Calendar/Tickets

CLASSICS III: Austrian Artisans
Sat, April 4, 8:00 p.m.
Sun, April 5, 3 p.m.

Program Notes
By Steven Ledbetter

Joseph Haydn
Symphony No. 94 in G, Surprise
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. His Symphony No. 94 was composed in London in 1791 and was first performed there on March 23, 1792, Haydn conducting. The symphony is scored for flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns, and trumpets in pairs, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 23 minutes.

Nicknames often boost the popularity of a composition. It is certainly easier to remember a snappy name than to recall key and opus number when trying to pull a work out of the dim and foggy recesses of fallible memory. And the simple truth of this observation may be offered to explain the fact that far and away the best-known of Haydn’s late symphonies are the ones to which nicknames have been attached—the Oxford, the Surprise, the Clock, the Military, the Drumroll, and the London—though the others are no less worthy of attention and performance. Nonetheless, it is worth recalling that the most popular and familiar of them all, the Surprise Symphony, achieved its popularity at once without benefit of epithet.

Certainly Haydn was too good a showman to announce a nickname like “Surprise” in advance. The effectiveness of a surprise depends on its being unexpected. Yet Haydn achieved one of the greatest successes of his life with that premiere. Still, the nickname somehow got attached to the symphony before long (a flutist named Andrew Ashe claimed, some years later, to have been responsible, and went so far as to say that Haydn thanked him for finding so appropriate a designation).

The “surprise” in question is the sudden fortissimo chord early in the second movement, coming just when the quiet melody has been repeated even more quietly and seems to die away into nothing. This passage was mentioned in one of the first reviews of the symphony, in the London Oracle for March 24, 1792 (the day after the premiere). Explanations were embellished whenever the piece was played. And the popularity of the symphony spread like wildfire.

Still, for all the attention given to the notorious surprise, there are a good many more reasons to cherish this symphony, surprises that are richer and subtler—innovations of the kind not likely to be noticed by anyone but the person who has to play them. Chief among these is the fact that here, possibly for the first time in the history of music, the timpanist is required to retune one of the kettledrums in the middle of a movement. This seems like a small point, but it had been normal for the kettledrums to be tuned to the tonic and dominant pitches of the home key and remain that way throughout a movement, with the result that they were restricted to playing when the music was in or very near the home key. By asking the player to tune the low G up to A for a passage in the middle of the first movement (and then to return to G for the recapitulation), Haydn in fact begins the liberation of the percussion instruments.

Then there is the slow introduction to the first Allegro; such introductions became common in Haydn’s late work as a way of grabbing the audience’s attention before setting out with a rushing whisper of a main theme. Here, however, the introduction is also relaxed and pastoral (the key of G major suggested rustication to eighteenth-century audiences), though it soon begins to hint at dark things in its modulations before poising itself for the actual Allegro. The Allegro itself begins, as we expect from the close of the introduction, on B, the third degree of the scale. But Haydn deftly hints in the harmonization at an entirely different key, just for an instant, and then rolls around to the expected tonic for the full orchestra’s entrance. This “out-of-key” beginning gives rise to many delightful surprises, not least of which is the recapitulation, which comes after careful preparation of B minor that deludes us into thinking that the tonic is still far away. But it hooks right into the out-of-key opening and leads us, surprised and delighted, right to the tonic and recapitulation.

The second movement, with its “surprise,” was, of course, the principal cause of the symphony’s immediate fame. The surprise itself is past by the sixteenth measure, but Haydn has by no means shot his bolt so soon. Beginning with a theme of deceptive simplicity (and simplicity is one of the very hardest things for a composer to achieve), Haydn produces a beautifully sustained set of variations, alternating simpler treatments with others that are more elaborate and dramatic, building to a wonderful marching climax and then dispersing in a wisp of harmonic haze.

The minuet, with one of the quickest tempo markings Haydn ever gave to this dance, has little of the air of an aristocratic ballroom; it comes across, rather, as a lusty peasant dance. Bassoons cavort with strings in the Trio, picking up an eighth-note phrase from the minuet proper and turning it upside down.

