WASO Perform The Greats

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)

Don Giovanni, K527: Overture

It was the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, who suggested the theme to Mozart: the wellknown 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:
4 November 2023. Umberto Clerici, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets,
two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets,
timpani, strings.

Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)

Violin Concerto in D, Op.61

Allegro ma non troppo
Larghetto –
Rondo (Allegro)

In December 1806, Johann Nepomuk Möser reviewed a concert for the Wiener Theaterzeitung at which ‘the excellent Klement’, leader of the orchestra at the Theater an der Wien, ‘also played, besides other beautiful pieces, a Violin Concerto by Beethhofen’. Möser went on to note that the ‘experts’ were unanimous, ‘allowing it many beauties, but recognising that its scheme often seems confused and that the unending repetitions of certain commonplace events could easily prove wearisome’. It is hard to imagine how the critics back then got it so wrong and why there was only one other documented performance during Beethoven’s life. (It was not until Joseph Joachim took the piece up in 1844 that it gained any currency at all.) Beethoven himself may have felt that the work had no future, as he made a version for piano and orchestra for the pianist, composer and publisher Muzio Clementi soon after the premiere.

Beethoven had been working at tremendous speed in the latter half of 1806. Having finally completed the first version of his opera Fidelio, he then in quick succession composed the Fourth Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto, the three ‘Razumovsky’ string quartets, the Violin Concerto and one or two other things before the end of the year.

The early years of the 19th century, Beethoven’s ‘heroic decade’, saw works that dramatise titanic struggles and epic victories on a scale unimagined by previous composers. This may reflect Beethoven’s own heroic response to the deafness which began to hamper his professional and personal life at the time; it may also reflect radical upheavals in European society: Napoleon’s armies occupied Vienna three times in the course of the decade. But the period also produced works of great serenity such as the Violin Concerto. Still large-scale works, their emotional worlds are far from the violent tensions of the odd-numbered symphonies.

Beethoven had toyed with and abandoned a Violin Concerto in the early 1790s. By the time of the D major work, however, he had composed nine of his ten sonatas for piano and violin. From the 1802 Op.30 set on, he invested these with the same complexity of emotion and expanded scale that we have noted in the symphonies and string quartets. But Beethoven’s interest in the concerto medium was, until 1806, primarily in composing works for himself as soloist – the first four piano concertos; after that time his hearing loss made concerto playing too risky. At one remove, as it were, in this work he could concentrate on the problem of reconciling the principles of symphonic composition – which stress dramatic contention and ultimate integration of contrasting thematic material – and concerto composition, which adds the complication of pitting the individual against the mass.

In the Violin Concerto Beethoven uses a number of gambits to bring about this synthesis. As in several works of this period, the Violin Concerto often makes music out of next to no material; the opening gesture of five drum taps, for instance, seemingly blank at the start, returns several times during the movement, most strikingly when the main material is recapitulated: there the whole orchestra takes up the motif. Similarly, the Larghetto slow movement has been famously described by Donald Tovey as an example of ‘sublime inaction’ – nothing seems to be happening, though in fact subtle changes and variations of material stop the piece from becoming monotonous. The seemingly improvised transition into the last movement dramatises the gradual change from that immobility to the release of energy in the finale. Throughout the work, Beethoven expertly creates and frustrates our expectations: the soloist only enters after a fully symphonic introduction, and only then with an ornamental flourish, rather than any thematic material. The beautiful second theme is, as Maynard Solomon notes, perfectly composed to exploit the richness of the lowest string of the instrument, but the soloist only gets that theme at the movement’s end. This large-scale plotting of the work allowed Beethoven to expand the dimensions of the violin concerto beyond all ‘classical’ expectations, and lay the foundation for the great concertos of Brahms and Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius.

Gordon Kerry © 2008

First performance:
23 December 1806, Vienna. Composer
conducting; Franz Clement, soloist.

First WASO performance:
31 July 1948. Bernard Heinze,
conductor; Ginette Neveu, soloist.

Most recent WASO performance:
9-10 March 2018. Asher Fisch,
conductor; Veronika Eberle, soloist.

