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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
March 19-20-21, 2010
84th Season / Subscription Concert No. 7
Michael Allsen


The distinguished German guest conductor Patrick Strub makes his Madison debut leading a program of three works, opening with Weber’s Oberon overture.  The young American pianist Jonathan Biss then joins us for an early masterpiece by Mozart, the Concerto No.9.   We wrap up with the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s first performance of another early masterpiece, Brahms's Serenade No.1.


Carl Maria von Weber  (1786-1826)
Overture to Oberon    
    
Weber completed the opera Oberon on April 9, 1826, just three days before he conducted its premiere in London.  We have performed its overture at six previous concerts, beginning in 1939.  The most recent performance was in 1994.  Duration 9:00.

Weber completed his opera Oberon just a few short months before his death.  The phenomenal succcess of his romatic masterpiece Der Freischütz (1821) secured international fame and commissions for new operas. His follow-up, Euryanthe (1823), was not particularly successful, but he soon received a commission from Charles Kemble, manager of London’s Covent Garden Theatre for two new operas.   By this time, Weber was ill with tuberculosis and deeply tired, but he saw a tour in England as a source of security for his family.  The first of these operas—and the only that he was able to write—was to be based upon an English libretto setting the Oberon legend.  Weber painstakingly learned English in preparation, and after several delays, finally left his home in Dresden in February 1826, with most of the score finished—leaving only a few numbers and the overture to complete after he arrived in London. While Oberon was a hit at its premiere, it never attracted the kind of lasting influence of Freischütz and only its overture performed with any regularity today.

Oberon's libretto was based upon a tale well-known to the early Romantics.  Originating in medieval French and German legends, it was the basis for a famous 17th-century English masque.  The best-known version in Weber’s time, and the basis of the opera, was an epic German poem published in 1780 by Christoph Martin Wieland.  (The title character, Oberon, king of the elves, also appears in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but there is little other connection between the story set in Weber's opera and Shakespeare's play.)  As in most romantic overtures, Weber refers to themes and events from the opera itself.  The stately horn theme that opens the overture refers to Oberon's magic horn, which he loans to the knight Huon, should the knight ever need supernatural assistance.  Huon and his lady Rezia do, of course, get in a jam near the end of the opera, and the magic horn serves to bring Oberon to the rescue.  After a lengthy slow introduction, Weber sets the remainder of the overture in sonata form.  The bustling main theme that opens the Allegro also serves as the accompaniment to the Act II quartet Over the dark blue waters.  The tranquil second theme, introduced by solo clarinet, is not drawn from the opera, but the syncopated melody that follows comes from Rezia's aria Ocean, thou mighty monster.  The Oberon overture is brilliant and happy throughout—despite the fact the composer was ill, depressed, and probably homesick at the time it was composed.  Weber's son later wrote of Oberon:  “All the light and life, and freshness and geniality of this work sprang from the brain of a weak, sick, bowed-down, and apprehensive man ... the genius that created it had nothing in common with the poor suffering body.”


Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major for Piano and Orchestra, K. 271 (“Jenamy”)

Mozart completed this concerto in January 1777.  It has been played once previously by the Madison Symphony Orchestra, with soloist Jeffrey Siegel in 1995. Duration 30:00.

Mozart spent most of his early life touring Europe as child prodigy with his father Leopold, looking for a prominent position for the phenomenally talented younger Mozart.  By 1775, his years as a Wunderkind were over, however, and the young Mozart returned to Salzburg to serve his father's patron, Archbishop Colleredo.  Aside from a few extended job-hunting trips, he would spend most of the next six years in his home town.  This period, spent in provincial Salzburg is often painted as a frustrating time for young Mozart, who worked for much of his early 20s to get out from under the wing of his protective and sometimes overbearing father.  But he was also surrounded by good friends, and—particularly in the early years—was astonishingly productive.  He also seems to have enjoyed the role of a young, but very big fish in a very small pond!  He composed symphonies, concertos, serenades, chamber works and even operas while in the Archbishop's employ, all the time working as a church musician for the  Archbishop.  Among the finest works he composed in Salzburg was the Piano Concerto No.9 (“Jenamy”)—completed within a few weeks of his 21st birthday.

