Program Notes for April 4 and 5 concerts

Felix Mendelssohn

b. February 3, 1809, Hamburg, Germany

d. November 4, 1847, Leipzig, Germany

Felix Mendelssohn was among the most popular composers of his time, and his music remains some of the most often played from the nineteenth century. He was also one of the few musical prodigies whose youthful ability could rival Mozart’s. The grandson of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, young Felix grew up in a home that welcomed as guests many of the most learned people of his day. He took piano, violin, and singing lessons as a youth. By the age of eight he was studying composition, and he was producing remarkably assured works by his teens, including the Octet at age 16 and the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at 17. Mendelssohn was a key figure in resurrecting the reputation of Johann Sebastian Bach, leading the St. Matthew Passion (the first performance the work had enjoyed since Bach’s death in 1750) in a now-famous 1829 concert. He subsequently held conducting posts in Düsseldorf and Berlin. But much of the later part of his life was spent in Leipzig, where he directed the Gewandhaus Orchestra and, in 1843, founded the Leipzig Conservatory. His extensive travels are reflected in compositions like the “Scottish” and “Italian” Symphonies and the “Hebrides” Overture.

“Ruy Blas” Overture, Op. 95
Composed: 1839
Duration: 8 minutes

In 1835, Mendelssohn was appointed as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Over the next several years, while also composing new music at a steady rate, he led concerts dedicated to his own music and that of his contemporaries – including the world premiere of Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1, also heard in this concert – as well as what he called “historical concerts” featuring music by neglected composers of the past. He worked tirelessly to improve Leipzig’s musical standing, in tandem with the city’s opera house, churches, schools, and other musical and arts institutions. One of the organizations with whom Mendelssohn worked was the Leipzig Theatrical Pension Fund. In 1839 the Fund decided to produce a benefit performance of Victor Hugo’s play Ruy Blas, written just months before, and Mendelssohn was asked to create an overture and song for the production. He read the play, decided privately that it was “quite ghastly,” and quickly produced a choral song but begged off of writing the overture, saying that he was too busy. Apparently, though, Mendelssohn re-thought the situation, and wrote the overture in a mere three days.

Hugo’s drama is set in the seventeenth century Spanish court of King Charles II. Ruy Blas, a servant and poet, has fallen in love with the Queen. His boss, Don Sallustio, disguises Blas as a nobleman in a plot to seek revenge on the royal family. Blas becomes popular at court, is appointed prime minister, and wins the Queen’s heart. But when Sallustio attempts to blackmail the Queen, Blas kills him and poisons himself, winning the Queen’s forgiveness as he dies. Esteemed by some and reviled by others, the play was burlesqued by W.S. Gilbert, turned into an opera by Filippo Marchetti, and has been filmed at least twice. First performed on March 11, 1839, Mendelssohn’s overture – which, given his attitude to the Hugo play, he preferred to call simply his “Theatrical Pension Fund Overture” – is an unusually powerful work for the composer, with more than a hint of violence. After an unsettled introduction, with portentous chords from the winds and brass, violins present the agitated main theme. This melody and other somewhat lighter ideas are worked out in highly dramatic fashion before the triumphant major key conclusion.

Henryk Wieniawski

b. July 10, 1835, Lublin, Poland
d. March 31, 1880, Moscow, Russia

One of the most famous violinists of the nineteenth century, Henryk Wieniawski was a prodigy who entered the Paris Conservatoire when he was nine and received its first prize for violin at age eleven. In his teens he embarked on his first tours of France and Russia. From 1860 to 1872 he lived in St. Petersburg as one of Russia’s pre-eminent musicians, teaching at the city’s new Conservatory, leading the orchestra and string quartet of the Russian Musical Society, and influencing – particularly with his stiff-wristed bowing technique – the playing of generations of Russian violinists. He subsequently resumed his international travels, including a two-year tour of the United States, while also holding a teaching post at the Brussels Conservatory. By the late 1870s Wieniawski’s health was such that he was often forced to stop playing in the middle of concerts, and he died from a heart attack in Moscow. Among his modest but significant catalog of compositions are two violin concertos that are among the most challenging in the repertoire, and a number of works (like the once-famous Polonaise in D major) that celebrate his Polish heritage.