Instrumentation:
flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two
bassoons, two horns, two trumpets,
timpani, strings.

Antonín Dvořák
(1841-1904)

Symphony No.7 in D minor, Op.70

Allegro maestoso
Poco adagio
Scherzo (Vivace) – Trio (Poco meno mosso)
Finale (Allegro)

From out of the darkness of a deep tonic pedal, violas and cellos wind their way ominously towards the light, rising to a peremptory three-note tattoo, repeated, each time more insistently, till it ends without hope on a stabbing chord. Thus, in a mere six bars, Dvořák sets the mood at the outset for the most powerful and serious of his nine symphonies.

It cost the composer greater effort than any of the others. In December 1884 he wrote to a friend: ‘Wherever I go I have nothing else in mind but [my new symphony], which must be capable of stirring the world, and God grant that it may!’ On one hand, he wished to impress the Philharmonic Society of London (which had commissioned it on his first visit to England in March 1884 and since elected him to honorary membership). On the other, he frankly sought to create a work which emulated the strength and beauty he had admired in the Third Symphony of his great friend and mentor Brahms on its premiere at the end of 1883. Dvořák keenly sought unqualified commendation from Brahms, for the latter was not only a staunch advocate, but also a stern critic of any carelessness he found in the younger composer’s work. Brahms had told Dvořák he looked forward to the new symphony being ‘quite different’ from its predecessor, No.6 in D.

Dvořák wrestled besides with a spiritual struggle stemming from his failure to win recognition at home as a composer of Czech operas and from his acute artistic need, love of country notwithstanding, to win recognition and success internationally. In the defiant tone of the Seventh Symphony we sense the composer choosing determinedly to strike out on his own.

The grimness of Dvořák’s main firstmovement theme and its related ideas is moderated by a gentle, conciliatory second theme introduced by flute and clarinet, but the movement ends in brooding resignation. To the slow movement Dvořák brings a prayer for serenity and consolation, in the course of which the pent-up anguish of all his doubts and uncertainties bursts forth. From the catharsis of anguish comes an elevated calm which lifts the heart and brings the movement to a tender conclusion.

The scherzo has much of the character of a furiant, but, far from being a simple and sunny Czech dance, it soon becomes dour, its rhythms pounding aggressively. The dreamlike central trio evokes a pastoral scene, with trilling birdsong and distant hunting horns. But the return of the scherzo jolts us back to reality.

The finale cries poignantly for help. Searching for direction, we gradually find ourselves swept up in the irresistible propulsion of a surging march. As a sense of real confidence develops, cellos and decorative violins introduce a broad, warm-hearted second theme – the first sign of happiness in the symphony and also, as Dvořák biographer Šourek suggests, Dvořák’s first use of a melody with national colouring. All now sweeps forward to a solemnly exultant conclusion in the major mode.

The composer personally conducted the first performance of his Seventh Symphony in St James’s Hall, London on 22 April 1885. (It is actually numbered ‘6’ on the autograph score, presumably because Dvořák didn’t count his first essay in the form, The Bells of Zlonice.) Public and critics gave it a more mixed reaction than its immediately attractive predecessor, which Dvořák had conducted there the previous year. But this did not dampen his habitual self-confidence as he wrote home: ‘The Symphony was immensely successful, and at the next performance will be a still greater success.’ In fact, the turning point with the Seventh Symphony seems to have been a pair of performances which Hans von Bülow conducted in Berlin in 1889, at which the composer was present. So ecstatic was Dvořák that he pasted a portrait of von Bülow on the title page of the score above an inscription: ‘Slava! – Glory be to you! You brought this work to life!’ That admiration was reciprocated. Bülow is known to have expressed the view that ‘the most important composer for me, apart from Brahms, is Dvořák’.

Abridged from a note © Anthony Cane

First performance:
22 April 1885, London, composer conducting.

First WASO performance:
15 April 1950. Rudolf Pekárek,
conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
5 August 2023. Asher Fisch, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two
oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four
horns, two trumpets, three trombones,
timpani, strings.