T H I S   E V E N I N G ' S  concert pairs two big works by Beethoven, under the revered Swedish-American conductor Herbert Blomstedt.  Debuting just five years apart, the Piano Concerto No. 4 and Symphony No. 7 were introduced in two very different benefit concerts in Vienna.  It took some time before the Concerto was recognized as a masterpiece, whereas the Symphony was hailed a triumph from the start.  Nevertheless both events were landmark moments in the composer’s career, as well as the history of classical music.  

       On December 22, 1808, a crowd of devoted music lovers braved a brutally cold night to gather at Vienna's Theater an der Wien for a Beethoven Akademie concert, to supplement his meager finances.  Though the composer had previewed his Fourth Piano Concerto in the private residence of his patron, Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, nearly two years earlier, it took months to schedule its public debut.  Yet what a performance it was!

       In addition to Piano Concerto No. 4, the four-hour-long evening also saw the premieres of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and a Choral Fantasy for vocal soloists, chorus, orchestra, and piano.  If that weren’t enough, the concert was rounded out with previously written works, including the concert aria Ah! Perfido and selections from Beethoven’s Mass in C major.  An improvised piano fantasia was also featured but, alas, is lost to history.

       By all accounts, the performance was a mess.  The musicians weren’t rehearsed and the soprano dropped out after Beethoven insulted her, to be replaced by an inexperienced teenager.  Bitter temperatures made for an uncomfortable experience for performers and audience alike. Among the waves of music, however, savvy listeners heard a revolutionary new model for the piano concerto.  It broke down the pristine conventions of Mozart’s Apollonian classicism and helped steer the course of music toward a new Romantic Era.  With Beethoven at the keyboard — marking the last time the composer would play publicly — the piano became the central hero.

       Tonight’s soloist, celebrated pianist Garrick Ohlsson, takes us on this extraordinary psychological journey of the most personal and intimate of Beethoven’s five works for piano and orchestra.

       Five years later, on December 8, 1813, Beethoven staged another benefit concert.  This one celebrated the Austrian soldiers who served during the Napoleonic wars.  The program featured two of Beethoven's works:  the bombastic Wellington's Victory and the premiere of his Seventh Symphony.  It was also the last concert Beethoven would conduct, due to his growing deafness.  The audience’s response to the Symphony “rose to the point of ecstasy” according to contemporaneous reports, and adoring admirers demanded an encore of the second movement Allegretto.

       Built on a series of rhythmic motifs, the Seventh Symphony has long been admired as a celebration of “dance.”  It is, perhaps, even more like a celebration of life, wending its way through different forms of movement, including dance, procession (the second movement funeral march), agility, speed, and repetition.  Its infecting rhythms, masterful transformations, and just-right modulations show Beethoven aptly pushing and bending (but never quite breaking) every edge of his audience’s expectations.  Music, at its best, both dares and satisfies, pulling us forward to harmonic resolution through irresistibly restless sounds.

        Centuries later, these now-familiar works have been etched into the cannon and immortalized through seemingly limitless performances, recordings, and soundtracks. Yet their sparkling musical invention and bold themes continue to astound.

—Amanda Angel and Eric Sellen
   

PIANO CONCERTO No. 4
in G major, Opus 58
by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Composed: 1805-06

Premiere:  Beethoven performed the concerto on March 1807 at a semi-private concert in the home of his patron Prince Lobkowitz. The public premiere took place at Vienna's Theater an der Wein on December 22, 1808.

Duration: about 35 minutes

________________________________

L I K E   M A N Y   C O M P O S E R S   before (and after), Beethoven wrote his concertos for piano and orchestra as vehicles for displaying his own dazzle as a performer.  In those times — before radio and recordings and copyright, and when public concerts were less frequent than today — new music was all the rage.  Composing your own ensured that you had fresh material to perform.  Your biggest hits, from last year or last week, were meanwhile quickly appropriated by others through copied scores and with the best tunes arranged for street organ grinders and local wind ensembles.  It is little wonder, then, that Mozart kept some scores under lock and key, and left the cadenzas for many of his concertos blank, so that only he could fill them in authentically with his own brand of extemporaneous perfection.

