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Unfinished Romantic
Janurary 14, 2017, 7pm Broadmoor Community Church January 15, 2017, 2:30pm First Christian Church |
Fanny Mendelssohn Overture in C Major
Schubert Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, D.759 “Unfinished” Beethoven Leonore Overture No. 1, Op. 138 Franck Symphonic Variations for Piano & Orchestra Dr. Zahari Metchkov, piano Pre-concert lecture 45 prior to each concert with Dr. Tania Z. Cronin, Colorado College The Romantic spirit—personal expression, striving to ever-greater heights, and exploring humanity—will never die! Rare music abounds with Fanny Mendelssohn’s Overture in C Major and a stunning performance of Franck’s Symphonic Variations by acclaimed pianist Zahari Metchkov, in a program rounded out by Schubert’s timeless Unfinished Symphony. This is music that will lift your heart and spirit.
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Performance of Fanny Mendelssohn's Overture in C is made possible through a generous grant from:
Both a pianist and an organist, Dr. Zahari Metchkov has performed at such venues as New York’s Avery Fisher Hall and Washington’s Kennedy Center. He has concertized in Israel, Bulgaria, and the United States. Dr. Metchkov released his first CD in 2008 - a recording of works for piano and orchestra by Franz Liszt and Cesar Franck and a second recording project featuring solo works for piano and organ completed in the Spring of 2014.
Native of Sofia, Bulgaria, Dr. Metchkov holds BM in piano and organ performance, MM in piano performance, and DMA in piano performance with a minor in music theory from the Cleveland Institute of Music, Cleveland, Ohio. In 2010 he joined Colorado State University-Pueblo’s department of music, currently an Associate Professor of Music, teaching applied piano, chamber music, and piano related courses. He was the 2013 recipient of the CSU-Pueblo’s Outstanding Service and Transformative Leadership Award and the 2014 recipient of CHASS Outstanding Faculty of the Year. Dr. Metchkov has also taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music as well as Youngstown State University.
Currently Dr. Metchkov is the Artistic Director of the Pueblo Keyboard Arts Festival and Piano Conversations Concert Series, Pueblo, as well as Rocky Mountain Music Alliance Concert Series, Colorado Springs. As a performer he has appeared in the Mostly Mozart Music Festival, Pianofest in the Hamptons, Bridgehampton Music Festival, Varna Summer Festival, Sofia Music Weeks Festival, Geneva Chamber Music Festival, New Year’s Music Days Festival, and San Angelo Piano Festival. He has appeared live on radio CPR-Denver, WCLV-Cleveland, Bulgarian National Radio, Radio Alma Mater-Sofia.
Placing high priority over the education of young pianists in Southern Colorado, Dr. Metchkov is President-Elect for the Colorado State Music Teachers Association, a chapter of the Music Teachers National Association. He is a frequent guest adjudicator and clinician to numerous piano festivals in Colorado and strives to promote well structured study of music, specifically piano, to young people of all ages and their families. He maintains a small private studio, whose members have garnered awards in state competitions and festivals.
Dr. Metchkov has been enjoying an active artistic life as a soloist, chamber artist, as well as church musician. 2016-2017 project highlights include the performances of the Brahms 1st Concerto, Franck’s Symphonic Variations, and Mozart Triple Piano Concerto as well as the Brahms and Ligeti Horn Trios. He has been a guest artist with the Pueblo Symphony, Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra, Colorado State University-Pueblo Orchestra, Colorado State University-Pueblo Wind Ensemble, Suburban Symphony, University Circle Chorale, University Circle Wind Ensemble, and Pleven Philharmonic. Dr. Metchkov is the music director at Ascension Episcopal Church, Pueblo where he leads the choirs and serves as organist. Besides music, he also enjoys skiing and is steadily working on climbing Colorado’s fifty-four 14ers.
Native of Sofia, Bulgaria, Dr. Metchkov holds BM in piano and organ performance, MM in piano performance, and DMA in piano performance with a minor in music theory from the Cleveland Institute of Music, Cleveland, Ohio. In 2010 he joined Colorado State University-Pueblo’s department of music, currently an Associate Professor of Music, teaching applied piano, chamber music, and piano related courses. He was the 2013 recipient of the CSU-Pueblo’s Outstanding Service and Transformative Leadership Award and the 2014 recipient of CHASS Outstanding Faculty of the Year. Dr. Metchkov has also taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music as well as Youngstown State University.
