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2018-19 CONCERT SEASON
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TRANSFORMATIONS
One performance only! SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 2019 at 2:30pm ENT CENTER FOR THE ARTS 5225 N Nevada Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80918 Dr. Karen Walwyn piano Sponsored by the Strub-Heer Fund Johannes Brahms Tragic Overture, op. 81 Anton Arensky Variations on a Theme by Tchaikovsky, op. 71 Florence Price Piano Concerto in One Movement Felix Mendelssohn Symphony No. 5 in D Major, op. 107 “Reformation” The Chamber Orchestra’s season ends with the perfect blend of familiar repertoire and forgotten gems. The passionate Romantic language of Tchaikovsky speaks through Arensky’s Variations, while the overlooked voice of pioneering African-American composer Florence Price comes to life in an astonishing performance of her Piano Concerto in One Movement by special guest Karen Walwyn, piano. A rare performance of Brahms’ Tragic Overture is a “must hear,” along with Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” Symphony in a performance with so much energy and drive that you might just entirely rethink the piece!
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PROGRAM NOTES BY MARK ARNEST
Overview: Anton Arensky
Born 12 July, 1861, Novograd, Russia; died February 25, 1906, Perkjärvi, Finland
Work Composed: 1893
Anton Arensky apparently had only two interests in life: music and fun. He was a superb pianist, as demonstrated in some recordings he made in the early 1890s. He composed prolifically, publishing 75 works between 1881 and 1905, including two operas, two symphonies, and some fine chamber music. At some point in his short life, he received a government pension that left him free to compose, but also left him free to pursue his vices, and he died of tuberculosis at age 44. His teacher Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that Arensky’s life “had run a dissipated course between wine and card-playing. … In his youth Arensky had not escaped entirely my own influence; later he fell under Tchaikovsky’s influence. He will soon be forgotten.” Nevertheless his name – although not much of his music – lives on for having played a small part in the extraordinary late-nineteenth century Russian cultural renaissance.
Memorial pieces have a long history in music. They were already common by 1497, when Josquin des Prez, the greatest composer of his generation, commemorated the death of the previous generation’s greatest composer with his La déploration de la mort de Johannes Ockeghem. The tradition was very much alive in nineteenth century Russia. When the pianist, conductor, and composer Nikolai Rubinstein died in 1881, Tchaikovsky honored his mentor’s memory with his Piano Trio, Op. 50. When Tchaikovsky himself died in 1893, he was honored by several of his colleagues, including Sergei Rachmaninoff in his Trio Elegiac, Op. 9, Alexander Gretchaninov in his symphonic Elegy in Memory of Tchaikovsky, and Arensky in his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 35.
The Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky began as the slow movement of that quartet, composed for the highly unusual ensemble of violin, viola, and two cellos. The theme is from Tchaikovsky’s song, A Legend, the fifth of his 16 Songs for Children, Op. 54. The movement quickly became an audience favorite, prompting Arensky to make this string orchestra version. (Considering the differences between the two ensembles, there are fewer differences between the versions that you might expect.)
Tchaikovsky’s soulful theme has a slightly liturgical feel appropriate to its text, a translation of Richard Henry Stoddard’s “Roses and Thorns,” a poem about the young Jesus. Arensky focuses entirely on Tchaikovsky’s theme; the seven decorative variations are delightful and beautifully laid out for the instruments – as you’d expect from a Rimsky-Korsakov student.
Overview: Florence Price
Born April 9, 1887, Little Rock, Arkansas; died June 3, 1953, Chicago, Illinois
Work Composed: ca. 1934
Among obscure composers, none has a more compelling story than Florence Price. As the first African American woman to have orchestral compositions performed, she’s frequently cited in articles and textbooks. But the musicologist Douglas Shadle describes Florence Price’s reputation as “spectral”: As music critic Alex Ross writes, “she is mentioned more often than she is heard.”
A glance at a newspaper archive will show that Price has been rediscovered regularly since the 1980s, but the current revival appears different, with more and more works being recorded, a documentary film in circulation, and – finally! – a publisher. It’s aided by the fact that a trove of her music was discovered in 2009, including a late violin concerto that shows Price exploring a more sophisticated musical vocabulary.
