Program Notes for January 24 and 25

Jean Sibelius

b. December 8, 1865, Hämeenlinna, Finland
d. September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland

Jean Sibelius was the first Finnish composer to attract international attention, and became a major figure in the establishment of his country’s artistic identity. He showed early talent on the violin – in fact, he once auditioned for the Vienna Philharmonic and for a time thought of pursuing a career as a violin soloist. But composition always attracted him, and he created a sensation in Finland with the premiere of his “Kullervo” Symphony in 1893. Supported by a lifetime pension from the Finnish government, by the first years of the twentieth century Sibelius’s works – many of which were inspired by the literature and landscape of his homeland – were being performed across the globe. After completing his Symphony No. 7 and a handful of other works in the mid 1920s, Sibelius retired into what has been dubbed the “silence from Järvenpää.” For the remaining three decades of his life he composed practically nothing, although reports of an Eighth Symphony (apparently destroyed) became legendary. In 1955 his ninetieth birthday was celebrated by performances and recordings worldwide.

Pelléas et Mélisande Incidental Music, Op. 46
Composed: 1905
Duration: 30 minutes

Sibelius wrote music for theatrical productions throughout his life, including incidental music for thirteen plays. Possibly the best known of these, written towards the end of his composing career, was for Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1925-27). Another of his best incidental scores was composed for Pelléas et Mélisande, an 1893 play by the Belgian playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) dealing with the forbidden and doomed love of the title characters. Maeterlinck is usually associated with Symbolism – a late nineteenth century artistic movement, also identified with poets like Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, that embraced symbolic language, mysticism, and dream-logic, as one writer has it, “to evoke, rather than to describe.” Maeterlinck’s play attracted a host of other musicians – along with Sibelius’s music, there is an incidental score by Gabriel Fauré, a symphonic poem by Arnold Schoenberg, and the famous opera by Claude Debussy.

The story, set in the medieval fantasy world of Allemonde, is psychologically complex, but its essentials are simple. The beautiful Mélisande, married to Golaud, falls in love with Golaud’s much younger stepbrother Pelléas. Golaud learns of their relationship and forbids them to meet again, enlisting his son Yniold to keep an eye on them. But meet they do, and often – in her room, at the Fountain of the Blind (where she loses her wedding ring), and elsewhere. When Golaud hears them declare their love for one another, he kills Pelléas and wounds Mélisande. She dies as she gives birth to a baby girl.

The music Sibelius created for a 1905 production of Maeterlinck’s play at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki is vivid yet restrained, scored for a much smaller orchestra than that employed by Schoenberg and Debussy in their works on the same subject. The suite begins with the powerful “At the Castle Gate,” then the English horn’s poignant tune introduces a wistful portrait of Mélisande. “By the Seashore” is a moody seascape, perhaps suggesting Mélisande’s loneliness, and “A Spring in the Park” is a dark-colored waltz. The English horn reappears for the somber “The Three Blind Sisters.” Pizzicato strings accompany a characteristically Sibelian theme in the winds in the “Pastorale,” leading to the flute’s folksong-like tune. “Mélisande at the Spinning Wheel” introduces a sense of foreboding, lightened somewhat in the sprightly “Entr’acte.” The grandiose coda of the “Entr’acte” could be mistaken for a forceful conclusion to Sibelius’s suite, but the actual final section is the beautiful, heartfelt “The Death of Mélisande,” with its poignant main theme and ominous rumblings from the timpani.


Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

b. January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria
d. December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria

No reminder is really needed of the unique stature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the history of Western music. His vast catalog of compositions – over 600 of them, including some 15 operas, 17 masses, 50 symphonies, 20 piano concertos, 23 string quartets, and so on (the list can go on for quite some time) – epitomizes the German-Austrian Classical style. His music is recognized and loved all over the world for its melodic, harmonic, and textural richness and beauty. The son of a well-known violinist and pedagogue, Mozart was one of the greatest prodigies ever, playing his first public concert at age five and composing his first music at seven. Before reaching the age of ten he had already played recitals in front of the likes of King George III of England. He traveled throughout Europe through his teens. After failing to find a secure post elsewhere, and having grown dissatisfied with his career in Salzburg, Mozart moved to Vienna, where he spent the last decade of his life. While he enjoyed some successes with his new operas and piano concertos, life there grew more and more precarious, leading to his early death at age thirty-five.

Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491
Composed: 1786
Duration: 30 minutes

From 1784 to 1786, Mozart enjoyed the peak of his Viennese popularity. His subscription concerts, presented annually during the Lenten season and often featuring the premiere of a new piano concerto that he would also perform, had become major attractions. Between February 1784 and December 1786 he wrote twelve piano concertos, Nos. 14-25, for these concerts. Few would argue that these works are among Mozart’s finest.

Of the 27 canonical piano concertos, only two are in minor keys. One is the dramatic Concerto No. 20 in D minor from 1785. The other is the Piano Concerto No. 24, completed on March 24, 1786, and given its premiere by Mozart on April 3 of that year at the Burgtheater in Vienna. During those early months of 1786 Mozart was hard at work completing his opera Le nozze di Figaro. By contrast with the infectious cheerfulness of most of Figaro, the Concerto No. 24 is serious and dark in color. As Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein has written, Mozart “evidently needed to indulge in an explosion of dark, tragic, passionate emotion.”

An air of mystery pervades the quiet string octaves that open the first movement. The music quickly turns dramatically propulsive, however, as the movement’s main theme is elaborated on – it is an unusual theme, employing all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (in fact, according to Michael Steinberg’s invaluable The Concerto, this theme was later used as the basis of a twelve-tone composition, a Symphony written in 1953 by the German composer Giselher Klebe). Woodwinds lighten the texture, but not the mood, with a new theme. The piano then gently enters, maintaining the minor key for a time. But then arpeggios lead into an airy, charming, and extended major key interlude. The minor key reasserts itself in the remainder of the development, and after a solo cadenza for the piano, the orchestra and piano combine to restate the chromatic main theme before a quiet, almost ambivalent conclusion.

The slow second movement opens with an unadorned, major key theme; its simplicity and the spare texture are quite a contrast to the opening movement. Separating repetitions of this idea are two interludes highlighting the woodwinds, the first making a brief return to the minor mode. The C minor key returns decisively in the third movement, a set of six variations with coda based on a martial sounding, almost march-like theme. The first two variations (and the fifth) feature embellishments of the theme by the piano soloist. The fourth and sixth variations are in a playful, delightful major key. But it’s back into the minor for a final varied restatement of the original theme, followed by a solo piano cadenza and coda.


Johann Sebastian Bach

b. March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Germany
d. July 28, 1750, Leipzig, Germany

Acknowledged along with Beethoven and Brahms as one of the “three Bs” of classical music, Johann Sebastian Bach was the culminating figure of music’s Baroque era. His over one thousand works – ranging from religious cantatas and masses to orchestral, chamber, and solo compositions – are loved and respected for their depth, contrapuntal invention, and their combination of intellectual rigor and great beauty. Born into a family of musicians, Bach was taught the rudiments of music by his father. He held several posts in his teens and early twenties as a singer, violinist and organist, during which time he also started to compose his first organ works and cantatas. The main body of his musical life is usually divided up into three periods. From 1708 to 1717 he served as court organist and composer for the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar. He then assumed the position of Kapellmeister in the city of Cöthen, where he worked until 1723 and where he wrote the famous Brandenburg Concertos and many other instrumental works. In 1723 Bach became the Kantor of the Thomas School in Leipzig, holding that post until his death. In Leipzig he taught, directed the city’s Collegium musicum orchestra, and composed hundreds of cantatas for the city’s churches.

