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2018-19 CONCERT SEASON
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Have questions?
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Artwork by LuAnn Walsh
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SING AND SHOUT
SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 2019 at 7:00pm BROADMOOR COMMUNITY CHURCH 315 Lake Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80906 SUNDAY, MARCH 17, 2019 at 2:30pm FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH 16 E Platte Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80903 Pre-concert talk begins 45 minutes prior to the performance with William Malone, Music Department Chair, Pikes Peak Community College Elisa Wicks violin Ian Buckspan clarinet Joshua Sechan bassoon Mark Arnest Shout Johann Sebastian Bach Violin Concerto No. 2 in E Major, BWV 1042 Richard Strauss Duet Concertino for Clarinet, Bassoon and Strings, AV147 Franz Joseph Haydn Symphony No. 98 in B-flat Major |
PROGRAM NOTES BY MARK ARNEST
Concert overview: At first glance, this is a motley collection of works, spanning 300 years and four distinct styles. But there are subtle connections in this program. All feature soloists in an important capacity, though in the Haydn, in a stroke of comedic genius, the soloist is reserved until almost the very end and is completely superfluous. Several of the pieces unfold almost conversationally, as if they were written-out improvisations: Arnest’s Shout, much of Bach’s concerto, and Strauss’s Concertino. And in Bach’s concerto, the striking opening motif – a rising triad – will occur again at the start of Haydn’s symphony.
Overview: Mark Arnest
Born Nov. 26, 1954, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Work Composed: 2016
Shout combines several of my musical influences. In my misspent youth, I was a rock and roll guitar player, and the main theme is loosely inspired by the first phrase of blues guitarist Johnny Winter’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” I first encountered the incessant piling on of riffs in the music of the great jazz composer Charles Mingus and, in fact, there is a riff from Mingus’s Better Git It In Your Soul that I had to consciously banish from Shout. The slow, sometimes mechanical thematic evolutions are characteristic of minimalism. And there are several connections – including the proportions and the three-part structure – to Bach’s stupendous Chaconne, the final movement of his Violin Partita in D minor. The Chaconne is a work of such power that Johannes Brahms wrote of it, “If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”
(Despite earnest appeals via ouija board, I have not been able to coax Brahms into saying anything similar about Shout.)
I love harmony, which makes Shout an anomaly in my work: It mostly unfolds over a single chord. The challenge was how to create a convincing musical arc without harmony, modulation, or many obvious structural divisions. (Originally there were to be none of the latter: I had written a lot of the piece before the contrasting middle section popped into my head.) The result is a piece that progresses as a series of waves, often overlapping, and which get generally longer, higher, and more intense. However, there’s no need for you, as a listener, to register this. To the extent that I thought about Shout, it’s so that you don’t have to; it’s not meant to be experienced intellectually. It’s just an old guitarist’s fever-dream.
There is a connection between this piece and musical technology. Like most of my peers, I do a lot of composing on the computer – and not just composing, but often do the final production on the computer as well. (Many contemporary symphonic film scores are produced in this way; nowadays, only blockbusters use real orchestras.) I wanted a lot of activity in Shout, so it’s mostly composed at the level of the desk, a pair of string instruments, instead of entire sections – and I don’t know if I would even have conceived of the piece had not a software company released a string instrument library in which each player had been sampled individually. I’d never thought about writing for a whole bunch of soloists, or near-soloists, but once I had all those solo strings inside the computer, it was hard not to imagine new ways to use them. So I have not just my misspent youth, but also the Vienna Symphonic Library to thank for Shout.
And, most of all, I have Thomas Wilson to thank: Over the years, nobody has been more supportive of my compositional efforts. And especially heartfelt thanks to the players, because Shout is awkward indeed.
Overview: J.S. Bach
Born Born March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Germany; died July 28, 1750, Leipzig, Germany
Work Composed: ca. 1717
Aside from its intrinsic musical merits, which are ample, there isn’t a lot to say about this concerto. We know it’s an authentic Bach concerto because there’s an autographed manuscript, not of this violin version, but of a later harpsichord version; and we can be reasonably certain that it dates from the years 1717–23 – before Bach began working in Leipzig – because that’s when most of his concertos were originally composed, although we can’t be certain it wasn’t composed in Leipzig. Aside from that, it’s crickets. For many a Bach cantata, we know the exact week of its first performance; in the case of this concerto, we don’t know when, or where, or by whom, or even if it was performed.
