Program Notes: Brilliant Beethoven, Wonderful Wang!
Featuring violinist Linda Wang
Friday, April 18, 2008 at 8 pm & Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 3 pm
Every commentary on the Coriolan Overture points out that the work has no connection with Shakespeare, and this note will not stray from that pattern. Rather than Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Beethoven’s inspiration here was a play by his friend Heinrich von Collin (1771-1811). However, since both plays are derived from Plutarch’s Lives, and it is the subject—Coriolanus, the proud Roman aristocrat and general —rather than the text that infuses this overture, the listener could just as properly envision Shakespeare’s creation and not go far wrong.
Beethoven was always moved by the argument for the ‘Great Man’, that charismatic and powerful individualist who struggles against fate, society, and his lesser coevals, all of which and whom he views with disdain from the ‘mountaintop’ of his unshakable and unremitting sense of integrity. (An extraordinarily early pre-cursor to the heroes of Ayn Rand.) Beethoven was notoriously difficult to get along with: irascible and impatient with his fellows; and, no doubt, he saw at least a little of himself in the obstinate and tragic hero of Coriolanus.
Collin wrote his play in 1802, and it was well-liked by the Viennese public. Mozart’s brother-in-law Joseph Lange (who also painted the last, appropriately unfinished portrait of that composer) had acted the title rôle to much acclaim. Beethoven composed the curtain raiser for a production given in April 1807, although the premiere was actually given at a subscription concert in March, conducted by the composer.
The key is c minor, as in the Fifth Symphony; and the overture, like the first movement of that great score, has a highly concentrated impact. An age-old truism has it that music’s two basic components are sound and silence. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the opening bars of the Coriolan Overture. Beethoven hews his portrait in blocks of sound, interspersed with pauses, then moves to a scurrying, ominous figure which sets the stage for Rome’s troubles with the Volsci and for Coriolanus’s troubles with both the tribunes of Rome and with the very historical concept of that great city. Recurrences of the detonations in the orchestra might signify the hero’s high-handed rejections of compromise, which lead to conflict and tragedy. Another side of the story is shown in the tender second theme, depicting Coriolanus’s love for his mother Volumnia and for his wife Vergilia, who plead with him to spare Rome from his revenge. . (It is tragically ironic that Corialanus was also the conqueror of the Volsci.) The final appearance of the Coriolanus motif presages his death; the scurrying idea falters, seems at a loss, and slows; and the three final pianissimo beats could be an echo of Shakespeare’s Aufidius: “Beat thou the drum, that it speak mournfully: Trail your steel pikes.”
Violin Concerto
And speaking of softly beating drums, a diverting trivia challenge is to list orchestral pieces that begin with solo timpani. (Some festive baroque pieces aside, the first well-known example is probably Haydn’s “Drum Roll” Symphony, No. 103, of 1795.) Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is the first such work ever in which the opening solo timpani statement comprises one of the movement’s principal motifs. That five-note idea goes on to occur more than 70 times in just the opening Allegro ma non troppo movement.
(By the way, other pieces that meet the requirements of our trivia question include Richard Strauss’s Burleske of 1885, the Britten Violin Concerto of 1939, and, more obscurely, Liszt’s Symphonic Poem no. 7, “Festklänge,” of 1853.)
Though written just a few months before the Coriolan Overture, the sublime Violin Concerto shows an altogether different aspect of Beethoven’s nature. The Beethoven of violent, fist-shaking gestures is not dominant in this broad score; rather we see Beethoven the nature lover, Beethoven the creature of serene thoughts. Bernard Jacobson speaks of the soloist’s “lofty calm.” Sir Donald Francis Tovey felt that the Concerto’s most beautiful passages “are not only mysteriously quiet, but mysterious in radiantly happy surroundings.” It is no coincidence that the same, tumultuous year in Beethoven’s life saw the creation of the Fourth Piano Concerto, in which once again the first movement’s prevailing mood is one of serenity.
Certainly this is the longest concerto for the violin that had been written up to that time; and it is the first movement in particular that is so unusually expansive, running as long (535 bars) as the typical duration of an entire late 18th-century violin concerto. The Larghetto in G, in free variation form, begins in hushed nobility on muted strings. Again there is a parallel with the Piano Concerto No. 4: in both works’ slow movements, abrupt, forte comments from the orchestra contrast with the soloists’ quieter utterances. The Violin Concerto shares another idea with the Fourth Concerto—and also with the Fifth Concerto, the Triple Concerto, and the Fifth Symphony, all written between 1803 and 1809—namely, there is in all these works a linking transition between the slow movement (or scherzo in the case of the Symphony) and finale. Here, the jaunty main theme is uncharacteristically presented by the soloist twice, the second time in a much higher register, before the orchestra takes it up.
