Sharing the classical music experience
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GLUCK, WEBER, BERLIOZ & BERWALD
Whether or not you observe the 40-day Christian Season of Lent starting with Ash Wednesday and ending Maundy Thursday before Easter Sunday, the idea translates into giving up something of value long enough to better see its importance in your life. For the Lenten season, I propose giving up listening to the so-called “greatest composer of all time” in order to see the world around Ludwig von Beethoven which is often obscured by hero worship. By offering a series of playlists “Without Ludwig”, my intention is to enrich our understanding of late 18th & early 19th century European music—to put Beethoven’s indisputable genius in a more inclusive and equitable context. Each playlist to follow will be in the format of a typical old-fashioned concert—overture, concertante work featuring a soloist, and symphony. Choral music concerts with orchestra will also be shared. We begin “OHNE LUDWIG” with one of the greatest overtures of all time. Richard Wagner expanded the orchestration of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1774 overture to Iphigénie en Aulide as an homage to Gluck, the “father of German music” (1714-1787). Carl Maria von Weber’s second piano concerto was inspired by Beethoven’s Emperor concerto. It was widely admired, then forgotten. Gluck was worshipped by Hector Berlioz as the “Jupiter of our Olympus” and his “musical father”. In defense of the shock produced by Berlioz’s dramatic scene Death of Cleopatra, he described it as a descendent of Gluck’s dramatic innovations and his hero’s ideal of “noble simplicity”. Franz Berwald (1796-1868) was artistically trapped in musically conservative Beethoven-obsessed Copenhagen. His innovative approach to advancing Beethoven’s symphonic argument was considered bizarre. Berwald heard only the first of his four symphonies during his lifetime. His 2nd, the extraordinary Sinfonie Capricieuse, composed in 1842, was finally premiered in 1914.
WEBER, BERLIOZ, MAHLER & HINDEMITH
While Carl Maria von Weber handily competed in Vienna, Berlin, & London with his operas against Beethoven’s Fidelio, his concertos & symphonies often suffered by comparison. Weber was Constanze Mozart’s cousin in an enormously musical family. Mozart’s “swan song” clarinet concerto was written 2 months before his death in 1791. The instrument evolved 20 years later from the 5-keyed basset clarinet to 10—13 keys, allowing Weber to achieve an operatic level of virtuosity in his clarinet concertos. Weber recast a viola piece for the “clown of the orchestra” giving the bassoon an unmatched level of brilliance in the Hungarian style made popular by Haydn. After the wild success of his opera Die Freischütz, (50 times over 18-months in Berlin!)—with its sensational overture offered here—Weber’s famous lunch meeting with Beethoven thawed their previous chilliness. The older composer embraced him several times in the spa town of Baden October 5, 1823. Weber recounted that “the usually rough and repellent” composer served him “as carefully as though I were his lady”! On the subject of Freischütz, Beethoven praised Weber as “a devil of a fellow, a fine fellow.” These exchanges occurred with Beethoven’s conversation tablets, owing to his deafness at a time when he was finishing his 9th Symphony. Weber suddenly died at age 40 in 1826. He had travelled to London to conduct his opera Oberon, but his weak heart & lungs succumbed to tuberculosis. Nine months later Beethoven died in March of 1827. To comply with rigid French operatic taste, in 1841 Hector Berlioz orchestrated the spoken dialog of Freischütz & arranged a piano piece by Weber to become its ballet Invitation to the Dance. Weber’s unfinished opera Die Drei Pintos was completed by Gustav Mahler to marvelous effect in 1887. That opera’s entr’acte is joined here by a short overture from incidental music for Friedrich Schiller’s German adaptation of Carlo Gozzi’s play Turandot. Weber used an authentic Chinese tune that became the basis for Symphonic Metamorphosis on a Theme by Carl Maria von Weber by Paul Hindemith written while teaching at Yale in 1943.
Fred Strickler Memorial Concert