Concerto in C major for 2 Keyboards, BWV 1061
Composed: c. 1730
Duration: 18 minutes

The concerto for harpsichord (the keyboard instrument of choice until it was supplanted by the piano in the 1760s and 1770s) with orchestra was an unexplored genre when Bach came to it around 1730. Most of his extant concertos – seven for solo harpsichord, three for two harpsichords, two for three harpsichords, and one for four – started life as concertos for other instruments. They were likely written for the Collegium musicum, a group of professional and amateur musicians that Bach led in weekly concerts. Bach himself was probably the soloist in the solo concertos, and in the concertos for multiple keyboards he may well have been joined by his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann, who were also living in Leipzig at the time.

The Concerto in C major, possibly his first concerto originally written for keyboard, apparently started life as a concerto for two solo harpsichords without orchestra, and only later was a string orchestra added (possibly not by Bach himself). The keyboards – pianos, in the case of the present performance – are constantly interacting and trading phrases, with the strings largely supporting them. The two soloists and the strings are fully integrated throughout the lively opening Allegro. The strings are entirely silent in the central Adagio, a gentle and intimate Siciliano in the minor mode. The contrapuntal third movement opens with a cheerful theme played initially by the first keyboard, then joined by the second. The theme is developed at some length before the violins, then the rest of the strings, join in.


Franz Schubert

b. January 31, 1797, Vienna, Austria
d. November 19, 1828, Vienna, Austria

Franz Schubert is one of the best-loved and most important composers of the nineteenth century, his music consistently marked by a remarkable melodic gift, rich harmonies, and an expansive treatment of traditional forms. During his short but extremely prolific career, he composed nine symphonies, dozens of chamber and solo piano works, and a host of operas and liturgical works. His songs, numbering over 600, virtually created the genre of the art song. He started composing in his teens, and some early works came to the notice of Antonio Salieri, who worked with the young composer on composition and music theory. After a couple of unhappy years spent as a schoolteacher by day and composer by night, Schubert decided to pursue a career as a full-time composer, leading a somewhat bohemian life while creating a vast number of compositions that, at the time, attracted little attention. Only gradually did his music win acclaim, inspiring a remarkable burst of creativity in the mid 1820s. By that time, however, he was suffering badly from the syphilis and (possibly) typhoid fever that would take his life at age 31.

Symphony No. 1 in D major, D. 82
Composed: 1813
Duration: 28 minutes

In 1808, the eleven-year-old Franz Schubert entered the choir of the Imperial Kapelle, attending the attached Stadkonvikt school for the next several years. The school’s pupils had an orchestra – Schubert played violin – that performed most nights, reading through the popular symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. According to his friends, Schubert wrote a couple of symphonies and some overtures for this group. But he destroyed them, and only a fragment of a symphony written in 1811 survives. The Symphony No. 1 dates from October 1813, and was probably also performed by the Stadkonvikt orchestra at some point. After that performance, and in common with Schubert’s other early symphonies, the Symphony No. 1 went unheard and unpublished until the end of the nineteenth century. Generally regarded as one of Schubert’s finest early works, the Symphony betrays the influence of his ongoing private lessons with Antonio Salieri, with whom Schubert continued to study until 1817.

The grand, ceremonial Adagio introduction to the first movement leads into a brilliant, scurrying first theme. Another upward-striving idea then takes over and is worked with for a time, gaining momentum as it goes. That theme takes a more dramatic turn in the formal development section. Then, surprisingly and unusually, the slow introduction to the movement makes a reappearance before the restatement of the main themes and a decisive coda. The Andante second movement is lilting and graceful at first. Its second theme is more stately and dramatic, in the manner of a march. But delicate woodwind colors soon take over as the first melody returns. The rollicking third movement has some of the folksy humor of the Minuet movements of Franz Josef Haydn’s symphonies; its central section is more laid-back, evoking the Austrian ländler. A lively, heavily ornamented theme is the focus of the energetic final movement – its momentum, only slowed slightly by the playful humor of the light-hearted second theme, carries right through to its vigorous coda.