Stockport Symphony Orchestra June 2021
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Leonore Overture No. 3, Opus 72a (1806)
A decade is a long time in opera. In the early nineteenth century, the likes of Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti might have knocked out a couple of dozen operas in such a window. Why then did such a prolific composer as Beethoven manage just one opera in his whole career, and take a decade to write it? The fact that he wrote four overtures for Fidelio gives us a clue: he was uncommonly dissatisfied with his only opera, sensing that it fell short of the all-encompassing masterwork he envisaged. He personal and political principles of freedom, rejection of tyranny and love are all reflected in the drama via the redemption of a wrongfully incarcerated prisoner by his disguised wife.
The story of the four overtures associated with Fidelio reflects Beethoven’s dissatisfaction with the opera. At its premiere in 1805, titled as Leonore, the overture is thought to have been the work now known as the Leonore No. 2 overture. The performance was unsuccessful; unsurprisingly, a predominantly French audience was unimpressed by an under-rehearsed piece with revolutionary themes, just a week after the French invasion of Vienna. The overture was revised into the punchier, less expansive Leonore No. 3 for a slimmed-down iteration of the opera the following year, now rebranded as Fidelio. Popularity remained limited, however, and Beethoven remained dissatisfied with the overture despite a third attempt, now called Leonore No. 1. His principal grievance was that in spotlighting the key motifs and drama of the opera, the plot and best tunes had all been deployed before the curtain had even twitched. When persuaded to make a further, more drastic revision of the opera in 1814, he completely reworked the overture into that which we now know as Fidelio, a succinct curtain-raiser of minimal resemblance to the Leonore overtures.
The Leonore No. 3 has remained a staple of concert hall repertoire, though is still occasionally prone to being used during the opera’s final scene change, a practice championed by Gustav Mahler. Perhaps heralding the great tone poems of the end of the century, the music narrates the story in relatively graphic detail. The dark opening pages evoke the imprisoned Florestan, who recalls better times in a vigorous (and hard-won) allegro while his wife Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, searches for him. An offstage trumpet heralds his freedom, and after a brief hymn of cautious optimism, the music erupts joyfully as Leonore reveals herself in the rescue
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Romance in F, Opus 50 (1798)
The Romance was a fashionable miniature in polite French circles in the late eighteenth century as a short, lyrical work of little extra-musical significance. This approach was not typical for Beethoven, though his two efforts in the genre are aesthetically attractive enough in their own right. It is possible that one of them was intended to be the slow movement of an early, abandoned violin concerto in C major. Cliches such as ‘graceful’ and ‘charming’ abound in descriptions of the pair of Romances, and while these are not inaccurate, their success rides almost entirely on greater works by the same composer.
The Romance in F was probably the first of the two to be written, though to keep orchestra librarians on their toes is frequently referred to as No. 2. It is written in rondo form, with a recurring theme appearing three times, sandwiching briefly differing episodes. The music is of unapologetically benign disposition, some momentary clouds in the middle section rapidly dispersing. The orchestra is very much led by the soloist, offering occasional comments and echoes to the soloist’s high and songful melody.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No 5 in C minor, Opus 67 (1804-08)
There can be very few pieces of music or literature whose opening lines are as familiar or genre-defining as the beginning of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. When performed in The Simpsons, the audience get up and leave after the first four bars, Chief Wiggum pointing out that “The rest is just filler”. If audiences had been surprised by the dramatic E-flat chords at the opening of the Eroica symphony three years earlier, the beginning of the fifth must have been astonishingly bold at its 1808 premiere.
Beethoven’s life in 1808 was as chaotic as it ever was. He had come a long way from the despair of his ‘Heiligenstadt testament’, in which he resolved to turn away from suicide for the sake of his art, but had only a few more years of any auditory faculty left in the bank. A severe finger infection threatened the decimation of his piano abilities, his relationship with Josephine Brunsvik stalled, and Vienna remained under Napoleonic occupation. Unlike Mahler, though, whose music is rooted in real-life, Beethoven’s symphonies are altogether more abstract, and it is rarely possible to correlate his music with his life.
So familiar is this music that it is now almost impossible to imagine how it sounded in 1808 on a chilly December night in Vienna, when the fifth symphony was premiered alongside performances of the sixth symphony, the fourth piano concerto, the Choral Fantasy, a couple of arias and some excerpts from the Mass in C. While we now hear the opening notes (G, E-flat, F and D) as irretrievably derived from the key of C-minor, they could just as easily be derived from E-flat major. It is also hard to escape the old cliché of this motif representing ‘fate knocking at the door’, an apocryphal explanation with very unconvincing evidence for it being Beethoven’s own. The motif is repeated obsessively in almost every bar of the first movement, though, its stride only ever really disturbed by an occasional sustained chord or a brief oboe cadenza, and so the ‘fate’ idea is a more convenient explanation than most alternatives, including the idea of it representing the song of a Viennese yellow-hammer.
The obsessive rage of the first movement is immediately snuffed out in the Andante, where revolutionary stirrings softly bring a sense of distant optimism in A-flat major. A set of variations follows, dreamily elaborating on the optimistic theme while reference to the ‘fate’ motto is left hidden in an accompaniment figure. The Scherzo opens with an unsettled G-minor arpeggio which rises up from the depths of the double basses, perhaps familiar from Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. The horns cry out “Fools!”, unmistakeably referencing the ‘fate’ rhythm. A middle passage follows, in which low strings scrub furiously around a hesitatingly vigorous theme.
Variously performed with or without an extensive repeated passage (this remains a hotly debated controversy), the Scherzo eventually dissolves into darkness. Through the mists, a soft timpani pulsation emerges. The strings restlessly search for resolution, higher and higher, until the finale blazes into view in triumphant C-major, trombones and piccolo appearing in a symphony for one of the very first times. The remainder of the symphony is a joyous, energetic affirmation of the journey we have experienced from the relentless obsession with ‘fate’ (or whatever the motif represents for us as individuals) in the first movement.