in practice, with so fine a performance, to object too strongly, or indeed at all. Justin Way’s semi-staging worked as well as it had for the Proms Ring last year. Often, though not slavishly, following Hofmannsthal’s explicit directions – Elektra and Klytemnestra did ‘stand eye to eye’, and to very good effect – it permitted the work to ‘speak for itself’, although in any case it generally does in full stagings, which tend perhaps more strongly to resemble one another than do those of any other opera that springs to my mind.

 

Semyon Bychkov, the Maids, and the Overseer

 

 

As with that Ring, the orchestra took centre stage, the BBC Symphony Orchestra on excellent form throughout. (The occasional moment of tiredness towards the end can readily be forgiven for any orchestra.) And likewise, we were fortunate indeed in the choice of conductor: Daniel Barenboim for the Ring; for Elektra, Semyon Bychkov, who was, if memory serves me correctly, the first conductor I heard in this work. Yet that should not be taken, any more than it had with a Ring that included Nina Stemme and Andreas Schager, to imply a downgrading of the vocal element. In proper Wagnerian style – and in this, if avowedly not with respect to metaphysics, or the lack thereof, Strauss remained a Wagnerian through and through – the various elements of the performance, even in a minimal staging, strengthened one another.

 

That could be heard in the first scene, in which a very nicely differentiated group of maids interacted with flickering intensity with conducting which really did emphasise that clichéd taking after Mendelssohn’s fairy music. The foresight of the Fifth Maid, Iris Kupke, was experienced as much in performance as in work. Miranda Keys’s Overseer was again well differentiated, though not exaggeratedly so, from the ‘mere’ maids. And then, in what might call the ‘interlude’ in which Elektra emerges from the house, Bychkov ensured that Strauss’s waltz writing disconcertingly reared its head and pointed ahead.

 

Christine Goerke’s Elektra announced herself in deeper voice than one often hears: more feminine, less harpy, though so certainly not lacking in volume where necessary. Sepulchral trombones complemented her lament, intensifying those baleful calls of ‘Agamemnon’ that were to follow. Throughout her lengthy soliloquy, Bychkov conjured up – and the BBC SO delivered – a truly Straussian orchestral phantasmagoria, in colour and in harmony. ‘Agamemnon! Vater!’: the orchestra sent shivers down the spine. But equally compelling was the tenderness from Goerke and orchestra alike, never more so than after ‘zeig dich deinem Kind!’ A daughter’s affection may have been twisted but, on one level, it remained childishly simple. Rhythmic and melodic details, for instance the baying of the dogs, both made their point in themselves and, when it came to material to be developed later on, sowed their musico-dramatic seeds with both mystery and expectant, Fatal clarity.

 

 

Gun-Brit Barkmin as Chrysothemis

The following scene, with Chrysothemis, was interesting. Elektra’s blood-curdling ‘spaltete dein Fleisch’ stood at one extreme. The flowering, in more than one sense, of Gun-Brit Barkmin’s Chrysothemis intrigued, if anything, more still. During her first lines, I wondered whether Barkmin would prove a little underpowered, even anonymous. But, as a panoply of woodwind colour to rival the composer’s ‘Indian summer’ worked its queasy magic, it became clear that this was a sister who would grow into her role at the crucial point: the voicing of what, in context, seems her very weird – or is it very ‘normal’? who knows any more? – obsession with child-bearing. Thereafter this was a woman indeed.

 

A woman indeed of a different nature is Klytemnestra. Her orchestrally-voiced arrival sent shivers down the spine, enhanced or perhaps ‘realised’ by Felicity Palmer’s splendidly grande-dame procession. If Palmer’s voice is vocally not what it was, it frankly mattered not a jot. But whilst this extraordinary confrontation worked itself out in words and singing, the orchestra broadened our terms of musical reference. You, yourself are a goddess, Elektra told her mother. What, then, did it mean to hear apparent echoes of Siegfried’s ‘Forest Murmurs’? Well, there is honesty in the German forest, but there is also redress, as Mime would find to his cost. The malevolent replanting of those Wagnerian seeds was suggestive, whether coincidental or otherwise. Fafner-like brass deepened the very real agony and sickness we heard from Palmer’s magnificently attentive outlining of that ‘Etwas’ which had fallen upon her. As for the intensity and sheer volume with which Goerke despatched ‘ich steh’ da und seh’ dich endlich sterben’ and likewise ‘der jauchzt und kann sich seines Lebens freun!’ What can one say other than superlative? Perfectly matched, by the way, by the orchestra as they stood, in that aforementioned scene, ‘eye to eye’.

 

Brittle, sardonic, orchestral mock-heroism ‘accompanied’ the appearance of the Young Servant. Sheer orchestral depravity ‘beautifully’ captured, in all its bizarre mixture of sincerity and insincerity, Elektra’s hymn to her sister’s female form. And finally, the relief of Orest’s arrival: not quite the first male voice but, my goodness, it sounded as if it were! Johan Reuter’s delivery of this difficult role brought bluff anger rather than the more ‘intellectual’ approach of a Matthias Goerne. There is room for both, but here, Reuter felt ‘right’. The final recognition hit as it should: a truly shattering dissonance on Elektra’s ‘Orest’ would be followed up by too beautiful remembrance of her former self, bathed in a narcissism that seemed almost literally, or at least verbally, skin-deep.

 

I do not know whether Palmer delivered her own off-stage scream. Whoever did it deserves mention in her own right, for it vied with the orchestral response – and Goerke’s truly terrifying steely response: Triff noch einmal!’ No compassion here, thank you. Again, Strauss’s insidious waltzing proved thematically, dramatically pregnant in the scene with Aegisth (a competent but less than exciting Robert Künzli). Rosenkavalier seemed less around the corner than already present as, following Elektra’s strange courtesies, he entered the house.

 

Christine Goerke as Elektra

Somehow, the voices of the BBC Singers seemed more than usually akin to Elektra’s ‘voices’ in a psychological sense. It was probably partly a matter of not seeing the singers, perhaps also a matter of the acoustic. Whatever the reason, it added an interesting, appropriately psychoanalytical deadliness to the final events. The insincerity, in context, of C major may here have been Strauss’s – and Bychkov’s, and the orchestra’s – crowning achievement. To speak, as Adorno did, of the discontinuity ‘between the wildness of most of Strauss’s music in Elektra and its blissfully triadic conclusion’ seems at the best of times wilful. Blissful? About as much as Handel’s use of the major mode in the ‘Dead March’ from Saul. After a brief period of ‘release’ with a ‘true’ operatic duet between the sisters, there came the final dramatic bludgeoning. And Elektra fell as shatteringly on stage as she did in the orchestra.