Overture to Fidelio, Opus 72c
Ludwig van Beethoven
(b. Bonn, 1770; d. Vienna, 1827)

Composed in 1814.
Premiered on May 25, 1814 in Vienna.
Instrumentation: woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani and strings.
Duration: approximately 6 minutes.

The decade (1804-1814) that Beethoven devoted to his only opera, Fidelio, was an unprecedented amount of time to spend perfecting such a work during the early 19th century. Given the same ten years, Rossini dispensed 31 (!) operas between 1810 and 1820, and Donizetti cranked out 35 (!!) specimens of the genre from 1827 to 1837. Even Mozart launched seven operas during his decade in Vienna. For Beethoven, however, Fidelio was more than just a mere theatrical diversion — it was his philosophy set to music. This story of the triumph of justice over tyranny and love over inhumanity was a document of his faith. To present such grandiose beliefs in a work that would not fully serve them was unthinkable, and so Beethoven hammered and rewrote and changed until he was satisfied. In his book The Interior Beethoven, Irving Kolodin noted, “As tended to be the life-long case with Beethoven, the overriding consideration remained: achievement of the objective. How long it might take or how much effort might be required was not merely incidental — such consideration was all but non-existent.”

The most visible remnants of Beethoven’s extensive revisions are the quartet of overtures he composed for Fidelio, the only instance in the history of music in which a composer generated so many curtain-raisers for a single opera. The first version of the opera, written between January 1804 and early autumn 1805, was initially titled Leonore after the heroine, who courageously rescues her husband from his wrongful incarceration. For this production, Beethoven wrote the Overture in C major now known as the Leonore No. 1, utilizing themes from the opera. The composer’s friend and early biographer Anton Schindler recorded that Beethoven rejected this first attempt after hearing it privately performed at Prince Lichnowsky’s palace before the premiere. (Another theory, supported by recent detailed examination of the paper on which the sketches for the piece were made, holds that this work was written in 1806-1807 for a projected performance of the opera in Prague which never took place, thus making Leonore No. 1 the third of the Fidelio overtures.) He composed a second C major overture, Leonore No. 2, and this piece was used at the first performance, on November 20, 1805. (The management of Vienna’s Theater-an-der-Wien, site of the premiere, insisted on changing the opera’s name from Leonore to Fidelio to avoid confusion with Ferdinand Paër’s Leonore.) The opera foundered. Not only was the audience, largely populated by French officers of Napoleon’s army, which had invaded Vienna exactly one week earlier, unsympathetic, but there were also problems in Fidelio’s dramatic structure. Beethoven was encouraged by his aristocratic supporters to rework the opera and present it again. This second version, for which the magnificent Leonore Overture No. 3 was written, was presented in Vienna on March 29, 1806, but met with only slightly more acclaim than its forerunner.

In 1814, some members of the Court Theater approached Beethoven, by then Europe’s most famous composer, about reviving Fidelio. The idealistic subject of the opera had never been far from his thoughts, and he agreed to the project. The libretto was revised yet again, and Beethoven rewrote all the numbers in the opera and changed their order to enhance the work’s dramatic impact. The new Fidelio Overture, the fourth he composed for his opera, was among the revisions. Beethoven realized that the earlier Overtures, especially the Leonore No. 3, simply overwhelmed what followed (“As a curtain raiser, it almost made the raising of the curtain superfluous,” judged Irving Kolodin), and, from a technical viewpoint, were in the wrong tonality to match the revised beginning of the opera. The compact Fidelio Overture, in E major, is now always heard to open the opera. The Leonore No. 3 often appears between the two scenes of Act II, a practice instituted in 1841 by the composer (The Merry Wives of Windsor) and conductor (of the Vienna Court Opera and founder of the Vienna Philharmonic) Otto Nicolai when he first produced Fidelio in the Habsburg imperial city. Both Overtures are regular entries on concert programs.