Price was born to a mixed-race couple in Arkansas. She showed unusual musical talent and attended the New England Conservatory, where she studied organ, piano pedagogy, and composition. She returned to Little Rock, where she married and taught music. In 1927, partly in response to a lynching in Little Rock, the Prices joined the Great Migration and moved to Chicago. There she began studying composition again, with Leo Sowerby; and in 1932 her work caught the attention of Frederick Stock, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In June 1933, Stock and the orchestra performed her Symphony No. 1, and the following year she premiered the Concerto in One Movement.
On April 9, 1939, Price had a moment of national attention when Marian Anderson performed some of Price's songs and spiritual arrangements at her famous performance at the Lincoln Memorial. But Price still had difficulty getting performances. In a 1943 letter asking Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky to consider programming her music, she wrote,
Unfortunately the work of a woman composer is preconceived by many to be light froth, lacking in depth, logic and virility. Add to that the incident of race – I have Colored blood in my veins – and you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.
Apparently Koussevitzky never replied.
Price continued to hone her craft, studying with composer Roy Harris in the 1940s; her later works, while hardly modern, are more adventuresome than the earlier ones. Her career was slowly moving forward in the early 1950s, but Price’s health failed and following her death, her music was largely forgotten.
The Concerto in One Movement comes very much out of the tradition of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. (Shadle calls Price “the culmination of the African American intellectual stream that followed in Dvorak’s footsteps.”) There’s no hint of the modernism of Stravinsky or Schoenberg, and even the resemblance between Price’s finale and Debussy’s African American-inspired works is strictly generic. Although in a single movement, there are three distinct sections that correspond to the traditional fast-slow-fast concerto form.
The first section is stormy yet lyrical. The form is free: The orchestra and piano first alternate, then join. The tonality stays mostly in D minor, with brief excursions into other keys (including a triumphant B-flat major). The spiritual-like second movement is haunting. The finale is based on the Juba dance, an African American plantation dance that has its roots in the Congo. You have to be a curmudgeon not to be charmed by it.
There was an unusual obstacle in bringing this work to the public: The orchestral parts had been lost. Composer Trevor Weston reconstructed the orchestral part, guided by three different piano scores – a version for solo piano, one for three pianos, and one for two pianos that contained Price’s notes on the orchestration; other Price orchestral works; and works by her composition teacher, George Chadwick. Price’s notes provided only a hint of what she had in mind. Of a passage for the strings, Weston writes, “Was it all of them? Or just some? If you use violins and cellos, that’s a different sound than violas and cellos. It’s like reconstructing a recipe or dish by a cook.” The reconstructed concerto was premiered in 2011, with Karen Walwyn as soloist.
Overview: Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Germany; died April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1880
Like his mentor, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms had a tendency to focus on one medium at a time. His three piano sonatas were composed one after another, as were his two piano quartets, the Triumphlied and the Schicksalslied, a pair of massive works for chorus and orchestra, and the final solo piano works, Op. 116 through 119. So the simultaneous composition of his only two concert overtures – the rambunctious Academic Festival Overture and the dour Tragic Overture – is not unusual in his output. Both were sketched in the summer of 1880 and completed later that year.
Brahms said of the two overtures that “one laughs and the other weeps,” and perhaps he simply needed to work on them simultaneously so as to give his personality its full range. However, unlike the Academic Festival Overture, much of the Tragic Overture’s thematic material dates from about a decade earlier, mixed in with sketches for the Alto Rhapsody and the Liebeslieder Waltzes of 1870.
The title is Brahms’s, though he told the conductor Bernhard Scholz that dramatic was also appropriate. The piece is conceived on a scale comparable to the first movements of his final two symphonies. The orchestra Brahms calls for is slightly larger, with piccolo and tuba added to his usual forces.
The overture begins with two striking chords The main theme is first sinuous, then stormy. Brahms creates energy with dramatic changes of key and incisive rhythms. The lyrical second theme is pulled upwards by its bass line, but its warmth is short-lived, as the music quickly turns from F major to F minor.
