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Overture Oberon Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Carl Maria von Weber has been described as a composer who is more often talked about than actually performed. Apart from his clarinet concertos, his three major operas – Der Freischutz, Euryanthe and Oberon – and the Invitation to the Dance there is little that serves to advance his stature as a composer.
His place in musical history as the founding figure of German Romantic opera, however, is assured and undisputed, for it was Der Freischutz, in 1821, that established the form and laid the foundations for the operatic works of Richard Wagner.
It was the success of Der Freischutz in London several years later that led to the creation of Oberon, when Charles Kemble of the Royal Opera House offered Weber a lucrative commission for a new opera in English. Already seriously ill with tuberculosis, and against his doctor’s strong advice, Weber accepted, and started learning English in order to be better able to understand the libretto when it arrived from England.
Two of the three acts of Oberon were completed before he departed for London to finish the score and supervise the rehearsals. He apparently left with a strong premonition of impending death, a feeling clearly shared by his wife, who, expecting their second child and remaining in Dresden, remarked “I have just heard his coffin lid shut!”
The first performance at Covent Garden on 12 April 1826 was described by Weber as “the greatest success of my life”; the overture, as well as several other parts of the opera, had to be played twice because of the tumultuous reception. The audience’s enthusiasm was such that, at the end of the opera, Weber was called on to the stage, “an honour”, he reported, “which no composer had ever before obtained in England.”
Even so, he was not completely satisfied with the work, and planned to make revisions. The cold and damp of the London air put paid to those plans, however – less than eight weeks later, on the morning of June 5, Weber was found dead in his bed.
Oberon was written in the same year as Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, and the two works not only share the characters of Oberon, Titania and Puck but also evoke the same magical fairy worlds – indeed, the Oberon overture has been described as “a celebration of the supernatural realm.”
Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra Cesar Franck (1822-90)
For a composer generally regarded as the founder of the modern French symphonic tradition, the Belgian-born Cesar Franck met with little recognition during his lifetime, having to wait until the final year of his life before any public performance of his music - in this case, his String Quartet - was an unqualified success. His development, both as a composer and as a major musical influence, was slow and tentative, and his naivete and candor, together with his lack of sympathy for current musical trends, made him unpopular with critics and colleagues alike, Gounod going so far as to describe the Symphony in D minor as “the affirmation of incompetence pushed to dogmatic lengths.”
There is a disappointing quality to many of Franck’s early and middle compositions, and virtually all of the works by which he is now remembered were written well after he turned 50 – in the case of the Symphony in D minor, the Violin Sonata and the Symphonic Variations, in just the last 5 years of his life. Even so, these works are remarkably few in number, and his fame rests on a very small part of his output.
Franck was a virtuoso pianist as a boy, and one of the greatest organists of his day. Several of his students – Dukas, d’Indy, Chausson and Duparc in particular – recognized his genius and his personal qualities, but he was generally regarded, in the words of Milton Cross, as “a quaint man……who insisted on writing a great deal of music nobody was interested in.”
Even the premiere of the Symphony in D minor on 17 February 1889 was a fiasco, with Delibes actually being castigated for daring to applaud at one point. The performance had only taken place, in the face of overwhelming opposition from the members of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra, at the insistence of Jules Garcin, the conductor – a gesture that must have taken some courage on his part. Several years earlier, at a rehearsal for the orchestral poem Les Djinns, the conductor Colonne had turned to Franck and asked him if it pleased him; on being assured by the composer that yes, indeed it did, Colonne turned to the orchestra and said “It’s all frightful music, gentlemen, but we’ll go on anyway.”
Franck was always completely unfazed by professional antagonism and public indifference, and remained a simple and humble man completely dedicated to – and content with - his musical and religious duties. At the successful performance of his String Quartet, just seven months before his death, he remarked to Vincent d’Indy “There, you see – the public is at last beginning to understand me.”
Franck’s one major innovation was the use of “cyclical form”, the building of themes from shorter motifs and phrases and the re-use of thematic material throughout the various movements of a work to establish unity.
This technique is used in the Symphonic Variations. There are three sections, with the introduction containing the opening phrases of what will become the theme for the variations in the middle section. There are 6 variations on this theme, with the cello melody at the end of the sixth variation providing the basic material for the brilliant finale.
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op.73 Johannes Brahms (1833-97)
The four Brahms symphonies, written in a 10-year span in the middle of his career, reveal more about the composer than all his other works combined, and yet his First Symphony – 23 years in the making – did not appear until Brahms was 43.
The legacy of Beethoven certainly accounted in large part for this cautiousness, and when the conductor Hans Von Bulow referred to Brahms’ First Symphony as “Beethoven’s 10th” the comparison was quite valid: despite being essentially a Romantic, Brahms was continuing the Classical symphonic tradition of Mozart and Beethoven, particularly in the way he followed the strict rules of composition and form.
This merging of the Romantic with the Classical tradition is a recurring theme in any discussion of Brahms. In combining freedom of emotion and flexibility of thought within the discipline of the Classical structure he managed to strike a balance between the music of Beethoven, the Classical composer turned Romantic, and that of Schumann, the Romantic who tried to be Classical, and whose personal recognition and support was so critical in the establishment of Brahms’ reputation in Germany.
Brahms also found himself – through no fault of his own – promoted as the spearhead of the school opposed to the German Romanticism of Liszt and Wagner that was trying to free music from the confines of rigid form. With his avoidance of the empty display and formlessness of Romanticism and his return to discipline, order and form, Brahms’ symphonies reflect the Classical reaction of the second half of the 19th century and the growing reaction against the excesses of Romanticism.
The Second Symphony was written in the summer of 1877 at Portschach on Lake Worth in southern Austria, a location that was to produce the Violin Concerto the following year and the G major Violin Sonata in 1879. With its expansive warmth, and following as it did so closely on the heels of the First Symphony, several critics noted the parallel with Beethoven’s Fifth and Pastoral pairing of 1807-08.
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra gave the first performance under Hans Richter on 30 December 1877. |
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Xiaoping Ma, piano |
