Program Notes: 14 June 2003
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Salzburg, 1756-Vienna, 1791):
Overture to Le Nozze di Figaro
Even now the opera lover can tune to a broadcast of Le Nozze
di Figaro and hear it introduced as "Mozart's delightful
comedy of love and intrigue", or something similarly
innocuous. But many present-day listeners, informed by recent
scholarship, increasingly see Figaro as Mozart's biting-and
deadly serious-commentary on class conflict, abuse of
aristocratic privilege and issues of gender and sexuality,
all of which were topics of hot debate amongst Enlightenment
thinkers. And at least one modern scholar sees Figaro as an
Enlightenment vision of the pastoral world as refuge for true
lovers, much in line with the doctrines of Rousseau, and, we
may add, Jefferson's view of the pursuit of happiness as an
unalienable right. Power, desire, truth: these eternal themes
of human relationships are the focus of this, and the other
operas, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, that Mozart composed
in his partnership with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte.
In 1783 Mozart met da Ponte, who was lodging at the same
house in Vienna. It is not unlikely that each man was struck
by the other's intellectual brilliance. Mozart had been an
accomplished keyboardist, violinist and composer since
childhood; da Ponte, seven years' Mozart's senior, showed
great facility in languages and literature at an early age.
The meeting would lead to one of the greatest collaborations
in the history of opera.
When Mozart suggested using Beaumarchais' Le mariage de
Figaro as basis for a new comic opera, da Ponte accepted. He
had some experience at converting established plays into
opera, and the first Figaro play, Le barbier de Séville, had
been set by Paisiello with great success. Moreover, Figaro
was prohibited in Vienna as a subversive play, and Mozart
foresaw that its staging as an Italian comic opera would
catch public interest; smart business indeed. With the
emperor in attendance, Le nozze di Figaro was first performed
on 1 May 1786. It was a great triumph, receiving nine
performances that season, only to disappear until Mozart's
success with Don Giovanni caused its revival several years
later.
Il barbiere di Siviglia (set by Paisiello and later, and more
familiarly, by Rossini) sets the situation for the succeeding
opera: Count Almaviva woos the young heiress Rosina under the
nose of her guardian, the lawyer Dr. Bartolo, who had hoped
to marry her himself. Almaviva is aided by the intriguing
barber Figaro, whose profession gains him access to
aristocratic households and sensitive (and therefore useful)
information. In Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro the grateful
Count has made the barber his valet; he has given his
blessing for Figaro to marry Susanna, the Countess'
maidservant. By this time, however, the Count's ardor for his
wife has cooled and he now looks elsewhere for sexual
fulfillment, and even though he has proclaimed that he will
govern his estates by liberal Enlightenment principles,
including the abolishment of the much-hated droit du
seigneur, he is confident of obtaining it with Susanna this
very night. In addition to his master, Figaro must now
contend with enemies made along the way: the vengeful Bartolo
and his old mistress Marcellina, and the Count's unctuous
music-master Don Basilio. These are stock opera buffa
characters and situations, but in the hands of da Ponte, the
early advocate of Rousseau, and Mozart, the liberal
Freemason, they portend much more.
The overture, whilst containing none of the opera's actual
music, sets the mood and concisely narrates the plot. The
tension is immediately palpable in the opening measures,
which contain devices of intrigue: unison eighth-note
passage-work; the low instrumental registers and hushed
dynamics hint at the dark aspects behind the mask of comedy.
Conflict between the characters, and indeed the war between
the sexes, is shown toward the middle of the overture by the
loud scale passages in lower strings and bassoons, very male
in its tympani-accented thumping anger, only to be mocked by
the same figure in the higher-pitched, feminine violins. In
the measures that immediately follow, these same violins
offer the sweeter melody of honesty and reconciliation.
Mozart employs comic touches, such as the chattering
woodwinds suggesting the magistrate Don Curzio's loose
dentures and resultant stutter. Final resolution occurs at
the overture's end when dotted-rhythms in horns, trumpets and
timpani play the wedding march and the proclaim Figaro's
broader theme, the triumph of love, virtue and truth that
transcend the absolutist barriers of sex and station.