The name associated with this concerto was for more than two centuries one of the great Mozart mysteries.  In the 1770s, there are several references in Mozart’s letters to a pianist, “Mademoiselle Jenomy” (a name he and his father spelled differently in nearly every reference to her), for whom he composed the concerto.  Mozart’s biographers knew little else about this rather mysterious female pianist, but in one influential biography written in 1912, the authors—knowing that Mozart’s spelling was no better than that of most 18th-century writers—decided that he was Italianizing a French name, and that the concerto was written for a “Mademoiselle Jeunehomme.”  The work was known popularly as the “Jeunehomme” concerto for nearly a century.  But in 2003, Mozart scholar Michael Lorenz found that Mozart’s spelling was not quite as bad as previously thought!  He identified the pianist as Victoire Jenamy (1749-1812), the daughter of a prominent dancer and choreographer George Noverre.  Noverre and Mozart were friends and professional colleagues: Noverre had choreographed a performance of Mozart’s opera Lucio Silla a few years earlier and on a visit to Paris in 1778, Mozart composed a fine score for Noverre’s ballet Les petits riens.  It was through Noverre that Mozart knew Victoire Jenamy, who was married to a wealthy Viennese merchant.  She was not a professional musician, but she did play occasionally in public and well enough to attract at least one admiring review in a Viennese paper.  She apparently commissioned the concerto in 1776, though it is not clear whether she ever performed it.  For his part, Mozart liked the concerto well enough to play it in both Mannheim and Paris in 1777 and 1778, and later programmed it on his concerts in Vienna.

The best-known of Mozart’s piano concertos are the series he wrote for his own concerts in Vienna in the 1780s, but No.9, the last of the solo piano concertos he wrote in Salzburg, stands alongside these late masterpieces.  It is one of the best of his early works: the biographer Alfred Einstein called it Mozart’s “Eroica” for its boldness and innovation.  This begins in the opening bars of the first movement (Allegro): concertos typically begin with an orchestral exposition, but here, the solo part jumps in during the first few measures, before stepping aside to allow the orchestra to introduce the main ideas.  Near the end of this section, the piano enters with a long trill and short bit of lyricism as a bridge to is its own exposition. The development is particularly long and intense, carried almost completely by the piano.  When the main ideas are recapitulated, Mozart presents them in a new order and in shortened form.  As usual, there is space near the end for a solo cadenza, but rather untypically, Mozart composed a set of cadenzas for this concerto, rather than leave them to improvisation.

The brooding Andantino was Mozart’s first concerto middle movement written in a minor key.  The inspiration here was clearly operatic, and the piano’s solo aria here is broken occasionally buy passages that sound like recitative.  The movement develops a pair of long lyrical phrases and culminates in an emotional cadenza.  The closing movement (Rondo: Presto) is a complete contrast: music tied together by an energetic theme that also seems suited for opera, but in this case a fast-paced comic scene.  (Several writers have noted the similarity between this bustling theme and an aria sung by Monastatos in Act II of Mozart’s Magic Flute.)  Between repeats and developments of this idea, Mozart places varied contrasting episodes: a suddenly wistful moment for the solo, a short cadenza that leads into a surprisingly extended courtly minuet, a long solo passage that maneuvers the music back to the main theme, and an exuberant closing passage that turns flippant at the very end.



Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Serenade No. 1 in D Major, Op. 11

Brahms composed this work in 1857-58.  Joseph Joachim directed the first performance in Hanover, on March 3, 1860.  This is our first performance of the work.   Duration 49:00.

In 1853, Brahms was discovered by the composer and critic Robert Schumann, who hailed him as a “young eagle” in a famous article of 1853.  Schumann saw the Classical lines of Brahms's music as an antidote to the more radical ideas of the “New German School” headed by Franz Liszt.  Brahms was held up as the successor to Beethoven, and Schumann suggested that “…if [Brahms] directs his magic wand where the massed power in chorus and orchestra might lend him their strength, we can look forward to even more wondrous glimpses into the secret world of the spirits.” Brahms was under great pressure, both self-imposed and from critics and friends allied with Schumann’s views, to compose a large “important” work—a symphony.  His first attempt at a large-scale composition, the first piano concerto, was initially a failure, and he seems to have withdrawn for a few years to study and hone his skills. In 1857 the 24-year-old Brahms secured his first professional job in the provincial town of Detmold, about 150 miles south of his hometown of Hamburg.  He thoroughly enjoyed the pastoral surroundings of Detmold, where he spent the next few winters directing the small court orchestra and an amateur choral society.  

