Digital Program: February 3, 2024

This overture was inspired by Heinrich von Collin’s play Coriolan, based on one of Shakespeare’s less frequently performed tragedies, Coriolanus. Collin’s play enjoyed some success on the Viennese stage for a time after its creation in 1802, subsequently fading from view. It resurfaced for a remarkable one-night stand in 1807 at the palace of Beethoven’s patron Prince Lobkowitz – a vehicle solely for Beethoven’s new overture. Collin’s play then sank like a stone, while Beethoven’s tremendous overture endures.

Beethoven no doubt identified with Shakespeare’s story of a lone man heroically bucking the system, rather than any putative improvement on the original by Collin. Thus, it is assumed that Beethoven’s overture is “programmatic,” dealing with the Roman general Coriolanus and his contempt for the plebeians of Rome, whom he considers greedy and corrupt. He also curses the Roman Senate for bowing to the wishes of the plebeians, for which act of rebellion he and his family are exiled. Coriolanus joins the enemy side, the Volscians, whom he agrees to lead in battle against Rome. Volumnia, Coriolanus’ mother, begs her son to make his peace with Rome.

The stormy first subject of the overture, in C minor, shows Coriolanus’ rebellious nature, the second subject (a tone higher) is associated with the gentle and humane Volumnia. Volumnia eventually seems to win her son over, but then the C-minor theme returns, with less conviction, and the music literally falls apart, as does Coriolanus, whose only possible fate is death: in Shakespeare he is killed by the Volscians, whose army he ultimately refuses to lead against Rome. In Collin, he falls on his own sword. In Beethoven he fades away, almost imperceptibly.

Source: Herbert Glass, LA Phil

Myth and reality often collide as we look back at the last years of Mozart’s short life. The persistent myth is that an impoverished, forsaken, unappreciated genius composed masterpieces for posterity while hurtling toward an untimely death and a pauper’s grave. Exhibit A supporting this story is the last three symphonies, written, it is said, with no prospect of having them performed, to be discovered only after his death. The story is mostly romantic balderdash, but there is a bit of mystery to Mozart’s last three symphonies all the same.

Mozart was 32 when he wrote them in the summer of 1788, and seven successful years as an independent composer-performer-impresario in Vienna had made him prosperous. But when the Holy Roman Empire, of which Vienna was the capital, declared war on Turkey in February of that year, the Viennese economy fizzled, and Mozart’s career fizzled with it. His livelihood depended on the Viennese moneyed class, which dwindled as upper-class men left the city to serve as military officers, or went to their country estates to avoid questions about why they weren’t serving. Mozart nonetheless planned a concert series for that summer, with an unrequited optimism that continued over the next three years, as he treated the drop in his income as a temporary problem that he could solve by borrowing money rather than cutting his expenses. Doubtless he would have been proved right had he survived a few years longer. But in the short term, he had to cancel his concert series – it isn’t clear whether the first concert took place – but he still finished the new symphonies now commonly, if inaccurately, known as numbers 39, 40, and 41. 

Contrary to myth, the evidence indicates that Mozart heard the three symphonies performed. He had orchestra parts copied, an expense he would not have incurred unless he needed them for a performance. He also went to the trouble of re-orchestrating the G-minor Symphony to add clarinets, an effort that would have made no sense unless the Symphony were going to be played. Mozart included symphonies in concerts he gave in Leipzig in 1789 and Frankfurt in 1790, and a Mozart symphony was performed at a concert led by Antonio Salieri in Vienna in 1791. No specific symphony can be identified for any of these events, but it hardly seems possible that Mozart would have passed up a chance to show off one or another of his new works. The orchestra for the 1791 Vienna concert included the clarinetists Johann and Anton Stadler (Mozart wrote his clarinet quintet and concerto for Anton), which may have supplied the occasion for the second version of the G-minor Symphony.