Violin Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 22
Composed: 1862
Duration: 22 minutes

Wieniawski established himself as a composer and violin virtuoso in his late teens, at least in part based on the popularity throughout Europe of the first of his two violin concertos, the Concerto in F-sharp minor, Op. 14. Three years after completing that work, in 1856, he started on a second violin concerto, but with his constant traveling and performing he didn’t manage to complete it until six years later. The Violin Concerto No. 2 in D minor was given its premiere on November 27, 1862, in St. Petersburg with Wieniawski as soloist and Anton Rubinstein conducting the Orchestra of the Russian Musical Society (of which Wieniawski served as leader). Over the next eight years the composer continued to revise the Concerto, only allowing its publication in 1870. It was dedicated to Wieniawski’s friend Pablo de Sarasate, who before long would be one of his main rivals as the pre-eminent violinist-composer of the day.

Wieniawski’s Concerto No. 2 manages gracefully to balance sound dramatic structure with lush, attractive melodies and the kind of virtuoso pyrotechnics that his audiences would have expected. Mention should also be made of the prominent role of the orchestra, which goes somewhat beyond a typical concerto accompaniment role, often taking the lead in the musical argument. The first movement, by far the most extensive of the work’s three, features two main themes: a restless opener, and a more lyrical second subject introduced by the horn. Both of these ideas, but particularly the second, are developed at length by the violin soloist, who employs the range of violin techniques, from double and triple stops to harmonics, glissandi, and a variety of bowing styles. Oddly, for a work so focused on the soloist, the movement has no solo cadenza. After the music builds to a powerful climax, a short orchestral coda leads without break into the second movement, a short and beautiful Romance based on a shapely melody in 12/8 time, with a short but fiery interlude, a brief reminiscence of the lyrical second theme from the first movement, and a solo cadenza.

The final movement, marked “à la Zingara,” is a gypsy-inspired whirlwind that was described by Wieniawski as “a small village scene: a summer evening and the villagers have gathered on the village square and want to dance; general merriment, joking and laughter.” Calling to mind other gypsy-influenced works of the time like Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, the perpetual motion of the main theme is offset by a more rustic dance in D major that appears twice, as well as brief reprises of themes from the first two movements.

Robert Schumann

b. June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Germany
d. July 29, 1856, Endenich, Germany

Robert Schumann was one of the quintessential artists of music’s Romantic era. Encouraged in a wide range of studies by his writer/publisher father, Schumann became a law student at the University of Leipzig. But music was his first love, and he studied piano with Friedrich Wieck – eventually, and famously, falling in love with and marrying Wieck’s daughter Clara, one of the finest pianists of her time. Schumann’s efforts to become a piano virtuoso were foiled when he developed partial paralysis of his right hand, so he focused on composing and writing. His music was often written in feverish bursts of activity – 1840, for instance, saw the creation of over 150 songs, and 1842 was a year of chamber music. While he composed in larger forms such as opera, symphony, and concerto, many feel that Schumann’s true genius truly came to the fore in his numerous songs and piano miniatures. As a critic he co-founded the influential Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and wrote articles praising composers like Chopin and Brahms. Having long suffered from mental problems, in February 1854 Schumann tried to drown himself in the Rhine, and he spent his final years in an asylum.

Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 38 “Spring”
Composed: 1841
Duration: 32 minutes

Writing for orchestra didn’t come naturally for Schumann. His first attempt at a large-scale orchestral work, a Symphony in G minor from 1832-33, was never completed. Other than that one piece, Schumann spent the entire decade of the 1830s writing nothing but piano music and songs. Part of that decade was also spent wooing Clara, the daughter of his piano teacher Friedrich Wieck. They had met when Schumann was twenty-four years old and Clara a fifteen-year-old piano prodigy. Friedrich Wieck was impressed with Schumann’s musical abilities, but put off by his drinking and worried by the signs of depression and instability he was already exhibiting – which, with hindsight, could well have been precursors of the even more serious nervous disorders Schumann experienced later. For years Wieck stood in the way of the marriage, but they ultimately ignored him and were married one day before Clara’s twenty-first birthday in September 1840.

