Ludwig van Beethoven
b. 16 December 1770 in Bonn, Germany; d. 26 March 1827 in Vienna,Austria.
Overture from Incidental Music for Kotzebue's "King Stephen," Opus 117. Premiered 10 February 1812 in Pest, Hungary, age 41.
The German author August von Kotzebue (1761-1819) wrote more than 200 plays, plus some novels and non-fiction. He is remembered today for developing the German melodrama, a genre that provided a simpler alternative to the literary verse dramas of Goethe and Schiller and expanded the audience for plays in Germany to include the middle classes. The plays themselves, which featured historical and exotic subjects and included sensational staging effects, are almost unknown in Germany today.
The city that the world has known as Budapest since November 1873 was before the unification three municipalities, Buda and Pest, located on opposite sides of the Danube River, and the village of Obuda ("old Buda"). Pest's Town Theater was inaugurated on 10 February 1812 with an entertainment honoring the Emperor Franz of Austria (which until World War I included Hungary). Kotzebue provided a prologue ("King Stephen, or Hungary's First Benefactor") and an epilogue ("The Ruins of Athens"). King Stephen (c. 970-1035) founded Hungary's modern state and is venerated as a saint. Beethoven composed overtures and incidental music for both plays.
The Overture to "King Stephen" is a sonata form with a slow introduction. The introductory material not only begins the overture as a whole but returns to mark the start of the recapitulation and the start of the coda. Beethoven keeps the movement compact by omitting a separate development section and combining the development with the second half of the composition. The syncopation in the catchy main theme gives the piece a joyful and lively character.
Johannes Brahms
b. 7 May 1833 in Hamburg, Germany; d. 3 April 1897 in Vienna, Austria.
Piano Concerto no. 1 in D minor, Op. 15. Premiered 22 January 1859 in Hanover, age 25.
On 27 February 1854 in Düsseldorf, Germany, the world surrounding Robert Schumann collapsed with a crash. In broad daylight, disoriented and distraught, he jumped from a bridge into the Rhine River. There were numerous witnesses, so Schumann was speedily rescued, but it was the end of normalcy for Schumann, his family, and his close friends. On 4 March Schumann was taken to an asylum in Endenich, where he spent the 17 months of life remaining to him. The young Johannes Brahms, a member of Robert and Clara Schumann's inner circle, upon hearing the news in Hanover had basically dropped everything and hastened to Clara's side, arriving in Düsseldorf on 3 March.
When he was not assisting Clara, Brahms was working on some turbulent material in D minor scored for two pianos. He worked on this piece for a long time, for five years, in fact. During that time the work changed from a sonata for two pianos to a symphony to a piano concerto. At last the concerto was completed and performed in Hanover in January 1859 with Brahms at the piano and conducted by Joseph Joachim. The audience's response was polite but unenthusiastic. In Leipzig five days later, however, the audience greeted the first two movements with hostile silence, then at the conclusion hissed Brahms from the stage.
This Concerto was a struggle for Brahms in two respects. One was that the music that now opens the work was probably Brahms's musical response to the traumatic events in Düsseldorf. The emotions associated with the music were raw, and Brahms had to wrestle with his material in both technical and emotional aspects. Two, while Brahms had previously composed two Serenades for small orchestra, the Piano Concerto was his first major composition with a symphony orchestra. His orchestration was not smooth, with several muddy-sounding passages. Brahms in effect was struggling with his inspiration as well as his technique.
And yet this music is tremendously compelling. The work opens with a thundering sustained D in the bass instruments, above which the strings enter with startling harmony and angular contour. The mood throughout the orchestra's introduction is terribly dark, expressing grief, anger, and tremendous striving. The music calms down for the entrance of the soloist, but the turbulence soon starts again. It is only when F major and new material are introduced that a sense of hope and rebirth becomes audible. Through a full sonata-allegro form, the two bodies of material strive together without achieving anything more than a technical resolution.
