PROGRAM

EIGHTY-SIXTH SEASON

Symphony Center Presents

Wednesday, February 8, 2017, at 8:00

Orchestra Series

BUDAPEST FESTIVAL ORCHESTRAIván Fischer ConductorRichard Goode Piano

Music by Ludwig van Beethoven

Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21Adagio molto—Allegro con brioAndante cantabile con motoMenuetto: Allegro molto e vivaceFinale: Adagio—Allegro molto e vivace

Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19Allegro con brioAdagioRondo: Molto allegro

RICHARD GOODE

INTERMISSION

Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67Allegro con brioAndante con motoScherzo: AllegroAllegro

This performance is generously sponsored by the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Fund for the Canon.

Symphony Center Presents is grateful to WFMT 98.7 FM for its generous support as media sponsor of the Orchestra series.

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Ludwig van BeethovenBorn December 16, 1770; Bonn, GermanyDied March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria

Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21

This is a young man’s music. As the first symphony by the greatest symphonist who ever lived, one might expect clues of the daring and novelty to come; since it was written at the turn of the century and pre-miered in Vienna, the

great musical capital, in 1800, one might assume that it is with this work that Beethoven opened a new era in music. But, in fact, this symphony belongs to the eighteenth, not the nineteenth, century; it honors the tradition of Mozart, dead less than a decade, and Haydn, who had given Beethoven enough lessons to know that his student would soon set out on his own.

The First Symphony is a conservative work by the least conservative of composers. (Just two years later, Beethoven proudly announced that he would follow a “new path.”) Alexander Thayer, who wrote the first significant book on Beethoven, saw 1800 as a turning point in the composer’s career: “It is the year in which, cutting loose from the pianoforte, he asserted his claims to a position with Mozart and the still living and productive Haydn in the higher forms of chamber and orchestral compositions—the quartet and the symphony.”

It was a bold step for a young composer (Beethoven wasn’t yet thirty) to write his first symphony when Haydn’s final work in the form was just five years old and Mozart’s Jupiter a scant twelve. But this was perhaps the best—and cer-tainly the riskiest—way for Beethoven to stake his claim to their territory. Beethoven had moved to

Vienna in 1792, the year after Mozart died, and in the famous words of Count Waldstein, he was to “receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.” Beethoven learned plenty from the example of Haydn’s music, but the actual lessons he had with the master didn’t go well, and Beethoven quickly understood that if he was to play a role in this great Viennese tradition, he would have to carve out a place for himself, all by himself.

Beethoven began to sketch a symphony in C major in 1795, and he was still struggling with it during a concert tour to Prague and Berlin the following year. But Beethoven apparently wasn’t ready to reckon with this great form yet, and he turned his attention primarily to the piano sonata, which became the vehicle for his most advanced ideas. In 1799, the year he composed one of his real watershed works, the Pathétique Sonata, Beethoven decisively returned to the idea of writing a symphony. The C major symphony he finished early in 1800 is the first of eight he would compose in thirteen years.

On April 2, 1800, Beethoven held a concert in Vienna’s Burgtheater, the first he would give for his own benefit in this opinionated and difficult music center. In a gesture of savvy public relations, he included a symphony by Mozart and two numbers from Haydn’s Creation on the program to set the scene for his own music—some of it new, like the septet that quickly became one of his most popular pieces, and this First Symphony. Sadly—inexplicably—the Viennese critics ignored the performance, but the Leipzig correspondent called it “truly the most interesting concert in a long time.”

Beethoven’s First Symphony is scored for the orchestra of Haydn and Mozart, including the

COMPOSED1811–12

FIRST PERFORMANCEApril 2, 1800; Vienna, Austria

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME26 minutes

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clarinets that weren’t yet a standard feature, and written in the conventional four-movement form he would soon transform. Although it’s a surprisingly cautious work from a bold and sometimes brazen composer, it’s neither faceless nor unaccomplished (and the critics of the time found it neither timid nor derivative).

Beethoven begins, slyly, with the kind of cadences that normally end a work, stated in the wrong key—or rather, searching for the right key. (Haydn had used a similar trick in his string quartets, but never to open a symphony.) Beethoven liked the effect so much that he did something comparable in his next work, The Creatures of Prometheus. The entire movement sparkles with genuine energy and is particularly colored by the brilliant and inventive writing for winds (one critic complained that “it sounded more like a wind band than an orchestra”).

