New York Philharmonic Program Notes
October 31, 2006
BRAHMS: Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a
Johannes Brahms was fascinated by the music of earlier times. While still a teenager, he spent much of what money he had at antiquarian bookshops; by the end of his life he had assembled a library of more than 2,000 volumes, which included numerous items of inestimable value (such as the autographs of Mozart’s G-minor Symphony and Haydn’s Op. 20 String Quartets). If he could not purchase an unpublished piece that interested him, he would often copy out the music for future reference.
In 1870 his friend Carl Ferdinand Pohl showed him the manuscript of a set of six Feldparthien by Haydn. Brahms was so taken by the second movement of the first piece in the set — a movement labeled “Chorale St. Antoni” — that he copied it out for his library. Three years later this forthright piece would serve as the basis for his much-loved Variations on a Theme by Haydn, a work that would, in turn, make the Chorale St. Antoni one of Haydn’s most famous tunes.
In point of fact, the Chorale St. Antoni and the Feldparthie in which it appeared — indeed, the entire set of six pieces that Pohl had stumbled across — turned out not to be by Haydn at all (although it would be assigned a spot in the classic Hoboken catalogue of Haydn’s works, identified as Hob. II:46). Just who did write the piece remains unclear, but since the middle of the 20th century musicologists have generally agreed that it could not have been Haydn. Nonetheless, its rhythm and harmony endow it with a distinctive, memorable character; to a composer of Brahms’s sensibilities, it leapt from the page as a worthy candidate upon which to develop variations.
Classic variation forms had long interested Brahms. His first major set — for piano, on a theme by Robert Schumann (Op. 9) — had appeared as early as 1854, and a second set of Schumann Variations (Op. 23, for piano four-hands) followed seven years later, the same year as his acclaimed Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel (Op. 24, again for piano). Other sets of piano variations (on original tunes, on a Hungarian song, on Paganini’s ubiquitous Caprice) dot his catalogue from the 1850s and 1860s, and variation movements are to be found in larger-scale works such as the Op. 18 Sextet.
Brahms approached writing for the orchestra with enormous caution, ostensibly intimidated by the “unattainable” heights that Beethoven had reached before him, but his fluency with variation procedures seem to have finally given him the courage to essay in this case a work for full orchestra. Although he had already written two serenades for chamber orchestra as well as his First Piano Concerto, the Haydn Variations is Brahms’s first complete stand-alone work for full orchestra, although he had been struggling with his First Symphony since 1855.
Tonic and subdominant harmonies alternate prominently in the “St. Antoni” theme; here they’re played out as the major triads built on B-flat and E-flat. This progression, which suggests the plagal cadence of hymnody (the “Amen” that gets tagged onto the end of hymns as a matter of course in many churches), emerges in subtle detail throughout the following variations. The theme sounds perfectly balanced as the opening of a simple A–A–B–A form, but its first section actually comprises two phrases of five measures each. Since phrases normally unroll in cells of two or four measures, one would expect the tune to sound lopsided; therein lies one of the mysteries that must have attracted Brahms to this theme. Following the announcement of the theme by a wind choir, Brahms writes eight variations and a final passacaglia, during which he gives free rein to the possibilities of variation form.
The critic Eduard Hanslick once passed off a bon mot in a newspaper column that is relevant to this topic. While away on vacation Brahms had grown a beard (this was obviously before the “Santa Claus look” had become his trademark). Taken aback, Hanslick remarked that Brahms’s face was as hard to recognize as the theme in many of the composer’s variations.
KODÁLY: Galántai táncok (Dances of Galánta)“If I were to name the composer whose works are the most perfect embodiment of the Hungarian spirit, I would answer, Kodály. His work proves his faith in the Hungarian spirit. The obvious explanation is that all Kodály’s composing activity is rooted only in Hungarian soil, but the deep inner reason is his unshakable faith and trust in the constructive power and future of his people.” So wrote Béla Bartók, whose opinion, emanating from the apex of 20th-century Hungarian music, holds considerable authority.
Zoltán Kodály achieved eminence as a composer, ethnomusicologist, and educator, and all of these strands proved interrelated through most of his career. As the son of a frequently transferred stationmaster for the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Railroads, Kodály spent his early years in a succession of small Hungarian towns (some of which would later be reassigned to Czechoslovakia). He expressed delight in the Magyar folk music that surrounded him, and simultaneously developed an interest in mainstream European chamber music. His parents were enthusiastic musical amateurs, and Kodály learned piano, violin, viola, and cello well enough to perform creditably on each — not a bad preparation for a composer in the making. In the course of studies at the Budapest Academy of Music he grew increasingly fascinated by the traditional music of his native country. He received diplomas in composition (in 1904) and in teaching (in 1905), and in 1906 he was awarded a doctorate in musicology, culminating in his dissertation, Strophic Structure in the Hungarian Folk Song.
