Trumpet Overture in C Major, Op. 101
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
In his youth, Felix Mendelssohn was often compared to Mozart. He had been a child prodigy who turned into a brilliant composer-performer. His style, too, was classical, with its lightness, clarity and emphasis on technical craftsmanship. Many of the brilliant works of Mendelssohn’s youth were chamber pieces, though he also composed 12 symphonies for strings, concertos for the violin and for the piano, the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and other dazzling works.
As a kind of gift for Mendelssohn’s 15 th birthday in 1824, his teacher, Carl Zelter, acknowledged the end of his student’s apprenticeship and welcomed him into the brotherhood of composers. Over the next two years, Mendelssohn produced some of his first mature music, including his First Symphony and a double-piano concerto. He wrote the Trumpet Overture (his first concert overture) in 1826, and it was premiered in Berlin the following year. Over the years, several performances of the work were given, most notably as the overture to Handel’s Israel in Egypt (in a revised form) in London and Düsseldorf during 1833.
What to listen for: Trumpets, of course! Especially at the opening, the middle and the ending of the overture, but in many other places also. The brass fanfare in the middle of the overture generates a musical idea that Mendelssohn then “discusses.” Near the beginning, listen for busy strings — the sort of thing you might hear in Vivaldi or Bach. In fact, Mendelssohn gives a nod in Bach’s direction by including a fugue, upon which a brass fanfare encroaches. Mendelssohn presents some especially sweet tunes in this overture, but he never loses sight of the proud trumpet-fanfare premise. At the stentorian ending, he leaves the final fanfare ringing in our ears.
Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Young Beethoven became known to the public more as a pianist than as a composer during the first years after he made Vienna his home in 1792. Part of this early reputation stemmed from performances he gave of his own piano concertos. The Concerto in B-flat, “officially” numbered second, was actually composed earlier than that in C major and was played widely before 1798. In that year, however, Beethoven successfully premiered his C Major Concerto in Prague, and the critics quickly realized that a true innovator had entered the musical arena. Vaslav Tomasek wrote, “The singular and original seem to be his chief aim in composition.”
The Piano Concerto in C Major gives us not so much the impression of innovation as that of a concerto à la mode, particularly in the first movement. The quiet opening (a foretaste of Beethoven’s later Violin Concerto) announces a heroic first theme. Other themes are alternately graceful and military-spirited. Up to this point the orchestra has played by itself. Now Beethoven emulates Mozart’s piano concertos, including the indirect manner of bringing in the piano part, which finally “discovers” the main theme. A substantial piano solo near the end of the movement was also part of the Mozart legacy.
The slow movement is unexpectedly sumptuous. It is led nearly throughout by the piano part, which begins by spinning out an incredibly touching melody. The depth and poignancy of this movement give the listener an early glimpse of the great Beethoven slow movements, which, reportedly, sometimes left audiences in tears.
In the concerto’s finale, we perceive the shadow of Haydn’s scintillating rondos mixed with Beethoven’s personal brand of boisterous wit. The rollicking opening theme keeps returning between episodes, two of which show Beethoven in a humorous mood. In the wealth of its themes and the sweeping progress of this jovial finale, we can easily understand a contemporary critic’s amazement at Beethoven’s “frequent daring deviations from one theme to another.”
The Walk to the Paradise Garden
Frederick Delius (1862-1934)
Writer Ethan Mordden has humorously suggested that “Delius is like halvah or pralines: too sweet for the average taste.” Yet that sweetness may be the most English aspect of the art of Delius. As Arthur Hutchings contends Delius’s style, “It is the very quintessence of the English spirit in art.” Simultaneously, the style of Delius is firmly derived from that of Debussy. So drawn was Delius to French Impressionism at the turn of the century, that he chose to live near Paris for many years.
Delius’s most famous opera, The Village Romeo and Juliet, however, shows a foreshadowing of Debussy. Like the latter’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Delius’s opera, constructed as a series of short scenes joined by continuous music, was finished in 1901, while Debussy’s opera did not premiere until the following year. None of the Debussy score has been successfully extracted as orchestral concert music. Delius, on the other hand, pointedly made his intermezzo between the last two scenes accessible as The Walk to the Paradise Garden.
The libretto to The Village Romeo and Juliet was based on a story by Swiss writer, Gottfried Keller, which, in turn was based on a true incident reported in a newspaper in 1847. It seems that two teenagers fell in love, a forbidden situation, since their parents had been bitter enemies for years. The paper reported that “on August 15, the two young people went to an inn . . . and stayed dancing there until one in the morning, after which they left together. The following day their bodies were found in a nearby meadow.”
In the opera, led by the “Dark Fiddler,” the two lovers walk to the river’s edge, where they embark a leaking hay barge and drift down stream to eternity. The parallels with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Maeterlinck/Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande are obvious. Not so obvious or well known is how much The Walk to the Paradise Garden stood for all of Delius’s output. The night he died, the BBC played a recording of the intermezzo after the announcement of his death. Eric Fenby, Delius’s personal secretary, wrote, “As I listened to that music, I saw the world of music as he entered it, and the world of music, richer now by far through his legacy of loveliness, as he had left it.”
Symphony No. 100 in G (“Military”)
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
“I am Salomon from London, and I have come to fetch you. Tomorrow we shall conclude an agreement,” was reportedly what concert promoter and violinist Johann Peter Salomon announced to Haydn when they met. It was September 1790, and early the next year Salomon took Haydn to London for the first time. The tour was a resounding success.
Small wonder, then, that when Haydn returned to Vienna, life seemed humdrum, and it did not take much for Salomon to convince Haydn to make a second trip to England. In early 1794, Haydn set foot for the second time on English soil. The “Military” Symphony was completed and premiered that year, and it had such immediate acceptance that it soon received a repeat performance. In fact, Haydn authority H.C. Robbins Landon asserts that Symphony No. 100 became the most popular symphony in the world from that point until 1805.
Haydn’s Adagio introduction begins in a stately but delicate mood and then turns unexpectedly somber., There is an abrupt turn-around, however, with the bright Allegro, which has a certain quick-march quality. It even opens with flutes and oboes alone, like a toy military band. The second theme, too, has the accentuation of a march.
The second movement, Allegretto, however, is the part of the symphony that prompted its nickname. The unique feature of this music is Haydn’s inclusion of “military” percussion instruments derived from the Turkish Janizary bands well known from the streets of Vienna. These included the triangle, cymbals and bass drum, and the composer saves their entrance until an effective moment. The scoring also gives a prominent place to the orchestra’s woodwind and brass sections, and a trumpet call comes near the end. A review of the repeat performance in London stated that this movement “. . . was again received with absolute shouts of applause. Encore! encore! encore! resounding from every seat: the Ladies themselves could not forbear.”
The Moderato minuet and Presto finale balance the first two movements. The main theme of the complex finale became so popular in its time that it could be heard on mechanical organs and appeared in printed “folk song” collections. As a final flourish, Haydn brings back the Janizary percussion near the ending.
Program Notes by Michael Fink and Notes, Inc.
