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PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth Ludwig van Beethoven Coriolan After completing his opera Fidelio in the summer of 1805, Beethoven worked himself into a creative frenzy that lasted several years and resulted in many of his most beloved musical works, including his Coriolan overture. This overture was inspired by the play Coriolan by Heinrich von Collin; a Romantic drama in which the Roman general Coriolanus, following a brilliant military career, is denied the consulship of Rome. He is eventually exiled and plans to lead an outside army against the city. After his wife and mother plead with him to reconsider, he gives up on his grand revenge and takes his own life. The play opened in 1802 at the Hoftheater in Vienna and ran sporadically over the next three years. The origins of Beethoven’s overture are a mystery. No evidence survives to show whether it was requested from Beethoven for a new staging of the play or if the existence of the overture prompted a return of the play to the stage. What is known is that Beethoven had a friendship with Collin, who was secretary to the Viennese court and was also involved in the management of the Hoftheater. Beethoven desired an appointment as a theater composer, but he also seems to have been genuinely moved by his friend’s drama. Most sources agree that the completion of the overture was not simply an attempt to curry favor. The overture received its premiere on a huge concert arranged for Beethoven’s financial benefit at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz in March of 1807. Its first public performance was in the Hoftheater a month later, where it was also well received. The Coriolan overture has maintained its popularity through the years. Composed in a loose sonata form, it succeeds in mirroring the play’s action through dramatic outbursts and a quiet, tragic ending. Carl Maria von Weber Oberon Carl Maria von Weber made a name for himself as an exacting taskmaster bent on reforming German opera. Weber came from a family of performers. With the strong encouragement of his father, Weber studied music with Michael Haydn and others. His goal was to create grand opera on the French model for German audiences who were used to either light Italian fare or Singspiel (spoken comedies with arias). Weber succeeded with Der Freischütz and Euryanthe. Interestingly, he produced his final opera in this vein for the English. Oberon: or the Elf King’s Oath was composed for Covent Garden where it premiered on April 12, 1826. The opera’s plot does not come directly from Shakespeare. Instead, the libretto for Oberon was written by James Planché from the translation of an epic-style Romantic poem by Christopher Martin Wieland. Weber’s music for the opera’s opening is certainly engaging in its own right, but it can also be heard as similar to the music that Felix Mendelssohn created to illustrate Shakespeare’s tale about Oberon and Titania. It’s an even stranger coincidence that both Mendelssohn and Weber’s pieces were composed in 1826. However, they both derive from German Romanticism’s fascination with the plays of Shakespeare. Wieland had translated twenty-two of the plays into German in the 1760s, and they became an essential part of nineteenth-century German culture. The opera has a very convoluted plot planned to deliver a fabulous night at the theater. The synopsis of elements on the original playbill gives us some idea: cast members and supernumeraries were either Fairies, Franks (from the court of Charlemagne), Arabians, or Tunisians; the sets include Oberon’s sylvan bower, opulent courts in France and Baghdad, and an ocean cave; and the drama is punctuated with special effects from storms, vast vistas, and enthralling sunsets (at least according to the advertising). Although there have been many well-meaning attempts to create practical versions of Oberon which might spur its entry into the standard repertoire, the overture remains much more popular than the opera itself. Weber uses Oberon’s magic horn to sing a “once upon a time” introduction. This leads to sprightly dance rhythms and the introduction of some of the aria themes used later in the opera. Antonín Dvořák Carnival Antonín Dvořák’s audience grew across Europe and in the United States after he gained a publisher thanks to a recommendation from Johannes Brahms in 1878. He received several important commissions from Great Britain, where his music was particularly popular, and an honorary doctorate from Cambridge. Dvořák accepted a professorship at the Prague Conservatory in January of 1891, but was then offered the directorship of the National Conservatory in New York. He accepted the position in America (having received a guarantee that he could return to the Conservatory) and began the most hectic year of his life. Besides fulfilling his duties at the Conservatory, Dvořák made two trips to England to conduct concerts, and performed his chamber works in several Czech and German cities. He also took time to