Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 2 Op36 in D

• Period of composition: 1801-1802 Date of Publication: 1804, by Kunst und Industrie Comptior, dedicated to Prince Karl von Lichnowsky.

• If proof were needed that 'the true artist creates out of his total experience', as Denis Matthews put it, then one need only look at the circumstances surrounding the composition of op.36. For this brilliant and original piece was completed during Beethoven's summer break in Heiligenstadt in 1802, the time of his greatest despair on realization that his increasing deafness could be a permanent affliction. The symphony was first performed on 5 April 1803 at a concert at the Theater an Der Wien which also included the premieres of Beethoven's C minor piano concerto and oratario 'Christus am Oelberge'. The critic present from the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung describe the new symphony typically, as "a work full of new, original ideas, of great strength, sensitive in orchestration and intellectual in concept, but one that would surely benefit from the abbreviation of some passages and the deletion [!] of others, for the modulations are entirely too eccentric."

• The vigorous independence that Beethoven had shown in his chamber works had now surfaced in the world of the symphony, though it bears features reminicant of Mozart's 'Prague' symphony. Thayer, who purposefully kept musical criticism to an absolute minimum in his 'Life of Beethoven' could not contain himself when discussing this composition - "a work whose grand and imposing introduction - brilliant Allegro, a Larghetto so lovely, so pure and amiably conceived...a Scherzo as merry, wayward, skipping and charming as anything possible...and a Finale, the very intoxication of a spirit 'intoxicated with fire'- made it...an era both in the life of its author and in the history of instrumental music." Passionate words from the usually reserved Thayer! After the opening call-to-attention, the slow introduction is rather more imposing than that of the first symphony with a powerful D minor climax that is reminicant of the opening of the first movement of the Ninth Symphony. The main Allegro has great drive with and ends with splendid coda. The lyrical Larghetto casts a backward glance at the previous century, with phrases that suggest Haydn or Mozart. It is however, a substantial and serious affair in sonata form and, like the First Symphony, withholds timpani and trumpets (the instruments of war!). With the third movement Beethoven acknowledges it as 'Scherzo' rather than labour it with the more traditional 'Menuetto' as he did with the First. This is pure Beethovenian humour, with a three note figure that is passed around the orchestra.The vitality of the finale (Allegro molto) is apparent from the explosive opening gesture. It is in sonata-form without repeats (the impression of a repeat occurs but this merely forms to opening of the development). The coda is massive, taking up more than a third of the whole movement. A reviewer in 1804 described this finale as "an uncivilized monster, a wounded dragon, refusing to die while bleeding to death, raging, striking in vain around itself with its agitated tail." - fanciful, but perhaps appropriate!

• One can only pity the English playwrights who lived in the years shortly after Shakespeare. Born in the shadow of the ultimate achiever in their field, they must have despaired at the inevitable comparisons, for beside Shakespeare, their greatest creations, which might have been admired in any other age, would appear woefully inadequate. Their careers might even seem unworthy of pursuit. Exactly what those unfortunate playwrights had to say on the subject is uncertain, but we do have the testimony of another man who faced a similar situation. Johannes Brahms dreamed of writing symphonies, even though fifty years earlier, Beethoven had proven himself master of that genre. "You don't know," Brahms once observed, "what it means to the likes of us when we hear his footsteps behind us." What it meant to Brahms was years of hesitation and preparation before he dared to publicly present a post-Beethoven symphony.
  
  
• Brahms had begun his first symphony in the early 1860s. His long-time friend Clara Wieck recalled seeing some sketches of it and a nearly-completed first movement, yet it wasn't until September of 1876 that Brahms finished the piece. It premiered November 4 of that year in Karlsruhe. Many observers were surprised that the first symphony of such an important composer was not premiered in Vienna where Brahms lived, but the composer had good reasons for his choice. Leery of Vienna's notorious music critics and its equally opinionated audiences, who worshipped Beethoven, he felt that the work would have a better chance outside of Vienna. This same logic leads Broadway producers to open new productions somewhere other than Broadway itself; if there are bugs to be worked out, you don't want to do it in front of a big city audience or big city critics! Perhaps critics of Brahms' day bore some resemblance to those of our day!
  

• The Karlsruhe premiere went rather well, with the only discouraging words coming from Brahms himself, who described the new symphony as "long and not especially amiable." Brahms then arranged for a Vienna performance, and it was on this occasion, in Beethoven's backyard, that the Beethoven parallels at last emerged. Critic Eduard Hanslick compared the styles of the two masters, suggesting that Brahms had relied rather heavily on the serious side of Beethoven at the expense of what he called "heart-warming sunshine." Furthermore, he insisted that the regal string melody of the fourth movement was strikingly similar to the Ode to Joy. Conductor/pianist Hans von Bülow agreed with Hanslick's assessment, and memorably tagged the piece "Beethoven's Tenth". Such comparative remarks could not have pleased Brahms, who had fought to be considered on his own merits, but if he read further in the reviews, he would have found high praise for the piece. Hanslick, for all his reservations, lauded it as "one of the most individual and magnificent works of the symphonic literature." He closed his review with these enthusiastic words: "The new symphony of Brahms is a possession of which the nation may be proud, an inexhaustible fountain of sincere pleasure and fruitful study."
  
