|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
A NEW ERA OF EXCELLENCE |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
SPRING CONCERT 2009 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Bravo Brahms! JOHANNES BRAHMS Concerto for Violin & Cello in A minor, Op. 102 PROGRAM NOTES
The most classical of Romantic composers, one who had steeped himself in a study of his predecessors Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, stood firm in his disregard for the "program" music of his contemporaries. Nowhere in the catalogue of the works of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) can one find a tone-poem or a symphonic painting. Many who look at Brahms' output see a long list of pure - or abstract - music pieces from solo piano works to full orchestral masterpieces. His symphonies carry no descriptive titles as works of his contemporaries did - Raff's To Winter, Tchaikovsky's Winter Dreams, or Dvořák's From the New World. Yet, as tonight's program illustrates, Brahms was often moved by external events or impetuses to write music to suit a particular moment, event, or emotion. The Concerto for Violin and Cello in A minor, Op. 102 (Double Concerto) was the last orchestral work Brahm completed, and it followed his Symphony No. 4 in E minor by two years. The concerto displays the same warm, autumnal qualities that characterized much of Brahms' late music output. What it lacks in pure dynamic flair, however, it more than atones for with its long-lined Romantic lyricism, particularly evident in the andante second movement. The Double Concerto began life as a concerto for the noted German cellist, Robert Hausmann, a member of the Joachim Quartet, founded by the same Joseph Joachim who had premiered the Brahms Violin Concerto and who was a fervent champion of the composer's music. The question arises, however, how did a cello concerto turn into a concerto for violin and cello? As with other Brahms works, there is a story of interest behind the concerto's composition. The Joachims, husband and wife, were both good friends with Brahms, and he cared dearly for each of them. After two decades of marriage, the Joachims came to a parting of the ways. Joseph became convinced his wife, the well-known soprano Amalie Weiss Joachim, was having an affair with music publisher Fritz Simrock. During the divorce proceedings, Amalie produced a letter to her from Brahms in which he took her side in the dispute. The Joachims divorce became final in 1883, and Joseph refused to socialize or communicate with Brahms for what he took to be the composer's betrayal of their friendship; but he did continue to premiere and advocate for Brahms' music.
In the course of the composing process, Brahms came to fear that Joachim might take further offense if he wrote a concerto for the cellist of Joachim's quartet instead of a new violin concerto for Joachim himself. As a peace offering to Joachim, Brahms added the violin - several critics suspect by simply taking some of the cello parts and reworking them for the violin - to come to the form we have today. Brahms' ploy worked, for the two men resumed their friendship, though not with the intensity it once had. A concerto for more than one solo instrument was unusual for the late nineteenth century Romantic school of composition. But it was not without precedent. The Baroque period was the age of the concerto grosso and works with various and sundry instrumentation. The Classical era saw a decline in this kind of concerto, but even here Haydn and Mozart had each composed a Sinfonia Concertante, and the master Beethoven himself had written a Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano in C major. Even Felix Mendelssohn, a classicist among early Romantic composers, had penned a concerto for piano and violin. Of his contemporaries, Max Bruch, a friend of both Brahms and Joachim, had composed a double concerto for the unusual combination of clarinet and viola. Still Brahms had ventured onto a little traveled path. Brahms expended a great deal of effort on the concerto, before the three men, Hausmann, Joachim, and Brahms, met in Baden-Baden at the home of Clara Schumann in September 1887 to play through the score. A run-through was scheduled with the local orchestra, and the premiere took place under the direction of the composer in November the same year in Cologne. The response to the work was cool at best. One of Brahms' friends referenced the piece as "a really senile production," while the conductor of its American premiere in 1889 could say only it was "not the most catchy thing imaginable." Few admired the work with the sincerity of Joseph Joachim, to whom Brahms, in appreciation, gave the manuscript score with the notation "to him for whom it was written." The Double Concerto is truly symphonic, the score dominated by the orchestra with distinct sections for the solo instruments. In many respects, the interplay between the orchestra and the soloists is a contrast in Brahmsian styles with the orchestral fullness of his last symphony playing off against the more intimate nature of his late chamber pieces - in a sense two genres colliding and meshing to form a new whole. The cello is the lead solo, but the writing for both instruments is quite extraordinary and difficult, with few of the fireworks that one finds in Brahms's other three concertos.
Most concert-goers are familiar with Brahms's great choral masterpiece A German Requiem, written in 1868 following his mother's death. Few, however, are aware that Brahms was a master at writing for the voice, composing during his career many choral works that are still in demand today. Two of his most masterful compositions for chorus and orchestra are Nänie, Op. 82 and Schicksalslied, Op. 54. The occasion Brahms used for Nänie was the death of his friend Anselm Feuerbach (b. 1829) in 1880. Feuerbach, a neoclassical artist at the Vienna Academy of Visual Arts, focused much of his artistic temperament in works that featured subjects from classical antiquity. He believed that craftsmanship and technique were indispensable to portraying the noble and the ideal in true art. Thus, his works were conceived in the statuesque classicism of Greek and Roman art, and it was Feuerbach's refined technique and symmetry of form that drew the classicist composer Brahms to his works. Through Brahms's intervention Feuerbach gained an instructor's position at the Vienna Academy, a post he held from 1873 to 1877. After losing a design competition for the ceiling of the Vienna Museum of Modeling, a bitterly disappointed Feuerbach resigned from the Academy and moved first to Rome, then permanently to Venice, where he died a few years later. Brahms, following in the steps of his friend, visited Venice, Rome, southern Italy, and Sicily to familiarize himself with the wellspring of Feuerbach's idealized world.