Currently Dr. Metchkov is the Artistic Director of the Pueblo Keyboard Arts Festival and Piano Conversations Concert Series, Pueblo, as well as Rocky Mountain Music Alliance Concert Series, Colorado Springs. As a performer he has appeared in the Mostly Mozart Music Festival, Pianofest in the Hamptons, Bridgehampton Music Festival, Varna Summer Festival, Sofia Music Weeks Festival, Geneva Chamber Music Festival, New Year’s Music Days Festival, and San Angelo Piano Festival. He has appeared live on radio CPR-Denver, WCLV-Cleveland, Bulgarian National Radio, Radio Alma Mater-Sofia.
Placing high priority over the education of young pianists in Southern Colorado, Dr. Metchkov is President-Elect for the Colorado State Music Teachers Association, a chapter of the Music Teachers National Association. He is a frequent guest adjudicator and clinician to numerous piano festivals in Colorado and strives to promote well structured study of music, specifically piano, to young people of all ages and their families. He maintains a small private studio, whose members have garnered awards in state competitions and festivals.
Dr. Metchkov has been enjoying an active artistic life as a soloist, chamber artist, as well as church musician. 2016-2017 project highlights include the performances of the Brahms 1st Concerto, Franck’s Symphonic Variations, and Mozart Triple Piano Concerto as well as the Brahms and Ligeti Horn Trios. He has been a guest artist with the Pueblo Symphony, Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra, Colorado State University-Pueblo Orchestra, Colorado State University-Pueblo Wind Ensemble, Suburban Symphony, University Circle Chorale, University Circle Wind Ensemble, and Pleven Philharmonic. Dr. Metchkov is the music director at Ascension Episcopal Church, Pueblo where he leads the choirs and serves as organist. Besides music, he also enjoys skiing and is steadily working on climbing Colorado’s fifty-four 14ers.
PROGRAM NOTES by Mark Arnest
Concert overview
Beethoven’s life’s work presents as satisfying a progression as one could hope for. His early works demonstrate his mastery of the style of his teacher, Haydn; his middle works – the period of this overture – show him pushing music into new realms; and in his final works, the now deaf and isolated composer turns inward, creating music of a visionary intensity that still inspires awe.
But there’s a question mark attached to each of this program’s other three Romantic composers. Fanny Mendelssohn, a female composer in a world of male composers, was not allowed to pursue a career in music – what would she have accomplished with the support of her family and of society? Franz Schubert, of course, is music’s greatest “what-if,” creating nearly a thousand compositions before his death at the appallingly early age of 31, some of the greatest of them in the weeks before his death. In contrast, César Franck was a late bloomer who would barely be remembered had he died a decade earlier than he did; but he died at the height of his powers from what was probably a minor illness compounded by overwork. What else would we have of Franck’s if he had been luckier?
Overview: Fanny Hensel (nee Mendelssohn) Overture in C
Born, where, November 14, 1805, Hamburg, Germany; died May 14, 1847, Berlin, Germany
Work Composed: 1832
Why It Matters: A major work by a composer who deserves wider recognition.
The story of Fanny Mendelssohn is one of music’s great lost opportunities. Her younger brother Felix was arguably the greatest of all musical prodigies, with works he composed as a teenager still holding a place in the repertory. But Fanny may have been even more gifted. Her father, for instance, thought she showed even more aptitude than Felix. Carl Friedrich Zelter, who in 1819 would become both her and her brother’s teacher, also appears to have thought even more highly of Fanny than of Felix: He wrote to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1816 that Abraham Mendelssohn “has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special.”
But her parents did not allow her to pursue a career in composition. Her father wrote to her in 1820 that “Music will perhaps become [Felix’s] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.” Even her brother did not champion her work, writing to their mother that “She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.”
Nevertheless, Mendelssohn pursued music as something much more than an ornament. In 1829 she married the painter William Hensel, who was supportive of his wife’s compositional efforts. She would eventually compose over 450 pieces – mostly art songs – of which this overture is the 266th; and the year before her death she published a volume of songs, suggesting that her brother’s views on her lack of musical ambition were mistaken.
The Mendelssohn children were blessed with talent, but cursed with high blood pressure. Both died following strokes, first Fanny, with Felix following less than six months later.
