Program Notes: Beethoven Symphony No. 5

JOHN ADAMS  
Tromba Lontana (Distant Trumpet)
BORN: February 15, 1947, in Worcester, Massachusetts 
WORK COMPOSED: 1986 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 4, 1986, in Houston, by the Houston Symphony conducted by Sergiu Comissiona. 

Harmonium 
WORK COMPOSED: 1980 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 15, 1981, in San Francisco, by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Edo De Waart. 

What to Listen For: 

• Both of these compositions by John Adams create a sound world — derived from the pioneering “minimalist” music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and others — featuring repeating motifs, pulsating or rippling textures, vivid instrumental colors and static, slowly shifting harmonies. 

Both of these compositions by John Adams create a sound world — derived from the pioneering “minimalist” music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and others — featuring repeating motifs, pulsating or rippling textures, vivid instrumental colors and static, slowly shifting harmonies. 

With so much of the orchestral repertory given over to great works of the past, it is often difficult for present-day composers to get noticed. One who has done so, and in spades, is John Adams. Born in New England but a long-time resident of California, Adams has established himself as one of the most successful American composers of our time. Having trained at Harvard and taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Adams is deeply knowledgeable about the theory and practice of music, particularly music of the last century. But early in his career, he chose to break with established academic compositional doctrine, rejecting the abstruse style that characterized much of the high-modernist music of the 1950s and ’60s. Instead, he adopted the techniques and manner of a group of American outsiders — musicians such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass — whose style became known, by analogy with trends in painting and sculpture, as “minimalism.” Adams adopted the minimalist technique of layering brief motifs to create a pulsating, harmonically static musical surface that changes slowly and incrementally over time. His innovation was to use this idiom for large-scale concert pieces entailing a wider and more varied range of expression than the minimalist pioneers had previously achieved. 

During the 1980s and ’90s, Adams established himself as one of America’s leading composers, producing a series of large orchestral pieces and a pair of operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. Each of these works combined the signature minimalist devices of motivic repetition, rhythmic pulsation and static or slow-moving harmonies with colorful orchestration, a wide range of expressive nuances and a rich harmonic vocabulary. The result was what some commentators have described as a “post-minimalist” style. In Adams’ hands, this style has proven flexible and fertile. Its rhythmic vitality marks it as contemporary American; its harmonic language often entails echoes of the Romantic period while remaining very much in the present historical moment. 

Adams has continued to mine the possibilities of this compositional idiom, which is now indelibly associated with him. During the last quarter-century, he has composed several more operas; a choral work, On the Transmigration of Souls, prompted by the events of September 11, 2001; a Christmas oratorio, El Niño; and a series of large-scale orchestral works, including symphonies and concertos for violin, electric violin and piano. These and other works have brought the composer both the Pulitzer Prize and the prestigious Grawemeyer Award (sometimes described as the “Nobel Prize for music”), as well as the distinction of being the most frequently performed living American composer. No less impressive, his works have won over many listeners who normally approach new music with some trepidation. 

The two pieces that form the first half of this concert are among Adams’ earliest orchestral works. Tromba Lontana is one of a series of short fanfares by 21 composers commissioned and performed by the Houston Symphony to mark the 150th anniversary of Texas’ declaration of independence. Its title means “Distant Trumpet,” though the composition uses two trumpets, separated in space to create a stereophonic sound. Adams intentionally rejected the cliche of a grandiloquent fanfare in favor of a quiet, atmospheric work. The titular trumpets trade phrases that generally begin with a sustained tone and move into a succession of soft staccato notes. Against this, Adams notes, “the orchestra provides a pulsing continuum of serene ticking in the pianos, harps and percussion. In the furthest background is a long, almost disembodied melody for strings that passes by almost unnoticed like nocturnal clouds.” 

Adams wrote Harmonium for the opening season of Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, home of the San Francisco Symphony. (He was then serving as composer-in-residence with that orchestra.) The work is a setting for chorus and orchestra of three poems, one by John Donne, the other two by Emily Dickinson. The characteristic palpitating texture of classic minimalist music provided an aural image that guided the writing of Harmonium. “That image,” Adams explained, “was of human voices — many of them — riding upon waves of rippling sound.” 

