Classics Live: Beethoven’s Ninth in the Ziggo Dome

About the Work

Mikhail Glinka is often regarded as the founder of Russian classical music, and with some justice: before him, Russia’s concert life and opera houses were dominated by imported Italian, French and German music, and it was Glinka who first showed that a Russian composer could speak with a national voice while commanding the full technique of the European tradition. His first opera, A Life for the Tsar (1836), made him famous. His second, Ruslan and Lyudmila, took him the better part of five years and reached the stage of the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St Petersburg in late 1842.

The opera is based on the early narrative poem by Alexander Pushkin, a fairy-tale romance in which the knight Ruslan must rescue his bride Lyudmila, snatched away on their wedding night by the evil dwarf-sorcerer Chernomor. It is a sprawling, magical, episodic work, full of enchanted gardens, a giant disembodied head and oriental dances, and at its premiere it was coolly received. Yet its musical influence was immense. The composers who came after Glinka, among them Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, treated Ruslan as a treasure-house, and its fantastical harmonies and orchestral colours echo through a century of Russian music.

The opera itself is rarely staged outside Russia, but its overture has become one of the most popular curtain-raisers in the orchestral repertoire: five minutes of sheer exhilaration, and a test of any string section’s nerve.

What to Listen For

The overture opens with a blaze: hammered full-orchestra chords, and then the violins set off on a scurrying, breathless theme at a Presto tempo that allows no rest. Listen to the strings here: this is famously one of the most exposed and treacherous passages in the orchestral literature, and a great orchestra makes it sound like quicksilver rather than hard work.

The contrast comes with a broad, warm second melody, sung out by the lower strings, a tune drawn from the opera itself. After the development, which tosses fragments of the main theme around the orchestra, listen near the end for something strange: in the bass, the low instruments intone a slow descent in whole tones, an eerie, rootless scale that was startlingly new in the 1840s and represents the sorcerer Chernomor’s dark magic. It is only a moment, a shadow crossing the stage, before the music bursts back into daylight and races to a triumphant finish.

About the Work

In 1874 Henrik Ibsen asked Grieg to write incidental music for a stage production of Peer Gynt, his sprawling verse drama about a boastful, restless Norwegian peasant lad who roams the world, from the halls of the mountain troll king to the deserts of North Africa, in search of himself. Grieg found the task daunting, but the music he produced turned out to be his most famous. The production opened in Christiania, today’s Oslo, on 24 February 1876. More than a decade later Grieg gathered the best numbers into two concert suites, and it is through these, above all the first, published in 1888, that the music has travelled the world.

Morning Mood opens Suite No. 1. Almost everyone knows it from films, advertisements and cartoons, where it has become shorthand for a sunrise over a fjord. The irony is that it is nothing of the kind. In the play, the music introduces the fourth act, where Peer, now a prosperous and none-too-scrupulous adventurer, wakes up on the coast of Morocco. The sunrise is a desert sunrise. Grieg, though, could not help writing out of his own landscape, and the music is so full of Nordic freshness that audiences have always heard Norway in it.

What to Listen For

The whole piece grows from a single, gently rocking phrase, passed back and forth between flute and oboe over sustained strings, a melody built largely on the notes of the pentatonic scale, which gives it its open, pastoral simplicity. Listen as it is taken up by ever larger forces: the strings and then the full orchestra carry it to a glowing climax, a moment of full sunrise. Then the light softens. Towards the close, listen for the horn’s calm statement of the tune and the delicate birdsong touches in the woodwind, as the morning settles into stillness.

About the Work

As a young man, Johannes Brahms toured northern Germany as accompanist to the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi, and it was from Reményi that he absorbed the flamboyant ‘gypsy’ style of Hungarian popular music: the csárdás with its slow, brooding opening and its whirlwind fast section, the sudden rubatos, the dazzling ornamentation. Years later, Brahms turned these memories into a set of Hungarian Dances for piano duet (piano four hands), the domestic music-making of every middle-class household of the day. The first two books appeared in 1869 and became some of the most popular and profitable music he ever published; two further books followed in 1880, making twenty-one dances in all.

Brahms was careful to call them arrangements rather than original compositions, which is why they carry no opus number. Several of the tunes were not in fact anonymous folk melodies but recent popular compositions: the famous Fifth, for instance, is based on a csárdás by the Hungarian composer Béla Kéler, which Brahms apparently believed to be traditional. Brahms himself orchestrated only three of the dances. No. 5, the most famous of them all, is played tonight in Albert Parlow’s orchestration, in a version the orchestra credits to Parlow and Jansons.

What to Listen For

This is a dance built on contrast and caprice. The opening is a passionate, swaggering minor-key melody, full of dark colour, which the orchestra plays with exaggerated freedom; listen for the sudden slowings and stretchings of the tempo, the hallmark of the Hungarian style. Then the central section flips into the major, with quicksilver changes of speed: a sudden dead slow, a sudden rush, the music teasing the listener like a dancer who cannot decide whether to stop or to spin. The opening tune returns to round the whole thing off, all in barely three minutes.

About the Work

In 1840 Giuseppe Verdi’s life was in ruins. Within a short span he had lost his two young children and his wife, and his comic opera Un giorno di regno had been a fiasco at La Scala. He resolved to give up composing. According to the story he told much later in life, the impresario of La Scala pressed a libretto on him anyway (Temistocle Solera’s Nabucco, a drama of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and the captive Hebrews), and when Verdi threw it on the table at home, it fell open at the words ‘Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate’ (‘Go, thought, on golden wings’). He could not get them out of his head, and the opera was written. Whether or not the anecdote is embroidered, Nabucco, first performed at La Scala on 9 March 1842, was the triumph that launched one of the greatest careers in operatic history.

