Beethoven’s Second Symphony - Morning
MORNING SYMPHONY SERIES
Thursday 2 November 2023, 11.00am
Perth Concert Hall
West Australian Symphony Orchestra respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and Elders of Country throughout Western Australia, and the Whadjuk Noongar people on whose lands we work and share music.
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Beethoven’s Second Symphony - Morning
Franz SCHUBERT Rosamunde: Overture (10 mins)
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART Don Giovanni: Overture (6 mins)
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN Symphony No.2 (34 mins)
Adagio molto–Allegro con brio
Larghetto
Scherzo (Allegro) and Trio
Allegro molto
Umberto Clerici conductor
Wesfarmers Arts Pre-concert Talk
Find out more about the music in the concert with this week’s speaker Yvonne Frindle. The Pre-concert Talk will take place at 9.40am in the Main Auditorium.
Listen to WASO
This performance is recorded for broadcast on ABC Classic.
For further details visit abc.net.au/classic.
WASO On Stage
About the Artist
Umberto Clerici
Conductor
After a career spanning more than 20 years as a gifted cello soloist and orchestral musician, Umberto Clerici has consolidated his diverse artist achievements to rapid acclaim as a conductor. Umberto is now the Chief Conductor of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.
Umberto began his career as a virtuoso cellist making his solo debut at the age of 17 performing Haydn’s D Major cello concerto in Japan. After years of performing throughout the world he took up the position of Principal Cello of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (2014-2021).
It was in Sydney in 2018 that Umberto made his conducting debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House. Following a swift trajectory of prestigious conducting engagements, Umberto is now in high demand with the major symphony orchestras throughout Australia and New Zealand. Umberto's other 2023 conducting engagements include returns to Sydney, Melbourne and West Australian Symphony Orchestras and his debut with the Tasmanian Symphony and Dunedin Symphony Orchestras. Earlier this season Umberto his debut in opera conducting Verdi’s Macbeth with Opera Queensland.
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About the Music
Franz Schubert
(1797-1828)
Rosamunde: Overture, D.644
In 1823 Schubert was commissioned to write incidental music to the romantic play Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus. He supplied interludes and ballet music – which survive among Schubert’s most popular orchestral works – but he wrote no overture. On the night (on both nights – the play flopped with only two performances) the overture to his opera Alfonso and Estrella was performed, and this was subsequently published with the rest of the Rosamunde music. Curiously, different music yet again has come down to us as the ‘Rosamunde Overture’.
Nowadays, almost without exception, when we hear the ‘Rosamunde Overture’ we are listening to the music composed to precede the melodrama Die Zauberharfe (or The Magic Harp) in 1820. This overture is without doubt Schubert’s best-known short orchestral piece.
The obvious tunefulness and life of this music has tended to obscure some fascinating aspects of the piece. One is that the striking changes of harmony in the rather grand introduction were taken from one of Schubert’s own ‘Overtures in the Italian Style’, and also used in the Symphony No.6 in C, where Schubert is clearly influenced by Rossini, whose music was just then beginning to take Vienna by storm. So in the Rosamunde Overture a Viennese composer takes on some Italian dialect! Such is Schubert’s own strength of creative personality that the result, far from sounding imitative, is something fresh and new. This fine music could be paralleled with Weber’s overtures to operas on romantic subjects (Der Freischütz, and Oberon, for example) but Schubert, like Rossini, remains more the classicist, the disciple of Haydn and Mozart.
- Yvonne Frindle
Composition Year:
1823.
Most Recent WASO Performance:
18-19 August 2000.
Sebastian Lang-Lessing, conductor.
Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets and three trombones; timpani and strings.
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About the Music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)
Don Giovanni, K527: Overture
It was the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, who suggested the theme to Mozart: the well-known tale of Don Juan, the libertine who seduces woman after woman until, having killed the father of one of his conquests, he is finally dragged off to hell by a stone statue of the dead man.
Mozart’s opera, however, is more than a simple morality play. Indeed, there is some question as to exactly how it should be described. Mozart in his thematic catalogue called it an opera buffa (‘comic opera’), but the score and the libretto both describe it as a dramma giocoso or ‘playful drama’ – a term which some take to be a simple alternative to the term ‘opera buffa’ but which had also been used to describe the blend of serious and comic characters and turns of plot, in a realistic narrative style, pioneered by librettist Carlo Goldoni from around 1750. Certainly, despite the sober ending and moral epilogue, there are plenty of comic elements and the Overture establishes this from the start, as the slow and imposing introduction, with its crashing chords and whisperings and murmurings from the violins, emerges into a bright and energetic Allegro.
