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Sibelius's Nordic SplendorKing Stephen, Op. 117: OvertureLudwig van Beethoven b. Bonn, Germany / December 15, 1770; d. Vienna, Austria / March 26, 1827 Beethoven regularly composed music to accompany theatrical productions, a common practice of the day. Perhaps the most distinguished example of his contributions to this field was the score he wrote in 1810 for the play Egmont. His admiration for its author – the brilliant and widely revered Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – undoubtedly played a role in the emotional depth and quality of Beethoven’s score. The following year, to celebrate the opening of a new theatre in the Hungarian city of Pest, August von Kotzebue was commissioned to write a three part festival play. Beethoven agreed to compose incidental music for the first and last sections, which bore the respective titles King Stephen, Hungary’s First Benefactor, and The Ruins of Athens. He wrote his music rather hurriedly, in less than a month, while taking a rest cure in the Bohemian city of Teplitz. He completed the scores in September, then sent them off to Pest. The theatre's opening was delayed until the following February. Kotzebue’s and Beethoven’s creations then received highly successful joint premieres. The music for King Stephen includes a full scale overture and nine other pieces, all of them brief, several featuring a chorus. The overture begins with a stately introduction. In the brisk, joyful main section, Beethoven acknowledges the Hungarian nature of his subject by incorporating the flavor of that country’s folk music. Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47 Jean Sibelius b. Hämeenlinna, Finland / December 8, 1865; d. Järvenpää, Finland / September 20, 1957 Sibelius’s early desire had been for a career as a violin soloist, but his talent as a performer proved insufficient. On the other hand, these circumstances ensured that he had no need to consult a professional soloist when he set to a work on this concerto in September 1902. The acclaimed soloist Willy Burmester had made repeated request for him to do so, and Sibelius now felt prepared to fulfill the commission. For a number of reasons, including a pressing need for cash, the premiere was given at a hastily-organized concert in Helsinki on February 8, 1904. Burmester being unavailable on such short notice, the solo part was played by the little-known and relatively inexperienced Viktor Novácek. Sibelius conducted. The concerto failed miserably. Even critics who had praised Sibelius’s earlier works to the skies found both it and Novácek’s performance wanting. Sibelius revised the concerto during the summer of 1905, spurred on by his publisher’s success in placing the piece in the concert series staged in Berlin by Richard Strauss. Strauss directed the Berlin Philharmonic in the second debut on October 19, with the orchestra’s Concertmaster, Carl Halir, playing the solo part. This version achieved everything that the first had not. Sibelius gave the concerto a superbly atmospheric opening that casts an immediate spell of mystery. The solo violin emerges out of a murmuring bed of strings, with a long, yearning theme of ever-growing intensity. The second subject is highly expressive, almost passionate. A substantial, turbulent cadenza appears at the midway point; the orchestra re-enters quietly, almost before it’s over. The coda is uncompromisingly stern. The first half of the second movement is quite restrained. The emotional temperature rises towards the middle, first through orchestral surges then increasingly so as the soloist joins in, leading to a powerful climax. In its wake, some sense of emotional resolution is at last achieved. Typically for Sibelius, the finale isn’t a jolly, dancing romp, but an exciting, insistently rhythmic rondo. Musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey labeled it “a polonaise for polar bears.” It contains the concerto’s highest share of technical demands, and builds up a good head of steam en route to the dynamic conclusion. Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68 Johannes Brahms b. Hamburg, Germany / May 7, 1833; d. Vienna, Austria / April 3, 1897 Many composers begin their careers with brief pieces for solo instruments or small combinations, then gradually expand their horizons, extending their palette of colors and the dimensions and complexity of the works they create – all the while purging their music of other composers’ influences. Brahms’s progression from derivative songs and piano pieces to major orchestral works with a stamp uniquely his own – symphonies in particular – was an unusually lengthy one. His awe of Beethoven was definitely a factor. Other causes may have lain within his inward-looking, highly self-critical personality. When he was 21, his first hearing of Beethoven’s Ninth so overwhelmed him that he set out to compose a symphony of his own. The sketches refused to fit that form, and he ended up using them in his Piano Concerto No. 1 and A German Requiem. Prior to, and during the creation of his Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, Brahms worked on his official first symphony. He finally felt it ready to be heard, some 20 years after he had begun it. Felix Dessoff conducted the premiere in Karlsruhe, Germany on November 4, 1876. It won great success, confirming in Brahms’s mind that he really did possess the necessary skills to follow in Beethoven’s footsteps as a great composer of symphonic music. Brahms’s admirers included the eminent conductor Hans von Bülow. It was he who grouped Brahms together with Bach and Beethoven as the “Three Great B’s of Music.” Bülow and others expanded upon this adulation by referring to Brahms’s First Symphony as “Beethoven’s Tenth.” Though the composer may not have appreciated the comparison, it certain senses it is inescapable. The symphony’s atmosphere of victory through struggle, of a journey from darkness to light, for example, links it with Beethoven’s symphonic ideals, especially with those expressed in his Fifth (which is also set in the same key, C Minor). Brahms’s use of a chorale melody in the finale calls Beethoven’s Ninth to mind, as well. As was to be the case with each of his four symphonies, in No. 1 Brahms sets forth the main weight of his arguments in the first and last movements. Here each is prefaced by an introduction in slow tempo. The one which begins the symphony sets the sombre, dramatic mood which also characterizes the more vigorous but equally austere first movement proper. The second movement offers a restful interlude, one with scarcely a moment of contrasting drama. Even though the third movement is hardly a scherzo, it provides a breath of fresh, lighter air to balance what has preceded it. At this point in the symphony, listeners may be wondering where this sequence of moods is leading. Brahms at first withholds his answer. He begins his finale with a prelude virtually as stark in tone as the one which opened the first movement. But its fatalistic grumblings are eventually dispelled by the heartfelt chorale melody which is the principal theme of the finale’s main body. Brahms acknowledged its family relationship to the Ode to Joy theme from Beethoven’s Ninth (“Any jackass can see that!” he remarked). He builds this movement with vast architectural and instrumental skill, as the symphony unfolds towards its grand, affirmative conclusion. Program Notes by Don Anderson © 2009 
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