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Bach and Beethoven
November 8, 9, 10 & 17, 2007
Click on the  to hear the musical examples.
Christoph Willibald Gluck
1714-1787 |
From: ORFEO ED EURIDICE, “Dance of the Furies”
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Gluck is one of the few composers of note who seems to have been completely self-taught. Raised by his father, a forester who tried to discourage his son’s musical bent, Gluck left home as a teenager to follow a musical career. His fame gradually spread in the course of holding several minor musical posts in central Europe. His first known composition was a full-fledged opera, Artaserse, set to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio. Metastasio had a kind of stranglehold on libretto writing in early and mid eighteenth century and his texts were repeatedly set to music by the period’s composers. For decades, the opera seria, as it was called, ruled the boards. It followed a standard and rather monotonous structure consisting of scene after scene of recitative followed by an aria in ABA form. The subject matter was generally about an event – often fictitious – in the lives of some ancient king or queen or a dramatization of a scene from an Italian Renaissance epic poem.
Throughout his highly successful career, Gluck composed only operas and a few ballets. Most of his operas are in the opera seria genre, but in 1760 in Vienna Gluck met the poet Raniero Calzabigi, who introduced him to the issues raging in Paris between adherents of the opera seria and indigenous French operatic tradition. Weary of the old opera seria, Gluck collaborated with Calzabigi to create a new operatic style more varied musically and directly expressive of the text, in accordance with neo-classical principles of simplicity and humanism espoused during the Enlightenment. Their first foray into new operatic territory was Orfeo ed Euridice (in Italian), which premiered in Vienna in1762. The French version, an actual recomposing of the opera, premiered in Paris in 1774, started a veritable war between the supporters of Gluck and Piccini, a composer of the standard opera seria.
Opera in France always included at least one ballet. Gluck provided two, the "Dance of the Furies" and the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits," both of which take place in Hades as Orpheus seeks to reclaim his beloved Eurydice. Gluck portrayed the wildness of the Furies in music by denying them a true melody; the dance is all tremolos under disorganized chord progressions. 
Gluck’s opera caused quite a stir among traditionalists. The intervention of the deus ex machina, Amor, the god of love, permitted the first ever happy ending of all the versions and musical settings of the Orpheus legend.
Antonio Vivaldi
1678-1741 |
Concerto for Two Flutes in C major, RV 533
Antonio Vivaldi 1678-1741
It is well known that beginning in 1703 and intermittently for many decades, Antonio Vivaldi served as music factotum at the Pio Ospedale della Pietá in Venice, an institution devoted to the care and education of abandoned, orphaned and indigent girls. In addition to his duties as virtuoso violinist, violin teacher, orchestra director and instrument purchaser, Vivaldi served as resident composer, producing hundreds of works for various instruments and ensembles, including about 500 concerti, often at a rate of more than two per month. The resident girls were trained in both string and wind instruments, including the organ, and as part of their training Vivaldi composed concertos for every instrument and instrument combination. Many of them were apparently written with specific girl soloists in mind.
What is often overlooked, however, is that Ospidale also housed boys, teaching carpentry, blacksmithing and other trades. We have no idea whether the boys’ program was as successful as the girls’ since the names of the artisans who worked in Venice’s palaces and churches are generally unknown.
Vivaldi saw to it that his music reached far beyond the boundaries of Venice. Around 1711 an Amsterdam firm issued his first published concertos as Opus 3, entitled L’estro armonico (The Harmonic Fancy), a set of 12 concertos, four each for one, two or four violins, and four with added cello. They are at the boundary between the old tradition of the Sonata da chiesa (church sonata) with its stately slow-fast-slow-fast movements, and the newer three- movement concerto form (fast-slow-fast). L’estro armonico was a sensation, becoming the most influential music publication of the first half of the eighteenth century. J.S. Bach admired these works and transcribed some of them as harpsichord concerti.
