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06-16 Parks 2.qxp_Layout 1 6/7/16 4:28 PM Page 26 NOTES ON THE PROGRAM By James M. Keller, Program Annotator The Leni and Peter May Chair Overture to Fidelio, Op. 72 Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55, Sinfonia eroica Ludwig van Beethoven L udwig van Beethoven seemed perpetually stymied when it came to opera. At different times he toyed with writing operas based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the medieval fairy tale Melusine, a drama about ancient Rome titled Vestas Feuer, and legends of the deceived knight Bradamante and the questing scholar Faust. The one opera he did manage to sink his talons into and carry through to completion — and another completion, and yet another after that — was the work he unveiled in 1805 under the title Leonore and then transformed, by fits and starts, into what is known today as Fidelio. In the years immediately following the French Revolution, theatrical plots involving political oppression, daring rescues, and the triumph of humanitarianism grew popular in many European countries. The plot of Leonore / Fidelio fit the bill perfectly. It involves a marriage rendered rocky not by spousal squabbling but rather by the imposition of ominous political forces from the outside. Florestan has been unjustly imprisoned by Don Pizarro (a nobleman in 18th-century Spain), but his devoted wife, Leonore, manages to get a job in the prison disguised as a boy, in which guise she calls herself Fidelio. Don Pizarro decides to execute Florestan before the imminent arrival of the Prime Minister and his virtuous prisoninspection team, but “Fidelio” intercedes and holds him at bay with a pistol until the good guys arrive — at which point Leonore (shedding her disguise) and Florestan are reunited in their marriage and Don Pizarro’s goose is cooked. Leonore was not well received at its 1805 premiere and its run ended after three performances. 26 | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC IN SHORT Born: Probably on December 16, 1770 (he was baptized on the 17th), in Bonn, Germany Died: March 26, 1827, in Vienna, Austria Works composed and premiered: Fidelio Overture, composed in May 1814, for the second revision of the opera then known as Leonore, newly recast as Fidelio; premiered May 26, 1814, at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, three days after the opera’s premiere. The first sketches for Symphony No. 3 date from summer or fall 1802, most of the composition was carried out in 1803, and the symphony was completed in the spring of 1804, dedicated to the musicloving nobleman Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz; premiered at Prince Lobkowitz’s palace in Vienna during the second half of 1804; the first public performance took place on April 7, 1805, at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, with the composer conducting. New York Philharmonic premieres and most recent performances: Fidelio Overture, premiered November 19, 1859, Carl Bergmann, conductor; most recent performance, July 19, 2014, at Bravo! Vail, in Colorado, Alan Gilbert, conductor. Symphony No. 3, premiered on February 18, 1843, Ureli Corelli Hill, conductor; most recently performed, May 10, 2014, Bernard Haitink, conductor Estimated durations: Fidelio Overture, ca. 6 minutes; Symphony No. 3, ca. 50 minutes 06-16 Parks 2.qxp_Layout 1 6/7/16 4:28 PM Page 27 The work’s failure has often been attributed to the fact that Vienna was being invaded by Napoleonic forces just then and that many of the city’s nobles and other opera-going types were busy getting themselves out of town. The Beethoven biographer Lewis Lockwood has protested that “in fact, the audience at the first performance was well stocked with French army officers, but it may be that the opera was over the heads of many listeners accustomed to lighter stage works.” Indeed, Leonore was in part a “lighter stage work”; one of its principal idiosyncrasies is that it grafts together a story of heroic humanitarianism and an opéra comique plot. In any case, Beethoven set about revising the piece following its initial failure, and on March 29, 1806, he introduced a truncated and restructured version of Leonore. This fared hardly better, and its run was cut short by an argument between the composer and the theater’s management. When plans surfaced to revive the work in 1814, Beethoven effected still further alterations and renamed the opera Fidelio. Finally it was a hit, and it is in that final form that one almost always finds it produced today. Each of these versions sported a different overture. (Beethoven even composed yet another overture, known today as the Leonore Overture No. 1, for a performance that was planned for Prague in 1807 but ended up not taking place.) The so-called Fidelio Overture was crafted specifically to introduce the 1814 version of the opera, and it was greeted with applause so enthusiastic that the composer was called to take two bows before the action of the opera proper could begin. Taut, tense, and dramatic, it serves as a splendid introduction, more appropriate in that context than the longer, weightier, and better-known Leonore Overture No. 3, which threatened to overwhelm the ensuing action when it opened the opera back in 1806. Where the earlier Leonore Overtures had been cast in the key of C major, corresponding to the more momentous and heroic sections of the action, the Fidelio Overture is set in the sunnier E major, which relates instead to the opera’s lighthearted secondary plot. Unlike the earlier Leonore Overtures, the Fidelio Overture does not try to mimic the story line, and allusions to the opera’s later music are minimal. Nonetheless, its music foretells the opera’s spirit with power and elegance from the orchestra’s opening fanfare, through sections of elegiac poignancy, to a blazing conclusion. A Deadline Not Met Georg Friedrich Treitschke, the Kärntnertortheater stage manager who had a hand in reworking the libretto for the 1814 version of Fidelio, related that several nights before the premiere Beethoven suddenly started scribbling some musical sketches on the back of a dinner menu at the Römischer Kaiser restaurant, commenting, “I have the idea for my Overture.” Ideas are one thing, completed works another; in this case, the former failed to grow into the latter by opening night and the overture Beethoven had penned several years earlier as incidental music for the play The Ruins of Athens was pressed into service instead. Beethoven later admitted, “The people applauded, but I stood ashamed; it did not belong to the rest.” Only at the second performance, three nights later, did the new Fidelio Overture get its first hearing. Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, fends off Don Pizarro in Act III of Fidelio, as depicted here, in the ThéâtreLyrique production of 1860 JUNE 2016 | 27 06-16 Parks 2.qxp_Layout 1 6/7/16 4:28 PM Page 28 Listen for … a False Entrance? The course of the first movement of the Eroica Symphony is quite unpredictable, and one of its quirks led to an incident that must have been fearsome at the time. Just before the recapitulation, Beethoven writes what sounds like a false entrance for the horn, prefiguring immediately upcoming material but sounding dissonant against a chord being played just then by the violins. An account by the composer’s pupil Ferdinand Ries from the rehearsal states: The first rehearsal of the symphony was terrible, but the hornist did in fact come in on cue. I was standing next to Beethoven and, believing that he had made a wrong entrance, I said, “That damned hornist! Can’t he count? It sounds frightfully wrong.” I believe I was in danger of getting my ears boxed. Beethoven did not forgive me for a long time. Beethoven was a partisan of noble humanitarian principles, joining those who saw the democratic ideals of ancient Greece reflected in the aspirations of Jacobins in post-Revolutionary France. At the head of the Jacobins was Napoleon Bonaparte, and Beethoven was among the political idealists who viewed Napoleon as a repository of hope for the social enlightenment of humankind. At the urging of the future King of Sweden, Beethoven began contemplating a musical celebration of Napoleon as early as 1797. As his sketches coalesced into Symphony No. 3, Beethoven resolved not to simply dedicate his composition to Napoleon, but to actually name it after him. In the spring of 1804, just as Beethoven completed his symphonic tribute, A Change of Title Beethoven’s original autograph score to his Symphony No. 3, with the title page he destroyed in rage, has disappeared, but the library of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde owns a copyist’s manuscript that the composer marked and used for conducting — and it tells a similar tale. Its title page originally read (in Italian) Sinfonia grande intitolata Bonaparte del Sigr Louis van Beethoven (Grand Symphony titled Bonaparte by Mr. Ludwig van Beethoven). But the words “titled Bonaparte” were erased with such vehemence that a gash stands largely in their place. When the piece was published, it was presented as Sinfonia Eroica … per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo (Heroic Symphony … to Celebrate the Memory of a Great Man), and the work’s dedication, originally intended for Napoleon, was given over instead to Beethoven’s patron Prince Lobkowitz. It became a leitmotif in Beethoven’s life that individuals would fail to live up to his idealizations, and that the composer would prefer Mankind in the abBeethoven’s conducting score, torn by furious erasing stract to Man in the flesh. 28 | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC 06-16 Parks 2.qxp_Layout 1 6/7/16 4:28 PM Page 30 news arrived that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, that the standard-bearer of republicanism had seized power as an absolutist dictator. It fell to Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries to inform the temperamental composer, and to relate the scene (which must have occurred in May 1804) in a later biography: Beethoven held [Napoleon] in extremely high esteem at that time and compared him to the greatest Roman consul. Both I and several of his closer friends saw this symphony lying on his table, already copied out in score; at the very top of the title-page was the word “Buonaparte” and at the very bottom “Luigi van Beethoven” — and that was all. Whether he intended to fill in the middle, and with what, I do not know. I was the first one to bring him the news that Buonaparte had declared himself emperor — whereupon he flew into a rage, shouting: “Is even he nothing but an ordinary man! Now he will also trample upon human rights and become a slave to his own ambition; now he will set himself above all other men and become a tyrant.” Beethoven went to the table, grabbed the top of the title-page, tore it in two, and threw it to the floor. The first page was re-written and the symphony was then for the first time given the title of Sinfonia eroica. 30 | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC At first, critical response was guarded. On February 13, 1805, readers of Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung ingested this report: The reviewer belongs to Herr van Beethoven’s sincerest admirers, but in this composition he must confess that he finds too much that is glaring and bizarre, which hinders greatly one’s grasp of the whole, and a sense of unity is almost completely lost. The same critic maintained that the piece “lasted an entire hour.” Eroica was the longest symphony ever written when it was unveiled, and listeners and critics commented widely on that fact. “If I write a symphony an hour long,” Beethoven is said to have countered, “it will be found short enough,” and he was proved right in the long run. Opinion about the Third Symphony shifted rapidly. By 1807 nearly all reactions to the piece were favorable, or at least respectful, and critics were starting to make sense of its more radical elements and to accept it as one of the summit achievements in all of music. Instrumentation: Fidelio Overture calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, and strings. Symphony No. 3 employs two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.