WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)

Symphony No. 20 in D Major, K. 133

Allegro Andante Menuetto and Trio [Allegro]

Mozart composed this symphony in July 1772, when he was back home in Salzburg for nine months between two extended tours to Italy with his father. In fact he composed eight symphonies in this short time, but the reason for their composition is not known. Mozart was employed by Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus, Count von Colloredo as concertmaster of the Salzburg court orchestra, but it was not part of his duties to write instrumental music. Most likely the symphonies were intended for private performance at one of the many concerts or civic occasions for which music was required in Salzburg, although he could have composed them with a view to using them while he was away, in concerts or to impress potential employers.

Every stop on their travels was an opportunity for Mozart to play and for his father Leopold to make connections, on the look-out for composing commissions and ever hopeful of a secure and well-paid appointment for Mozart in the court of a great nobleman. Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, governor of the Duchy of Milan, considered it, but his mother the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa thought differently: ‘You ask me to take the young Salzburger into your service. I do not know why, not believing that you have need of a composer or of useless people … What I say is only to prevent your burdening yourself with useless people and giving titles to people of that sort … [who] go about the world like beggars.’

What to listen for

The symphony developed from the overture to an Italian opera, and was intended in this period as a work with which to open or close a concert program. This symphony, Mozart’s twentieth, is in the bright festive key of D major, and the use of trumpets, as well as the usual oboes, horns, and strings, suggests that it was intended for a celebratory occasion. The first movement opens with three strong chords, known as ‘hammer-strokes’, the conventional opening for a symphony at this time. In the second slow movement, muted violins and pizzicato lower strings are joined by a solo flute, which mostly doubles the first violin. Oboes, horns, and trumpets return for a Viennese minuet and a playful dance-like final movement.

FRANÇOIS-ADRIEN BOIELDIEU (1775–1834)

Harp Concerto in C Major, Op. 82

Allegro brillante Andante lento Rondo: Allegro agitato

Boieldieu was France’s leading opera composer at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was fortunate to grow up in Rouen, one of the few cities which still had an active musical life despite the French Revolution and its aftermath, and his first opera was performed there in 1793 when he was only eighteen. He moved to Paris in 1796 and produced a series of comic operas which were highly successful and cemented his reputation as an opera composer. Boieldieu married a ballet dancer, described as ‘exquisitely beautiful’, but the marriage broke down after less than a year, and this prompted him to move to St Petersburg where he was director of the French Opera at the court of Tsar Alexander I. He stayed there for six years, and moved back to Paris in 1812. Boieldieu’s greatest work is considered to be his 1825 opera La dame blanche (The White Lady), whose mysterious plot and tuneful score made it phenomenally successful.

Boieldieu’s gift for creating singable and spontaneous melodies led to his being known in his own time as ‘the French Mozart’. His music was described by Berlioz as ‘without difficulties and requiring no special attention, simple both for performers and listeners – a pleasant and elegant art, never dreaming and passionate, but fresh and lively’.

What to listen for

Boieldieu wrote this harp concerto at the age of twenty. The orchestra very lightly accompanies the harp and frequently drops out altogether, to ensure that its soft-grained timbre can be heard. The slow second movement is mournful, almost funereal in character. Unusually, a short cadenza at the end of this movement leads without pause to the dramatic final movement with its recurring ethereal theme in a minor key.

PROGRAM NOTES

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CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH (1714–1788)

Symphony No. 1 in D Major, Wq. 183/1

Allegro di molto Largo Presto

In the eighteenth century, Carl Philip Emanuel was the most famous of the musical Bach family, far more than his father Johann Sebastian. Emanuel Bach was recognised by his contemporaries as the leading keyboard player of his time, and his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments was required reading for composers such as Haydn, Czerny and Beethoven. It remains one of the most comprehensive and precious resources in understanding both the practicalities and the aesthetics of music in the eighteenth century.

Bach was hired by Prussian king Frederick the Great in 1740 as one of two harpsichordists in his Berlin court orchestra, which with forty players was one of the largest in Germany. With virtually unlimited power and wealth and an almost obsessive interest in music, Frederick was able to employ the finest musicians in Germany as players, conductors and composers. They included the flute virtuoso Johann Quantz, who was also Frederick’s teacher. Frederick was a great military tactician and ran his court in a similar manner. Every night of the week except Monday and Friday (when he went to the opera) private concerts were held, beginning precisely at 7pm. At every concert, the king played six of the three hundred or so concertos composed for him by Quantz in the conservative style he favoured, and it was the job of CPE Bach, virtuoso keyboard player and one of the most original composers of the period, to accompany him. Not surprisingly, over the years and after accompanying ‘ten thousand flute solos’ played by an amateur with an unreliable sense of rhythm, Bach became bitter and felt that his abilities were not properly recognised, especially as he was not paid at the level of the other musicians in the court. As he confided to a friend, ‘If you are under the impression that the King loves music, you are mistaken. He only loves the flute, and more than that, the only flute he loves is his own’.

