"The Emperor"
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5, "Emperor"
Reicha: Overture in D major
Schubert: Symphony No. 3
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat, Opus 73, “Emperor”
Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna, Austria, on March 26, 1827. He composed the “Emperor” Concerto in 1809, but it was not performed in Vienna until early 1812. The first known performance was given in Leipzig on November 28, 1811, by Friedrich Schneider, with Johann Philipp Christian Schulz conducting the Gewandhaus Orchestra. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, plus timpani and strings.
Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, the last concerto that he was to complete, was composed in the difficult year of 1809, a year much taken up with warfare, siege, and bombardments. Napoleon’s army began firing into Vienna on the night of May 11 - directly toward Beethoven’s apartment. The composer took refuge in the cellar of his brother’s house and held a pillow over his ears to protect them from the damage of the concussions. The Imperial family, including the emperor’s youngest brother, the Archduke Rudolph, who was Beethoven’s sole composition student and one of his strongest supporters, fled the city. About this time Beethoven composed the Harp Quartet for strings, Opus 74, the piano sonata Les Adieux, Opus 81a, and the grandiose piano concerto published as Opus 73. All three of these works are in the key that apparently possessed Beethoven at the time, E-flat major (the same “heroic” key of his earlier Third Symphony).
The nickname of the concerto, the Emperor, takes on an ironic twist in these circumstances, since the emperor to whom it must refer is Napoleon, the man responsible for that miserable night in the cellar and the successive miseries of burnt houses and wounded civilians. But Beethoven never knew anything about the nickname, which is almost never used in German-speaking countries. In fact, the origin of the nickname is still unknown.
The piece was successfully performed in Leipzig in 1811, but Beethoven withheld a Viennese
performance for some three years after finishing it, possibly because he hoped that his steadily increasing deafness might abate enough to allow him to take the solo part. In the end his pupil Carl Czerny played the first Vienna performance, but this time it failed unequivocally. The fault was certainly not in the composition and probably not in the performance. Most likely the audience, the “Society of Noble Ladies for Charity,” expected something altogether fluffier than this noble, brilliant, lengthy, and demanding newpiece.
In many respects the Emperor Concerto is a throwback (after the unusual treatment of soloist and orchestra in the Fourth Concerto) to the grand virtuoso showpiece where the soloist is a two-fisted hero who takes on the mighty orchestra. With elaborate bravura the piano rolls off chords, trills, scales, and arpeggios against three emphatic sustained chords in the orchestra, thus establishing the soloist’s independence before he lapses into nearly a hundred measures of silence, while the orchestra sets out the two principal themes in an enormous orchestral ritornello. The first of these, a malleable idea that gives rise to most of the developmental motives of the score, yields after a brief transition to a new theme, first heard in the minor with staccato strings, a hesitant pianissimo march. But soon it shifts to the major, and the horns, imbuing it with rare warmth, take over the melody in a legato form. Motives from the first theme build to a martial peroration before the soloist enters with a chromatic scale to take over the narrative. Once the principal material has been briefly stated by the soloist, Beethoven at last gets on with the business of moving decisively away from the home key for a decorated version of the second theme in the unexpected key of B minor moving to B major (written as C-flat) before side-slipping suddenly to the “normal” second key, B-flat. From here on the development and recapitulation are built largely from the motives that grow out of the first theme, laid forth on the grandest scale with great nobility.
Just before the end of this enormous movement - it is longer than the other two put together - Beethoven introduces an entirely new wrinkle at the chord that was the traditional signal for the soloist to go flying off in improvisatory fireworks, however inappropriate they might be to the piece as a whole. Beethoven forestalls the insertion of a cadenza by writing his own, a procedure so unusual that he added a footnote to the score: “Don’t play a cadenza, but attack the following immediately.” What follows is a short but well-considered working out of the principal idea with the orchestra joining in before long in the warm horn melody. (From this time on, Beethoven began to write cadenzas for his earlier concertos, too. Since he was no longer going to play them himself, he wanted to be sure that the cadenza offered was not an arbitrary intrusion into the musical fabric.)
The slow movement appears in the seemingly distant key of B major (the very first foreign key to be visited in the opening movement). Now it provides a short but atmospheric Adagio with elements of variation form. The rippling piano solo dies away onto a unison B, with a mysterious sense of anticipation, heightened by a semitone drop to B-flat major, the dominant of the home key. The piano begins to intimate new ideas, still in the Adagio tempo, when suddenly it takes off on a brilliant rondo theme. The bravura piano part takes the lead again in this movement: the wondrously inventive development section presents the rondo theme three times, in three different keys, and each time the piano runs off into different kinds of brilliant display. The coda features a quiet dialogue between solo pianist and timpani which is on the verge of halting in silence when the final brilliant explosion brings the concerto to an end.
Reicha: Overture in D major
Anton Reicha was born in Prague on February 26, 1770, and died in Paris (where he was more generally known as Antoine Reicha) on May 28, 1836. It is not absolutely certain when he wrote the Overture in D nor when the work had its first performance. It is scored for flute, paired oboes, bassoons, horns and trumpets, plus timpani and strings.
