by Bill Scanlan Murphy
LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN
(1770–1827)
CORIOLAN OVERTURE
Composed: 1807
Premiered: Vienna, Austria, 1807
Heinrich Johann von Collin’s very ill-advised retread of the Shakespeare play was first staged in 1802, to no great success. Beethoven was asked to write an overture for the play’s attempted resurrection in 1807. Quite possibly because the overture promised far more than the play could deliver, the one and only performance of the play preceded by the overture turned out to be the play’s last-ever airing. Unlike von Collin’s hackwork, however, Coriolan has always been one of Beethoven’s most popular works.
By a happy coincidence, the events of the play lend themselves neatly to being summarized in the more-or-less standard sonata form in which Beethoven casts his overture. The first subject—Coriolanus the angry hero, rejected by Rome—melds easily into the second-subject pleadings of his wife and family before the development shows us the tormented loyalties of the general, who must lay siege to a city containing his own family. It is not too fanciful to think that Beethoven, legendarily ferocious to all around him (not least because of his failing hearing) but nonetheless desperate for love, identified with this conflicted hero. Rather than uniting the two subjects in tonal reconciliation, the recapitulation shows the hero crumbling under his own contradictions. Beethoven unites with Shakespeare (whatever von Collin may have wanted) in presenting the heroic face of utter defeat.
PAUL HINDEMITH
(1895–1963))
DER SCHWANENDREHER (Third Concerto for Viola)
Composed: 1935
Premiered: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1935
In 1935, Paul Hindemith was at the crossroads of his career. One of the most respected musicians in Germany, equally famous both as a composer and performer (conductor and violist), he would soon be driven permanently from his homeland by the Nazis. Hindemith’s opera Mathis the Painter, that premiered in 1934, had dealt with the very un-Nazi topic of the delicate relationship of the artist to the state; suffice it to say that Dr. Goebbels and Hindemith had their differences.
It is typical of this composer that, just as his life was showing signs of falling apart, he would write a work as outwardly genial as Der Schwanendreher; however, equally typical, there are subtle undercurrents. A Schwanendreher (literally “swan-turner”) was the servant who turned the spit as the swan roasted at a medieval banquet; Hindemith drew a cartoon to illustrate the piece showing not a single roasting bird, but several swans skewered on a wheel. As the piece progresses, four harmless medieval melodies from Franz Magnus Boehme’s Old German Songbook (long a favorite of Hindemith’s) are twisted, turned, and remade at the hands of the violist in ways that occasionally hint at something far darker than the scenario Hindemith provided for the first performance (at which, significantly, he played the viola):
“A minstrel visits a happy company of people and plays for them the music he has brought from far away: songs grave and merry and at the end a dance. According to his fancy and ability he develops and decorates the old tunes with preludes and fantasias.”
The first movement is based on the melody Zwischen Berg und tiefen Tal (Between Mountain and Deep Valley): "Between the mountain and the deep valley, there is an empty road, and if your lover becomes boring, let him walk it." Though a simple enough thought, in places the music recalls the sternest of Hindemith’s major works.
The second movement opens with an idyllic exchange between the viola and the harp leading to the woodwinds’ choral statement of Nun laube, Lindlein, laube (“Put out your leaves, little lime tree”), which is then strangely interrupted by the bassoon’s “Der Gutzgauch auf dem Zaune sass” (“The cuckoo sat on the fence”). The Lindlein melody returns, this time accompanied by a return of the movement’s opening in an atmosphere of unmistakable melancholy. Perhaps we should remember that Dr. Goebbels’ Ministry was off Berlin’s Unter den Linden, and that the cuckoo, unlike its bucolic Anglo-Saxon cousins, is often a devil in German folk tales.
The finale executes (the word seems apt) eleven variations upon the tune Seid ihr nicht der Schwanendreher? (“Are you not the swan-turner?”) The “you” of the title can be interpreted as plural. As the violist/Hindemith hauls this melody through every conceivable variation technique (and two cadenzas), what, exactly, is he asking us? The music ends on a confident, positive note—but perhaps we should wonder why!
HECTOR BERLIOZ
(1803–1869)
SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE
Composed: 1830
Premiered: Paris, France, 1830
When the young Hector Berlioz first set eyes upon the Irish actress Harriet Smithson at a performance of Hamlet in 1827, he was instantly smitten. However, it was only in 1829 that Berlioz hit upon the scheme of composing a mighty symphonic work that would win her love for him. The Symphonie was written mostly over a six-week period between March and April in 1830, and first performed before an audience that included the all-important Miss Smithson. The two finally met, and, after an eventful on-off courtship greatly complicated by the fact that neither spoke the other’s language, they married, disastrously, in 1833.
Berlioz rewrote his “explanation” of the Symphonie many times over the years, placing less and less stress on the “beloved” as his relationship with Harriet crumbled, ending up with a slightly absurd, sub-Poe opium-soaked horror story that led Leonard Bernstein to call the piece “the first psychedelic trip”. The purely musical facts are more straightforward.
To represent his beloved, Berlioz uses a recurring theme—the idée fixe (obsession)—which recurs throughout the symphony. Beethoven had first used this device in his fifth and ninth symphonies, but here Berlioz turns a compositional technique to a narrative use—the very essence of Romanticism.
The idée fixe is revealed after a long introduction in the first movement. Berlioz uses his very large orchestra (much larger than Beethoven’s) in an entirely new, almost painterly fashion; the instrumental colors are as important as the notes they carry.
In the second movement, the hero sees his beloved at a crowded ball, and the idée fixe drifts in over the harp-driven waltz—a very early example of one, by the way. In the slow movement, essentially a very large-scale recast of Beethoven’s Scene by the brook, the oboe and cor anglais imitate shepherd’s pipes and the timpani evoke distant thunder.
Things take a macabre turn in the March to the Scaffold, as the artist is executed for the supposed murder of his beloved. As the knife of the guillotine rises, the idée fixe crosses the condemned man’s one last time. Or maybe not; there is still the finale. The Symphonie ends in the world of purest Gothic horror—a Witches’ Sabbath, in which the idée fixe appears as a grotesque dance played by a shrieking clarinet, shortly before the brass intone the Dies Irae, a ninth-century sequence from the Requiem Mass that describes the last day.
Whether as romance, “trip,” or simply a very large symphony, the Symphonie Fantastique holds a unique place in the repertory. There is nothing else remotely like it.
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