The slow movement is charming and graceful; it is slight, as sometimes suggested, only by the composer’s own later standards. Beethoven calls the next movement a minuet, but both his tempo (Allegro molto e vivace) and a very swift metronome marking argue that this is really the first of his true symphonic scherzos. (Haydn had begun to write third-movement scherzos in his string quartets, but he didn’t transfer that crucial development into his symphonies.) The finale, with its humorous slow introduction, is as playful and spirited as anything in Haydn. It is not yet

the heroic or the revolutionary Beethoven, but it proves brilliantly that the student had learned his teacher’s lessons well.

Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19

Although it is known as no. 2, the B-flat piano concerto is the earliest of Beethoven’s five well- known works in the great classical form. In fact, it’s not even the compos-er’s first attempt at writing a concerto for himself. When he was only

fourteen, Beethoven composed a piano concerto in E-flat, and, although only the solo part has survived, it clearly reveals that the teenage

Beethoven thought himself a great virtuoso. (The concerto was reconstructed and performed for the first time in 1943.) But, sometime over the next six years, Beethoven wisely shelved that score and began a new piano concerto in B-flat, over which he struggled on and off for several more years until he felt it was ready for the public. The teenage show-off had become a perfectionist.

In 1792, the year Beethoven left Bonn and settled in Vienna, he wrote out a fresh copy of this concerto, perhaps to show his new teacher, Joseph Haydn, whom he would soon dismiss, leaving neither man with kind words for the

Beethoven’s study in the Schwarzspanierhaus, where he died; colored lithograph from a sepia drawing by J.N. Noechle, ca. 1827

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other. At the first chance to play the work in public, Beethoven evidently dropped the original finale (discovered among his papers after his death) and wrote a new one. He also revised the slow movement. This is probably the concerto he played at the charity concert on March 29, 1795—his first official public appearance in this great music capital—although by then he had written another one, in C major—the one we know as no. 1. (Beethoven’s old friend Franz Gerhard Wegeler recalls that the composer finished the finale at the very last moment, while suffering from a bad stomachache, but the evidence suggests that he was remembering a different performance and a different concerto.)

Beethoven continued to work on the B-flat score. He sketched, and then discarded, a new slow movement in D major. For a performance in Prague in 1798, he brushed up both the outer movements and added a coda to the Adagio. Still, he was dissatisfied. In fact, when he wrote to the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel in 1801, Beethoven hadn’t a good thing to say about either of his piano concertos:

I wish to add that one of my first concertos, and therefore not one of the best of my com-positions, is to be published by Hofmeister, and that Mollo is to publish a concerto, which, indeed, was written later, but which also does not rank among the best of my works in this form.

In truth, both of these concertos reflect Mozart’s influence—in their design, in the balance of piano and orchestra, and in the piano writing itself—but from the day he arrived in Vienna, Beethoven was impatient to establish himself as a new force to be reckoned with,

not as the next Mozart. Moreover, by 1801, he had already completed another concerto—the Third—that decisively broke away from the classical model and pointed in a completely new direction. That was the composer Beethoven wanted the power brokers at Breitkopf to notice. Nonetheless, he thought both of his first con-certos fit to print, and they were published that year, in the “wrong” order—the C major concerto in March, and the earlier one in B-flat major in December.

For all its classical decorum, there’s something explosive and rebellious about Beethoven’s earli-est piano concerto. In the very opening orchestral tutti, for example, Beethoven swerves unexpect-edly into D-flat major, at the same time pulling back from fortissimo to pianissimo to emphasize the jolt, in a way that is quite un-Mozartean. Once the piano enters, we are in the presence of a new personality. By all accounts, the young Beethoven was a thrilling performer of a very different sort than Mozart—the newspaper reports praise his power, “unheard-of bravura and facility,” and sheer intensity of feeling—and his concertos reflect these musical sensibilities, as well as his new style of piano playing.

