CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

“I wanted to press some rewind button and immediately experience it all again.”—London Times

When Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the 2007 London Proms, a London Times critic described the concert as “so life-affirming in spirit that I wanted to press some rewind button and immediately experience it all again.” Another showcase for this orchestra’s lush sound is Haydn’s 88th Symphony, admired by Johannes Brahms for its serene slow movement and joyous finale.

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Mariss Jansons, Chief Conductor
Ricarda Merbeth, Soprano
Michelle Breedt, Mezzo-Soprano
Michael Schade
Michael Volle, Bass
Westminster Symphonic Choir
Joe Miller, Conductor

HAYDN Symphony No. 88

BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9

Program Notes:

JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809)Symphony No. 88 in G Major
Pity the poor symphony without a city and in need of a name. Many of Haydn’s later symphonies belong to sets that were important to the composer professionally and, stylistically, to music history. The “Paris” Symphonies of 1785–1786 (Nos. 82–87), for example, were commissioned for performance in the French capital. Marie Antoinette reportedly favored No. 85, hence its nickname “La reine” (“the Queen”). The “London” Symphonies of 1791–1795 (Nos. 93–104, the composer’s last dozen) not only crowned his career but also brought the genre to new heights and depths. Clarinets find their way into the orchestra as markers of the high Classical style (an early example of a symphony with clarinets is Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony of 1778), and remarkable effects inspired the sobriquets “Surprise” (No. 94, with a sudden forte outburst), “Military” (No. 100, with bracing percussion blasts), “Drumroll” (No. 103, with, yes, a drumroll). These works earned their composer fame and fortune; once a hired hand of the Esterházy, a minor court in the backwoods of Hungary, Haydn now found himself in demand by audiences, impresarios, publishers, and performers across Europe.
Symphonies Nos. 88 and 89 are (not well) known as the “Tost” symphonies. Dating from 1787, they were commissioned by violinist and entrepreneur Joseph Tost, who was late in paying the composer for his works. Most memorable about No. 88 is thus not the circumstance of its commission or the witty subtitle it spawned, but something simpler and arguably more significant. The trumpets and drums called for sit quietly in the first movement (where they would be expected to play) and enter in the largo slow movement. A solo cello and oboe also give the movement rich and striking orchestral color. The movement takes the form of theme and variations, but elements of sonata and rondo creep in as well.

The third trio movement has a rustic charm, with a drone accompaniment recalling bagpipes and contrasting with the more stately minuet. The juxtaposition reflects a typical 18th-century aristocratic conceit of an idealized pastoral. (Think of Marie Antoinette in Petit Hameau, the faux farm on the grounds of Versailles, pretending to be a peasant.) The finale is a raucous contredanse, likewise a less elevated form than the courtly minuet, as it entails regular switching of partners and thus invites social mixing.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125
Richard Wagner declared Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony a turning point in the history of the genre (onto a path that led, unsurprisingly, to Wagner’s own works). In Wagner’s view, the introduction of text to an instrumental genre rendered the symphony articulate, its meaning manifest.

History has, however, proven him wrong. Instead of clarifying the content of the symphony, the inclusion of Schiller’s poem “An die Freude” in the finale has only multiplied its meanings. Ultimately the Ninth stands as the quintessential “empty signifier,” an “unconsummated symbol” that surely means something—but exactly what cannot be said.

“The Ninth Symphony is a symbol whose referents cannot be completely known,” wrote Beethoven’s biographer Maynard Solomon, “and whose full effects will never be experienced.” At every moment and at every level—form, genre, tonality, gesture, or text—the music demands interpretation, yet evades elucidation; somehow the symphony slips away from its own reception. “A fog of verbiage and criticism surrounds the Choral Symphony,” composer Claude Debussy quipped. “It is amazing that it has not been finally buried under the mass of prose that it has provoked.”

