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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
October 2-3-4, 2009
84th Season / Subscription Concert No. 1
Michael Allsen


We open this 84th season with a great theatrical curtain-raiser by Beethoven, his overture Consecration of the House.  One of his very late works, this overture features one of his finest fugues in its grand conclusion.  Strauss’s tone poem Death and Transfiguration is a showpiece for all sections of the orchestra, his evocation of the death and triumphant afterlife of an artistic soul.  For our final work, we welcome back pianist Peter Serkin, who appeared with the orchestra in 2005, performing Bartók’s first concerto.  On this program, he performs Brahms’s stormy first concerto: the composer’s first large-scale work.



Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Consecration of the House, Op. 124

Beethoven composed this work in 1822, completing it shortly before the premiere at the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna, on October 3, 1822.  We have performed it previously in 1953, 1971, and 1987.  Duration 11:00.

One of Beethoven's more profitable sidelines was composing incidental music for stage plays: usually comprising an overture, and music to be played during scene changes and at climactic moments in the drama.  At the very end of the remarkably creative period biographers call the “heroic decade” (1802-1812), he composed three sets of incidental music in quick succession, beginning in 1810 with music for Goethe's Egmont.  In 1811, playwright August von Kotzenbue wrote two new plays to celebrate the opening of a new theater in Pest, The Ruins of Athens and King Stephan, and Beethoven provided incidental music for both plays.  He also provided smaller bits and pieces for several additional plays during his career.  His last piece of theatrical music was written in 1822.  The Josefstadt Theater had been thoroughly renovated and playwright Carl Meisl had rewritten Kotzenbue’s Ruins of Athens to celebrate the opening.  Beethoven was again asked to provide incidental music.  He recycled nearly all of the music he had written for the play, but replaced the rather brief 1811 overture to Ruins of Athens with a much grander and larger piece.  Beethoven, completely deaf by this time, conducted the orchestra with an assistant.  The music was successful, but the new overture, retitled Consecration of the House, was particularly popular: audiences at the first three nights of the opening demanded that it be repeated.  Beethoven himself liked the overture enough to use it again on the landmark program in May 1824 that included the Vienna premiere of sections from his Missa Solemnis and the world premiere of his Symphony No.9.

Compared to profound and even avant garde late Beethoven works like the Missa Solemnis, the ninth, the Diabelli Variations, and the last string quartets, Consecration of the House sounds at first startlingly conservative: more Handel than Beethoven.  But Beethoven was looking to the past at the end of his own life, and his fugal writing in particular shows the result of his study of Handel and Bach.  The work begins much like a Baroque overture, with stately processional music underlaid by solemn trombones.  Martial trumpet music with an extravagant bassoon countermelody leads to a blustery transition.  And then the violins launch a magnificent double fugue, one of Beethoven’s longest and most accomplished essays in the form, and a stunning conclusion to the overture.


Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Death and Transfiguration, Op. 24

Strauss composed this work in 1888-1889, and conducted the first performance in Eisenach on June 21, 1890.  The Madison Symphony Orchestra has performed it on three previous programs, in 1939, 1966, and 1977.  Duration 23:00.

Strauss’s most frequently-performed works are a series of tone poems he composed as a relatively young man.  This most Romantic of symphonic forms is an expression of poetic or philosophical ideas in music, or frequently, pure program music: telling a story or painting a scene.  Strauss's tone poems adapt his own dramatic interests and frankly autobiographical details into his distinctive and freely-developing musical style. They are also masterpieces of orchestration: making colorful use of the large orchestral forces of the late 19th century.  He wrote his first four tone poems, Aus Italien (From Italy), Macbeth, Don Juan, and Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) in quick succession in 1886-1889.  While the first three are relatively straightforward pieces of program music, Death and Transfiguration was more metaphysical, based upon a conception of Strauss’s own, rather than a literary work.  His friend Alexander Ritter later wrote a poem outlining the work (appended to the published score), and Strauss himself outlined the concept in a 1894 letter:

“It was six years ago that it occurred to me to present in the form of a tone poem the dying hours of a man who had striven towards the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist.  The sick man lies in bed, asleep, with heavy irregular breathing; friendly dreams conjure a smile on the features of the deeply suffering man; he wakes up; he is once more racked with horrible agonies; his limbs shake with fever–as the attack passes and the pains leave off, his thoughts wander through his past life; his childhood passes before him, the time of his youth with its strivings and passions and then, as the pains already begin to return, there appears to him the fruit of his life’s path, the conception, the ideal which he has sought to realize, to present artistically, but which he has not been able to complete, since it is not for man to be able to accomplish such things.  The hour of death approaches, the soul leaves the body in order to find gloriously achieved in everlasting space those things which could not be fulfilled here below.”

A strikingly similar conception appears in his friend Gustav Mahler’s second symphony, written at virtually the same time, and Strauss was also deeply influenced by Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which he had heard for the first time shortly before beginning Death and Transfiguration.

Death and Transfiguration is in several sections, clearly outlining Strauss’s picture of the dying artist.  The irregular rhythms of the opening clearly show the dying man’s halting breaths—probably a reference to the music that accompanies the dying Tristan in Act III of Tristan und Isolde.  He rouses himself to remember his childhood, in the guise of a lovely series of woodwind and violin solos above luminous horns and strings.  But pain intrudes again and a strident strike from the timpani announces a tumultuous battle scene as he fights for life.  In Ritter’s poem: “But Death grants him little sleep or time for dreams.  He shakes his prey brutally to begin the battle afresh.  The drive to live, the might of Death.  What a terrifying contest!”  At this end of this battle, the brass briefly announce a triumphant theme that will represent his eventual transfiguration and the realization of his ideals. 