Myth and reality are on more friendly terms when it comes to the effect Mozart’s later works had on contemporary ears. His music was indeed seen as difficult, for both player and listener. His later symphonies particularly must have departed radically from normalcy in a way modern listeners can scarcely imagine. Our notion of “symphony” starts with Beethoven, and we assume that a symphony will be a major work containing a composer’s most profound utterances. Mozart’s audiences, on the other hand, expected a symphony to be relatively small and light. Only 17 years before Mozart wrote his last symphonies, a prominent German musician, describing the symphony for musical laymen, wrote, “Because it will not be practiced like the sonata but must be sightread, it should contain no difficulties that cannot be met and performed clearly by several players simultaneously.” Great emotional power and extended architecture were the territory of oratorio, serious opera, and liturgical music.

The Symphony in E-flat is unusual in several respects. It is the only symphony from Mozart’s adulthood that does not use oboes, which means that the clarinets are given unusual prominence. It also has a slow introduction, a common feature in symphonies of the day, but rare in Mozart. A slow introduction could be a grand entry, setting the mood for a grand allegro, or a moment of tonal darkness, raising uncertainty to be resolved when the Allegro begins. This slow introduction is both, beginning grandly and assertively, then almost dissipating in a few misty bars before the energetic Allegro makes a deceptively cautious entrance.

Both the ambling Andante con moto and the bounding, energetic Minuet are typical of Mozart’s mature symphonies. The middle section of the Minuet, with one clarinet playing a simple but unforgettable little tune over the other clarinet’s bubbly arpeggios, would be at home in any of the dances that Mozart was writing in his part-time job as Imperial court chamber composer.

The scrambling finale is not at all typical of Mozart. Mozart’s finales are often remarkable for their sheer number of melodic ideas, but the finale of this Symphony relies essentially on a single theme, explored and worked over. Such monothematic construction was a favorite device of Haydn, whose spirit is also heard in the movement’s sense of mischief, never more apparent than at the very end, when the theme gets in the last word, refusing to let the Symphony end with conventional final chords.

Source: Howard Posner, LA Phil

As Beethoven’s reputation as a composer came to match his fame as a pianist, he began introducing his large-scale compositions in ambitious musical academies. The most sprawling of these concerts came on December 22, 1808, at the Theater an der Wien, when Beethoven programmed his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, three movements from his Mass in C, a Fantasia for solo piano, a concert aria, the Choral Fantasia, and the present work, the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58.

Johann Friedrich Reichardt, a well-known musical traveler, writer, and former music director to the King of Prussia, happened to be in the theater that night, as a guest of one of Beethoven’s patrons. Reichardt was no musical conservative – he helped cultivate the German art song, paving the way for Schubert – but even he had trouble listening to four hours of Beethoven’s new music. “I accepted the kind offer of Prince Lobkowitz to let me sit in his box with hearty thanks,” Reichardt remembered. “There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from half past six to half past ten, and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing – and still more of a loud.”

“It was with the Fourth Concerto, in G major, that the ultimate of condensation, of unity with the solo exposition, of imagination, and of discipline was attained,” wrote the pianist Glenn Gould. This might seem like a surprising statement, especially when the Third Concerto, with its stormy C minor paralleling the Fifth Symphony, and the Fifth Concerto, characterized as it is by breadth and nobility, have tended to overshadow their more understated companion. But just listen to the unanimity of purpose between soloist and orchestra as the Fourth Concerto opens, with the piano making itself heard from the silence and the strings stealing in as its first utterance fades away. 

Or witness the careful construction of the dialogue between soloist and orchestra in the slow movement, a movement so imaginative that commentators gripped by fantasy have sought a program where none was intended, suggesting, for example, the dialogue of Orpheus (soloist) and the Furies (orchestra) at the gates of the underworld. Another legendary pianist, the German Wilhelm Kempff, wrote that “On the two pages of full score which this movement occupies, there are few notes. Instead there are many rests, which sit like black, sinister birds on the lines of the music, signs signifying a silence which takes the breath away.”

From the depths of the slow movement’s E-minor gloom, the main theme of the rondo-finale scurries in, shy and playful at first, but soon assuming an assertive, almost bellicose character. Orpheus reappears in a brief moment of melodic repose in a patch of thematic material that returns throughout the movement to counterbalance the opening’s more martial character.

Source: John Mangum, LA Phil