Giuseppe Verdi (Le Roncole, 1813-Milan, 1901): Don Carlo Introduction and Scene, "Ella giammai m'amo," Act IV
During the 19th century it was common practice for opera
libretti to derive from the works of great playwrights and
poets. Verdi's Shakespearian operas include Macbeth, Othello
and Falstaff; his Byronic operas include I due Foscari and Il
corsaro; Ernani derives from Hugo, and La traviata from Dumas
fils. But Verdi seems to have had a special affinity for the
plays of Friedrich Schiller, the source for no less than four
operas: Giovanna d'Arco, I masnadieri, Luisa Miller and Don
Carlo.
In 1850, when Verdi was negotiating the composition of Les
vêpres siciliennes with the Paris Opéra, Don Carlos was
suggested as an opera subject. Fifteen years later it came up
again as a scenario by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle.
Verdi accepted it, with the revisions he demanded, including
the spectacle of the auto-da-fé in Act III. He found the
play congruent with his own values: individual and national
freedom and resistance to oppression from throne and church,
interaction of personal and political destinies, and dramatic
complexity of relationships.
It was no easy task to transform Schiller's sprawling drama
into a cohesive opera libretto, and Verdi's demands on du
Locle (Méry died in June, 1866) were severe. Don Carlos was
too long; it was said, amongst other things, that opera goers
would miss the last trains out of Paris. In truth it was
very long, so entire numbers were cut in rehearsals. The
premiere at the Opéra on 11 March 1867, on which so much time
and money had been lavished, was still disappointing to
Verdi, who held that Italian houses gave livelier
performances with far less rehearsal time.
Nonetheless he was fond of this grand opera in the French
style, his longest and darkest score, and was loath to cut
it. In 1882 he revised it himself, still Don Carlos in
French. The first act was removed and numbers were revised.
The four-act version, now known as Don Carlo in Italian
translation, was performed at La Scala in 1884, and this
shorter version held the stage for many years. But in recent
decades the five-act version, in either French or Italian,
has regained favor and is now most often performed.
Despite Friedrich Schiller's place in German letters, Don Carlos
(1787) is rarely performed, and almost never outside Germany. In
fact, it is by dint of Verdi's operas based on his work that
Schiller holds the stage today. He is best known the world over
for his ode "An die Freude," several stanzas of which were set by
Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony. The writing of Don Carlos
increased his interest in historical investigation, and further
historical writing would follow, but his protagonist bore little
resemblance to the actual Infante Carlos, only son of Philip II
of Spain, a 14-year-old hunchback, possibly epileptic, mentally
unstable and violent. It is true that he was briefly betrothed to
the 13-year-old Elisabeth de Valois, daughter of Henry II of
France, and she did marry the 32-year-old Philip, bringing about
peace between the two nations. The historical Carlos accepted
this with no ill will, but he became more unstable and violent
for whatever reasons, and died at the age of 23.
Schiller's dramatic purposes and Enlightenment political
sentiments needed more than this. He drew upon a fictional
narrative, Histoire de Dom Carlos, fils de Philippe II, by the
anti-clerical Abbé César Vichard de Saint-Réal (1639-92). The
abbé, and thus Schiller, transformed the neurotic Don Carlos into
a progressive Hamlet, a brooding intellectual whose energies are
channeled into the cause of Flemish liberation from Spanish
tyranny, and resisting his father, who, for reasons of state,
married Carlos' beloved Elisabeth. The histories of other
personages were altered or invented, such as the ancient and
fanatic Grand Inquisitor; the liberal Marquis of Posa, who shares
Carlos' ideals; and Princess Eboli, who loves Carlos. Schiller,
and later Verdi, created what the scholar Julian Budden sees as a
biblical Samuel-King Saul-Jonathan-David axis, in the form of the
Grand Inquisitor-Philip-Carlos-Posa relationship. This afforded a
complex interconnection of relationships, and both Schiller and
Verdi portray the Spanish king in a most human way, caught
between obligations of the church and the kingdom, and the ideals
of his only son, whom he loves but must imprison and put to
death.
In Act IV, the act in grand opera when dramatic focus shifts
to the intimate, Philip's awful burdens include the
realization that his young bride's heart lies elsewhere, and
this leads to even more desolate realms of self-awareness.