compose. The major work of the year was to be a triptych of overtures he tentatively titled “Nature, Life and Love.” Dvořák directed the premiere of the music in 1892 during his farewell concert in Prague in April and again during his first concert in America in October. We know these works today as the separate pieces In Nature’s Realm, Carnival, and Othello. The brightest and most popular of the three is the Carnival overture. Dvořák used a sonata framework for this piece, which gave him an opportunity to create some reflective interludes within the gaiety suggested by the title. Many of the beautiful introspective melodies feature the woodwind instruments. The driving energy of the exposition wonderfully portrays the joy of life, while the recapitulation and coda allow this joy to have the last word. Gustav Holst The Planets Gustav Holst’s biographer was his daughter Imogen, who wrote engagingly about a man as dedicated to music as he was appalled by celebrity. Holst’s German ancestry came through a grandfather who had been born in Riga, Latvia. He was christened Gustavus Theodore von Holst. The family business was music, and Holst grew up around skilled performers. His earliest composition dates from around the age of twelve. He tried to set a poem he had memorized as homework “knowing Berlioz’s book on ‘Instrumentation’ not wisely but too well, and not knowing anything else about the theory of music.” While that project was abandoned, he did eventually succeed in some juvenile piano pieces, organ voluntaries, and songs. He won his first professional appointment at the age of seventeen as a village organist and choirmaster. Holst attended the Royal College of Music in London, where he traded the keyboard for a trombone to help pay the bills. He supported himself for several years as a professional trombonist while finishing his studies at the RCM and then pursuing teaching jobs. He was named music director of the St. Paul’s Girl’s School in 1905 — a position he held until his death. Subsequent teaching positions included time at the RCM, University College, Reading, and Harvard. Holst always seemed to throw himself into his work in an attempt to bring about the best product. This was true of his teaching, composition, and interesting enthusiasms such as studying Hindu literature and the Sanskrit language or collecting folk tunes on walking trips with his college friend Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although he often showed a preference for his thatched cottage at Thaxted and the company of students and amateur choral societies, Gustav Holst was attracted to many disciplines outside these realms. This point is driven home by his most popular large work, The Planets. Holst had gotten into a discussion about astrology during a 1913 holiday in Spain. He wrote to a friend, “I only study things that suggest music to me. That’s why I worried at Sanskrit. Then recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology fairly closely.” The following summer he began work on the suite. The music took him three years to complete, and Holst had no hopes that anyone would agree to mount such a large-scale orchestral work in war time. As a surprise, however, Holst’s friend Henry Balfour Gardiner secured Queen’s Hall in London along with its orchestra under Adrian Boult and a group of singers for a private performance on September 29, 1918. Imogen Holst, who was eleven years old at the time, recalls the event: They found the clamour of Mars almost unbearable after having lived through four years of a war that was still going on. The cool to-and-fro of the chords in Venus had a balanced tranquility that had not yet become a familiar device. The scurry of Mercury was breathlessly exciting … Jupiter was thoroughly happy, without any of the false associations that were afterwards to link the big tune to the words of a patriotic hymn. In Saturn the middle-aged listeners in the audience felt they were growing older and older as the slow, relentless tread came nearer … The magical moment in Uranus was when all the noise was suddenly blotted out, leaving a quietness that seemed as remote as the planet in the sky. It was the end of Neptune that was more memorable than anything else at that first performance. Hearing the voices of the hidden choir growing fainter and fainter, it was impossible to know where the sound ended and the silence began. With his expanded orchestration and thrilling use of musical materials, Holst created a piece of music as dramatic and powerful as our solar system. We can listen to this multi-faceted work of art as a reflection of centuries of beliefs about the effects of the different planets or as a depiction of the “Ages of Man” (an interpretation made popular by Frank Howes, Raymond Head, and others). But the breathtaking images NASA has captured focus our attention on the drama of the physical objects themselves — a fitting way to hear this music as we continue missions to explore more and more of our universe. © 2008 Klayton Woodworth and Karen M. Woodworth |