The three disciplines of composition, teaching, and musicology — often uneasy counterparts among the musical professions — coexisted and reinforced one another in what would become Kodály’s triple legacy. He joined with his great compatriot and lifelong friend, Bartók, in organizing trips around the countryside to collect folk songs. As with Bartók, the musical material of these folk pieces deeply inspired the language of Kodály’s original compositions. After polishing his compositional skills with the help of a post-graduate grant in Paris (where he studied with Charles-Marie Widor, made the acquaintance of Debussy, and generally widened his awareness of the latest compositional trends), Kodály returned to Budapest. Reestablished in his native country, he taught at his alma mater, wrote music criticism for newspapers and magazines (including important analyses of Bartók’s works), edited and published folk-song collections, and — of course — continued to compose.
The best known of Kodály’s works (at least outside of Hungary) are his orchestral scores, shimmering displays of melody and color such as the evocative Dances of Galánta. The immediate roots of this piece might be traced to 1927, when Kodály wrote a piano suite called Dances of Marosszék, celebrating a section of Transylvania that he had visited while growing up. He orchestrated that work in 1930, and seems to have viewed Dances of Galánta as a sort of sequel. He provided the following comment about the piece, which he phrased rather curiously in the third person:
Galánta is a small Hungarian market town known to travelers between Vienna and Budapest. The composer passed seven years of his childhood there. At that time there existed a famous Gypsy band that has since disappeared. This was the first “orchestral” sonority that came to the ears of the child. The forebears of these Gypsies were already known more than 100 years ago. About 1800 some books of Hungarian dances were published in Vienna, one of which contained music “after several Gypsies from Galánta.” They have preserved the old traditions. In order to keep it alive, the composer has taken his principal themes from these old publications.
In the course of the work’s five movements the listener is treated to various manifestations of the traditional Hungarian verbunkos style, in which slow figures alternate with fast ones and swagger gives way to irresistible foot-stamping. The clarinet plays a particularly prominent part, reflecting the role of the single-reed tárogató in Hungarian folk music. This work, however, is no mere folk-song recital; instead, everything is filtered through the composer’s colorful brand of brilliantly orchestrated modernism.
An earlier version of this note appeared in the programs of the UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra and is used with permission. © James M. Keller
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55, “Sinfonia eroica”Ludwig van Beethoven was a partisan of noble humanitarian principles, joining those who saw the democratic ideals of ancient Greece reflected in the aspirations of the Jacobins of post-Revolutionary France. At the head of the Jacobins was Napoleon Bonaparte, and Beethoven was among the political idealists who viewed Napoleon as a repository of hope for the social enlightenment of humankind.
At the urging of the future King of Sweden, Beethoven began contemplating a musical celebration of Napoleon as early as 1797. As his early sketches gradually coalesced into a symphony, Beethoven resolved not simply to dedicate his composition to Napoleon, but actually to name it after him. However, in the spring of 1804, just as Beethoven completed his symphonic tribute, news arrived that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor: the standard-bearer of republicanism had seized power as a dictator of absolutism. It fell to Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries to inform the temperamental composer, and to relate the scene (which must have occurred in May 1804) in a later biography:
Beethoven held [Napoleon] in extremely high esteem at that time and compared him to the greatest Roman consul. Both I and several of his closer friends saw this symphony lying on his table, already copied out in score; at the very top of the title-page was the word “Buonaparte” and at the very bottom “Luigi van Beethoven” — and that was all. Whether he intended to fill in the middle, and with what, I do not know. I was the first one to bring him the news that Buonaparte had declared himself emperor — whereupon he flew into a rage, shouting “Is even he nothing but an ordinary man! Now he will also trample upon human rights and become a slave to his own ambition; now he will set himself above all other men and become a tyrant.” Beethoven went to the table, grabbed the top of the title-page, tore it in two, and threw it to the floor. The first page was re-written and the symphony was then for the first time given the title of Sinfonia eroica.
The autograph score thus mutilated has disappeared, but the library of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde owns a copyist’s manuscript that Beethoven marked and used for conducting — and it tells a similar tale. Its title page originally read (in Italian) “Sinfonia grande intitolata Bonaparte del Sigr Louis van Beethoven” (“Grand Symphony titled Bonaparte by Mr. Ludwig van Beethoven”). But the words “titled Bonaparte” were erased with such vehemence that a gash stands in their place. When the piece was published, it was presented as Sinfonia Eroica … per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo (“Heroic Symphony … to Celebrate the Memory of a Great Man”), and the work’s dedication, originally intended for Napoleon, was instead given to Beethoven’s patron Prince Lobkowitz. It would become a leitmotif in Beethoven’s life that individuals would fail to live up to his ideals, that the composer would prefer Mankind in the abstract to Man in the flesh.
At first critical response was guarded. On February 13, 1805, readers of Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung read this report: “The reviewer belongs to Herr van Beethoven’s sincerest admirers, but in this composition he must confess that he finds too much that is glaring and bizarre, which hinders greatly one’s grasp of the whole, and a sense of unity is almost completely lost.” The same critic maintained that the piece “lasted an entire hour” (italics his). That comment was an exaggeration, but when the Eroica was unveiled it was indeed the longest symphony ever written, and listeners and critics commented widely on that fact. Beethoven is said to have countered, “If I write a symphony an hour long, it will be found short enough,” — of course, he was proved right in the long run. Opinion about the Third Symphony shifted rapidly. By 1807 nearly all reactions to the piece were favorable, or at least respectful, and critics were starting to make sense of its more radical elements and accepting it as one of the summit achievements in all of music.
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