My barely educated guess is that the concerto belongs earlier rather than later in that six-year window. Bach spent a couple of years in the early 1710s making organ transcriptions of Italian concertos, including ten Vivaldi concertos; and this first movement, although more richly developed than Vivaldi, contains what may be the most Vivaldi-like thematic material in all of Bach. You don’t have to be a genius to have experienced the ear-worm quality of Vivaldi’s music, and Bach may simply have had that sound stuck in his head.
The first movement is in Baroque concerto form, which essentially consists of passages featuring the soloist alternating with passages that do not. Closer up, the piece modulates from the initial E major to various closely related keys. In typical Bach style, once he’s cadenced – the musical equivalent of a full stop – in a key, he’s ready to move on to a new one. Here, he cadences in nearly every closely related key. The most distantly related of these keys, G-sharp minor, is Bach’s final stop before returning to the beginning. The compositional technique is almost kaleidoscopic: Bach joins motifs, divides them, shortens them, extends them, reshapes them, and rearranges them.
Unusually but not uniquely for a Bach concerto movement, it ends with a repeat of the opening section. (So does the finale of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5.) This framing section is itself a mini-ABA form, with the striking opening music cleverly expanded at its second appearance; but this means we hear it twice at the start of the movement and twice at the end, and the final appearance does seem a bit superfluous, which may be why Bach rarely utilized this form.
The second movement is dominated by its mournful bass line, over which the violin weaves a sorrowful song. Violinist Boris Schwartz called it “perhaps the most poignantly beautiful [movement] Bach ever conceived.” Bach didn’t write many typical melodies, 16 bars long with a clear beginning and end; what he excelled at was this sort of quasi-melodic embroidery, which poured out of him without any sense of inhibition or constraint. The finale combines concerto form with rondo form: a jolly theme recurs several times, always in the key of E. As in the first movement, each of the contrasting episodes ends in a different key, and again the most distant key is saved for the final episode.
Overview: Richard Strauss
Born June 11, 1864, Munich, Germany; died September 8, 1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
Work Composed: 1947
Richard Strauss began his career as a twenty-something enfant terrible, shocking audiences with his daring tone poems, and ended it 60 years later as an anachronism, having remained true to a late-Romantic style that younger composers had abandoned. He first achieved fame as an instrumental composer, with tone poems for orchestra that included Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung, Till Eulenspiegel, and Also Sprach Zarathustra. With his 1905 opera Salome he discovered he had a knack for opera, and he concentrated on this genre for the next 27 years, completing thirteen. But with the brilliant but extraordinarily self-indulgent Capriccio in 1942 – in which a poet and a musician argue over the relative merits of words and music, before deciding to compose the very opera we’ve been watching – he had said all he had to say in this realm. Instrumental music and lieder dominated his final seven years.
The Concertino was commissioned by the orchestra of Radio Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. It is Strauss’s penultimate composition, followed only by the famous Four Last Songs, and for those of us whose view of Strauss’s instrumental music is based on the early tone poems, it’s startling. Although still extraordinarily sophisticated, this Strauss is mellower and more genial. Strauss composed as easily as most of us talk, and perhaps the most striking thing about the Concertino is its conversational tone – the music, especially in the second movement, pours out like an extended improvisation. If the Four Last Songs are Strauss’s artistic last will and testament, the Concertino is his last dinner party, containing no deep revelations, but leaving an impression of charm and delight that cannot fade.
Strauss was aware that he sometimes could not control his urge to overwrite things. “I write in too complex a way,” he wrote; “I have a complicated brain.” In this sense, the Concertino is typical, with many oblique coloristic modulations, and its absolute horror of repose. The parts are always moving, and the music continually presses forward.
The first movement is obviously programmatic, although Strauss described two slightly different programs. To his colleague Clemens Krauss, he described the piece as being based on Hans Christian Andersen's story The Swineherd. But he told bassoonist Hugo Burghauser, to whom he dedicated the piece, a somewhat different scenario, in which a princess (the clarinet) gambols in the woods, where she is startled by a bear (the bassoon). The bear woos her, and when they dance, the bear transforms into a prince.
The second scenario fits the music more closely, and even without a program, the seduction of the clarinet by the bassoon is clearly audible, after which the two share one another’s musical material.
The first movement contains all of the piece’s dramatic action; the second movement is an extended outpouring of lyricism, displaying Strauss’s legendary inventiveness. Strauss weaves long melodic lines out of pithy motives that originate in the first movement. The textures are masterfully handled, and much of the movement is truly conceived as a duet, with both clarinet and bassoon playing, but neither one dominating.