Mendelssohn’s music is more similar to her brother’s than any other composer’s – so much so that several of her songs were published under his name in his opus 8 and 9 collections. This may be as much due to similar educations as similar personalities: Both began studies with their mother, a grand-student of J.S. Bach, and both continued with Zelter.
This overture is striking for its extravagant invention. It’s a standard sonata movement with slow introduction, but Mendelssohn treats it with a master’s touch. It’s effectively scored, especially considering Mendelssohn never got an opportunity to hear her own orchestration; and it combines thematic coherence and unity with a wide range of color and expression – much as her brother’s best work does.
The introduction is tender and yearning, with a questioning phrase in the strings answered by consoling winds. When she repeats the beginning section, she increases the tension simply by holding one note – the inner-voice “G,” also the first note heard in the piece – longer than at the initial statement. In addition to its expressive content, the introduction gives us the germ of what will become the second theme, and highlights the two-note falling motif that permeates the overture – the “sigh” that has embodied musical yearning since Monteverdi in the 1600s.
The energetic main theme emphasizes the “G” with which the piece opens. The lyrical second theme is especially reminiscent of her brother’s work.
The beginning of the central development section is bold, even while maintaining a seamless connection with the previous section: Mendelssohn turns the proclamatory major chord with which the exposition ends into a minor chord. The following quiet section’s airy and lucid textures can only be described as Mendelssohnian, as are its wide-ranging modulations.
But it’s the piece’s final sections – the recapitulation and the coda – that are most striking. Many Romantic composers treat recapitulations somewhat cavalierly, simply repeating the exposition with the bare amount of change required by a differing tonal scheme. Mendelssohn enlivens the recapitulation with numerous variations and extensions of the original material. And in a brilliant stroke, she delays the piece’s climax until the coda, extending and glorifying the exposition’s proclamatory ending.
Overview: Franz Schubert Unfinished Symphony
Born January 31, 1797, Vienna, Austria; died November 19, 1828, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1822
Why It Matters: Unfinished or not, this is one of Schubert’s greatest symphonies
Now and then there’s an enormous gulf between popular conception and historical reality; and nowhere is the gulf larger than in the “mystery” of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Here’s the reality: Schubert worked fast, rarely revised, and not infrequently got distracted before completing large-scale compositions, especially if there was no performance date on the horizon. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony is simply the most famous unfinished composition by the composer who may well be the all-time leader in unfinished compositions.
For instance, only half of Schubert’s 22 piano piano sonatas are complete. Nor is this even the only unfinished Schubert symphony. Number 7 was also left incomplete, though sketched fully enough to it have been completed by others; and Schubert left incomplete sketches for four additional symphonies. The mystery is less that this symphony is unfinished than that Schubert completed as many as he did.
Nevertheless, this is the greatest of Schubert’s unfinished works. The 25-year-old Schubert composed it in the autumn of 1822. He had been a freelance composer for four years, and while he was not thriving, the public was beginning to notice his music. But 1822 was the year that the syphilis that would eventually kill him first showed serious symptoms, and it sharpened Schubert’s already acute awareness of death. In 1824, he would write to a friend, “Think of a man whose health will never be right again, and who from despair over the fact makes it worse instead of better, think of a man, I say, whose splendid hopes have come to naught, to whom the happiness of love and friendship offers nothing but acutest pain, whose enthusiasm (at least, the inspiring kind) for the Beautiful threatens to disappear, and ask yourself whether he isn’t a miserable, unfortunate fellow. … so might I sing every day, since each night when I go to sleep I hope never again to wake, and each morning merely reminds me of the misery of yesterday.”
Familiarity can dull but cannot eradicate this symphony’s strangeness, especially that of its first movement. No symphony since Beethoven’s “Eroica” had so emphatically hollered, “new!” What previous symphony had begun with such an amorphous, expressively ambiguous theme; had introduced its second theme so brusquely; or extended this second theme area so as to dwarf the first theme? (Schubert corrects this seeming imbalance by concentrating on the first theme during the development section.) Even Beethoven rarely composed such enormous development sections, played so obsessively with such stark dynamic contrasts, or had such unstable recapitulations: The main theme returns here not as a long-sought destination, but simply as another way-station on the journey.
Nor is the famously cheerful second theme quite what it seems. Schubert never allows it to be cheerful for long, violently interrupting it at its first repetition. The theme returns, but takes its own dramatic turn, and within two minutes of our first hearing it, it sounds like an echo of what it once was. There’s a logic to this movement, but it’s not the architectural logic of Beethoven; it’s the logic of a dream.
