After just having heard on Saturday evening a live WQXR broadcast from Carnegie Hall that featured the Vienna Philharmonic performing, among other works, Schubert's Eighth Symphony, I went to the Hall on Sunday afternoon to hear the same ensemble give another concert, once again under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst. On this occasion, the orchestra paired a work from the very end of Romanticism with one from that movement's earliest beginnings.
The program opened with a relatively short work, Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, ("Transfigured Night") originally composed in 1899 for string sextet; it was subsequently arranged by the composer for chamber orchestra in 1917 and then revised in 1943. This is the composer's most accessible and therefore best known work, a favorite of those audiences who find his later twelve tone technique too difficult to appreciate. And this short tone poem, based on verses by Richard Dehmel, is in fact a haunting and evocative piece that is quite affecting to hear. In it, Schoenberg fairly well exhausted whatever possibilities Romanticism still had left to offer, and in that sense it can be viewed as a turning point in modern music. The composer himself saw in it, at least for himself, the resolution of the conflict between the absolute music of Brahms and programmatic works of Wagner. In a letter to Dehmel he wrote:
"For your poems have had a decisive influence on my development as a composer. They were what first made me try to find a new tone in the lyrical mood. Or rather, I found it even without looking, simply by reflecting in music what your poems stirred up in me."
It is difficult today to comprehend how controversial the chamber version of this work must have sounded to its Viennese audience at its premiere in 1902, both for Dehmel's then explicit references to sexuality as well as for Schoenberg's own infamous use of the "nonexistent" inverted ninth chord.
After intermission, the orchestra returned to perform the second and final work on the program, Schubert's Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944 (1825-1826), justifiably known as the "Great," in part to distinguish it from the composer's Symphony No. 6 in the same key and in part to acknowledge its own magnificence. Perhaps there exists no more poignant testament to the relative anonymity in which Schubert lived his life than the confusion surrounding the numbering and dating of his symphonies. Unpublished during his lifetime and even for several decades thereafter, the symphonies' chronologies had to be painstakingly reconstructed after the composer's death, thus making it seem he had lived in antiquity rather than in the nineteenth century. What a contrast to the situation of Beethoven whose works were published and assigned opus numbers almost as soon as he had written them. It's now generally accepted that this work is the missing Gmunden-Gastein symphony from 1824 and that it should therefore more correctly be listed as the No.8. The D. 944 might, in fact, never have come down to us at all if Schumann, during a visit to Vienna, had not fortuitously paid a visit to Schubert's brother Ferdinand who had kept the manuscripts in safekeeping and had even arranged for a performance of the symphony's last movement. Fortunately, Schumann was as perspicacious a critic as one could hope to find in 1830's Germany. Immediately recognizing the symphony's importance, he sent a copy of the manuscript to Mendelssohn who successfully premiered the work with the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1839. But even then the work was misunderstood by audiences and musicians alike. The audiences found it far too long and the musicians, most notably in London, thought it unplayable. It was only in the twentieth century, after Mahler and others had redefined the entire concept of the symphony, that the work finally achieved the popularity it had deserved all along.
One of the paradoxes of the No. 9 is that although the work is as carefully constructed as any of Beethoven's and scrupulously follows the traditional structure of the Classical symphony in that all four movements are in sonata form, it often strikes the listener as a much more personal statement than the works of Schubert's predecessors, one in which melody is given greater weight than thematic development. The orchestration also differs in the importance given to the brass section. This is the first major symphony to make use of trombones as a standard part of the instrumentation rather than merely as a means of adding emphasis. The writing for the horns especially stands out - the symphony opens with a solo by that instrument - so much so that it's difficult to describe its effect without resorting to the rapturous effusions of Schumann who wrote:
"A horn is heard from a distance. It seems to come from another sphere. Here everything listens, as if a heavenly spirit were wandering through the orchestra."
In short, the work really is, as Schumann again pointed out, the first true Romantic symphony. Listening to it, it's difficult at times to believe it was actually written during Beethoven's lifetime. It seems to belong to another era altogether.
I enjoyed this concert much more than the one that had been broadcast the evening before. The Schubert, in particular, was well executed and succeeded in conveying to the audience the work's full splendor.
No comments:
Post a Comment