Overview: Josef Haydn
Born March 31, 1732, Rohrau, Austria; died May 31, 1809, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1792
As is the case with J.S. Bach’s cantatas, the very vastness and richness of Haydn’s symphonic output becomes a barrier to our comprehension. It’s not too difficult to pick one’s favorites out of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, or Mahler’s, or Bruckner’s; and even a a semi-casual listener can find the half-dozen or so of Mozart’s 41 symphonies that truly stand out.
But Haydn’s 104 symphonies – as many as 108 by some reckonings – present a higher order of challenge. For starters, they span nearly 40 years of Haydn’s creative life; and the artistic approach is very different between the first and the last, since Haydn contributed mightily to the late 18th Century’s stylistic innovations. Haydn generally got better as he aged, but there are gems strewn throughout, such as No. 22, with its pair of English horns, and the stormy No. 39, which influenced even Mozart. Even if you limit yourself to the later, consistently excellent, symphonies – beginning with the “Paris” symphonies (Nos. 82-87) – that still leaves nearly two dozen symphonies to get to know.
But it’s well worth the effort, because the fact is, the more Haydn symphonies one knows, the better they sound: Familiarity breeds not contempt but admiration. On the one hand, Haydn was able to compose so fluidly because he used a lot of pre-existing forms, such as the sonata or the minuet and trio (which account for all four movements in this symphony); but he was anything but a cookie-cutter composer. Haydn was one of the most formally inventive composers of all time, and his many sonata movements become even more impressive once you begin to fathom how many different strategies he had for making the form work.
Symphony No. 98 is one of the first set of the “London” symphonies. These symphonies were composed for his two visits to London, in 1791–92 and 1794–95. Most of Haydn’s later symphonies begin with slow introductions, and these introductions are almost always organically connected to the following allegro. In this case, the connection could not be simpler: The piece begins with a slow, minor-key version of what will be the main theme. But the slowness misleads us: It’s so slow, as musicologist Charles Rosen notes, that “it seems, not a melody, but the majestic outline of a harmony.” It enables Haydn to relate the two sections without being ham-fisted about it.
When the allegro version of the theme arrives, Haydn almost immediately varies it by turning the second half of the theme into an accompaniment. This second half – mostly as a basic shape, with the intervals radically altered – dominates the transitional passage. The second theme is closely related to the first. Haydn’s sonata forms are often described as “monothematic,” because where most composers put a second theme, he puts a variant of the first theme; but this is a bit misleading. Haydn’s first and second themes, although similar, are never identical; and in between them, he always uses contrasting themes. Haydn’s so-called monothematic movements always contain more than one theme – but he doesn’t always put them in the places other composers have led us to expect.
The vigorous development section contains imitative music reminiscent of the Baroque style of Handel and Bach. Most of Haydn’s contemporaries had abandoned this style, but Haydn frequently resorted to it to give added texture to his music, especially in development sections.
The second movement is also in sonata form, and though it’s brief, Haydn packs an enormous amount of expressive range into it. The prayerful first theme features pauses between the phrases. A four-note upbeat figure in the second theme’s accompaniment relates it to the first movement’s second theme; the surprisingly stormy development section also begins with a thematic reference to the first movement’s first theme.
The Menuetto’s main theme is characterized by an upward swoosh of grace notes. Later on there’s some charming rhythmic dislocation, but Haydn never lets us lose sight of the pulse.
Haydn’s finales tend to be relatively lightweight, and although this one is as bubbly as champagne, it is nevertheless one of the most ambitious finales Haydn ever composed. It’s also in sonata form. The main theme is clearly connected to that of the third movement, with the earlier swoosh of grace notes slowed down to create a pair of upbeats. As in the first movement, the second theme is closely related to the first theme; but the closing theme is reminiscent of Mozart, and it’s very possible that the younger composer was on Haydn’s mind, since this symphony was the first piece he composed after hearing of Mozart’s death. A four-note upbeat figure relates this movement to the first and second movements, creating an extremely tight overall structure.
It’s impossible to miss the start of the development section: There’s an abrupt change of key, and a new color featuring a solo violin. For clarity, Haydn duplicates this sound at the end of the development section, cleverly giving the start of the recapitulation to the solo violin.
As the piece seems to be coming to an end, Haydn has more surprises for us. There’s an enormous coda, and while it’s common to speed up the tempo at the end of a movement, Haydn instead slows it down, giving the coda added weight. And then, almost at the end … but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.