The finale is a wonderfully lively and sophisticated sonata-rondo, one of Haydn’s most brilliant achievements. Many of Haydn’s late symphonic movements are built up monothematically, with all of the melodic material deriving from the opening idea. It is worth noting that this is not the case in either the first of last movement of the Surprise Symphony—in both cases there is a markedly differentiated secondary theme (an object lesson in the dangers of oversimplifying the stylistic features of any great composer). Haydn repeatedly expressed his delight at the level of quality orchestral playing had reached in London, far beyond anything available to him in Vienna. This finale, with its breathtaking pace and difficulties of ensemble (especially the headlong sixteenth-note rush of the unison strings just before the end) is a prime example of Haydn’s response to their playing—with greater demands than ever before; thus he prefigured the increasingly virtuosic orchestral writing of the next century.

Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 1 in D
Gustav Mahler was born at Kalische (Kalište) near the Moravian border of Bohemia on July 7, 1860, and died in Vienna on May 18, 1911. He did most of the work on this symphony in February and March 1888, having begun to sketch it in earnest three years earlier and using material going back to the 1870s. He revised the score extensively on several occasions; the second, and last, edition published during Mahler’s lifetime was dated 1906. Mahler himself conducted the first performance of the work, then in five movements and called “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts,” with the Budapest Philharmonic on November 20, 1889. At a New York Philharmonic concert on December 16, 1909 he introduced the work to the United States in its final four‑movement form, having dropped the original second movement (the so‑called “Blumine” movement; see below) after a June 1894 performance in Weimar. The symphony is scored for four flutes (three of them doubling piccolo), four oboes (one doubling English horn), four clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet, two doubling high clarinet in E‑flat), three bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), seven horns, five trumpets, four trombones, bass tuba, timpani (two players), bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tam‑tam, harp, and strings. Duration is about 53 minutes.

Mahler took an unusually long time to bring to final form his first contribution to the genre of the symphony, which he was to dominate and change drastically. He may have begun active composition on the First Symphony as early as 1884; it was premiered in 1889, but still not finished. Much of the concentrated work of shaping the score’s first version took place under the impetus of a troubling involvement with a married woman, Marion Mathilda von Weber, the wife of a German soldier, Captain Carl von Weber, who was the grandson of the composer of Der Freischütz. Mahler had met the Weber family late in 1886, when the Leipzig Opera revived a number of Weber’s works for the centennial of the composer’s birth. He continued in close contact with the Webers, and it was at their house that he conceived and first heard the opening sonority of the First Symphony, the extraordinary sound of the dominant note, A, repeated in seven octaves. Mahler took a place at the Webers’ piano while they sat on either side of him, playing the notes in the octaves his hands were unable to reach. Before he knew it, he found himself in love with Marion, and she with him. They planned to run away together, but in the end, Mahler did not show up at the appointed rendezvous.

He poured his emotional energies into completing the work that we now call the First Symphony and writing the first movement of what we call the Second Symphony, though Mahler himself was thinking of them as symphonic poems—that is, program music with some kind of story to tell.

At the premiere in Budapest on November 20, 1889, Mahler listed the work in the program like this:

                              Mahler. “Symphonic Poem” in two parts.
Part I: 1. Introduction and Allegro comodo.   2. Andante.   3.          Scherzo.
Part II: 4. A la pompes funèbres; attacca.   5. Molto appassionato.

Despite the title “symphonic poem,” he gave no hint as to its subject matter, and the music struck listeners as ironic in way they could not understand. The title of the fourth movement signals that it is some kind of funeral march; but in fact, Mahler produced a parody of a funeral march, with no explanation. One critic recognized Mahler’s “genuine musical gifts,” but found the work to overstep “artistic moderation” and to “lack a unifying underlying note.”