Legend would have us believe that Mozart procrastinated so much about the composition of this overture that on the eve of the opera’s premiere he had still not composed it. Whatever the case, the overture made it in time for the raising of the curtain on the opera’s first performance on 29 October 1787.
Symphony Australia © 2004
First Performance:
29 October 1787, National Theatre, Prague.
First WASO Performance:
12 June 1945. Ernest MacMillan, conductor.
Most Recent WASO Performance:
3 November 2018.
Christopher Dragon, conductor (Kalgoorlie).
Instrumentation:
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings.
Glossary
Allegro – Italian performance/tempo indication meaning fast and lively. A movement or section of music in this style.
Libretto – the words of an opera or oratorio.
About the Music
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)
Symphony No.2 in D, Op.36
Adagio molto–Allegro con brio
Larghetto
Scherzo (Allegro) and Trio
Allegro molto
To a modern listener, the movement merely proclaims the composer’s youthful vigour.
Beethoven was by now expanding symphonic form significantly. On one hand there is a vast slow introduction – by turns imposing, solemn and lyrical – which reaches a powerful climax in D minor (presaging the Ninth Symphony) before a mood of hushed expectancy gives way to an irresistible ‘boil-over’ directly into the Allegro. On the other hand, the outer movements culminate in bigger and grander codas than ever before. And, perhaps most significantly, we see unprecedented weight and emphasis on the last movement – the finale no longer just a high-spirited wrap-up but now beginning to bear a greater burden of symphonic argument.
If the first-movement Allegro pursues a course of unprecedented brilliance and energy, it nevertheless remains essentially ‘normal’ until the coda, where, as Donald Francis Tovey has suggested, Beethoven’s orchestra rises to an intense climax assuming the grandeur of a great chorus.
To follow such exhilaration comes a Larghetto movement described by Tovey as ‘one of the most luxurious slow movements in the world’, and by Robert Simpson as ‘an outstanding marvel of beauty and grace’. Even with no indication of the normal sonata-form repeats, this leisurely movement is unusually substantial, causing Beethoven in a later arrangement for piano trio to indicate a marginally livelier tempo, Larghetto quasi andante.
The third movement is the first in a Beethoven symphony to bear the supposedly characteristic designation Scherzo, and is, in fact, the first of only two such movements in all Beethoven’s symphonies. It reveals the composer in boisterous good humour, as he contrives to make music out of a variety of staccato three-note figures with impulsive chordal interjections, yet managing to sound joyful, as if he were out in the countryside free of all worldly cares.
Similar sharp dynamic contrasts characterise the finale – the movement which, more than any other, marks the composer’s advance in the three years since the First Symphony. Like the Larghetto, this is a sonata movement without repeats, displaying great brilliance and good humour, and posing a problem of dissonant harmony which finds resolution in a massive coda more than half as long again as the main body of the movement. It is in the coda that Beethoven opens the magic casements briefly, poised on a knife-edge of hushed expectancy, to reveal a blissful glimpse of future glories in store. But it cannot last. Beethoven at age 32 can only round it off and bring us conventionally down to earth.
Beethoven completed the Second Symphony in the seclusion of rural Heiligenstadt, outside Vienna, where he was under doctor’s orders to rest and try to restore his failing hearing. It was there that he realised his ailment was progressive and incurable, there that he was driven to pen his despairing, valedictory Heiligenstadt Testament. Yet at the same time he was able to compose a symphony of mingled exhilaration and bliss – a salutary reminder that he, unlike the Romantics, is to be interpreted by heart-on-sleeve analysis at one’s peril.
Anthony Cane © 1998/2011
First Performance:
5 April 1803, Vienna. Composer conducting.
Most recent WASO performance:
24 August 2014. Asher Fisch, conductor.
Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons; two horns, two trumpets; timpani and strings.
Glossary
Coda – a concluding section added to the basic structure of a piece or movement to emphasise the sense of finality.
Sonata form – a term conceived in the 19th century to describe the way most Classical composers structured at least the first movement of a symphonic work or a sonata. It involves the exposition or presentation of themes or subjects: the first subject is in the tonic or home key, the second in a contrasting key. The resulting tension between keys is intensified in the development, where recognisable melodic and rhythmic aspects of the themes are manipulated as the music moves further and further away from the ultimate goal of the home key. Tension is resolved at the recapitulation where both subjects are fully restated in the tonic. There is sometimes a coda (literally, ‘tail’) to enhance the sense of finality.
Staccato – short, detached notes.
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