  

• Today, Brahms' First Symphony stands, as the composer would have wished, on its own reputation. It is seen as one of his finest creations, indeed, as one of the finest symphonies by any composer of any time. It also serves as evidence of its creator's essential conservatism, for as Hanslick and the others realized, it was a work closely related to those of eighty years earlier. Chronologically, Brahms lived in the late 1800s, but stylistically, he clung to the days of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, virtually immune to the artistic developments of his own day. Here was Brahms, in the summer of 1876, completing a symphony in the classical mold at the very same time that Wagner was staging for the first time his earth-shattering masterpiece, The Ring Cycle. The two compositions, perhaps the finest by their respective creators, have nothing whatsoever in common, other than dates of origin, and ever since that time, scholars have puzzled over the incongruity. The problem isn't Wagner; he was closer to the style of the day than was Brahms, whose retrospective nature has been the object of much study. One of the most interesting commentaries on the subject came from a man who was learned in the fields of music and psychology. Here are excerpts from remarks made in Vienna in 1982 by Leonard Bernstein:
  
  

• "Here stands a master composer producing one classical symphony after another, a confirmed and determined classicist in an era when classicism had long since been swept away by the tides of Romanticism that flooded Europe in the nineteenth century. And through it all, Johannes Brahms stands firm in his old well-worn coat, insisting to the very end on perpetuating the classical tradition of Mozart and Beethoven....... What was he avoiding? Was he simply a classicist who had outlived his period, a has-been, a left-over, as his detractors would have it? On the contrary, it is precisely the other way around: Brahms was a true Romantic containing his passions in classical garb. It was clearly a case of self-limitation. The only question that remains is --- why?... Whence the rage and whence the containment? What did this celebrated, comfortable king of Vienna have to rage about? So much. He raged against his native city of Hamburg, which time and again had passed him by when selecting a new conductor for their Philharmonic Orchestra, a position Brahms deeply coveted. He raged against the fates that had destroyed his adored Schumann, idol of his youth, after an all-too-brief relationship. He cried out against the forces that had conditioned him to be incapable of happiness with a woman, of domestic bliss, of having children--- and how he loved children! So much to rage about, and so much more we don't even know, at which we can only guess. Thus, I believe, arose in his inner being the absolute necessity for containment. Brahms was genius enough to be his own psychiatrist, unconsciously of course. He set himself up as the Guardian of Music Order in an age of Romantic disorder, but what he was really guarding were his own passions, those conflicts that threatened to tear him apart. And so he invented that persona --- beard, belly, and all --- so familiar to his society and ours. This amazing display of self-control, self-discipline, and self-containment probably saved his life, his sanity, and hi! s God-given powers to fashion the music with which he enriched and ennobled the world.'
  
  © Elizabeth Schwarm Glesner

Schumann (1840-1893)
Manfred Overture

• During the 19th century, it was not rare to encounter artists who had lost a healthy sense of detachment between themselves and their works and who, accordingly, began to identify with the fictitious characters of their novels, plays or musical works. Hector Berlioz, for instance, incorporated his feelings for the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson into the autobiographical "Symphonie fantastique". Determined not to act as dastardly as his "Eugene Onegin", Peter Tchaikovsky (who also wrote a "Manfred" Symphony) married an effusive but intellectually limited young female admirer. And Robert Schumann, one of Tchaikovsky's great idols, found in Byron's "Manfred" a figure with whom he no doubt felt a great affinity.
  
  

• It all started in 1817, when George Gordon Lord Byron published his poetic drama "Manfred", an early example of "mental theater", as he called it. "Manfred" caused ripples not only in the literary world but also among composers, whose sympathetic strings were made to vibrate by the Faustian hero. The French composer Louis Lacombe (1818-1884), for example, produced a Manfred for soloists, chorus and orchestra in 1847. At about the same time, Robert Schumann, whose father had translated and published some of Byron's writings, seems to have begun identifying with the drama's tragic hero (for further reading on this topic, see the excellent psychobiography of Schumann by Peter Ostwald, Schumann - The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1985). No sooner had he completed his "problem child", the opera Genoveva, in 1848 than he began composing his Manfred music, finishing it in 1849. Formally, however, Manfred is a hybrid and, save for the Overture, it never found its place in the concert hall. Schumann's mental theater took the form of a musical melodrama comparable to Beethoven's incidental music to Goethe's Egmont. Much too good as mere incidental music, much too diffuse to stand on its own, these pieces have been left by the wayside of a repertoire that allows only a very limited range of forms.
  
  

• Only the overtures of both works have made their way into the standard concert repertoire. The Manfred Overture is one of Schumann's most impressive orchestral works and ranks along with the Rhenish Symphony among his best works in this field. It was also written during the last years of Schumann's full mental powers, before he tried to commit suicide. There is much to suggest that Schumann saw himself in the title figure of Byron's drama. The following words no doubt rang particularly true to him: "Look on me! there is an order / of mortals on the earth, who do become / old in their youth, and die ere middle-age, / without the violence of warlike death; / some perishing of pleasure, some of study, / some worn with toil, some of mere weariness, / some of disease and some insanity, / and some of wither'd or of broken hearts." Schumann could identify with the hunted hero perched on an Alpine cliff, thinking about jumping into the void; who is captivated by the beauty of nature but tormented by his problematic love for his sister and is filled with guilt for "destroying" a woman (possibly suggesting to the composer his own guilty feelings towards his wife, whose career as a performing artist and composer he had impeded); and who finally asks the gods for the "blessing of madness"... Be it as it may, the overture of Byron's poetic drama strikes us today as a succinct and gripping confession. Its intensity is only found later in the works of Gustav Mahler who, incidentally, quoted a motif from the Manfred Overture in the first movement of his Sixth Symphony, thus also suggesting the possibility of his own identification with this Byronic hero par excellence.