His introduction and scene "Ella giammai m'amo!" is a old-
fashioned, formal ternary structure: introduction and
exposition, a middle section followed by a final section that
recapitulates the musical and dramatic material of the
exposition-very appropriate for Philip's kingly station and
reactionary world view, both of which imprison his humanity.
Carlisle Floyd (Latta, SC, 1926). Susannah: aria, "Hear me, O Lord"
Carlisle Floyd studied composition with Ernst Bacon at
Syracuse University, earning his BA in 1946 and his MA in
1949. He studied piano with Sidney Foster and Rudolf
Firkusny. His teaching career began in 1947 at Florida State
University, where his two-act opera Susannah received its
first performance in 1955. It is typical of Floyd's music in
its accessible style, almost an American type of what
Hindemith called Gebrauchsmusik, or "music for practical
use." Floyd's harmonies are simple but fluid. His melodies
derive from American folk and hymn tunes, but his sources are
far-flung: act I of Susannah begins with a quotation from J.
S. Bach's E-major violin partita, which is almost immediately
transformed into a country fiddle tune.
Floyd has composed operas with the limited resources of small
opera companies in mind. Casts and orchestras are kept
small: no heckelphones or Wagner tubas in his scoring.
Lighting and other technical needs are simple. Likewise, his
plots are simple and appeal to all audiences, with realistic
narratives and characters.
Susannah is based on the story of Susannah and the Elders in
the book of Apocrypha. In New Hope Valley, a Tennessee
mountain hamlet, pretty Susannah Polk (soprano), an innocent
girl of 19, has aroused the jealousy of the Church Elders'
wives. She and her poor family are disdained by the
villagers; she is seen as a possible wanton, and her brother
Sam (tenor) as a drunk. An Elder's son, Bat McLean (tenor)
is pressured by his parents into "confessing" his seduction
by Susannah; conscience-stricken, he warns her.
Sam overhears and advises patience, urging her to attend a
revival meeting led by Olin Blitch (bass-baritone), an
itinerant preacher. Susannah rejects his public appeal to
repentance, and visits her at home to counsel her in person.
He is attracted to her and, urged on by her reputation, makes
advances; despite her revulsion she allows him to spend the
night.
Blitch has destroyed Susannah's standing in the community and
is now stricken with remorse ("Hear me O Lord", the aria on
our program). He realizes that her alleged sinful nature was
based on malicious gossip. But the villagers are unmoved by
his protestations of Susannah's innocence. Her brother Sam
learns of these events, and shoots and kills the preacher.
The villagers attempt to drive Susannah out of town, but she
menaces them with Sam's shotgun. She seductively draws Little
Bat to her in order to slap his face; he runs off as the
curtain falls.
The role of Susannah was sung by Phyllis Curtin at the
prèmiere, in Tallahassee, and at its first New York
performance, by the City Opera in 1956. Susannah has been
widely performed throughout the United States, and in 1966 it
was the only contemporary work to be in the repertory of the
Metropolitan Opera's national company during their inaugural
season.
Verdi: Macbeth. Aria, "Come dal ciel precipita," Act II.
"This tragedy is one of the greatest creations of man," Verdi
said in a letter to his librettist, Francesco Piave, on 4 April
1846. "If we can't make something great out of it let us at
least try and do something out of the ordinary." The tragedy
was Shakespeare's Macbeth, which Piave was transforming into a
libretto for Verdi. True to form, the composer was making all
manner of demands on his librettist: keep the verses short; keep
the style noble and lofty, except for the witches' scenes, which
"must be trivial but in an extravagant original way." Three
weeks later Verdi complained to Piave that Lady Macbeth's
recitative was too long and not "lofty" enough; there were too
many lines in the duet between Macbeth and Banquo-"Oh, how
prolix you are!" Verdi was no easy man to work with, especially
in the case of the long-suffering Piave, his most frequent
collaborator.
Perhaps Verdi's inherently prickly nature was exacerbated by his
veneration of Shakespeare, and Macbeth in particular. The bloody
melodrama and gloomy Scottish setting appealed to an era that was
fascinated with all things Scottish, a by-product of the Romantic
cult of early times, enshrouded in the mists of myth and distant
historical memory. No wonder that the Scottish Play was
Shakespeare's most popular tragedy in Verdi's time. There are
other reasons, especially the popular fascination with what the
historian Garry Wills calls liminal states of mind, those border
regions that lie between consciousness and unconsciousness,
sanity and madness, waking and dreaming, and life and death.
Melancholia, madness, somnambulism, dreams, séances and
apparitions excited the popular imagination; Macbeth's brooding
soloquies, Banquo's ghost, the three witches and Lady Macbeth's
madness and suicide (women's madness became a stock operatic item
also) were sure guarantors of a full house; so was a gore-
saturated stage. All these were stock-in-trade for Italian
opera of the 19th century. But Verdi, with his peerless
theatrical instincts, incorporated all these items into a firmly-
paced and emotionally genuine narrative.
Banquo's "Come dal ciel precipita" (Act II) is a deeply moving
romanza for baritone in a strong supporting rôle, a Verdi
hallmark. In the wooded grounds of Macbeth's castle, gangs of
hired murderers hide in wait for Banquo and Fleance, who now
enter. Introduced by nervous string tremolos, Banquo advises
caution on his son Fleance. Dirge-like lower brasses and
bassoons in the gloomy key of F minor set the mood as Banquo, in
measured notes, meditates on this night, much like that of
Duncan's murder. "A thousand anxious imaginings herald
misfortune," he sings, as Verdi's harmonic scheme brings an
anxious moment in the surprising move to A-flat minor, and then
to the parallel major; the shift back, not to F minor but to the
unexpected F major, underscores the "phantoms of terror" that
oppress Banquo's mind.
The ballet music for Macbeth continues the mood of the
witches and their cauldrons that opens Act III. It contains
"Scottish" dotted rhythms, and musical colors that suggest
the gloom of Scottish heaths and mists, and invokes the
supernatural stage action; there are also lyric episodes.
The ballet closes with a witches' round-dance whose rhythms
recall those of the Ronde du sabbat in Berlioz' Symphonie
fantastique. Macbeth's first performance, at Florence on 14
March 1847, was successful. Verdi sold the score to Ricordi
for 18,000 lire, compared with 2500 lire he received for
Nabucco just a few years earlier. He revised it for Paris in
1865, where it was performed at the Théâtre-Lyrique in French
translation.
Ludwig van Beethoven (Bonn, 1770-Vienna, 1827):
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
In 1813, just five years after Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was
first performed, E.T.A. Hoffmann declared that his music
"sets in motion the lever of fear, of awe, of horror, of
suffering, and wakens just that infinite longing which is the
essence of romanticism." Beethoven was "a completely romantic
composer" who no longer composes by design or shape, "but,
following the so-called dæmonic method, he dashes everything
off exactly as his ardently active imagination dictates it to
him . . . Can there be any work of Beethoven's that confirms
all this to a to a higher degree than his indescribably
profound, magnificent symphony in C minor?"
Hoffmann's reception of the Fifth typified idealism, a new
idealist æsthetic current amongst theorists, critics and
audiences of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. An outgrowth
of the 18th-century sublime, it bestowed upon instrumental music
a new prestige, the highest expression of a musical and artistic
ideal. Idealist thinkers believed that instrumental music
exercised a power of imagination, which Beethoven's favorite
intellectual Immanuel Kant called Geist, or "spirit," that was
beyond the explicitly descriptive power of language, and could
only be manifest in the higher ideal of musical form; it
transported the listener to the infinite realm of pure spirit,
beyond the constraints of words and concrete images. Aesthetics
of idealism notwithstanding, Hoffmann's hagiographic tone would
become the very stuff of what Sir George Grove called "the
Beethoven religion" that prevailed over the public imagination
throughout the 19th century; the Fifth Symphony was amongst its
most venerated objects of worship.