The slow movement brings a sense of serene relief with a very slow tempo and even slower harmonic changes. Its form is more discursive than those of the outer movements, starting and ending in D major, with a central episode in B minor. The third movement returns to the dark mood of the first. It is a sonata-rondo form, the main theme alternating with several contrasting bodies of material. There is a fugal passage for the strings and a formal cadenza for the piano. Only now does the key arrive in D major to stay, the mood sounding relieved as well as joyful.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony no. 5 in C minor, Opus 67. Premiered 22 December 1808 in Vienna, age 38.
A surprising number of Beethoven's compositions built in the key of C minor share a particular quality or mood. There is a special intensity in the energy; these works breathe an atmosphere of turbulence, rage, and struggle. Joseph Kerman coined the term "C-minor mood" for this quality. Richard Taruskin in his Oxford History of Western Music devotes an entire chapter to Beethoven's "C-minor mood" and four of his works that epitomize it: the Trio no. 3 for piano, violin, and cello; the Overture to "Coriolan"; the Piano Sonata no. 32; and--of course--the Symphony no. 5.
"Yet to describe the distinctive Beethovenian tone simply as the 'C-minor mood' is woefully inadequate," writes Taruskin. ". . . For the 'C-minor mood' is really not a mood at all. A mood is static. What Beethoven offers, as always, is a trajectory." Most of these compositions conclude in C major, with a transition to the major mode that Taruskin identifies as an echo of the "sublime" moment in Joseph Haydn's Creation where God creates light with a brilliant burst of C major: light doesn't simply happen; light triumphs over darkness, day disperses night, order destroys chaos. The challenge in playing and hearing Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 yet again is to witness and experience vicariously Beethoven's astounding, titanic struggle as if for the first time. Any one performance of this piece might or might not succeed; the piece itself is miraculous.
Beethoven's famous remark that the opening of the Fifth represents Fate knocking at the door is not thoroughly documented, though this and other such poetic ideas are useful. But the miracle consists of melodies, harmonies, and rhythms that are integrated and bound together to an extent not seen previously in a symphony. The familiar motto that opens the symphony (da-da-da-daah, da-da-da-daah) is like musical DNA whose melodic shape and rhythm recurs not only throughout the first movement, but the entire symphony as well.
In the first movement, as the tonality turns to E-flat, it seems that the motto fades away, but it punctuates each phrase in the lower strings. The second movement is a genuine interlude in the proceedings, but it is remarkable as a set of variations with two themes (the cello theme and the trumpet theme), and the trumpet moment--a sudden burst of C major in a context of A-flat major--foreshadows the climactic start of the fourth movement.
The horns burst into the third movement with the rhythm of the motto, slightly modified to fit into the 3/4 meter. The main section of the scherzo is dominated by this rhythm; the trio is another interlude, featuring the famous solo for the cellos and double basses. At the return of the first section, as it fades away with the strings playing pizzicato, instead of ending in C minor the tonality veers toward a mysterious A-flat. Then, just as in the second movement, C major bursts out of the mists to a glorious dawn.
The beginning of the fourth movement is by no means the end of the journey. C major must have a weight and sense of space that dispels the storm of C minor; therefore, the energy and sense of struggle from the first movement is to a significant extent present in the fourth. The motto rhythm, transformed to the triplet rhythm of the third movement, returns here in the second key area. But the greatest surprise of all occurs when, at the climax of the development, the third movement returns. Beethoven had pulled this in the Piano Sonata in E-flat, op. 27 no. 1, but it is another "first" in the context of a symphony.
There have been endless jokes about the coda of the fourth movement--a couple hundred C major triads in a row--but there is much more to it than that. First, the strings offer the last appearances of the motto as a rhythm. Then the trumpets enter with a last version of the opening theme of the fourth movement. These two thematic references bind the two ends of the Symphony together. As for those repeated C major chords, Leonard Bernstein famously commented about the Fifth Symphony that Beethoven worked over the piece until each note was the only note that could possibly happen. Indeed.
