Single tickets $28-$55 (senior and student discounts available)
Patron Services: 54-MUSIC (707-546-8742)

 

Here’s German romanticism at its best with the 4th Symphony of Brahms, a composer who is said to have never written an ugly note. His sole violin concerto is performed with emotional potency and formidable technique by Elina Vähälä on a 1678 Stradivarius. Living composer Wolfgang Rihm’s moody, pensive song cycle takes its inspiration from Brahms.

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

WOLFGANG RIHM
Ernster Gesang (Serious Song)
Wolfgang Rihm was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, on March 13, 1952, and still lives there. He composed his Ernster Gesang (Serious Song) for orchestra in the closing days of 1996 on a commission from Wolfgang Sawallisch for the Philadelphia Orchestra, which gave the premiere on April 13, 1997. The score calls for English horn, four clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trombones, tuba, four timpani (one player), and a string section without violins. The score specifies that the clarinets are to sit toward the front and to the left of the conductor, where first violins are normally placed. Duration is about 13 minutes.

Rihm's earliest compositions date from the age of eleven. He studied theory and composition at the Musikhochschule in Karlsruhe with Eugen Werner Velte (from 1968 to 1972) and later attended the Darmstadt Vacation Courses where he studied with Karl Heinz Stockhausen in 1973 and with Klaus Huber in 1974 and also worked with Wolfgang Fortner and Humphrey Searle. From 1974 76 he studied musicology with Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht. From 1973 he was lecturer in theory and composition at the Musikhochschule in Karlsruhe, and in 1978 80 he was a lecturer in Darmstadt. In 1981 he taught at the Musikhochschule in Munich, and since 1985 he has been on the composition faculty in Karlsruhe. His prolific output numbers more than 300 compositions, including seven works for the stage, three symphonies along with other orchestral works in series with titles like Abgesangsszenen and Chiffre; concertos or concertante works for piano, violin, viola, and oboe; a substantial number of works for solo voice or chorus and orchestra, and a great deal of chamber music, including twelve string quartets.

His early studies with the most "modern" composers, especially in Darmstadt (where the "vacation courses" were almost a prerequisite to being considered "modern" in those decades. But his vast output in fact covers a wide range of styles, for the most elaborate to relatively traditional.

Serious Song comes as an intentional homage to one of his great German forebears, Johannes Brahms, whose death on April 3, 1897, signaled to many at the time the end of a great classical German tradition. Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch requested from Rihm "a piece that should in a specific way establish a connection to Brahms" for a performance almost exactly 100 years later.

From the outset Rihm decided to create a rich, dark, Brahmsian sound by emphasizing the lower-pitched instruments and omitting the flutes and violins (as Brahms himself had done in the opening movement of his German Requiem to establish a somber color). He spent months playing through songs and piano works of Brahms's late period, soaking up his characteristic harmonic tricks that make late Brahms so powerfully expressive.

One of the works that lingered especially in his mind was the Four Serious Songs (Vier ernste Gesänge), settings for baritone and piano of four passages from the Bible. The first three are, on the whole, somber and filled with a sense of despair; but the last sets the 13th chapter of Romans, Paul's great essay on love, which builds the cycle to a luminous close. It is from this cycle that Rihm draws not only his own title—as if this were another "serious song"—but also subtle thematic and harmonic references to capture the autumnal mood of the earlier score. Rihm feels in this work the stimulus of his fathers—Brahms the artistic father, and his own, recently-deceased, parent to whose memory he dedicated this music.

JOHANNES BRAHMS
Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 77
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany, on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna on April 3, 1897. He wrote the Violin Concerto in the summer and early fall of 1878, but the published score incorporates revisions made after the premiere, which was given by the dedicatee, Joseph Joachim, in Leipzig on January 1, 1879, the composer conducting the Gewandhaus Orchestra. In addition to the soloist, the score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 38 minutes.

The Violin Concerto of Brahms is both a close collaboration of two great friends and the testament to their friendship. Brahms was twenty in May of 1853, when he met the violinist Joseph Joachim, who was also a fine conductor and a solidly grounded composer in his own right. Joachim was just two years older but already well-established as a musician. A close bond of mutual idealism sprang up between the two men at once and remained unbroken for more than thirty years. (There was a rupture between them in the middle 1880s, when Brahms clumsily tried to help patch Joachim's failing marriage. Brahms later composed his Double Concerto as a peace offering; it was accepted, but the two never regained the unfettered frankness of their earlier friendship.)