Mozart’s shadow still falls across the elegantly designed first movement, despite evidence of the subversive young Beethoven in the details. The bold and lovely slow movement (revised for the 1795 premiere) is one of his earliest attempts to display both his true originality and the range of his emotional compass. The finale is light and witty, with a wonderful syncopated theme that the pianist finally “corrects,” putting the off-beat material on the beat shortly before the ending. The boisterous spirit of Vienna’s new self-appointed musical king is apparent in every measure.

COMPOSED1790–95, revised 1801

FIRST PERFORMANCEMarch 29, 1795, the composer as soloist

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo piano, flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, strings

CADENZASby Beethoven

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME28 minutes

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COMPOSED1804–08

FIRST PERFORMANCEDecember 22, 1808; Vienna, Austria

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contra-bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME31 minutes

Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67

This is the symphony that, along with an image of Beethoven, looking agitated and disheveled, has come to represent greatness in music. In fact, many people know only the very opening seconds, just as they may remember vividly and

accurately no more than the Mona Lisa’s smile, or the first ten words of Hamlet’s soliloquy. It’s hard to know how so few notes, so plainly strung together, could become so popular. There are certainly those who would argue that this isn’t even Beethoven’s greatest symphony, just as the Mona Lisa isn’t Leonardo’s finest painting—Beethoven himself preferred his Eroica to the Fifth Symphony. And yet, it’s hardly famous beyond its merits, for one can’t easily think of another single composition that in its expressive range and structural power better represents what music is all about.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has spoken forcefully and directly to many listeners—trained and untrained—over the years; we each listen and understand in our own way. We can prob-ably find ourselves somewhere here, among the characters of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End:

Whether you are like Mrs. Munt, and tap surreptitiously when the tunes come—of course not so as to disturb the others; or like Helen, who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood; or like Margaret, who can only see the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds the full score open on his knee; or like their cousin, Fräulein Mosebach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is “echt Deutsch”; or like Fräulein Mosebach’s young man, who can remember nothing but Fräulein Mosebach: in any case, the passion

of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings.

That is why we still go to concerts, and, whether we see shipwrecks or hear dominant sevenths, we may well agree, when caught up in a captivating performance, “that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.”

For a while, this piece was somewhat overshad-owed by the Ninth Symphony, which seemed to point the way to the rest of the nineteenth century and emboldened generations of compos-ers to think differently of the symphony, or of music in general. But the Fifth Symphony has never really lost its appeal. Robert Schumann, whose musical predictions have often come true, wrote that “this symphony invariably wields its power over men of every age like those great phe-nomena of nature. . . . This symphony, too, will be heard in future centuries, nay, as long as music and the world exist.” It is surely no coincidence that Theodore Thomas, the first music director of the Chicago Symphony, picked this symphony to conclude the ensemble’s inaugural concert in 1891, as well as the concert given in 1904 to ded-icate Orchestra Hall. “I care not from what the station in life come the thousands who sit before me,” Thomas once told a reporter. “Beethoven will teach each according to his needs.”

A familiarity earned by only a handful of pieces in any century has largely blunted much of the work’s wild power for our ears today. Knowing the many works that couldn’t have been written without this as their example has blinded us to the novelty of Beethoven’s boldest strokes: the cross-reference between the famous opening and the fortissimo horn call in the scherzo, the way the scherzo passes directly—and dramatically—into the finale, and the memory of the scherzo that appears unexpectedly in the finale—all forging the four movements of the symphony

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into one unified design. The idea of a symphony tracing the journey from strife to victory is commonplace today, but Beethoven’s Fifth was an entirely new kind of symphony in his day.

There’s no way to know what the first audience thought. For one thing, that concert, given at the Theater an der Wien on December 22, 1808, was so inordinately long (even by nineteenth-century standards), and jammed with so much important new music, that no one could truly have taken it all in. J.F. Reichardt, who shared a box with Prince Lobkowitz, later wrote: “There we sat from 6:30 till 10:30 in the most bitter cold, and found by experience that one might have too much even of a good thing.”

Reichardt and Lobkowitz stayed till the end, their patience frequently tried not by the music—to which these two brought more understanding than most—but by the performance, which was rough and unsympathetic. Surely some in the audience that night were bowled over by what they heard, though many may well have fidgeted and daydreamed, uncomprehending, or perhaps even bored. Beethoven’s was not yet the most popular music ever written, and even as great a figure as Goethe would outlive Beethoven without coming to terms with the one composer who was clearly his equal. As late as 1830, Mendelssohn tried one last time to interest the aging poet in Beethoven’s music, enthusiastically playing the first movement of the Fifth Symphony at the piano. “But that does not move one,” Goethe responded. “It is merely astounding, grandiose.”

