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The Wolfgang/Ludwig Connection
Morrison High School Auditorium -- November 15, 2008 - 8:00 pm
Map to Venue

Don Giovanni Overture                                                                 Mozart

Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, KV466                                        Mozart
Piano Soloist: Dr. Robert Elfline
Allegro
Romanze
Rondo - Allegro assai

Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21                                            Beethoven
Adagio molto - Allegro con brio
Adante cantabile con moto
Minuetto: Allegro molto e vivace
Adagio - Allegro molto e vivace

PROGRAM  NOTES

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827) did not arrive in Vienna for permanent residence until November 1792, nearly a year after the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791). But during the Romantic century that followed Beethoven's death, musicologists, historians, and performers tried to draw a more immediate relationship between these two musical giants. Both were wunderkinds; both pushed their art to new heights; both died relatively young; and, Bonn and Vienna were only a short distance apart as the crow flies. Surely, these two must have met and studied one with the other!

Otto Jahn

It is well-documented that Beethoven went to Vienna in the spring of 1787, and two things are certain: The visit was brief, lasting a mere two weeks, and he returned home in haste at the news his mother's tubercular condition had worsened (She died in July of 1787). Otto Jahn, a nineteenth-century biographer of Mozart, relates one version of the two composers meeting, "communicated to me in Vienna on good authority." Shortly after arriving in Vienna, the sixteen-year-old Beethoven

...was introduced to Mozart, and played to him at his request. Mozart, considering the piece he performed to be a studied show-piece, was somewhat cold in his expressions of admiration. Beethoven remarking this, begged for a theme for improvisation, and, inspired by the presence of the master he reverenced so highly, played in such a manner as gradually to engross Mozart's whole attention; turning quietly to the bystanders, [Mozart] said emphatically, "Mark that young man; he will make himself a name in the world!"

There is, however, no evidence to support Jahn's contention, neither in the correspondence of Beethoven or Mozart, nor in the recollections of these two men's contemporaries.

A latter-day biographer of both Mozart and Beethoven, Maynard Solomon, postulates that Beethoven's quick removal from Vienna after only two weeks may have been encouraged not only by his father's request to return to Bonn to attend to his mother in her illness, but

...perhaps over a rejection by Mozart, who was preoccupied with his own affairs, including his worrisome financial condition...

At this time Mozart was also troubled by the approaching death of his father, a trip to Prague, and the completion of his opera Don Giovanni. Too, Mozart already had living and studying with him another wunderkind of notable talent, nine-year-old Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and possibly felt he could not take on an additional student.

Jahn's is the only anecdote to link the two composers intimately, and since it is heresay and given to Romantic hyperbole, it is entirely possible - and highly probable - that Mozart and Beethoven never met.

W. A. Mozart - 1789

At the time of Beethoven's youthful trip to Vienna, Mozart was negotiating with a theater in Prague to premiere a new opera buffa which he had yet to compose based on the legend of the notorious libertine Don Juan. Don Giovanni was written, with the exception of the overture, in a brief six-weeks period.

The overture was written on the eve of the first performance. The story goes that Mozart was enjoying an evening out with friends and performers of the opera company in Prague, when one of the group reminded Mozart that he had yet to write the overture for Don Giovanni. Feigning nervousness, Mozart and his wife Constanze went to his room where he began composing the overture around midnight. Although tired and somewhat "in his cups," the composer finished the piece in about three hours. Whenever he appeared to nod off, Constanze would bring him back to his duty by telling him fanciful stories.

The music was delivered to the copyists the next morning, but it was just minutes before the curtain was to rise on the first performance that the copied music, the ink still wet, was distributed to the musicians. With Mozart at the keyboard, the orchestra launched into the music with such brio and precision that the audience broke into applause just as Leporello began his solo. Mozart is said to have whispered to those musicians near him, "Some notes fell under the seats. But it went well."

The Overture to Don Giovanni began the trend of using actual themes from an opera as an introduction to the opera itself. It consists of an opening section which reproduces the scene of a banquet and is followed by an allegro which characterizes the impetuous, pleasure-seeking Don, oblivious to consequences. As a concert piece, the Overture has had various codas added at various times to provide a suitable conclusion.

