The Program
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60
Two years intervened after the completion of his Third Symphony
(the "Eroica") before Beethoven ventured upon another. Three
symphonies (the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth) followed in succession,
each very different from the others in character and scale.
The Fourth is always observed to be less forceful and dramatic than
the Third and Fifth, but it surpasses them in athletic energy and,
in places, in sheer beauty of sound. Yet Beethoven's purpose was
never quite what it seems, so that simply to characterize the
Fourth as "light-weight" or "relaxed" is to tell only a part of the
story. Robert Schumann compared it to a "slender Greek maiden," but
even he would admit that the extremes of seriousness and
skittishness found in the work do not properly belong to such a
maiden's drapery.
Like many of Haydn's symphonies—and a few of Mozart's—Beethoven
opens with a slow introduction. The purpose of these introductions
was not to foreshadow the themes or even the mood of the rest of
the movement, but to act like the overture to an opera, and
accustom the audience to the orchestra's sound and to induce a
serious concentration. In the "Eroica," he had
dispensed with an introduction, but the Fourth has a fine one, dark
and mysterious in character, and without any clear sense of
direction until a fortissimo burst and some rocket-like figures in
the violins force the issue.
Once the main Allegro vivace section—and the true key of the
symphony, B-flat major, is established—all tension evaporates. The
standard procedures of Classical sonata form fall into their
assigned places. In the development, the actual pace of the music
is still brisk, but the harmonic pace is very slow, giving an
impression of immense breadth, like a glance forward to Wagner or
Bruckner. Beethoven keeps us waiting expectantly for the return of
the opening theme, even after the correct key has been firmly
reached. The rest of the movement duly follows, with only a brief
coda—not another massive peroration in the manner of the
"Eroica."
The main melody of the slow movement is of wonderful serenity. The
second melody, introduced by the solo clarinet, provides not
contrast but rather completion, as though the whole first paragraph
were a single sentence. There are stern pages in this
movement—bleak pages, too—but its profound placidity marks it off
as one of the greatest of Beethoven's slow movements. None of his
contemporaries could approach him on this ground.
Although marked menuetto, the third movement has the character of a
scherzo, with teasing cross-accents and a lively pace. The trio
section is a little slower and pastoral in character. The strings
join it later with some strange rumbling inner lines, and the
original tempo returns. Beethoven repeats the whole process, so
that the trio is heard twice, the scherzo three times.
The finale is as muscular and energetic as a tiger. The bustling
opening theme has no introduction and immediately plunges into the
bass register. It is more often used as accompaniment than as
theme, though it can serve either purpose. The flow is sometimes
broken by more relaxed passages, and there is an extraordinary
series of harsh baying chords that recur from time to time. The
recapitulation is marked by the spotlight falling briefly and
famously on the first bassoon, and at the end the principal melody
stops running, apparently exhausted. But its faint is merely a
feint. This is another of Beethoven's jokes—just when you think his
melody cannot keep going even one bar more, it leaps up and slaps
you rudely in the face.
—Hugh Macdonald
MATTHIAS PINTSCHER
Chute d'Étoiles
With a brazen outcry from a massive orchestra-an explosion, a
breakdown, a collapse-Matthias Pintscher's Chute
d'Étoiles begins. The title, which translates as "Falling
Stars," refers to Anselm Kiefer's monumental installation of the
same name in the Grand Palais in Paris in 2007, and engages with it
in a complex intellectual exchange, matching it in force and
drama.
Not just an homage to Kiefer and his oeuvre, however, this
orchestral composition also incorporates motifs and material from
Pintscher's recent works. Through the image of falling stars—the
idea that the world was born from an explosion—Kiefer combines
destruction and creation. Creation emerges from the process of
obliteration, as one state breaks down and gives birth to a new
one.
Pintscher has long admired this artist, his work, and his rigorous
evolution, stating, "He is one of the few artists in whose earliest
works you can already find exactly the same aura and archaism that
he has refined up to the present. There is an idiom of strength and
clarity that he has continued to develop further for over 40 years.
I find it very exciting to see such consistency in an artist's
work." Chute d'Étoiles is an homage to Kiefer and at
the same time a translation of the apocalypse depicted by the
artist-the collapse of the world and of our conceptions of it-into
the medium of sound.
The starting point for Pintscher's orchestral composition was
the sound and aura of the entire installation: an inspirational
moment that enabled me to think further about the force of sounds I
have previously developed. The material is, so to speak, melted
into lead; the entry of the solo trumpets is like opening two
valves of a gigantic instrument made of lead, which supplies air in
a very finely-chiseled and concise form.
Janus-faced, the orchestral sound gives birth to a breathing
voice—a voice that does not appear as one individual, but is
instead articulated in two forms. The trumpet part unfolds as one
instrument playing in two directions. This goes back to a method
Pintscher used 15 years ago in his composition
Janusgesicht (Janus Face):
There is no virtuoso struggle between the two; rather, they
mutually inspire each other, they represent the same attitude,
playing the same repertoire of sounds and techniques. One part fans
out in two ways.
Instead of the orchestra and soloists entering into a concertante
dialogue, the trumpets are much more "like growths, fused onto this
orchestral sound. In concentrated form, they release the aggregate
of this lead-like orchestra, guiding it into various states as soon
as they exit this orchestral space." Both the softness and the
heaviness of lead, which Kiefer uses in his works, provide
Pintscher with an inspiring starting point:
I find the "sound" of lead in Kiefer's works incredibly
fascinating. The strength that is captured in this material! It is
flexible, malleable, yet unbelievably heavy. I find this state of
matter, with its combination of softness and heaviness, to be
exciting-this is what I try to make audible in the music.
