SUPPORT YOUR SYMPHONY

Oregon Symphony Music Director David Danzmayr lands in town to conduct the Seattle Symphony through Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (December 28, 29 & 30 + a New Year's Eve Concert, Countdown & Party on December 31). Photo by Bjørn Bertheussen.
 

The turn of a new year is traditionally a time of renewal, of taking stock of our lives and again aspiring to be the best versions of ourselves. The two compositions we hear this evening speak, each in its own way, to that impulse. One of them, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, is well known, both generally and particularly to Seattle Symphony audiences for its annual performances at this point on the calendar. The other, which opens our program, is unfamiliar but no less appropriate to the moment.

LILI BOULANGER
Vieille prière bouddhique (“Old Buddhist Prayer”)
BORN: August 21, 1893, in Paris
DIED: March 15, 1918, at Mézy-sur-Seine
WORK COMPOSED: 1914–1917
WORLD PREMIERE: Unknown

What to Listen For:

• A restrained chant melody, heard at once, establishes the devout character of this “daily prayer for all the universe,” as the work’s subtitle reads.
• Midway through, a rhapsodic flute solo introduces a more sensuous element.

Vieille prière bouddhique, by the French composer Lili Boulanger, takes its text from Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), a treatise on Buddhist doctrine and practice dating from the fifth century. In concise verses, which Boulanger set in French translation, it asks all creatures — all spirits and all that are born, all men and all women, gods and humans, at all points of the compass — to be without enemies and obstacles, overcome grief, attain happiness and move freely on the path for which each is destined, a path that leads ultimately to Enlightenment.

It is poignant that such beneficent thought should come from an artist whose own life was marked by suffering and tragedy. Born into a musical family — her father was a composer, and her sister, Nadia, became a renowned teacher whose students included Aaron Copland, Astor Piazzolla and Philip Glass — Lili Boulanger began composing during adolescence, and in 1913, became the first woman to win the Paris Conservatoire’s prestigious Prix de Rome award. Unfortunately, she suffered poor health from an early age, enduring both bronchial pneumonia and the gastric illness we now call Crohn’s disease. During World War I, she did volunteer work in support of families of musicians serving in the French army. That effort decisively undermined her already fragile health, and she died shortly before her 25th birthday.

Boulanger began writing Vieille prière bouddhique in 1914, during her Prix de Rome residency, and completed it in 1917. Scored for chorus, orchestra and solo tenor, the music strikes a tone of ancient religiosity from the start, as sustained drone figures in the orchestral strings support a chant, intoned by the chorus, whose melody follows an archaic scale. A sinuous flute solo leads to an elaboration of the preceding words and music, now featuring solo tenor. When the chorus resumes its principal role, it is to briefly recapitulate the material in strong and, ultimately, exalted tones.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Opus 125
BORN: December 16, 1770, in Bonn
DIED: March 26, 1827, in Vienna
WORLD PREMIERE: May 7, 1824, in Vienna.

What to Listen For:

• Over the course of its four movements, the music traces an emotional arc from crisis to jubilation, one that we find also in other Beethoven compositions, including his Third and Fifth symphonies.
• The addition of voices to the orchestra in the finale had no precedent in symphonic music, but it provided Beethoven with a vehicle for a heightened expression of joy.

Between 1800 and 1812, Beethoven transformed the symphony as no other composer had up until that point (or arguably has done since). His first two works of this kind, written in 1800 and 1802, summarized the Classical-period symphony, which had been his inheritance from Mozart and Haydn, considered the great symphonists of the late 18th century. With his Third Symphony, the epochal Sinfonia Eroica of 1804, Beethoven expanded both the musical and emotional scope of the genre, imparting to it the heroic spirit that would become a hallmark of 19th-century Romanticism.

The works that followed proved Beethoven’s symphonic style was capable of expression that ranged from desperate struggle to the purifying beauty he found in nature. Equally important, they revealed the imposing command of form and development that places these compositions among the great intellectual achievements of Western culture.

Then, beginning in 1813, no symphony came from Beethoven’s pen for more than a decade. Much of this period saw a marked decrease in the composer’s output and his progressive withdrawal from most social contact. He was, during this time, embroiled in emotional and legal turmoil engendered by the custody of his troubled nephew. Moreover, he was now almost completely deaf and struggling to accept the impossibility of intimate companionship, something he had long hoped for, but that finally seemed unattainable in view of his failed hearing and single-minded devotion to music.