Brahms had first tried and failed to produce a symphony in 1856 (though large chunks of this unfinished work did show up in later music).  While in Detmold, he turned instead to the serenade, the light, flexible, and genial form favored by Mozart and Haydn, using a “Classical” orchestra of limited size.  His two serenades are modest works that were at least partly experiments in orchestral writing, but which are lyrically beautiful and thoroughly accomplished works in their own right.  The serenade form that Brahms adapted was relatively free—18th- and early 19th-century serenades were originally pieces to be performed in informal settings (mostly outside), and there was no strictly-prescribed form, or even a standard number of movements.  Most had at least four contrasting movements, but there were frequently as many as nine or ten.  Brahms’s first serenade was clearly an exercise in carefully assembling a work and gradually fleshing it out with orchestral color.  It went through several versions, an octet, a nonet, a small orchestra version with flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon, and a two-piano version, before he completed the final version, still for a small orchestra: pairs of woodwinds and trumpets, four horns, timpani, and strings.  (Brahms later destroyed all but the two-piano and orchestral versions.) Though not a symphony, the Serenade No.1 is “symphonic” in length and there are many hints of Brahms’s mature style in its six movements.  There are also several clear references to Haydn and Beethoven in the work.

The expansive opening movement (Allegro molto) is laid out in sonata form.  It begins in a pastoral mood, with quiet “bagpipes” and a dancelike and Haydnesque theme heard first in solo horn and woodwinds, before appearing in the full orchestra.  (Several writers have linked this idea to the main finale theme of Haydn’s final symphony, No.104.)  The second main theme is much more clearly Brahms, a sweeping and lyrical melody that had has an underlying rhythmic vitality.  The exposition is rounded off in a briefly stormy homage to Beethoven.  The development section is longer and more intense that one might expect in a supposedly “light” piece, thoroughly exploring all of the main ideas.  The recapitulation is conventional, bringing back all of the main ideas, but the closing is a surprise—rather than ending in a Beethovenian storm, there is a witty little woodwind coda that takes off from the main theme.

The second movement is a substantial Scherzo that begins with a rhythmically unstable idea that is worked out in several quirky ways.  Horns solemnly mark out the time for the central trio, a rustic dance tune, and the movement ends with a repeat of the opening material   Brahms follows this with a lovely Adagio, the longest of the serenade’s movements—again, a full-scale sonata-form piece.  Brahms’s model here may have been the “Scene by a Brook” from Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony.  The opening musical ideas are gentle and idyllic, and there is rather broad transition to the equally gentle second theme, heard first in the solo horn.   This movement, as it develops these themes, is a feast for the solo woodwinds, with the strings serving mostly as background until one grand duet between the violins and cellos in the development.   There are occasional minor-key clouds, but otherwise the movement remains placid and sunny throughout, ending in a serene coda.

Two lighter movements follow.  The Menuetto is essentially a piece of smaller chamber music in the midst of a orchestral work—a pair of minuets, the first presented by solo woodwinds, and a more lush melody by the strings.  Critic Eduard Hanslick, who would become the most influential champion of Brahms’s music, was particularly taken with the woodwind passage, writing in a review that: “The first minuet seems to us the pearl of the work, and perhaps the prettiest movement as yet written by Brahms.  The instrumental coloring and the grace of the melody give it the characteristic of night music, and it is full of moonlight and the scent of lilac.”  The second Scherzo is lighthearted take on the brusque Scherzo of Beethoven’s second symphony, with a great deal of thunderous counterpoint.

The closing Allegro is a rondo, though Brahms interjects a great deal of intense development into this usually lightweight form.  The main recurring them is a strongly-accented idea that alternates with more lyrical episodes.    The movement is rounded off by a short, exuberant coda.

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program notes ©2010 by J. Michael Allsen