From the late 1740s, Bach started to apply for other positions, including after his father’s death the job of music director in Leipzig. Finally, in 1768, after twenty-eight years in the King’s service, he was appointed resident composer and music director for the city of Hamburg, succeeding Telemann. He took a leading part in the city’s musical life, performing, teaching, and overseeing two hundred performances a year until his death twenty years later.

In a composing career spanning over sixty years, from the late Baroque to the high Classical periods, Bach produced over a thousand works in all genres from keyboard sonatas to symphonies, concertos, songs and sacred vocal works. He was one of the most original musical thinkers of his time, always trying something new, and always with the goal of engaging and moving the listener.

What to listen for

Bach’s four symphonies date from his time in Hamburg. Each consists of three movements in what was then the conventional order of fast-slow-fast, yet little else about them is conventional. They are like musical conversations, sometimes charming, sometimes dark and confronting, full of surprising twists and turns, unexpected pauses and changes of harmony, and Bach’s characteristically masterful use of the orchestra creates a kaleidoscope of tone colours from various combinations of instruments, especially the winds.

Bach was an exponent of a mid-eighteenth-century artistic movement known as Empfindsamkeit or sensitive style, and he believed that music should touch the heart and move the emotions. He wrote that he wanted his music to express many emotions, one after another, and this characterises much of his music, giving it an intimate, conversational feel.

His originality is apparent from the opening of the first movement of this symphony, which conventionally at this time would have begun with three rising notes outlining a chord, played by the whole orchestra in unison, forcefully establishing the key of the movement. Bach deliberately undermines this formula by starting with a single long, nagging note played by the first violins, broken up into a deliberately confusing rhythm and accompanied by a whole series of jagged rising patterns from the other strings, then repeating this whole pattern on a higher note, then on another one, higher again. The whole effect is to outline a chord, as the conventional opening would, but the key of the movement is only gradually revealed as the rest of the instruments join in and the movement at last properly gets under way. The brief slow movement is a wonderful combination of luminous melody and striking orchestral effects, in which a lyrical aria for flute is suspended above a sonorous bass with interjections from pizzicato strings, and it leads straight into the sparkling finale.

1514

MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937)

Pavane pour une infante défunte

Ravel was one of the most original composers of the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in the French Pyrenees, close to the border with Spain, to a Basque mother and Swiss father. Although he grew up in Paris, studying piano and composition at the Paris Conservatoire, he was strongly influenced by his Basque heritage and much of his music has a Spanish flavour. By the 1920s he was internationally regarded as France’s leading composer, his unique compositional voice showing the influence of baroque, classical and jazz styles. He thought that composers should find their own voices, and famously turned down George Gershwin’s request to study with him because he thought that it would result in Gershwin writing ‘bad Ravel’. (He did teach Vaughan Williams though, for three months). He composed his most famous work, Boléro, in 1930, commenting later, ‘I’ve written only one masterpiece – Boléro. Unfortunately there’s no music in it’.

Ravel enlisted as a lorry driver in World War I (he thought that being short and slight he would be perfect as a pilot but he was refused because of his age). He lived alone all his adult life, his closest relationship being with his mother, and he was devastated when she died suddenly in 1917. Towards the end of his life he developed a condition which may have been Alzheimer’s disease, and which prevented him from composing. ‘I still have so much music in my head, but I can’t get it onto paper.’ In 1937 he underwent a brain operation which was supposed to alleviate his symptoms, but he died shortly afterwards.

What to listen for

Pavane pour une infante défunte (‘Pavane for a deceased Spanish princess’) was the first of Ravel’s compositions to become well known internationally. Although it is most familiar as a work for orchestra, Ravel composed it first as a piece for solo piano, in 1899.

A pavane was a processional court dance from the Renassiance. In many of his works Ravel used past dance forms and other musical styles, but only as a point of reference; he was not setting out to recreate them. As Ravel himself explained, this ‘is not a funeral lament for a dead child, but rather an evocation of a pavane that a little princess might, in former times, have danced at the Spanish court’. However he also gave a contradictory explanation, saying: ‘Do not be surprised, that title has nothing to do with the composition. I simply liked the sound of those words [‘infante défunte’] and I put them there, that’s all’.

Whatever the inspiration, the mood is nostalgic and wistful. Ravel intended it to be performed at a slow tempo – his own playing was described by a critic as

‘unutterably slow’ – but not too slow, because he once commented after hearing it played, ‘Listen, my boy, next time remember that I wrote a ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’, and not a ‘Dead Pavane for a Princess’’.