Anton Reicha is remembered by those especially interested in the early romantic era as a theorist rather than a composer. Nonetheless, by 1800, Reicha had already composed a great many pieces, often of a surprisingly experimental nature. In 1803 he dedicated a set of 36 fugues to Haydn (who was concentrating on polyphonic forms in his last years). Reicha experimented so strikingly with unusual cadential plans and changes of meter that Beethoven wrote that “a fugue is no longer a fugue.” Still, both men seem to have inspired one another with novel ideas. Their relationship dated back to 1795, when the 15-year-old Reicha was playing flute in the court orchestra of Bonn alongside a young violist of his own age: Beethoven.
As a composer, Reicha is probably best known for establishing the woodwind quintets as a genre. He wrote more than two dozen, and wind players are happy to trot them out often. But larger works – operas, symphonies, and other orchestral works – remain in a historical limbo.
After 1808, Reicha lived in Paris for most of the rest of his life, where he was highly regarded for his theoretical treatises on dramatic composition and what he called “high” composition. He became an influential teacher to a whole school of French composers, especially including Berlioz (who generally despised the stultifying instruction at the Conservatory, but who appreciated the fact that Reicha gave reasons for the “rules”), Franz Liszt, Charles Gounod, and even (briefly) César Franck.
Reicha’s large output has not been fully codified by scholars. Many pieces were published long after their composition, so that it is almost impossible to establish a chronology. The D-major overture to be performed here (one of at least three in that key) is distinctive in one clearly musical way: Reicha chose to write it in the exotic meter of 5/8 time. He liked the fact that 5 could be parsed in a measure as 3+2 or 2+3, giving a flexibility to the melodic structure that a “square” meter could not. In this regard he was surely an influence on Berlioz, for whom the rhythmic flexibility of his melodies is an important feature.
The overture’s opening – unharmonized repeated notes in the strings – cleverly conceals the metrical peculiarity of the work at first. Only after a few bars does the listener realize that the melody doesn’t quite fit normal preconceptions, and that what might be a 6/8 measure sounds surprisingly truncated. We may be surprised (especially since the orchestral sound points us to the age of Beethoven or Schubert), but it hardly disturbs us. Beyond that, Reicha provides an elegantly crafted and attractive movement with a variety of melodic ideas, each presented in its own instrumental coloring, so that the ear and the mind are induced to smile at his wit and originality.
Schubert: Symphony No. 3 in D major, D.200
Franz Peter Schubert was born in Liechtental, a suburb of Vienna, on January 31, 1797. and died in Vienna on November 19, 1828. He began his Third Symphony on May 24, 1815, broke off work partway through the first movement, began again on July 11, and completed it on July 19. It was probably privately performed by an amateur orchestra that had grown out of the family string quartet, but it had its first public performance only on February 19, 1881, when August Manns conducted it at the Crystal Palace in London. The symphony is scored for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, plus timpani and strings.
Schubert grew up in a very musical family and had his first lessons in piano from his brother Ignaz and in violin from his schoolmaster father. The family had its own string quartet for playing at home. In this ensemble Franz played the viola, while his brothers Ignaz and Ferdinand played violin and their father the cello. This ensemble also formed the core of a small orchestra, no doubt made up of friends and neighbors who played various instruments, and it was at home that this domestic ensemble performed many of the young Franz’s early works. He spent a year at a teacher training school and two unhappy years as a teacher in his father’s school. But music drew him inexorably. In the year 1815 alone (when he was 18 years old) he composed nearly 150 songs - about one-fourth of his lifetime total!
The Third Symphony, composed at 18, was almost certainly performed by his own family orchestra, but then not heard again until long after the posthumous rediscovery of Schubert’s genius aroused interest even in the works of his youth. Like his other early symphonies, the opening movement is filled with a boundless energy starting with the scales that rush upward in the slow introduction and play an important part in the ensuing Allegro. In the first theme, the clarinet sends out dotted rhythms that continue in the oboe for the second theme (this feature of Schubert’s style encourages some commentators to hear already in this youthful work a hint of the “Great” C major symphony that he completed only in the last year of his life).
The Allegretto of the second movement has a march quality and a folksy character that evokes Haydn and suggests the possibility of that master’s favored theme-and-variations form, but Schubert instead gives us a new, cheerful theme in the oboe and later the flute for the middle section, and returns to the opening music to round out the movement.
Schubert still retains the term “Menuetto” for the third movement, though it is much more vigorous and lively than a real minuet would have been. As with Beethoven’s First Symphony, it is much more a scherzo than a court dance. The Trio hearkens back to older styles in its conscious reduction of the orchestra to oboe and bassoon with strings.
The finale races like the whirlwind in 6/8 time. Despite its lively dance-like character, Schubert occasionally slips into the minor key (foreshadowing a favorite harmonic ploy of his mature works, when he gets great expressive results from surprising changes between the major and minor modes), and the movement runs virtually without pausing for breath to its lively conclusion.
- © Steven Ledbetter
Steven Ledbetter was musicologist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998, at which time he created his own program note service. He earned a Ph.D. in Musicology at New York University and taught at Dartmouth College.