‘Va, pensiero’ is sung in the third act by the Hebrews, exiled and enslaved on the banks of the Euphrates, as they long for their lost homeland. The text paraphrases Psalm 137: ‘By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept.’ It later came to be linked, in popular memory, with the Italian struggle for unity and independence, although historians now question how far it served as a rallying song at the time. When Verdi died in 1901, crowds in Milan sang it in his honour, and Arturo Toscanini led a great choir in it when the composer’s body was moved to its final resting place.

What to Listen For

After a short orchestral introduction, with its quiet, expectant string tremolo and a pause, the choir enters softly with the famous melody, and for much of the chorus the voices sing in unison, not in harmony. It is a deliberate and powerful effect: a whole people singing with one voice. The melody swells in a great arch to a fortissimo climax at the words ‘O mia patria, sì bella e perduta!’ (‘O my homeland, so lovely and lost!’), then falls back. Only near the end does Verdi spread the voices into harmony, as the chorus prays for strength to endure, and the music fades away in quiet, harp-accompanied resignation.

About the Work

Guillaume Tell was Rossini’s last opera, and his most ambitious. Written for the Paris Opéra, where it was first performed on 3 August 1829, it is a vast historical epic in four acts, based on Friedrich Schiller’s play about the legendary Swiss hero who led his people’s revolt against Austrian tyranny, the man forced to shoot an apple from his own son’s head. It pointed the way to the grand French opera of the following decades. And then Rossini, at thirty-seven the most celebrated composer in Europe, simply stopped writing operas. He lived for almost forty more years, but William Tell was his operatic farewell.

The full opera is long and rarely staged, but its overture is one of the most famous pieces of orchestral music ever written. Unusually for its time, it is not a single movement but a kind of miniature tone poem in four linked sections, painting in sound the Swiss landscape and the story to come. Its final galop, thanks to generations of radio, cinema and cartoons, is known to millions who have never set foot in an opera house.

What to Listen For

The overture falls into four clear scenes. It begins at dawn in the Alps, and with a startling sound: five solo cellos, accompanied by the double basses, in a hushed, richly harmonised meditation. It is one of the most original openings in all of Romantic music.

Then a storm gathers. Listen for the patter of the first raindrops in the violins and woodwind, the rumbling of the lower strings, and the full fury of the tempest with crashing brass and timpani, before it rolls away into the distance.

In the calm that follows comes a pastoral scene: a ranz des vaches, the traditional call of Swiss herdsmen summoning their cattle, played by the cor anglais and answered by the flute’s airy decorations. It is pure Alpine tranquillity.

And then the trumpets shatter the peace with a fanfare, and the orchestra launches into the famous galop, a thrilling charge that represents the Swiss soldiers’ march to liberation. Listen to how Rossini, the master of the crescendo, keeps the energy building and building to a breathless close.

About the Work

Beethoven had been fascinated by Friedrich Schiller’s poem An die Freude (‘Ode to Joy’) for more than twenty years before he set it in the Ninth Symphony. The symphony itself took shape slowly in the early 1820s, and it grew into the largest and most revolutionary symphony yet written. Its decisive innovation, bringing voices (soloists and chorus) into the symphony’s finale, had no real precedent, and it changed the course of music: for the rest of the nineteenth century, every symphonist would have to reckon with it.

The premiere took place at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna on 7 May 1824. Beethoven, by now completely deaf, stood on the stage beside the conductor, following the performance in his score and indicating the tempi. Famously, he did not hear the ovation behind him until one of the musicians, by most accounts the contralto Caroline Unger, turned him round to see the audience applauding.

The symphony’s meaning has always been bound up with the words Beethoven chose: a vision of universal brotherhood, of joy as the divine spark that unites humankind: ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder,’ all people become brothers. The Ninth was performed to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall and at countless other moments of celebration and hope across the world, and its ‘Ode to Joy’ melody has become the anthem of Europe. Few works have carried such a weight of public meaning, and few repay it so richly.

What to Listen For

The first movement (Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso) begins out of nothingness: bare open fifths, shimmering in the strings, from which fragments tumble downward until the full orchestra hurls out the mighty main theme in D minor. It is music of cosmic scale and grim power, and its coda, over a grinding, repeated figure in the bass, is among the darkest pages Beethoven wrote.

The second movement is the Scherzo, placed second rather than third, an unusual choice. Listen for the timpani, tuned an octave apart, cracking out the rhythm in the opening bars, and the relentless, driving energy of the fugal writing, with a more relaxed, pastoral trio section at its centre.

The third movement (Adagio molto e cantabile) is one of Beethoven’s most sublime slow movements: two alternating, deeply serene melodies, the first varied and ornamented with increasing richness on each return. Near the end, two loud fanfares interrupt the calm, as if summoning us to what comes next.

The finale opens with a deliberate shock: a violent, dissonant outburst. The cellos and basses reply in a wordless recitative, as the orchestra quotes the themes of the first three movements and the low strings reject each in turn. Then, quietly, the basses announce the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme, which grows through variations to the full orchestra. The dissonant outburst returns, and this time a human voice answers it. The bass soloist sings words Beethoven wrote himself: ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!’ (‘O friends, not these sounds!’), and the chorus joins in the Ode.

From here the finale unfolds as a vast sequence of episodes: a comic Turkish march, with triangle, cymbals and bass drum, led by the tenor soloist; a hushed, awe-struck chorale on ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen!’ (‘Be embraced, you millions!’); a magnificent double fugue combining the two great themes; and a headlong, ecstatic coda that ends the symphony in a blaze of D major. In the Ziggo Dome, listen for the moment the audience is invited to join the singing: Beethoven’s call to universal brotherhood taken, for once, at its word.