Most of Vivaldi’s concertos, however, were not published in his lifetime, making it is nearly impossible to date them. The Concerto in C Major, RV 533, is the only extant one for two flutes, its manuscript resides in Turin’s Biblioteca Nazionale.
One of the interesting musical aspects of this Concerto is that in each movement, Vivaldi concentrated on a different aspect of the flute duet: The first and third movements feature the soloists playing in parallel and in counterpoint with each other; in the second movement, they relate in a more imitative manner.
This is a typical late Baroque concerto. The first movement alternates between the ritornello (or refrain) for the entire ensemble,  punctuated by episodes for the soloist(s). The second movement belongs exclusively to the soloists, supported by the basso continuo (viola da gamba and harpsichord). Notice that here, the first flute begins the theme, while the second flute enters later with a decorated repeat of the melody.
The final movement has the same structure as the first with a ritornello by the orchestra, alternating with the flutes, who alternate between dialogue and parallel playing.
Domenico Cimerosa
1749-1801 |
Concerto in G major for Two Flutes and Orchestra
Domenico Cimarosa
“A contemporary of Mozart, Domenico Cimarosa was one of the most illustrious opera composers of the late eighteenth century. Known today primarily for his comic masterpiece Il Matrimonio Segreto (The Secret Marriage), Cimarosa also composed serious opera and sacred choral music for courts and opera houses in his native Italy and as far away as St. Petersburg.
Born to a Neapolitan stone mason and a laundress, Cimarosa was one of those fortunate children of the working class who was able to rise above his station by means of a Church education in the church school where his mother worked. There, he was noticed for his musical ability, appropriately passed on and trained at the Conservatory of Santa Maria di Loreto. Already during his student years, he showed special aptitude for comic opera, a gift that led to the rise in his fame and fortune.
In 1787, he accepted a position as maestro di cappella for the Russian empress Catherine the Great, where he continued churning out operas. Four years later, however, when the Imperial court had to curtail its lavish spending, Catherine laid off her contingent of Italian musicians. Cimarosa went on to Vienna in 1792 – just a year after Mozart’s death – and knocked the socks off the Emperor Leopold II with Il matrimonio segreto, thereby achieving the kind of success and court favor that the unfortunate Mozart had never seen in his final years. At the premiere, Leopold actually had the entire opera performed again after a supper break for the audience and cast.
Immediately after his stay in Vienna, Cimarosa returned to assume a post in Naples where he had grown up and received his musical education. But in 1799, he became embroiled in politics -– on the wrong side – and was imprisoned by the victorious Spanish Bourbon King Ferdinand. Although incarcerated for only four months, Cimarosa never regained his health and was unable to complete his final opera commissioned for Venice. One other connection with Mozart: friends suspected that Cimarosa had been poisoned, although an autopsy showed that he died of natural causes.
The Concerto for Two Flutes (1793) is one of Cimarosa's few instrumental works and one of only two works for orchestra (the other being a harpsichord concerto written 20 years earlier). The work reflects Mozart’s influence in melodic and harmonic language so strongly that it is likely that the inexperienced composer of instrumental music used Mozart’s music as a model.
While the themes sound Mozartian, the structure of the Concerto is quite unusual. With his primary focus on the two soloists, Cimarosa packs the first movement with a continual string of new melodies and opportunities for them to strut their stuff, treating them more as operatic stars than as less prestigious instrumentalists. The Concerto begins with a "pseudo-exposition," in that it introduces two themes that are never heard again during the movement and employs the two soloists in the style of a Baroque concerto. Instead of repeating the themes, the two soloists begin again alone with new primary and secondary themes that will recur in due course in the recapitulation. In a device used occasionally by Mozart in his concertos, Cimarosa gives new music to the soloists and orchestra throughout the development section. Finally, after the recapitulation, the movement calls for a cadenza, which the soloists were supposed to improvise – or at least plan. Although there is no extant cadenza by Cimarosa, there are several "on the market;" and many soloists write their own.
