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The Marriage of Figaro was banned in Mozart’s time, yet it’s now a favorite of both opera buffs and classical fans. Celebrated soprano Christine Brandes sings an aria from Figaro, and takes a star turn in Berg’s “vocal concerto.” We honor the 100th anniversary of Mahler’s death with the magnificent Adagio of the composer’s tenth (and unfinished) symphony.

Listen to Christine Brandes:

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:
Overture to Le nozze di Figaro, The Marriage of Figaro, K.492
Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He composed Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte in late 1785 and early 1786, completing it on April 29; the first performance took place in Vienna on May 1, 1786. The overture is scored for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani and strings. Duration is about 4 minutes.

Mozart’s three great Italian comic operas to librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte share the composer’s extraordinary dramatic insight into human emotion and human weakness. This understanding allows him to create fully rounded human beings.

The first of these operas drew its libretto from a French comedy that had been banned from Vienna for political reasons. Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro features a wise-cracking servant who foils his master’s plan to seduce the servant’s bride-to-be. The plot was not greatly different from many stylish comedies of the day, but Beaumarchais’s characters were far more politically outspoken.

Mozart took Lorenzo da Ponte’s adaptation of Beaumarchais’s comedy and converted it into one of the great human stories of the musical theater. The characters live in their music as few characters in any opera. They experience “a crazy day” (to translate the subtitle given the opera in Vienna) in which true love triumphs over lechery, but not without ambiguity or ambivalence, and not before we have laughed at delightful scenes of comic invention and sympathized with near-heartbreak. The overture, which was written last, does not quote any material from the opera, but its brilliance and non‑stop hustle set the emotional tempo for the “crazy day” to follow.

Porgi Amor, from Le nozze di Figaro, K.492
Porgi amor is sung by the Countess at the opening of the second act; it is scored for pairs of clarinets, bassoons, and horns, plus strings.

Few characters in the history of opera are as moving and as memorable as the unhappy Countess in Figaro. She had once been the light-hearted Rosina who married her beloved Count at the end of an earlier opera, The Barber of Seville. Now, years later, she is painfully aware that her husband no longer loves her and that he pursues many amorous conquests. Now he wants her chambermaid Susanna, who is about to marry the Count’s manservant Figaro.

All this has been set before the audience in the first act of Mozart’s opera. Mozart and da Ponte made one striking change in the dramatic exposition of the first act, as compared to Beaumarchais’s French comedy: they kept the Countess offstage. Mozart knew that the appearance of this noble woman, upon whose love hinges the entire outcome of the drama, would be far more effective if withheld until the beginning of the second act. Her aria, a direct and heartfelt utterance of her sorrow, makes the Countess one of Mozart’s great dramatic creations. The effect is enhanced by the utter simplicity of the music she sings. Here there are no sweeping rhetorical gestures, no dramatic outbursts of vocal pyrotechnics—only the straightforward expression of the feelings of a supremely unhappy woman.

Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro    
Al mio duolo, a’ miei sospir,
O mi rendi il mio tesoro,
O mi lascia almen morir.

Pour, O Love, some consolation
onto my grief, on my sighs;
either return my beloved to me,
or else let me die.

Symphony No. 41 in C major, K.551, Jupiter
Mozart completed the Jupiter Symphony (the nickname is not his) on August 10, 1788. No performance in his lifetime is known. The score calls for one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 31 minutes.

Few examples of high-speed composition are as impressive as Mozart’s feat in the summer of 1788, creating his last three symphonies in under two months.

A general business recession in Vienna played a role in the steady decline of Mozart’s fortunes, culminating in his death at age thirty-five, three-and-a-half years later. Mozart was repeatedly forced to write to his fellow Mason, Michael Puchberg, requesting a loan. On June 17 he needed money to pay his landlord and asked Puchberg for a few hundred gulden more “until tomorrow.” Yet again on the 27th he wrote to Puchberg to thank him for the money so freely lent him, but also to report that he needed still more and didn’t know where to turn for it

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Clearly Mozart was in serious financial straits. Yet between the last two letters, he composed the Symphony No. 39, and followed it quickly with No. 40 and No. 41. He is hardly likely to have composed three whole symphonies at such a time if he didn’t have some hope of using them in a practical way to support his family. He mentioned “concerts in the Casino” to Puchberg. Probably he wrote all three of the symphonies for those planned concerts. But, as far as we know, they never took place.

Mozart begins with two brief, strikingly contrasted ideas: a fanfare for the full orchestra followed immediately by a soft lyrical phrase in the strings. These two diverse ideas would seem to come from two different musical worlds, but presently Mozart joins them by adding a single counterpoint for flute and oboes. The motives continue to animate the discourse through the modulation to the dominant and the presentation of the second theme. After a stormy passage for full orchestra, the skies clear again and Mozart presents a whistleable little tune to round off the end of the exposition and reinforce the new key.

The second movement seems calm and serene at the outset, but it becomes agitated as it moves from F major to C minor and introduces a figure that seems to change the meter from 3/4 to 2/4; when the thematic material returns, it is decorated in a highly ornate way.

