Book your tickets here for this fantastic programme with the English Symphony Orchestra in Hereford Shirehall, 7 October 2018 at 3:30
English Symphony Orchestra
Kenneth Woods – Artistic Director
Roman Kosyakov – Piano
Programme
Schumann – Symphony No. 4
Liszt – Totentanz
Roman Kosyakov – Piano
Sibelius – The Swan of Tuonela
Sibelius – Symphony No. 7
Part of Schumann 2018, a year-long celebration of Schumann’s orchestral music
Robert Schumann- Composer, writer, ladies man, hard drinker and inventor of “Klangfarbenmelodie”
This concert is, in a way, about legacies and how artists both embrace and transcend them.
Imagine, for a moment, the challenge faced by the young Ludwig van Beethoven when he set to work on his First Symphony at the age of 25. Growing up in the shadow of symphonists like Mozart and Haydn must have been intimidating. Between them, those two Classical masters had written at least 145 symphonies. What was left for the young Beethoven to contribute to the genre after Mozart and Haydn?
It took Beethoven five years to answer that question for the first time when his First Symphony was finally premiered in 1801, and by the time of Beethoven’s death in 1827, a new generation of composers asking themselves what was left for them to contribute to the genre after Beethoven?
Of all the 19th Century symphonists, it was Schumann who seemed least intimidated by Beethoven’s example. His four symphonies are remarkable for both the extent to which they rise to the challenge of ambition and achievement set by Beethoven and the extent to which they set out in new directions, stretching the very definition of the symphony.
Among his many symphonic innovations, Schumann’s development of the single-movement symphony, in the work we now know as his Fourth, was his biggest leap forward, and was n innovation that would have a huge effect on generations of later composers. Of all the single-movement symphonies written since Schumann’s Fourth, the greatest is surely Sibelius’s Seventh. Both works were to be their composer’s last symphony to be completed.
Neither Schumann nor Sibelius were actually sure early on whether either of these works was really a symphony. Both originally called their works a “Symphonic Fantasy,” only later deciding that “symphony” was the right description.
At virtually the same time Schumann was stretching the definition of the symphony from the four-movement Classical structure he’d inherited from Beethoven into something more fluid and fantastic, his friend and colleague Franz Liszt was taking symphonic music in a totally new direction with his innovation of the tone poem, a genre in which Sibelius would also later excel.
Schumann’s 4th symphony was in fact, the second he wrote. After the huge success of his 1st symphony in 1841 Schumann, with typical single-mindedness, forged ahead through the remainder of the year with his focus squarely on orchestral music. Progress on the D minor was sporadic, with entries in the Haushaltbuch noting numerous bursts of productivity and other periods where the work was set aside due to travel, illness or the urgency of other projects. Finally, Schumann declared on October 4th that he had ‘finished polishing the symphony.’
There were sound musical reasons why Schumann might have needed more time to work on his new symphony; it was a radical new approach to symphonic form – a symphony in a single breath. Schumann had clearly fashioned the D minor symphony after Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, his experiment in what he initially even called a ‘Symphonic Fantasy’ was more structurally ambitious than Schubert’s prototype, and became, a model for revolutionary works such as Schoenberg’s 1st Chamber symphony and Sibelius’s 7th symphony.
Schumann expressed disappointment with the premiere performance, although he was confident that the merits of the symphony (and the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, first heard in the same concert) would soon be recognised:
‘I know they are not at all inferior to the First, and must succeed eventually.’
Certainly, many of the early reviews of both pieces were positive. If the premiere had not been a triumph, neither was it a catastrophe. Nonetheless, Peters Edition declined to publish the symphony.
He returned to his symphonic Cinderella in 1851. The success of his final symphony, published as his 3rd, had renewed his enthusiasm for the genre. Although Schumann spent only a week revising and re-orchestrating the symphony, the changes are extremely important and telling: this is a revision undertaken by a master at the peak of his powers. Most importantly, Schumann attended to the transitions between the different movements and sections, making them more compelling and seamless. He refined the orchestration for performance by the 45 or so musicians of his Düsseldorf orchestra or the Leipzig Gewandhaus, (not a modern symphony orchestra of over 80 players). The premiere of the revision in 1852 was one of the last great public and critical triumphs of his career, and this time, he had no difficultly in finding an enthusiastic publisher.
The first movement represents one of the most original re-imaginings of Sonata form of the post-Beethoven era. The slow introduction begins with a powerful multi-octave A pedal, on the upbeat. This metric dislocation is loaded with tension, and the theme that follows is notable for its economy of rhythm and intervals. The continuous quaver motion of the melody metamorphoses into a growling bass ostinato, and the violins introduce the main theme of the Lebhaft (lively section). The exposition is extremely terse, and essentially monothematic, setting the tone for the symphony as a whole. The development lurches from a jovial arrival in F major to a fortissimo unison E flat, dominated by the stentorian power of the trombones, and even introduces material previously withheld. Only in the last third of the movement does Schumann introduce the lyrical second subject, and this soaring theme provides the impetus for an ecstatic coda, which eschews any Beethovenian restoration of order and stability (note how all the accents and emphases fall on wrong or weak beats and bars).
To treat the Romanze as a broad, big-boned Romantic slow movement is to misread both Schumann’s intent and his metronome marking. The lilting theme in the solo oboe and cello is modelled on a courtly Renaissance dance, and Schumann reportedly intended to double the pizzicato accompaniment in the strings with guitar or lute. As if to underline the sense of continuation and interconnectivity between the first and second movements, the following middle section, with its elegant violin solo, is actually a fairly direct variation of the symphony’s opening. The Scherzo offers an abrupt and violent contrast, while growing organically from motives found in the symphony’s opening bars. The Trio, like the Introduction, is a study in continuous quaver motion, integrally connected to both the symphony’s opening and the violin solo in the Romanze, and is as dreamy and sensual as the Scherzo is violent and severe.
The transition to the finale shows Schumann completely at home in the dramatic world of high German Romanticism, with stormy tremoli and dramatic brass fanfares. In the main body of the finale, Schumann changes the meter from 2/4 to 4/4, and integrates the theme of the first movement with the triumphal new theme of the finale, an incredibly powerful link, which Schumann had not developed in the original.
The structure of the Finale neatly parallels that of the first movement, gradually increasing in intensity as it adds new themes, this time the musical journey heads surely towards the closure so emphatically avoided by the first movement, in an utterly characteristic meeting of Apollonian rigour and Dionysian ecstasy.
Liszt and Schumann were musicians with very different aesthetics, and yet, for much of their professional lives, the two were extremely friendly. Liszt greatly admired the pianism of Schumann’s wife Clara and was an effective early advocate for much of Schumann’s piano music.
Liszt, whose early fame as a concert pianist is without known parallel in all of music history, retired from the concert platform at the age of just thirty-five in 1846. It was around this time that he began to develop his idea of the tone poem, or symphonic poem. Liszt described his earliest tone poems as overtures, and there are earlier overtures like Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 which are similar in scope and ambition to Liszt’s. In Liszt’s mind, the tone poem was not just a programmatic work in which the musical form was determined by a literary model the music sought to depict. Instead, although tone poems and symphonic poems could be both narrative and descriptive, Liszt saw that the real interest of the form was in the way a poetic idea could motivate a purely musical form and create something new. His thirteen canonical tone poems for orchestra written between 1848 and 1858 were to serve as a potent model for composers including Dvorak and Richard Strauss. As Liszt’s conception of the tone poem developed, he began to explore the possibility of joining several tone poems together into multi-movement works, notably in his Dante and Faust symphonies. Liszt, the symphonic poem was a necessary invention in an era when Beethoven seemed to have done all that could be done with the symphony.