After his Italian trip, Brahms began work on the elegy to his former friend. He selected for the text a poem Nänie by another classicist in the arts - though from another era - Friedrich von Schiller, the same Schiller that provided the text to the choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Nänie is the German form of the Greek noenia, a dirge that parents sang on the death of a child. Schiller's poem is an impassioned contemplation on the brevity of life and the fleeting nature of beauty. In this, he draws on Greek and Roman mythology to emphasize his meaning, without calling out any particular gods or goddesses by name. Brahms, for his part, takes the poem and turns it into a metaphor for the death of the relatively young Feuerbach and the loss to the world of the beauty of his creations. What other great works of beauty could this man have given the world had he lived a normal life span? In Schiller, the opening line "Even the beautiful must die," a clear reference to Adonis, in Brahms becomes a declaration on Anselm Feuerbach. Brahms completed Nänie in the summer of 1881 and dedicated the piece to Henriette Feuerbach, the step-mother of the artist. The premiere of Nänie took place in Zurich on December 6, 1881, and was an immediate success. Today, the composition ranks after the German Requiem with Alto Rhapsody, the Song of Triumph, Song of the Fates and the Song of Destiny as the best-known of Brahms's choral works. One music connoisseur has expressed the following concerning the work: "For sheer heartbreaking beauty of sound and line, Nänie is possibly the most radiant thing [Brahms] ever wrote."
Shortly after completing A German Requiem in 1868, Brahms was visiting conductor and fellow composer Albert Dietrich in Wilhelmshaven, a German naval seaport. By chance, in Dietrich's study Brahms came upon a volume of verse by Friedrich Hölderlin, a contemporary and friend of Friedrich von Schiller. One particular work struck Brahms instantly, Hyperion's Song of Destiny (Hyperion's Schicksalslied), taken from Hölderlin's novel Hyperion,* or, The Hermit in Greece. The Schicksalslied is a short, three-verse poem on immortality and death. The first two verses give a view of the life of the "Holy spirits," who "walk up there in the light"; the third verse paints a quick picture of the lamentable, tragic life of "Suffering humans" who "decline and blindly fall...down into the Unknown." Deeply moved by the verses, Brahms began composing the music for the poem the same day. Despite this inspired start, it took three years of revisions and rewriting before Brahms was fully satisfied with a complete version (a draft version exists of his early conceptions). Composed so soon after A German Requiem and sharing some of that work's characteristics, Schicksalslied is sometimes referred to as Brahms's "Little Requiem." Brahms did, however, owe a debt of gratitude to the eminent conductor Hermann Levi, who led the premiere of Schicksalslied in Karlruhe the evening of October 13, 1871. Brahms had originally intended to conclude the piece with the chorus, but Levi convinced Brahms to delete the chorus, thereby leaving the epilogue to the orchestra itself. Carefully rehearsed and enthusiastically presented by Levi, the "achingly beautiful" Schicksalslied was well-received by the public, securing Brahms a position as a first-rate composer of choral music. The Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80 is the first of two independent orchestral overtures that Brahms composed as a contrasting pair. One is light and humorous in mood, the other, Tragic Overture, Op. 81, dark and dramatic; both are drawn from the same body of material. By nature, Brahms was a retiring individual who disliked the trappings of celebrity. He found it difficult to accept the gushing admiration that sometimes came his way. But among his friends, he could easily become the life of the party. It was no surprise then that when the University of Breslau in 1879 awarded Brahms an honorary doctorate with the citation "the foremost composer of serious music in Germany today," he responded with a simple handwritten note of acknowledgment. He was content to let the matter rest. Bernard Scholz, conductor of the Breslau symphony, informed Brahms that a mere note was not a sufficient response for such an esteemed honor. He suggested that Brahms should make a musical gift to the University: "Compose a fine symphony for us! But well orchestrated, old boy, not too uniformly thick!" Brahms relented, and shortly informed Scholz of the title of his proposed offering. Scholz, unaware that Brahms could be bitingly satirical, thought it “devilishly academic and boring." The Overture is anything but academic and boring. Instead of a sober scholarly piece celebrating the nobility and sanctity of the university setting, Brahms gave his audience a rollicking medley of student songs reflecting the less restrained life of the young academics, songs celebrating drinking, womanizing and initiation. The collection of songs is wrapped in a thickly-orchestrated score, that nevertheless is remarkably light in execution. The orchestral forces are some of the largest ever employed by Brahms, with augmented brass and percussion. The songs were well known to the students, the faculty and the administration at the University. They included the following tunes: Wir haben gebauet ein stattliches Haus (We have built a stately house) in the trumpets, followed by the noble Landesvater (Father of his country) melody in the strings. Then comes the sprightly freshman-initiation "fox-song," Was kommt dort von der Höhe? (What comes from there on high?). All of these are treated again before Brahms brings in the oldest, most famous of German student songs, Gaudeamus igitur:** (Let us rejoice while we are still young; after a jolly youth and a burdensome old age, the earth will claim us.) This last song Brahms imbues with a noble - indeed pompous - grandiosity that brings the work to a stirring conclusion. Brahms conducted the premiere of Academic Festival Overture at a special commencement at the University of Breslau on January 4, 1881, to a mixed reception. The faculty and other academics in the audience failed to get the humor and frowned on the effrontery of the composer. It is reported that the students, on the other hand, received the performance with boisterous enthusiasm. Notes * Hyperion, whose name means 'the one above,' was the father of the sun (Helios), the dawn (Eos) and the moon (Selene). Homer makes references to Hyperion in both The Iliad and The Odyssey. **Click Here to hear an mp3 of the choral version of Gaudeamus igitur.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Clinton Symphony Orchestra PO Box 116 Clinton, IA 52733-0116 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
