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KSO/GA Festival Gala – May 3, 2014
Overture in D major, D. 590
“In the Italian Style”
Franz Schubert
1797-1828
Throughout his short life, Franz Schubert hoped to make a name for himself in opera,
considered the most prestigious of musical genres. He began the pursuit at a tender age but
continually had difficulties selecting appropriate plays and librettos in keeping with the
public taste. None of the eight operas he completed ever succeeded. Most never made it to
the stage in his lifetime, and those that did, usually folded after a few performances.
With all due respect, however, while Schubert has now taken his place in the pantheon of the
great Viennese composers, he was the proverbial “prophet ignored in his own land.” Born
into the lower middleclass with no prospects higher than that of a mere schoolteacher, he
lacked the social connections that could have set his career on a successful course. Not only
were his operas – complete and incomplete – failures, but his Lieder and instrumental works
fared little better outside his own circle of friends. Some of his greatest works saw their first
public performance and publication decades after his death.
By 1817, writing successful opera posed a particularly difficult hurdle for any composer. A
true “opera war” raged in Vienna between the adherents of the German style whose principal
proponent was Carl Maria von Weber, and the boosters of the new Italian style of the young
Gioacchino Rossini. That year, sensing which way the wind was blowing and pretending to
transalpine manners, Schubert composed two overtures “In the Italian Style.”
The Overture in D is the first of the two (The other is in C Major, D. 591.) Its spirited tempo
and colorful orchestration shows that Schubert learned his lesson well. While the opening
short Adagio could have been from any traditional symphonic work and was recycled music
from the overture to Die Zauberharfe, later reused in the incidental music to the play
Rosamunde, the following Allegro points clearly south of the border. While no match for
Rossini in popularity, Schubert and his Italian rival shared one characteristic: both of them
could churn out such overtures in a matter of hours.
Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756-1791
Mozart composed a total of 28 solo keyboard concertos, most of them for his own use in
subscription concerts in Vienna. Consequently, the timing of their composition was
influenced by the artistic climate and the economic wellbeing of the city. For five years after
Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, he was a hot commodity both as a composer and a virtuoso
performer. Commissions were flooding in, and his economic position was quite comfortable
– that is to say, he couldn’t squander the money quite as fast as it was coming in. Thus, in the
short period between 1782 and 1786, with a booming economy creating a heyday for musical
life in Vienna, Mozart composed 17 of these concertos, including this one in C minor.
During those years aristocratic families vied with one another to underwrite and sponsor
concerts of the latest in musical fashion. “Concertos,” he wrote to his father, “are a happy
medium between what is too hard and too easy...pleasing to the ear...without being vapid.”
Occasionally, however, Mozart felt the urge to break away from this popular mold. In March
1786, in the middle of composing his most effervescent and popular comedy, The Marriage
of Figaro, he sat down to compose the stormy and somber C minor Piano Concerto, one of
only two concertos he wrote in minor keys.
It is always important when considering music of the Classical period to pay special attention
to works in minor keys, because their rarity makes them the conveyors of particular
emotional pathos. For Mozart, as well as for many composers of seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, each key, and especially each mode, was believed to have specific rhetorical and
emotional significance. There were entire treatises written on the emotional affects of
specific elements in music, and, although few composers “composed by the book,”
Audiences knew the general tenets of the system and reacted accordingly. It is analogous to
how we automatically attribute emotional affect to background music for film or television.
Mozart premiered the C-minor Concerto at his own concert in April. It left the audience
uncomfortable, as storms and tragedy were not popular in Vienna’s aristocratic circles.
However, at the height of the Romantic era in the following century this concerto and its Dminor (K. 466) companion, supposedly representing Mozart’s tragic and “demonic” side,
were his most frequently performed concertos.
There are a number of interesting points to make about this work. The orchestra, the largest
for any of his concertos, includes both oboes and clarinets, both of which play prominent
solo roles. The clarinet was a relatively new addition to the late eighteenth-century orchestra,
and Mozart explores the novel sound qualities of its inclusion.
The opening theme of the first movement – which, incidentally, is not echoed by the piano –
lends itself to being broken up into short motives. It is these fragments of the theme that
Mozart explores throughout the rest of the movement. The leaps of a major seventh carry the
emotive weight and render the theme virtually impossible to sing (Such angular melodies
belonged to the category of extreme emotion, anger and even hysteria in the treatises.)
The second movement, in contrast, presents a simple lyrical tune, used as a refrain for the
rondo, an unusual structure for a slow movement. No matter how poignant the episodes
between the refrain, Mozart continually inserts this optimistic musical reminder.
The final movement is a set of C-minor variations, a structure seldom used by other
composers of this period in concertos but one that Mozart especially liked and developed.
The coda that brings the concerto to a close speeds up the tempo, ending the work on a note
of tension, a conclusion that was bound to disturb an audience who were accustomed to
rousing upbeat finales.
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827
Although the autograph of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in C minor is dated 1800, sketches
date back to as early as 1796, and the composer made revisions up to the date of publication.
The premiere took place at an Akademie (benefit concert) of Beethoven’s works in April
1803, together with that of the Second Symphony and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of
Olives.
Even at the premiere the manuscript had not been finalized. Beethoven was the soloist and
asked his friend, the young conductor Ignaz von Seyfried, to turn pages for him. Seyfried
later wrote: “...but heaven help me! – that was easier said than done. I saw almost nothing
but empty pages; at the most, on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly
unintelligible to me were scribbled down to serve as a clue for him; for he played almost all
of the solo parts from memory since, as was so often the case, he had not had the time to set
it all down on paper.” The Concerto was finally published in 1804 with the empty pages
filled in.
The key of the Concerto, C minor, is also that of the Fifth Symphony and of the last Piano
Sonata, and has been considered to be Beethoven’s Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) key.
This literary and musical movement, whose heyday occurred during Beethoven’s early
childhood, reflected the revolutionary attitudes and stormy emotions of the period. But for
Beethoven emotional upheaval was a personal constant throughout his life.
The Concerto’s first movement opens with a powerful statement of one of the composer’s
deceptively simple musical ideas: a rumination on a triad, first as an arpeggio, then filled in
with a descending scale. The contrast with the second theme, a graceful melody with
expressive leaps and appoggiaturas, is, therefore, all the greater. In this concerto Beethoven
still adhered strictly to the tradition of the Classical concerto, in which a long orchestral
introduction precedes the entrance of the soloist; in the last two piano concertos, the soloist
plunges in from the start. At a later date, probably in 1809, Beethoven wrote a cadenza for
the movement for his patron and pupil Archduke Rudolf. There is an unusual and mysterious
transition at the end of the cadenza back to the orchestra.
The second movement, a gentle Largo, sharply contrasts with the first, accentuated by the
surprisingly distant key of E major. It contains a lovely dialogue between flute and bassoon,
accompanied by the pizzicato strings and piano arpeggios.
The Concerto ends with a Rondo and an unusual coda that suddenly takes off with a
transformation of the main theme into Presto in 6/8. Like most compositions in minor keys
through the Classical period, it concludes in C major.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
[email protected]
www.wordprosmusic.com