TMSO Special 2021 (1/19) │ Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra

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Artists

Eliahu INBAL, Conductor

Program

Beethoven: Symphony No.6 in F major, op.68, “Pastorale”

Program Notes
Beethoven: Symphony No.7 in A major, op.92

Program Notes

Ⅰ Awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country: Allegro ma non troppo
Ⅱ By the brook: Andante molto mosso
Ⅲ Merry gathering of country folk: Allegro
Ⅳ Thunderstorm: Allegro
Ⅴ Shepherdʼs song ̶ Happy and thankful feelings after the storm: Allegretto

Ludwig van Beethoven: Born in Bonn, December 16, 1770; died in Vienna, March 26, 1827

The dividing line between program music and absolute music is a thin one, but Beethoven proved himself a master of both in his Sixth Symphony. Although the work has been produced with scenery, with characters who move about on stage, and as part of the cinema classic Fantasia, Beethoven took care to advise that the symphony is “more an expression of feeling than painting.” The composerʼs own love for the pleasures of the country are well-known. The time he spent in the woods outside Vienna offered his tortured soul precious solace and peace of mind. To quote the composer: “How glad I am to be able to roam in wood and thicket, among the trees and flowers and rocks. No one can love the country as I do … In the woods there is enchantment which expresses all things.”

The symphony received its first performance in Vienna as part of that incredible marathon concert of 22 December, 1808 at the Theater an der Wien, an all-Beethoven concert that also included the Fifth Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto, Choral Fantasy and some vocal and choral music.

The symphonyʼs opening places us immediately in relaxed, beatific surroundings. The day is sunny, warm and abounding in natureʼs fragrances and gentle breezes. But aside from conjuring nature imagery, the music is remarkable for its motivic writing ̶ virtually the entire movement is built from tiny musical cells found in the first two bars. Entire phrases and sentences are often formed from these motivic ideas repeated again and again.

The second movement invites contemplation. To Donald Francis Tovey, this is ‘a slow movement in full sonata form which at every point asserts its deliberate intention to be lazy and to say whatever occurs to it twice in succession, and which in doing so never loses flow or falls out of proportion.”

The Sixth is the only symphony in which Beethoven departed from the four-movement format. The remaining three movements are played without interruption. Rough, peasant merry-making and dancing are portrayed, but the boisterous festivities suddenly stop when intimations of an approaching storm are heard. There is not much time to take cover; a few isolated raindrops fall, and then the heavens burst open. Timpani, piccolo and trombones, all hitherto silent in the symphony, now make their entrances.
With the tempest over, a shepherdʼs pipe is heard in a song of thanksgiving for the renewed freshness and beauty of nature. The joyous hymn is taken up by the full orchestra as if, to quote Edward Downes, “in thanks to some pantheistic god, to Nature, to the sun, to whatever beneficent power one can perceive in a universe that seemed as dark and terrifyingly irrational in Beethovenʼs day as it can in ours.”
Program notes by Robert Markow

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.

Ⅰ Poco sostenuto - Vivace
Ⅱ Allegretto
Ⅲ Presto
Ⅳ Allegro con brio

For sheer visceral excitement, there are few works in the orchestral repertory to match Beethovenʼs Seventh Symphony, and all manner of descriptive comments have been invented to explain this phenomenon. Beethovenʼs contemporary, one Dr. Iken, saw the symphony as depicting a political revolution (a not unlikely interpretation in those heady Napoleonic days). Alexander Oulibischoff regarded it as a buoyant masquerade, while A. B. Marx saw in it a story of Moorish knighthood. Even such serious composers as Berlioz and Schumann saw fit to attach programmatic interpretations. Berlioz described the first movement as a peasant round dance, and Schumann left a detailed account of the symphony as portraying a rustic wedding. But unlike the Sixth Symphony, in which the composer had deliberately incorporated the expression of feelings of nature, Beethoven attached no “meanings” to the Seventh beyond the sounds themselves. Wagner accurately described the essence of the music by dubbing it “the Apotheosis of the Dance,” though it is doubtful he expected it actually to be choreographed, as has been done on several occasions.

The symphony was first heard at a gala benefit concert for wounded Austrian and Bavarian soldiers given in Vienna on December 8, 1813. The real showstopper on the program was another Beethoven work, Wellingtonʼs Victory (or the “Battle” Symphony), now regarded as one of the composerʼs worst efforts, but despite the circusy atmosphere at this event (lots of drums, marches, simulation of cannonades, etc.), Beethovenʼs new symphony was also well received. In fact, the second movement was encored, an unprecedented occasion for a “slow” movement.

The introduction to the first movement is the longest such passage Beethoven, or anyone else up to that time, had ever written for a symphony, amounting almost to a whole movement in itself and lasting a third of the movementʼs approximately twelve minutes. In addition to having its own pair of themes, the introduction defines the harmonic regions that will have reverberations throughout the rest of the symphony. The tonic key of A major is emphatically established in the opening “call to attention”; excursions then follow to C major (the lyrical oboe theme that arrives after the succession of rising scales in the strings) and F major (the lyrical theme later in the flute). So important to the symphonyʼs grand structural design are these three keys that Robert Simpson has deemed them “more like dimensions than keys.”

The transition to the movementʼs main vivace section is scarcely less imaginative and extraordinary, consisting as it does of 68 repetitions of the same note (E) to varied rhythms; these eventually settle into the rhythmic pattern that pervades the entire vivace. From here Beethoven propels us through a sonata-form movement of enormous energy, bold harmonic changes, startling alternation of loud and soft, and obsessive rhythmic activity.

The second movement (Allegretto) is hardly a “slow” one, but it is more restrained and soothing than the frenetic first movement. Again, an underlying rhythmic pattern pervades. The virtually melody-less principal subject in A minor is heard in constantly changing orchestral garb. There is also a lyrical episode of surpassing beauty in A major (woodwinds) and a stormy fugato built from the principal theme.

The third movement is a double Scherzo and Trio in F major (one of the harmonic pillars of the symphony). The slower Trio section, with its accordion-like swells and strange, low growls from the second horn, is believed by some to have been based on an old Austrian pilgrimsʼ hymn. Following the customary Scherzo-Trio-Scherzo format, the Trio is presented complete a second time, and then again the complete Scherzo. With characteristic humor, Beethoven threatens to present the Trio still a third time (“What, again?” is the expected reaction from the listener), but suddenly he dismisses it with five brusque chords from the full orchestra, and we are ready for the next movement.

The whirlwind finale, like the previous movements, is built from a single rhythmic cell. The Dionysian energy that infuses this movement has caused many listeners, in the words of Klaus G. Roy, to “come away from a hearing of this symphony in a stage of being punch-drunk. Yet it is an intoxication without a hangover, a dope-like exhilaration without decadence.”
Program notes by Robert Markow

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.