FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Hebrides Overture (Fingal's Cave), Opus 26

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg on February 3, 1809, and died in Leipzig on November 4, 1847. Mendelssohn completed the Hebrides Overture in December 1831 and revised it twice; the first performance of the final version was in Berlin on January 10, 1833, the composer conducting. Mendelssohn seems never to have resolved the choice of title; while composing it, he called it "The Hebrides"; at various times he referred to it as "The Lonely Island," and performed it as "The Isles of Fingal." The printed parts of the first version are entitled "Hebrides," but the published score of the revision is "Fingal's Cave." The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani and strings.

A great letter writer, Felix Mendelssohn sent his family regular reports of his impressions and activities, embellished with charming and skillful drawings. Thus, while visiting Scotland, he wrote of the impression made on him of a visit to Fingal's Cave, a celebrated sea cave in the basalt lava on the southwestern shore of Staffa, in the island group known as the Inner Hebrides. The roar of the waves, the clear air, the cries of sea birds, and the impressive rock formations were a powerful stimulant. "In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me," he wrote on August 7, 1829, "the following came into my mind there," and he wrote out twenty-one measures of music that correspond to the beginning of his overture. Though it took another sixteen months to complete, he perfectly captured the uncanny effect of the Hebridean landscape.

Once he had finished the work, Mendelssohn had to decide what to call it. The term "tone poem," which we might find most appropriate, had not yet been invented, and it was certainly not a symphony. So instead he called it an overture, because it was a single movement for orchestra cast in sonata form, like the overtures of Mozart or Beethoven, though it does not actually precede and introduce a larger work, as the term "overture" implies. It was thus the very first example of the "concert overture," a genre that became quite popular in the romantic era. The wonder of Mendelssohn's score is the constant freshness and flexibility of his invention. The opening figure of his first theme recurs many times-but almost every time its appearance differs after a single measure. The freedom that he takes in the working out of this idea and its sequels is not the freedom that comes with "rule-breaking" for its own sake, but freedom derived from a firm vision of the end, from attention concentrated on the goal of a specific kind of expression, here of landscape painting via music. And it is thus that the young composer (just twenty-one when he finished the score in Rome) created one of his most original and compelling works.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 3 in E flat, Opus 55, Eroica

Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. The Eroica was composed between May and November 1803, with some further polishing in the following year. It was privately performed in the Vienna town house of Prince Joseph von Lobkowitz, to whom the score is dedicated, in the summer of 1804, Beethoven conducting; the first public performance took place in Vienna on April 7, 1805. The score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

From the earliest period of the symphony's history, Beethoven's Eroica has been intertwined with the composer's ambivalent and contradictory feelings about Napoleon. Beethoven had thought about composing a work honoring Napoleon for some time when he wrote the E flat symphony between May and November 1803. His friend Ferdinand Ries recalled that Beethoven had intended to honor Napoleon as First Consul, a spokesman for a more democratic government in France, and that the score of the symphony was simply headed "Buonaparte" at the top of the title page with the composer's signature at the bottom. But, said Ries, when Napoleon declared himself Emperor in May 1804, Beethoven

flew into a rage and cried out: "Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!" Beethoven went to the table, took hold of the title page by the top, tore it in two and threw it on the floor. The first page was rewritten and only then did the symphony receive the title Sinfonia eroica ["Heroic symphony"].

Actually Beethoven's feelings about Napoleon had run hot and cold over a period of years. Yet the title Eroica did not arise quite in the way Ries indicates; it did not appear until the orchestral parts were published two years later. And if Beethoven did tear up his original title page (his original autograph score is lost), he treated a copyist's manuscript less violently. The copyist had originally written, in Italian, "Grand Symphony entitled Bonaparte" on the title page. At some point the last two words were violently crossed out; yet at a still later time, Beethoven himself added in pencil a notation in German, "Written on Bonaparte," suggesting that he had reconsidered his emotional outburst. As early as August 1804, Beethoven offered the Eroica to a publisher with the comment, "The title of the symphony is really Bonaparte."

