Sinfonia Concertante

Mozart Sinfonia Concertante featuring Aisslinn Nosky on violin and Maureen Murchie on viola plus Mozart Marriage of Figaro Overture and Beethoven Symphony No. 7
 
Overture to The Marriage of Figaro, K. 492 
Mozart composed his opera The Marriage of Figaro in late 1785 and early 1786; the manuscript of the overture is dated April 29, 1786. The Marriage of Figaro was first performed on May 1 of that year in Vienna. The overture is scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, with timpani and strings. Performance time is approximately four minutes.
 
On November 11, 1785, Leopold Mozart complained that he had scarcely heard from his son Wolfgang: "He is up to his eyes in work on his opera The Marriage of Figaro," he wrote. Lorenzo Da Ponte, Wolfgang's librettist, later recalled the whirlwind pace of their collaboration: "As fast as I wrote the words, Mozart set them to music. In six weeks everything was in order." That is no doubt sheer exaggeration-by a man often given to overstatement-but much of the four-act comic opera apparently was composed between October 16, when Mozart finished his great piano quartet in G minor, and the first of December.
 
The overture to The Marriage of Figaro was left till the very last moment, as was Mozart's practice. The manuscript is dated April 29, 1786, the same day he entered the work in his personal catalog of compositions. By then the orchestral parts for the opera had been copied and rehearsals had started. Figaro opened on May 1 at the Burgtheater in Vienna, with the composer conducting from the keyboard. It was well received there, and after it was given in Prague that December, Mozart enjoyed a popularity seldom known to composers during their lifetimes. "Here they talk about nothing but Figaro," he wrote when he visited Prague in January. "Nothing is played, sung, or whistled but Figaro. No opera is drawing like Figaro. Nothing, nothing but Figaro."
 
The overture is a perfect curtain raiser. It crackles with excitement and is full of promise. The combination of frantic music and a hushed tempo suggests intrigue and conspiracy from the start; the warm glow of horns and winds assures us that this is, above all, a comedy. The pace is unrelentingly fast (we now know that Mozart tore up a page of slower music he intended as a contrasting middle section). In Peter Sellars's famous and controversial staging of the opera, set in New York City, the overture accompanied a typical Manhattan rush hour. Mozart was thinking of something far less urban, but the human heart has always been animated by complicated attachments and great expectations.
 
Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, K. 364
Throughout his childhood and teenage years Mozart spent an extensive amount of time traveling around Europe as a child prodigy, playing at various courts with his father and sister.  In 1773 he was hired as a court musician in Salzburg, and although he was quite successful there, he wanted more.  So, he began another period of travel in search of employment and in 1778 his search brought him to Paris, where he was undoubtedly exposed to various sinfonia concertantes, which were all the rage because they combined the most attractive features of the symphony with the tunefulness and technical virtuosity of the concerto.  But he was unable to find a job, partly because he was now an arrogant and annoying “20 something” and no longer a “cute” and “cuddly” little genius.  Mozart returned to “Salzburg slavery,” as he rather injudiciously called his local employment, and reluctantly resumed his work as composer, orchestra musician and organist in Archbishop Colloredo’s provincial musical establishment in Salzburg.  Still inspired by the sinfonia concertantes he heard Paris he began to write two of his own.  The first one he unfortunately abandoned; however, the second is the masterpiece that you will hear this afternoon.    Although there is no evidence to support this, it is a charming thought that he might have composed the Sinfonia Concertante for a father- son musical outing: Papa on violin, Wolfgang on viola.
The first movement, Allegro maestoso begins with a masterful introduction that incorporates many compositional techniques of Mozart’s time, including the Mannheim Walze, or Mannheim roller, in which the orchestra builds with a dramatic crescendo from piano to fortissimo.  Once the introduction comes to a climax the crescendo dramatically reverses and the soloists emerge.  Throughout the movement they continue to toss the principal thematic material back and forth; this culminates in a dramatic cadenza.   The second movement, Andante, is one of Mozart’s early examples of a truly melancholy C-minor movement.  The seriousness of this music is reinforced by the dark, rich sonority in the solo viola and the division of the lower strings into several parts.  The finale is a rondo whose ingratiating theme is reminiscent of the rising trill motive of the first movement. The two recapitulations of the rondo theme are separated by extended episodes. After a cadenza-like accompanied passage that takes the soloists into the highest reaches of their instruments, the piece concludes with a series of bright, cadential harmonies.
 
Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92
Consider the assessment by Goethe on first meeting Beethoven during the summer of 1812:
 
“His talent amazed me; unfortunately, he is an utterly untamed personality, who is not altogether in the wrong in holding the world to be detestable, but surely does not make it any the more enjoyable either for himself or for others by his attitude.”
 
