Join Music Director Rossen Milanov and the Columbus Symphony as we start the 2021 year in grandiose style paying homage to Mozart's birth month with Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 4, Op. 61, more commonly known as Mozartiana!
Program:
Mozart - Symphony No. 40
Tchaikovsky - Suite No. 4, op. 61 (Mozartiana)
In compliance with state and city health protocols, only 300 seats will be allowed per night. Your assigned seat will be available at will call in the main entrance of the Ohio Theatre on the night of the concert. Each concert is approximately one-hour with no intermission.
We look forward to seeing you in-person for this exclusive opportunity! But if you are unable to attend the performance, please watch the virtual concert in our free digital series An Evening with the Symphony: The Masterworks. The Russian Winter Festival I concert will be available to stream on January 29, 2021 at 7:30 pm.
Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550 (1788)
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Salzburg, 1756 – Vienna, 1791)
Several things went wrong in Mozart's life around 1788, the year the last three symphonies were written. The concert series where the composer had presented his great piano concertos had been discontinued; Mozart seemed to have lost much of the audience support he had previously enjoyed. In 1786-87, he had had an immense success in Prague with his operas The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, but back home in Vienna, things were going downhill financially. Mozart's appointment to the relatively minor position of "Kammer-Kompositeur" at the imperial court did little to improve matters. The composer's family life was also extremely difficult: four of his children died in infancy, three of them between 1786 and 1788. This left Mozart and his wife Constanze with only one surviving child, Karl Thomas, born in 1784; a second son, Franz Xaver Wolfgang, who would become a composer, was born in 1791, a few months before Mozart's death. Among the further reasons that may have contributed to the deterioration of Mozart's situation, researchers have cited the composer's gambling habit, household mismanagement by Constanze, and a general tendency of the Mozarts to live beyond their means.
What is certain is that during the summer of 1788 Mozart started writing heart-rending letters to his friend and fellow Freemason, Michael Puchberg, imploring him for rather large sums of money. In one of these, he was asking Puchberg for "a hundred gulden until next week, when my concerts in the Casino are to begin." Since the letter was written at the time Mozart was working on what would prove to be his last three symphonies, there is reason to believe that they intended them for some concerts that were being planned; yet we don't know whether these concerts ever took place. But at least the prospect of a performance, from which the composer expected an improvement in his situation, inspired three of Mozart's greatest symphonic masterworks.
The opening of Symphony No. 40—the second in this famous set of three—is, in its quiet way, nothing short of a revolution. In the 18th century, symphonies usually started with a forceful downbeat whose function was somewhat similar to that of the rising curtain in the theatre: "Ladies and gentlemen, stop talking, the piece has begun!" The French had a special name for this downbeat: premier coup d'archet ("first bowstroke"). More than a simple custom, this way of opening a work became one of the defining elements of symphonic style.
Dispensing with the premier coup d'archet, Mozart started this symphony with a lyrical melody. What is even more unusual is that this lyrical melody is preceded by almost a full measure of accompanying eighth-notes in the divided violas, something quite unheard of in the 18th century. Later, such accompaniment figures without melody became more frequent: one may think of the openings of Schubert's Gretchen at the Spinning-Wheel or his String Quartet in A minor, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto or many opera arias by Italian composers. The example they all followed was Mozart's G-minor symphony which may be seen as the symbolic point of origin of musical Romanticism.
Many writers have felt this symphony—not only its first measure—to be Romantic in spirit. The symphony contains dissonances, modulations and chromatic progressions that were extremely bold for their time, and revealed new worlds of expressivity that had not previously been known to musicians. Individuality, bold innovations and heightened expressivity—all three concepts were to become central to the Romantic aesthetics. At the same time, the symphony preserves a clarity of form and a balance among its constituent elements that is entirely Classical. We could not find better examples for sonata form than the first and the last movements; Classical rules and symmetries are respected throughout.
One of the most exciting parts in the first movement is the development section, where the famous opening melody undergoes dramatic transformations and its segments taken apart, a technique later adopted by Beethoven. In the course of about 90 seconds, there is ample counterpoint, a great deal of contrast in dynamics and orchestration, and key changes every four bars or so. The section begins and ends with a short descending scale scored for woodwinds only, making for seamless yet noticeable transitions.
The theme of the second-movement Andante is played by the string instruments in successive entries (almost, though not quite, like in a fugue). At the repeat of this theme, the woodwinds add a descending scale motif in thirty-second notes separated by rests: this particular masterstroke was quoted almost literally by Haydn in the "Winter" section of his oratorio The Seasons. But Mozart develops the idea differently, using it for another great buildup of tension in the middle of the movement, before the recapitulation brings back the initial feelings of peace and serenity.