Haydn’s achievement in his late symphonies is one of the high points of classical music. The the old court patronage system was fading away, but the new, broader audience made up of members of the growing middle class was still unsophisticated. Moving between these worlds, Haydn found a way to compose music that was as advanced as anything being composed by anyone, elevated enough to dazzle connoisseurs, and catchy enough to please the general public. Modern, great, and approachable – it’s difficult for a composer not to envy Haydn’s success.
Concert overview: At first glance, this is a motley collection of works, spanning 300 years and four distinct styles. But there are subtle connections in this program. All feature soloists in an important capacity, though in the Haydn, in a stroke of comedic genius, the soloist is reserved until almost the very end and is completely superfluous. Several of the pieces unfold almost conversationally, as if they were written-out improvisations: Arnest’s Shout, much of Bach’s concerto, and Strauss’s Concertino. And in Bach’s concerto, the striking opening motif – a rising triad – will occur again at the start of Haydn’s symphony.
Overview: Mark Arnest
Born Nov. 26, 1954, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Work Composed: 2016
Shout combines several of my musical influences. In my misspent youth, I was a rock and roll guitar player, and the main theme is loosely inspired by the first phrase of blues guitarist Johnny Winter’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” I first encountered the incessant piling on of riffs in the music of the great jazz composer Charles Mingus and, in fact, there is a riff from Mingus’s Better Git It In Your Soul that I had to consciously banish from Shout. The slow, sometimes mechanical thematic evolutions are characteristic of minimalism. And there are several connections – including the proportions and the three-part structure – to Bach’s stupendous Chaconne, the final movement of his Violin Partita in D minor. The Chaconne is a work of such power that Johannes Brahms wrote of it, “If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”
(Despite earnest appeals via ouija board, I have not been able to coax Brahms into saying anything similar about Shout.)
I love harmony, which makes Shout an anomaly in my work: It mostly unfolds over a single chord. The challenge was how to create a convincing musical arc without harmony, modulation, or many obvious structural divisions. (Originally there were to be none of the latter: I had written a lot of the piece before the contrasting middle section popped into my head.) The result is a piece that progresses as a series of waves, often overlapping, and which get generally longer, higher, and more intense. However, there’s no need for you, as a listener, to register this. To the extent that I thought about Shout, it’s so that you don’t have to; it’s not meant to be experienced intellectually. It’s just an old guitarist’s fever-dream.
There is a connection between this piece and musical technology. Like most of my peers, I do a lot of composing on the computer – and not just composing, but often do the final production on the computer as well. (Many contemporary symphonic film scores are produced in this way; nowadays, only blockbusters use real orchestras.) I wanted a lot of activity in Shout, so it’s mostly composed at the level of the desk, a pair of string instruments, instead of entire sections – and I don’t know if I would even have conceived of the piece had not a software company released a string instrument library in which each player had been sampled individually. I’d never thought about writing for a whole bunch of soloists, or near-soloists, but once I had all those solo strings inside the computer, it was hard not to imagine new ways to use them. So I have not just my misspent youth, but also the Vienna Symphonic Library to thank for Shout.
And, most of all, I have Thomas Wilson to thank: Over the years, nobody has been more supportive of my compositional efforts. And especially heartfelt thanks to the players, because Shout is awkward indeed.
Overview: J.S. Bach
Born Born March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Germany; died July 28, 1750, Leipzig, Germany
Work Composed: ca. 1717
Aside from its intrinsic musical merits, which are ample, there isn’t a lot to say about this concerto. We know it’s an authentic Bach concerto because there’s an autographed manuscript, not of this violin version, but of a later harpsichord version; and we can be reasonably certain that it dates from the years 1717–23 – before Bach began working in Leipzig – because that’s when most of his concertos were originally composed, although we can’t be certain it wasn’t composed in Leipzig. Aside from that, it’s crickets. For many a Bach cantata, we know the exact week of its first performance; in the case of this concerto, we don’t know when, or where, or by whom, or even if it was performed.
My barely educated guess is that the concerto belongs earlier rather than later in that six-year window. Bach spent a couple of years in the early 1710s making organ transcriptions of Italian concertos, including ten Vivaldi concertos; and this first movement, although more richly developed than Vivaldi, contains what may be the most Vivaldi-like thematic material in all of Bach. You don’t have to be a genius to have experienced the ear-worm quality of Vivaldi’s music, and Bach may simply have had that sound stuck in his head.