We are told that the two men walked together through the streets of Teplitz, where Beethoven had gone for the summer, and exchanged cordial words. When royalty approached, Goethe stepped aside, tipping his hat and bowing deeply; Beethoven walked on, indifferent to mere nobility. This was a characteristic Beethoven gesture: defiant, individual, strongly humanitarian, intolerant of hypocrisy—and many listeners find its essence reflected in his music. But before confusing the myth with the man, consider that, throughout his life, Beethoven clung to the "van" in his name because it was so easily confused with "von" and its suggestion of lofty bloodlines.
 
Without question, Beethoven's contemporaries thought him a complicated man, perhaps even the utterly untamed personality Goethe found him. He was a true eccentric, who adored the elevated term Tondichter (poet in sound) and refused to correct a rumor that he was the illegitimate son of the king of Prussia, but looked like a homeless person (his attire once caused his arrest for vagrancy). There were other curious contradictions: he was disciplined and methodical—like many a modern-day concertgoer, he would rise early and make coffee by grinding a precise number of coffee beans—but lived in a squalor he alone could tolerate. Certainly, modern scholarship, as it chips away at the myth, finds him ever more complex.
 
We don't know what Goethe truly thought of his music, and perhaps that is just as well, for Goethe's musical taste was less advanced than we might hope (he later admitted he thought little of Schubert's songs). The general perception of Beethoven's music in 1812 was that it was every bit as difficult and unconventional as the man himself—even, perhaps, to most ears, utterly untamed.
 
This is our greatest loss today. For Beethoven's widespread familiarity—of a dimension known to no other composer—has blinded us not only to his vision—so far ahead of his time that he was thought out of fashion in his last years—but to the uncompromising and disturbing nature of the music itself.
His Seventh Symphony, for example, is so well known to us today that we can't imagine a time that knew Beethoven, but not this glorious work. But that was the case when the poet and the composer walked together in Teplitz in July 1812. Beethoven had finished the A major symphony three months earlier—envisioning a premiere for that spring that didn't materialize—but the first performance wouldn't take place for another year and a half, on December 8, 1813.
 
That night in Vienna gave the rest of the nineteenth century plenty to talk about. No other symphony of Beethoven's so openly invited interpretation—not even his Sixth, the self-proclaimed Pastoral Symphony, with its bird calls, thunderstorm, and frank evocation of something beyond mere eighth notes and bar lines. To Richard Wagner, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was "the apotheosis of the dance." Berlioz heard a ronde des paysans in the first movement. (Choreographers in our own time have proven that this music is not, however, easily danceable.) And there were other readings as well, most of them finding peasant festivities and bacchic orgies where Beethoven wrote, simply, vivace.
 
The true significance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is to be found in the notes on the page—in his distinctive use of rhythm and pioneering sense of key relationships. By the time it is over, we can no longer hear the ordinary dactylic rhythm (a dotted eighth note followed by a sixteenth note) in the same way again, and—even if we have no technical terms to explain it—we sense that our basic understanding of harmony has been turned upside-down.
 
Take Beethoven's magnificent introduction, of unprecedented size and ambitious intentions. He begins decisively in A major, but at the first opportunity moves away—not to the dominant (E major) as historical practice and textbooks recommended, but to the unlikely regions of C major and F major. Beethoven makes it clear that he won't be limited to the seven degrees of the A major scale (which contains neither C- nor F-natural) in planning his harmonic itinerary. We will hear more from both keys, and by the time he is done, Beethoven will have convinced us not only that C and F sound comfortably at home in an A major symphony, but that A major can be made to seem like the visitor! But that comes later in his scheme.
 
First we move from the spacious vistas of the introduction into the joyous song of the Vivace. Getting there is a challenge Beethoven relishes, and many a music lover has marveled at his passage of transition, in which stagnant, repeated E's suddenly catch fire with the dancing dotted rhythm that will carry us through the entire movement. The development section brings new explorations of C and F, and the coda is launched by a spectacular, long-sustained crescendo that is said to have convinced Weber that Beethoven was "ripe for the madhouse."
 
The Allegretto is as famous as any music Beethoven wrote, and it was a success from the first performance, when a repeat was demanded. At the indicated tempo it is hardly a slow movement, but it is sufficiently slower than the music that precedes it to provide a feeling of relaxation.
 
By designing the Allegretto in A minor, Beethoven has moved one step closer to F major; he now dares to write the next movement in that unauthorized, but by-now-familiar, key. And he cannot resist rubbing it in a bit, by treating A major, when it arrives on the scene, not as the main key of the symphony, but as a visitor in a new world. One does not need a course in harmony to recognize that Beethoven has taken us through the looking glass, where black appears white, and everything is turned on its head.
 
To get back where we belong, Beethoven simply shatters the glass with the two fortissimo chords that open the finale and throws us into a triumphant fury of music so adamantly in A major that we forget any past harmonic digressions. When C and F major return—as they were destined to do—in the development section, they sound every bit as remote as they did in the symphony's introduction, and we sense that we have come full circle.  (Adapted from a note by Philip Huscher)