Largely due to the familiarity of the piece from its uses in popular and political culture (A Clockwork Orange, Die Hard, Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, Bernstein’s performance at the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “Ode to Joy” as anthem of the European Union), it is worth remembering just how strange and even troubling this music is, how potentially worrisome its utopian impulse. From the outset something seems amiss. The opening portrait of an inchoate world in the process of formation purposefully confuses listeners, because the falling intervals fail to define a key and tonal center. As musicologist Leo Treitler wryly observed, the symphony divides the world in two: those who know it is in D minor, and those who do not. The movement then unfolds as a traditional sonata-allegro in three parts (exposition, development, and recapitulation) with a final coda. The development feigns a repeat the exposition, but the main theme never arrives. Eventually a sudden crescendo (an increase in volume) introduces the recapitulation. “The effect is not so much of returning home,” notes musicologist Nicholas Cook, “as of running into a brick wall at speed.”

The second scherzo movement is likewise in sonata form, heard twice as bookends to a central trio; the third is a complicated set of double variations whose form proves easier to analyze than to hear. Perfectly audible is the unusually difficult, chromatic solo for the fourth French horn. Why the fourth horn, a hired hand in a small orchestra? “Sheer perversity,” Cook suggests, challenging the lore that Beethoven wrote for the fourth player because he alone possessed a valved horn; in fact, the part can be played on the natural—that is, valveless—instrument.

The first three movements of the Ninth are gorgeous, complex, and challenging in their ways, but each generally accords with the symphonic tradition to date. Not so with the finale, which proves that music is a concatenation of metaphor. The finale defies musical logic to date, being at once a set of variations (on the “Joy” theme, nine in all), a cantata (non-dramatic vocal work accompanied by orchestra), a symphony within a symphony (following the four-movement design of the Ninth itself to become a symphony within a symphony), a sonata form with double exposition (thus akin to a concerto), and even an opera and an oratorio (with the instrumental recitative at the opening).

The finale begins with a dissonant, arresting, vicious fanfare that Wagner dubbed the Schreckensfanfare (“fanfare of terror”). What follows is an instrumental recitative: The basses intone a speech-like melody in dialogue with reminiscences from the previous three movements. The music recalled, however, has never been heard before; the quotations are altered, transformed and deformed by the vicissitudes of memory. Next the basses introduce a new tune, wordlessly humming the “Joy” melody that will become the theme of the movement. (As with the opening, if you know what’s coming, then you know, but if not, the melody comes as a surprise.) Following this, the horrible fanfare returns. Finally the music finds its voice with the appearance of a solo baritone. Wagner, a composer committed to the primacy of texted music, interpreted the dismissal of the fanfare and the previous themes—“not these tones”—as a rejection of instrumental music as a whole. “Staunchly he threw his anchor out,” he proclaimed of Beethoven, “and this anchor was the Word.”

What, however, do those words say? The “Ode to Joy” has generally been interpreted as a hymn to humanity, a utopian vision of universal goodwill, even freedom and liberty. But this paean to the people runs up against the strangest moment in the entire symphony. In the middle of the movement, following three instrumental and three vocal variations, the “Joy” theme transforms into a Turkish march, a style of military music featuring winds and percussion inspired by Turkish janissaries. All solemnity and dignity drains away, yielding to the carnivalesque.

In this nearly blasphemous passage, the eminent cultural critic Slavoj Zizek finds reason for reckoning. Writing in the wake of the Treaty of Lisbon, which established the post of President of the European Union, and in the shadow of violent conflicts between Turks and Kurds in Berlin, Zizek dubs the Turkish march “the return of the repressed.” It dares to challenge the world born of the embryonic opening intervals in the first movement, developed over the course of the symphony, and celebrated here at the last.

And so consider the poignant second stanza of Friedrich Schiller’s poem that invites some to “join in celebration” but banishes others. Those “who cannot rejoice” should “steal weeping away.” Zizek takes pause. “Before succumbing to the warm sentiment of how we are all one big family,” he cautions, “I think my fellow Europeans should spare a thought for all those who cannot rejoice with us, all those who are forced to ‘steal weeping away.’ It is, perhaps, the only way we’ll put an end to the rioting and car burnings and other forms of the Turkish march we now see in our very own cities.” Other unnerving twists and turns unsettle the familiar hymn and frustrate any attempt to arrive at a single interpretation. As we intently study the symphony, it—like the Mona Lisa—stares back at us, keeping its secrets to itself.