Take the celebrated opening, which Beethoven once, in a moment he surely regretted, likened to Fate knocking at the door. It is bold and simple, and like many of the mottoes of our civilization, susceptible to all manner of popular treatments, none of which can diminish the power of the original. Beethoven writes eight notes, four plus four—the first ta-ta-ta-TUM falling from G down to E-flat, the second from F to D. For all the force of those hammer strokes, we may

be surprised that only strings and clarinets play them. Hearing those eight notes and no more, we can’t yet say for certain whether this is E-flat major or C minor. As soon as Beethoven con-tinues, we hear that urgent knocking as part of a grim and driven music in C minor. But when the exposition is repeated, and we start over from the top with E-flat major chords still ringing in our ears, those same ta-ta-ta-TUM patterns sound like they belong to E-flat major. That ambiguity and tension are at the heart of this furious music—just as the struggle to break from C minor, where this movement settles, into the brilliance of C major—and will carry us to the end of the symphony.

If one understands and remembers those four measures, much of what happens during the next thirty-odd minutes will seem both familiar and logical. We can hear Fate knocking at the door of nearly every measure in the first movement. The forceful horn call that introduces the second theme, for example, mimics both the rhythm and the shape of the symphony’s opening. (We also can notice the similarity to the beginning of the Fourth Piano Concerto—and, in fact, ideas for both works can be found in the same sketchbooks, those rich hunting grounds where brilliance often emerges in flashes from a disarray matched by the notorious condition of the composer’s lodgings.)

Although the first movement is launched with the energy and urgency of those first notes, its progress is stalled periodically by echoes of the

Theater an der Wien; engraving after J. Alt, ca. 1815

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two long-held notes in the first bars; in the reca-pitulation a tiny, but enormously expressive oboe cadenza serves the same purpose. The extensive coda is particularly satisfying not because it effectively concludes a dramatic and powerful movement, but because it uncovers still new depths of drama and power at a point when that seems unthinkable.

The Andante con moto is a distant relative of the theme and variations that often turn up as slow movements in classical symphonies. But unlike the conventional type, it presents two different themes, varies them separately, and then trails off into a free improvisation that covers a wide range of thoughts, each springing almost spontaneously from the last. The sequence of events is so unpredictable, and the meditative tone so seductive, that, in the least assertive movement of the symphony, Beethoven com-mands our attention to the final sentence.

Beethoven was the first to notice his scherzo’s resemblance to the opening of the finale of Mozart’s great G minor symphony—he even wrote out Mozart’s first measures on a page of sketches for this music; while the effect there is decisive and triumphant, here it is clouded with half-uttered questions. Beethoven begins with furtive music, inching forward in the low strings, then stumbling on the horns, which let loose with their own rendition of Fate at the door. At some point, when Beethoven realized that the scherzo was part of a bigger scheme, he decided to leave it unfinished and move directly, through one of the most famous

passages in music—slowly building in tension and drama, over the ominous, quiet pounding of the timpani—to an explosion of brilliant C major. Composers have struggled ever since to match the effect, not just of binding move-ments together—that much has been success-fully copied—but of emerging so dramatically from darkness to light. The sketchbooks tell us that these fifty measures cost Beethoven considerable effort, and most surprisingly, that they weren’t even part of the original plan. Berlioz thought this transition so stunning that it would be impossible to surpass it in what follows. Beethoven, perfectly understanding the challenge—and also that of sustaining the vic-tory of C major once it has been achieved—adds trombones (used in symphonic music for the first time), the piccolo, and the contrabassoon to the first burst of C major and moves forward toward his final stroke of genius.

That moment comes amidst general rejoicing, when the ghost of the scherzo quietly appears, at once disrupting C major with unexpected memories of C minor and leaving everyone tem-porarily hushed and shaken. Beethoven quickly restores order, and the music begins again as if nothing has happened. But Beethoven still finds it necessary to end with fifty-four measures of the purest C major to remind us of the conquest, not the struggle.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

© 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra