Beethoven: Symphony No.7

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 7 in A, Op.92

1. Poco sostenuto – Vivace
2. Allegretto
3. Presto
4. Allegro con brio

The first performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony on 8 December 1812 was one of the greatest triumphs of his career. The occasion was a benefit concert for soldier wounded at the battle of Hanau. In the way of early 19th century concerts, the programme was exceptionally long, and as well as the Seventh included the premier of his Eighth Symphony. Both were received well (and the Seventh’ second movement proved popular enough that it was encored), although it was the potboiler “Battle Symphony” that really attracted attention, celebrating Wellington’s recent victory at Vitoria, a turning point in the Napoleonic Wars.


Beethoven was certainly well-acquainted with the course of the wars. An avowed supporter of the Republican revolution in France, he had originally dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon, only to strike the dedication from the title page when Napoleon declared himself Emperor. He had also suffered in 1809 when Napoleon’s forces occupied Vienna. Already suffering deteriorating hearing, he complained that the noise of shelling was accelerating his descent into deafness.


Life in an occupied city was difficult enough, but Beethoven was also wrestling with poor health and depression. In 1811 on the advice of his doctor he went to stay for six months at the spa town of Teplice in Bohemia. The break evidently did some good: on his return to Vienna in the winter he began work on his Seventh Symphony. However, his health remained poor enough that his doctor ordered him back to Teplice in summer 1812. It was here that he wrote his famous letter addressed to “The Immortal Beloved”: a passionate love letter, never sent. Speculation continues to this day about the intended recipient. It is an extraordinary document, that reveals a man in emotional disarray, torn between his evident desire for the intended recipient and a conviction that his vocation as a composer means he cannot commit to a relationship.


Beethoven may have been filled with doubt and depression, but the Seventh Symphony is a statement of absolute conviction. It is characterised by a rhythmic obsessiveness that is relentless even by Beethoven’s standards. Coupled with this is a strong tendency to build structures on drones or repeated bass figures, something also heard in a number of folksong arrangements Beethoven made at the time. The combination of obsessive repetition and abrupt, violent changes of mood and texture led some to speculate that he had composed the symphony while drunk. His contemporary Weber went as far as to suggest that passages such as the coda to the first movement, in which cellos and basses waver around a drone for a full 22 bars, demonstrated that Beethoven was “ripe for the madhouse.”


The first movement’s slow introduction is on such an expansive scale that it might almost be considered a movement in itself. It reaches a climax and dies away to a moment of indecision, one of those moments where the listener is almost put into the mind of the composer: an idea is repeated, turned, and gradually changed until it becomes the rhythm that dominates the main part of the movement. This begins quietly and innocuously before erupting into a forceful galop that hardly lets up.


The second movement is similarly built on an obsessive repeated rhythm. At its first performance it was taken to be a funeral march for the dead of the Napoleonic Wars, and in fact its structure closely resembles the funeral march from his Third Symphony: a sombre opening alternating with a gentler more pastoral idea. Beethoven also borrows another idea from his Third here, in presenting the accompaniment first, before the theme appears winding its way over the dactyls of the bass.


The third movement is an altogether earthier dance. Its opening "scherzo" [in Italian, literally "joke"] section is a rumbustious triple time canter, full of unexpected twists and turns. The contrasting "trio" section’s theme was originally sketched in 1806 and intended for a string quartet. It derives from a Lower Austrian pilgrims’ hymn tune and builds from a quiet prayer to a full blooded cry, as though the congregation has joined in. Both sections are reprised before a final outing of the opening. At the very end Beethoven suggests that he might even go round again, before dismissing the idea with a series of short sharp chords.


The finale picks up where the third movement left off, and then proceeds without respite. It is not so much the speed of the music (Beethoven wrote plenty of faster music) so much as its muscularity that creates its sense of unstoppable force. How deaf Beethoven was by 1811 is a matter of debate; his pupil Czerny maintained that he was still able to hear relatively well and only succumbed to profound deafness later. But he certainly pushes his orchestra here to the extreme, and having exhorted the players to produce an almost unyielding fortissimo [“strongest” or “loudest”] in the final bars he demands for the first time that they produce a triple-forte, effectively demanding that they play “louder than possible.”


In 1816 The Seventh Symphony broke new ground by being the first of his symphonies to be published as a score. This was a significant event: music had hitherto been published purely in the form of instrumental parts, intended for performers. Increasingly, an expanding middle-class audience had the means and desire to study orchestral works. This marked the birth of the notion of a canon of “great works” that largely persists today. As Beethoven’s letters to his publisher complaining of the many mistakes in the score attest, he found the experience thoroughly aggravating. However, given his appalling handwriting, it is perhaps appropriate to spare a sympathetic thought not only for the challenge presented to the musicians, but also the no less Herculean task faced by Beethoven’s copyists.

Stravinsky: Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments

1. Largo - Allegro - Maestoso
2. Largo
3. Allegro

The piano was central to Stravinsky’s composing routine, but it was not until 1924 that he began to see performing on it in public as a potential source of revenue for himself. Always of an entrepeneurial bent, he had in the years since the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World War been working hard to expand his sources of income through a variety of means. As well as performing, the early 1920s saw Stravinsky take up conducting, and engage in the creation of piano rolls of his music. There were certainly good incentives to engage in these activities: all enabled his music to be propagated to a wider audience. However, another advantage was the control they gave Stravinsky over the presentation of his music. He was spurred to take up the baton by the cool reception given to the premiere of Symphonies of Wind Instruments and in 1923 as well as conducting the early performances of his Octet took advantage of another new technology by making a recording of the piece. Meanwhile, he had been taking advantage of facilities offered by the Pleyel Company in Paris to create pianola versions of his works. In an interview he explained that his aim in creating these rolls was not to produce ‘a photograph of my playing... but rather a “lithograph”, a full and permanent record of tone combinations that are beyond my ten poor fingers to perform.’


These activities - the taking charge of performances and using various means of mechanical reproduction to relay his music - may be seen as a reflection of his increasingly vocal antipathy to the very idea of “interpretation”, which he characterised as “a crime against the composer”. His music, he asserted, should be performed exactly and precisely as he had written it, with no liberties whatsoever to be taken by the performers. The player-piano in particular appealed, as an instrument able to produce a performance without any interpretive interference.


It is ironic that with the premiere of his Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments in 1924 Stravinsky used music designed to deny the possibility of individuality to launch his career as an interpretive performer. Whether he intended this from the start or whether that he should take the soloist’s role was suggested as he neared completion of the work by its commissioner Serge Koussevitsky, is unclear. Certainly the influence of Carl Czerny's studies that Stravinsky practised to prepare for his public performance can be heard in the concerto. Also unclear is whether there is any truth in the tale of his memory lapse at the first performance. As Stravinsky himself relates it in his memoirs, “After finishing the first movement and just before beginning the Largo which opens with a passage for solo piano, I suddenly realized that I had completely forgotten how it started. I said so quietly to Koussevitzky, who glanced at the score and hummed the first notes. That was enough to restore my balance and enable me to attack the Largo.” Stravinsky was a master of inflating his own myth, however, and Sergei Prokofiev, who was present, remembered no such incident. The concerto was performed over 40 times in the first five years of its existence, all with the composer at the piano - Stravinsky had made sure to retain exclusive performing rights for himself, realising that the fees he earned as performer of the concerto were rather greater than the performing royalties he received as its composer.


The Concerto is one of the earliest manifestations of his so-called "neoclassical" style. The distinctly Russian voice of his earlier works is abandoned in favour of what appears to be a mask stitched together from gestures drawn from earlier music. In addition to the exercises of Czerny's, the concerto displays a debt to baroque. The absence of strings follows the example of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and his cantata Les noces [The Wedding], which was originally envisioned as an orchestral work but ended up scores for pianos and percussion. “The short, crisp dance character of the Toccata (the concerto's first movement)," explained Stravinsky, "engendered by the percussion of the piano, led to the idea that a wind ensemble would suit the piano better than any other combination. In contrast to the percussiveness of the piano, the winds prolong the piano's sound as well as providing the human element of respiration."


The music of the concerto swings between two poles. These are set out in the first movement, in which a slow, monumental, Handelian introduction leads to a hyperactive toccata which embodies the "sewing machine" view of baroque music. The subsequent two movement repeat this pattern: a solemn slow movement and a sparkling motor of a finale, which pauses slightly for a recollection of the very opening before speeding to its conclusion.


Stravinsky recalled that on another occasion performing the concerto,“I suffered a lapse of memory because I was suddenly obsessed by the idea that the audience was a collection of dolls in a huge panopticon. Still another time, my memory froze because I suddenly noticed the reflection of my fingers in the glossy wood at the edge of the keyboard.” Such detached, isolated feelings perhaps offer a clue to the unsettling effect of his neoclassical style. The mechanical sewing-machine rhythms and the ironic appropriation of archaic musical gestures suggest something more than simply the donning of a mask, but the disturbing possibility that there is nothing behind the mask.