It is not clear when Joachim first asked Brahms to write him a concerto, but, in any case, he had to wait a number of years before receiving it. Not until the summer of 1878 did the composer feel ready to essay the piece, his first concerto since the one in D-minor for piano, which had been a catastrophic failure with the audience at its premiere in 1859. Brahms drafted the score during a fruitful summer in Pörtschach, a favorite beauty spot where, as he wrote, "so many melodies fly about that one must be careful not to step on them." On August 21, 1878, Brahms suggested to Joachim that they collaborate on the final details of the solo part, since the composer was not himself a violinist. The intensity of the collaboration is evident in the composer's manuscript score, which bears the marks of extensive revision in Brahms's hand—often lightening the orchestral texture for the benefit of the soloist—and even more elaborate revisions to the solo part, made in red ink by Joachim himself.

The process of revision even ran beyond the first performance, which took place in Leipzig on New Year's Day, 1879. Joachim, of course, was the soloist, and the normally shy and retiring Brahms conducted. The critical response was certainly more favorable than it had been for the piano concerto two decades earlier, but Brahms was still regarded as a composer of severely intellectual music that made extraordinary demands on its listeners. Despite Joachim's ardent championing of the concerto, it did not really join the standard repertory until after the turn of the century.

But Brahms and his friends were clearly pleased; we have an amusing description of the evening's aftermath from a Bostonian, George W. Chadwick, who was a student in Leipzig at the time and soon to become one of America's leading composers. A few days later Chadwick wrote to a friend in Massachusetts:

Joachim played Brahms' new concerto for the violin in the Gewandhaus that night under Brahms' own direction, and about one o'clock I saw the precious pair, with little Grieg (who is here this winter) staggering out of Auerbach's Keller (of Faust renown) all congratulating each other in the most frantic manner on the excellent way in which they had begun the New Year. I thought to myself that Johnny Brahms might be the greatest living composer but I did not believe it could save him from having a "Katzenjammer" [hangover] the next day about the size of the Nibelungen Trilogy, as many a lesser composer has had.

What early audiences found difficult to follow in Brahms was the abundance of his invention. He was never simply content to state a musical idea and then restate it; he begins to develop his ideas almost from the moment they appear, and the impact of so much material seemed overwhelming. The opening orchestral ritornello flows in long musical paragraphs, but these are made up of strikingly varied ideas, interwoven in one another, capable of being developed separately or in combination. The unaccompanied melody at the opening, with the orchestra entering softly on an unexpected harmony, is an homage to Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. The second part of the orchestral exposition runs through a gamut of musical ideas, hinting at but never quite reaching a new lyric melody that finally appears—swaying, coaxing—only when the soloist is able to introduce it in his exposition.

Throughout the movement Brahms is not concerned to produce an excuse for virtuosic fireworks in which the orchestra simply provides support, but to blend the soloist and orchestra into a substantial organism inspired by the Beethoven Violin Concerto, the one earlier work that could be said to occupy the level at which Brahms aimed.

The slow movement was an afterthought, replacing two whole movements that Brahms decided to cut before the premiere. (Characteristically self-effacing, Brahms described them as "the best parts.") The new Adagio begins with a woodwind passage referred to by violinist Pablo de Sarasate when he explained why he did not intend to learn the new concerto: "Why should I stand there and let the oboe play the one good tune in the piece?"

Brahms had been introduced to Joachim by a Hungarian violinist, Eduard Remenyi, with whom he was touring and who taught Brahms about the style of so called "gypsy" music. The finale of the Violin Concerto is another delightful essay in imitating that exotic style, filled with fire, flash, and energy.

JOHANNES BRAHMS
Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Opus 98
Brahms first mentioned the Fourth Symphony in a letter to his publisher on August 19, 1884; about a year later, in October 1885, he gave a two-piano reading of it with Ignaz Brüll for a small group of friends, and conducted the premiere at Meiningen on October 25. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, and strings. Piccolo and triangle appear only in the third movement, contrabassoon only in the third and fourth movements, and trombones only in the fourth. Duration is about 39 minutes.

Of all the great masters of the nineteenth century, Brahms was the one who most thoroughly absorbed the new field of music history and who understood the music of the past as well as he understood that of the present. So it is hardly surprising—even though it seems ironic—that his last and most modern symphony, arguably his greatest single symphonic achievement, should also be the one most deeply indebted to the music of the past, reviving techniques and forms that most people regarded as long dead, and making them live anew. Brahms is by no means the only composer over the last century who went "back to the future," but he did it more successfully than anyone else.

