Stockport Symphony Orchestra February 2022
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Egmont Overture Op. 84 (1809-1810)
Beethoven was characteristically complex in his views towards Goethe. Although the composer greatly admired the poet’s works, the pair clashed immediately at their only meeting, in Teplitz in 1812. Beethoven was nauseated by Goethe’s reverence for the establishment, writing that he ‘delights in the court atmosphere far more than is becoming to a poet’. Goethe, for his part, was appalled by the ‘absolutely uncontrolled personality’ of Beethoven, who at one point during their meeting had pointedly snubbed the Empress Maria Ludovika while Goethe swept off his hat and bowed.
If Beethoven, the arch-revolutionary, was troubled by Goethe’s respect for the elite, he held far greater respect for the ideas within Goethe’s writing. The 1788 play Egmont described the eponymous Count (1522-68), a Flemish nobleman whose protests against Spanish rule of the Netherlands led to his execution by the ruthless Duke of Alba. In summer 1809, while at the height of his middle or ‘Heroic’ period, Beethoven had taken shelter in his brother’s cellar during the French bombardment of Vienna. Egmont’s themes of resistance to tyranny and hope for mankind chimed loudly, and Beethoven enthusiastically set about writing incidental music for the play.
The Overture seems to echo the Egmont story in miniature. In the introduction, dramatic chords depict the Count in gaol amid Dutch opposition to Spanish rule. Turmoil continues into the tense Allegro, where metrically ambiguous descending phrases in the strings hint at unrest. Sudden brassy chords abruptly bring the music to a halt, and silence ensues: has the Count been beheaded? After a brief woodwind prayer, a triumphant, major-key figure rises through the strings and erupts joyfully into a tutti realisation. The Count may be dead, but his cause lives on.
William Walton (1902 – 1983): Viola Concerto (1929, revised 1961)
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Andante comodo
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Vivo, con molto preciso
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Allegro moderato
Perhaps the town’s most esteemed son, William Walton was born in Werneth, Oldham to a contralto mother and organist father, who had studied under Sir Charles Hallé. He left the North West aged 10 for Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a chorister and then undergraduate. Though Walton never graduated from Oxford, his college friend Sacheverell Sitwell subsequently supported him by hosting the young composer in his Chelsea attic room. Walton recalled later that ‘I went for a few weeks and stayed about fifteen years’. During this time Walton was introduced to the likes of Stravinsky and Berg, achieved his first success with Façade, a setting of extraordinary poems by Sitwell’s sister Edith, and wrote his viola concerto while holidaying with the Sitwells on the Amalfi Coast in 1929.
Walton was invited to write the viola concerto by Sir Thomas Beecham in 1928, with the virtuoso violist Lionel Tertis in mind for the solo. Though Walton was fond of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy for solo viola and orchestra, his wife Susana recorded in her biography of Walton that ‘He knew little about the viola except that it made a rather awful sound!’. Nonetheless, he wrote the new concerto enthusiastically in the winter of 1928-29 and was dismayed when Tertis returned the completed score to the composer, rejecting it as ‘too modern’. Walton toyed with reworking the solo part for violin rather than viola, but ultimately offered it instead to the German composer and violist Paul Hindemith, who was far more enthusiastic. With Walton conducting and Hindemith playing the solo, the concerto’s premiere was well received, and even Tertis came to champion the work, declaring his ‘shame and contrition’ for originally misjudging it. Edward Elgar was less complimentary, questioning at the Three Choirs Festival in 1932 whether ‘Such music should be thought fit for a stringed instrument’.
Dedicated ‘To Christabel’ (Christabel, Lady Aberconway), for whom Walton held an unrequited passion, the concerto is characterised by a unique blend of dense chromaticism with lyrical emotion. A keen revisionist for many of his mature works, Walton revisited the score in 1961 to reduce the scoring from triple to double woodwinds and trumpets, remove the tuba part and add a harp. It is the 1961 version we hear tonight. Written in conventional three-movement format, it makes high technical demands of both soloist and orchestra. The choice of tempo marking for the sonata-form first movement is significant; Andante comodo is scarcely seen anywhere other than here and the introspective first movement of Mahler’s ninth symphony (1908). The soloist interacts closely with the orchestra from the outset, in dialogue with the oboe in the first movement, bouncing off the orchestra in the rollicking scherzo, and interweaving with bassoon and clarinet in the expansive finale. The concerto closes with what the great musicologist Michael Kennedy called ‘The single most beautiful passage in all [Walton’s] music, sensuous yet full of uncertainty’.
Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957): Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Opus 82 (1914-19)
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Tempo molto moderato – Allegro moderato (ma poco a poco stretto) – Vivace molto – Presto – Più presto
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Andante mosso, quasi allegretto – Poco a poco stretto – Tranquillo – Poco a poco stretto – Ritenuto al tempo I
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Allegro molto – Misterioso – Un pochettino largamente – Largamente assai – Un pochettino stretto
Sibelius’ seven symphonies constitute one of the most perfect sets in the genre in terms of tracing the development of their composer and rewriting the rules of the format. His first symphony, written under the Russian occupation of Finland, is intensely Russian in style, and could have been an eighth by Tchaikovsky. From that point onwards, Sibelius tirelessly refined and reworked the form of his symphonies, via the majestic second and the bleak desolation of the fourth to the unique seventh symphony. The cliché of his works having an ‘organic’ quality is not unjustified: more than almost any composer, his ability to form a continuously developing musical line from evolving motifs results in music of immensely satisfying architecture.
This development was achieved while struggling with his place in the world. Although he achieved huge success at home, to the point that his fiftieth birthday was declared a national holiday, he was tormented by doubts about his ability to cement himself as a progressive artist, rather than a decadent, anachronistic Romantic relic. At the same time, Schoenberg and Stravinsky were rejecting the symphonic tradition, and Strauss had turned to elaborate tone poems. Though Mahler persisted with the symphony, his scores bulged with rapidly escalating demands for vast orchestral forces in epic, 90-minute works. Sibelius’ seven symphonies instead become progressively smaller, shorter and lighter, culminating in the single-movement, twenty-minute seventh.
Amid great national pride and domestic acclaim for his works, the fifth symphony was commissioned in 1912 by the Finnish government to mark Sibelius’ forthcoming fiftieth birthday. Times had been difficult for the composer: in 1909-09, he had undergone fifteen major operations to resect a suspected throat cancer. With effective treatments in their infancy (Rutherford had only just started experimenting with radium at the Holt Institute in Manchester), and as an unreconstructed drinker and smoker, Sibelius was convinced that his end was near. Ultimately the tumour seems to have been benign, but the prospect of impending death motivated him to abstain from his vices and return to composing with renewed vigour. The symphony was completed ready for the evening of his fiftieth birthday, and was immediately greeted with huge public and critical popularity.
Sibelius remained dissatisfied with his new symphony, though, and quickly set about making revisions. The 1915 and 1916 versions were both withdrawn, and the work was put to one side in the shadow of World War One, the Finnish declaration of independence from Russia and the ensuing civil war. Only after returning home late in 1918 (having been forced to flee for Helsinki with his family earlier in the year) did he resume work on the fifth. Recalling that he ‘practically composed anew’, he stripped the symphony down to three movements (amalgamating the first two) and prepared the version with which we are familiar today.
The symphony opens on a cold, bright morning with optimistic, avian horn calls above rumbling timpani. The woodwind take over the birdcalls as the music gathers momentum, seeming to rise, stretch and acknowledge the day. The light is transient, though, as a bleak bassoon solo heralds a suffocating fog of darker themes, derived from the symphony’s original scherzo. Just when it feels as though there might be no escape, the clouds part, the music quickly ascends through the gears and the morning light re-emerges, the music now in a quicker metre and galloping headily towards a boisterous conclusion.
The second movement is a surprisingly simple theme and variations, in which a light, ascending motif is passed in dialogue between flute and pizzicato strings. Moments of strife and sorrow pass as the music slowly unwinds with soft restlessness. The abrupt conclusion is unconvincing, and is followed immediately by the finale. A short, skittish passage provides some heightened energy before the emergence of one of Sibelius’ greatest passages. In his diary on 21 April 1915 he recalled his inspiration for this music: ‘Today at ten to eleven I saw sixteen swans. One of my greatest experiences. God, how beautiful!... Their call is the same woodwind type as that of cranes, but without tremolo. A gentle refrain that sounds like the crying of a small child. Nature’s mysticism and world-weariness!’. Beneath the undulating wings of a soaring horn figure, a touchingly melancholic theme sings eloquently from the cellos and woodwind. Although the busier early idea makes a brief reappearance, it is the swan theme which has the last word, blazing nobly through the last pages.