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2008 Series I Concerts
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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) sits astride the 18th and 19thè centuries, a musical colossus who inherited the classical tradition exemplified by Mozart and Haydn and transformed it into the nascent romanticism of the 19th century. To contemporary eyes Beethoven is very much the romantic exemplar, a Promethean figure who represents genius, artistic freedom and individualism, blazing a path of musical innovation that literally changed the course of music. But his music is solidly grounded in the classical tradition and his musical forefathers, and it is often this dynamic confrontation between the objective “classical” and the subjective “romantic” spirit that gives Beethoven’s music its characteristic energy and sound. Tonight’s performance, then, is not only a chance to hear music composed by Beethoven in three disparate genres, but to hear his melding of the classical and romantic, the Apollonian and Dionysian, into a musical style uniquely his own.
Beethoven’s only foray into the genre of opera, Fidelio, went through a number of revisions before it reached its final form. Based on the French play Leonore, ou l’amour conjugal by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, the opera Leonore (the original title of the opera) premièred on November 20, 1805 in Vienna, a week after Napoleon’s troops occupied the city. Obviously not an auspicious environment for the birth of art, it was withdrawn after three performances. A second version of the opera premiered to enthusiastic audiences on March 29, 1806, but was withdrawn by Beethoven after only five performances due to squabbles with the theatre management over the profits. A third version of the opera, with an overhauled libretto and considerable reworking by Beethoven (including the name Fidelio for the first time), debuted on May 23, 1814 and was a huge success.
The overture we are hearing tonight was composed for the 1814 performance. Beethoven also composed Leonore II and Leonore III Overtures for use in the 1805 and 1806 productions respectively, and a Leonore I in anticipation of a Prague performance in 1807 that never materialized. The Fidelio Overture differs from all the versions of the Leonore Overtures in that it is in the key of E major, the key of hope and liberation in Leonore’s aria, while the other three are in the key of C major, the key of final liberation in the opera. Also, unlike the Leonore versions of the overture, the Fidelio Overture uses no thematic material from the opera, which was the norm for operas composed during the 18th century.
What is forward-looking (and romantic) in Fidelio is the theme of the opera itself, with its celebration of personal freedom, heroism and bravery and the struggle for political liberty. The great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler remarked on the opera in 1948: “Certainly, Fidelio is not an opera in the sense we are used to, nor is Beethoven a musician for the theatre, or a dramaturgist. He is quite a bit more, a whole musician, and beyond that, a saint and a visionary. His Fidelio has more of the mass than of the opera in it; the sentiments it expresses come from the sphere of the sacred, and preach a ‘religion of humanity’ which we have never found so beautiful or necessary as we do today…”
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #4 was composed in 1805-06 and given its public premiere at a concert at the Theater an der Wien on December 22nd, 1808. The famous December 22nd concert included not only the Piano Concerto #4 but the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Choral Fantasy, portions of the Mass in C Major as well as various other works… the concert in total lasted over 4 hours! Suffice to say that the length of the concert (in addition to lack of heating in the theater, the music being under rehearsed and the orchestra rebellious due to Beethoven’s antagonizing manner) turned into a fiasco for the composer. He earned no money from the production and the audience was cold (no pun intended) towards his newer music, including the piano concerto. It was, in fact, forgotten until the young Felix Mendelssohn rescued the work from oblivion through his performance of it in 1836.
The Fourth Concerto is a decided break with the traditional classical concerto form. Charles Rosen in his book The Classical Style states, “The most important fact about concerto form is that the audience waits for the soloist to enter, and when he stops playing they wait for him to begin again.” The first measures of the fourth concerto break the classical rules- instead of an orchestral introduction followed by the soloist entering, the Fourth Piano Concerto begins with the piano alone, playing music serene, contemplative, self-confident. In fact, the overall mood of the concerto could be considered to be one of serenity; in contravention of the typical virtuosic, assertive, extroverted character of a classical concerto, Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto has a very introverted, lyrical and intimate feel. The orchestra enters reservedly at first, and once the tutti swells to its peak the piano is gracefully acknowledged as the dominant partner. Only once does the piano assert its authority by raising its voice, and that is at the structurally important recapitulation of the main theme, and even then the piano quickly fades from a full fortissimo to piano, dolce.
The second movement is perhaps the concerto’s most famous. Against loud, staccato outbursts in the orchestra, the piano plays music soft, legato and songful, richly harmonized. This prompted Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny to state to the potential performer that “in this movement one cannot help thinking of an antique dramatic and tragic scene, and the player must feel with what movingly lamenting expression his solo must be played in order to contrast with the powerful and austere orchestral passages.” In the lyric and witty final movement tympani and trumpets appear for the fist time in the musical form known as a rondo. High spirits are on display, with a feeling of enormous power or forces held in reserve.
Is this work classical or romantic, Apollonian or Dionysian? Perhaps it can be best described as the perfect fusion of Apollonian form and orchestration and Dionysian and Promethean spirit.
Finally, we end this concert with a work that has become in many ways synonymous with classical music- Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. So much has been already spoken and written about this justly famous composition that anything added is likely to be superfluous. At the risk of repetition, I would like to discuss one point germane with the theme of these notes. After the expanded dimensions of the Eroica Symphony, Beethoven returned to a much more concise, “classical” form for his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. The musical kernel or germ from which the entire Fifth Symphony springs can be found in the opening four note ”fate” motive. This musical and motivic concision can be seen as the forerunner of much music of the 19th century and beyond. Richard Wagner’s use of leitmotifs as the building blocks for his enormous music dramas can be directly traced to Beethoven, as can, in particular, the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler. The first movement of Mahler’s Ninth symphony, for example, is based entirely on musical motives found on the first page of the orchestral score. And to take this development one step further, Schoenberg used a single 12-tone row as the basis for entire compositions. Beethoven’s development of music, fusing warring tendencies into a unique, cohesive whole spawned the myriad advancements of romantic music and ultimately the rejection of romanticism in much of 20th century music. Ironically, the Beethoven who exalted mankind and the human spirit in Fidelio and the Fifth Symphony bore the seeds in those works of an ultimate rejection of the subjective in art.
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