Spring Harmonies: An Evening of Eternal Dreamscapes

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) suffered from chronic illnesses that often rendered him professionally unproductive for months at a time. 1880 marked the end of just such a period and Grieg announced his return to artistic activity with an appointment as conductor of the orchestra in his home city Bergen. He would only hold this post until 1882 and settled afterward into a structured schedule of composition and touring.    

The inspiration for Grieg’s return to work in 1880 was poet Aasmund Olafsson Vinje. Vinje (1818-1870) was a quintessential Romantic nationalist whose art often focused on rural Norwegian life. Grieg, who could be described in much the same way, found kindred sentiment in Vinje’s words. He chose twelve poems to set as lieder and published them as his op. 33 in 1880. Separated into two “books,” Twelve Melodies after Poems by Vinje was translated into many languages under Grieg’s watchful eye. He was intent on seeing the flavor of the original texts accurately represented in each new form and this standard was no less applicable to himself. In the Op. 34 Two Elegiac Melodies Grieg took two from among the original twelve poems and “translated” them for string orchestra. Rather than use the verse as wellsprings for a pair of short tone poems, Grieg simply re-wrote the vocal lines in the language of strings and the word-for-note orchestration he employed was a stroke of delicate genius. The first movement speaks of the wounds of life and their inability to destroy faith. The second, Last Spring, imagines the season of rebirth colored by the possibility that the viewer may not live to see another. Grieg also arranged these two poems for solo piano in 1880 but the string orchestra version stands out as the most representative of the composer’s nostalgic sense of home.

Source: Jeff Counts, Utah Symphony

Where the Seventh Symphony is an expansive giant with much in common with the “Eroica” Third Symphony, the Eighth is a tautly compressed work – almost “neo-classical” in aspect, if not its subversive attitudes. Beethoven sketched it roughly contemporaneously with the Seventh, which he finished first. The only one of Beethoven’s symphonies without a dedication, it had its premiere in February 1814, on another concert with the Seventh Symphony and Wellington’s Victory.

The first obvious point of concision: no introduction, no chords, just a jump from the starting gate into a manic race. Which then stumbles, comically, in only the first of many musical jokes, the rude humor of which would have been much more apparent then than it is now, although many years later Gustav Mahler was disturbed by it enough to reorchestrate the beginning of the recapitulation, “correcting” one of Beethoven’s pranks.

Like the Seventh, the Eighth Symphony has no true slow movement. Instead there is a “scherzoish” Allegretto that ticks along like one of Maezel’s metronomes. It has often been written that this movement – in tune and in ticking – is a parody or arrangement of a canon that Beethoven improvised in honor of Maelzel in 1812. Scholars now believe, however, that Anton Schindler, the composer’s friend and highly unreliable biographer, may have created both story and canon long after the fact. Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony and other works could have provided a model, were one needed; Maelzel did not produce his metronome until after the Eighth Symphony was completed and the business break with the composer occurred.

Having given us a sort of pseudo-scherzo in place of a slow movement, Beethoven reverts to a minuet for the third movement, a type of movement that his scherzos had made obsolete. (His last previous minuet had been in a string quartet in 1806.) This one is thumpingly humorous in the main section, however, but seriously lyrical in its Trio, burnished by horn and clarinet duets.

The finale is another mad dash, though begun softly, with silent hesitations. The loud, dissonant interruption plays an important role in the huge coda, one of the most over-the-top and outsize codas from the master of the outrageous coda. Tchaikovsky, not noted for his fun side, thought this movement one of Beethoven’s greatest symphonic masterpieces.

The Eighth Symphony was not disliked by Beethoven’s contemporaries, but little favored either, particularly in comparison with the Seventh. When asked why by his piano student Carl Czerny, Beethoven replied, “Because the Eighth is so much better.”

Source: LA Phil

The four drum taps that open Beethoven’s Violin Concerto are one of the most surprising and audacious ideas that the composer ever committed to paper. What was he thinking? Is this an echo of the military music that emanated from the French Revolution and was to be heard all over Vienna in those warlike years? Is it an easy way to set the tempo, like those audible 1-2-3-4 counts that jazz musicians rely on? Is it a suggestion of menace or coming thunder? Is it a way to attract the audience’s attention? Or is it a tune?

The Concerto is so familiar in our concert life that it’s no longer easy to imagine the shock waves those four notes should have set off at its first performance in 1806. In fact the Concerto came into the world with very little fanfare and made little impression on the Viennese or anyone else. Not for some 50 years was it treated as the great work we now know it to be, when Joachim, David, Vieuxtemps, and other virtuosos began to play it everywhere. 

Beethoven may have had no knowledge of Mozart’s five early violin concertos, but he certainly knew a D-major concerto by Franz Clement, a young Viennese violinist who had played it in a concert in 1805 at which Beethoven had presented the “Eroica” Symphony. Beethoven’s own concerto was written “par Clemenza pour Clement” as we read on the autograph score, and the dedicatee gave the first performance in December 1806, an event colored by the anecdote that he was sight-reading from Beethoven’s messy manuscript and by the program’s inclusion of a sonata to be played by Clement on a single string and “mit umgekehrten Violin” – with the instrument upside down.

What makes Beethoven’s Concerto different from all the other violin concertos of his time is its enormously enlarged sense of space. With four symphonies behind him, he now thought instinctively in the extended paragraphs of symphonic structure and was able to create a broad horizon within which his themes could be extended in leisurely fashion and adorned by graceful elaborations from the soloist. For the four drum taps are a theme, or at least a crucial part of a theme, to be taken up by the soloist and the orchestra at various points, sometimes soft, as at the opening, sometimes brutally loud, and always highly distinctive. The other themes are elegant, often built out of rising or falling scales and usually moving in stepwise motion, avoiding wide intervals and sustaining a calm dignity.

The slow movement is a group of variations on a theme of surpassing simplicity and beauty, 10 measures long. First played by the strings alone, it passes to the horns and clarinet, then to the bassoon, then back to the strings with strong wind punctuation. The soloist, who has offered only decoration up to this point, then introduces a second theme, even more serene than the first, also treated to a variation. Just when a final variation seems to be hinted at by the horns, a violent series of chords sets up a cadenza-link to the finale. Since Beethoven left no cadenzas himself, every great soloist from Joachim onward has composed his own set. 

The Rondo’s catchy theme releases a burst of energy and an inexhaustible flow of lively invention. The bassoon is favored in a minor-key episode that is heard, regrettably, only once. At the end, the coda plays with the theme like a kitten with a ball of wool and rounds the work off with a light touch quite at odds with the image of a surly, stormy composer that we often take to be the real picture.

Source: Hugh Macdonald, LA Phil