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Academy Festival Orchestra, July 16
PROGRAM NOTES
FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
“Representation of Chaos,” from The Creation
Composed 1798
Duration ca. 6 minutes
Scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3
trombones, timpani, and strings
Franz Joseph Haydn was, with his friend and admirer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the
two great composers of the late 18th century, a period we now think of as music’s “Classical”
era. Unlike Mozart, who enjoyed youthful brilliance but suffered an early demise, Haydn
matured slowly over a long career. His skill and artistry deepened over the span of half a
century through the composing of more than 100 symphonies, dozens of string quartets and
other forms of chamber music, operas, ecclesiastic works, songs, and piano solos. During his
final years of creativity, Haydn crowned his compositional output with a pair of superb
oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons.
Completed in 1798, The Creation relates the story of the world’s beginning told in the biblical
Book of Genesis, with interpolations from Psalms and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Throughout the
work, Haydn employs suggestive musical figuration to underscore the meaning of the text, the
type of composing often described by the term “tone painting.” The most striking instance of
this practice comes at the start of the oratorio, an orchestral prologue that Haydn called the
“Representation of Chaos.”
This is one of the most remarkable passages by Haydn or any other 18th-century composer, with
strange and unsettled harmonies, abrupt shifts in volume, irregular phrase lengths, and lack of
melodic continuity serving to depict primordial disorder. It is, however, not actual chaos we
hear but only a musical portrayal of such a state, and a very Classical-period portrayal, at that.
Haydn was no anarchist, even in conveying an impression of anarchy, and the music here is
wrought with consummate skill and control.
ALBAN BERG
Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6
Composed: 1914-15
Duration ca. 20 minutes
Scored for 4 flutes and piccolos, 4 oboes and two English horns, 5 clarinets plus bass clarinet
and alto clarinet, 4 bassoons and contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, 2
sets of timpani, 2 harps, celesta, percussion, and strings
A century and more of eventful development in music separates Haydn from Alban Berg,
development that led composers to a point of crisis. Haydn had lived and worked at a time
when the harmonic underpinnings of Western music were both well established and relatively
stable. The strange tonal dislocations we heard in the opening portion of The Creation were
exceptional and understood to convey disorder. They achieved their purpose by varying
extremely from the musical norms of the day. But throughout the 1800s those norms were
continually reshaped as composers introduced ever more complex harmonic possibilities into
their work. By the beginning of the next century the familiar tonal language that had served as
the foundation of Western music for 300 years had been stretched to a breaking point. The
most insightful composers understood that the necessary next step in music’s evolution was to
push beyond the realm of conventional chords and established notions of consonance and
dissonance.
One of those composers was Berg. Coming of age in Vienna just as the ethos of 19th-century
Romanticism gave way to a brave new world of modernism, Berg was a pioneer in forging a
musical idiom that drew freely on combinations of tones that had been considered dissonant in
the vocabulary of traditional harmony. He also composed in an intensely emotional vein that
bears comparison with the Expressionist art of Kandisnky, Franz Marc, and other painters, and
with the writing of Frank Widekind and Franz Werfel.
All this is apparent in Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 6, an audacious Expressionist
masterpiece. Berg begun work on this composition in the summer of 1914 and quickly
completed what became the first and third of its three constituent pieces. The eventual second
piece followed a year later.
In its harmonies, melodic gestures, and orchestration, the three contrasting character pieces
that make up this work are thoroughly modern (though listeners familiar with the symphonies
of Gustav Mahler may hear that composer’s influence on Berg’s writing). The opening
Praeludium juxtaposes ominous sonorities with expressions of ineffable longing. “Reigen,” the
title of the second movement, means “Round Dance,” and its music brings dream-like
evocations of waltzes and other dances. The final piece is a march with decidedly apocalyptic
intimations. It seems hardly a coincidence that Berg composed this music on the eve of World
War I.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55, Sinfonia eroica
Composed 1803-04
Duration ca. 48 minutes
Scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings
With his Sinfonia eroica, completed in 1804, Beethoven brought into being a new musical
genre, the Romantic symphony. Beethoven’s first two symphonies had extended the classical
procedures of Mozart and Haydn, and the composer, now in his early 30s, might well have
continued writing in that vein.