The second movement is less unconventional, but only barely. It begins in a prayerful mood, but takes its first surprising turn less than a minute in, as Schubert’s love of coloristic modulations asserts itself. The poignant second theme, first heard from the clarinet, takes us deeper into the new sonic realm Schubert was inventing, as he uses harmony to suggest light and shadow to a degree no composer ever had.
Schubert’s premature death, not quite 32, is one of music’s greatest tragedies. It’s made more poignant by the fact that had Schubert lived even another decade, he would have achieved the professional success that had largely eluded him: In 1828 he was just a little ahead of fashion. Though he made enough from his music to live on, only a handful of his peers were aware of his importance. One was the 18-year-old Robert Schumann. Hundreds of miles away in Leipzig, he wrote in his diary, “Schubert is dead – dismay.”
Overview: Ludwig van Beethoven Leonore Overture No. 1
Born, December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany; died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1807 or possibly 1805
Why It Matters: A wonderful example of the pains Beethoven took to get a composition exactly right.
Beethoven was a talented child, but as a prodigy he was not in the league of Mendelssohn or Schubert. If he ultimately surpassed them, it was due more to his legendary work ethic than to an innate facility. And nothing epitomizes this work ethic more than the four overtures he composed for his one opera, “Fidelio.” (The first three are called “Leonore” overtures, after the name of the opera in its 1806 revival, to avoid confusion with the final “Fidelio” overture.)
An opera overture presents an unusual challenge, with two goals that conflict with one another. On the one hand, it must whet the audience’s appetite for what comes next, while giving them a flavor of the opera’s musical language. On the other hand, it must be sufficiently satisfying in itself.
The four surviving overtures to “Fidelio” present three different solutions to this challenge. (A possible fifth overture is now lost.) But it’s not entirely clear how they represent the evolution of Beethoven’s response to the problem of beginning an opera, because the chronology is uncertain. The probable order is No. 2, No. 3, No. 1, and the final “Fidelio” overture; but it might be as the numbering suggests. Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s notoriously unreliable first biographer, believed that No. 1 was composed in 1805, the first of the opera’s overtures; but Gustav Nottebohm, whose studies of Beethoven’s sketchbooks are one of the foundations of modern musicology, dated it to 1807, following No. 3. Early 20th Century scholarship favored Schindler, but today’s musicological community has swung back to Nottebohm.
Was there a fifth overture? Schindler based his view on the fact that the opera’s original overture was performed at a private concert for Viennese arts partron Prince Karl Lichnowsky prior to the opera’s premier. There, writes Schindler, “it was unanimously pronounced to be too light, and not sufficiently expressive of the nature of the work; consequently it was laid aside and never made its appearance again in Beethoven’s lifetime.” This overture is definitely lighter than Nos. 2 and 3, and was indeed not performed until after Beethoven’s death; yet in its quotation of Florestan’s pivotal Act 2 aria, it has an unmistakeable connection to the opera.
No one has ever accused Leonore Overtures Nos. 2 and 3, performed at the opera’s 1805 premiere and its 1806 revival respectively, of being “too light.” They’re magnificent, if anything too large and dramatic to be effective as overtures, No. 3 even more so than No. 2. They satiate rather than whet an audience’s appetite.
The overture we know as No. 1 was probably composed for a planned-but-never-realized Prague revival in 1807. As a stand-alone piece, it’s less effective to Nos. 2 and 3, and it’s no surprise that it’s the least-performed of the three Leonore overtures; but as an appetite-whetter, it’s superior. It’s shorter, only a little longer than the final “Fidelio” overture; and its plasticity of form is admirable, with a seamless transition between the slow introduction and the following fast section, and the meditation on Florestan’s aria replacing the traditional development section.
(Beethoven would go full appetite-whetter in the final “Fidelio” overture: It’s contains no themes from the opera, and it no longer foreshadows the opera’s main key. )
The overture was not performed until 1836, when it was conducted by no less than Felix Mendelssohn. In the audience was his sister Fanny, who described it as “a finely felt work, interesting, charming, as are few other things that I know.”