These difficult personal circumstances might alone have explained the relative silence of the formerly prolific composer. But the work of Beethoven’s final years suggests that he was passing through a creative crisis as well; for when the flow of compositions at last resumed, the results were distinct from anything their author had produced before.

In his late compositions, Beethoven seems to be reaching in opposite directions at once. His tone is more intimate, more personal, yet the scale on which his ideas take form has once again expanded. There is a greater feeling of maturity and a sense of profound spirituality in his musical utterances, but his melodies often have the simplicity of folk tunes. And while boldly formulating new concepts of musical design and harmonic language, he takes pains to incorporate such anachronisms as fugal counterpoint in his compositions.

Nowhere are the contradictions that inform Beethoven’s late music more evident than in his Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824. And nowhere, in either his own earlier symphonies or those of other composers, are there precedents for the grandeur and almost terrifying fervor of this work, or for the remarkable conception of the symphony’s choral finale.

But while the Ninth Symphony seems in many ways sui generis, it also represents an extension and culmination of certain concerns that had preoccupied Beethoven throughout his career. The triumph of the spirit, the psychological progression from pathos to joy that had been the theme of the Third and Fifth symphonies, the opera Fidelio, and the Egmont Overture, finds its greatest expression in Beethoven’s final symphonic essay. In each of the aforementioned works, the victory of love, heroism or both is celebrated in strong, simple melodies and straightforward harmonies, and Beethoven extends that rhetorical device magnificently in the Ninth Symphony’s closing movement.

Even the use of Friedrich Schiller’s ode “An die Freude,” the “Ode to Joy,” as the basis of the finale stems from Beethoven’s youth. As a young man, he had sketched a setting of these verses and the idea of completing it never left him. Thus, the Ninth Symphony was as much fulfillment as breakthrough, a work that crowned Beethoven’s efforts to articulate in music the 19th century’s great humanist vision, even while it opened new vistas in the field of symphonic composition.

If the finale is the triumphant goal of the Ninth Symphony, the significance of this movement, its cathartic power and seeming necessity stem from the sense of conflict presented at the outset of the composition. The initial movement seems a work of elemental force and it grows out of the most elemental musical materials. Its initial moments suggest a shapeless, formless primordial void: static harmonies from which fragments of melody tentatively emerge, the music slowly gathering momentum until it erupts to launch what is still the most tumultuous and compelling drama in the symphonic literature. 

The second movement presents a robust scherzo, one in which Beethoven offers a remarkable display of compositional skill. Successive statements of its principal motif, punctuated by startling exclamations from the timpani, are woven into intricate contrapuntal passages suggesting a great cosmic dance.

In contrast to the vigor of this second movement, the third gives us music of heavenly sweetness, a sense of deep and serene spirituality. The tranquility of this Adagio molto e cantabile—Andante moderato might lead us to believe that the turmoil of the opening movement has been resolved. But as the finale begins, we find that a sense of agitation, conveyed by a harsh fanfare, still lingers over the symphony.

The disturbing fanfare is answered at once by a more tempered statement from the deep orchestral voices of the cellos and basses. A second outburst is similarly answered. Beethoven now recounts the progress of the symphony thus far, presenting fragments of music from the three preceding movements in turn. Like the fanfares, each of these recollections is interrupted by the low strings. Their declamatory statements seem more like speech than music, as if the notes are groping for words.

At last, a bit of melody emerges, growing more confident as it is taken up by additional instruments. This is the famous principal theme of the movement, and with its bright announcement by the full orchestra, the symphony seems assured of a joyous conclusion. But victory is not so easily won. Again, the dissonant fanfare sounds, casting the work once more into shadow.

And then, something quite extraordinary occurs. The declamatory music presented earlier by the cellos and basses again rises up in protest, but now it has a new voice, a human one, and has found the words for which it has been searching: “O friends, not these sounds, but let us raise our voices in joyful song!” The lines are Beethoven’s, and as if in obedience to his call, the symphony bursts into song. The remainder of the movement is an elaborate setting of Schiller’s ode. During the course of this presentation, the composer employs, in varying configurations, the full range of instrumental and vocal resources at his disposal, and the “Ode to Joy” theme, which seemed so modest at its first appearance, becomes a soaring anthem for joy, for brotherhood, for all Beethoven hoped mankind might be.

Paul Schiavo © 2022