Brahms carried on the tradition of Beethoven to a degree unmatched by his contemporaries – one commentator has written that he was the first composer to spend his life regretting that he hadn’t been born earlier – but in one area Brahms’s treatment of the traditional sonata form is highly individual and owes nothing to earlier composers: the closing sections of his expositions.
The typical Classical closing section is a kind of placeholder. It tells listeners that, although the key has changed, we’ve reached a place of stability from which we will venture into the uncharted territory of the development section. Closing themes tend to be more generic than the other themes in a sonata form: Too much individuality would undermine their purpose as a grounding moment.
In contrast, Brahms’s closing sections can be quite hairy. The tonality may be unstable, and the pace of events frequently accelerates, not calms down. Psychologically, Brahms blurs the distinction between the exposition and the development.
This closing section begins with a destabilizing series of modulations. Although it settles down in F, Brahms keeps us guessing whether it will be the expected F major or F minor.
The development section begins with the same two chords with which the piece opened, creating a moment of structural ambiguity – will Brahms repeat the exposition? He does not, but what follows is remarkable and possibly unique in Brahms’s output. The tempo decreases by half; and instead of the tumultuous development that the exposition has led us to expect, we get a mysterious, subdued but quietly determined passage. It’s this part of the piece to which composer Walter Niemann was probably referring when he wrote, “The fleeting touches of thrilling, individual emotion in this overture are not to be found in conflict and storm, but in the crushing loneliness of terrifying and unearthly silences in what have been called ‘dead places.’”
When we get our first taste of D major, it sounds not like a goal but like a far-off dream, and it finally arrives as a sublime chorale-like statement of the opening theme. The recapitulation begins, not with this first theme, but the lyrical second theme. The first theme finally returns in the apocalyptic D-minor coda. An eerie calm precedes the big ending.
Overview: Felix Mendelssohn
Born February 3, 1809, Hamburg, Germany; died November 4, 1847, Leipzig, Germany
Work Composed: 1830
It’s not that surprising that Felix Mendelssohn chose not to publish his Reformation symphony. He was notoriously picky about what he’d share with the world, and only about half the Mendelssohn music we hear today was published during his lifetime. The Reformation is merely one of the most popular and ambitious of his posthumously published works. (The even more popular Italian symphony was also published posthumously.)
But the animosity he came to feel towards the Reformation symphony has no parallel in his attitude to other unpublished pieces. “I can no longer tolerate the ‘Reformation’ Symphony, and of all my compositions it is the one I would most like to see burnt,” he wrote to his friend Julius Rietz in January 1838.
He had not always felt this way. At the time of its composition, it was one of the richest and most ambitious works he’d undertaken, and he worked hard to get it performed. (The premier finally occurred in 1832.) As was often the case with Mendelssohn, he then withdrew it for revision, and it did not receive its second performance until December 1837, when it was performed in Düsseldorf. This performance is sufficiently obscure that you are still very likely to read that the symphony was performed only once in Mendelssohn’s lifetime.
This second performance was decisive. Mendelssohn was not present, but he took very much to heart Rietz’s description of the audience’s reaction: The piece was very well received, wrote Rietz, and “people were racking their brains trying to figure out what it was supposed to mean.”
That was it for Mendelssohn, and he responded with the quote above. What had changed in Mendelssohn between 1830 and 1838?
This requires a digression. The music of the Classical period – the international style at the time of Mendelssohn’s birth – was characterized by clearly defined forms such as the sonata, the rondo, and the minuet and trio, each of which had a distinct dramatic function. Early in the nineteenth century, composers began breaking away from this orderly world, and one of the most exciting new developments was program music, in which a piece of music’s form was determined by an external program rather than by internal musical processes.
An influential theorist of program music was the composer Adolf Bernhard Marx, who happened to be friends with the Mendelssohn family; and the young Felix was strongly influenced by Marx’s ideas. Some of his greatest early works, including the Overtures to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Hebrides, have striking pictorial and programmatic elements.