Mozart settled permanently in Vienna in 1781, against the wishes of his father, and at first he was quite in demand as a performer, teacher and composer, due in large part to the ongoing success of his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio. But he soon learned that fame did not guarantee a continuing income. He never received the favor of the royal court as some of his less talented contemporaries did, and he never gained the patronage of a benefactor such as the Esterhazys had been for his friend Joseph Haydn. Besides commissions for new works and teaching, Mozart came to see that subscription concerts were a means to achieving a stable living. To this end, he composed the final seventeen of his twenty-seven piano concertos in the last ten years of his life.

The Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, KV466* is the first of only two piano concertos Mozart wrote in a minor key, the other being No. 24 in C minor, KV491. The concerto was premiered on February 11, 1785, in Vienna with the composer at the keyboard. Mozart's father Leopold happened to be visiting his son in Vienna at the time and wrote to Nannerl, Wolfgang's sister, about the reception of the work: "[It was] an excellent new piano concerto by Wolfgang, on which the copyist was still at work when we got there, and your brother didn't even have time to [practice] the rondo because he had to oversee the copying operation."

This concerto's profound yet lively character makes it one of the most popular of Mozart's concertos. In keeping with its minor key, the concerto is full of Stürm und Drang (Storm and Stress). The second movement Romanza contains one of Mozart's most appealing and best-known melodies. The concerto ends on a bright note, in the key of D major.

Ludwig van Beethoven

The young Beethoven was a great admirer of this particular Mozart piano concerto and kept it in his repertoire until he graduated to subscription concerts of his own music. He played it, for instance, in a benefit concert for Mozart's widow Constanze in 1799. In fact, Beethoven was a great admirer of Mozart's music in general. That Beethoven was influenced in his own compositions by Mozart is clear from one notable example: Beethoven's sketchbooks reveal a passage from Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor that Beethoven adapted to his own Symphony No. 5 in C minor.

It was not the formidable shadow of Mozart that provoked Beethoven to attempt a symphony, but rather the success of his former teacher Joseph Haydn who had brought back from a London engagement a set of symphonies that took Vienna by storm. Beethoven began work on a symphony in C major in 1794 and labored diligently over it for some time, but it remained unfinished; yet some scholars contend that this first serious effort did indeed become the basis for the Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21, completed in early 1800 and auditioned in April of that same year.

The symphony is dedicated to Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a minor aristocrat of Dutch birth, director of the Imperial Library and patron of C.P.E. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and other composers of the period. Its premiere was on a subscription concert for Beethoven's benefit which included a symphony by Mozart, an aria from Haydn's Creation, and a piano concerto and a septet by Beethoven. A local music critic gave praise to the ideas espoused in the piece, but complained about the orchestration; wind instruments are "used far too much, so that the music is more like a band than an orchestra." Following a performance of the work at Leipzig the following year, a reviewer referred to the symphony as "the confused explosions of the outrageous effrontery of a young man."

This first personal concert was the beginning of a ten year period of "astonishing success" for Beethoven and his music, so much so that one Paris critic in 1810 warned that Beethoven's music was "a danger to the musical art... It is believed that a prodigal use of the most barbaric dissonances and a noisy use of all the orchestral instruments will make an effect. Alas, the ear is only stabbed; there is no appeal to the heart."

The Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21 looks to Mozart and Haydn in many of its characteristics, but this is to be expected from a composer who was an ardent admirer of one and the student of the other. But, the work also reveals the Beethoven that is to come. The third movement Menuetto is not a true minuet in the sense of Mozart or Haydn, but rather a taste of the Scherzo Beethoven was to introduce fully in his Third Symphony with such flair. This Menuetto is constructed with strong rhythms, fast tempi, and sudden modulations in mood and texture which are then moderated with a melodic trio. Though short, the movement is a joy to hear and clearly prescient of what was to come in Beethoven's music output that did so much to develop and extend classical music.

*KV (Köchels Verzeichnis) refers to Ludwig von Köchel's chronological thematic catalogue of Mozart's works, the first systematic attempt at a listing of Mozart's complete music output.

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