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Program Notes by Eric Bromberger

Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, Opus 43
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770, Bonn
Died March 26, 1827, Vienna

Beethoven had many reasons to accept, in 1800, a commission for a ballet score based on the Prometheus myth: he had long wanted to write a work for the stage, the ballet would be created by the distinguished ballet-master Salvatore Viganò, and frequent performances would mean increased income for the composer. Doubtless the Prometheus story itself, with its tale of a hero bringing enlightenment to mankind, appealed to the young composer. He began work on the score during the second half of 1800, shortly after the premiere of the First Symphony and at the same time he was writing the “Spring” Sonata.

Prometheus had its first performance at the Burgtheater on March 28, 1801, and–despite some critical carping about the suitability of Beethoven’s music for dancing–the ballet had a reasonable success: it was performed over twenty times during the next two seasons. Beethoven published the overture in 1804, and it quickly became one of his most frequently performed works, but the score to the rest of the ballet, which consists of sixteen separate numbers, was not published until long after his death.

The Prometheus Overture is extremely concise (it lasts barely five minutes) and powerful–it is easy to understand why this music was performed so frequently. Massive chords open the slow introduction, which leads without pause into the Allegro molto con brio. As that marking suggests, this goes at a blistering pace, introduced quietly by a moto perpetuo theme in the first violins. Woodwinds in pairs announce the bubbling second subject, by turns staccato and syncopated. Part of the reason for the conciseness of this overture is the fact that it has no development section: Beethoven simply introduces his ideas, recapitulates them, and the Prometheus Overture hurtles to its close.

Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Opus 73 “Emperor”

In the spring of 1809 Napoleon–intent upon consolidating his hold on Europe–went to war with Austria. He laid siege to Vienna in May, and after a brief bombardment, the city surrendered to the French and was occupied through the remainder of the year. The royal family fled early in May and did not return until January 1810, but Beethoven remained behind throughout the shelling and occupation, and it was during this period that he completed his Fifth Piano Concerto. Some critics have been ready to take their cue from the French occupation and to understand the concerto as Beethoven’s response to it. Alfred Einstein identified what he called a “military character” in this music, and Maynard Solomon has particularized this, hearing “warlike rhythms, victory motifs, thrusting melodies, and affirmative character” in it.

But–far from being swept up in the fervor of the fighting–Beethoven found the occupation a source of stress and depression. During the shelling, he hid in the basement of his brother Caspar’s house, where he wrapped his head in pillows to protect his ears. To his publishers, Beethoven wrote: “The course of events has affected my body and soul . . . Life around me is wild and disturbing, nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers, misery of every sort.” The concerto he wrote during this period may be noble and powerful music, but it is noble and powerful in spite of the military occupation rather than because of it. And in fact, Beethoven had done much of the work on the concerto before the French army entered Vienna: his earliest sketches date from February 1809, and he appears to have had the concerto largely complete by April, before the fighting began.

Beethoven defies expectations from the opening instant of this music. The Allegro bursts to life with a resplendent E-flat major chord for the whole orchestra, but this is not the start of the expected orchestral exposition. Instead, that chord opens the way for a cadenza by the solo piano, a cadenza that the orchestra punctuates twice more with powerful chords before sweeping into the movement’s main theme and the true exposition. This first movement is marked by a spaciousness and grandeur far removed from Beethoven’s misery over the fighting that wracked Vienna. This is music of shining sweep, built on two main ideas, both somewhat in the manner of marches: the strings’ vigorous main subject and a poised second theme, sounded first by the strings, then repeated memorably as a duet for horns. After so vigorous an exposition, the entrance of the piano feels understated, as it ruminates on the two main themes, but soon the piano part–full of octaves, wide leaps, and runs–turns as difficult as it is brilliant. This Allegro is music of an unusual spaciousness: at a length of nearly twenty minutes, it is one of Beethoven’s longest first movements (and is longer than the final two movements combined). Beethoven maintains strict control–he does not allow the soloist the freedom to create his own cadenza but instead writes out a brief cadential treatment of themes before the movement hurtles to its powerful close.

The Adagio un poco mosso transports us to a different world altogether. Gone is the energy of the first movement, and now we seem in the midst of sylvan calm. Beethoven moves to the remote key of B major and mutes the strings, which sing the hymn-like main theme. There follow two extended variations on that rapt melody. The first, for piano over quiet accompaniment, might almost be labeled “Chopinesque” in its expressive freedom, while the second is for winds, embellished by the piano’s steady strands of sixteenths.

As he did in the Fourth Piano Concerto, Beethoven links the second and third movements, and that transition is made most effectively here. The second movement concludes on a low B, and then Beethoven drops everything one half-step to B-flat. Out of that expectant change, the piano begins, very gradually, to outline a melodic idea, which struggles to take shape and direction. And then suddenly it does–it is as if these misty imaginings have been hit with an electric current that snaps them to vibrant life as the main theme of final movement. This Allegro is a vigorous rondo that alternates lyric episodes with some of Beethoven’s most rhythmically-energized writing–this music always seems to want to dance. Near the close comes one of its most striking moments, a duet for piano and timpani, which taps out the movement’s fundamental rhythm. And then the piano leaps up to energize the full orchestra, which concludes with one final recall of the rondo theme.

