Program Notes · Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra · 22 October 2026
Emilie Mayer’s Faust and Beethoven’s Fifth
v3 · updated 30 September 2026 · 13 sources
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v3 · 30 September 2026 · Further reading added
- Added three recommended books: The First Four Notes, Mozart: The Reign of Love, The Classical Style
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v2 · 30 September 2026 · Sources added; house-style edit
- Added 10 sources
- Removed em dashes
- Minasi: Il Pomo d'Oro role corrected to principal conductor 2012-2015 (not co-founder); unsourced Diapason d'Or/Echo Klassik claim removed; Carlo Felice role stated as music director
- Minasi: removed unsourced claim that he co-edited the critical edition of Bellini's Norma
- Mayer bio: removed unsourced claim of an inheritance granting independence; father's death dated to 1840
- Mayer Faust Overture: dated to around 1880; reception now 'critically acclaimed in the early 1880s'; removed 'Dutch premiere' (not stated by the orchestra)
- Mayer Faust Overture: removed unsourced claim about characteristic seventh-chord colourings
- Mozart K. 503: premiere softened to 'probably played it himself in Vienna soon afterwards'; repertoire entry dated to the later twentieth century
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v1 · 22 June 2026 · First published
Emilie Mayer (1812–1883)
Faust Overture11 min
About the Work
The concert overture (a single-movement orchestral piece, often inspired by a literary or dramatic subject, written for the concert hall rather than the theatre) was one of the most popular orchestral genres of the Romantic era. Mendelssohn’s overtures were the great models, and composers across Europe used the form to paint a scene, tell a story in miniature, or evoke a famous literary character. Emilie Mayer, a prolific and resourceful orchestral composer, wrote around fifteen such overtures, and among them is this Faust Overture, inspired by Goethe’s monumental drama: the foundational text of German Romanticism, and a subject that drew composers from Berlioz and Schumann to Liszt and Wagner.
Mayer composed the Faust Overture around 1880, in her later Berlin years, when she was a well-established figure in the capital’s concert life, and it was critically acclaimed in the early 1880s. Goethe’s Faust, the story of the restless scholar who bargains his soul with Mephistopheles in his search for meaning, knowledge and love, offered exactly the kind of dramatic, philosophically charged subject the Romantic concert overture thrived on. Its appearance on this programme is a reminder of just how recently Mayer’s music has begun to return to the international stage after more than a century of neglect.
Hearing it opposite Beethoven, whose shadow loomed over every nineteenth-century symphonist, is fitting for a composer once called ‘the female Beethoven’: it invites us to listen to Mayer not as a curiosity but as a serious orchestral voice of her age, finally being given her due.
What to Listen For
As a Faust overture in the Romantic tradition, expect music of dramatic contrasts: the brooding, striving spirit of Goethe’s hero set against more lyrical, tender material. Listen for a weighty, often shadowed opening that establishes the work’s serious tone (the restless searching that defines Faust himself), and for the way Mayer builds momentum through her orchestra with sudden harmonic shifts and rich colourings.
This is your chance to hear, quite possibly for the first time, the orchestral voice of a composer her contemporaries took entirely seriously. Notice how confidently she handles the full Romantic orchestra, how she shapes a dramatic arc across a short span, and how the music drives toward its climax. Come without preconceptions: rather than measuring the piece against the masterpieces that frame it, listen for what is individual in Mayer’s voice, and for the simple, striking fact that music this assured lay silent and unheard for well over a hundred years.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 50332 min
About the Work
Mozart completed his Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major on 4 December 1786, in the same busy stretch that produced the ‘Prague’ Symphony, and probably played it himself in Vienna soon afterwards. It is the last of the great series of concertos he wrote for his own use during his peak Viennese years, and it is the grandest and most public of them all. Where some of the earlier concertos charm or beguile, K. 503 impresses: it is big-boned, ceremonial and symphonically ambitious, the work of a composer at the height of his powers writing on the largest scale the genre allowed.
The key of C major, with its bright trumpets and drums, had long carried associations of pomp and grandeur, and Mozart exploits them fully. Yet the concerto is far from merely festive. Again and again the confident C-major rhetoric is shadowed by sudden turns to the minor, lending the music a searching, ambiguous quality beneath its splendour. Commentators have often heard in its breadth and contrapuntal richness a foreshadowing of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, which lay two years ahead.
Intriguingly, this magnificent work was not an immediate favourite. Its grandeur and relative reticence (it offers fewer of the obviously seductive tunes of, say, the A-major or C-minor concertos) meant it was less often played, and it only really entered the standard repertoire in the later twentieth century. Today it is recognised as one of the supreme achievements of the Classical concerto: spacious, noble, and inexhaustibly rich.