Overview: César Franck Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra
Born, Dec. 10, 1822, Liege, Belgium; died November 8, 1890, Paris, France
Work Composed: 1885
Why It Matters: One of the handful of masterpieces on which Franck’s reputation is based
On the continuum of child prodigies, Fanny Mendelssohn and Schubert were both on the extreme high end; in contrast, César Franck is one of music’s most famous late bloomers. The works for which he’s best known – the symphony, the violin sonata, and these variations – all date from the last five years of his life; and his next-best-known works nearly all date from the five years before that. Had Franck died at 60, he would be at most a footnote in music history books.
Of course, Franck’s earlier life prepared him for his late life creative outburst. He was a gifted child, but apparently not as gifted as his father – hoping for another Mozart or Liszt to support the family – desired, and his father’s pushiness appears to have hindered his son’s career as much as it advanced it. Franck was a successful student at the Paris Conservatory; however, the failure of an early oratorio caused him to abandon ideas of a public career at the age of 24. He began making his living as a teacher and organist.
But obscurity was not to be Franck’s fate. His increasing powers as an organist, both interpreting and improvising, gradually brought him fame throughout France, and in 1873 he was appointed professor at the Paris Conservatory. Only then, at the age of 50, did he again have time to compose in earnest, and it took him a decade to perfect his distinctive chromatic style. The late works of Franck demonstrate that no composer of his generation had more fully grasped Richard Wagner’s harmonic innovations.
Franck, like his fellow late-blooming, devoutly Catholic, Wagnerian, organist-composer Anton Bruckner, was notoriously insecure about his work. In addition to having experienced few public successes, he was faced with a daily conflict: His family did not like the increasingly complex style that his students adored. His student Vincent d’Indy said of Franck that when “he was hesitating over the choice of this or that tonal relation or over the progress of any development, he always liked to consult his pupils, to share with them his doubts and to ask their opinions.”
This modesty endeared him to his students, who called him Père Franck. And Franck’s religious faith had a strong effect on his work, even his instrumental music. Although his viscous chromatic style – modulating abruptly and often – was especially suited for the depiction of yearning and sorrow, his works typically end in an affirmative blaze of glory.
That’s the case with the Variations Symphoniques. Its popularity is strong evidence of its quality, because its length – shorter than most concertos – makes it a difficult piece to work into a standard program, and the difficult piano part is not obviously flashy. (Much of its difficulty stems from the fact, invisible to audiences, that Franck wrote for his own extremely large hands.)
The piece’s three sections are played without a break. The lengthy introductory section pits orchestra against piano in a manner echoing the slow movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4. But the opposition contains the seeds of its resolution: The orchestra’s brusque statements and the piano’s despairing responses are both based on the same interval – half-steps, rising in the orchestra but falling in the piano.
These falling half-steps are the same “sigh” motive we heard in Fanny Mendelssohn’s overture. But Franck, by putting several of them together, turns a sigh into a sob, and makes it even more sorrowful later on in an extended piano solo.
The variations of the work’s title occupy the piece’s middle section. They’re based on a graceful new theme, introduced by the piano and midway in mood between the first section’s sorrow and the finale’s jubilation. After seven variations, Franck brings back the sorrowful opening motive in the cellos. This leads to a wonderfully hazy transition, a trill on the piano, and – boom! – the finale. It’s almost giddy in its glee; but the triumphant theme is a transformation of the dolorous opening theme. All doubts and sorrow have been removed.
Concert overview
Beethoven’s life’s work presents as satisfying a progression as one could hope for. His early works demonstrate his mastery of the style of his teacher, Haydn; his middle works – the period of this overture – show him pushing music into new realms; and in his final works, the now deaf and isolated composer turns inward, creating music of a visionary intensity that still inspires awe.
But there’s a question mark attached to each of this program’s other three Romantic composers. Fanny Mendelssohn, a female composer in a world of male composers, was not allowed to pursue a career in music – what would she have accomplished with the support of her family and of society? Franz Schubert, of course, is music’s greatest “what-if,” creating nearly a thousand compositions before his death at the appallingly early age of 31, some of the greatest of them in the weeks before his death. In contrast, César Franck was a late bloomer who would barely be remembered had he died a decade earlier than he did; but he died at the height of his powers from what was probably a minor illness compounded by overwork. What else would we have of Franck’s if he had been luckier?
Overview: Fanny Hensel (nee Mendelssohn) Overture in C
Born, where, November 14, 1805, Hamburg, Germany; died May 14, 1847, Berlin, Germany
Work Composed: 1832
Why It Matters: A major work by a composer who deserves wider recognition.