Beethoven just missed completing the Fidelio Overture for the first performance of the 1814 revision. Accounts do not agree on which of his overtures was substituted for the premiere, on May 23. According to Schindler, it was one of the earlier Leonore Overtures; Treitschke recorded that the Prometheus Overture was played and Seyfried, The Ruins of Athens. The Fidelio Overture was first heard at the second performance of the run, on May 25. The Overture, whose themes do not derive from those of the opera, opens with an introduction comprising two contrasting strains of music: a rousing fanfare for the full orchestra and a darkly colored harmonic passage in slow tempo without a definable theme. The work’s compact sonata-allegro form begins with the fast tempo and the announcement by the solo horn of the main theme, based on the fanfare motive from the introduction. The fleet second theme is presented quietly by the strings following an energetic climax. The tiny central section, based on the fanfare motive, is less a true development than a transition to the recapitulation of the themes. A rousing coda, separated from the body of the Overture by a return of the slow harmonies of the introduction, brings this noble Overture to a stirring close.

Symphony No. 8 in GMajor, Opus 88
Antonín Dvorák
(b. Nelahozeves, Bohemia, 1841; d. Prague, 1904)

Composed in 1889.
Premiered on February 2, 1890 in Prague, conducted by the composer.
Instrumentation: woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings.
Duration: approximately 36 minutes.

You would probably have liked Dvorák. He was born a simple (in the best sense) man of the soil who retained a love of country, nature and peasant ways all his life. In his later years he wrote, “In spite of the fact that I have moved about in the great world of music, I shall remain what I have always been — a simple Czech musician.” Few passions ruffled his life — music, of course; the rustic pleasures of country life; the company of old friends; caring for his pigeons; and a child-like fascination with railroads. When he was in Prague during the winters, he took daily walks to the Franz Josef Station to gaze in awe at the great iron wagons. The timetables were as ingrained in his thinking as were the chord progressions of his music, and he knew all the specifications of the engines that puffed through Prague. When his students returned from a journey, he would pester them until they recalled exactly which locomotive had pulled their train. Milton Cross sketched him thus: “To the end of his days he remained shy, uncomfortable in the presence of those he regarded as his social superiors, and frequently remiss in his social behavior. He was never completely at ease in large cities, with the demands they made on him. Actually he had a pathological fear of city streets and would never cross a busy thoroughfare if a friend was not with him. He was happiest when he was close to the soil, raising pigeons, taking long, solitary walks in the hills and forests of the Bohemia he loved so deeply. Yet he was by no means a recluse. In the company of his intimate friends, particularly after a few beers, he was voluble, gregarious, expansive and good-humored.” His music reflected his salubrious nature, and the late New York Times critic Harold Schonberg concluded, “He remained throughout his entire creative span the happiest and least neurotic of the late Romantics.... With Handel and Haydn, he is the healthiest of all composers.”

Dvorák was nearing fifty when he wrote his Eighth Symphony, when his early years of struggle and poverty were being ameliorated by the honors that were coming his way. The Symphony was dedicated to the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, the official sponsor of an Academy encouraging the arts in Bohemia with that most powerful of all stimuli — money. The stipend Dvorák received as part of an award (the Austrian Iron Cross, Third Order) allowed him to concentrate on composing and disseminating his works without the distractions of other duties. In December 1889, Dvorák, his faithful wife in tow, boarded a train for the official recognition ceremonies in Vienna. More than a little apprehensive about the disparity between his humble background and the opulent extravagance of Vienna, he made it, palpitations aplenty, through his interview with the charming Franz Josef, who showed a sincere interest in the composer and the musical situation out in the provinces of Bohemia.

Only a few months later, Dvorák was awarded an honorary doctorate by Cambridge University as a result of his enormous popularity in Britain. (He was the first musical god in England since the demise of Mendelssohn nearly half a century earlier.) His own account of the event gives an indication how he viewed such rituals, whether in the hushed groves of academe or the glittering halls of the Habsburg palace: “It was all frighteningly solemn, nothing but ceremonies and deans, all solemn-faced and apparently incapable of speaking anything but Latin. When it dawned upon me that they were talking about me, I felt as if I were drowning in hot water, so ashamed was I that I could not understand them.” The picture of him as merely a shuffling country bumpkin, however, unaware of his special gift and of his international notoriety, is dispelled by his next sentence: “However, when all is said and done, that Stabat Mater of mine [performed as part of the investiture ceremony] is more than just Latin.” Wisdom and modesty have seldom found a happier marriage in a great man.

