German Masters



Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93

Premiered in Vienna at an all-Beethoven Musikalische Akademie (self-promoting concert) in February 1814, the Eighth Symphony suffered from comparison with the Seventh, which was very popular at the time and had preceded it on the program. Beethoven had a giant orchestra for the occasion: “At my last concert in the Large Redoutensaal there were 18 first violins, 18 second violins, 12 cellos, 7 double basses, 2 double bassoons” he noted in his diary.

After the rhythmic spree of the Seventh, the new symphony sounded tame and more traditional – not what the audience expected from Beethoven. Unfortunately, this unfavorable comparison is still made today, although Beethoven insisted that the Eighth was the better of the two. The reviewer of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitschrift was perceptive in his appraisal of the symphony and its lukewarm reception: “This reviewer is of the opinion that the reason does not lie by any means in weaker or less artistic workmanship...but partly in the faulty judgment that permitted the symphony to follow the one in A Major, partly in the surfeit of beauty and excellence...if this symphony were performed alone, we have no doubt of its success.”

Beethoven began working on the Symphony in the summer of 1812, immediately after finishing the Seventh, while he was taking the cure at the baths of Teplitz and Carlsbad in Bohemia. He was in a bitter mood at the time: nothing could be done at this point in his life to improve his hearing and he suffered unremitting digestive difficulties, which may have been caused by ulcers. Certainly, his personal life was in disarray; he was frustrated in love, and was involved in bitter family squabbles. Suicide and death were never far from his mind, as the following letter dated May 2, 1810 to his friend Dr. Franz Wegeler indicates: “A year or two ago my more quiet, restful life came to a halt, and I was dragged by force into worldly affairs…But who could be immune from the effect of the external storms? Yet I should be happy…had not the demon pitched his camp in my ears. Had I not read somewhere that men must not part voluntarily from this life as long as they are capable of doing a single good deed, I should have ceased to exist long ago, and this by my own hand. Oh, life is so lovely, but for me it is poisoned forever…” But none of this misery is reflected in the Symphony.

The Eighth Symphony’s more traditional structure harks back to the composer’s early symphonies in which he paid tribute to the spirit of his Viennese predecessors, especially Haydn. The orchestration and development sections, however, belong to the mature Beethoven. And while the Seventh is powerful and dramatic, the Eighth is good-natured, cheery and humorous – as if the composer needed a rest from the tension of the earlier symphony. The first movement gets right down to business with no slow introduction.

Its second theme follows right on the heels of the first with a minimal bridge passage.

The contrast comes in the development as Beethoven shows a dark side of his two optmtimistic themes.

Of special interest has always been the second movement, which by tradition would normally be slow but which Beethoven marks an Allegretto scherzando (Playful allegretto). Some musical historians claim that its rigid ostinato repeated chord is a tribute to the inventor of the metronome, Beethoven’s sometime friend and rival Johannes Nepomuk Mälzel.

The movement ends with an unexpected abruptness.

Since one scherzo is enough, Beethoven wrote an old-fashioned Minuet as the third movement, with an unusual duet between the horns and solo clarinet in the Trio.

The symphony ends with a Finale full of Haydnesque humor and surprises, the chattering opening becoming a rhythmic motto for the movement – something like the four opening notes of the Fifth Symphony.

The highlight is a long coda bursting with energy and vitality. The prolonged and repeated final cadence, a counterweight to the sudden ending of the Scherzo, seems almost a parody of symphonic grandiosity.



Johannes Brahms
1833-1897

Johannes Brahms
Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15

This concerto was Johannes Brahms's first orchestral work to survive his self-criticism and weeding – he literally consigned to the flames anything that he considered less than perfect. It had a strange and checkered birth, starting life in 1854 as a two-piano sketch for a symphony. The orchestration, however, caused trouble for the inexperienced composer and he dropped the project. He transformed parts of it instead into a piano concerto, using the first movement of the discarded symphony for the first movement of the Concerto and composing a new slow second movement and a rondo as its third movement. He did not waste the scherzo movement of the symphony: its theme found new life in the second movement, the funeral march, of the German Requiem.

It took a further couple of years of agonizing, including continuous correspondence about orchestration with his friend, violinist Joseph Joachim, before Brahms was satisfied enough to release the work for its premiere in Hanover with Joachim’s orchestra in January 1859. The Concerto was a modest success, but a performance in Leipzig, five days later elicited nothing but catcalls. “The work cannot give pleasure…it has nothing to offer but hopeless desolation and aridity…Herr Brahms has deliberately made the piano part as uninteresting as possible…” stated one of the critics.

In this Concerto of massive proportions – it is nearly 50 minutes long – the piano and orchestra are true equals. Although Brahms wanted certain piano passages to stand out prominently, by and large the orchestra has equal billing and often predominates in the presentation of ideas. Critics used to refer to it as a "symphony with piano accompaniment."

According to Joachim, the stormy opening with its foreboding sense of doom reflected Brahms’s emotional response to the news of his friend Robert Schumann’s attempted suicide and commitment to an asylum. The theme builds up considerable tension by withholding the affirmation of the tonic d minor for a full minute – and then not for very long – before veering off again.

Among its other features, the trill figures prominently and will return as a motivic element in the final movement.

The first movement is especially rich in thematic material: three additional important thematic groups, two in the orchestra,

and the last as the opening theme for the piano.

After paying tribute to the material from the orchestral exposition, it introduces a gentle secondary theme of its own to parallel the original orchestra theme that immediately follows.

It is important, however, to note that each theme is made up of a single motivic element; Brahms combines and reorders these elements, thereby redefining their significance within the fabric of the movement as a whole. Yet, all the themes in the movement are to some degree tonally ambiguous, and Brahms uses their flexibility to prolong and develop the tension. It may well have been the tenuous hold on the tonality that proved so unsettling to the critics. The lack of virtuosic cadenza anywhere in the work may have soured them as well.

The rhapsodic Adagio in D major provides some respite, clearly recalling the slow movements of Brahms’s idol, Beethoven, whose Ninth Symphony Brahms had recently heard. Brahms inscribed over this movement the words from the Catholic Mass "Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini" (Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord) – a revealing and more salubrious substitute for his original Adagio, whose text when it appears in the German Requiem is: "Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras" (For all flesh is as grass).

The orchestra opens with a theme that spins out for over a minute, its various internal motives providing some the material for the free-form movement.

The piano enters with its own theme, while still maintaining the mood set by the orchestra.

The soaring piano line in its dialogue with the orchestra is like something taken from a slow bel canto aria. Played on a modern piano, it is a challenge to make the extended pianissimo writing sing, as in this unusual slow cadenza.

The trills and the cadence on the timpani are a gentle reminder of the beginning of the Concerto and a harbinger of the coming storm.

The rondo Finale returns to the Sturm und Drang of the first movement, using the trill as a common element between the principal themes of both movements.

This theme is balanced by a cantabile theme in the piano, reminiscent of Schumann.

The movement also contains a little fugue – for a more conservative touch – and a Beethovenesque coda, ending with series of horn calls

(an echo of Fidelio?) Along with the trill, the horn calls hark back to a matching horn solo in the first movement, where it frames one of the piano's excursions.