But the world of the nascent 19th century was not the same one in which Beethoven’s
illustrious predecessors had lived and worked. The aristocracy that had presided over musicmaking and most everything else in Europe since the end of the Renaissance was under siege
both politically and intellectually. Revolutions in America and France had turned the theories of
the Enlightenment into reality, and a heady sense of freedom and new possibilities was in the
air throughout the continent. It was a time of idealism and, in a broad sense, of heroism.
Beethoven was strongly affected by these new currents. He applauded the French Revolution
and remained an ardent democrat throughout his life. Numerous anecdotes recount his refusal
to defer to members of the nobility, even those who were his patrons. It is not surprising,
therefore, that he should have planned a work portraying a popular hero such as Napoleon
Bonaparte, which was his original intention in writing his Third Symphony. (We must recall that
when the composer began work on this piece, early in 1803, the general and First Consul was
widely perceived as the defender of the French Revolution and an embodiment of a new and
hopeful political order. Napoleon the Emperor and scourge of Europe was still a thing of the
future.)
Nor is it startling that Beethoven’s expansive spirit should have outgrown the comparatively
restrained musical forms and language of the previous generation. By the turn of the century,
the composer had begun moving towards larger, more potent modes of expression. His Third
Piano Concerto and, to some extent, his Second Symphony seem to be pushing against the
limits of their Classical-period models. These pieces, however, hardly foretold the extraordinary
leap taken in the Eroica. Its length alone, nearly twice that of most Mozart or Haydn
symphonies, far exceeded any orchestral composition yet attempted. Even so, it was not so
much its outer dimensions as its inner life, its tremendous power and propulsive drive, that
placed the Eroica beyond the pale of the comparatively modest music of the 18th century.
A sense of energy and restless invention pervade the long opening movement. Beethoven
seems so full of creative fire that the usual first-movement design can scarcely contain his
thoughts, and we find him continually overstepping its nominal boundaries. Subsidiary themes
are developed with unusual thoroughness. The haunting melody introduced following a series
of wrenching chords midway through the movement properly has no place in the movement
but is given a significant role nevertheless. The closing, or coda section, a brief passage serving
to round off a movement in the Classical-period symphonies, is here substantial and important.
As a result, this portion of the symphony has about it the feeling of an epic drama.
Those qualities are present as well, though in different forms, in the music that follows. The
funeral march that forms the second movement still sends chills down the spine, its consoling
central episode notwithstanding. The ensuing scherzo gives us a nimble, dance-like movement
with a horn-call Trio, or contrasting central section.
Following an initial flourish, the finale begins as a set of variations on a theme presented by the
oboe and endorsed, phrase for phrase, by the orchestra. This was a favorite tune of
Beethoven’s. He had used it previously in his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, as well as for
the subject for a set of piano variations, Opus 35. But although Beethoven always favored the
theme-and-variations procedure and worked it masterfully, his inventiveness now proves too
great for its comparatively confined architecture. After its statement by the oboe and
orchestra, the subject spills out of the strict variation format into fugal and other
developments, concluding with a rousing coda.
Beethoven maintained that this was his finest symphony, and while it is difficult to choose
among his works in this genre, there is reason to agree. Nowhere, even in his Fifth and Ninth
Symphonies, was the composer more successful in welding a wide array of thematic ideas into
a cohesive whole, in developing those ideas to fill out an expansive score, or in extracting from
them an arresting musical drama. From this point of view, the well-known account of how the
composer angrily changed the title of his score from Buonaparte to the anonymous Sinfonia
eroica (“Heroic Symphony”) after learning that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor hardly
bears retelling. Today, the connection between this music and the Corsican general is not
particularly apparent. Like all art, the Third Symphony really tells us of the artist who conceived
it. Beethoven himself, who overcame the adversity of his growing deafness to compose the
work, can rightly be considered the heroic figure to which its title alludes.