The first sketches date from 1804 and are intermixed with those
of the Fourth Piano Concerto, whose opening rhythms the Fifth
Symphony shares. But work on the new symphony stopped as other
compositions engaged Beethoven's energies in those years. By
1806 Beethoven again turned his attention to symphonic
composition. The C-minor symphony's planned finale, a movement
of Mozartean pathos, was discarded and a new, utterly triumphant
finale took shape. By that time he had made the acquaintance of
Count Franz von Oppersdorff, who wished to act as Beethoven's
patron and thus obtain his latest works. Oppersdorff paid
advance fees for the new symphony in C minor. In 1807, however,
Beethoven interrupted work on it to compose a mass for the
Esterházy family. In March 1808 he wrote Oppersdorff, informing
him that the new symphony would soon be ready once the parts had
been copied. The count sent more money, but Beethoven, who could
be less than scrupulous in business, dedicated the C-minor
symphony and its companion, the Sixth Symphony (Pastorale), to
Prince Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky. Oppersdorf was
compensated by receiving the Fourth Symphony, and disappeared
from Beethoven's life. The two new symphonies were performed at a
concert on 22 December 1808, at the Theater an der Wien.
The Fifth is Beethoven's first minor-key symphony, and his "C
minor mood" has been much commented upon. It is much
different from that of Mozart, for whom this key had aspects
of sublimity: melancholy, terror, otherworldliness.
Beethoven, however, used C minor as a stormy, heroic
tonality; his works in this key include the String Quartet
Op. 18, no. 4; the Pathétique Sonata; the Third Piano
Concerto; the Eroica Symphony's funeral march; the overture
to Collin's drama Coriolan; and, of course, the Fifth
Symphony-all well-known works full of high intensity
bordering on vehemence.
The sudden shifts from C minor to C major in the Fifth, which
occur within the first and third movements, and between the
third and fourth movements, recall Haydn's late minor-key
symphonies, which employ this tonal scheme; so does the
beginning of The Creation, where the sudden, glorious
breaking-forth of the parallel major happens on the words
"And there was light." The association of minor-to-major
with darkness-to-light was a common enough trope during the
Classic Era. But Beethoven's uses of it in the Fifth are
particularly momentous, especially in the unexpected full
force of the Finale's triumphant opening measures, a moment
which he reserved for the first use of the piccolo,
contrabassoon and trombones in the symphony.
The extreme gestures and vehement energy are typical of
Beethoven's "heroic period." They are also the rhetoric of
the revolutionary orator, for Beethoven was captivated by the
sentiments, rhetoric and music of the French Revolution. This
captivation shows in the slow movement's fanfares and the
augmented winds and martial spirit of the Finale, all of
which recall the music of the Revolutionary fêtes and stage
works; moreover, the conductor and period-performance
specialist John Eliot Gardiner believes that the first-
movement motive of the Fifth derives from the rhythms of
Cherubini's Hymne au Panthéon of 1794, music Beethoven
probably knew and respected. (Gardiner is more credible than
Beethoven's factotum, Anton Schindler, a notoriously
unreliable source, whose well-traveled Beethoven quote, that
the world's most famous musical motive represents "Fate
knocking at the door," is probably apocryphal.)
Additionally, the expanded wind section and more aggressive
brass and timpani writing are straight from the opera house,
especially the horn-and-trumpet fanfares in the slow
movement, the long timpani lead-in to the Finale, and the
grand wind sonorities with which the Finale begins. Overall,
the musical language of the Fifth may be the most operatic
Beethoven employs in any of his symphonies. No wonder, for
Fidelio had its première just a few years before, and he was
now writing more music for the stage. The so-called "rescue
opera", a fashion imported from Revolutionary France, had an
especial influence-Fidelio was of this type-and the entire
Fifth Symphony, with its gripping opening movement, moody and
unsettled slow movement, dark and brooding scherzo and
triumphant finale, has the dramatic, narrative qualities of
grand opera. Nonetheless the Fifth's structure is purely
symphonic, and derived from well-tried practices. The
motives that tie the entire work together are short, two or
four measures, typical of Classic-era melodic construction.
The first-movement exposition and development are extremely
tight, again a Haydn hallmark. The fugato writing in the
Scherzo's trio recalls the young Beethoven's mastery of J. S.
Bach at the keyboard. But Beethoven's repetitive hammering-
out of the motives; the intense and unrelenting energy
followed by periods of unsettled reflection, especially in
the slow movement; and the unexpected shifting of gravity to
other structural points, such as the coda of the outer
movements-all these are the compositional methods of a
revolutionary architect in music. After two centuries
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony still has the power of transport.
- Henry Wyatt
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