Oklahoma City Philharmonic, CLASSICS 4: January 30, 2010
MENDELSSOHN (1809-47)
Overture to Son and Stranger (Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde), Op. 89 (1829)
MOZART (1756-91)
Symphony No. 41 in C major, K.551, Jupiter (1788)
Allegro vivace
Andante cantabile
Menuetto
Molto allegro
FRANCK (1822-90)
Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra (1885)
SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-75)
Concerto No. 1 in C minor for Piano, Trumpet, and Strings, Op. 35 (1933)
Allegretto
Lento
Moderato
Allegro con brio
(The four movements are played without pause.)
Overture to Son and Stranger (Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde), Op. 89
Felix Mendelssohn
Born: February 3, 1809 in Hamburg, Germany
Died: November 4, 1847 in Leipzig, Germany
Composer’s name: Following the Mendelssohn family’s conversion from Judaism to Lutheranism—the children in 1816, the father in 1822—the members of the family appended the second name of Bartholdy to their surname; accordingly, the composer often signed his name “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” (with no hyphen).
Work composed: 1829, completed on December 19
Work premiered: in a private performance at the Mendelssohn’s home in Berlin on December 26, 1829; the first public performance took place in Leipzig on April 10, 1851; the Overture was first given as an independent concert piece on October 26 1848 in Leipzig, conducted by Julius Rietz
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, and strings
Even persons who eschew superlatives might have to agree that Felix Mendelssohn was the most astonishing prodigy in the history of music. By the time he turned 18 he had composed such irreplaceable masterpieces as his delightful Octet and his Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Half his life earlier, when he was nine, he both gave his debut piano recital and heard one of his psalm settings performed by the highly regarded Berlin Singakademie. By the time he was 21 he had been offered—and had turned down—the music professorship of the University of Berlin. 
Because he was born into a family that was both cultured and wealthy; his grandfather was the noted philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and his father was a supremely successful banker, one remembered for his astute observation that he would go down in history as his father’s son and his son’s father. Felix, his also-gifted sister Fanny Cäcilie (some three years his elder), and their younger siblings Rebekah and Paul benefited from an exemplary education and myriad other advantages reserved for the privileged. Felix mastered Classical and modern languages, wrote poetry, and polished his considerable skills as a landscape painter and an artist in pen-and-ink. His musical education included private lessons in piano and violin, as well as composition lessons from Carl Friedrich Zelter (musical adviser to the literary colossus Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), whose other students included Otto Nicolai, Carl Loewe, and Giacomo Meyerbeer. One of the perks young Mendelssohn enjoyed was having a private orchestra at his disposal to try out his new compositions at every-other-Sunday musicales that were instituted in 1822 at the family home in Berlin, the Mendelssohns having moved there from Hamburg in 1811.
One of the life-long friendships Mendelssohn developed during the years of the private house concerts was with Karl Klingemann, eleven years his elder, who in 1827 left Berlin for London to serve as Secretary to the Hanoverian Legislation. Two years later he urged Mendelssohn to come for an extended visit, and the experiences of that trip, the first of many Mendelssohn would undertake in the British Isles, gave rise to both the composer’s popular Hebrides Overture (a.k.a. Fingal’s Cave) and his Scottish Symphony.
During that trip Mendelssohn began planning the celebration of his parents’ upcoming 25th wedding anniversary. By September 1829 we find him acting as long-distance ringleader, sending letters to Fanny and her husband, the painter Wilhelm Hensel, detailing the gifts he had in mind: twin pieces, one composed by him, the other by Fanny. His would be fully staged in a theatre that would be constructed expressly for the purpose at the family’s home. He drafted Klingemann as the librettist for his piece, which he ended up terming a Liederspiel, implying a work with songlike vocal numbers in which the plot would be advanced through spoken dialogue. Parts were assigned to friends and family members. Even the tone-deaf Hensel was not exempt: for him Mendelssohn crafted a part that was effectively limited to a single note—intoned 91 times.
Mendelssohn returned from his trip on December 7 and the very next day swung into action with on-site preparations for his Liederspiel, in addition to helping coach the companion piece out of Fanny. His was titled Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde, literally The Homecoming from Abroad, though it would become better known in English-speaking lands as Son and Stranger, the name it was given in Henry Fothergill Chorley’s once-standard translation from the 1850s. It was a huge hit with the 120 invited guests at the anniversary party, but although the composer told Klingemann six weeks later that “I consider it the best piece I have composed thus far,” he steadfastly refused to publish it. As a result, the work was not produced in public until April 10, 1851, when it was given in Leipzig.
