Oklahoma City Philharmonic, CLASSICS 7: April 17, 2010

WAGNER (1813-83)
Overture to Tannhäuser (1845)

BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, Choral (1822-24)

Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso
Molto vivace
Adagio molto e cantabile
Presto—Recitativo “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne”—Allegro assai

Overture to Tannhäuser
Richard Wagner

Born: May 22, 1813 in Leipzig, Saxony (Germany)
Died: February 13, 1883 in Venice, Italy
Work composed: Most of the musical composition of the opera Tannhäuser took place between July 1843 and April 13, 1845; Wagner completed the Overture on January 11, 1845.
Work premiered: Tannhäuser was premiered at the Königlich Sächsisches Hoftheater in Dresden, on October 19, 1845, with the composer conducting.
Instrumentation: Three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, tambourine, castanets, bass drum, harp, and strings.

Tannhäuser—or, to use Wagner’s complete title, Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (“Tannhäuser and the Singers’ Contest on the Wartburg”)—completely befuddled the audience that attended its premiere, in 1845. This was partly due to the questionable achievement of the singers to whom the leading roles were entrusted, but also to the new ground Wagner was beginning to explore as an opera composer. 
 When Wagner composed Tannhäuser, he was just arriving at the musical-theatrical breakthroughs that would cement his place in music history. The two comic operas of his youth, Die Feen (“The Fairies,” 1832-33, after a tale by Carlo Gozzi) and Das Liebesverbot (“The Ban on Love,” 1834-35, after Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure), were behind him, and the latter had even made it to the stage. He had worked his way up in his profession through a succession of modest positions at far-flung musical establishments: the music directorship of a little theatre company in Magdeburg, a conducting debut in Bad Lauschstadt, the music directorship of the town theatre in Königsberg (where he began his first marriage), and, beginning in August 1837, the music directorship of the theatre in Riga, where he embarked on the composition of his grand opera Rienzi. In March 1839 Wagner lost his position in Riga, and he and his wife set out for London and thence to Boulogne, where he met the successful and esteemed composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer gave Wagner a letter of introduction to the director of the Paris Opéra, and thus armed Wagner proceeded to the City of Light, where he and his wife lived from hand to mouth from 1839 until 1842. There he would compose his first post-Rienzi opera, Der Fliegende Holländer (“The Flying Dutchman”). Although the Paris Opéra turned down his petition to have that somber work staged, at least it directed Wagner’s libretto to another composer they had already hired to write an opera on the same topic. In 1842, Wagner finally started to break into the world to which he aspired, when the Dresden Opera accepted both Rienzi and Der Fliegende Holländer for production, and shortly hired their composer as the house’s assistant court musical director.
 Wagner’s connection with Meyerbeer and his period in Paris are telling. Although the Romantic operas of Carl Maria von Weber and Heinrich Marschner played a strong role in Wagner’s developing musical vocabulary, the dramaturgy of his early operas was strongly rooted in French tradition, and specifically the tradition of the French Grand Opera that was epitomized by Meyerbeer. Wagner’s early operas share with those works a grandly rhetorical style and adhere to many of the general dictates of Parisian taste, which yielded operas of considerable length often based on an epic historical plot, with grandiose settings and situations, a big cast, and a prominent chorus
 In Tannhäuser, a work whose plot derives from medieval German legend (though greatly filtered through 19th-century Romanticism), we find the title character, unfulfilled by the orgiastic abandon he has experienced on the Venusberg, discovering the possibility of something better—call it redemption, if you will—through the chaste purity of sacred devotion. In Wagner’s opera, the push-and-pull between these moral and spiritual poles is represented by Tannhäuser’s conflicting attraction to the figures of Elisabeth (the sacred) and Venus (the profane). The work’s overture prefigures the opera not only by introducing some of the music that will be heard in the course of the evening, but also by foreshadowing aspects of the plot itself. It makes much of the famous hymn of the pilgrims the knight will join in his quest for redemption.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, Choral

Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso
Molto vivace
Adagio molto e cantabile
Presto—Recitativo “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne”—Allegro assai

