Program Notes - February 19, 2011
Richard Wagner
Born: May 22, 1813 in Leipzig, Germany
Died: February 13, 1883 in Venice, Italy
Wagner: Siegfried Idyll in E WWV 103 (1870)
Few composers have been captured as vividly, for better or worse, by their own pens and those of others, as Wagner. Few composers had lives as tumultuous or self-contradictory as his, and few had more uncompromising visions about music's transcendent status among the arts. So this little piece from Tribschen, Switzerland, in 1870 stands out in his work as a winsome anomaly: a birthday present for his wife, named for their just-born son (who, of course, had in turn been named for the hero of Wagner's career-crowning Ring cycle, still in the works); for instruments alone (thus lacking explicit mythological or dramatic pretensions); of less than twenty minutes' duration (as opposed to the usual four hours); and performed by an impromptu collective of musicians on the couple's staircase (rather than in the Bayreuth pit, carefully constructed to conceal and congeal orchestral playing so it would not distract from the action onstage). The conductor Hans Richter, who was developing a formidable artistic reputation and would give the Ring's premiere in 1877, put in a few bars of cameo as a trumpeter. The Siegfried Idyll marks an event of joyous impromptu hausmusik, a little secular indulgence in the context of Wagner's self-fashioned musical religion, and an oddly intimate gesture from a composer whose music, despite the personal nature of its expression, always seemed aimed at the largest possible audience.
There are several musical ideas present in this work that also appear in Siegfried, the third music drama of the Ring. These include the ascending scale figure associated with Brünnhilde and the presence of birdsong-style motifs that echo those of the woodbird, which leads the hero to his sleeping beloved in the drama. The first section evokes a mood of languid slumber, with a second theme gathering momentum in triple time and building to a mini-climax. The real climax comes after a more martial-sounding theme (associated in the Ring with Siegfried's heroism) is introduced in the horn and developed alongside existing material, after which the opening mood returns and the music winds down serenely. A distinctive chromatic chord reappears throughout to threaten the piece's contented atmosphere, but in so doing, simply highlights it. One of the interesting side effects of Wagner writing instrumental chamber music (which this piece is in spirit, even in his full orchestral version) is a whiff of the style of Brahms, who was at the time seen as his aesthetic arch-enemy, and even a glance forward to Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, where Wagnerian instrumental gestures are freed from the opera pit (and the voices that soar over it) and create their own narrative fantasy.
Robert Schumann
Born: June 8, 1810 in Zwickau, Germany
Died: July 29, 1856 in Bonn, Germany
Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 (1845)
If Wagner's musical love letter was a surprise on many levels, this concerto represents the culmination of a long series of such gestures from Schumann to his sweetheart and eventual wife, Clara Wieck. Beginning with their courtship in 1837 (upon which Clara's father ensured their geographical separation) and continuing into their marriage three years later, Schumann expressed his sometimes agonizing feelings of longing for Clara, an exceptional pianist nine years his junior, in a series of piano solo works (the collections entitled Davidsbündlertänze, Carnaval, Kreisleriana, and most notably, the Fantasy in C major Op. 17) whose volatile passion has made them staples of the repertoire. The Piano Concerto, considered alongside these early masterpieces, displays a much more mature, settled framework for feelings that were still clearly very strong in 1845, after five years of marriage and musical collaboration. The piano writing reflects what must have been a remarkably nimble and subtle virtuosity on the part of Clara, judging by the large proportion of leaps at a relatively soft dynamic level and textures that expand in the finale to cover vast stretches of the keyboard, all the while breathing life into the orchestra's lyricism rather than offering mere showmanship. It was this demure, conversational aspect that prompted Liszt (a great admirer of Clara's playing) to dismiss the concerto as being “without piano,” but also makes this work refreshing within the canon of more extrovert concertos written for an instrument whose mechanism can sometimes distract from its capacity for real expression.
