© 2011 Mary Eichbauer
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, op.
43. Composed 1801; first performed 28 March 1801 in Vienna. Scored for two
flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and
strings.
Prometheus, in Greek mythology, is the creator of the human race, and its champion
against the cruel and fickle gods. As a Titan, Prometheus represents a halfway point
between god and human—a place our modern-day mythology fills with the superhero,
who performs daring feats and suffers unspeakable torments. When Zeus punished
humanity by taking away that divine gift, fire, Prometheus sneaked up to Mount Olympus
and stole it back, a theft for which he paid dearly. For years, Prometheus was chained to
a mountaintop, where he was visited every day by an eagle, sent by the vindictive Zeus,
which ate his liver without killing him. Every night, the liver would grow back, ready for
the following day’s torment. Finally, Heracles broke Prometheus’s chains and freed him.
In The Creatures of Prometheus, other, gentler parts of the Prometheus myth figure more
prominently. Prometheus, with the help of the god Apollo, brings civilization and the
arts to his protégés.
The ballet’s plot is essentially an excuse for beautiful dances on the themes of the
various arts. After creating a man and a woman from clay and bringing them to life with
fire from the gods, Prometheus almost destroys his creatures because they are little more
than animals. Rescued by Apollo, the creatures are taken to Mount Parnassus, the home
of the Muses, to learn the arts and how to appreciate them. When they can appreciate the
beauties of nature and art, they are set free to live their lives.
Salvatore Viganò (1769-1821), a Neapolitan ballet master who was all the rage in
1800, wanted Beethoven to collaborate with him on a full-length ballet on the theme of
Prometheus. Viganò, who simplified the traditional, stilted movements of classical
ballet, making them somewhat more natural, created a dramatic synthesis of pantomime
and ballet that he called “coreodramma.” This ballet was performed 16 times, and
achieved some modest success. But once Viganò and his work fell out of favor, the ballet
was seldom revived. Beethoven cannibalized parts of the ballet music for other works.
Only the overture has become part of the orchestral repertoire.
Dramatic, rising chords introduce the overture. After a pause comes a slow,
dreamy introduction, decorated with ornaments by the winds. Fast, busy scales in the
strings erupt suddenly out of nowhere, creating a sense of energy and happy anticipation.
Dramatic contrasts in dynamics and unexpectedly accented notes contribute to this effect.
The brief overture is a fast and exciting ride, full of exuberance and joy.
Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999). Concierto de Aranjuez, for guitar and orchestra.
Composed in 1939 in Paris. First performed 9 November 1940 in Barcelona, Spain.
Scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two
trombones, strings and solo guitar.
Born in Sagunto, Valencia, Spain, Joaquin Rodrigo lost his sight at age three after a case
of diphtheria. He was able to study and compose music in Braille, and studied both in
Spain and Paris with the finest teachers, including Paul Dukas. Although best known for
his compositions for guitar, Rodrigo was primarily a pianist. This concerto is his best
known work by far.
The Concierto de Aranjuez was an early composition of Rodrigo’s, written while
he was still studying in Paris. Rodrigo said that the first movement was a response to the
beauty of the gardens at the Palacio Real de Aranjuez, near Madrid, an attempt to capture
“the fragrance of magnolias, the singing of birds, and the gushing of fountains.” King
Juan Carlos I of Spain awarded Rodrigo a hereditary royal title in honor of his 90th
birthday: Marqués de los jardines de Aranjuez (Marquis of the gardens of Aranjuez), so
that the gardens he wrote of so lovingly in his music would always be evoked by his
name.
The first movement starts with solo guitar playing a joyous melody. Flutes join
in, then strings repeat the melody, bouncing the bow for a slightly percussive effect.
Violins play a second theme that is bounced back and forth by strings and winds for a
moment, before the guitar comes back in with a series of whimsical variations on both
themes. Throughout, the guitar is prominent, never being overpowered by the orchestra,
but, rather, trading melodies in a sort of dialogue. The composer said that the first
movement is “animated by a rhythmic spirit and vigor without either of the two
themes…interrupting its relentless pace.” Solo cello has a beautiful moment at the
beginning of the development section. Although the themes are occasionally cast in a
minor key, the mood of this movement remains buoyant, with gorgeous, swirling notes in
the winds and strings creating a feeling of mystery, while the guitar maintains its cheerful
good humor. The movement ends as it began, with the original theme.
The Adagio second movement represents a dialogue between guitar and solo
winds, mainly English horn. This is one of the best-known melodies in twentieth-century
music, having inspired variations in many genres, from classical to jazz and rock, from
Miles Davis to Led Zeppelin. Years after its composition, Rodrigo’s wife claimed that
this bittersweet theme was her husband’s response to the miscarriage of her first
pregnancy. The guitar starts the movement with a simple strummed chord, putting the
plaintive English horn solo at center stage. The guitar repeats the theme with
elaborations, before making way for the English horn again. The whole movement
consists of the same theme, repeated with variations and ornamentation by solo
instruments, strings, and guitar in an ever-changing series of repetitions that never grow
tiresome. At the movement’s center, the solo guitar plays the theme unaccompanied, in
its most mournful repetition yet, continuing to darken the mood as the orchestra joins in.
The guitar then plays an emotional and complex cadenza. When strings come in and
repeat the theme at full volume, the effect is emotionally devastating. The pace slows as
the guitar ends on a few rising notes, accompanied by pianissimo strings.
The third movement rises unexpectedly out of the second, almost as if the
composer could not bear to leave the mood dark for very long. This final movement’s
complex time signature switches back and forth, alternating quickly from 2 to 3 beats per
measure. This creates the feeling of a cheerful folk dance, brushing away any lingering
feeling of sadness left by the previous movement. According to the composer, this
movement “recalls a courtly dance in which the combination of double and triple time
maintains a taut tempo right to the closing bar.” The guitar ends on a long descending
scale and a simple repeated note.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). Symphony No 8 in F, op. 93. Composed 1812;
first performed 27 February 1814 in Vienna. Scored for two flutes, two oboes, two
clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.
Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony presents a perfect example of the dangers of biographicalbased interpretations. The year 1812 was, for Beethoven, one that included a good deal
of frustration and misery. His deafness was continuously getting worse, and a letter
found among his effects from this period suggests that he had just suffered a terrible
disappointment in love. (Many mysteries remain around this episode—the identity of the
woman has never been definitively established by scholars, and the love letter to this
“Immortal Beloved,” found in Beethoven’s papers, was probably never mailed.) This
man who fiercely desired domestic companionship had apparently just learned that he
was probably never going to have it.
Beethoven’s brother, Nikolaus Johann (called Johann, after their father), added to
Beethoven’s distress by planning to marry his own housekeeper, who already had a
daughter by another man. Beethoven traveled to see his younger sibling, but was unable
to dissuade his brother from this marriage that he found unsuitable, or to convince the
bishop or the local authorities to stand in the way of the union. At one point, the brothers
reportedly came to blows, but the wedding went on as planned. Beethoven returned
home furious. One can only imagine his state of mind when contemplating his brother’s
planned happiness with a woman of the lower classes against his own dashed hopes.
Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny reportedly asked him why he thought his long
Symphony No. 7 was more popular than its compact successor. “Because the Eighth is
so much better,” he is said to have replied. But, not only did the public give the work a
lukewarm reception at its premiere (where it was heard opposite the monumental
Seventh), but sometimes, after Beethoven’s lifetime, the Seventh’s second movement
was substituted for the Eighth’s in performance. Some critics have agreed with the
public’s ranking of these works (French composer Hector Berlioz, for example), but
others, such as Georges Bernard Shaw and Tchaikovsky, have considered the Eighth a
great masterpiece, perhaps because Beethoven, at the height of his powers, played
musical games in the Eighth that the public did not understand, including dissonance in
the second movement, and the intrusion of an unexpected tone in the finale that
eventually introduces the dominant key of the ending. Separated from others by his
deafness, his odd habits and bad temper, Beethoven turned to his music. His Symphony
No. 7 contains some melancholy elements mixed with its beautiful exuberance, but the
Eighth is lively, witty and rambunctious throughout, with touches seemingly inspired by
Beethoven’s old teacher Haydn. In a way, the Eighth is a throwback to a classicalsounding symphonic idiom, but its innovation lies in play with key changes and rhythms
that are not immediately obvious.
The first movement (Allegro vivace et con brio), begins with an emphatic
statement of the first theme, which, despite its energy, has a pastoral feel. After an
interlude of quick, rhythmic repetitions that serve as a sort of introduction, the second
theme, a lighter, dance-like figure, arises quickly. After the exposition, the themes are
developed in a stormy section, once more introduced by the repetitious rhythms. The
recapitulation of the themes contains a kind of musical joke. Instead of repeating the
theme more or less the way it had been played before, he relegates it to the lower
registers—cellos, basses, bassoons—while the higher instruments do their best to obscure
it. (Gustav Mahler found this so irritating that he “retouched” the section to bring the
theme out where it could be heard.) The movement ends as it began, with a repetition of
the main theme.
The second movement, Allegretto scherzando, is a curiosity. It has been
suggested that Beethoven was responding to Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony No. 101,
whose second movement is a clever amalgam of clock sounds made by orchestral
instruments, from little tickers to the bong of a giant pendulum, accompanied by a sweet
little tune that morphs into a maelstrom. Another theory is based on the fact that
Beethoven had recently spent some time working with his friend Johann Nepomuk
Maelzel, the inventor of the metronome. Accordingly, the winds start off this movement
with a rhythmic pulse, to which the violins soon add a sprightly little melody,
humorously echoed in the lower strings. Winds join in and pass phrases of the little tune
around the orchestra in many voices, from high and lilting winds and strings to the gruff
pronouncements of the cellos and basses. Each brief section is punctuated by a brief
flurry of quick notes, as if the metronome had suddenly gone mad. A lyrical section
seems to dispense with the metronomic beat altogether, making a lovely interlude of
variations out of the original melody. The regular background beats return until a gradual
slowing towards the end. Little chirps from different instruments recall the original
theme, broken into pieces, and a surprise forte passage, worthy of Haydn, leads into a
rousing Mozartian ending.
The second movement was sufficiently scherzo-like that Beethoven probably
decided to forego his usual practice of putting a scherzo (or “joke”) in the place of the
traditional minuet as a third movement. This minuet is deceptive, however; anyone who
tries to dance to it is headed for disaster. The brass occasionally gets slightly out of sync
with the rest of the orchestra, a trick Beethoven used before in his Pastoral Symphony
(No. 6) to suggest the ineptness of a country band of folk musicians. The central trio
contains a lovely duet for horn and clarinet, with the basses growling out bits of the
original theme just below the surface.
The Allegro vivace fourth movement starts out quietly, but soon surprises us with
a full-volume volley of sixteenth notes. The opening theme seems more like a rhythm
than a melody, but the lyrical second theme makes up for it. The orchestra seems to be
playing hide-and-seek with us, as the sound fades away into soft, fragmented passages,
and then returns to full volume. One note keeps intruding at the start of the full-volume
passages—a brusque C-sharp that seems out of place. But that note eventually has its
way, pulling the whole orchestra into a new key, from which is it dragged back again
through herculean efforts by the trumpets and timpani. The movement’s structure
includes another joke: the coda (Italian for “tail”), usually just a short ending, is as long
as the whole movement—the tail wagging the dog.