The story of Fanny Mendelssohn is one of music’s great lost opportunities. Her younger brother Felix was arguably the greatest of all musical prodigies, with works he composed as a teenager still holding a place in the repertory. But Fanny may have been even more gifted. Her father, for instance, thought she showed even more aptitude than Felix. Carl Friedrich Zelter, who in 1819 would become both her and her brother’s teacher, also appears to have thought even more highly of Fanny than of Felix: He wrote to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1816 that Abraham Mendelssohn “has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special.”
But her parents did not allow her to pursue a career in composition. Her father wrote to her in 1820 that “Music will perhaps become [Felix’s] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.” Even her brother did not champion her work, writing to their mother that “She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.”
Nevertheless, Mendelssohn pursued music as something much more than an ornament. In 1829 she married the painter William Hensel, who was supportive of his wife’s compositional efforts. She would eventually compose over 450 pieces – mostly art songs – of which this overture is the 266th; and the year before her death she published a volume of songs, suggesting that her brother’s views on her lack of musical ambition were mistaken.
The Mendelssohn children were blessed with talent, but cursed with high blood pressure. Both died following strokes, first Fanny, with Felix following less than six months later.
Mendelssohn’s music is more similar to her brother’s than any other composer’s – so much so that several of her songs were published under his name in his opus 8 and 9 collections. This may be as much due to similar educations as similar personalities: Both began studies with their mother, a grand-student of J.S. Bach, and both continued with Zelter.
This overture is striking for its extravagant invention. It’s a standard sonata movement with slow introduction, but Mendelssohn treats it with a master’s touch. It’s effectively scored, especially considering Mendelssohn never got an opportunity to hear her own orchestration; and it combines thematic coherence and unity with a wide range of color and expression – much as her brother’s best work does.
The introduction is tender and yearning, with a questioning phrase in the strings answered by consoling winds. When she repeats the beginning section, she increases the tension simply by holding one note – the inner-voice “G,” also the first note heard in the piece – longer than at the initial statement. In addition to its expressive content, the introduction gives us the germ of what will become the second theme, and highlights the two-note falling motif that permeates the overture – the “sigh” that has embodied musical yearning since Monteverdi in the 1600s.
The energetic main theme emphasizes the “G” with which the piece opens. The lyrical second theme is especially reminiscent of her brother’s work.
The beginning of the central development section is bold, even while maintaining a seamless connection with the previous section: Mendelssohn turns the proclamatory major chord with which the exposition ends into a minor chord. The following quiet section’s airy and lucid textures can only be described as Mendelssohnian, as are its wide-ranging modulations.
But it’s the piece’s final sections – the recapitulation and the coda – that are most striking. Many Romantic composers treat recapitulations somewhat cavalierly, simply repeating the exposition with the bare amount of change required by a differing tonal scheme. Mendelssohn enlivens the recapitulation with numerous variations and extensions of the original material. And in a brilliant stroke, she delays the piece’s climax until the coda, extending and glorifying the exposition’s proclamatory ending.
Overview: Franz Schubert Unfinished Symphony
Born January 31, 1797, Vienna, Austria; died November 19, 1828, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1822
Why It Matters: Unfinished or not, this is one of Schubert’s greatest symphonies
Now and then there’s an enormous gulf between popular conception and historical reality; and nowhere is the gulf larger than in the “mystery” of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Here’s the reality: Schubert worked fast, rarely revised, and not infrequently got distracted before completing large-scale compositions, especially if there was no performance date on the horizon. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony is simply the most famous unfinished composition by the composer who may well be the all-time leader in unfinished compositions.
For instance, only half of Schubert’s 22 piano piano sonatas are complete. Nor is this even the only unfinished Schubert symphony. Number 7 was also left incomplete, though sketched fully enough to it have been completed by others; and Schubert left incomplete sketches for four additional symphonies. The mystery is less that this symphony is unfinished than that Schubert completed as many as he did.
Nevertheless, this is the greatest of Schubert’s unfinished works. The 25-year-old Schubert composed it in the autumn of 1822. He had been a freelance composer for four years, and while he was not thriving, the public was beginning to notice his music. But 1822 was the year that the syphilis that would eventually kill him first showed serious symptoms, and it sharpened Schubert’s already acute awareness of death. In 1824, he would write to a friend, “Think of a man whose health will never be right again, and who from despair over the fact makes it worse instead of better, think of a man, I say, whose splendid hopes have come to naught, to whom the happiness of love and friendship offers nothing but acutest pain, whose enthusiasm (at least, the inspiring kind) for the Beautiful threatens to disappear, and ask yourself whether he isn’t a miserable, unfortunate fellow. … so might I sing every day, since each night when I go to sleep I hope never again to wake, and each morning merely reminds me of the misery of yesterday.”
