by Bill Scanlan Murphy
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
PIANO CONCERTO NO.25 in C, K. 503
Composed: 1786
Premiered: Prague, 1786
Allegro maestoso
Andante
Rondo – Allegretto
This concerto was written during Mozart’s last, fleeting acquaintance with normal life and solvency; his slide down the tight spiral of poverty and misfortune that led to his early, miserable death began in 1789. These were also extremely fruitful years for him musically; No. 25 was the third piano concerto that he wrote in 1786.and was written simultaneously with the Prague symphony and at least parts of Le Nozze di Figaro.. Indeed, between 1785 and 1788, Mozart wrote an astounding twelve piano concerti, but none anywhere near the scale of No. 25. It is certainly an imposing edifice; it would take another 30 years (and Ludwig van Beethoven) before there was a longer piano concerto. And – not a small point – the only Mozart work that Beethoven openly stole music from was this one.
It has long been the accepted mythology (not least in fantasies like the movie Amadeus) that Mozart composed simply by assembling the music in his head, then writing it all down at once in its finished form – unlike, say, Beethoven, who sketched ideas and produced endless drafts before attempting a final version of a work. This has never seemed likely to musical realists, and recent work by David Buch has unearthed Mozart sketchbooks just like Beethoven’s (only legible); in other words, he was a master craftsman, not merely a mouthpiece for the angels. In this concerto, we see the craftsman at his best – which is not at all to deny the work’s deep, heartfelt inspiration.
Like all the most profound music, this is music about music itself; in dealing with thorny technical issues, the composer reaches through the sounds into his own soul, and through his into ours. The choice of key is significant. C major, supposedly the simplest key, was reserved by Benjamin Britten (who idolized Mozart) for his darkest, deepest music, and it was used by Mozart’s teacher Haydn as a symbol for God himself in The Creation.
Much has been made historically of Beethoven’s famous use of the da-da-da-dum rhythm to unify the first movement of his Fifth Symphony (come to that, the entire symphony) – but Mozart does exactly the same thing with the first movement of this concerto and with the same material. The first movement is entirely dominated by the same rhythm, played, unlike Beethoven’s falling third, on the same pitch. This holds the music together with an iron grip, as Beethoven clearly noted; and, to prove just how seriously Beethoven took this concerto, and this movement in particular, there is a very obvious borrowing from it in the first movement of his own Fourth Piano Concerto. Genius speaks unto genius, obviously. It is also no coincidence that the concerto takes some time deciding whether it is in C major or C minor – exactly the same tension that makes the Beethoven masterpiece tick.
The second movement, like the first, is in sonata form, with highly elaborate figurations fully written out for the piano, unlike earlier works (Mozart’s included) which would merely have provided the pianist with material for improvisation. Here, the baroque continuo player (the origin of the keyboard player) is starting to turn into the Romantic keyboard hero. Beethoven - even Rachmaninov - is not so far away.
The final Rondo seems cheerful enough until the minor tonality that so threatened to rain on the first movement makes itself felt. However, the major triumphs, and the path to the light – and the future – opens out into the joyous ending.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)
SYMPHONY No. 10 in E Minor, Op. 93
Moderato
Allegro
Allegretto
Andante; Allegro
It is always dangerous, and often very misleading, to read autobiographical significance into any particular work, but in the case of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, the piece is almost incomprehensible without understanding the composer’s life at the time it was written. The Symphony was written in the shadow – and the removal of the shadow – of one of the most significant events in Soviet history.
A famous music historian once built an entire lecture on Prokofiev around the supposedly horrible fact that Pravda did not even mention the composer’s death when he passed away in 1953; an undergraduate then demolished the entire thesis by pointing out that Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin. While dying that day was merely an irony for Prokofiev, Stalin’s demise (some say at the hands of Secret Police chief Lavrenti Beria) marked a major new phase in the life of Dmitri Shostakovich. The Tenth Symphony was his first attempt to deal with this new fact in his life.
The biographical intent is easily proved: a major feature of the Symphony is a melody based on the letters of the composer’s name – the notes D-S-C-H (S and H are E flat and B in German nomenclature). This will first appear in the third movement. It is no coincidence that the only key in which these notes appear naturally is C minor; yet again, a composer is reaching into the C major/minor realm for his profoundest utterance.
The first movement greets us – if that is the word – with a grindingly dissonant, horrifying first subject that has often been associated with Stalin himself, while the second subject, major-key and optimistic, always appears after it. Some commentators have associated various melodic ideas in the movement with Shostakovich, Stalin, Laurenti Beria and the composer’s bitter enemy Andrei Zhdanov, who had denounced him for “bourgeois formalism” (and thus brought him within inches of a lifetime in Siberia) in 1948. Ironically, this emotionally hypercharged movement is perhaps the least “formalist” music Shostakovich ever wrote. More concrete, and certainly more intriguing, is the direct quotation from one of his songs, a setting of a Pushkin monologue entitled “What is in my name”? A dark, looming bass line dominates all.
After the emotional sprawl of the first movement, the mere five minutes of the second come as almost a relief - but, if anything, we are in even darker territory, In his controversial autobiography Testimony, Shostakovich explicitly states that the movement is “a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking”.
In the third movement, we finally encounter Shostakovich himself, unarguably, in the D-S-C-H theme. We also meet someone else – but it is not Stalin this time. The horn plays, twelve times, a sequence of notes that spells out the name Elmira. At the time of the symphony’s composition, Shostakovich was deep into an affair with Elmira Nazirova, one of his students. The movement is a nocturne, seeming to speak more of guilt and bleakness than love; indeed, in a letter to his lover, Shostakovich even points out that the “Elmira” theme is similar to a motif in Mahler’s Lied von der Erde. There, the same sequence of notes is unmistakably associated with death. The D-S-C-H theme, not at all incidentally, appears on the composer’s headstone.
The Finale begins with the bass groanings of the first movement, with darkness threatening to turn to actual tragedy until a strangely birdsong-like passage opens the music out into a Mahlerian fantasy culminating in a hyper-emphatic statement of the D-S-C-H theme. This is often interpreted as a gesture of the composer’s triumph over his enemies - but is that haunted, turned-in-on-itself figure (man or music) capable of triumph in the romantic sense? You decide.
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