Beethoven and Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No. 1

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25

I           Molto allegro con fuoco
II          Andante
III         Presto

Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg in 1809, the son of a prosperous banker and grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the great Jewish thinker of the Enlightenment. His family was influential in cultural circles, and he and his sister were educated in an environment that encouraged both musical and general cultural interests. At the same time the extensive acquaintance of the Mendelssohns among artists and men of letters brought an unusual breadth of mind, a stimulus to natural curiosity.

Much of Mendelssohn’s childhood was passed in Berlin, where his parents moved when he was three, to escape Napoleonic invasion. There he took lessons from Goethe’s much admired Zelter, who introduced him to the old poet in Weimar. The choice of a career in music was eventually decided on the advice of Cherubini, consulted by Abraham Mendelssohn in Paris, where he was director of the Conservatoire. A period of further education followed, a Grand Tour of Europe that took him south to Italy and north to Scotland. His professional career began in earnest with his appointment as general director of music in Düsseldorf in 1833.

Mendelssohn’s subsequent career was intense and brief. He settled in Leipzig as conductor of the Gewandhaus concerts, and was instrumental in establishing the Conservatory there. Briefly lured to Berlin by the King of Prussia and by the importunity of his family, he spent an unsatisfactory year or so as director of the music section of the Academy of Arts, providing music for a revival of classical drama under royal encouragement. This appointment he was glad to relinquish in 1844, later returning to his old position in Leipzig, where he died in 1847.

As a boy Mendelssohn had tried his hand at the composition of concertos for one or two pianos, and had also written a concerto for piano and violin. In maturity he was to write two piano concertos, the first of which, in G minor, was composed hurriedly, as he made his way back from Italy, and written down three days before the first performance, on 17th October 1832 in Munich, with the composer as soloist.

The G Minor Concerto is unusual in a number of ways. In particular Mendelssohn dispenses with the customary orchestral exposition, as he was to do in the later Violin Concerto, allowing the orchestra a mere seven bars of introduction, before the brilliant intervention of the soloist with a virile subject characterised by a descending octave leap and ascending octave scale. From this the orchestra borrows a dotted rhythm and fashions material of its own in response. The second subject is surprisingly wide-ranging in key, moving via B flat minor to D flat major, where it remains until B flat major is regained via a brief reprise of the first theme. A full restatement of the secondary melody is heard from the orchestra, accompanied by flowing semiquavers from the piano. This material casts a Romantic mantel over what might otherwise seem a movement of Classical succinctness. The short development makes use of both subjects.

The recapitulation moves into the soulful slow movement via a dramatic brass entry on a chord of B major and subsequent cadenza. The characteristic principal theme is stated by the strings and restated in gently decorated form by the piano. This is demonstrable ‘Song without Words’ territory. The movement expands naturally into a simple ternary structure embracing only brief and incidental migrations from the tonic and dominant key areas. The movement comes to a complete standstill on a sustained chord of E major, although the score indicates that the final Presto follows almost at once.

The finale contains a lyrical, virtuoso tune that defies analysis in its simplicity and floridity. The resurgent repeated chord device for accompaniment enhances the sense of a light rather than an elegant purpose, almost suggesting the style of the drawing room galop so beloved of the later Victorians. The work’s concision proclaims an aversion to self-regarding display, and its conclusion admits of the conventional orchestral last word.

© Elizabeth Boulton

Anna Clyne Stride

Arvo Pärt Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten

Beethoven Symphony No.5

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67

I           Allegro con brio
II          Andante con moto
III         Scherzo: Allegro
IV         Finale: Allegro

Let us not commit Beethoven to what he once said about the opening of his Fifth Symphony: ‘Thus fate is knocking at the door’. Trying to express the sense of music in words is a vain undertaking, and when Beethoven made this statement to Schindler, his devoted assistant but suspect reporter, he surely touched on only one aspect of this well-known theme. It is not, in fact, a self-contained motif but a point of departure for the kind of potential developments only Beethoven could have foreseen. It is also the nervous pulse in a movement of unusual power and concentration.

We can obtain a greater insight into the meaning of this theme if we examine Beethoven’s sketches, which have been preserved. From these we can see that the composition of the Fifth Symphony took no less than three years. The first sketches appear in 1805, but the Symphony was (probably) only completed in March 1808. The first performance took place in December 1808. The sketch-books give us an idea of Beethoven’s ingenious method of composition. Themes or motifs intended for one composition were often transferred to other works if Beethoven’s architectural intuition rejected them for the one he had planned originally. Thus the opening theme of the Fifth Symphony appears side by side with sketches for Piano Concerto No. 4 in G in which the figure of ‘fate knocking at the door’ assumes a much more gentle character. Sketches relating to the Symphony also include the insistent beat that dominates the first movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. They show how Beethoven, having transferred the less dramatic versions of the symphonic theme to other works, gradually developed and concentrated the main subject of the first movement from which the entire Symphony was to grow. Once the character of the theme and its development was established, the other movements followed without anything like the effort involved in creating the form of the first movement.

Sketches for the other three movements appear in recognisable form soon after those for the opening Allegro con brio. The first idea for the second movement was conceived as a minuet in A flat and a trio in the same key, which became the triumphant second theme in C major. A little later, sketches in this key appear with the note ‘trombe, corni’ (trumpets, horns), and thus the character of the movements with its variations on the two themes in different keys was established.

There are many sketches for the third movement, which apparently took some time to assume its present form. What is most interesting, however, is that with these sketches Beethoven quoted no less than 29 bars of the last movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor. Though key and time signature are different, Mozart’s theme betrays an obvious relationship with Beethoven’s Scherzo, and it is revealing and moving to discover that Beethoven unashamedly wrote down Mozart’s theme when he developed his own, so to speak, in sympathy.

In his early sketches Beethoven elaborated an idea for the finale, which he later abandoned. His Ninth Symphony, with its present choral finale, initially had a totally different wholly instrumental theme, which later became the main subject of the finale in his String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132. This illustrates how, as a composer, one must take the wrong turns first in order to find the right ones in the end. When the sketches for the Scherzo were sufficiently advanced, they prompted the extraordinary, initially mysterious link with the finale – an extended passage that arouses expectation but also anticipates the bright key of C major just before it is reached in all its glory at the beginning of the finale where the trombones play for the first time in the Symphony. This juxtaposition of two contrasting harmonies is a characteristic device that Beethoven also used in the Eroica and Ninth symphonies. An entirely new idea was the reminiscence of the Scherzo in the middle of the finale of the Fifth Symphony.

The seemingly endless succession of C major chords that brings the work to its conclusion is justified by the tremendous concentration that preceded it, not only in the last movement but in the entire Symphony. What an experience it must be to hear this work for the first time! But if we can recreate this experience and combine it with an understanding of how Beethoven assembled his themes from the sketches over a period of three years – discarding what did not fit, even at a stage when the first movement had only just begun to take shape – our appreciation of this Symphony will have acquired a new dimension.