       Beethoven moved to Vienna at the age of 22 in 1792.  He’d hoped to get to Europe’s musical capital sooner and to study with Mozart, but family circumstances had kept him at home in Bonn helping raise his two younger brothers (while tempering the boys’ alcoholic father).  It was as a performer that Beethoven forged his reputation in Vienna, and within a year he was widely known as a red-hot piano virtuoso.  

       This set the stage for writing his own concertos.  For the first three, written between 1795 and 1802, he followed in Mozart’s footsteps with the form.  In the 1780s, Mozart had turned the concerto into a fully-realized and independent genre, sometimes churning out three or four each season.

       But whereas Mozart, over the course of thirty or more works showcasing a piano or violin soloist, had developed the concerto into sublime products, Beethoven (ultimately creating just five works for piano and one for violin) strived to make the form individual and handmade again.  Mozart created the molds and set the standards, and only occasionally over-filled or over-flowed them.  Beethoven at first worked within and around those earlier parameters, but the thrust of his musical creativity eventually shattered tradition in order to offer up the first magnificently over-charged concertos of the Romantic 19th century.

ABOUT THE MUSIC
       The Fourth Piano Concerto begins unexpectedly, with piano alone.  While today we recognize this as unusual, it is probably impossible for us to understand how totally shocking it was for audiences at the premiere.  Even though Mozart’s concertos had crystallized the form only twenty years earlier, musical audiences of the time knew the conventions and were expecting creativity within those boundaries.  A concerto always started with an orchestral introduction.  The beginning might be longer or shorter, noisy or quiet, but the concerto was ultimately an orchestral genre, with soloist as an invited guest.  

        Here, with Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, the soloist is instead placed fully in charge of the form — not just in the audience’s minds as the expected center of attention, but equal to the entire orchestra.  Thus is the heroic 19th-century concerto born, in which the soloist becomes protagonist rather than mere dialogue partner, and the “conversation” between soloist and orchestra takes on a sense of combative clashing and argument far beyond the good-natured sparring and mimicry that earlier concertos had offered as musical entertainment.

       Not only does the piano begin the concerto, but it starts with unusual gentleness and grace, and “warms up” gradually.  Indeed, the entire concerto seems much more of a personal statement from Beethoven, as soloist and overall composer, than any of his preceding concertos.  The opening movement continues at length — at twenty minutes, it is at least a third longer than any that Mozart or Beethoven had previously created — alternating across the sections of sonata form between a deceptive, tender playfulness and a more robust outlook.  

       Then in the second movement, the orchestra and soloist almost seem to be wandering around in different concertos.  The orchestra offers forceful stabs of sound, to which the piano repeatedly responds with introspective musings, as if thinking about something else entirely.  Once the bewildered orchestra backs off, however, Beethoven allows the piano to be more or less alone onstage, as if deep in thought.  Some sublimely heart-wrenching solo piano passages follow, including a cadenza for right hand alone, before the movement withers to silence.

       Without pause, we are suddenly in the third movement finale.  Here, at last, the orchestra and soloist are ready to play together, and this joyful movement is a delightful rondo of invention and variations built around an initial short march tune.  Beethoven carefully varies the lengths of each statement and its response, building up a wonderfully vibrant sense of fun and excitement.  A brief cadenza allows a momentary spotlight on the soloist and then, just as at the beginning of the concerto, Beethoven also breaks convention at the end.  Traditionally, the orchestra would have closed out the piece without the soloist, or with the soloist merely playing along with the tune at the end.  But here the piano maintains its individual identity, seeing its heroic journey through to the final chord in the final bar.

—program note by Eric Sellen © 2021

Eric Sellen served as program book editor for The Cleveland Orchestra through this past season.  He has written program notes for orchestras and festivals across North America and Europe.

________________________________

SCORING:  Beethoven scored each of the movements of his Piano Concerto No. 4 differently:  the first movement calls for flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings, plus the solo piano; the second movement utilizes only piano and strings; and the finale augments the first-movement ensemble with 2 trumpets and timpani.

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA TIMELINE:  The Cleveland Orchestra first played Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4 in November 1923, with soloist Josef Hofmann and music director Nikolai Sokoloff.  The most recent performances were given in May 2017 at Severance Hall with Franz Welser-Möst and soloist Murray Perahia.
   