MANUEL DE FALLA (1876–1946)

Spanish Dance from La Vida Breve

Falla was the most famous Spanish composer of the twentieth century. He lived in Paris in the early 1900s, where he was befriended by Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky. He was forced to return to Spain following the outbreak of World War I, then moved to Argentina after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish government offered him a large pension if he returned to Spain, but he refused, and died in Argentina.

Falla is best known now for works which draw on the influences of Spanish folk music, such as The Three-cornered Hat and Nights in the Gardens of Spain. Danse espagnole (Spanish dance) comes from his short opera La vida breve composed in 1905, and first performed in Nice in 1913. It explored traditional Spanish gypsy music and while the opera itself is now rarely staged, the instrumental music including Danse espagnole is frequently performed in different arrangements.

FRANCISCO TÁRREGA (1852–1909)

Recuerdos de la Alhambra

Tárrega was a Spanish guitarist and composer, who is credited with establishing the classical guitar as an important solo instrument. He ran away from home at just ten years old to play the guitar in Barcelona, and again at the age of thirteen with a group of gypsies. He later studied at the Madrid Conservatory, and went on to give guitar recitals in Paris and London. As well as composing around eighty pieces for solo guitar, he transcribed compositions by Spanish nationalist composers Albéniz and Granados as well as Beethoven piano sonatas and Chopin preludes.

What to listen for

Spanish music for guitar lends itself easily to being played by the harp. Recuerdos de la Alhambra, whose title means ‘Memories of the Alhambra’, a Moorish palace in Granada, is Tárrega’s most famous work. It is a tremolo study, in which the strings are rapidly plucked to give the illusion of long sustained notes, technically challenging for both guitarist and harpist.

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BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824–1884)

Vltava (The Moldau) from Má vlast

Smetana was born in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), and his music is strongly associated with the rise of Czech nationalism. After his intended career as a virtuoso pianist stalled, he began working as a piano teacher, conductor and composer in Prague. During this period he participated in the pro-democracy uprising in 1848 and composed some patriotic pieces. By the 1850s he felt that his talents were not being recognised in Prague, and he moved to a provincial city in Sweden for some years. Encouraged by political changes in Bohemia, he moved back to Prague in 1862.

Smetana became part of and was influenced by the Czech National Revival, a movement to revive Czech language, culture and national identity, after centuries of domination by Austria. Like all other educated Czechs of his generation, Smetana spoke only German, which was the official language. He wrote, ‘In the newly growing self-awareness of our nation I too must also make an effort to complete my study of our beautiful language so that I, educated from childhood only in German, can express myself easily, in speech and in writing, just as easily in Czech as in German’.

Now fully established in the musical society of Prague, Smetana was appointed principal conductor of the first permanent Czech theatre, and virtually singlehandedly set about creating a canon of Czech opera, composing eight himself, and encouraging other Czech composers. His best known opera is The Bartered Bride.

By 1874, however, he had become profoundly deaf, and was forced to resign, due to ‘the almost uninterrupted internal din that roars inside my head and, at times, builds to a tempestuous clamour’. Despite this, he continued to compose, and over the next five years he produced his greatest and most enduring work, a cycle of six symphonic poems entitled Má vlast (‘my homeland’). The premiere in 1882 in Prague was hugely successful: Smetana had to take a bow after each movement, while ‘a virtual storm of enthusiasm broke out after Vltava. From all directions hundreds joyously shouted Smetana’s name’.

This work cemented Smetana’s reputation as the major composer of Czech national music, however, his health deteriorated, and he died just two years later at the age of sixty in the Prague Lunatic Asylum.

After his death, Smetana became somewhat of a folk hero. Criticism of his life or work was discouraged, the influences on him by other composers deemed frivolous

were not acknowledged, and the cause of his deafness and death – syphilis – was never mentioned. Má vlast spoke so strongly to Czech national feeling that Smetana’s own suffering while creating it became identified with that of his country and its people.

What to listen for

A symphonic poem was a musical form made fashionable in the second half of the nineteenth century. It aimed to musically illustrate a non-musical source such as a poem, novel, painting, or landscape, and many European composers used the symphonic poem to reflect the then emerging concept of national identity. This was Smetana’s intention with Má vlast, in which he drew on the culture and landscape of his native Bohemia to celebrate the emerging nation.

Vltava, the movement performed in this concert, is the second in the cycle. It depicts the course of the Vltava (in German, ‘Moldau’), the longest river in the Czech Republic, as it winds through the Czech countryside past Prague until it joins the Elbe. As it passes through forests we hear hunting music and a polka at a village wedding. Rusalkas, water-nymphs from Czech mythology, frolic in the moonlight, before the gentle meandering stream turns into thundering rapids near Prague. The recurrent theme which runs through the work, as the river runs through the countryside, represents the spirit of Bohemia.

Program notes © Lynne Murray 2018 1918

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