At the time he wrote this concerto, Beethoven was 38 and his hearing was deteriorating rapidly. It had become so weak by this time that he knew he could not give the first performance of the concerto–this is the only one of his piano concertos for which he did not give the première. That première had to wait two years after the concerto’s completion: it took place in Leipzig on November 28, 1811, with Friedrich Schuster as soloist. That performance, which Beethoven did not attend, was a great success–a reviewer wrote that “It is without doubt one of the most original, imaginative, most effective but also one of the most difficult of all existing concertos . . . the crowded audience was soon put into such a state of enthusiasm that it could hardly content itself with the ordinary expressions of recognition and enjoyment.” But the Vienna première–on February 12, 1812, with Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny as soloist–did not have a success. One journal noted the difficulty of the music and suggested that “It can be understood and appreciated only by connoisseurs.”

The nickname “Emperor” did not originate with the composer, and Beethoven’s denunciation of Napoleon’s self-coronation several years earlier suggests that he would not have been sympathetic to it at all. Despite various theories, the source of that nickname remains unknown, and almost certainly Beethoven never heard this concerto referred to by the nickname that we use reflexively today.

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Opus 92

Beethoven turned 40 in December 1810. Forty can be a difficult age for anyone, but for Beethoven things were going very well. True, his hearing had deteriorated to the point where he was virtually deaf, but he was still riding that white-hot explosion of creativity that has become known, for better or worse, as his “Heroic Style.” Over the decade-long span of that style (1803-1813) Beethoven essentially re-imagined music and its possibilities. The works that crystalized the Heroic Style–the Eroica and the Fifth Symphony–unleashed a level of violence and darkness previously unknown in music, forces that Beethoven’s biographer Maynard Solomon has described as “hostile energy,” and then triumphed over them. In these violent symphonies, music became not a matter of polite discourse but of conflict, struggle, and resolution.

In the fall of 1811, Beethoven began a new symphony–it would be his Seventh–and it would differ sharply from those two famous predecessors. Gone is the sense of cataclysmic struggle and hard-won victory that had driven those earlier symphonies. There are no battles fought and won in the Seventh Symphony–instead, this music is infused from its first instant with a mood of pure celebration. Such a spirit has inevitably produced a number of interpretations as to what this symphony is “about”: Berlioz heard a peasants’ dance in it, Wagner called it “the apotheosis of the dance,” and more recently Maynard Solomon has suggested that the Seventh is the musical representation of a festival, a brief moment of pure spiritual liberation.

But it may be safest to leave the issue of “meaning” aside and instead listen to the Seventh simply as music. There had never been music like this before, nor has there been since–Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony contains more energy than any other piece of music ever written. Much has been made (correctly) of Beethoven’s ability to transform small bits of theme into massive symphonic structures, but in the Seventh he begins not so much with theme as with rhythm: he builds the entire symphony from what are almost scraps of rhythm, tiny figures that seem unpromising, even uninteresting, in themselves. Gradually he unleashes the energy locked up in these small figures and from them builds one of the mightiest symphonies ever written.

The first movement opens with a slow introduction so long that it almost becomes a separate movement of its own. Tremendous chords punctuate the slow beginning, which gives way to a poised duet for oboes. The real effect of this long Poco sostenuto, however, is to coil the energy that will be unleashed in the true first movement, and Beethoven conveys this rhythmically: the meter of the introduction is a rock-solid (even square) 4/4, but the main body of the movement, marked Vivace, transforms this into a light-footed 6/8. This Vivace begins in what seems a most unpromising manner, however, as woodwinds toot out a simple dotted 6/8 rhythm and the solo flute announces the first theme, a graceful melody on this same rhythm. Beethoven builds the entire first movement from this simple dotted rhythm, which saturates virtually every measure. As theme, as accompaniment, as motor rhythm, it is always present, hammering into our consciousness. At the climax, horns sail majestically to the close as the orchestra thunders out that rhythm one final time.

The second movement, in A minor, is one of Beethoven’s most famous slow movements, but the debate continues as to whether it really is a slow movement. Beethoven could not decide whether to mark it Andante (a walking tempo) or Allegretto (a moderately fast pace). He finally decided on Allegretto, though the actual pulse is somewhere between those two. This movement too is built on a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the first five notes: long-short-short-long-long–and this pattern repeats here almost as obsessively as the pattern of the first movement. The opening sounds like a series of static chords–the theme itself occurs quietly inside those chords–and Beethoven simply repeats this theme, varying it as it proceeds. The central episode in A major moves gracefully along smoothly-flowing triplets before a little fugato on the opening rhythms builds to a great climax. Beethoven winds the movement down on the woodwinds’ almost skeletal reprise of the fundamental rhythm.

The Scherzo explodes to life on a theme full of grace notes, powerful accents, flying staccatos, and timpani explosions. This alternates with a trio section for winds reportedly based on an old pilgrims’ hymn, though no one, it seems, has been able to identify that exact hymn. Beethoven offers a second repeat of the trio, then seems about to offer a third before five abrupt chords drive the movement to its close.

These chords set the stage for the Allegro con brio, again built on the near-obsessive treatment of a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the movement’s opening four-note fanfare. This four-note pattern punctuates the entire movement: it shapes the beginning of the main theme, and its stinging accents thrust the music forward continuously as this movement almost boils over with energy. The ending is remarkable: above growling cellos and basses (which rock along on a two-note ostinato for 28 measures), the opening theme drives to a climax that Beethoven marks fff, a dynamic marking he almost never used. This conclusion is virtually bacchanalian in its wild power–no matter how many times one has heard it, the ending of the Seventh Symphony remains one of the most exciting moments in all of music.

The first performance of the Seventh Symphony took place in the Great Hall of the University in Vienna on December 8, 1813. Though nearly deaf at this point, Beethoven led the performance, and the orchestra was able to compensate for his failings, so that the première was a huge success. On that occasion–and at three subsequent performances over the next few months–the audience demanded that the second movement be repeated.

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