By then the Overture had already been offered as a standalone concert piece, a winning work whose details suggest some kinship with Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture from the preceding year. Both its song-like, minute-long introduction (Andante) and the ensuing Allegro di molto employ themes that appear later in the Liederspiel.
Symphony No. 41 in C major, K.551, Jupiter
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart
Born: January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria
Died: December 5, 1791in Vienna
Composer’s name: He was christened Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, but he often used Amadé or Amadè (the French or Italian equivalent of Gottlieb) as a middle name. He rarely employed the latinized form Amadeus, and on the few occasions he did it was clearly in jest; nonetheless, it became widely used in posterity.
Work composed: July 25 (at earliest) through August 10, 1788
Work premiered: No information has survived concerning the premiere of this work.
Instrumentation: Flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s biography contains such an amazing procession of experiences and achievements that it reads almost like an 18th-century novel. The story of his final three symphonies occupies a full chapter of this life-as-novel—unfortunately, one that falls not terribly far from its end. More than two centuries after they were written, these works—the Symphonies No. 39 in E-flat major, No. 40 in G minor, and No. 41 in C major (Jupiter)--continue to stand at the summit of the symphonic repertoire, where they keep company with a small and supremely select group of fellow-masterpieces by the A-list of composers.
Almost incredibly, all three of these symphonies were produced in the space of about nine weeks, in the summer of 1788: Mozart began his Symphony No. 39 around the beginning of June, not quite a month after Don Giovanni was granted a lukewarm reception at its Vienna premiere, and he went on to complete the succeeding symphonies on July 25 and August 10. Each is a very full-scale work, comprising the standard four movements of the late-Classical symphony. Twelve movements in nine weeks would mean that, on the average, Mozart expended five days and a few hours on the composition of each movement. That doesn’t figure in the fact that he was writing other pieces at the same time, or that he was also giving piano lessons, tending a sick wife, enduring the death of a six-month-old daughter, entertaining friends, moving to a new apartment, and begging his fellow freemason Michael Puchberg for assistance that might see him and his family through what was turning into an extended financial crisis.
Mozart, of course, had no idea that these would be his last symphonies. He undoubtedly had every expectation of living well into the 19th century; and although that is not what happened, at least he had another three and a half years in which he might well have written further symphonies. Since he didn’t, these three works stand as the summa of his achievement in symphonic music, and in their strikingly different characters we glimpse not only a drawing together of strands of development that had enriched his orchestral music to that point but also hints of what the future might have held.
These three symphonies have been minutely analyzed over the years—especially Nos. 40 and 41—and they have revealed such richness in their structural details that the analytical conversation continues at full force to this day. Still, words come with difficulty when one tries to discuss Mozart’s final symphonies. One can dissect their harmonic structures, their deployment of themes, their contrapuntal subtlety, and the mastery of their instrumentation and yet fail to convey the exceptionally well-wrought personalities that each makes evident even at first hearing. In Symphony No. 41, the so-called Jupiter, Mozart seems intent on showing off his sheer brilliance as a composer. Its emotional range is wide indeed, prefiguring the sort of vast expressive canvas that would characterize the symphonies of Beethoven. In this work’s finale Mozart renders the listener slack-jawed through a breathtaking display of quintuple invertible counterpoint, and that in itself may be viewed as looking both backward, to the sort of contrapuntal virtuosity we associate with Bach and Handel, and forward, to the dramatic power of fugue as demonstrated in many of the greatest compositions of Beethoven.
Although we don’t know just when it was premiered, the Jupiter Symphony quickly earned a reputation as a work of exceptional qualities. In 1798 a reviewer for Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung referred to Mozart’s “formidable Symphony in C major, in which, as is well known, he came on a little too strong.” But soon commentators adopted tones of almost universal adulation. By the time Georg Nikolaus von Nissen published his groundbreaking Mozart biography, in 1828, the judgment of music-lovers was firmly set. “His great Symphony in C with the closing fugue is truly the first of all symphonies,” declared Nissen. “In no work of this kind does the divine spark of genius shine more brightly and beautifully.”