The G major Symphony, in its warm emotionalism and pastoral contentment, mirrors its creator. It was composed during Dvorák’s annual summer retreat to the country at Vysoká, and his happy contentment with his surroundings shines through the music. Those months in 1889 were so richly productive for the composer that he confessed a certain frustration to his friend Alois Göbl because his head was “so full of ideas” that he simply could not write them down quickly enough. The Symphony is the most overtly nationalistic of the nine he composed, and displays its flood of folk-derived themes with directness and candor. This characteristic is enhanced by the new direction that Dvorák pursued in the structural foundations of the work. It departed from the carefully integrated, fully developed musical architecture that had underlain the previous symphonies, a preoccupation which reached its apogee in the magnificent, brooding Symphony No. 7 in D minor. The Eighth Symphony is based unashamedly on its beautiful melodies, with little true development. In this, the work recalls the symphonies of that greatest of melodists, Franz Schubert, and in mood and technique it is a true heir to that hallowed tradition. Hermann Kretschmar even thought that the work should not be classed with Dvorák’s symphonies at all, but rather belonged to the category of the symphonic poems and Slavonic Dances.

Dvorák was absolutely profligate with themes in the opening movement. In the exposition, which comprises the first 126 measures of the work, there are no fewer than eight separate melodies which are tossed out with an ease and speed reminiscent of Mozart’s fecundity. The first theme is presented without preamble in the rich hues of trombones, low strings and low woodwinds in the dark coloring of G minor. This tonality soon yields to the chirruping G major of the flute melody, but much of the movement shifts effortlessly between major and minor keys, lending a certain air of nostalgia to the work. The opening melody is recalled to initiate both the development and the recapitulation. In the former, it reappears in its original guise and even, surprisingly, in its original key. The recapitulation begins as this theme is hurled forth by the trumpets in a stentorian setting greatly heightened in emotional weight from its former presentations. The coda is invested with the rhythm and high good spirits of an energetic country dance to bring the movement to its rousing ending.

The second movement is one of the most original formal conceptions in late-19th-century symphonic music. It comprises two kinds of music, one hesitant and somewhat lachrymose, the other stately and smoothly flowing. Some have interpreted these strains as tonal pictures of a crumbling ruin (the opening section resembles “The Old Castle” movement of the Poetic Tone Pictures for Piano, Op. 85) and a peasant wedding. This may be. But looked at in the abstract, as pure music, the movement also points forward to the interest of many 20th-century composers in creating a work from disparate types of music. The compositions of Mahler, Ives and Stravinsky, among others, are filled with instances of what seems to be two different pieces pushed up against each other for the dramatic effect their juxtaposition creates. In this movement, Dvorák built two blocks of music that are different not just in key and melody, but in their total conception. The first is indefinite in tonality, rhythm and cadence; its theme is a collection of fragments; its texture is sparse. The following section is greatly contrasted: its key is unambiguous; its rhythm and cadence points are clear; its melody is a long, continuous span. The form of this movement is created as much by texture and sonority as by the traditional means of melody and tonality. It is a daring and prophetic type of music-making from a composer who is usually regarded as an arch conservative, as the critic for The New York Times recognized in 1892. “The music of the symphony,” he wrote following the New York premiere on March 12th, “is certainly modern and strange enough to meet the demands of the most modern extremists.”

The third movement is a lilting essay much in the style of the Austrian folk dance, the Ländler. Like the beginning of the Symphony, it opens in G minor with a mood of sweet melancholy, but gives way to a languid melody in G major for the central trio. Following the repeat of the scherzo, a vivacious coda in faster tempo paves the way to the finale.

The trumpets herald the start of the finale, a theme and variations with a central section resembling a development in character. The bustling second variation returns as a sort of formal mile-marker — it introduces the “development” and begins the coda. (One point of good fun in this variation: note how the horns, pulling the low woodwinds along with them, ascend to their upper register and blow forth an excited trill generated by the pure joy of the surrounding music.) This wonderful Symphony ends swiftly and resoundingly amid a burst of high spirits and warm-hearted good feelings.

Dvorák’s Czech biographer, Karel Hoffmeister, observed of the G major Symphony, “It is not profound. It awakens no echo of conflict or passion. It is a simple lyric singing of the beauty of our country for the artist’s consolation. It is a lovable expression of a genius who can rejoice with the idyllicism of his own forebears.”

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in A Minor, Opus 54
Robert Schumann
(b. Zwickau, Germany, 1810; d. Endenich, near Bonn, 1856)

Composed in 1841 and 1845.
Premiered on December 4, 1845 in Dresden, conducted by Ferdinand Hiller with Clara Schumann, the composer’s wife, as soloist.
Instrumentation: woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings.
Duration: approximately 30 minutes.

