Leonore Overture No. 3, Opus 72a
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770, Bonn
Died March 26, 1827, Vienna

No other work gave Beethoven more trouble than his only opera, Leonore, which he retitled Fidelio during its final revision. This tale of political idealism, resistance to tyranny, and marital fidelity comes to a climax when the heroine Leonore prepares to sacrifice her life to protect her imprisoned husband Florestan from the evil Pizarro; the couple is saved at the last minute by the arrival of the good minister Don Fernando, who has Pizarro arrested. Beethoven’s problems with the opera, which occupied him over a span of eleven years and took him through three different versions, are reflected in his problems devising a suitable overture: Fidelio is doubtless the only opera in existence to have four different overtures.

Some chronology is necessary here, for the territory is confusing. Shortly after composing the Eroica in 1803, Beethoven set to work on this opera, which took two years to complete. Leonore (Beethoven’s preferred title) was premièred in Vienna in November 1805 and on that occasion was prefaced by what we now know as the Leonore Overture No. 2. This version of the opera was not a success, and Beethoven revised it, trimming the number of acts from three to two. The overture had proven particularly difficult for the players, and for the première of the revised version in March 1806 Beethoven completely re-wrote it; this is the version known as Leonore Overture No. 3. What about Leonore Overture No. 1? That was apparently composed for a planned production in Prague in 1807 that never took place. The manuscript for this overture was discovered after the composer’s death and published in 1838 with the absurdly high opus number of 138 (which in fact is Beethoven’s last opus number).

In all three of the Leonore overtures, Beethoven faced what was essentially a dramatic rather than a musical problem–he composed an overture based on music that accompanies the dramatic events of the opera’s final act: Leonore’s willingness to sacrifice herself, the last-minute arrival of Don Fernando, and the arrest of Pizarro. This is powerful material, but it is far in the future when Act I opens with much more innocent activity–the frothy infatuation of the young Marzellina with the new jailer’s assistant. Any of these violently dramatic overtures is wrong as an introduction to so light a beginning to the opera, and when the powerful Leonore Overture No. 3 is used to open the opera, it “annihilates the first act,” in Donald Francis Tovey’s wonderful phrase.

Beethoven was aware of this problem. When he made his final revisions of the opera in 1814 (re-naming it Fidelio at that time), he composed the Fidelio Overture as the fourth–and most successful–of his overtures to this opera. A conventional curtain raiser, full of thrust and noble sentiment, it makes no use of musical material from the opera itself, and perhaps for this reason it has become a successful opening to the first act. However, many subsequent opera conductors (Mahler and Toscanini among them) have felt that the Leonore Overture No. 3 was too good to lose and performed it as an introduction to the opera’s final scene, where it comes just after the fortuitous arrival of Don Fernando and just before the release of Florestan. In that position, the overture’s fiercely dramatic character makes good sense.

In the concert hall, of course, none of this matters, and the music can be taken on its own terms. The Leonore Overture No. 3 has become one of Beethoven’s most popular overtures, preserving some of the high drama of the opera and treating it in taut sonata form. The overture’s slow introduction opens with descending phrases (mirroring Florestan’s descent into the dark dungeon?), and woodwinds soon echo a phrase from his great aria at the beginning of Act II, In des Lebens Frühlinstagen, a sad account of how far he has fallen from his happy early life. Gradually the introduction grows more animated and settles into the Allegro, where the rising-and-falling melody in C major becomes the main idea for the overture; Beethoven quickly syncopates this idea, and that rhythmic kick will animate much of the overture. There is gentler secondary material, but this too grows more turbulent (this overture never relaxes for very long). Matters reach a climax, and Beethoven breaks off the development with another quotation from the opera–the off-stage trumpet that heralds the dramatic arrival of Don Fernando in Act II. The coda brings one of the most famous (and difficult) passages in the orchestra repertory: all by themselves, a handful of violins (“due o tre violini,” says Beethoven in the score) race ahead over a sequence of rising scales. They are gradually joined by players from the other string sections and then from the full orchestra as Beethoven drives to a heroic close, well-suited to this tale of the triumph of good over evil.

Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major, K. 453
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg
Died December 5, 1791, Vienna

Mozart escaped from the Archbishop of Salzburg (and from his own father) in June 1781, moving to Vienna to pursue his fortunes as a freelance musician. He quickly found success in his adopted city, taking students, publishing music, and putting on very successful concerts of his own music, some of them attended by Emperor Joseph II. After three years in Vienna, Mozart himself began to sense a new richness in his own music. He described his Quintet for Piano and Winds, K.452 as “the best work I have composed,” and in February 1784 he began to keep a catalog of his own works, the surest indication that he felt it was important to record and remember each new composition (he would maintain that catalog for the rest of his life).

Among the works composed in 1784 were six piano concertos, and Mozart entered the Piano Concerto in G Major, K.543 into his catalog on April 12 of that year. Evidence suggests that he may have written this music for his student Barbara von Ployer, daughter of Archbishop Colloredo’s agent in Vienna–she is known to have performed this concerto at an academy put on at the home of her father in Döbling (a suburb north of Vienna) on June 10, 1784. On that same program Mozart was pianist in the première of his Quintet for Piano and Winds, and he and Ployer performed his Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos, K.448.

Mozart appears to have regarded G major as a somewhat neutral key, and he seldom used it–this is the only one of his 27 piano concertos that key. But this concerto is anything but neutral in character–perhaps Mozart chose that key merely as a stable platform, because he ranges far from G major in the course of it. In fact, one of the most striking things about the Piano Concerto in G Major is the wide range of its expression, which pitches mercurially through a variety of moods, keys, and kinds of music. Mozart was quite right to recognize a new depth to his music in 1784, and the Piano Concerto in G Major is a perfect example of this new richness of expression.