SYMPHONY NO. 7 in A major, Opus 92
by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Composed: 1811-12

Premiere: December 8, 1813, at a special concert at the University of Vienna with Beethoven conducting.

Duration: about 35 minutes

________________________________

I T   S E E M S   F I T T I N G  that the Seventh Symphony, Beethoven’s greatest demonstration of the compelling power of rhythm, received its first hearing through the efforts of Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, inventor of the metronome.  

       Mälzel has been described by one Beethoven biographer as “part Edison and part Barnum,” and while he is best remembered today for the little ticking box that has held generations of music students to the rhythmic straight and narrow, he mesmerized the public with his more extravagant contraptions, such as the Mechanical Chess Player and the Mechanical Trumpet, during his lifetime.  Beethoven delighted in all sorts of modern devices and was pleased to compose his bombastic Wellington’s Victory for another Mälzel instrument, the orchestra-imitating Panharmonicon.  

       To help promote this confluence of two very different kinds of genius — his own mechanical and Beethoven’s compositional —  Mälzel proposed a triumphal tour of England, to be funded by a series of concerts in Vienna.  (The tour never came off, owing to a dispute between the two men regarding the performing and publishing rights to the music.)  

       The first concert was to benefit Austrian soldiers wounded in the Napoleonic Wars; if that concert succeeded, there would be no problem selling tickets to repeat performances, which would benefit Mälzel and Beethoven.  The latter’s new orchestral arrangement of Wellington’s Victory would attract patriotic Austrians to the concert, Mälzel’s Mechanical Trumpet would be heard in marches by Dussek and Pleyel, and, for connoisseurs, there would be a chance to hear an “entirely new symphony” Beethoven had recently finished, his Seventh.  

       To ensure the event’s drawing power, Mälzel lined up an all-star orchestra, with the great Schuppanzigh and Spohr leading the violins, the composer Meyerbeer and pianists Hummel and Moscheles playing drums and cymbals, and the venerable Salieri (teacher of Beethoven and Schubert, and rival of Mozart) cueing the fanfares and salvos.  (While the presence of the 15-year-old Schubert at this concert has not been documented, it has been surmised in view of the importance of the event and the strong influence of the Seventh Symphony in Schubert’s later compositions.)

PREMIERING A NEW SYMPHONY
       In rehearsal, the famous Beethoven temper was not in evidence.  When the violinists complained about the difficulty of their part, the composer politely asked them to take it home and practice; at the next rehearsal, there were smiles and compliments all around.  

       Beethoven’s unique conducting style, however, was in full flower at the concert on December 8, 1813, with his gesturing perhaps exaggerated because of his deafness. Louis Spohr recalled: “Beethoven was in the habit of giving dynamic indications to the orchestra by means of all sorts of peculiar movements of his body.  When he wanted a sforzando [‘suddenly strong’] he would vehemently throw out both his arms, which previously he had held crossed across his breast.  For a piano [‘softly’] he would crouch down, going down deeper as he wanted the sound to be softer.  Then, at the beginning of a crescendo [‘gradual increase in loudness’] he would rise gradually, and when the forte [‘loudly’] was reached he would leap up into the air.  Occasionally he would shout with the music in order to make the forte stronger, without being conscious of it . . .”

       At one point, Beethoven’s inability to hear quiet passages led to near disaster when he overlooked the second of two pauses in the recapitulation of the symphony’s first movement.  While the orchestra paused, Beethoven continued to beat time, getting himself about ten bars ahead of the players.  Spohr’s description continued:  “Beethoven, indicating the pianissimo passage in his own way, had crouched down under the music stand; at the crescendo, which followed, he became visible once more, made himself taller, and then leapt high up in the air at the moment when, according to his calculation, the forte should have begun.  When this did not happen, he looked about him in terror, stared in astonishment at the orchestra, which was still playing the pianissimo, and found his place only when the so-long-awaited forte began and became audible to him.”