Much as she loved Schumann’s lyrical piano pieces and songs, Clara had long encouraged him to take on something ambitious like a symphony. She wrote in her diary, “his imagination cannot find sufficient scope on the piano…his compositions are all orchestral in feeling.” Their marriage seemed to inspire him, and the Symphony No. 1 was composed over a mere four days, January 23 and 26, 1841. The orchestration occupied him for the next month, and was completed on February 20. Not surprisingly, Clara’s opinion of the new work was of great importance to him. Luckily, she was very pleased, writing “…I should never finish talking about the buds, the scent of violets, the fresh green leaves, the birds in the air – all of which, one hears living and stirring through it in youthful strength.” In the next months Schumann pursued his orchestral inspiration, also writing the first version of what became his Symphony No. 4 and a “symphonette” later revised as the Overture, Scherzo and Finale.

There have long been complaints about Schumann’s skills as an orchestral arranger. When Felix Mendelssohn was preparing the first performance of the Symphony No. 1 with his Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra – which took place on March 31, 1841 – he was forced to change the key of part of the Symphony’s opening because some of the notes were unplayable, or barely playable, by the valveless trumpets and French horns then in use. Since then conductors have felt fairly free to make small and large adjustments to Schumann’s orchestration – Gustav Mahler entirely rescored all four of Schumann’s symphonies, and one musicologist even wrote an 874-page book on possible revisions of Schumann’s orchestrations!

Schumann originally gave each movement of the Symphony an evocative title. But while there are a few pictorial details in the work – wind instruments seeming to imitate bird songs, for instance – Schumann didn’t intend his work to be descriptive, but rather more generally impressionistic. As he wrote in a letter to fellow composer Ludwig Spohr, the Symphony had been written “with a vernal passion…that always sways men even into old age and surprises them anew each year. Description and painting where not part of my intention, but I do believe that the season in which this symphony was born influenced its structure and helped make it what it is.” Note that last point – although the work is titled “Spring,” it was actually written in January and February, in the dead of winter. Schumann’s music looks forward longingly to the onset of the new season.

Schumann laid out his strategy for the first movement – originally titled “Beginning of Spring” – in a letter to conductor Wilhelm Taubert, who was about to lead the Symphony in Berlin: “I should like the very first trumpet entrance to sound as if it came from on high, like a summons to awakening. Further on in the introduction, I should like the music to suggest the world’s turning green, perhaps with a butterfly hovering in the air, and then, in the Allegro, to show how everything to do with spring is coming to life.” That first trumpet entrance, a fanfare-like figure, is quickly taken up by the strings. An air of expectancy hovers over the subsequent minor key music. The tempo then accelerates, and the main body of the movement is launched with a relative of the fanfare theme. A second, quieter theme is also announced by the woodwinds over scurrying strings. The development is largely devoted to a variety of rearrangements of the variant of the opening fanfare. The tempo speeds up even more as the movement comes to a close, the momentum halted briefly by the emergence of a lovely, hymn-like idea.

It has been said that the slow second movement, originally called “Evening,” was intended to be a portrait of Clara. The main melody, announced by the violins, then taken up by the cellos over woodwind chords, is a haunting song. Moments of anxiety arise, but are dispelled by a further statement of the main theme by the winds. In the quiet coda, trombones are heard for the first time, hinting at a new idea that emerges more fully in the purposeful stride of the third movement, which follows without a break. This movement, initially called “Merry Playmates,” is in rondo, or ABACA, form: in B the winds and strings trade phrases before a vigorous tune is propelled forward by the strings, and C is an ever more unfettered dance.

An upward-striving gesture opens the fourth movement. Schumann had called this movement “Spring’s Farewell,” and in the letter to conductor Wilhelm Taubert mentioned above, warned him that that music was “not to be taken too frivolously.” Two themes are contrasted here. The first has a playful air. The second, in the minor, has a more rustic flavor, the darker coloration of which carries into the central development, of a more nostalgic character. The themes are heard again in their original form, with a short song from the oboe, a call from the horn, and a short cadenza for the flute. Further horn calls sound forth in the symphony’s exhilarating closing moments.