The first movement is in Baroque concerto form, which essentially consists of passages featuring the soloist alternating with passages that do not. Closer up, the piece modulates from the initial E major to various closely related keys. In typical Bach style, once he’s cadenced – the musical equivalent of a full stop – in a key, he’s ready to move on to a new one. Here, he cadences in nearly every closely related key. The most distantly related of these keys, G-sharp minor, is Bach’s final stop before returning to the beginning. The compositional technique is almost kaleidoscopic: Bach joins motifs, divides them, shortens them, extends them, reshapes them, and rearranges them.
Unusually but not uniquely for a Bach concerto movement, it ends with a repeat of the opening section. (So does the finale of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5.) This framing section is itself a mini-ABA form, with the striking opening music cleverly expanded at its second appearance; but this means we hear it twice at the start of the movement and twice at the end, and the final appearance does seem a bit superfluous, which may be why Bach rarely utilized this form.
The second movement is dominated by its mournful bass line, over which the violin weaves a sorrowful song. Violinist Boris Schwartz called it “perhaps the most poignantly beautiful [movement] Bach ever conceived.” Bach didn’t write many typical melodies, 16 bars long with a clear beginning and end; what he excelled at was this sort of quasi-melodic embroidery, which poured out of him without any sense of inhibition or constraint. The finale combines concerto form with rondo form: a jolly theme recurs several times, always in the key of E. As in the first movement, each of the contrasting episodes ends in a different key, and again the most distant key is saved for the final episode.
Overview: Richard Strauss
Born June 11, 1864, Munich, Germany; died September 8, 1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
Work Composed: 1947
Richard Strauss began his career as a twenty-something enfant terrible, shocking audiences with his daring tone poems, and ended it 60 years later as an anachronism, having remained true to a late-Romantic style that younger composers had abandoned. He first achieved fame as an instrumental composer, with tone poems for orchestra that included Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung, Till Eulenspiegel, and Also Sprach Zarathustra. With his 1905 opera Salome he discovered he had a knack for opera, and he concentrated on this genre for the next 27 years, completing thirteen. But with the brilliant but extraordinarily self-indulgent Capriccio in 1942 – in which a poet and a musician argue over the relative merits of words and music, before deciding to compose the very opera we’ve been watching – he had said all he had to say in this realm. Instrumental music and lieder dominated his final seven years.
The Concertino was commissioned by the orchestra of Radio Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. It is Strauss’s penultimate composition, followed only by the famous Four Last Songs, and for those of us whose view of Strauss’s instrumental music is based on the early tone poems, it’s startling. Although still extraordinarily sophisticated, this Strauss is mellower and more genial. Strauss composed as easily as most of us talk, and perhaps the most striking thing about the Concertino is its conversational tone – the music, especially in the second movement, pours out like an extended improvisation. If the Four Last Songs are Strauss’s artistic last will and testament, the Concertino is his last dinner party, containing no deep revelations, but leaving an impression of charm and delight that cannot fade.
Strauss was aware that he sometimes could not control his urge to overwrite things. “I write in too complex a way,” he wrote; “I have a complicated brain.” In this sense, the Concertino is typical, with many oblique coloristic modulations, and its absolute horror of repose. The parts are always moving, and the music continually presses forward.
The first movement is obviously programmatic, although Strauss described two slightly different programs. To his colleague Clemens Krauss, he described the piece as being based on Hans Christian Andersen's story The Swineherd. But he told bassoonist Hugo Burghauser, to whom he dedicated the piece, a somewhat different scenario, in which a princess (the clarinet) gambols in the woods, where she is startled by a bear (the bassoon). The bear woos her, and when they dance, the bear transforms into a prince.
The second scenario fits the music more closely, and even without a program, the seduction of the clarinet by the bassoon is clearly audible, after which the two share one another’s musical material.
The first movement contains all of the piece’s dramatic action; the second movement is an extended outpouring of lyricism, displaying Strauss’s legendary inventiveness. Strauss weaves long melodic lines out of pithy motives that originate in the first movement. The textures are masterfully handled, and much of the movement is truly conceived as a duet, with both clarinet and bassoon playing, but neither one dominating.
Overview: Josef Haydn
Born March 31, 1732, Rohrau, Austria; died May 31, 1809, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1792
As is the case with J.S. Bach’s cantatas, the very vastness and richness of Haydn’s symphonic output becomes a barrier to our comprehension. It’s not too difficult to pick one’s favorites out of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, or Mahler’s, or Bruckner’s; and even a a semi-casual listener can find the half-dozen or so of Mozart’s 41 symphonies that truly stand out.