This was the Mendelssohn of the Reformation symphony, which tells the story of the Protestant reformation. But Mendelssohn had also been brought up with a deep reverence and understanding of Classical forms, and by 1838 he had turned decisively against program music. As he wrote to Rietz,
The fundamental thoughts (Grundgedanken) in your overture and my “Reformation Symphony” (both having, in my opinion, similar qualities), are more interesting for what they indicate, than actually interesting in themselves. … The most important point is to make a theme, or anything of the kind which is in itself musical, really interesting.
He had rejected Marx’s idea of program music, and had decided that music should make sense entirely on its own terms. Today we are generally inclined to be more charitable to the symphony: Yes, it requires some explanation, but with that explanation, it works very well.
The symphony’s programmatic elements are concentrated in its ambitious outer movements. In the slow introduction, some commentators hear Mendelssohn’s homage to the Catholic Renaissance choral masters; but he was also aware that Mozart had used the opening motif in the finale of his “Jupiter” symphony. Just before the allegro, Mendelssohn inserts the angelic Dresden Amen – a catchy rising melodic motif played here by the strings – which musicologist Benedict Taylor describes, in this context, as a “spiritual call emanating from a realm above the strife of this world.”
The symphony then unfolds as an energetic but, for a while, conventional sonata form. But just before the recapitulation, we again hear the Dresden Amen, and it transforms the following recapitulation. The tempo is slower – an unusual change for any composer, but astonishing for one as devoted to symmetry and balance as Mendelssohn – and the second theme is all but omitted, only briefly alluded to in the lengthy coda.
It’s a complex and elusive movement suggestive of spiritual struggle. Mendelssohn chose to follow it with a movement that contrasts as strongly as possible, both in its expressive directness and the simplicity of its form. He wrote that he himself didn’t entirely understand why he had chosen such a powerfully different mood until he was in a church, listening to prayers being recited monotonously, and noticing how “a merry piece of military music interrupted this, or how the colorful little banners fluttered to and fro, and how the choirboys were draped with golden tassels.”
The brief third movement is an almost operatic song of grief that ends with a brief allusion to the first movement.
The finale begins with Martin Luther’s famous chorale tune, “Ein’ Feste Burg ist unser Gott.” Taylor writes that “Luther’s chorale was known to everyone in Protestant Germany as perhaps the musical embodiment of their religion.” In the following sonata form, the chorale remains a key musical element, as Mendelssohn deftly weaves elements of it into the musical fabric. That the symphony ends in triumph is evident to anyone; but without knowledge of the chorale’s origin, we would not know that this triumph is Protestant.
We will never know if Mendelssohn had an overarching story for the symphony. But even without it, Taylor writes, “Mendelssohn’s work could be justly claimed to be one of the finest pieces of program music written in the nineteenth century.”
Overview: Anton Arensky
Born 12 July, 1861, Novograd, Russia; died February 25, 1906, Perkjärvi, Finland
Work Composed: 1893
Anton Arensky apparently had only two interests in life: music and fun. He was a superb pianist, as demonstrated in some recordings he made in the early 1890s. He composed prolifically, publishing 75 works between 1881 and 1905, including two operas, two symphonies, and some fine chamber music. At some point in his short life, he received a government pension that left him free to compose, but also left him free to pursue his vices, and he died of tuberculosis at age 44. His teacher Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that Arensky’s life “had run a dissipated course between wine and card-playing. … In his youth Arensky had not escaped entirely my own influence; later he fell under Tchaikovsky’s influence. He will soon be forgotten.” Nevertheless his name – although not much of his music – lives on for having played a small part in the extraordinary late-nineteenth century Russian cultural renaissance.
Memorial pieces have a long history in music. They were already common by 1497, when Josquin des Prez, the greatest composer of his generation, commemorated the death of the previous generation’s greatest composer with his La déploration de la mort de Johannes Ockeghem. The tradition was very much alive in nineteenth century Russia. When the pianist, conductor, and composer Nikolai Rubinstein died in 1881, Tchaikovsky honored his mentor’s memory with his Piano Trio, Op. 50. When Tchaikovsky himself died in 1893, he was honored by several of his colleagues, including Sergei Rachmaninoff in his Trio Elegiac, Op. 9, Alexander Gretchaninov in his symphonic Elegy in Memory of Tchaikovsky, and Arensky in his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 35.
The Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky began as the slow movement of that quartet, composed for the highly unusual ensemble of violin, viola, and two cellos. The theme is from Tchaikovsky’s song, A Legend, the fifth of his 16 Songs for Children, Op. 54. The movement quickly became an audience favorite, prompting Arensky to make this string orchestra version. (Considering the differences between the two ensembles, there are fewer differences between the versions that you might expect.)
Tchaikovsky’s soulful theme has a slightly liturgical feel appropriate to its text, a translation of Richard Henry Stoddard’s “Roses and Thorns,” a poem about the young Jesus. Arensky focuses entirely on Tchaikovsky’s theme; the seven decorative variations are delightful and beautifully laid out for the instruments – as you’d expect from a Rimsky-Korsakov student.
Overview: Florence Price
Born April 9, 1887, Little Rock, Arkansas; died June 3, 1953, Chicago, Illinois
Work Composed: ca. 1934
Among obscure composers, none has a more compelling story than Florence Price. As the first African American woman to have orchestral compositions performed, she’s frequently cited in articles and textbooks. But the musicologist Douglas Shadle describes Florence Price’s reputation as “spectral”: As music critic Alex Ross writes, “she is mentioned more often than she is heard.”
A glance at a newspaper archive will show that Price has been rediscovered regularly since the 1980s, but the current revival appears different, with more and more works being recorded, a documentary film in circulation, and – finally! – a publisher. It’s aided by the fact that a trove of her music was discovered in 2009, including a late violin concerto that shows Price exploring a more sophisticated musical vocabulary.
Price was born to a mixed-race couple in Arkansas. She showed unusual musical talent and attended the New England Conservatory, where she studied organ, piano pedagogy, and composition. She returned to Little Rock, where she married and taught music. In 1927, partly in response to a lynching in Little Rock, the Prices joined the Great Migration and moved to Chicago. There she began studying composition again, with Leo Sowerby; and in 1932 her work caught the attention of Frederick Stock, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In June 1933, Stock and the orchestra performed her Symphony No. 1, and the following year she premiered the Concerto in One Movement.
On April 9, 1939, Price had a moment of national attention when Marian Anderson performed some of Price's songs and spiritual arrangements at her famous performance at the Lincoln Memorial. But Price still had difficulty getting performances. In a 1943 letter asking Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky to consider programming her music, she wrote,
Unfortunately the work of a woman composer is preconceived by many to be light froth, lacking in depth, logic and virility. Add to that the incident of race – I have Colored blood in my veins – and you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.
Apparently Koussevitzky never replied.
Price continued to hone her craft, studying with composer Roy Harris in the 1940s; her later works, while hardly modern, are more adventuresome than the earlier ones. Her career was slowly moving forward in the early 1950s, but Price’s health failed and following her death, her music was largely forgotten.
The Concerto in One Movement comes very much out of the tradition of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. (Shadle calls Price “the culmination of the African American intellectual stream that followed in Dvorak’s footsteps.”) There’s no hint of the modernism of Stravinsky or Schoenberg, and even the resemblance between Price’s finale and Debussy’s African American-inspired works is strictly generic. Although in a single movement, there are three distinct sections that correspond to the traditional fast-slow-fast concerto form.
The first section is stormy yet lyrical. The form is free: The orchestra and piano first alternate, then join. The tonality stays mostly in D minor, with brief excursions into other keys (including a triumphant B-flat major). The spiritual-like second movement is haunting. The finale is based on the Juba dance, an African American plantation dance that has its roots in the Congo. You have to be a curmudgeon not to be charmed by it.
There was an unusual obstacle in bringing this work to the public: The orchestral parts had been lost. Composer Trevor Weston reconstructed the orchestral part, guided by three different piano scores – a version for solo piano, one for three pianos, and one for two pianos that contained Price’s notes on the orchestration; other Price orchestral works; and works by her composition teacher, George Chadwick. Price’s notes provided only a hint of what she had in mind. Of a passage for the strings, Weston writes, “Was it all of them? Or just some? If you use violins and cellos, that’s a different sound than violas and cellos. It’s like reconstructing a recipe or dish by a cook.” The reconstructed concerto was premiered in 2011, with Karen Walwyn as soloist.
