Concert III, 2025-2026 Season

Ambition and Destiny

Overture to Oberon, Carl Maria von Weber

Oberon was Weber’s last opera and his only one written in English, a language he had learned for the occasion. The entry on the opera in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes the “unmitigated awfulness" of the libretto and calls it a “picaresque farrago of nonsense.” It is a story of the fairy king Oberon, who refuses to reconcile with his wife Titania until he has found a human couple who are truly faithful to one another. Such a couple is found, but both the man and the woman individually get captured by pirates, sold into a harem, and condemned to death and the like, which at the very least extends the plot to a decent length. Oberon, of course, intercedes after being summoned by a magic horn, and everything ends happily. Amazingly, Weber's music is some of his best, and after opening with a magical horn call, the overture gets increasingly brilliant and ends in a blaze of glory.

Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58, Ludwig van Beethoven

In the early nineteenth century, Mozart was regarded as the concerto composer par excellence. Beethoven's first three piano concertos, written between 1795 and 1803, were in many ways quite Mozartean, especially with respect to the relationship between the piano and the orchestra. In the first movements in particular, as in Mozart, the orchestra proposed, and the piano responded. Thematically, the piano's most frequent role was to elaborate on material that originated in the orchestra. 

Beethoven, a virtuoso pianist before deafness closed that expressive avenue, played some of the Mozart concertos, though probably not in a manner that would have delighted the composer. Musicologist Simon Keefe quotes Beethoven's friend and composer Anton Reicha, who had the unenviable job of page turning for Beethoven on one such occasion: "I was mostly occupied in wrenching out the strings of the piano, which snapped, while the hammers stuck among the broken strings. Beethoven insisted upon finishing the concerto, so back and forth I leaped, jerking out a string, disentangling a hammer, turning a page." That description fits well with a longstanding sense of Beethoven as uncouth, oblivious to social norms, and possessed by his art.

The opening of the Fourth concerto, which Beethoven also played in public, despite the relatively advanced state of his deafness in 1806, is worlds away from Reicha's description, as well as from the openings of Mozart's concertos. The pianist starts the work alone, with a tranquil statement of minimalistic material (the rhythm is similar to the famous opening motif of the Fifth Symphony, but the effect is totally different). The orchestra then obediently follows the piano's lead. There are pianistic fireworks in the course of this movement, but the predominant atmosphere is a sort of expressive, noble calm.

In the slow second movement, which some scholars have suggested represents a confrontation between Orpheus (the piano) and the Furies of Hades (orchestra), the orchestra and the soloist have completely different material throughout. The reason for this could be to illustrate the Greek myth, but Owen Jander has suggested that it could also be because the movement originated as a piece for solo piano (there is evidence of later nineteenth-century pianists playing it that way). If this is the case, then it seems that Beethoven just divided up the material between the piano and the orchestra for the concerto. There is no way to know whether either of these conjectures is true, but they may offer some lively ways to engage with the music as you listen.

The last movement is more conventional: the orchestra opens (followed by the piano), the two forces share material, and the virtuosity of the pianist is on full display in this rousing end to a much-loved and norm-breaking work. 

Symphony No. 4, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony is the first of his last three symphonies, all larger in scale and intensity than his first three. It was written in 1877-78, over the short period when Tchaikovsky lived with the wife he had suddenly decided to marry, surely partly as a cover for his homosexuality and perhaps partly, as Roland John Wiley says, as a source of much-needed income. He was also worrying about a drying-up of inspiration, and unhappy with his teaching job at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The marriage was a complete disaster, and Tchaikovsky became so ill that his doctor recommended living apart from his wife.

Tchaikovsky started the symphony before his marriage and completed it after both the marriage and the crisis it precipitated were over. It is tempting to read the emotional extremity of the work as a response to his psychological situation. Indeed, he wrote to his patron Nadezhda von Meck, to whom the work is dedicated, that he was "extremely depressed" during the time of composition, and that "it rather echoes my feelings at that time." On her urging, he produced a "program" for the piece—that is, a story to go along with it—but it is hard to know how much of it to believe. The idea that the opening trumpet theme (which comes back in the last movement) is implacable "Fate," however, does ring true. Tchaikovsky also compared his work to Beethoven's Fifth. Like that work, this one progresses from struggle to triumph, from minor to major, but in contrast to the Beethoven, Tchaikovsky's minor-mode "Fate" motive returns unchanged in the last movement. His own narrative about the last movement suggests that its boisterous good cheer represents the festivities of other people rather than the triumph of the symphony's protagonist.

Another difference from Beethoven is that Tchaikovsky's first movement is remarkably long—by far the longest movement of his four. It features (so often that it is truly unmissable) a yearning theme with a strikingly limping rhythm that is used to drive all the movement's climaxes, as well as two much shorter contrasting themes of great sweetness and delicacy. In contrast to the Beethoven, where the four-note "fate" motif completely pervades the movement, here the Fate idea seems to disrupt and interrupt something that keeps trying, and often failing, to get going. 

The remaining movements are collectively not much longer than this huge first movement: the second, a wistful folk-like tune in the minor, sandwiched around a lush section in the major; the third, a cheerful scherzo where the strings play only pizzicato—an effect Tchaikovsky was proud to have invented; and the last, a percussion-filled march interrupted by Fate. Nineteenth-century symphonies quite often have hugely long last movements, but such a disproportionate first movement is unusual, and we might understand it as part of the "meaning" of the symphony—perhaps as setting up some kind of conflict or problem that is fundamentally unresolvable.

© Mary Hunter