Repertoire & Program Notes

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda:

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) | Tragic Overture, Op. 81

Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833 in Hamburg and died on April 3, 1897 in Vienna. He composed the Tragic Overture in the summer of 1880 at his country retreat at Bad Ischl; it was revised there the following year. Hans Richter conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the premiere on December 20, 1880. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings. Marin Alsop conducted the last performance of the work on January 9, 2005.

Many of Brahms’ works were produced in pairs: the Piano Sonatas, Op. 1 and Op. 2; the Piano Quartets, Op. 25 and Op. 26; the String Quartets, Op. 51; the Clarinet Sonatas, Op. 120; even the first two Symphonies, the sets of Liebeslieder Waltzes, and the Serenades. These twin pieces seem to have been the result of a surfeit of material — as Brahms was working out his ideas for one composition in a particular genre, he produced enough material to spin off a second work of similar type. Though the two orchestral overtures, Academic Festival and Tragic, were also written in tandem, they have about them more the quality of complementary balance than of continuity. Academic Festival is bright in mood and lighthearted in its musical treatment of some favorite German student drinking songs. The Tragic Overture, on the other hand, is somber and darkly heroic. Of them, Brahms wrote to his biographer, Max Kalbeck, “One overture laughs, the other weeps.” And further, to his friend and publisher, Fritz Simrock, “Having composed this jolly Academic Festival Overture, I could not refuse my melancholy nature the satisfaction of composing an overture for a tragedy.”

Brahms never gave any additional clues to the nature of the Tragic Overture. Despite the attempts by many writers to find extra-musical references in this composition, it was almost certainly not inspired by any specific literary work or personal bereavement. (Extensive sketches that date from nearly a decade earlier were used for a large portion of the exposition and seem to preclude this latter possibility.) Brahms had long been an admirer of classic drama and literature, and he used some of his first earnings as a composer to purchase volumes of Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Plutarch, and Goethe. This Overture may have been the outcome of a long involvement with the writings of those masters, coupled with the strong influence of the ethos and music of Beethoven’s Overtures for Coriolan and Egmont. Brahms’ intention that the work be general rather than specific in nature is underlined by the provisional title he gave to it during its composition: “A Dramatic Overture.” He settled on Tragic Overture, according to his correspondence, because neither he nor his friends could devise anything more suitable.

Philip Hale regarded this composition as one of Brahms’ greatest works because of “its structure and depth of feeling. There is no hysterical outburst; no shrieking in despair; no peevish or sullen woe; no obtruding suggestion of personal suffering. Commentators have cudgelled their brains to find a hero in the music: Hamlet, Faust, this one, that one. They have labored in vain; the soul of Tragedy speaks in the music.”

The Tragic Overture is comparable in form and expression to the first movement of a symphony. Its sonata structure commences with a stern summons of two chords immediately preceding the austere arching main theme in D minor. Brahms’ characteristically dark orchestral sonority, emphasizing low strings and low woodwinds, does much to supply the solemn mood of the work. The first theme gives way to a hushed transitional section employing the sepulchral sounds of trombones and tuba over a quivering string accompaniment. A contrasting theme is presented in the relatively tranquil tonality of F major by violins, but the stormy disposition of the opening is not kept long at bay. The compact development restores the tempestuous mood. The recapitulation is a considerably altered version of the exposition’s musical events, which here receive further exploration of their expressive potentials. The sense of heroic struggle which forms the dominant emotional world of the Tragic Overture remains undiminished to the end.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) | Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg and died on December 5, 1791 in Vienna. He composed the G major Piano Concerto in 1784 and his student Barbara Ployer was soloist in the premiered on June 13, 1784 in Vienna. The score calls for flute, pairs of oboes, bassoons, and horns, and strings. Duration is about 32 minutes. The last performance by the orchestra took place on March 18, 2006, when Jeffrey Kahane was both the soloist and conductor.

One of Mozart’s favorite and most talented pupils in 1784 was Barbara Ployer, daughter of Gottfried Ignaz von Ployer, the Viennese agent at the Habsburg court (today he would probably be called a lobbyist) for Mozart’s old employer and nemesis, the Archbishop Hieronymous Colloredo of Salzburg. Mozart gave Barbara lessons during the winter at the family’s town home in the Lugeck, near St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and in the summer at their villa in the nearby village of Döbling, north of the city, on the way to Grinzing. On February 9, 1784, he finished for her the Concerto in E-flat major (No. 14, K. 449), which “Fräulein Babette” (as Mozart called her) first played on March 23rd. That handsome piece was so well received in the Ployer household that Mozart created for it a sequel, the G major Concerto (K. 453), and presented it to his student/patron just three weeks later, on April 12th. (During that amazingly fertile spring season, Mozart wrote two more piano concertos, K. 450 and K. 451, between the works for Babette.) A performance was arranged at the Ployer residence in Döbling for June 13th. Mozart took advantage of the occasion to invite the famous composer Giovanni Paisiello, who was passing through Vienna on his way back to Naples after serving as opera composer to the Empress Catherine in St. Petersburg for eight years, to accompany him “in order that he might hear my composition and my pupil.” In addition to Babette’s rendition of the new work that evening, Mozart joined his student in the Two Piano Concerto (K. 365), and then took part in his recent Quintet for Piano and Winds (K. 452). One wonders if Paisiello’s stronger emotion that night was pleasure or envy. At any rate, Mozart thought highly of the new G major Concerto; it was one of only six such works that he published during his lifetime.