Overview: Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Germany; died April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1880
Like his mentor, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms had a tendency to focus on one medium at a time. His three piano sonatas were composed one after another, as were his two piano quartets, the Triumphlied and the Schicksalslied, a pair of massive works for chorus and orchestra, and the final solo piano works, Op. 116 through 119. So the simultaneous composition of his only two concert overtures – the rambunctious Academic Festival Overture and the dour Tragic Overture – is not unusual in his output. Both were sketched in the summer of 1880 and completed later that year.
Brahms said of the two overtures that “one laughs and the other weeps,” and perhaps he simply needed to work on them simultaneously so as to give his personality its full range. However, unlike the Academic Festival Overture, much of the Tragic Overture’s thematic material dates from about a decade earlier, mixed in with sketches for the Alto Rhapsody and the Liebeslieder Waltzes of 1870.
The title is Brahms’s, though he told the conductor Bernhard Scholz that dramatic was also appropriate. The piece is conceived on a scale comparable to the first movements of his final two symphonies. The orchestra Brahms calls for is slightly larger, with piccolo and tuba added to his usual forces.
The overture begins with two striking chords The main theme is first sinuous, then stormy. Brahms creates energy with dramatic changes of key and incisive rhythms. The lyrical second theme is pulled upwards by its bass line, but its warmth is short-lived, as the music quickly turns from F major to F minor.
Brahms carried on the tradition of Beethoven to a degree unmatched by his contemporaries – one commentator has written that he was the first composer to spend his life regretting that he hadn’t been born earlier – but in one area Brahms’s treatment of the traditional sonata form is highly individual and owes nothing to earlier composers: the closing sections of his expositions.
The typical Classical closing section is a kind of placeholder. It tells listeners that, although the key has changed, we’ve reached a place of stability from which we will venture into the uncharted territory of the development section. Closing themes tend to be more generic than the other themes in a sonata form: Too much individuality would undermine their purpose as a grounding moment.
In contrast, Brahms’s closing sections can be quite hairy. The tonality may be unstable, and the pace of events frequently accelerates, not calms down. Psychologically, Brahms blurs the distinction between the exposition and the development.
This closing section begins with a destabilizing series of modulations. Although it settles down in F, Brahms keeps us guessing whether it will be the expected F major or F minor.
The development section begins with the same two chords with which the piece opened, creating a moment of structural ambiguity – will Brahms repeat the exposition? He does not, but what follows is remarkable and possibly unique in Brahms’s output. The tempo decreases by half; and instead of the tumultuous development that the exposition has led us to expect, we get a mysterious, subdued but quietly determined passage. It’s this part of the piece to which composer Walter Niemann was probably referring when he wrote, “The fleeting touches of thrilling, individual emotion in this overture are not to be found in conflict and storm, but in the crushing loneliness of terrifying and unearthly silences in what have been called ‘dead places.’”
When we get our first taste of D major, it sounds not like a goal but like a far-off dream, and it finally arrives as a sublime chorale-like statement of the opening theme. The recapitulation begins, not with this first theme, but the lyrical second theme. The first theme finally returns in the apocalyptic D-minor coda. An eerie calm precedes the big ending.
Overview: Felix Mendelssohn
Born February 3, 1809, Hamburg, Germany; died November 4, 1847, Leipzig, Germany
Work Composed: 1830
It’s not that surprising that Felix Mendelssohn chose not to publish his Reformation symphony. He was notoriously picky about what he’d share with the world, and only about half the Mendelssohn music we hear today was published during his lifetime. The Reformation is merely one of the most popular and ambitious of his posthumously published works. (The even more popular Italian symphony was also published posthumously.)
But the animosity he came to feel towards the Reformation symphony has no parallel in his attitude to other unpublished pieces. “I can no longer tolerate the ‘Reformation’ Symphony, and of all my compositions it is the one I would most like to see burnt,” he wrote to his friend Julius Rietz in January 1838.