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, Choral

Ludwig van Beethoven
Born: December 16, 1770 (probably, since he was baptized on the 17th), in Bonn, then an independent electorate of Germany
Died: March 26, 1827, in Vienna
Work composed: Mostly between 1822 and February 1824, although he was actively plotting the piece by 1817 and some of its musical material was sketched as early as 1812
Text: In the finale, Friedrich Schiller’s ode “To Joy”
Work dedicated: To King Frederick Wilhelm III of Prussia (though Beethoven dedicated another manuscript copy of this symphony to the Philharmonic Society of London)
Work premiered: May 7, 1824, at Vienna’s Kärntnertor Theater, with Michael Umlauf conducting (and the deaf composer standing beside him to indicate tempos)
Instrumentation: Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, and strings, plus (in the finale) four vocal soloists (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) and four-part mixed chorus

Practically every commentator on music has had something to say about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and their opinions have been so divergent as to make one wonder if they could possibly have been speaking of the same piece at all. Not a few members of early audiences chalked it off as the raving of a deaf lunatic, and nearly three decades into the piece’s life we find a reviewer for the Boston Atlas trying to explain it away politely as “the genius of the great man upon the ocean of harmony, without compass which had so often guided him to his haven of success; the blind painter touching the canvas at random.” Beethoven’s contemporary Louis Spohr, one of the most admired violinists and composers of their generation, was an enthusiast of his colleague’s early works, but here he drew the line: its first three movements, he wrote, “in spite of some flashes of genius, are to my mind inferior to all the eight previous symphonies,” and he found the finale “so monstrous and tasteless … that I cannot understand how a genius like Beethoven could have written it.” And yet, wrote Hector Berlioz, “There is a small minority of musicians, whose nature inclines them to consider carefully whatever may broaden the scope of art, … and they assert that this work is the most magnificent expression of Beethoven’s genius. … That is the view I share.”  Even critics who had problems grasping this symphony tended to echo a sentiment that inhabits these three quotations: whatever you make of it, this is the work of a genius.
Beethoven certainly did not stint in providing fodder for dissent. Take the symphony’s length, for example. Nobody was prepared for it when it hit in 1824—a legendary premiere at which Michael Umlauf conducted with the deaf composer standing beside him to indicate tempos. Beethoven’s Third Symphony had tried listeners’ patience by clocking in at perhaps 50 minutes back in 1805; now they were faced with a symphony that might last another 20 minutes beyond that, a scale that proved baffling to many early orchestral audiences. But the impact of this piece was such that before long other symphonists began “scaling up” to bigger structures than had been previously imagined. Modern audiences, accustomed to symphonies of an hour or more (by Bruckner or Mahler, for example), are unlikely to experience Beethoven’s Ninth as shockingly long; yet its very dimensions were cause for wonderment when it was new.
 So was the inclusion of voices in its finale. What were listeners to make of it? Was this a proper symphony at all, or a sort of oratorio? And what about the voice writing itself, which Verdi decried (“No one will ever approach the sublimity of the first movement, but it will be an easy task to write as badly for voices as is done in the last movement”)? In truth, this is no exercise in bel canto, and many a soloist has veered towards shipwreck in the craggy contours of the vocal lines. But misgivings aside, this symphony does pack an undeniable punch, in no small part thanks to precisely these “problematic” features—the momentum acquired through its remarkable length, the revitalizing of its essential sound with the entrance of the chorus in the finale, even the drama associated with solo singers sitting silent for nearly an hour and then leaping in to wrestle challenging tessituras.