The opening Allegro gets off to what seems a “normal” beginning with an elegant first subject and a firmer second idea announced by the strings and repeated by the woodwinds. The piano enters on the opening theme, but then announces a third theme all its own, a more poised statement that leads us into a different world altogether, full of those wonderful chromatic shadings that seem so typically Mozartean. The development brings a further surprise–it too plunges into new directions, with the piano’s rippling triplet arpeggios soaring high and plunging downward with an unexpected freedom. This is quickly over, and the recapitulation leads to a long cadenza, which Mozart wrote out, a sign that this concerto was written for a student–usually he extemporized his cadenzas in the course of performance, but here he took care to write them down.

Once again, strings lead the way with the chaste main theme of the Andante. The key signature may say C major here, but Mozart does not remain in that key for long, and soon this poised beginning leads into unexpected areas, filled with harmonic surprises (the music ranges as far afield as G-sharp major) and a sense of urgency. The piano has extended solo passages in this movement, and again Mozart writes out the substantial cadenza.

There is a wonderful story associated with the Allegretto finale, worth hearing in detail. Mozart was fond of pets, and in Vienna he had both a horse and a dog. In May 1784 he bought a pet starling, and the starling promptly endeared itself to the composer by spontaneously learning to sing the main theme of the finale of this concerto. That starling apparently had ideas of its own about composition: it added a sharp to one note and put in a fermata along the way; Mozart was charmed and wrote the starling’s version of that theme down in his journal, commenting: “Das war schön.” (When the starling died three years later, Mozart buried it in his garden and wrote some verse to mark the occasion.) No commentator can resist hearing a bird-like quality to this theme, and some detect premonitions in it of the music Mozart music would write seven years later for Papageno in The Magic Flute. In any case, the theme has a jaunty, irresistible quality, nicely set off by its chirping gracenotes. Four variations on this theme follow, and then Mozart springs a surprise, appending a section he marks Presto. Finale. This substantial conclusion (it takes up nearly a third of the movement) has reminded many of the sort of finale Mozart might supply for an opera buffa, full of energy, witty music, and sharp contrasts. After all this energy, the concerto’s sudden conclusion is particularly effective.

Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Opus 73
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna

Brahms was haunted by the example of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. “You have no idea how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us,” Brahms remarked to the conductor Hermann Levi, and he worked on his own First Symphony for nearly twenty years before he was ready to take it before audiences. The première in November 1876 was a success, and Brahms himself conducted the new work throughout Europe during the winter concert season. With the stress of that tour behind him, he spent the summer of 1877 in the tiny town of Pörtschach on the Wörthersee in southern Austria, and there he began another symphony. This one went quickly. To Clara Schumann he wrote, “So many melodies fly about that one must be careful not to tread on them.” Brahms’ First Symphony may have taken two decades, but his Second was done in four months, and its première in Vienna on December 30, 1877, under Hans Richter was a triumph.

While the Second Symphony is quite different from the turbulent First, this music is not all pastoral sunlight. The first two movements in particular are marked by a seriousness of purpose and a breadth of expression. Brahms’ friend Theodor Billroth spoke of only one side of the Second Symphony when he said: “It is all rippling streams, blue sky, sunshine and cool green shadows. How beautiful it must be at Pörtschach!” For all the sunshine in this symphony, the first two movements explore some of those shadows in depth.

The hand of a master is everywhere evident in the Second Symphony, particularly in Brahms’ ingenious use of the simple three-note sequence (D-C#-D) heard in the cellos and basses in the first measure. This figure recurs hundreds of times throughout the Second Symphony, giving the music unusual thematic and expressive unity. The constant repetition of so simple a figure might become monotonous or obsessive in the hands of a lesser composer, and it is a mark of Brahms’ skill that he uses this figure in so many ways. It gives shape to his themes, serves as both harmonic underpinning and blazing motor-rhythm, is by turns whispered softly and shouted at full-blast. Once aware of this figure, a listener can only marvel at Brahms’ fertile use of what seems such unpromising material.

The Allegro non troppo opens with this figure, and a rich array of themes quickly follows: a horn call, a flowing violin melody (derived from the opening three-note motto), a surging song for lower strings (Brahms characteristically sets the cellos above the violas here), and a dramatic idea built on the violins’ octave leaps. This wealth of thematic material develops over a very long span (the only longer movement in a Brahms symphony is the massive finale of the First) before the movement comes to a relaxed close.

The expressive Adagio non troppo opens with the cellos’ somber melody; while this is in B major, so dark is Brahms’ treatment that the movement almost seems to be in a minor key. The center section, with its floating, halting melody for woodwinds, brings relief, but the tone remains serious throughout this movement, which comes to a quiet conclusion only after an eruption in its closing moments.

After two such powerful movements, the final two bring welcome release. The charming third movement comes as a complete surprise. Instead of the mighty scherzo one expects, Brahms offers an almost playful movement in rondo form. The oboe’s opening melody (Brahms marks it grazioso: “graceful”) leads to two contrasting sections, both introduced by strings and both marked Presto. Brahms’ rhythms and accents here are imaginative and complex: phrases are tossed easily between instrumental families and complicated rhythms are made to mesh smoothly as one section gives way to the next. This movement so charmed the audience at the symphony’s première that it had to be repeated.

The Allegro con spirito opens quietly and quickly–so quickly that one may not recognize that its first three notes are exactly the same three notes that began the symphony. In sonata-form, the finale features a broad second subject that swings along easily in the violins. Full of energy and explosive outbursts, this movement drives to a mighty conclusion. We do not usually think of Brahms as a composer much concerned with orchestral color, but the writing for brass in the closing measures of this symphony is thrilling, no matter how often one has heard it.