Schumann’s Piano Concerto occupied a special place in his loving relationship with his wife, Clara. In 1837, three years before their marriage, Schumann wrote to her of a plan for a concerted work for piano and orchestra that would be “a compromise between a symphony, a concerto and a huge sonata.” It was a bold vision for Schumann who had, with one discarded exception, written nothing for orchestra. In 1841, the second year of their marriage, he returned to his original conception, and produced a Fantasia in one movement for piano with orchestral accompaniment. That memorable year also saw the composition of his Symphony No. 1 and the first version of the Fourth Symphony, a burst of activity which had been encouraged by Clara, who wanted her husband to realize his potential in forms larger than the solo piano works and songs to which he had previously devoted himself. Schumann had really drawn up his own blueprint for the piano and orchestra work in a prophetic article he wrote in 1839 for the journal he edited, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (“New Music Journal”): “We must await the genius who will show us, in a newer and more brilliant way, how orchestra and piano may be combined; how the soloist, dominant at the keyboard, may unfold the wealth of his instrument and his art, while the orchestra, no longer a mere spectator, may interweave its manifold facets into the scene.” The Fantasia seemed to satisfy the desires of both husband and wife. Clara ran through the work at a rehearsal of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on August 13, 1841, and Robert thought highly enough of the piece to try to have it published. His attempts to secure a publisher for the new score met with one rejection after another, however, and, with great disappointment, he laid the piece aside.

In 1844, Robert had a difficult bout with the recurring emotional disorder that plagued him throughout his life. After his recovery, he felt a new invigoration, and resumed composition with restless enthusiasm. In May 1845, the Fantasia came down from the shelf with Schumann’s determination to breathe new life into it. He retained the original Fantasia movement, and added to it an Intermezzo and Finale to create the three-movement Piano Concerto, which was to become one of the most popular of all such works in the entire keyboard repertory. The public’s initial reaction to the new Concerto, however, was cool. The composition did not have any of the flamboyant virtuosity that was then routinely expected from a soloist (Liszt dubbed it “a concerto without piano”), and the originality of its formal conception put audiences off. Clara, undeterred, was convinced of the work’s value, and she was determined to have it heard. The style of the Concerto even helped her to find a new direction for her concertizing, since she thereafter left behind the vapid virtuoso showpiece, and concentrated instead on the more substantive music of Bach, Beethoven and her husband. As Victor Basch wrote, she felt that this change in attitude and repertory “reconciled the discrepancy between her aspiration as an artist and her duties as a wife.” Clara’s perseverance had its reward — she lived to see not only this magnificent Concerto but all of her husband’s music become accepted and loved throughout the world.

Schumann’s Piano Concerto is memorable not only for the beauty of its melodies and the felicity of its harmony, but also for the careful integration of its structure. Were the manner in which the work was composed unknown, there would be no way to tell that several years separate the creation of the first from the second and third movements. The Concerto’s sense of unity arises principally from the transformations of the opening theme heard throughout the work. This opening motive, a lovely melody presented by the woodwinds after the fiery prefatory chords of the piano, pervades the first movement, serving not only as its second theme but also appearing in many variants of tone color, harmony and texture in the development section. Even the coda, placed after a stirring cadenza, uses a double-time marching version of the main theme.

The second movement, the “very essence of tender romance” according to Eugene Burck, is a three-part form with a soaring melody for cellos in its middle section. The movement’s initial motive, a gentle dialogue between piano and strings, is another derivative of the first movement’s opening theme.

The principal theme of the sonata-form finale is yet another rendering of the Concerto’s initial melody, this one a heroic manifestation in energetic triple meter; the second theme employs extensive rhythmic syncopations. After a striding central section, the recapitulation begins in the dominant key (a technique borrowed from Schubert) so that the movement finally settles into the expected tonic major key only with the syncopated second theme. The soloist is granted another rousing cadenza before the conclusion of this most satisfying work.

Of this Concerto, with its masterful balance of sentiment and vigor, Professor Donald Tovey wrote, “It attains a beauty and depth quite transcendent of any mere prettiness, though, like all Schumann’s deepest music, it is recklessly pretty.”

©2007 Dr. Richard E. Rodda