The first performance of the Violin Concerto was given on December 23, 1806, by Franz Clement (1780-1842), principal violinist and conductor of the orchestra at the Theater an der Wien. The occasion was a benefit concert for Clement. There are two famous incidents related to this premiere. The first is that Clement read the solo part at first sight, without rehearsal. This is dismissed by some as unlikely because of the manuscript, which shows insertions in the solo part suggesting am expert violinist’s collaboration. (The truth might be that Clement had had no rehearsal with the orchestra, but knew his own part well enough from having worked closely with Beethoven during the work’s composition.) The other anecdote is certainly true: since it was Clement’s show, he inserted one of his own compositions between the first two movements of the Concerto — a violinist who did such a thing today would no doubt be hooted from the stage — and played it, moreover, while holding the violin upside-down! While we might with hindsight frown upon such circus-like behavior, Clement’s intention was perhaps to “sweeten the pill” with some light showmanship between the two halves of a concerto whose unprecedented length was something audiences were not accustomed to.
And, truth to tell, the work was criticized as being too drawn out and repetitive; but even Johann Nepomuk Möser, who penned such a critique, admitted in the same review that the audience had responded with “exceptional applause.” Even so, the Concerto was not very well received in subsequent performances — Tomasini in Berlin, 1812 and Baillot in Paris, 1828 — and the music was not heard again in Vienna until Henri Vieuxtemps played it in 1833. That was no great success, either. Indeed, the performance that established the work as an unquestioned masterpiece and fixed its position in the standard repertoire was given by a boy of 14, Joseph Joachim, under Mendelssohn’s direction in London on May 24, 1844, a full 38 years after this masterwork’s premiere. It was Joachim’s debut concert, and in later years he would write a cadenza to the first movement of this Concerto and, later still, would play ‘Franz Clement to the Beethoven’ of Johannes Brahms, when that composer wrote his own magnificent concerto in the same key.
In this performance, Linda Wang plays the cadenza by another great violinist of a later generation, Fritz Kreisler.
Eighth Symphony
For the Eighth Symphony we move forward about five years to the summer of 1812, during which year Beethoven also composed his Seventh Symphony. (Both symphonies, in fact, were premiered at the same concert at Vienna’s Redoutensaal on February 27, 1814.) Contemporary comparisons between the two symphonies displayed a marked preference for the Seventh, and Carl Czerny tells us that Beethoven, perhaps predictably, said that he was not surprised, since the Eighth was much the better of the pair.
It was typical that Beethoven, after having written an epical work, would follow it with a more traditional score: witness the classical Fourth Symphony after the revolutionary Third, or the final F Major Quartet after the forward-looking (seven-movement!) Quartet in c-sharp minor. The disparities between the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies are not so marked, but the Eighth is definitely more classical in form and length and lighter in mood, with Beethoven’s sense of humor much more evident than it is in the sober and more dramatic Seventh. The stage for the Seventh is set with Beethoven’s longest symphonic introduction, while the Eighth has no introduction at all: we are launched at once into the forthright and jolly Allegro vivace e con brio opening movement. The energy level remains high, and although the second subject is a little quieter, it is not much slower. There is no letup at all in the development or in the coda until the very end. (The coda was originally 34 bars shorter and was probably premiered that way).
More playful still is the second movement, Allegretto scherzando, which is based on a comic four-part canon Beethoven had written for his friend Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, inventor of the metronome. The theme, as you might expect, has a ‘tick-tock’ quality reminiscent of the slow movement of Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony. But this is no slow movement proper—the Eighth really doesn’t have one—and its light-heartedness was decried by many; it even became customary with later conductors to drop the movement altogether and substitute the Allegretto from the Seventh Symphony in its place! Yet Berlioz, who knew better, would later describe the movement as “one of those creations that has neither predecessor nor counterpart; such a thing falls entire from heaven into the consciousness of the artist…and we are transfixed by it…”
The third movement Beethoven called a “Tempo di menuetto,” the first time he had used the designation “minuet” in a symphony since the First Symphony; and thus this movement, perhaps more than any of the other three, is a nod to the past. Notice, however, that he does not call it a minuet outright, but rather in the tempo of a minuet. That is a very different matter. Formally, this movement meets the requirements of the dance, and yet somehow it doesn’t really sound like a minuet. The rustic horns of the trio might hark back to Mozart (specifically to the trio of the G-minor Symphony No. 40) and Haydn, but the running figure accompanying them seems not entirely consistent with the dance form.
The quicksilver finale has a few surprises up its sleeve. First, it is an ingenious mix of sonata form and rondo; second, as with the first movement, it travels to remote keys before returning ‘home’; and then there is the coda, which, with its length of some 250 bars, is about as long as the rest of the movement. Such a coda will not be found in any 18th-century symphony.
Robert Schumann praised the Eighth for its “profound humor,” which can be heard in all four of its movements.
