by Bill Scanlan Murphy
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)
BRANDENBURG CONCERTO No. 2 in F, BWV 1047
Composed: 1721
Premiered: Cöthen, Germany, 1722
When, in 1721, Bach dedicated the six concerti grossi that we now know as the Brandenburg Concertos to Margrave Christian Ludwig, the youngest son of the Grand Duke of Brandenburg, he came close to ending his career. He had met the Margrave in 1719 while he was in Berlin to buy a harpsichord, and promised to send him "some pieces of my composition;" it took him two years to get around to doing so. The pieces he actually sent were useless to the Margrave, as they were scored for the instruments - even the specific players - that Bach had at his disposal at the court at Cöthen, where he worked. Though Bach declared in the dedication (in French!) that the music showed "the small musical talent that God has granted me," it is clear that he was trying to impress the Margrave, with a view to a job in the far larger, richer court of Brandenburg. The Margrave, apparently annoyed at receiving a glorified job application as a present, ignored the Concertos, and never sent Bach so much as an acknowledgement; Bach was in fact lucky that the Margrave didn't write to Prince Leopold of Cöthen, telling him what his Kapellmeister was up to behind his back.
The title Brandenburg Concertos, then, is - well, an exaggeration, added by Bach's biographer Spitta in 1873. The Margrave might also have been puzzled to receive pieces in the concerto grosso form, which had been out of style for at least a generation, and certainly since Vivaldi had blazed the trail of the solo concerto. The concerto grosso, instead of having one solo instrument pitted against a full orchestra, sets a group of instruments (the concertino) - here, a flute, an oboe, a trumpet and a violin - against a larger orchestra (the ripieno). It is known that Bach had an exceptional trumpet player in his Cöthen orchestra, and here he is given a terrifyingly difficult part, originally intended for the tiny clarino trumpet - not that the other concertino parts are much easier.
Despite using the old concerto grosso format for the Brandenburgs, Bach adopts the three-movement form (fast-slow-fast) that Vivaldi made popular, rather than the seven, nine or even more movements that earlier concerto grosso composers such as Corelli had favored. Corelli's jarring stop-start pattern is replaced by a logical, satisfying arch of three balanced movements. So, paradoxically, the work is in a deeply conservative form, but a "modern" shape. The very essence of Bach's genius was his summation of the previous hundred years while staring far into the future, and it is never more evident than here.
JENNIFER HIGDON (b. 1962)
Blue Cathedral
Composed: 1999
Premiered: Philadelphia, 2000
Commissioned in 1999 by Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, where the composer is a member of the faculty, Blue Cathedral commemorates the composer's brother, Andrew Blue Higdon, who had recently died. Ms. Higdon offers a remarkably pictorial account of the world evoked by the music:
"I found myself imagining a journey through a glass cathedral in the sky. Because the walls would be transparent, I saw the image of clouds and blueness permeating from the back of the sanctuary, floating along the corridor amongst giant crystal pillars..."
Behind this almost surreal dream-image, however, lies the pain of the composer's bereavement. Andrew was a clarinetist; the composer plays the flute. The dialogs between flute and clarinet, therefore, carry great significance, not least when the clarinet spirals away from the flute towards the end of the piece, continuing a journey into a Beyond whose gateway is Higdon's aerial cathedral.
The composer offers another, less impressionistic, explanation of this strange, ethereal music, which has its roots in the world of Copland and Ravel, but soon seems to float higher than either:
"This piece represents the expression of the individual and the group - our inner travels and the places our souls carry us, the lessons we learn, and the growth we experience."
Death and joy are the two experiences that bring most of us our rare glimpses of the transcendent; in Blue Cathedral, Jennifer Higdon sets herself the awesome task of showing us her own journey from loss to illumination.
LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN (1775-1827)
SYMPHONY No. 5 in C minor
Composed: 1804-1808
Premiered: Vienna, Austria, 1808
What may well be the most famous piece of music of all time was first heard just before 1 a.m. in an unheated Viennese concert hall in late December, the last work but one in four hours of Beethoven premieres. Strangely, it was premiered as Symphony No. 6; Beethoven had written the great C minor work and the Pastoral Symphony simultaneously, and was never entirely sure how to number them. Even this is not the whole story; Beethoven began the C minor symphony directly after the Eroica - No.3!
Much has been made of the universally recognized da-da-da-dum figure that opens, defines and unifies this titanic work. Beethoven himself is said to have described it to his friend Anton Schindler as representing "Fate knocking at the door," but this is almost certainly apocryphal (or the famously grumpy composer fobbing off unwelcome questions). Perhaps more musically realistic is the thought of Beethoven attempting to out-compose his teacher Haydn, some of whose later symphonies include the device of monothematicism, which collapses the traditional first- and second-subject structure of the first movement by making the two subjects identical. Haydn had thus managed to unify a movement; with his knock-at-the-door (or whatever), Beethoven unifies an entire symphony. This was a huge leap forward in compositional technique that was not fully appreciated (or liked) at the time.
The figure simply obsesses the first movement; either the falling third of the figure or its Morse-code "dot-dot-dot-dash" rhythm is very nearly always present, even when the comparatively lyrical major-key second subject appears. It really is a Morse code letter, by the way - "V" (for Victory), which is why the work became known as the "Victory Symphony" in the Allied countries during World War Two. The figure makes only the tiniest, ghostliest appearance in the theme-and-variations second movement (listen carefully to the violins!), but returns as huge as ever in the dark, brooding, hopelessly mistitled Scherzo. If this is Beethoven's idea of a "joke," his idea of gloom is too dark to contemplate. He was not, from all accounts, a jovial man.
Beethoven unifies the last two movements to the extent of removing the gap between them - yet another "first" in a work replete with them. As the dot-dot-dot-dash worries away at the end of the Scherzo, the music modulates seamlessly to - what? Beethoven surprises us (and outraged his contemporaries) by writing the finale in C major, making this the first symphony to begin in one key and end in another. But even this triumph of the spirit is overshadowed by that relentless, nagging figure, which returns (of course) toward the end; if the figure is indeed "Fate," what has sometimes seemed like an overdone repeated C major cadence at the end of the work is Beethoven slamming the door of his music in its face. Several times.
(To top of page)