Familiarity can dull but cannot eradicate this symphony’s strangeness, especially that of its first movement. No symphony since Beethoven’s “Eroica” had so emphatically hollered, “new!” What previous symphony had begun with such an amorphous, expressively ambiguous theme; had introduced its second theme so brusquely; or extended this second theme area so as to dwarf the first theme? (Schubert corrects this seeming imbalance by concentrating on the first theme during the development section.) Even Beethoven rarely composed such enormous development sections, played so obsessively with such stark dynamic contrasts, or had such unstable recapitulations: The main theme returns here not as a long-sought destination, but simply as another way-station on the journey.
Nor is the famously cheerful second theme quite what it seems. Schubert never allows it to be cheerful for long, violently interrupting it at its first repetition. The theme returns, but takes its own dramatic turn, and within two minutes of our first hearing it, it sounds like an echo of what it once was. There’s a logic to this movement, but it’s not the architectural logic of Beethoven; it’s the logic of a dream.
The second movement is less unconventional, but only barely. It begins in a prayerful mood, but takes its first surprising turn less than a minute in, as Schubert’s love of coloristic modulations asserts itself. The poignant second theme, first heard from the clarinet, takes us deeper into the new sonic realm Schubert was inventing, as he uses harmony to suggest light and shadow to a degree no composer ever had.
Schubert’s premature death, not quite 32, is one of music’s greatest tragedies. It’s made more poignant by the fact that had Schubert lived even another decade, he would have achieved the professional success that had largely eluded him: In 1828 he was just a little ahead of fashion. Though he made enough from his music to live on, only a handful of his peers were aware of his importance. One was the 18-year-old Robert Schumann. Hundreds of miles away in Leipzig, he wrote in his diary, “Schubert is dead – dismay.”
Overview: Ludwig van Beethoven Leonore Overture No. 1
Born, December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany; died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1807 or possibly 1805
Why It Matters: A wonderful example of the pains Beethoven took to get a composition exactly right.
Beethoven was a talented child, but as a prodigy he was not in the league of Mendelssohn or Schubert. If he ultimately surpassed them, it was due more to his legendary work ethic than to an innate facility. And nothing epitomizes this work ethic more than the four overtures he composed for his one opera, “Fidelio.” (The first three are called “Leonore” overtures, after the name of the opera in its 1806 revival, to avoid confusion with the final “Fidelio” overture.)
An opera overture presents an unusual challenge, with two goals that conflict with one another. On the one hand, it must whet the audience’s appetite for what comes next, while giving them a flavor of the opera’s musical language. On the other hand, it must be sufficiently satisfying in itself.
The four surviving overtures to “Fidelio” present three different solutions to this challenge. (A possible fifth overture is now lost.) But it’s not entirely clear how they represent the evolution of Beethoven’s response to the problem of beginning an opera, because the chronology is uncertain. The probable order is No. 2, No. 3, No. 1, and the final “Fidelio” overture; but it might be as the numbering suggests. Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s notoriously unreliable first biographer, believed that No. 1 was composed in 1805, the first of the opera’s overtures; but Gustav Nottebohm, whose studies of Beethoven’s sketchbooks are one of the foundations of modern musicology, dated it to 1807, following No. 3. Early 20th Century scholarship favored Schindler, but today’s musicological community has swung back to Nottebohm.
Was there a fifth overture? Schindler based his view on the fact that the opera’s original overture was performed at a private concert for Viennese arts partron Prince Karl Lichnowsky prior to the opera’s premier. There, writes Schindler, “it was unanimously pronounced to be too light, and not sufficiently expressive of the nature of the work; consequently it was laid aside and never made its appearance again in Beethoven’s lifetime.” This overture is definitely lighter than Nos. 2 and 3, and was indeed not performed until after Beethoven’s death; yet in its quotation of Florestan’s pivotal Act 2 aria, it has an unmistakeable connection to the opera.
No one has ever accused Leonore Overtures Nos. 2 and 3, performed at the opera’s 1805 premiere and its 1806 revival respectively, of being “too light.” They’re magnificent, if anything too large and dramatic to be effective as overtures, No. 3 even more so than No. 2. They satiate rather than whet an audience’s appetite.