PUBLIC ACCLAIM
       And how did this cliffhanging performance of a new “serious” work fare amid the hokum and foofooraw of Mälzel’s patriotic spectacle?  Very well, thank you.  The audience came prepared to be thrilled, and Beethoven’s robust new symphony didn’t disappoint them.  Their applause, wrote one journalist, “rose to the point of ecstasy.”  Significantly, it was not the symphony’s taut, propulsive outer movements that warranted encores, but the melodious Allegretto, whose major-minor ambiguity so richly anticipated the bittersweet moods of postwar, Biedermeier-era Vienna and its greatest composer, Schubert.

       To us latter-day listeners, however, the Seventh Symphony’s most striking characteristic may be the synthesis it achieves between the intensity and compression of the Fifth and the rustic high spirits of the “Pastoral” Sixth.  Beethoven’s symphonic imagination had lain fallow for three years after he finished those two works, and this new start found him writing with a harmonic daring that enlivens his most obsessive rhythms.  Although the symphony is in A major, the remote keys of C and F figure so prominently that they become tonal centers in their own right, giving this busy music a much-needed sense of space; the third-movement scherzo, in fact, turns the tables by being in F major, but ending its first phrase firmly on an A-major chord.  

       It was not Beethoven’s harmonic skill, however, but his persistent rhythms that prompted Richard Wagner to call this symphony “the Apotheosis of the Dance.”  The work’s patterns are all versions of the dactylic foot — one strong beat, followed by two weaker ones.  The simplest form of this is the scherzo’s steady quarter notes in 3/4 meter.  Then there is the famous “Schubert-rhythm” of the second-movement Allegretto, which, speeded up, becomes the engine that drives the finale.  Even the cantering 6/8 of the first movement’s Vivace section is made up of innumerable tiny dactylic cells.

       Beethoven has not neglected the thematic unification of this work, either.  In particular, themes from the long Poco sostenuto introduction to the opening section cycle throughout the first and later movements.  For example, the introduction’s long, rising scales (like “gigantic stairs,” commented the English writer George Grove) can be heard cantering up and down in the development of the movement’s main Vivace section.  And this theme’s graceful turns and leaps eventually grow into the whirling-dervish theme of the finale.  Later in the first movement, an immensely long crescendo builds over a bass that moans in semitones; something very similar happens before the coda of the finale (these are said to be the passages that caused Carl Maria von Weber to say that Beethoven was “ripe for the madhouse”) — and both of these moments have a close cousin in the Trio theme of the scherzo, with its wavering half-step.

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?
       Such observations, however, can carry us only a little way toward understanding how a composer can be so bold and so right at the same time.  Even associations beyond or outside the music don’t add much.  British music writer Donald Francis Tovey wrote that “the symphony is so overwhelmingly convincing and so untranslatable, that it has for many years been treated quite reasonably as a piece of music, instead of as an excuse for discussing the French Revolution.”  The revolution, of course, is in the music.  And familiar as this music is, it always catches us off guard, from the opening notes — a pregnant oboe theme that Beethoven promptly discards — to the sudden, final A-major cannon shots, which explode any thought of a lengthy “Beethoven coda.”

       Asked once why he didn’t compose more music in the vein of his best-selling works, Beethoven replied, “Art always demands something new from us.”  Two centuries after he wrote it, the Seventh Symphony sounds as new as tomorrow’s premiere.

—program note by David Wright © 2021

David Wright lives and writes in New Jersey.  He previously served as program annotator for the New York Philharmonic.

________________________________

SCORING:  Beethoven scored his Symphony No. 7 for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA TIMELINE: Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony crept into The Cleveland Orchestra’s repertoire.  The second movement was played by itself in November 1919, at the “First Popular Concert” of the Orchestra’s second season.  The first performance of the entire symphony at a Cleveland Orchestra subscription concert was by the La Scala Orchestra of Milan, conducted by Arturo Tos­canini, on February 2, 1921.  The Cleveland Orch­estra played the complete symphony for the first time in April 1922, with music director Nikolai Sokoloff conducting.  It has been played frequently on Orchestra concerts since that time, most recently in October 2019, under conductor Klaus Mäkelä.
    

A print-friendly PDF of this
concert's program book information
can be found at the following link:

AUGUST 1 - ALL BEETHOVEN
 
This can be printed out ahead of time
by those who prefer to read the musical
commentary and biographies on paper.