Events

• Christopher O’Riley, piano

• May 14-15, 2010 9:00 PM
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• where: Michael & Susan Dell Hall directions
• conductor: Peter Bay

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
b. 27 January 1756 in Salzburg, Austria; d. 5 December 1791 in Vienna.

Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major, K. 595. Entered in Mozart’s catalog of compositions on 5 January 1791, age 35.

Two aspects of Mozart’s professional life in Vienna directly effected the genesis of this, his last piano concerto. In April 1781 Mozart had asked to be dismissed from the service of Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg and moved to Vienna. It is not immediately apparent whether he chose to make his living there as a freelancer or was forced to do so by his failure to find permanent employment with the nobility, but Wolfgang was essentially a freelance musician for the rest of his life. H.C. Robbins Landon in Mozart’s Last Year, explains that this contrasts sharply with Joseph Haydn’s situation. He was employed most of his professional life by the Esterházy family, a position that provided Haydn a steady income and a generous pension. Landon also points out that, while Haydn was competent playing a keyboard instrument and the violin, he was never a solo performer. Mozart, of course, was widely known as a virtuoso pianist and violinist, so that all of his violin concertos and most of his piano concertos were written to be played by himself.

Understanding when and why Mozart composed this work became a puzzle after scholar Alan Tyson discovered, by examining the watermarks in Mozart’s manuscript papers, that the paper on which Mozart wrote this Concerto was paper that Mozart used for works composed around 1788. The present consensus is that Mozart started the composition in 1788 but laid it aside at some unknown point, then completed it around January 1791. Many scholars note that Mozart rarely bothered to finish a composition without some prospect for publication or performance, so he might have begun work on this concerto for a possible public concert that eventually fell through. He did play this concerto on 4 March 1791, and that has been long thought to be the first performance. But Landon in his Mozart Essays reports that Count Carl von Zinzendorf’s diary for 9 January 1791 records a concert given for a state visit by the King and Queen of Naples that included Babette Ployer, a noted student of Mozart’s. This diary does not name or describe what was played, but 9 January is a plausible date for a first performance of a work sent to copyists on or about 5 January.

The suddenness of Mozart’s fatal illness should remind us that this piano concerto was no more consciously intended to be a last concerto than his last three symphonies (ending with the “Jupiter” Symphony) were planned as his last symphonies. At the same time, the character of this concerto is expansive, even magisterial, making it easy to perform and hear as a valediction; in addition, the slow movement is in E-flat, the key in which Mozart framed many of his richest inspirations. There are no structural experiments here, just a gorgeous demonstration of the traits that make Mozart’s piano concertos among his most fascinating and influential compositions: the vocal, even operatic, quality in the melodies, the treatment of the wind section almost as a second orchestra, and a sense of drama in the musical dialogue between the piano and the orchestra.

Gustav Mahler
b. 7 July 1860 in Kalischt (now Kališté), near Jihlava, Bohemia; d. 18 May 1911 in Vienna.

Mahler’s work on a composition generally had two phases: a period of intense concentration—often one or two summers between opera seasons—during which the basic musical content was worked out, followed by a lengthy period of tinkering with details, particularly orchestration, to achieve the best effect. The first performances of one of his works were followed by a flurry of corrections and revisions entered in his manuscript scores. In the case of the First Symphony, his first major composition to be performed in public, there was the additional element of the young composer struggling to find his voice and find an audience. Space permits only a summary of the story behind Mahler’s Symphony No. 1; numerous fascinating but less significant details are omitted.

When Mahler conducted the first performance of this work in Budapest in November 1889, it had five movements with the title “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts (Five Movements).” The performance was a failure. After thoroughly reworking the piece, Mahler conducted two more performances, one in Hamburg in 1893 and another in Weimar in 1894. For these performances Mahler added a narrative program and the title Titan, after the novel by Jean Paul (pseudonym of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763-1825, one of the leaders of early literary Romanticism). But even at the time Mahler stated clearly that his music was not about Jean Paul’s novel, so that the borrowed title caused as much misunderstanding as it solved.

A translation of Mahler’s 1894 program for the Symphony follows:

Part I, The days of youth: Fruit, flower, and thorn pieces

1. Endless spring (Introduction and Allegro comodo): The introduction describes nature’s awakening from its long winter sleep.

2. Chapter with flowers (Andante).

3. With full sails (Scherzo).

Part II, Commedia humana [Human comedy]

4. Stranded! (A funeral march in the style of Callot): The following will help to explain this movement: the initial inspiration for it was found by the composer in a burlesque engraving: “The Huntsman’s Funeral,” well known to all Austrian children, and taken from an old book of fairy stories. The animals of the forest accompany the dead huntsman’s coffin to the graveside; hares carry the pennant, then comes a band of Bohemian musicians, followed by cats, toads, crows, etc., all playing their instruments, while stags, deer, foxes and other four-legged and feathered creatures of the forest accompany the procession with droll attitudes and gestures. This movement is intended to express a mood alternating between ironic gaiety and uncanny brooding, which is then suddenly interrupted by:

5. Dall’inferno al paradiso [From hell to paradise] (Allegro furioso): the sudden outburst of despair from a deeply wounded heart.