The Nickname of the Jupiter
Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 is universally known among English-speaking music lovers as the Jupiter Symphony. As with so many musical nicknames, this one did not originate with the composer. We have no reason to doubt the account provided by the English composer and publisher Vincent Novello, who (along with his wife) visited Mozart’s widow and their son Franz Xaver in 1829 and reported: “Mozart’s son said he considered the Finale to his father’s Sinfonia in C—which Salomon christened the Jupiter—to be the highest triumph of Instrumental Composition, and I agree with him.” This would have been the German violinist Johann Peter Salomon, remembered especially for having established himself as an impresario in London and arranged Franz Joseph Haydn’s two stints in Great Britain in the 1790s. The account rings true: the earliest concert programs to use the nickname were Scottish and English, and the first printed edition to slap the name on the title page was a piano transcription of the symphony published in London in 1823.
—JMK |
Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra
César Franck
Born: December 10, 1822 in Liège, in the Walloon district of the Low Countries (Netherlands)
Died: November 8, 1890, in Paris
Work composed: Autumn 1885, completed on December 12
Work premiered: May 1, 1886 at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, with pianist Louis Diémer (the work’s dedicatee) and with the composer conducting at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings, in addition to the solo piano
Most of César Franck’s major works were created near the end of his life, principally in his final decade. In a sense, Franck was both an early bloomer and a late bloomer. It seems clear that he was a child prodigy, though probably not on a level with Mozart or Mendelssohn. Franck’s father (a sometimes-unemployed, but always ambitious, clerk) seized on his son’s precocity and enrolled him at the Liège Conservatory several months before the boy’s eighth birthday. Within two years Franck earned top prizes in solfège and piano, and his father began exploiting him as a pianist and budding composer on the concert circuit, often in tandem with a brother who also displayed some talent. Before long Franck was enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire, this time amassing academic distinctions in piano, counterpoint, and fugue. He completed his education there at the age of 20, no longer a prodigy, and embarked on a performing and career that advanced only fitfully. He found stability in the employ of the church, most enduringly as organist at the church of Ste. Clotilde from1858 until his death. In 1872 he succeeded his own former teacher, François Benoist, as organ professor at the Paris Conservatoire. Although he did not officially teach composition there, his organ seminars served as the de facto training ground for a generation of France’s leading lights, including Vincent d’Indy, Ernest Chausson, Henri Duparc, Guy Ropartz, Gabriel Pierné, Louis Vierne, and Guillaume Lekeu. 
Through all this Franck quietly honed his own craft as a composer, though without calling much attention to his creations. It seems likely that his works would have gone all but unnoticed if his adoring students had not taken it upon themselves to promote his music. The critic Charles Bordes acutely summed up the situation when he remarked, “Father Franck is the offspring of his pupils.” Several of them were involved in the formation of the influential Société Nationale de Musique (with its famous motto “Ars Gallica”) to provide a forum for works by contemporary French composers. The Société presented Franck's early Trio de Salon No. 2 in its very first program (on November 25, 1871) and went on to premiere many of the master’s new compositions, including the one played in this concert. When, in 1886, Camille Saint-Saëns resigned as the Société’s president as a protest against including foreign works in the group’s programs, Franck took over as its leader, to be succeeded on his death by his most ardent apostle, d’Indy. By that time, Franck had achieved considerable respect in most quarters. In 1885 he was honored with the cross of the Légion d’honneur, and in 1887 a high-profile all-Franck festival concert was given at the Cirque d’Hiver, though it turned out to be loftier in conception than in execution.
Among the works on the Cirque d’Hiver program was Franck’s Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra, which was receiving its second performance—torpedoed, in the event, by the inept conducting of Jules Pasdeloup. The work had been warmly received at its world premiere a year earlier, when the composer conducted, and it would go on to be applauded as one of his signal masterpieces. The piece’s genealogy reaches back to Franck’s Les Djinns (1884), a symphonic poem with a difficult obbligato piano part that was played at its premiere by Louis Diémer, a pianist acclaimed for deep musicality and a tendency to underplay dazzling effects of virtuosity. At the time Franck promised to compose “another little something” for Diémer. The resultant Symphonic Variations is, in effect, a piano concerto compressed into a single movement consisting of an ultra-serious introduction, a middle section of variations cast in conversational style between the piano and the orchestra, and, following a long trill in both hands of the piano part, a telescoped sonata-form finale (Allegro non troppo) with a glittering coda. The whole is knitted together through the pervasive use of themes presented in the opening measures—a stentorian, rather angry figure in the strings, and the mournful, drooping melody with which the piano responds—and the theme, introduced by pizzicato strings, that generates the more formal variations of the central section.
