Program Notes: The Three B’s: Bach, Beethoven & Brahms
Featuring Nicholas Kitchen, violin & Yeesun Kim, ‘cello
September 23 & 25, 2005
J.S. Bach: Overture in C major (from BWV 1066)
To most music lovers today the term “overture” refers to a curtain-raiser for an opera, or perhaps a short, free-standing orchestral composition, i.e., a “concert overture”. Indeed the term is derived from the French ouvrir, to open, and did originate as the first music heard in the presentation of an opera or ballet in 17th-century France. Subsequently, a series of dance movements from the stage work would be performed under the collective title “Ouverture”, and this term was adopted by composers of other nations, eventually being applied to entirely new compositions unrelated to the stage (even to many solo harpsichord suites). Such is the case with the four such suites (or “overtures”, German Ouvertüren) by Bach. (His contemporary Telemann is thought to have written some 600 — yes, six hundred — of these!) Since Bach’s autograph scores have not survived, it is impossible to date the suites with accuracy; it has been suggested that they were revised or modified around 1724 from previously existing material. The C-major work is in seven movements, the present overture followed by a series of six dance movements that are omitted from this performance. So in this case, we have the Overture from an Ouvertüre, used both “to open” the concert and as a sort of “concert overture”.
Brahms: Double Concerto
This is the last of the four concertos Brahms wrote and his last orchestral work. In the summers of the years 1886-88 Brahms enjoyed the surroundings of Lake Thun in Switzerland, and it was here in 1887 that he wrote this concerto, which had its public premiere on October 18th of that year in Cologne, though it had been performed privately at Baden-Baden earlier. The soloists in both performances were Joseph Joachim and Robert Hausmann, with Brahms conducting. Joachim was one of the great violinists of the 19th century and for many years one of Brahms’s dearest friends. Hausmann was the cellist of the string quartet Joachim had formed (just as our soloists for this concert are members of their own splendid group, the Borromeo Quartet). Unfortunately, a rift had developed between Joachim and Brahms over the former’s divorce from his wife Amalie after Brahms took her side in the matter. Joachim, it seems, was unreasonably jealous and accused Amalie of infidelity with the publisher Simrock; Brahms believed her innocent. This was in 1881. Joachim continued to perform Brahms’s music, however-it was for Joachim and with his assistance that the great Violin Concerto had been written in 1878-and when Brahms offered him the new Double Concerto, the two friends were happily reconciled.
One might suppose that most of Brahms is scored for too large an orchestra to be played by the BCO. Actually, other than an augmented string section, Brahms’s orchestra was not much more expansive than that used by Haydn and Mozart in their final orchestral works. To the pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets (as well as timpani) that were already routine in the last years of the eighteenth century, Brahms, in this work, adds only a further pair of horns (four in all). Nevertheless, the orchestra does present a larger sound than one of the Classical period, partly because of the greater power of the instruments as they evolved over the intervening decades and partly owing to a larger body of strings. (Moreover, most of Mozart and Haydn does call for considerably smaller forces, often only pairs of oboes and horns with the strings.) All the same, in order to accommodate the solo instruments for this work, Brahms had to adopt a more chamber-like approach to the orchestration. It is a difficult matter to allow two solo players to be heard over the full volume of the typical orchestra of Brahms’s day. Of course, Brahms is known for his classicism of form as well, and this concerto was not well received in its early days, as Brahms was accused of being more concerned with structure than with the emotion so beloved of the Romantics. But the emotion is certainly there, and plentifully. The music may at first strike some new listeners as distant and cool, but with familiarity, it reveals its beauties as one of his greatest and most powerful works.
Beethoven: Symphony No. 7
Completed in or around May 1812, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, when it was premiered on December 8, 1813, was his first to appear before the public since the Fifth and Sixth had been given their simultaneous premieres in 1808. The Sixth had been Beethoven’s “Pastorale” Symphony, in which he appended a program describing the scenes of nature depicted in the various movements. It was only to be expected, then, that various people would attach their extramusical ideas to a “program” for the Seventh, even though Beethoven intended none. All kinds of fanciful scenarios were dreamed up. One suggested that the symphony was supposed to portray a revolution; another a chivalric romance. The musicologist Arnold Schering (1877-1941) proposed that the music was a pictorial representation of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Even Wagner’s famous declaration that the Seventh represented the “apotheosis of the dance” goes on to very subjective images, if not an outright “program”. Robert Schumann, himself the quintessential Romantic, had concocted an elaborate tableau describing a country wedding, the music supposedly illustrating such details as the bride’s attire and the priest’s sermon. It remains moot whether Schumann was merely making fun of such programmatic notions.
We spoke of scoring in the Brahms. The orchestra for Beethoven’s Seventh is identical to the one he used in his very first symphony (a product of the eighteenth century) and indeed identical to that used by Brahms three quarters of a century later (!) for the Double Concerto, except with just a pair of horns rather than a quartet. Beethoven’s handling of the winds in this work has been contrasted with their use in earlier symphonies: they are generally fully melded with the orchestra in the Fifth, more soloistic in the Sixth, and tend to be dealt with as distinct bands in the Seventh. The symphony begins with an unusually protracted slow introduction of some 62 bars marked Poco sostenuto before the tempo picks up in the magnificent Vivace. The dark second movement, one of Beethoven’s most famous conceptions, consists of “ten settings of a march-like theme,” to quote Robin Golding; the audience at the premiere demanded that it be repeated. This is followed by a rollicking Scherzo and Finale.
(A couple of interesting points about that first performance. It was a benefit concert for Austrians and Bavarians who had been wounded in the battle against Napoleon at Hanau (October 30), and the real “hit” of the evening was Beethoven’s new “Battle” Symphony, otherwise known as “Wellington’s Victory,” which commemorated another battle, Vitoria in Spain, in which Napoleon’s forces, under his brother Joseph, had been defeated on June 21, resulting in the end of the Peninsular War. An extraordinary assemblage of prominent composers took part as instrumentalists on the occasion of this concert. Hummel and Moscheles, great pianists both, played percussion and were joined in that office by the opera composer Meyerbeer! Other composers, Spohr, Dragonetti, Salieri also took part, as did Ignaz Schuppanzigh, leader of the string quartet that premiered so many of Beethoven’s works in that form. Truly an all-star gathering!)