Totentanz (“Dance of Death”) stands slightly apart from Liszt’s other tone poems because of the solo roll given to the piano. It’s not exactly a piano concerto, but if a symphonic poem is like a poetic and sometimes programmatic symphony, Totentanz might well be seen as a and programmatic concerto. A tone concerto, if you like. The work is basically a series of variations of the Medieval chant “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”), which was a great favourite of composers from Berlioz (who memorably deployed it in his Symphonie Fantastique) through to Rachmaninoff who used it prominently in many of his works. Perhaps the most striking feature about this remarkable work to contemporary ears is Liszt’s remarkably modern use of the piano. The writing is incredibly percussive and wildly virtuosic, and miles from the mainstream of 19th Century piano writing. In fact, Totentanz was to prove a huge influence on the youthful Bartók’s modernist First Piano Concerto.
The invention of the tone poem marked an important turning point in symphonic music, and for most of the 19th Century, composers were either tone poets or symphonists. Liszt was a tone poet while his friend and colleague Schumann was a symphonist. Richard Strauss was the greatest of all tone poets, while his friend and colleague Mahler was a symphonist. Antonín Dvořák was a notable exception who excelled in both genres, but all of his symphonic poems were written after his Ninth and final symphony.
Sibelius was one of the few who moved comfortably between these two dominant genres throughout his career. His cycle of seven symphonies is one of the great achievements in musical history, but his output of symphonic poems is of almost equal quality and of greater scope and quantity. Like Liszt, most of his tone poems are single movement works and more poetic than narrative in tone, from the early masterpiece En Saga through to his bleak final major work, Tapiola. However, also like Liszt, he occasionally grouped a number of tone poems into a multi-movement work, notably in his 1893 work Kullervo, a work that is referred to often as both a symphony and a suite, and in his Lemminkäinen Suite. The Swan of Tuonela is the third of the four tone poems which make up this epic work and has long since established itself independently as one of Sibelius’ most popular works.
Just as Totentanz is a tone poem in which the solo piano serves as the key narrative voice, in The Swan of Tuonela, it is the plaintive solo cor anglais which carries most of the musical argument forward. The work describes the hero, Lemminkäinen, journeying to the Tuonela, The Isle of the Dead , which is circled endlessly by a single swan, depicted by the solo cor anglais.
Sibelius’s music could, like Schumann’s, be both simultaneously all-embracing and painfully personal. Sibelius had one of the most distinctive and instantly recognisable voices of any composer, but his refusal to repeat himself meant that most of his major works came at great personal cost. His wife, Aino, despaired at his dependence on alcohol as a compositional aid. But when inspiration came, the results were staggering. So it was when Sibelius composed his Fantasia sinfonica in 1924. That year saw both Sibelius and his marriage to Aino in crisis. “Aino… is at the end of her tether…I am on the wrong rails. Alcohol to calm my nerves and state of mind. How dreadful old age is for a composer! Things don’t go as quickly as they used to, and self-criticism grows to impossible proportions.”
Aino, disgusted by his drunken state during a recent trip to Gothenburg, refused to accompany Sibelius to the triumphant premiere of the Fantasia sinfonica. In the end Sibelius found the strength to conduct a triumphant concert, and Sibelius quickly realised that the Fantasia sinfonica was really meant to be his Seventh Symphony.
Renewal came hard to Sibelius. In the end, he had two more masterpieces to give the world after the Seventh, his final tone poem, Tapiola and his music for The Tempest. Years of struggle on an Eighth Symphony ended when Sibelius is believed to have burned the incomplete manuscript in his dining room. Other than that, the last thirty years of Sibelius ’ life seem to have been creatively barren.
“If I cannot write a better symphony than my Seventh,” he told a friend, “then it shall be my last.” To better Sibelius’ last symphony is a harrowing benchmark, one I’m not convinced any composer before or since has convincingly achieved. It is to every perceptive listener’s great regret that Sibelius had “withdrawn into himself” thirty years before his death, but the legacy he left us is more than worthy to stand beside that of his colleague and sometime antipode, Gustav Mahler.
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