During the same period that Beethoven's feelings toward Napoleon grew warmer or cooler, he was himself struggling with the great catastrophe of his increasing deafness. He surely knew that it was only a matter of time before he could no longer take part in musical performances or even converse with his friends. The realization naturally brought on moods of depression, a dark night of the soul, from which he found release in creation. The powerful works composed during this period-first among them the Eroica Symphony-have largely created the popular view of the composer wresting control of his fate from a malign universe. Early listeners were most astonished by the unusual length of the symphony; it ran almost twice as long as any previous symphony. Beethoven accomplished this feat not simply by increasing the number of measures overall, but by creating music of such a tensely charged character that an elaborate working out of its implications was necessary. Compared to symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, the proportions underwent a drastic change: in the Eroica, the development section and coda are far longer than those sections in any earlier symphony. That is precisely where Beethoven argued the meaning of the concentrated musical ideas first heard in the exposition.

The first movement of the Eroica does not have a single theme that stands complete in itself, no melody that runs its course and comes to a full stop. The straightforward opening measures immediately shade off into ambiguity and doubt when, in the very first thematic idea, Beethoven introduces a C sharp, a pitch foreign to his home key, and leaves it dangling uncomfortably at the end of the phrase. This troublesome note appears throughout the first movement in every conceivable context, as if each new appearance were an attempt to explain, in yet another way, the meaning of that unexpected note. Finally, in the most direct way possible, Beethoven ends the recapitulation in the expected E flat, then jumps without warning to a loud D flat chord (which is the same as C sharp). It is a glove thrown in the face: what are we to make of this? Beethoven makes of it a new development section of great breadth finally taking us back to the home key, having triumphantly exorcized that disturbing, out of place note. Only here, at the very end of the movement, do we hear the opening theme presented four times as a complete melody without the addition of the distressing C sharp.

The slow movement, Adagio assai, generated heated discussion as to the appropriateness of including a funeral march in a symphony. It is Beethoven at his most somber. No attentive listener can fail to be moved by the shattering final measures in which the dark march theme of the opening returns for the last time, truncated, broken into fragments in a dying strain. The scherzo, on the other hand, is a whirlwind of activity scarcely pausing for breath. All suggestion of the traditional symphonic minuet vanishes before a torrent of rushing notes and irregular phrases. The three horns have an opportunity to show off in the trio; it was no doubt for this moment that Beethoven took the unusual step of adding a third horn.

The last movement recalls one of Beethoven's recent successes, his ballet music for The Creatures of Prometheus. Its closing dance contained a musical idea that Beethoven had already worked into a set of piano variations (now known anachronistically as the Eroica Variations); he returned to that theme as the basis of the variations that close the Third Symphony, sometimes using the bass line alone, sometimes the melody. The charming and whistleable tune goes through changes of character leading to a fugal drama and a poignant oboe solo, accompanied by clarinets and bassoons just before the final rush to the end, with its virtuosic outbursts and energetic fanfares for the full orchestra. Beethoven once remarked that the Third remained his favorite of all the symphonies he had composed (though this was before he had written the Ninth). In saying this, he no doubt recognized what listeners have felt ever since: that in the Eroica they first know the true Beethoven.

WILLIAM WALTON
Viola Concerto

William Turner Walton, knighted by King George VI in 1951, was born in Oldham, Lancashire, England, on March 29, 1902, and died on Ischia, in the Bay of Naples, on March 8, 1983. The Viola Concerto is the first of his three great concertos for a stringed instrument with orchestra; he wrote it in 1928 and 1929 for Lionel Tertis, but it was Paul Hindemith who was soloist in the premiere on October 3, 1929, with London's Queen's Hall Orchestra under the composer's direction. He revised the score in 1936 and 1961. In addition to the solo viola, the score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), oboe and English horn, two clarinets (second doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, harp, and strings. Duration is about 27 minutes.

Walton composed three concertos for stringed instruments at wide intervals: the Viola Concerto for Lionel Tertis in 1929, the Violin Concerto for Jascha Heifetz in 1939, and the Cello Concerto for Gregor Piatigorsky in 1956. The Viola Concerto is widely regarded as the finest example of its genre. Written when its composer was still generally regarded as an enfant terrible, its poetry and structural power attracted wide notice and helped give the composer the self confidence to continue on a more mainline track than he had hitherto pursued.