The reference to Callot is to Jacques Callot (c. 1592-1635), the founder of engraving and etching in France. As far as we know, he produced only etchings, about 1,400 of them. His style was precise, with richly detailed backgrounds. Just as Mahler’s funeral march is a bit grotesque, Callot regularly portrayed characters in a grotesque or satiric manner. However, while there is a famous German engraving “Wie die Thiere den Jäger begraben” (known in English as “The Huntsman’s Funeral”), it was not by Callot but rather by Moritz von Schwind (1804-1871), primarily known to us today as a member of Franz Schubert’s circle of friends. Mahler must have been describing the print from memory, since a number of details mentioned by him don’t match the print.

Following the performance of 1894, Mahler again reworked the composition. He significantly enlarged the orchestra, adding a fourth quartet of the common wind instruments where there had previously been three, and adding three horns to the existing four. The narrative program and descriptive titles were cut, as was also the second movement. Blumine was not so much lost as forgotten. In the mid-1960s the score of Blumine was sold at auction, then donated to the Yale Library. With the score coming to public notice, in 1967 it was published and performed in England conducted by Benjamin Britten and in the United States by the New Haven Symphony conducted by Frank Brieff.

Now that performance materials for the original second movement are available, an interesting question emerges regarding what exactly to do with the piece. If one insists that a composer’s final version of a composition is the only legitimate one, Blumine probably shouldn’t be performed at all, and the First Symphony is appropriately known as a four-movement work. But the Symphony gains several things with the second movement restored to its original place. First and foremost, Blumine is a lovely piece. A performance of the Symphony in five movements has two halves of nearly equal length—both about 30 minutes versus 20 minutes plus 30 minutes with four movements—and with two 30-minute halves the overall shape and time scale of the symphony is more satisfying. This way the length of the Finale—much longer and grander than the other movements—seems less out of proportion. And with Blumine being in the key of C, the two important occurrences of the key of F are better prepared: the Trio of the Scherzo and the Finale, where F becomes the main key.

For the present performances, Maestro Bay and the Austin Symphony are presenting the Symphony itself in its final revision in four movements and performing Blumine as a related but separate composition.

Blumine. First performance in New Haven, Connecticut, 1967.

The piece, in a sunny C major, was always intended as a kind of intermezzo, not as a formal, “serious” symphonic movement. The theme from which the entire movement is built is played at the start by the solo trumpet. There are two central episodes, the first starting and ending in A minor, the second gradually returning to the home key. The main theme returns on the trumpet, with enriched orchestration.

Symphony No. 1 in D. First performance in five movements in Budapest, Hungary, on November 20, 1889, age 29; first performance in four movements in Berlin on 16 March 1896, age 35.

The start of the Symphony is one of Mahler’s amazing and memorable touches, the pitch A played very softly and in octaves by the strings. Against this, woodwinds play bird calls and the brass play distant fanfares: spring emerges from winter. The string octaves finally resolve to D, and the cellos introduce the first of the quotations from Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, “Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld” (“Went this morning o’er the field”), an easygoing celebration of spring. The string octaves return, though there is more movement in the harmony, more intensity in the expression. This culminates in a return to D and the song material, this time played jubilantly by the full orchestra.

The Scherzo is one of Mahler’s happiest and most appealing inspirations, a folk dance with great physical energy. Where the main section of the movement is in A, the Trio, in the character of a Ländler, begins in F and works its way to a conclusion in C. A return to the dance in A concludes the movement. The slow movement, a funeral march in D minor, begins with the timpani marking a simple beat; a solo double bass starts a familiar tune, “Frère Jacques,” known in Austria as “Bruder Martin” or “Bruder Jacob.” The round is treated at length before other, even more odd, strains begin, at one point bringing in a grotesque bass drum and cymbals. The music winds down, becoming even more hushed and shifting to a soothing G major with muted strings: this section borrows material from the last of the Wayfarer songs, “Die zwei blauen Augen von meinen Schatz” (“The two blue eyes of my darling”), gentle yet regretful. The main march returns, this time a half-step higher in E-flat minor, only later dropping back into D and slowly fading away.

The fourth movement comes in with extraordinary violence, the emotional equivalent of a hurricane. The key of F minor suddenly asserts itself with great clarity. The movement is a fairly conventional sonata form, with two large bodies of material that are almost schizophrenically contrasted. After the violent first material is a nostalgic section in D-flat that reaches an impassioned conclusion. The turmoil returns, culminating in a brass fanfare that starts in C but surprisingly pops into D, the key of the Symphony. This dies away, and the evocative string octaves return from the first movement, played in D now. Most of the last climax of the first movement is replayed, re-establishing D as the real home key. The Symphony concludes in a bold triumph.

©2010, David Mead

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