Seascapes, Reconciliation, and a Descent into Madness

About the Work

In the summer of 1829, the twenty-year-old Mendelssohn embarked on a walking tour of Scotland with his friend Karl Klingemann. Having just made a successful London debut, he was free to indulge his passion for landscape painting and to absorb the wild scenery that had inspired Walter Scott and Ossian.

The two travelers crossed to the uninhabited Isle of Staffa to visit Fingal’s Cave, a spectacular sea cave with hexagonal basalt columns and extraordinary acoustics. The Hebrides overwhelmed the composer. He wrote to his sister Fanny, enclosing the opening bars of an orchestral work: “In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, I send you the following, which came into my head there.”

But Mendelssohn was a perfectionist, and the overture went through multiple revisions before he was satisfied. He completed the score in Rome in December 1830, but continued to revise it before its premiere. The premiere took place in London on May 14, 1832, on the same program as his other famous overture, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The work’s title has caused confusion from the beginning. Mendelssohn originally called it “The Lonely Island,” then “The Hebrides,” but in 1834 the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel issued it as “Fingal’s Cave,” and both names stuck.

What to listen for tonight:

• The opening theme: The famous melody that came to Mendelssohn in the Hebrides: a gently rolling figure in the violas, cellos, and bassoons that immediately conjures the swell and surge of northern seas.

• Orchestral color: Though Mendelssohn uses a modest orchestra, his handling of instrumental texture is masterly. Listen for the way wind and string choirs alternate and combine, painting the cave’s echoing spaces and the crash of waves against rock.

• Atmosphere over narrative: Unlike Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique later on this program, the Hebrides Overture tells no story. Instead, Mendelssohn aims to capture a mood, a place, a moment: the lonely grandeur of the Scottish coast.

About the Work

The Double Concerto, completed in 1887, was Brahms’s final orchestral work and carried a private purpose beyond its musical aims. For more than thirty years, the violinist Joseph Joachim had been one of Brahms’s closest friends and most important musical collaborators. But their relationship had ruptured in the early 1880s when Joachim’s marriage to the mezzo-soprano Amalie collapsed. Brahms, fond of Amalie, sided with her, and the wounded violinist broke off contact.

Years of estrangement passed. Then Brahms saw an opportunity: he would write a concerto for both violin and cello, with the cello part for Robert Hausmann, as a peace offering to Joachim. The concerto even incorporates the musical motif A–E–F, a permutation of F–A–E (Frei aber einsam, “free but lonely”), Joachim’s personal motto.

The gesture worked. The premiere took place in Cologne on October 18, 1887, with Joachim and Hausmann as soloists and Brahms conducting. The friendship was restored. Clara Schumann wrote in her journal: “This concerto is a work of reconciliation; Joachim and Brahms have spoken to each other again for the first time in years.”

Tonight two principals of the Berliner Philharmoniker, First Concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley and First Principal Cello Bruno Delepelaire, bring their own musical partnership to this profound and intimate work.

What to listen for tonight:

• First movement (Allegro): An orchestral introduction leads to an extended solo passage for the cello, almost a cadenza before the movement has properly begun. The violin joins, and the two instruments establish their dialogue. Throughout the movement, notice how Brahms gives both soloists equally important material, neither dominating.

• Second movement (Andante): A serene, song-like slow movement in D major. The two soloists intertwine in what has been described as one of Brahms’s most beautiful creations: intimate chamber music expanded to orchestral scale.

• Third movement (Vivace non troppo): A spirited finale in the Hungarian style Brahms loved. Listen for the rhythmic drive and the increasingly virtuosic interplay between the two soloists as the concerto builds to its exhilarating close.

About the Work

In September 1827, the twenty-three-year-old Berlioz attended a Paris performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and fell catastrophically in love. The object of his obsession was the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, playing Ophelia. He pursued her relentlessly, writing love letters that went unanswered. She refused even to meet him.

The Symphonie fantastique, composed in 1830, was nothing less than Berlioz’s extravagant attempt to attract Harriet’s attention. The full title, “Episode in the Life of an Artist: Fantastic Symphony in Five Parts,” announces its autobiographical nature. The program, distributed to the audience, describes a young artist who, in the depths of despair over unrequited love, has poisoned himself with opium. The symphony depicts his hallucinations.

The premiere took place on December 5, 1830, at the Paris Conservatoire under François-Antoine Habeneck. Harriet heard a revised version in 1832, along with its sequel Lélio, and at last appreciated the strength of his feelings. The two met shortly afterward and married the following year. (The marriage proved unhappy; they separated in 1844.)

What to listen for tonight:

• The idée fixe: A single melody represents the beloved throughout all five movements, one of the first uses of a recurring theme to unify a symphony. Berlioz transforms it to match each movement’s mood: tender in the first, glittering in the second, distorted into a vulgar dance tune in the fifth.

• First movement (Rêveries, Passions): The artist first sees the woman of his dreams. After a slow introduction depicting his restless melancholy, the idée fixe appears in full: elegant, yearning, consuming.

• Second movement (Un bal): A waltz at a ball. Harps lend the dance its glitter as the artist catches glimpses of his beloved in the crowd. The idée fixe floats through the whirling music.

• Third movement (Scène aux champs): A pastoral scene in the countryside. Two shepherds’ pipes call and answer: an English horn on stage responds to an offstage oboe. Distant thunder rumbles at the close; the artist’s solitude is unrelieved.

• Fourth movement (Marche au supplice): The artist dreams he has murdered his beloved and is marched to the scaffold for execution. The idée fixe appears briefly in the clarinet, a last thought of her, before the guillotine falls with a thunderous chord. The severed head drops into the basket.

• Fifth movement (Songe d’une nuit du sabbat): The most shocking movement in symphonic music up to that time. The artist finds himself at a witches’ sabbath, surrounded by monsters and sorcerers gathered for his funeral. The beloved appears, but now transformed into a grotesque witch, her once-noble theme shrieking and cackling. Church bells toll; bassoons and tubas bray out the Dies irae, the medieval chant of the dead, in blasphemous parody. A demonic fugue whips the music into frenzy. Listen for the extraordinary orchestral effects: col legno (striking the strings with the wood of the bow) to evoke rattling bones; sul ponticello (bowing near the bridge) for an eerie, glassy tone.