Download PROGRAM NOTES by Paul Schiavo Old, and

PROGRAM NOTES by Paul Schiavo
Old, and Not So Old, Vienna
If any city can rightly claim to be the historical center of Western music, it is surely Vienna. For
more than two centuries, the Austrian capital has nurtured some of the greatest musical creators.
There Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler came to practice their art. There
Schubert spent his brief life pouring forth songs and symphonies. What Paris has been to painters
and London to writers, so Vienna has been to composers.
Vienna’s first musical efflorescence came during the late 1700s, when the city was home to
Haydn, Mozart and the young Beethoven. Their music defined what we now call the Austrian
Classical style, a compositional idiom that commands admiration 200 years later. But Vienna had
a second period of musical greatness during the last years of the 19th century and the first
decades of the 20th. During that period, a group of composers led by Arnold Schoenberg, and
known today as “the Second Viennese School,” strove to unite traditional principles of
composition with a modern harmonic language. Our concert presents works by three Viennese
masters representing both the Classical and Second Viennese periods.
FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Symphony No. 88 in G major, Hob. I:88
BORN: March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Austria
DIED: May 31, 1809, in Vienna
WORK COMPOSED: ca. 1787
WORLD PREMIERE: Unknown, but probably 1787 at the Esterházy palace, in western Hungary,
where the composer directed the resident orchestra and musical matters in general for some
three decades.
The extraordinarily prolific Franz Joseph Haydn composed more than a hundred symphonies over
the course of some 35 years. His Symphony in G major, No. 88 in the standard listing of Haydn’s
output, ranks among the most characteristic and popular of these works.
Haydn spent most of his career, some three decades, beginning in 1761, as resident composer
and conductor in the employ of the Esterházy family, a princely Hungarian clan that maintained
palaces in Vienna and in the countryside east of that city. This position gave Haydn a mandate to
compose freely and resources with which to realize his creations and test his musical ideas. His
relative isolation during much of each year at the rural Esterházy estate proved to be a mixed
blessing. The composer, in his own words, “was cut off from the world ... and forced to be
original,” and it is fair to wonder whether his extraordinary musical inventiveness would have
developed in a more cosmopolitan milieu, where public taste and aesthetic fashion would have
been a constant consideration.
Haydn was not so isolated, however, that the world failed to take note of his originality. As copies
of his music circulated throughout Europe, his reputation spread and interest in presenting his
latest works grew. Paris proved especially important in this respect, and during the 1780s Haydn
produced some eleven symphonies for French orchestras and publishers. Among those
compositions is the one that opens our program.
Haydn prefaces the first movement with the type of slow introduction that was by this time a
standard feature of his symphonic format. This prologue is brief and apparently simple, yet
neither the halting rhythms of its phrases nor their sudden dynamic contrasts offer anything that
could be described as commonplace or predictable. A miracle of economy, the ensuing Allegro is
being built entirely on a single theme.
The second movement begins as a set of variations on the hymn-like melody presented at the
outset. Brahms reportedly said of this passage, “I want my Ninth Symphony to sound like that.”
But a sudden outburst interrupts this music, with trumpets and timpani making one of their first
appearances in a symphonic slow movement. (The effect of their intrusion is heightened by the
fact that these instruments have been silent until now.) Haydn’s juxtaposition of these
contrasting kinds of expression instills the remainder of the movement with a Beethovenian
drama.
The third movement’s minuet section brings a humorous, unbuttoned interlude, while the finale,
like the opening movement, is monothematic. Haydn here displays compositional invention of a
high order, the music combining brilliance and high spirits.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR: The symphony begins with an introductory paragraph in slow tempo and
exaggeratedly formal rhythms calculated to maximize the effect of the opening moments of the
first movement proper. The strings introduce the movement’s theme simply and quietly; the
orchestra then repeats the initial phrase in a robust manner, with violins adding a running
counter-melody. From this slender material Haydn constructs the entire movement. Note,
particularly, how much he does with the first seven notes of his theme during the central
“development” episode.
Haydn employs unusually delicate textures at the start of the second movement, relying
especially on the principal oboe and cello, and giving us some surprising and poignant turns of
harmony. Again, the composer uses aural contrast to deep effect, the gentleness of his initial
material making the intrusion of strong martial sonorities all the more audacious.
The robust theme of the minuet is balanced by delicate echoes of its own principal motif. In the
contrasting central section, irregular phrase lengths of the main subject suggest a rustic
character, and Haydn accentuates this quality by means of a bagpipe-like drone in the
accompaniment. The music of the finale alternates between a saucy recurring subject and
episodes that prove to be imaginative developments of that subject. The latter include a striking
contrapuntal passage midway through.
Scored for flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
© 2016 Paul Schiavo