The Ninth Symphony took its time germinating in the composer’s laboratory. Beethoven composed it mostly between 1822 and February 1824, although he was actively plotting the piece by 1817 and some of its musical material was sketched as early as 1812. Like all of Beethoven’s symphonies, the Ninth was conceived as a grand experiment, but somehow it held onto its stature as a beacon of the avant-garde more firmly than did its predecessors. Doubtless that has to do, in very large part, with the fact that it was Beethoven’s last symphony. Many, many avant-garde moments pepper his symphonic production—the harmonic dissonance that opens the First Symphony, the expansion of the orchestra itself in the Fifth, the departure from the traditional four movements in the Sixth (and this doesn’t even scratch the surface)—but in every case those advances were immediately swept along in a current of more Beethoven, always building towards new advances. Standing at the end of that astonishing sequence of works, the Ninth takes on a magnified aura of monumentality—of finality, on one hand, but also of pointing to a future that Beethoven would not address. If Beethoven himself could show us where the implications of the Eroica or the Pastoral Symphonies might lead, the path from the Ninth remained an utterly uncharted challenge to future generations of composers.
The path of the Ninth Symphony itself is perfectly clear. It is one of Beethoven’s many musical journeys from darkness into light, a trajectory he had already explored in such works as his Third and Fifth Symphonies and his opera Leonore/Fidelio. Mystery shrouds the opening: strings and horns playing the open fifth interval of A-E—harmonically vague, not clarifying until the 13th measure that the key of this piece is to be D minor, when that is made clear in resounding fortissimo. That is the moment when the movement’s principal theme is sounded by the full orchestra—or rather, by what gives the impression of being the full orchestra, since the composer holds his trombones in check until the Scherzo and his piccolo, contrabassoon, and percussion (apart from timpani) until the finale. A wealth of subsidiary themes are presented in short order and put through a tense process of development and recapitulation before the movement reaches its lengthy and quite terrifying, even apocalyptic, coda.
The wide-open intervals of the symphony’s beginning are somewhat recalled by the hammer-blows, in falling octaves, that launch the Scherzo—with the third of the figure’s four introductory eruptions literally pounded out by the solo timpani. These will return from time to time in the movement, interrupting the comparatively elfin scurrying of the Scherzo’s ongoing flow. At times this leads to a galumphing swagger—Bruckner must have adored this movement—that is all the more resounding following the gentle, woodwind-laden pastoralisms of the movement’s trio section.
The Adagio molto e cantabile (which often-languorous Debussy did not find too long) introduces the soulful side of Beethoven, greatly in contrast to the athleticism of what has come previously in this symphony. The movement unrolls as a set of extended variations. Mostly these involve the first violins’ tender melody in 4/4 that graces the opening, but to a lesser extent Beethoven also develops a second theme, which flows a bit more urgently in contrasting ¾ meter.
The hushed spell is broken in the most emphatic manner with the Presto that opens the finale: a horrific explosion by the orchestra that is punctuated by the most curious thing imaginable, a recitative-like passage played in unison by the cellos and double basses unaccompanied. Although no text is expressed, the recitative seems to be asking questions, and the orchestra responds with answers that allude to material heard in the preceding movement. After considerable back-and-forth these low strings announce the famous theme that will fuel what is essentially a movement of variations. The first three of these variations involve instruments only, weaving in threads of greater complexity, until finally, after a recurrence of the movement’s opening outburst, the bass (or baritone) soloist sings a real recitative, with words by Beethoven: “O friends, not these tones! Rather, let us tune our voices in more pleasant and more joyful song.” Now we hear the principal theme, by now familiar, intoned to the words of Friedrich Schiller’s ode “To Joy.” By way of continuing variations--as sundry as a “Turkish march,” a vigorous orchestral fugue, and some passages of highwire vocalizing--Beethoven leads us through his grand choral finale.
This ode was far from Schiller’s finest literary achievement, but attached to the intensity of Beethoven’s expression it has come to symbolize the highest aspirations of humanitarianism. So it is that Beethoven’s Ninth, problematic in certain ways but never disguising its wealth of genius, transcends its own musical achievement. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that “Beethoven’s music is music about music,” but ensuing generations have begged to differ. Beethoven’s Ninth has come to be music about the hopes and dreams of humankind.

Earlier versions of these notes appeared in the programs of the New York Philharmonic and are reprinted with permission; © New York Philharmonic.

James M. Keller is Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. From 1990-2000 he wrote about music on staff at The New Yorker, and in 1999 he received the prestigious ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award for his feature writing in Chamber Music magazine, which he serves as Contributing Editor.