The finale is the most famous and astonishing movement in the work. Mozart forms his themes out of contrapuntal ideas that can combine with one another in an incredible variety of ways. Though it sounds at first like a straightforward sonata-form movement, gradually it turns into a technical showpiece. At the beginning we hear some of the themes upside down. New combinations appear in the recapitulation. But nothing prepares us for the sheer tour de force of the coda, when Mozart brings all of the thematic ideas together in a single contrapuntal unity. These closing pages of Mozart’s last symphony contain the very epitome of contrapuntal skill employed in the service of an exciting musical climax. We end with a sensation produced by more than one passage in Mozart’s works: everything fits; all the world is in tune.

Alban Berg: Sieben frühe Lieder, (Seven Early Songs), for Soprano and Orchestra
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was born in Vienna on February 9, 1885, and died there on December 24, 1935. In 1928 he selected seven unpublished songs written much earlier and put them in the present order; at the same time he prepared an orchestral version of the set. This received its first performance in Vienna on November 6, 1928. The orchestra called for in these settings includes two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, trumpet in F, two trombones, timpani, bass drum, side drum, triangle, tam-tam, cymbals, harp, celesta ad libitum, and strings. Duration is about 18 minutes.

Alban Berg’s small output of mature works includes some of the most important compositions of the 20th century: two of its most important operas (Wozzeck and Lulu), one of its most greatest violin concertos, and one of its greatest string quartets (the Lyric Suite).

When a composer moves us profoundly, we want to know where he started and what path his music followed. The Seven Early Songs provide a clue.

Berg composed many art songs in the tradition of the German Lied, starting as early as 1900 and continuing throughout his studies with Arnold Schoenberg between the years 1904 and 1908. Most of these remained unpublished. After becoming famous for Wozzeck, he felt the need to bring out a new work quickly to keep his name before the public. He chose seven songs composed between 1905 and 1908. Three of them had been included on a program by Schoenberg’s pupils given in Vienna on November 7, 1907, but after that, these early songs evidently returned to his trunk for nearly twenty years.

Berg was interested in musical symmetry, and he shows it even in such minor details as the orchestration. The first and last songs are written for full orchestra, the second and sixth for reduced forces, the third and fifth for isolated choirs of the orchestra, so that the fourth song, Traumgekrönt, becomes the hinge of the whole score.

Throughout the set, Berg reveals his indebtedness to the great German art song tradition. At the same time his music is marked by intensely emotional expressions, compressing extremes of range or dynamics into a single phrase. This climax-packed style is characteristic of the “second Vienna school,” and offers a view of the future. 

Gustav Mahler Adagio from the Symphony No. 10 in F-sharp minor
Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt (Kalište) near the Moravian border of Bohemia on 7 July 1860 and died in Vienna on 18 May 1911. He did most of his work on the unfinished Tenth Symphony in the summer of 1910. Ernst Krenek prepared a full score of the first and third movements in 1924; Franz Schalk conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the first performance that October 14. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones. tuba, harp, and strings. Duration is about 22 minutes.

In the summer of 1907 Mahler learned, that he had a serious heart lesion. For four years he concentrated any free time to composing. The summer of 1908 saw composition of Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), which he avoided calling his Ninth Symphony out of a superstitious fear that no composer after Beethoven could live beyond a “Ninth.” The Ninth Symphony of 1910 was actually, to Mahler’s mind, his tenth; he had circumvented “the limit.” Immediately he began concentrated work on what was to be the Tenth. Ironicallly, it was not to be finished: at his death he left extensive sketches, but not even a single completed movement.

The manuscript shows that the Tenth was to be unusually personal. Mahler was tormented by the knowledge that his greatly beloved wife Alma was seriously considering leaving him for another man, Walter Gropius. She chose to stay with Mahler, though she married Gropius later. Through the score of the symphony, Mahler wrote personal notes of pleading and despair to his “Almschi,” begging her to remain with him.

When Mahler died, it seemed unlikely that any of the music from the Tenth would ever be heard. But in 1924 the composer Ernst Krenek married the Mahlers’ daughter Anna. Mahler’s widow asked him to prepare a practical score of the two movements that were most nearly complete. This he did (though others played a hand in its final form), and thus the Adagio, the most extended of the two movements, entered the repertory in a shadowy sort of way. More recently several other hands have completed the entire symphony, elaborating on Mahler’s sketches to produce a performing version. Three such versions have been performed and recorded. Still, many believe that no one but Mahler himself could possibly “finish” his score, so the official Mahler edition prints only the lengthy Adagio.

It begins with a probing upbeat in the violas—a beginning that does everything but affirm the tonic of F-sharp. The main thematic material arrives in F-sharp in the first violins and becomes an urgent duet with the second violins. (In Mahler’s day, orchestral second violins sat to the front on the right-hand side of the stage—from the audience’s point of view—so that this duet involved a conversation back and forth across the entire foreground of the orchestra.) The viola music from the opening recurs in developments through various keys as a questioning alternative to the warm F-sharp music. The conversation builds to a powerful climax in A-flat minor: woodwinds and brass instruments sustain full chords at maximum volume while harp and strings sweep up and down in broken-chord figurations, attempting. A sustained solo trumpet holding a long high A is opposed by the second violins, then the cellos, which bring in a last recurrence of the F-sharp music, which partakes of reminiscences and fragments of all the thematic ideas before closing in a wide-spaced, gentle cadence.

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)

 

 

 

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