The third movement is one of the most metrically irregular minuets ever written. (You could conceivably choreograph it but certainly not to the steps of the minuet!) Intricacies such as the hemiola (two 3/4 measures rearranged in three 2/4 units) are combined with dissonant clashes in the harmony and a pungent chromaticism in the melodic motion. The Trio, in which the tonality changes from G minor to G major, is more relaxed, although the musical articulation remains complex. The woodwind (with the exception of the clarinets) and the two horns all enjoy some great soloistic opportunities in the Trio.
Unlike many symphonies written in minor keys, Mozart's Symphony No. 40 does not switch to the major mode for the finale but remains in the minor to the end. This movement has no equals in the Classical literature for sheer dramatic power and intensity. It contains a passage that, astonishingly, uses eleven of the twelve chromatic pitches in close proximity to an almost ‟atonal” effect, and ends with three strong G-minor chords that almost sound like cries of despair.
Suite No. 4 (“Mozartiana”), Op. 61 (1887)
by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia, 1840 – St. Petersburg, 1893)
It wasn't for nothing that the late musicologist John Daverio called Tchaikovsky “one of the most passionate Mozart-lovers of the nineteenth century.” Mozart's music was clearly a defining influence for the Russian master. Tchaikovsky had great admiration for Mozart's dramatic side (Don Giovanni was his favorite opera). At the same time, he saw Mozart primarily as the representative of an idyllic past, one for which he felt a great deal of nostalgia and which he struggled to recapture in his own works. As he wrote to his supporter and confidante, Mme von Meck in 1878:
maybe it is precisely because, as a man of my times, I am broken and morally sick that I like to seek peace and consolation in Mozart’s music, most of which is an expression of life’s joys as experienced by a healthy, wholesome nature, not corrupted by introspection.
In 1887, Tchaikovsky composed a four-movement orchestral suite, which he called Mozartiana, based on works by Mozart, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Don Giovanni. The arrangements are more than simple orchestrations: they amount to rather radical reworkings of their originals. In the first movement, Tchaikovsky re-imagined Mozart's Gigue in G (K. 574), a curious miniature that Mozart wrote down, in one fell swoop, in the notebook of a court organist during his 1789 visit to Leipzig. The unusual chromatic counterpoint may have been inspired by his sojourn in J. S. Bach's city, but the direct model of the Gigue may actually be found in one of G. F. Handel's keyboard suites. Tchaikovsky starts soft but soon unleashes a powerful crescendo, culminating in a big tutti in triple fortissimo, complete with some heavy strokes of the timpani.
The gentle minuet that follows (K. 576b, previously listed as K. 355) dates from the final months of Mozart's life, as recent research has established. Behind a conventional façade lurk some rather intriguing chromatic complexities, which Tchaikovsky seized upon with a particularly sensitive orchestration. He placed particular emphasis on Mozart's dissonances and didn't hesitate to call, once again, for a furious fortissimo when the harmonic tension increased.
The third-minute Preghiera (“Prayer”) is based on Ave verum corpus (K. 618), an intimate sacred choral work also from Mozart's final year. Tchaikovsky's direct source here was a piano paraphrase that Franz Liszt had made of Mozart's work, and published as part of a composition titled À la Chapelle Sistine. (Thus, this movement may also be seen as a tribute to Liszt, who passed away a year before Mozartiana was written.) In this movement, Tchaikovsky gave a prominent role to the harp, thereby transposing Mozart's simple, hymn-like setting (via Liszt's piano version, marked angelico) into a purely Romantic realm. Here the “prayer” is no longer offered by a devout congregation, as in Mozart, but by a divinely inspired 19th-century artist.
For all the exalted feelings Tchaikovsky poured into Mozart's Ave verum, the high point of the suite is unquestionably the last movement, which is longer than the first three combined. The source this time is Mozart's set of ten variations for piano on “Unser dummer Pöbel meint” (“Our stupid rabble thinks,” K. 455). The surprising title comes from a French comic opera (La rencontre imprévue ou les pèlerins de la Mecque—“The Unexpected Encounter or the Pilgrims to Mecca”) by Christoph Willibald Gluck, here in German translation. It is said that Mozart improvised his variations in Gluck's presence in 1783. When he eventually wrote them down, the result was one of Mozart's most brilliant variation sets, complete with two big cadenzas and many other special features. In orchestrating these variations, Tchaikovsky gave full rein to his coloristic imagination, and since Gluck's opera was set in the Middle East, Tchaikovsky at one point brought in the “Turkish” percussion familiar from Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio. Elsewhere he seems to take us on a sleigh ride, as Mozart did in one of his celebrated German dances. But this time, the ride—suggested by the glockenspiel—seems to end in a crash or at least a wild descent down the hill. Tchaikovsky gave the first cadenza—at the end of this same variation—to the violin, and the second, shortly before the end, to the clarinet. The work concludes with a recall of the theme in its original form.
Peter Laki
 20.jbi.png)