The first movement of the piece sets Donne’s poem “Negative Love.” Adams notes that this work considers different kinds of love, ascending, as it were, from the base to the sublime. The composer therefore sought to trace a comparable ascent musically, starting with a single pulsating tone that expands through the accumulation of further tones. Eventually, the music grows into what Adams describes as “a huge, calmly rippling current of sound that takes on energy and mass until it finally crests on an immense cataract of sound some 10 minutes later.” 

Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” provides the text for the slow central movement of Harmonium. This portion of the piece begins with a quiet tolling in the orchestra and modal, chant-like phrases for the voices, establishing an elegiac atmosphere that Adams maintains over the course of the movement. 

A transition passage of mounting energy leads to the finale, which sets a Dickinson poem of very different character. “Wild Nights” presents the poet’s ecstatic side, her longing to lose herself in passion and oblivion. Adams’ music is, at the start, no less unbridled, but the final part of the movement hints at the calm of “a heart in port,” one that is “Done with the compass, / Done with the chart.” 

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN 
Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 
BORN: December 16, 1770, in Bonn, Germany
DIED: March 26, 1827, in Vienna, Austria
WORK COMPOSED: 1802–1808 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 22, 1808, in Vienna, conducted by the composer. 

What to Listen For: 

• Beethoven’s great innovation in this symphony was to use a vivid melodic motif — the famous “da-da-da-daaah” figure heard at the outset — as a dramatic as well as a musical element. It forms the subject for what seems like a tumultuous struggle throughout most of the first movement, and it returns in the third and fourth movements to cast the work’s triumphant conclusion into sharp relief. 

Beethoven’s great innovation in this symphony was to use a vivid melodic motif — the famous “da-da-da-daaah” figure heard at the outset — as a dramatic as well as a musical element. It forms the subject for what seems like a tumultuous struggle throughout most of the first movement, and it returns in the third and fourth movements to cast the work’s triumphant conclusion into sharp relief. 

No orchestral composition has gripped the popular imagination quite like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Through countless performances, recordings and even parodies, the famous four-note motif that opens this work has become familiar to millions of people. The piece has acquired a heavy gloss of extra-musical interpretation. It has been proposed as a mirror of one of Beethoven’s romantic relationships, as an allegory of Olympian strife and more. 

Such descriptions generally say more about the imaginations of commentators than about the work itself. Still, this symphony demands to be heard as more than “pure music,” and not only because of the composer’s tantalizing description of its initial figure as “Fate knocking at the door.” Beethoven has come to represent to us the Romantic ideal of the artist-hero, that solitary and suffering individual who transcends trying circumstances by dint of genius and struggle. And it is the Fifth Symphony, with its strife-torn first movement and triumphant finale, that gives this view its most convincing musical expression. As such, it is important not only as a key to understanding the composer but as an embodiment of one our culture’s enduring concepts of what art can be. 

Beethoven began work on the Fifth Symphony in 1802 but did not complete it until 1808. Significantly, the celebrated four-note motif that opens the work was present in the earliest sketches. This motif, the figure Beethoven associated with fate, dominates the first movement, its rhythmic vigor accounting in no small way for the sense of agitation and momentum that prevails here. 

Beethoven provides a timely contrast to the turbulent spirit of the opening movement with the ensuing Andante con moto. The Scherzo: Allegro— that follows is another matter. Here, a theme softly stated by the low strings in the opening moments seems ghostly and ominous, and its menacing aspect is confirmed moments later by a disturbing reappearance of the first movement’s “fate” motif. Later, Beethoven creates a passage of extraordinary drama. The ghostly melody freezes in mid-step as time and motion are suspended. Slowly, the theme is taken and transformed little by little until the music bursts into the finale with a blaze of light and victory. 

The drama is not over, however. In the middle of this fourth movement, we suddenly return to the “fate” motif and the ghostly atmosphere of the Scherzo. This prepares a recapitulation, not only of the movement’s themes but also of the dramatic passage from darkness to light, from despair to joy, which is the essence of the finale and the goal of the entire symphony. 

All notes by Paul Schiavo © 2024