The Concerto begins with the best of good cheer. The movement’s main theme is one of those peerless Mozartian mixes of march, song, and symphony, bursting with the beautiful melodic kernels that incited his contemporaries to jealousy over his lyrical gifts. The violins present a complementary motive, a close-interval phrase which finds an echo in the soulful theme that opens the Andante. After its entry, the piano usurps and elaborates both of these themes, and adds a new one of its own between them in an unaccompanied passage. The soloist pauses while a vigorous tutti leads to the stronger sentiments of the development section, largely based on a little arpeggiated motive previously introduced in the orchestral introduction. The recapitulation returns the earlier material, and allows for a solo cadenza, for which Mozart left not one but two notated realizations.

The Andante is one of those wondrous, formally unclassifiable slow movements that abound in the piano concertos. It opens with what English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey called “a solemn, pleading phrase” in the violins and a limpid melody shared among the woodwinds. The piano enters, ponders some of the material already presented, and then undertakes a thoughtful dialogue with the members of the orchestra for the remainder of the movement. Such thorough, symphonic integration of soloist and ensemble was one of Mozart’s greatest contributions to the concerto form. The finale is a crystalline set of variations that concludes with a dashing coda in quicker tempo, exactly the technique that Mozart used to round off the acts of his operatic masterpieces.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550

Mozart completed the G minor Symphony in the Viennese suburb of Währing on July 25, 1788. The date of the first performance is uncertain, though it may have taken place at a concert Mozart directed in Leipzig in May 1789. The score calls for flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings; Mozart added parts for two clarinets in a revision. Duration is about 34 minutes. The Symphony was last performed on September 23&24, 2011 with Yan Pascal Tortelier on the podium.

At no time was the separation between Mozart’s personal life and his transcendent music more apparent than in the summer of 1788, when, at the age of 32, he had only three years to live. His wife was ill and his own health was beginning to fail; his six-month-old daughter died on July 29th; Don Giovanni received a disappointing reception at its Viennese premiere on May 7th; he had small prospect of participating in any important concerts; and he was so impoverished and indebted that he would not answer a knock on the door for fear of finding a creditor there. Yet, amid all these difficulties, he produced, in less than two months, the three crowning jewels of his orchestral output, the Symphonies Nos. 39, 40 and 41. The G minor alone of the last three symphonies may reflect the composer’s distressed emotional state at the time. It is among those late works of Mozart that look forward to the passionately charged music of the 19th century while epitomizing the structural elegance of the waning Classical era.

The Symphony’s pervading mood of tragic restlessness is established immediately at the outset by a simple, arpeggiated figure in the violas above which the violins play the agitated main theme. This melody is repeated with added woodwind chords to lead through a stormy transition to the second theme. After a moment of silence, a contrasting, lyrical melody is shared by strings and winds. The respite from the movement’s driving energy provided by the dulcet second theme is brief, however, and tension soon mounts again. The wondrous development section gives prominence to the fragmented main theme. The recapitulation returns the earlier themes in heightened settings. The Andante, in sonata form, uses rich chromatic harmonies and melodic half-steps to create a mood of brooding intensity and portentous asceticism. Because of its somber minor-key harmonies, powerful irregular phrasing and dense texture, the Minuet was judged by Arturo Toscanini to be one of the most darkly tragic pieces ever written. The character of the Minuet is emphasized by its contrast with the central trio, the only untroubled portion of the entire work. The finale opens with a rocket theme that revives the insistent rhythmic energy of the first movement. The gentler second theme, with a full share of piquant chromatic inflections, slows the hurtling motion only briefly. The development section exhibits a contrapuntal ingenuity that few late-18th-century composers could match in technique and none surpass in musicianship. The recapitulation maintains the Symphony’s tragic mood to the close.

The evaluation that the French musicologist F.J. Fétis wrote of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 remains as valid today as when it appeared in 1828: “Although Mozart has not used formidable orchestral forces in his G minor Symphony, none of the sweeping and massive effects one meets in a symphony of Beethoven, the invention which flames in this work, the accents of passion and energy that pervade and the melancholy color that dominates it result in one of the most beautiful manifestations of the human spirit.”

©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda​​

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Colorado Symphony
Douglas Boyd, conductor
Jeffrey Kahane, piano

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