He had not always felt this way. At the time of its composition, it was one of the richest and most ambitious works he’d undertaken, and he worked hard to get it performed. (The premier finally occurred in 1832.) As was often the case with Mendelssohn, he then withdrew it for revision, and it did not receive its second performance until December 1837, when it was performed in Düsseldorf. This performance is sufficiently obscure that you are still very likely to read that the symphony was performed only once in Mendelssohn’s lifetime.
This second performance was decisive. Mendelssohn was not present, but he took very much to heart Rietz’s description of the audience’s reaction: The piece was very well received, wrote Rietz, and “people were racking their brains trying to figure out what it was supposed to mean.”
That was it for Mendelssohn, and he responded with the quote above. What had changed in Mendelssohn between 1830 and 1838?
This requires a digression. The music of the Classical period – the international style at the time of Mendelssohn’s birth – was characterized by clearly defined forms such as the sonata, the rondo, and the minuet and trio, each of which had a distinct dramatic function. Early in the nineteenth century, composers began breaking away from this orderly world, and one of the most exciting new developments was program music, in which a piece of music’s form was determined by an external program rather than by internal musical processes.
An influential theorist of program music was the composer Adolf Bernhard Marx, who happened to be friends with the Mendelssohn family; and the young Felix was strongly influenced by Marx’s ideas. Some of his greatest early works, including the Overtures to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Hebrides, have striking pictorial and programmatic elements.
This was the Mendelssohn of the Reformation symphony, which tells the story of the Protestant reformation. But Mendelssohn had also been brought up with a deep reverence and understanding of Classical forms, and by 1838 he had turned decisively against program music. As he wrote to Rietz,
The fundamental thoughts (Grundgedanken) in your overture and my “Reformation Symphony” (both having, in my opinion, similar qualities), are more interesting for what they indicate, than actually interesting in themselves. … The most important point is to make a theme, or anything of the kind which is in itself musical, really interesting.
He had rejected Marx’s idea of program music, and had decided that music should make sense entirely on its own terms. Today we are generally inclined to be more charitable to the symphony: Yes, it requires some explanation, but with that explanation, it works very well.
The symphony’s programmatic elements are concentrated in its ambitious outer movements. In the slow introduction, some commentators hear Mendelssohn’s homage to the Catholic Renaissance choral masters; but he was also aware that Mozart had used the opening motif in the finale of his “Jupiter” symphony. Just before the allegro, Mendelssohn inserts the angelic Dresden Amen – a catchy rising melodic motif played here by the strings – which musicologist Benedict Taylor describes, in this context, as a “spiritual call emanating from a realm above the strife of this world.”
The symphony then unfolds as an energetic but, for a while, conventional sonata form. But just before the recapitulation, we again hear the Dresden Amen, and it transforms the following recapitulation. The tempo is slower – an unusual change for any composer, but astonishing for one as devoted to symmetry and balance as Mendelssohn – and the second theme is all but omitted, only briefly alluded to in the lengthy coda.
It’s a complex and elusive movement suggestive of spiritual struggle. Mendelssohn chose to follow it with a movement that contrasts as strongly as possible, both in its expressive directness and the simplicity of its form. He wrote that he himself didn’t entirely understand why he had chosen such a powerfully different mood until he was in a church, listening to prayers being recited monotonously, and noticing how “a merry piece of military music interrupted this, or how the colorful little banners fluttered to and fro, and how the choirboys were draped with golden tassels.”
The brief third movement is an almost operatic song of grief that ends with a brief allusion to the first movement.
The finale begins with Martin Luther’s famous chorale tune, “Ein’ Feste Burg ist unser Gott.” Taylor writes that “Luther’s chorale was known to everyone in Protestant Germany as perhaps the musical embodiment of their religion.” In the following sonata form, the chorale remains a key musical element, as Mendelssohn deftly weaves elements of it into the musical fabric. That the symphony ends in triumph is evident to anyone; but without knowledge of the chorale’s origin, we would not know that this triumph is Protestant.
We will never know if Mendelssohn had an overarching story for the symphony. But even without it, Taylor writes, “Mendelssohn’s work could be justly claimed to be one of the finest pieces of program music written in the nineteenth century.”