Walton had, in fact, become quite notorious for a single early piece, Facade, an unlikely offspring of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire. At the time of its composition, in 1923, Walton was one of the young Turks of British music-he was just 21-and had become connected with the outrageous Sitwells, who were the motivating force for the creation of this early and unique masterpiece.

In this early work he was surely influenced by the chamber ensemble used in Pierrot lunaire and by Schoenberg's treatment of the voice, particularly the rhythmicized character of Sprechstimme, when he undertook to set the poems of Edith Sitwell for a special "entertainment" devised by the Sitwell family. Polka, Ländler, tango, country dance, waltz, foxtrot, tarantella--all these and other styles cropped up in Walton's ebullient score, which is now welcomed for its inventiveness and wit. At the time of the premiere, though, the very parochial critics of the British press regarded the work as scandalous. Headlines read, "Drivel they paid to hear" and "Surely it is time this sort of thing were stopped"!

At any event, Walton did stop. His was essentially a conservative artistic temperament, and by the late '20 this began to be apparent, particularly with the Viola Concerto, which was suggested by Sir Thomas Beecham as a vehicle for Lionel Tertis (1876-1975), whose artistic mastery of that often-snubbed instrument induced many British composers to write for it. The list includes Bax, Bridge, Walton, Vaughan Williams, and Bliss, so that this one performer almost single-handedly created a modern repertory for the instrument. Of all the commissioned works, none so impressed the musical world (and later composers who might write for him) as the Walton concerto.

Walton composed much of the piece in Amalfi, a gloriously beautiful stretch of Italian coast south of Naples, during the winter of 1928-29. By February 2, 1929, he wrote to Siegfried Sassoon to say that he had just finished the second movement, and "I think it will be my best work." When he returned to London in the spring, he sent the completed score to Tertis-only to suffer the indignity of having the intended performer refuse it on account of its Amodernity.@ Later on, in his autobiography, Tertis admitted "with shame and contrition" that he had made a serious mistake in his evaluation of the work. In the end the premiere was played by composer Paul Hindemith, who was a fine violist, but whose temperament was not really suited to the romantic qualities of Walton's music. But Tertis heard that performance, realized how much of the soul of the music Hindemith had not played, and took it up himself. Since that time it has been one of the favorite concerto vehicles for first-rate violists.

Tertis's first response to the concerto is particularly surprising because Walton's art was always essentially romantic, despite the novel surface that he might put on Façade or the oratorio Belshazzar's Feast. In spirit the Viola Concerto is not much different from Elgar=s Cello Concerto, particularly in beginning with a ruminative opening, and reserving the fastest tempo for the middle movement. Any stringed instrument lower than the violin runs the risk of being overwhelmed by the orchestra when used in a concerto, but here, too, Walton has learned from Elgar how to lighten the orchestral part, to leave acoustic openings where the solo instrument can sound through to the ear.

The tone of the first movement's opening is elegiac, with the theme softly hovering over a mildly dissonant accompaniment. A contrasting theme is introduced in a lower register by the soloist against a still lighter orchestration, gently punctuated, and turning into a more rapid passage that becomes driven and energetic. These develop in vigorous opposition to one another, building to a dramatic climax, out of which the solo viola develops a brief cadenza from the opening orchestral phrase, and the elegiac first theme returns in the orchestra with enlivening commentary from the soloist.

The middle movement is not only in the fastest tempo of the work but also draws most explicitly on musical elements that place the concerto in the 1920s-an elaborate pattern of syncopations that derive from ragtime and jazz, but are less square and distinctly less predictable. The surface may come from the "modern era," but the wit can just as easily be called Haydnesque, and the interplay of melodies in a contrapuntal style recalls an updated Bach.

The opening of the finale comes as a surprise; after romantic elegy and jazzy wit, we find a theme that seems at the outset square and even a bit ludicrous. But this begins to interact with more passionate and expressive lines, growing into the weightiest part of the concerto with the opening figure losing its grotesque character and turning into a powerful theme for climactic fugal treatment. Eventually the fugal material turns into an ostinato over which the poignant theme that opened the concerto to bring the work back to its elegiac tone, hovering between minor and major, a wordless introverted nostalgia, longing for that which is no more.

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)

© 2007 Atlantic Symphony Orchestra

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