It is well known that Brahms waited a long time—until he was forty-three, in 1876—before allowing the world to hear what he was finally willing to let go as his First Symphony (he had planned several others before that, and a few of them actually reached completion, but as something other than a symphony). Once having broken the ice, though, Brahms immediately composed a Second Symphony the following year. Then after a gap of five years, he composed his Third Symphony, and again a sibling immediately followed a year later.

In the summer of 1884, Brahms wrote to his publisher that he needed music paper with more staves on it—a hint from this always-reticent composer that he was writing music for orchestra. Brahms always chose a location of great natural beauty for his summer vacation, rarely choosing same place more than twice. There he would compose feverishly, absorbing the beauties of the surrounding countryside into his music. He wrote the Fourth Symphony between the late summer of 1884 and the end of the summer of 1885. When he reported to friends that the cherries in the area were too tart to eat them simply as fruit, he also wondered whether his new symphony might be equally tart. (Certainly early audiences found it challenging and mysterious.)

Brahms reported the new piece to Hans von Bülow with characteristic reserve, "I do have a couple of entr'actes; put together they make what is commonly called a symphony." Bülow led a reading with his orchestra at Meiningen, a small court that was far away from the international musical capitals. Even with Bülow's enthusiasm and the orchestra's good will, they found the symphony a tough nut to crack. But after the premiere, the Meiningen orchestra toured with the work, giving it the benefit of their experience in an increasing number of performances, and winning many admirers.

Some of Brahms's closest friends felt that the symphony began too abruptly. Yet Brahms clearly wanted the piece to sound as if it has begun somewhere else—coming from another universe, perhaps—before we were able to hear. He had actually composed an introductory passage that would make the beginning quite definite—and then deleted it! The opening theme is only the beginning of an astonishing web of closely interlocked ideas, each growing out of something that has come before or foreshadowing something that will follow after. Listeners familiar with the classical tradition expect that the composer will repeat the exposition (as Brahms himself had done in his three previous symphonies). In this final symphony he chooses to avoid that repetition—but does so in a way that fools us, for eight measures, into thinking that it the repetition begun. Suddenly a single, subtle change of harmony leads us far afield. The eventual return to the recapitulation has a surprise, too: the very opening theme appears in the woodwinds, but played in notes twice as long as when we first heard them, and sounding therefore like indications of the approaching return. But after this, Brahms leaps back to the original speed and we find ourselves already in the middle of the recapitulation.

The second movement has a key signature for E major, but Brahms instead intones a theme that circles around the note E using the pitches of the scale of C major. This is nothing other than a return to the harmonic style of the sixteenth century, to the old Phrygian mode, about which Brahms read in one of the classic music histories of his time, a book about Giovanni Gabrieli. In that book, Brahms had especially marked a passage in which the author declared that the Phrygian mode was the darkest of all the melodic scales for traditional church music, expressing penitence and deep need.

The same source added that the "gloomy Phrygian" must perforce yield to the "bright, cheerful Ionian"—C major—and Brahms seems to have followed this as a recommendation in his symphony, for the Scherzo is indeed in C, though there are other reasons for its appropriateness here: it had already played an important role in the first movement, and the second movement's Phrygian mode had suggested the key of C. Though most of the symphony was regarded as exceptionally difficult to understand in Brahms's day, this movement earned from its first audience a request for an encore. It is in the Finale that Brahms really reveals the depth of his commitment to the old Renaissance and Baroque masters and his power of transforming their old techniques into a modern work. This is a "passacaglia," a special kind of variation form in which a short melodic passage (and its harmonic implication) is set to repeating over and over again, while the composer finds ways to varying it. Since these variations often take the form of adding new contrapuntal lines—and since Brahms knew that counterpoint and variation were two of his greatest strengths as a composer—it seems natural to us that he should choose this form, but many of his friends were nonplused that he should try to imitate "dead" music. The first eight chords of the movement give the theme straight out (in the melody line). After that it returns, in some form, over and over, thirty times. The first nine variations gradually increase the tension almost to the breaking point, and then four variations (which are in the major mode and played at half the speed of the others) function as an interlude to reduce the tension, allowing for another outburst to provide a kind of recapitulation for the final group of statements. A splendid coda, sonorous and glowing, provides the capstone for the work.

back to top