PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
JOSEPH HAYDN
Symphony No. 100 in G major, Hob.I:100, Military
Franz Joseph Haydn was born at Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. The Symphony No. 100, called the Military, is one of the last set of symphonies that Haydn wrote for the impresario Salomon in London. He composed the work early in 1794, probably beginning it in Vienna and completing at after his arrival in London, where he conducted the first performance on March 31, 1794, his sixty‑second birthday. The symphony is scored for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets in pairs, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum and strings. Duration is about 24 minutes.
The Military Symphony, No. 100, is one of that group of twelve written for London in the early 1790s on which Haydn’s reputation as a symphonist has always rested secure, even when the first eighty or ninety symphonies remained largely unknown. The German violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon, who had settled in London ten years earlier, was a great admirer of Haydn’s. While traveling on the continent, he heard of the death of Haydn’s long‑standing patron, Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, and hastened to Vienna to knock on Haydn’s door and announce, “I am Salomon and I have come to take you to London!”
The composer was delighted by the financial offer and intrigued at the idea of visiting a city with the most developed concert life in Europe. He parted tearfully from Mozart (whom he would never see again) and set out to become the toast of London with six new symphonies (now numbered 93‑98). After a return to Vienna in July 1792, where he was for a short time the unenthusiastic teacher of a headstrong German musician from Bonn named Beethoven, he set out for London again in January 1794, and stayed there a year-and-a-half. During this period he finished and premiered the “Military” symphony, which became, for many years, the most popular and famous symphony in the world.
The opening Adagio has thematic links with the Allegro, but at first we notice only the gradual increase in tension, a sense of foreboding as the introduction comes to rest on the dominant. What follows is utterly unexpected: “toy” music from the flutes and oboes with a shrill tune that is reworked for material throughout the exposition. After modulating to the dominant (and restating the “toy” music), Haydn gives us a completely new theme, a perky violin tune that will turn out to be the main subject matter of the development (since by that time the first theme will have been thoroughly discussed in the exposition). But before we get there, we encounter two full bars of rest, followed by a leap to distant harmonic regions, and the perky tune begins to take on an ominous character. Gradually, though, things lighten and the mood of the opening is restored in time for the recapitulation.
The “military” second movement was a sensation for years. It is a rather fast slow movement. The serenade begins softly, but on repetition it suddenly becomes fortissimo with the support of the entire battery of percussion and a shift to the minor key. An unaccompanied trumpet call (using a fanfare apparently well known in Haydn’s day) explodes into a distant A-flat that relapses to the tonic for a sonorous brass-and-percussion close.
The final Presto is wondrously rich and elaborate with far-reaching harmonies, Haydn’s best kettledrum joke, and an unexpectedly dark and serious moment of calm preceding the final appearance of the military instruments in full force, a feature that drew some criticism from a London reviewer, who felt that they produced “a fine effect” in the second movement, where they might help tell a story, but found them “discordant, grating, and offensive” in the finale. He seems to have been alone in his complaint, however. Haydn no doubt felt the colorful contribution they could make here was entirely fitting to end this extroverted symphony, and since the Military Symphony soon became the most famous symphony in the world—at least until Beethoven composed his Fifth—it would seem that most people agreed.
Wolfgang AmadEUS Mozart
Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K.467
Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, who began calling himself Wolfgang Amadeo about 1770 and Wolfgang Amadè in 1777, was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. The score of the C‑major Piano Concerto, K.467, is dated March 9, 1785; Mozart first performed it in Vienna three days later. The orchestra includes one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. Duration is about 29 minutes.
In both opera and concerto composition, the composer is writing for a soloist who must function with an orchestra and who must be allowed to stand out, to project an independent personality. In the opera, this happens in part because the soloist is in costume and on a separate stage, playing a role in a story which presumably attracts some of the audience’s attention. In the concerto, the composer writes to create and project a specific personality for the soloist. Part of this happens because the soloist plays material which is faster or higher, and part because the composer reserves some of the best tunes for the soloist, who has them exclusively, or at least presents them first.
Sometimes, a concerto can suggest opera in another way. The C‑major concerto, K.467, was composed as part of an extraordinary string of works produced in just over a year—eight piano concertos altogether between February 1784 and March 1785 (with four more to come before the end of 1786). The opening music of K.467 strongly hints at Leporello’s impatient marching up and down outside the home of Donna Anna, waiting for his libertine master to finish his nocturnal rendezvous inside. It is the gestural quality of the music that implies theatrical movement. The continuation of this little marching tune is more symphonic than we could expect in the opera house, but the vivid theatricality of the interplay between winds and strings, between small instrumental groups and the full tutti, and (eventually) between the soloist and the orchestra, is all of the character that Mozart constantly turned to such dramatic purpose in his operas.
The essence of drama is surprise. From the beginning, the audience awaits the principal player’s appearance. The orchestra has played an elaborate ritornello, providing plenty of material for discourse; it has ended with a ringing tutti and a full cadence. We are ready for the soloist—but no! The oboe carries on with an extension, and we must wait through a closing section. Then, the soloist sneaks in—just a little comment on the flute’s last phrase, not even a noticeable theme. It is rather like a dramatic scene in which some of the characters have been talking about the principal figure, unaware that he has quietly entered from the wings and overheard the entire conversation, until he draws attention to himself with a remark.
Once on stage, the pianist offers elaborate decorations for variety. The orchestra was quite unable to move out of C major, but the pianist boldly charts new territory, after first offering a minor‑key version of the dominant, a tactical feint that leads us astray and once again establishes the pianist as the leading personality of this dramatic discourse.
If the first movement suggests opera buffa, the slow movement seems to be in every essential respect to be a serious aria that happened to get composed for a pianist rather than a singer. The accompanimental figures (especially the repeated triplets) are operatic stereotypes, and the soaring melody, while perfectly suited to the piano, has the kind of languishing grace with which a prima donna could work wonders. The melodic lines, which climb to an early peak then gradually descend in graceful arcs, call for a bel canto treatment from the lucky instruments that get to sing this delicate melody. The muted strings and the passing chromaticisms suffuse the whole with a tinge of unutterable melancholy.
In the final rondo we are back to opera buffa, with the orchestra playing straight man to the piano’s jester. The orchestra presents a perky little tune echoed very briefly by the piano. Then, an orchestral tutti sets up the cue for the pianist’s next entrance. The piano starts with what could be the beginning of a heroic gesture—a theme rising in slow notes through the triad, but suddenly it turns again to cheerful laughter (though the horns quietly echo the grand gesture behind the fun). And on it goes, throughout this delicious rondo until, at the final return of the rondo theme, the soloist races off in a burst of high‑spirited runs to close the concerto.
BÉLA BARTÓK
Concerto for Orchestra
Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (then part of Hungary but now absorbed into Rumania), on March 25, 1881, and died in New York on September 26, 1945. The Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky through the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in memory of Natalie Koussevitzky. Bartók composed the work between August 15 and October 8, 1943; Koussevitzky led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the first performances on December 1 and 2, 1944. The Concerto for Orchestra is scored for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets (with a fourth trumpet marked ad lib.), three trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, bass drum, tam-tam, cymbals, triangle, two harps and strings. Duration is about 36 minutes.
Early in the 1940s, with a world war raging in Europe, Bartók immigrated to the United States, where he had a position doing research on recordings of eastern European folk songs housed at Columbia University. But he was concerned that his position there was only temporary. Worse, he had begun to have a series of irregular, high fevers that the doctors were unable to diagnose, but which turned out to be the first indication of leukemia. By early 1943, the state of his health, and the fact that Americans showed little interest in his music, brought him to a low point. He insisted that he never wanted to compose again. The medical men were unable to do much, yet powerful medicine that spring came not from a doctor, but rather from a conductor—Serge Koussevitzky.
Violinist Joseph Szigeti had told Koussevitzky of Bartók’s situation, warning him that the proud composer would not accept anything remotely smacking of charity. Koussevitzky therefore offered work: $1000 to write a new orchestral piece with a guarantee of a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The commission was a tonic for the ailing composer. At once he was filled with ideas for a new composition, which he composed in just eight weeks, August 15 to October 8, 1943, while resting under medical supervision at a sanatorium in upstate New York.
Bartók was delighted with the premiere; Koussevitzky hailed the Concerto for Orchestra as the “best orchestra piece of the last 25 years,” and demonstrated his confidence in the score by putting it in the BSO program again only three weeks after the premiere performances! In the program book for the premiere, Bartók wrote that his work traced “a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.” He chose the title Concerto for Orchestra because his work was designed to spotlight by turn each of the sections and most of the principal players.
The Concerto opens with a soft and slightly mysterious introduction laying forth the essential motivic ideas that eventually explode in an Allegro vivace. The second movement is entitled “Game of Pairs,” a simple but original chain-like sequence of folk-like melodies presented by pairs of bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes and trumpets. The third movement, Elegia, is one of those expressive “night music” movements that Bartók delighted in.
The Intermezzo interrotto (“Interrupted Intermezzo”) alternates two very different themes: a rather choppy one first heard in the oboe, then a flowing, lush, romantic one that is Bartók’s gift to the viola section. Later there is a sudden interruption in the form of a vulgar, simple-minded tune that descends the scale in stepwise motion: it is Bartók’s parody of a theme from Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, which so incensed him, when he heard the American premiere conducted by Toscanini on a radio broadcast, that he created this nose-thumbing burlesque.
The last movement begins with characteristic dance rhythms in an equally characteristic Bartókian perpetuo moto that rushes on and on, throwing off various motives that gradually solidify into themes, the most important of which appears in the trumpet and turns into a massive fugue, complicated and richly wrought, but building up naturally to a splendidly sonorous climax.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)