But Haydn’s 104 symphonies – as many as 108 by some reckonings – present a higher order of challenge. For starters, they span nearly 40 years of Haydn’s creative life; and the artistic approach is very different between the first and the last, since Haydn contributed mightily to the late 18th Century’s stylistic innovations. Haydn generally got better as he aged, but there are gems strewn throughout, such as No. 22, with its pair of English horns, and the stormy No. 39, which influenced even Mozart. Even if you limit yourself to the later, consistently excellent, symphonies – beginning with the “Paris” symphonies (Nos. 82-87) – that still leaves nearly two dozen symphonies to get to know.
But it’s well worth the effort, because the fact is, the more Haydn symphonies one knows, the better they sound: Familiarity breeds not contempt but admiration. On the one hand, Haydn was able to compose so fluidly because he used a lot of pre-existing forms, such as the sonata or the minuet and trio (which account for all four movements in this symphony); but he was anything but a cookie-cutter composer. Haydn was one of the most formally inventive composers of all time, and his many sonata movements become even more impressive once you begin to fathom how many different strategies he had for making the form work.
Symphony No. 98 is one of the first set of the “London” symphonies. These symphonies were composed for his two visits to London, in 1791–92 and 1794–95. Most of Haydn’s later symphonies begin with slow introductions, and these introductions are almost always organically connected to the following allegro. In this case, the connection could not be simpler: The piece begins with a slow, minor-key version of what will be the main theme. But the slowness misleads us: It’s so slow, as musicologist Charles Rosen notes, that “it seems, not a melody, but the majestic outline of a harmony.” It enables Haydn to relate the two sections without being ham-fisted about it.
When the allegro version of the theme arrives, Haydn almost immediately varies it by turning the second half of the theme into an accompaniment. This second half – mostly as a basic shape, with the intervals radically altered – dominates the transitional passage. The second theme is closely related to the first. Haydn’s sonata forms are often described as “monothematic,” because where most composers put a second theme, he puts a variant of the first theme; but this is a bit misleading. Haydn’s first and second themes, although similar, are never identical; and in between them, he always uses contrasting themes. Haydn’s so-called monothematic movements always contain more than one theme – but he doesn’t always put them in the places other composers have led us to expect.
The vigorous development section contains imitative music reminiscent of the Baroque style of Handel and Bach. Most of Haydn’s contemporaries had abandoned this style, but Haydn frequently resorted to it to give added texture to his music, especially in development sections.
The second movement is also in sonata form, and though it’s brief, Haydn packs an enormous amount of expressive range into it. The prayerful first theme features pauses between the phrases. A four-note upbeat figure in the second theme’s accompaniment relates it to the first movement’s second theme; the surprisingly stormy development section also begins with a thematic reference to the first movement’s first theme.
The Menuetto’s main theme is characterized by an upward swoosh of grace notes. Later on there’s some charming rhythmic dislocation, but Haydn never lets us lose sight of the pulse.
Haydn’s finales tend to be relatively lightweight, and although this one is as bubbly as champagne, it is nevertheless one of the most ambitious finales Haydn ever composed. It’s also in sonata form. The main theme is clearly connected to that of the third movement, with the earlier swoosh of grace notes slowed down to create a pair of upbeats. As in the first movement, the second theme is closely related to the first theme; but the closing theme is reminiscent of Mozart, and it’s very possible that the younger composer was on Haydn’s mind, since this symphony was the first piece he composed after hearing of Mozart’s death. A four-note upbeat figure relates this movement to the first and second movements, creating an extremely tight overall structure.
It’s impossible to miss the start of the development section: There’s an abrupt change of key, and a new color featuring a solo violin. For clarity, Haydn duplicates this sound at the end of the development section, cleverly giving the start of the recapitulation to the solo violin.
As the piece seems to be coming to an end, Haydn has more surprises for us. There’s an enormous coda, and while it’s common to speed up the tempo at the end of a movement, Haydn instead slows it down, giving the coda added weight. And then, almost at the end … but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.
Haydn’s achievement in his late symphonies is one of the high points of classical music. The the old court patronage system was fading away, but the new, broader audience made up of members of the growing middle class was still unsophisticated. Moving between these worlds, Haydn found a way to compose music that was as advanced as anything being composed by anyone, elevated enough to dazzle connoisseurs, and catchy enough to please the general public. Modern, great, and approachable – it’s difficult for a composer not to envy Haydn’s success.