The overture we know as No. 1 was probably composed for a planned-but-never-realized Prague revival in 1807. As a stand-alone piece, it’s less effective to Nos. 2 and 3, and it’s no surprise that it’s the least-performed of the three Leonore overtures; but as an appetite-whetter, it’s superior. It’s shorter, only a little longer than the final “Fidelio” overture; and its plasticity of form is admirable, with a seamless transition between the slow introduction and the following fast section, and the meditation on Florestan’s aria replacing the traditional development section.
(Beethoven would go full appetite-whetter in the final “Fidelio” overture: It’s contains no themes from the opera, and it no longer foreshadows the opera’s main key. )
The overture was not performed until 1836, when it was conducted by no less than Felix Mendelssohn. In the audience was his sister Fanny, who described it as “a finely felt work, interesting, charming, as are few other things that I know.”
Overview: César Franck Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra
Born, Dec. 10, 1822, Liege, Belgium; died November 8, 1890, Paris, France
Work Composed: 1885
Why It Matters: One of the handful of masterpieces on which Franck’s reputation is based
On the continuum of child prodigies, Fanny Mendelssohn and Schubert were both on the extreme high end; in contrast, César Franck is one of music’s most famous late bloomers. The works for which he’s best known – the symphony, the violin sonata, and these variations – all date from the last five years of his life; and his next-best-known works nearly all date from the five years before that. Had Franck died at 60, he would be at most a footnote in music history books.
Of course, Franck’s earlier life prepared him for his late life creative outburst. He was a gifted child, but apparently not as gifted as his father – hoping for another Mozart or Liszt to support the family – desired, and his father’s pushiness appears to have hindered his son’s career as much as it advanced it. Franck was a successful student at the Paris Conservatory; however, the failure of an early oratorio caused him to abandon ideas of a public career at the age of 24. He began making his living as a teacher and organist.
But obscurity was not to be Franck’s fate. His increasing powers as an organist, both interpreting and improvising, gradually brought him fame throughout France, and in 1873 he was appointed professor at the Paris Conservatory. Only then, at the age of 50, did he again have time to compose in earnest, and it took him a decade to perfect his distinctive chromatic style. The late works of Franck demonstrate that no composer of his generation had more fully grasped Richard Wagner’s harmonic innovations.
Franck, like his fellow late-blooming, devoutly Catholic, Wagnerian, organist-composer Anton Bruckner, was notoriously insecure about his work. In addition to having experienced few public successes, he was faced with a daily conflict: His family did not like the increasingly complex style that his students adored. His student Vincent d’Indy said of Franck that when “he was hesitating over the choice of this or that tonal relation or over the progress of any development, he always liked to consult his pupils, to share with them his doubts and to ask their opinions.”
This modesty endeared him to his students, who called him Père Franck. And Franck’s religious faith had a strong effect on his work, even his instrumental music. Although his viscous chromatic style – modulating abruptly and often – was especially suited for the depiction of yearning and sorrow, his works typically end in an affirmative blaze of glory.
That’s the case with the Variations Symphoniques. Its popularity is strong evidence of its quality, because its length – shorter than most concertos – makes it a difficult piece to work into a standard program, and the difficult piano part is not obviously flashy. (Much of its difficulty stems from the fact, invisible to audiences, that Franck wrote for his own extremely large hands.)
The piece’s three sections are played without a break. The lengthy introductory section pits orchestra against piano in a manner echoing the slow movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4. But the opposition contains the seeds of its resolution: The orchestra’s brusque statements and the piano’s despairing responses are both based on the same interval – half-steps, rising in the orchestra but falling in the piano.
These falling half-steps are the same “sigh” motive we heard in Fanny Mendelssohn’s overture. But Franck, by putting several of them together, turns a sigh into a sob, and makes it even more sorrowful later on in an extended piano solo.
The variations of the work’s title occupy the piece’s middle section. They’re based on a graceful new theme, introduced by the piano and midway in mood between the first section’s sorrow and the finale’s jubilation. After seven variations, Franck brings back the sorrowful opening motive in the cellos. This leads to a wonderfully hazy transition, a trill on the piano, and – boom! – the finale. It’s almost giddy in its glee; but the triumphant theme is a transformation of the dolorous opening theme. All doubts and sorrow have been removed.
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