In terms of form, the composition does not trace a conventional
dramatic development. Pintscher creates a sculpture, an eruptive
sound object, which propels the events from the opening outburst.
In the process, the composer explains,
the ending mirrors the beginning. Individual particles break loose
from the force of the opening explosion, which are then led,
transformed, and developed into a concentrated mode, at the end
almost finding their way back into their original state. And yet
the trumpet lines are not isolated at the end, but are positioned
at the top of the sound in a high attack; at the highest point, the
whole then breaks off.
—Marie Luise Maintz
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Grosse Fuge in B-flat Major, Op. 133
Even by Beethoven's standards, the Grosse Fuge is
an extraordinary work. On its own, it has a puzzling intensity; in
its original context as the finale of a long, complicated, profound
string quartet, it is even more mystifying.
That quartet, the Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 130, is a
six-movement work that embodies all the richness and complexity of
Beethoven's late years. Its fifth movement is the famous Cavatina,
a piece that leaves very few of us anywhere but in a remote heaven
of emotion. To follow it, Beethoven originally conceived of an
enormous fugue, far surpassing any fugue he had ever written in its
many-layered design—and in the tough demands he makes on players
and listeners alike.
The quartet was written rapidly between July and November 1825 at a
time when Beethoven's obsessively paternal regard for his nephew
Karl was leading inexorably to the point of crisis. It was
performed a few months later, when the public and Beethoven's
publisher found the finale incomprehensible. The composer was
persuaded to detach it from the rest of the work, publish it
separately and put another, less ambitious finalenin its place. He
may have agreed to do so, not so much because the quartet was
disfigured or overburdened by it, but because it contains so many
facets and contrasts that it makes a remarkably whole and complete
work on its own.
The fugue theme is drawn from the four notes that featured
prominently in the previous Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132. The
chromatic contour becomes insistently familiar as the fugue
proceeds. Several clearly separate sections can be identified when
listening. The opening, headed Overtura, is a forceful unison
statement of the theme, followed by brief foretastes of sections to
come—like a table of contents in a book or a movie preview. The
first main section is furiously loud and emphatic for an almost
unendurable length, or so it seems. There is no relief until a
complete change of key and character appears in a central slow
movement. This moves directly into a brisk Allegro molto—much more
tuneful and exultant, although it passes through innumerable
complex corridors, with much trilling and erupting, before finally
exorcising all memories and closing with youthful gaiety—like a
return to the distant world of Beethoven's earliest music.
It was Hans von Bülow, a formidable pianist and champion of
Beethoven's music, who first arranged the Grosse
Fuge for string orchestra, when he was serving as music
director to the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen from 1880 to 1885,
introducing the weight of the bass section to the original four
instrumental parts. He instilled such discipline in his orchestra
that he had the entire string section play the work from memory
while standing up! They performed it this way in Berlin soon after
and caused a sensation. Many conductors have programmed the work in
this form—including Furtwängler, Klemperer, and Toscanini—but have
graciously allowed the players to use printed music … and
chairs.
—Hugh Macdonald
ALEXANDER SCRIABIN
The Poem of Ecstasy, Op. 54
Le poème de l'extase (The Poem of Ecstasy) is a
superb example of the huge, self-obsessed orchestral repertoire
from the period before World War I, which we generally associate
with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. Scriabin was a strongly
progressive and individualistic composer who saw himself as the
prophet of a new cosmos, and his works as the voice of a divine
being.
Like many Russians who, once they were attached to an idea, pursued
it relentlessly to its ultimate point, blind to other
influences—Mussorgsky and Tolstoy come to mind—Scriabin was driven
by a powerful inner force to capture his mystical vision in music.
He is easily dismissed as a crazy megalomaniac, but his music is
superbly crafted and excitingly modern, even today.
Most of Scriabin's music is for the piano, with some important
orchestral works composed at regular intervals throughout his short
career. His previous orchestral work—Symphony No. 3, "The Divine
Poem"—was a three-movement symphony completed in 1904 when he was
32. It ventured into the territory of philosophical abstraction,
which had begun to consume his mind shortly before. His next
orchestral work was to be a symphony entitled Orgiastic
Poem, but it eventually emerged as a one-movement work,
The Poem of Ecstasy, giving an even greater
prominence to the composer's obsession with the spirit's search for
ecstasy and his monomaniac belief in his own creativity. Alongside
the orchestral piece, Scriabin wrote a long verse-poem of the same
name, full of mystical fantasizing, which also embraced his Fifth
Piano Sonata in its grandiose vision.
But while the poem is safely ignored as the rambling of a deluded
egomaniac, the orchestral work is a masterpiece that stands
fittingly beside the other great orchestral creations of those
years. The Poem of Ecstasy was completed early in
1908 and first performed later that year at Carnegie Hall under the
baton of the composer's friend Modest Altschuler. Two months later,
it was played in Moscow under Vasily Safonov, and it was soon
adopted by orchestras all over the world keen to present the latest
in advanced music.
The orchestra is large, and contrasts of mood are extreme, yet the
piece has a concentration that was to become even more pronounced
in Scriabin's final orchestral work, Prometheus: The Poem of
Fire, of 1910. While Mahler's symphonies were reaching further
out into all realms of human thought, Scriabin's were concentrating
into a densely packed kernel of feeling and belief.
The themes have particular functions. For example, the opening
theme on the flute is the theme of longing; the clarinet's melody
over hazy strings is a dream theme, and the trumpet's succession of
rising phrases with a chromatic descent is "victory." Galloping
horns offer "dark presentiments." Such labels are easily understood
in the context of 19th-century program music, although a sustained
interpretation of their relationship is hardly possible or
desirable. We have simply an alternation of moods in the composer's
mind, with a clear recapitulation of the opening material leading
to an ecstatic climax.
—Hugh Macdonald