The first movement's flurry of descending chords was copied and theatrically inflated by Grieg, and the discreetly segmented main theme also bears much similarity to its counterpart in his much later concerto. Originally a Fantasy for piano and orchestra in its own right (written in 1841, four years before the other two movements), this movement is tightly unified by its principal theme, which constantly transforms in mood and texture while keeping the curves of its outline. Despite the minor key and relatively intimate mood, joy is never far from the surface throughout this music, even in the frenetic coda with its Mendelssohn-esque fairy dances that simmer with suppressed passion. The slow movement brings the mood of “Träumerei” from the Kinderszenen of 1838, the naivete of a dreaming child in playful dialogue between piano and orchestra, with a swooning melody for cellos in the central section. The transition to the finale seems to gently melt the musical material of the concerto's opening; this movement transforms the first movement's main theme into one of the brightest finale themes (Mozart's A major concerto K488 may have been an inspiration of a kind), the piano taking wing with a giddy series of pirouettes, and the only hiatus coming from the hushed and cleverly syncopated second theme, designed to trip up the audience's sense of the beat (or possibly just for the enjoyment of the soloist, in the way it creates extra rhythmic tension in the rapid figurations). The coda expands into long stretches of delicious harmony, the outpouring of a man who composed numerous false endings as though he could not bear to abandon the sound of his wife's playing.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born: December 17, 1770 in Bonn, Germany
Died: March 26, 1827 in Vienna, Austria
Beethoven: Symphony No. 4 in B flat, major, Op. 60 (1845)
How does one follow a tour-de-force like Beethoven's Third (Eroica) symphony? This is the stigma that will always dog the Fourth, along with the long-maintained critical cliché that Beethoven's even numbered symphonies are the abstract, aloof, subtle counterparts to the heroic, dramatic odd numbered ones (the Pastoral, number six, is in its own, pictorial category). Actually what the even numbered symphonies share is a kind of deftness in their energy that always looks back to Beethoven's First symphony, where he simply injected the existing classical style with a brutal rhythmic insistence, rather than turning that language upside down. If the Second symphony applies that insistence to a more complicated, unpredictable set of textures than the first, the Fourth can be seen as adding a further layer: the addition of obsessive repetition as a prominent and carefully controlled element, paving the way for the explosion of dance riffs in the Seventh. The Fourth also has a contextual reason for its very similar feel to the Second symphony – it was commissioned in 1806 by Count Franz von Oppensdorf, who was a big fan of the Second, and who paid Beethoven handsomely to create a similar work. This financial impetus to replicate an existing success, as much as anything else, may have helped overcome the pressure Beethoven must have felt post-Eroica to produce something even more revolutionary, and the experimental, mostly upbeat character of the Fourth conveys a good deal of the fun he must have had writing without burden.
The opening slow introduction recalls the suspense of its counterpart in the Second, but strips it down and intensifies it, looking forward as well to the Fifth with its ominously descending thirds, and even, in its sustained pianissimos, to the hypnotic opening of Mahler's First almost a century later (Mahler often “borrowed” such musical ideas from the canon, turning them into dramatically expanded versions of themselves). From this emerges a blustery Allegro, leaping out of the orchestra like a jungle cat pouncing after its prey, and alternating smoothly gliding melodies with sizzling tremolando and timpani passages. The slow movement packs in an impressive level of detail and contrast in its themes, with military, hymn-like, and operatic ideas all vying for attention as well as imaginative uses of rapid string textures. The scherzo is very similar to those in the First and Seventh symphonies, perhaps bridging them in style with its typical rapid conversation between ascending and descending motifs, sudden fortissimo shocks and a quirky trio section where the melody always seems to be in progress before we begin to hear it. This relationship of contrast between scherzo and trio was becoming important enough to Beethoven that he repeats here the standard da capo sequence, playing the trio twice and the scherzo three times (the last abridged) in total. The finale, like those of the Second and Eighth, uses extremely rapid, twisting melodic figures to trip up the listener's sense of the beat, putting the strings through their paces, and obtaining comically dazzling results when the woodwind soloists have their turn.
–Tim Ribchester