Concerto No. 1 in C minor for Piano, Trumpet, and Strings, Op. 35
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich
Born: September 12 (old style)/25 (new style), 1906 in Saint Petersburg, Russia
Died: August 9, 1975 in Moscow
Work composed: From March 6 to July 20, 1933
Work premiered: October 15, 1933 in the Large Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic with Fritz Stiedry conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, trumpeter Alexander Nikolayevich Schmidt, and the composer (as pianist)
Instrumentation: Trumpet and strings, in addition to the solo piano
Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 in the aftermath of the official censure he received for his opera The Nose following its staging in mid-January 1930. The composer was stung by the attack but he realized that he had no option but to atone, or at least behave in a way that could be interpreted as such. He was already involved as a composer for a politically approved Soviet youth-theatre collective, and he immediately intensified that connection, producing incidental music for springtime productions in both 1930 and 1931. But his situation remained dicey. In October 1930 his ballet The Golden Age proved another critical setback. Among other things, it was considered a glorification of the bourgeois music hall; so Shostakovich’s decision to get involved next with what was essentially a musical review with popular overtones—its title is often translated as Hypothetically Murdered—does seem strange (though the Soviet critics’ negative assessment of it when it opened in October 1931 seems not strange at all).
Some drastic step was in order, and Shostakovich took it later that fall when he issued a self-flagellating tract he titled “Declaration of a Composer’s Duties,” in which he confessed the wrong-headedness of essentially all the theatre and film music he had written to date and deplored the low state to which music had sunk in such collaborative ventures. Yet again the official response was harsh: Shostakovich, they insisted, was shifting the burden of his own shortcomings onto his collaborators and, even worse, he wasn’t behaving like a team player. Nonetheless, his tract did stir up useful conversation in the musical bureaucracy. One of the upshots was the formation of the Union of Soviet Composers, and when the Leningrad branch was formed, in August 1932, Shostakovich was named to its governing board. By then he was embarked on another major project, the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which (ironically) would occasion his next political flogging when it was produced a few years later.
During this period of turmoil Shostakovich had all but ceased appearing as a concert pianist, which had been an essential strand of his earlier musical persona. As an emerging musician he had been torn over whether he should focus on composition or performance. He could have gone in either direction; when he graduated from Leningrad Conservatory he possessed sufficient technique and chutzpah to include Beethoven’s fearsome Hammerklavier Sonata in his senior recital. Although his emphasis in composition became clear soon enough—fortunately for us—he did perform regularly as a pianist, and a good number of recordings attest to his persuasiveness as a decisive, rather ascetic interpreter of his own music, including his Preludes and Fugues for piano, Piano Trio No. 2, Piano Quintet, Sonata for Cello and Piano, and Piano Concertos No. 1 and No. 2.
In early 1933 he found himself focusing on the keyboard again, in short order producing a series of Twenty-four Preludes (Op. 34) and then his First Piano Concerto. At about this time he told a friend that he was considering giving up composing and returning to his career as a concert pianist, an understandable temptation in light of the problems his compositions had caused him. Fortunately, the concerto proved to be wildly successful and quickly entered the repertoire as a must-play. Shostakovich wisely refused to comment on the “inner meaning” of this work—not that he wasn’t asked! This left the delighted listeners to simply revel in the work’s optimistic bonhomie and its understated references to Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Mahler, and various styles of popular music; and it left the critics without anything to attack, for a change. It was an important success for Shostakovich, and it seems to have gotten him back on track as a composer. With the premiere of his First Piano Concerto he definitively gave up performing the concert repertoire that had previously won him acclaim—including concertos by Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev—and would henceforth appear only as a performer of his own compositions, often of this concerto.
What’s in a Name?
The title-page inscription “Concerto for Piano, Trumpet, and Strings” is admittedly unusual and it has led to confusion about whether this is actually a piano concerto or a double concerto (or perhaps a sinfonia concertante) for piano and trumpet, with an accompanying string orchestra. Shostakovich later told his student Evgeny Makarov that when he started working on this piece he envisioned it as a trumpet concerto. As he progressed, he began imagining a piano part, which eventually ended up emerging in his score as the solo instrument. The trumpet was still there, to be sure; but whereas the piece was originally going to spotlight the trumpet, with a supporting part from the piano and the string orchestra, the roles became entirely reversed. No ifs, and, or buts: this is a piano concerto. But the trumpet part nonetheless reveals its early prominence, and that instrument provides a particularly pronounced and involved strand in the overall texture.
—JMK |
The Mozart and Shostakovich notes originally appeared in the programs of the New York Philharmonic and are reprinted with permission; © New York Philharmonic. Mendelssohn and Franck notes; © James M. Keller
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.