This first version of the work is now lost; the earliest surviving copy of the piece (now at Yale) already incorporates revisions that Mahler made for the second performance four years later. For performances in Hamburg and Weimar, in 1893 and 1894 respectively, Mahler went rather overboard with programmatic description, giving the whole work a title (“Titan, a tone-poem in symphonic form”) as well as each of the two parts and five movements, while the fourth movement was treated to a virtual essay:

4. “Aground” (Funeral march “in the manner of Callot”). The following may serve as explanation: The external stimulus for this piece of music came to the composer from the parodistic picture, known to all children in Austria, “The Hunter’s Funeral Procession,” from an old book of children’s fairy tales: the beasts of the forest accompany the dead woodsman’s coffin to the grave, with hares carrying a small banner, with a band of Bohemian musicians, in front, and the procession escorted by music-making cats, toads, crows, etc., with stags, roes, foxes and other four-legged and feathered creatures of the forest in comic postures. At this point the piece is conceived as an expression of a mood now ironically merry, now weirdly brooding, which is then promptly followed by:

This was clearly overkill. When Mahler performed the work in Berlin in 1896, he gave it a form substantially like that in which we know it, removing the original second movement and the programmatic titles. He had learned from unhappy experience how misleading titles were, as each listener interprets in a different way. Far better to let the music speak for itself.

Still, it is worth noting that Mahler drew those discarded titles from the works of a favorite German romantic author, Jean Paul (the pen name of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter [1763-1825]), whose best-known novel, a massive work in four volumes called Titan (completed in 1803), dealt with a heaven-storming idealist whom Mahler clearly sought to emulate. Nonetheless he wrote the music first and only thought of the connection to Jean Paul afterwards, so we can conveniently ignore it when considering the symphony as a work of art.

Thus, for all practical purposes, we have a traditional symphony that is very untraditional in its content and expressive quality. The introduction takes its cue from Beethoven, growing gradually from almost nothing (“like a sound of nature,” he says of the opening bars, containing that single A spread over seven octaves), followed by fragments of melody—bird calls, fanfares, a horn melody. The “cuckoo call” that appears so frequently is a descending fourth (Audobon never heard such a cuckoo!), an interval that forms one of the most constant musical ideas of the symphony. Hints of human intrusion in the form of distant fanfares gradually grow more assertive. Suddenly we are presented with a melody familiar from the Songs of a Wayfarer, “Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld,” which becomes the principal material of the first movement, reappearing several times with its emotional quality affected by the character of the linking materials, particularly the movement’s single powerful climax.

The A-major scherzo, a comfortable Austrian Ländler liked at once by even the first audiences, conjures up the vigor of a peasant dance, with reference to Mahler’s own song Hans und Grete, composed in 1880. The trio, in F, is by contrast far more nostalgic and delicate.

The third movement unsettled most early listeners, who found Mahler’s ironic treatment of death disturbing. Timpani softly play a march beat, reiterating the descending fourths that are so frequent a motif in this symphony; over the rhythmic pattern, a solo double-bass eerily intones the melody we have all sung as Frère Jacques--only in the minor key! The hushed stillness, the muffled drums, and the use of a children’s tune in this context all contribute to the uncanny mood of the movement. By contrast a strain of what listeners today may well recognize as “klezmer music” overlays the march with an unexplained mood of parody. A turn to a consoling passage in G major (the closing strains of the Wayfarer songs, representing a gentle acceptance of death) does not last; the opening materials return to emphasize death as a fearsome specter.

Mahler once described the finale as “the cry of a wounded heart,” a description that is particularly suitable for the opening gesture. This finale aims to move from doubt and tragedy to triumph, and it does so first of all through a violent struggle to regain the home key of the symphony, D major, not heard since the first movement. Mahler first does so with an extraordinary theatrical stroke: a violent, gear-wrenching shift from C minor directly to D major in the full orchestra, triple-forte. But this “triumph” has been dishonestly won; it is completely unmotivated, harmonically jarring. So this passage ends in a return to the inchoate music of the symphony’s very opening, this time building gradually to the truly jubilant conclusion, for which Mahler requests that all the horns, playing the “chorale resounding over everything,” stand up so that the melody may make its proper effect and, if possible, drown out everything else with the song of joyous triumph.

© Steven Ledbetter 
www.stevenledbetter.com

BUY TICKETS ONLINE!
Click here.

MAKE A GIFT ONLINE
The generous support of our corporate and individual donors helps to sustain the vitality and mission of the New Phil. Click here to donate securely online.

VOLUNTEERS
Do you love music, like to keep busy and have some time on your hands? Here’s how you can help the New Phil! Give us a call and join our office team! Click here for more information.