The orchestra again leads off the Largo with a brief introduction into a delicate da capo aria for the soloists. Cimarosa uses this standard formula taken from the Baroque opera seria, an ABA scaffolding over which singers wove a heavy embroidery of vocal embellishments, as the model for showcasing the flute. The flutes introduce the principal theme in the A section. But the middle, or B, section is elegantly long, with extended phrases and featuring a double duet between the flutes and a pair of oboes.
The Largo leads without pause into the Rondo, a typical form for final concerto movements because the orchestra plays the rondo refrain while the soloist(s) play increasingly intricate episodes. In this Concerto, the soloists play three episodes between returns of the rondo theme, including a cadenza and a hefty coda.
A word should be said about the style of flute playing in this Concerto. In general, the upper voice dominates, with the lower voice adding accompanying figures. The duets in thirds and sixths are standard for the period as are the dialogues in which one soloist introduces a phrase and is echoed by the other. The ornaments – trills and series of descending appoggiaturas, etc.– are also classic for both the flute and operatic duets.
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827 |
Symphony No. 1 IN C major, Op.21
Ludwig van Beethoven 1770-1827
Ludwig van Beethoven settled in Vienna in 1792, hoping to take the city by storm; but it took him several years to establish his credentials in this musically sophisticated city whose musical idol was the ageing Franz Josef Haydn. By the time Beethoven premiered the First Symphony on April 2 1800 at the Burgtheater his reputation was secure: he was well known as a pianist and in great demand as a soloist; his chamber and piano compositions had begun to attract serious attention and he had acquired numerous sponsors among the aristocracy and the well-to-do. He dedicated the First Symphony to one of them, the Baron van Swieten, a supporter and friend of Mozart, who had established a large library of music and promoted the music of Bach and Handel to Viennese audiences. The period of the First Symphony is also that of the Op.18 String Quartets, and both represented important milestones for him as he sought to assimilate and surpass the achievements of Haydn in these two genres.
The concert was a benefit for Beethoven in which he was featured both as performer and composer. The hefty program – by no means unusual for the time – included a Mozart symphony, two movements from Haydn’s Creation, an improvisation on the piano by Beethoven, the Septet, Op. 20, the Symphony No.1 and probably the Piano Concerto in C major.
Yet, despite Beethoven’s growing reputation, the critics' initial reception of the symphony was lukewarm at best, "...a caricature of Haydn pushed to absurdity." That absurdity was already apparent in the opening chords that trick the listener as to the true key of the piece, which is definitively established in the Allegro. The third movement, although labeled "Minuet," dashes forward almost at a gallop with oddly placed forte outbursts, the first of Beethoven's symphonic innovations, the scherzo. If there’s a minuet at all in this work, it’s the lilting second movement, unusual also in that it begins as a fugue, in the strings, adding the other sections of the orchestra with each statement of the fugue subject.
The humor of the stammering scale, plus another bit of tonal ambiguity in the introduction to the final movement, also went unappreciated. The Finale begins with a slow opening of a repeated partial scale in the violins, reaching one note higher with each repetition, until it suddenly bursts forth into a dance-like theme. It is an opening worthy of Haydn at his most humorous. Like the Finale, the Minuet theme is also based on a rising scale motive.
In a short time, however, the Symphony became a great favorite, "...a glorious production, showing extraordinary wealth of lovely ideas...". A measure of its popularity was the appearance only two years later of an anonymous pirated arrangement for piano quintet that elicited a nasty letter from Beethoven to the Wiener Zeitung of October 30, 1802, disclaiming authorship and complaining of publishers' actions and the insecurity of a composer's rights. Copyright laws were still in the distant future, but two of Beethoven’s younger contemporaries, the enterprising composers Carl Maria von Weber and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, made significant contributions to copyrights for composers.
Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2007
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