What to Listen For
The first movement (Allegro maestoso) opens with grand, march-like C-major chords. But listen, just moments in, for the music’s sudden clouding into the minor, a shadow that will keep recrossing the movement and give it its peculiar depth. This is one of Mozart’s longest and most symphonic concerto movements; notice the wealth of themes and the way the piano, when it enters, both joins and gently transforms the orchestra’s grand argument. One of its melodies has often been likened to the ‘Marseillaise.’
The slow movement (Andante) moves to the warm key of F major and unfolds as a serene, songful meditation, the piano in intimate dialogue with the woodwinds, Mozart the opera composer audible in its vocal grace. The finale is a spacious rondo built on an elegant, dancing theme, but it too has surprising reach and contrapuntal interest, far more than a simple romp. Keep your ear on the conversation between piano and orchestra throughout: in this concerto, more than almost any other, they are true equals in a single grand design.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 6733 min
About the Work
No piece of orchestral music is more famous than Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and few have been more influential. Its four opening notes, three short and one long (‘short-short-short-LONG’), are perhaps the most recognisable musical idea ever written, and the symphony built from them became, almost immediately, the very emblem of what a symphony could be: not merely a sequence of pleasing movements but a single dramatic journey, a struggle that ends in triumph.
Beethoven worked on the symphony over several years, completing it in 1808 amid the most fertile period of his life, even as his deafness deepened. It was unveiled at one of the most extraordinary concerts in history: a marathon, freezing four-hour event at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien on 22 December 1808, which also gave the premieres of the Sixth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy, with Beethoven himself at the piano. The under-rehearsed performance was reportedly a shambles, but the Fifth Symphony’s power soon became undeniable. The writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, reviewing it shortly afterwards, hailed it as opening ‘the realm of the colossal and immeasurable.’
The symphony’s overarching design, a tense, stormy C minor driving across four movements to a blazing C-major victory, became the model for the ‘struggle to triumph’ narrative that would shape Romantic music for the rest of the century. The terse opening motto saturates the whole work, binding it into a single, irresistible argument.
What to Listen For
Everything grows from those first four notes. Listen for how the opening motto is not just a theme but a building block: Beethoven hurls it through the first movement obsessively, in every register and instrument, generating tremendous momentum from the barest material; even a lone oboe’s brief, plaintive cadenza cannot halt its drive.
The second movement (Andante con moto) offers respite: a flowing, dignified set of variations on two themes, with noble brass outbursts. The third movement returns to C minor and a sense of foreboding: listen for the menacing opening on cellos and basses and the gruff, scrambling fugato of its central trio. Then comes the symphony’s great masterstroke: instead of ending, the scherzo dissolves into a long, suspenseful passage of hushed, throbbing strings over a quiet drumbeat, the tension stretched almost unbearably, until it bursts directly, without a break, into the blazing C-major finale. At that moment Beethoven brings in trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon for the first time in the symphony, flooding the hall with new brilliance. Listen, too, for how the shadow of the third movement briefly returns mid-finale, only to be swept aside as the music drives to one of the most emphatic, hard-won victories in all of music.
Tonight's Artists
Mao Fujitapiano
Mao Fujita’s affinity for Mozart is well established: his recorded cycle of the complete Mozart sonatas marked him out as a Mozartian of rare poise and clarity. The ‘grand’ C-major Concerto, K. 503, asks for more than charm, though: its symphonic breadth and shadowed grandeur call for architectural command alongside the singing tone and transparency that are Fujita’s hallmarks. Hearing this most public of Mozart’s concertos in his hands is a chance to test a celebrated Mozart specialist against the composer’s most ceremonious canvas.
Mao Fujita, born in Tokyo in 1998, is among the most admired pianists of the younger generation. He began playing at the age of three and rose rapidly through the competition circuit, winning first prize at the Clara Haskil Competition in Switzerland in 2017 and then the silver medal at the 2019 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, which brought him to wide international attention. An exclusive Sony Classical artist, he announced himself on record with an acclaimed complete set of Mozart’s piano sonatas, and his Mozart playing, poised, transparent, unaffected and singing, has become something of a calling card. Praised for the refinement and natural musicality of his playing rather than mere display, he now appears with leading orchestras and in major recital halls around the world.
Further reading
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Accessible The First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth and the Human Imagination
Matthew Guerrieri, Vintage 2014
A lively book about Beethoven’s Fifth and the many meanings people have heard in its opening motif, from Romantic critics to wartime radio.
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Accessible Mozart: The Reign of Love
Jan Swafford, Harper Perennial 2021
Swafford’s life of Mozart, strong on the Vienna years that produced the great piano concertos such as K. 503.
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Deeper The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
Charles Rosen, W. W. Norton 1998
Rosen’s study of the Classical style has a long chapter on Mozart’s piano concertos and shows the musical language Beethoven’s Fifth grew from.