by David M. Zajic
Academic Festival Overture, op. 80
Johannes Brahms (1833-1896)
Composed: 1880
Premiered: January 4, 1881
Johannes Brahms received a thorough musical education in his youth, but his course of study never included a college experience. He studied composition and piano privately as a child-and it’s not every wunderkind who can claim to have played the bordellos of Hamburg by the age of thirteen. By 1850 Brahms had developed enough of a local reputation as a pianist to become the accompanist to the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi. In 1853, Brahms and Reményi embarked on a concert tour of Germany that eventually took them to Hanover, where Brahms attracted the attention of Joseph Joachim. At 21, Joachim was already established as a major violin virtuoso, and he was to become one of Brahms’s closest friends. When Brahms parted company from Reményi shortly thereafter, it was to Joachim that he turned. He spent two months with Joachim in Göttingen, auditing courses in philosophy and history at the University. This was Brahms’s closest approach to college life as a student.
Thus it is not so shocking that in 1877, when Cambridge University wished to offer him an honorary doctorate, Brahms’s desire for academic recognition was outweighed by his distaste for travel and publicity. Two years later, Brahms accepted an honorary doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Breslau, and expressed his gratitude by composing the Academic Festival Overture -from the students’ point of view! The overture is a medley of popular student drinking songs, but also functions as a mini-symphony. The overture opens with an accented eighth-note pattern and a bouncy melody, that will serve as a bridge between the sections. The first student song, “Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches Haus,” is sung by the brass after a drum roll. We hear a vigorous presentation of the unifying melody again, but the texture lightens, and the strings begin a more flowing tune, “Der Landesvater.” Next, the bassoons introduce “Fuchsleid,” a silly hazing song. These elements are now developed and mixed together in what must be Brahms’s closest musical approach to the “New German” school, typified by Richard Wagner. Finally, the brass shout out “Gaudeamus igitur” over wild running scales in the strings.
Andante and Rondo ongarese
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Composed: 1809
Weber assumed his first professional musical position at age 19 as an opera conductor in Breslau in 1804. After two years of conflict with the Breslau musicians over issues of orchestral seating, rehearsal discipline, and other reforms, Weber returned to concert touring. In July 1807, he took a non-musical position as personal secretary to Duke Ludwig of Württemburg in Stuttgart. There Weber became friends with Franz Danzi, the Stuttgart court music director, and continued to write music for the court orchestra. Weber wrote the Andante and Rondo ongarese in 1809, probably for his brother, Fridolin. It is not known whether the work was performed at that time. Weber left the Duke’s service in February 1811, when he was banished from Württemburg, accused of stealing silverware (of which he was innocent), and embezzlement and selling military exemptions (of which he was guilty).
Weber toured for three more years with Munich as his home base. In 1811, he wrote a Clarinet Concertino which was so popular that many Munich wind players requested concertos. Among them was bassoonist Georg Friedrich Brandt. Weber became conductor of the Prague Opera in 1813. When Brandt visited Prague in February 1813, Weber rewrote the Andante and Rondo ongarese for bassoon. This version was first performed by Brandt on February 19, 1813. The original version was rediscovered in 1864 by composer and writer Friedrich Jähns.
Romance in F for Viola and Orchestra
Max Bruch (1838-1920)
Composed: 1911
Premiered: April 25, 1911
Bruch taught composition at the Berlin Hochschule from 1892 until his retirement in 1911. During retirement, Bruch developed an interest in the combination of viola and clarinet. Between the composition of the Eight Trio Pieces for clarinet, viola, and piano and the Double Concerto for clarinet and viola, Bruch wrote a short work for viola and orchestra. The Romance in F is dedicated to Maurice Vieux, the principal violist of the Paris Opéra and the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, but it was first performed by Willy Hess, former concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, and a professor at the Hochschule.
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Composed: 1760s
Haydn’s four violin concertos were written during the earliest years of his service to the Esterházy family. The concerto in C major is probably the third in order of composition, and was written for the Italian violinist Luigi Tomasini. Tomasini was the concertmaster of the Esterházy court orchestra, and he probably taught Haydn, a violinist of limited ability, a great deal about how to write for the violin.
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, op. 55 “Eroica”
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Composed: 1803-1804
First private performance: December 1804
Public premiere: April 7, 1805
Beethoven settled in Vienna in 1792 and made a fine living as a pianist and composer, also receiving an annuity from a consortium of aristocrats. By 1801, Beethoven became aware that he was losing his hearing, and the following year wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter to his brothers to be read after his death in which Beethoven described his traumatic reaction to the loss of a musician’s most important sense. The Eroica Symphony was written during the height of this depression.
Although the title of the work at publication in 1806 was Heroic Symphony composed to celebrate the memory of a great man, the working title during composition was Bonaparte Symphony. Beethoven perceived Napoléon Bonaparte as a liberator of the masses from centuries of aristocratic oppression. When Napoléon had himself crowned emperor in December 1804, Beethoven was disgusted and removed the dedication. In fact, the removal was quite literal: the original manuscript has a “Bonaparte”-shaped hole ripped out of the title page.
In creating the Eroica, Beethoven also considered the heroism of Prometheus, a character in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods to give to mankind, and Beethoven’s own heroism in facing deafness and depression. The finale of Eroica contains melodies first heard in Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures of Prometheus. Beethoven’s version of Prometheus focuses on the gift of art and culture to the human creatures, and mankind’s initial failure to understand the gift. The four movements can be seen as a prototype for a heroic story: struggle, defeat, recovery, and victory.
Beethoven was the first composer to consciously think of himself as an artist rather than a craftsman producing a valuable commodity, and the Eroica was the first of his works consciously written as a work of art for posterity. It uses the traditional structures of a Classical symphony, but on a scale never before attempted. The first movement expands sonata allegro form by using the development section to introduce new melodic material derived from passing details, and uses unprecedented harmonic dissonance and rhythmic tension. One surprising item to listen for in this movement is the apparently early entrance of a single French horn before the recapitulation in the rest of the orchestra. Beethoven’s pupil, Ferdinand Ries, once mistook the premature entrance as a mistake, crying “Can’t the damned horn player count?,” which enraged the composer.
Beethoven had already written a “funeral march for a hero” in his Piano Sonata, op. 26. The scale of the Eroica funeral march is much grander, and concludes with a heartbreaking fragmentation of the main theme in the violins. Few symphonic works prior to the Eroica used more than two French horns, so the scherzo is noteworthy for its exposed three-horn writing in the trio.
The finale is a theme and variations, the theme being the one used in Prometheus, and even earlier in one of the Twelve Contredances. The theme is presented in parts and put together while the audience listens. The first version presents only the bass line in pizzicato strings. The second and third hearings add harmony and embellishment. Not until the fourth iteration is the actual melody heard, played by the winds. The remaining variations are interspersed with two fugato sections.
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