Exhausted but wakeful after this battle, the artist’s life passes before his mind’s eye: a series of struggles and triumphs that is the longest section of Death and Transfiguration.  The transfiguration theme rings out throughout, but in the end he once more subsides, with weakening heartbeats portrayed by the timpani.  Death finally triumphs with an angry proclamation from the brass—what Ritter called “the final iron hammer-blow.”  What follows is Strauss’s evocation of “everlasting space”—shimmering chords which build gradually to a full statement of the transfiguration theme, first in lush strings and then triumphantly in the full orchestra.  The work closes in a mood of quiet exaltation.

There is an epilogue.  Some 60 years later, Strauss completed his final work, the Four Last Songs.  The last and longest of these, Im Abendrot (In Twilight) has an elderly couple looking out over a darkening valley that represents their waning lives. When the soprano finally sings of death itself, the mood is not of resignation or fear, but of calm acceptance and satisfaction.  In the closing bars, Strauss includes a quiet allusion to Death and Transfiguration’s main theme, bringing his career as a composer to a symbolic end.


Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Concerto No. 1 in D minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 15

Brahms's first piano concerto was composed between 1854 and 1859.  He was the soloist in the first performance in Hanover, on January 22, 1859.  Previous Madison Symphony Orchestra performances have featured Howard Stein (1939), Gunnar Johansen (1951), William Masselos (1967), Howard Karp (1974), Ruth Laredo (1984), and David Buechner (1996).  Duration 45:00.

In a letter written just after his second performance of his first piano concerto, Brahms wrote to his friend Joseph Joachim: “My concerto has been a brilliant and decisive...failure.”  Joachim had conducted the premiere in Hanover, where it met with a polite but indifferent reaction from the audience.  Five days later, Brahms played the concerto again in Leipzig, and heard a “perfectly distinct hissing from all sides” at the conclusion of the third movement.   Why was this brilliant work such a flop?  At least part of the reason seems to be Brahms’s place in musical politics of the day.  Just a few years earlier, in an editorial in his musical journal, Robert Schumann had hailed young Brahms as a new standard bearer for the more conservative party of Romantic musicians—as an antidote to the music of radicals like Franz Liszt.  This work, Brahms’s first large orchestral piece, did not match the expectations of either clique.  The concerto lacked the showy “thrills and chills” heard in the works of Liszt, and demanded by most audiences, but its passionate nature seems to have been a bit too much for the conservatives.

This virtuosic and fiery piece is a complete contrast to the more intellectual and symphonic second concerto he wrote twenty years later, but both works now are part of the standard repertoire.  A young Brahms was clearly wearing his heart on his sleeve in the Concerto No.1.  In the aftermath of Schumann’s article, he felt pressure to compose a large, symphonic work, and almost immediately began work on a symphony in D minor.  The opening three movements were finished by 1854, but Brahms was dissatisfied with the orchestration, and transformed the movements into a large-scale sonata for two pianos, which he performed at private gathering with Clara Schumann.  Still unsatisfied, he took the advice of his friend Julius Grimm, and combined the two conceptions of the work to create a piano concerto.  (The original second movement was abandoned in favor of the present Adagio, but this music would resurface years later as part of his German Requiem.) 

He was still tinkering with the concerto late in 1858, just prior to its ignominious early performances, and made several more changes prior to its publication.  Just as this trying process of composition and revision was playing itself, Brahms was struck with an enormous emotional blow.  His teacher and mentor Schumann threw himself into the Rhine in 1854, in an attempted suicide.  Schumann survived, but spent the rest of his life in an insane asylum.  Brahms’s relationship with Robert’s wife Clara had always been a close and affectionate one, but with Schumann’s insanity and death in 1856, it became a complicated affair, tinged with some guilt on both sides.  Some writers have even traced the great emotional outcry at the beginning of the concerto to Brahms’s anguish over Robert’s death and his guilty love for Clara. 

The opening movement (Maestoso) is a large-scale sonata form, and makes the most of Brahms’s emotive and thoroughly Romantic themes. In the orchestral introduction, there are two contrasting ideas—one vehement and the other much more calm.  The piano enters with a placid melody and the music gradually intensifies, eventually returning to the passionate mood of the opening.  A horn call motive introduces a long and stormy development section, and this horn call will pervade much of the rest of the movement. 

In a letter to Clara Schumann, Brahms referred to the Adagio as “…a lovely portrait of you.”  This movement opens with a flowing melody in the bassoons, setting a quiet mood that is maintained throughout the movement.  The piano answers this melody, and the rest of the movement continues a gentle dialogue between soloist and orchestra.  The contrasting middle section is announced by the clarinet, and after an almost meditative cadenza, there is a return of the opening idea.

The last movement (Allegro non troppo) is a rondo, meaning that a single theme returns throughout, in alternation with contrasting music.  In this case, the main idea is a syncopated opening theme that was clearly inspired by Gypsy music.  This theme serves as a counterweight to several secondary melodies, two cadenzas, and a large central fugue that develops the main theme.
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program notes ©2009 by J. Michael Allsen