Klaus Mäkelä in Barcelona: Schumann’s Manfred, Lisa Batiashvili plays Sibelius, Dvořák’s Seventh

About the Work

Lord Byron published Manfred in 1817 and called it a dramatic poem. It was never really meant for the stage. Its hero is a nobleman who lives alone in a castle in the Alps, tormented by guilt over the death of Astarte, the woman he loved. The poem hints strongly that she was his sister and that the love was forbidden. The plot is slight, and its real subject is his inner turmoil. He rejects the consolations of faith and penance and chooses to meet his fate on his own terms. For the Romantic generation he was the model of the proud, self-tormenting outsider.

Schumann had known the poem since he was eighteen, and it never lost its hold on him. In 1848, a year of revolutions across Europe, he made his own version of the text and set it as what he called a ‘dramatic poem with music’: an overture followed by fifteen numbers, among them choruses, solo songs and passages in which the actors speak over the orchestra. He thought of it as ‘something completely new and unheard-of’, and it has remained hard to place, being neither an opera nor a concert piece.

The overture was performed first, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 14 March 1852, with Schumann conducting. The complete work followed three months later in Weimar, where Franz Liszt put it on the stage and conducted. Since then the overture has gone its own way. It is the one part of the score that is regularly played, and it is widely thought to be among the finest orchestral movements Schumann wrote. The composer Hugo Wolf said that it brought the essence of the drama to expression ‘with the simplest strokes’.

It is a portrait more than a narrative. Schumann does not illustrate scenes from the poem. He writes a movement in the form of a symphonic first movement, in the dark and unusual key of E-flat minor, whose restless themes stand for the state of Manfred’s mind.

What to Listen For

Three stabbing chords from the full orchestra tear open the curtain. A slow, sorrowing introduction follows, and the tempo gradually quickens until the music breaks into the main fast section.

The principal theme is breathless and driven, always pressing forward and never finding a firm footing. Against it Schumann sets gentler, plaintive phrases. Listen to how the ideas are pulled apart, stretched and joined together again instead of simply being repeated: the whole movement surges up towards passion again and again, and each time falls back.

There is no victory at the end. The fast music exhausts itself, and the slow introduction returns as an epilogue. The overture closes in the minor key, without the redemption a listener might expect.

About the Work

Sibelius wanted, as a young man, to be a violinist. He gave up the ambition, but when he came to write his only concerto it was for the instrument he knew from the inside. The idea was with him from 1899. By the autumn of 1903 the work was far enough advanced for him to promise the dedication to Willy Burmester, a celebrated virtuoso who had once led the orchestra in Helsinki and who offered to give the first performance in Berlin. His wife Aino described him that winter playing the themes on his violin day and night, with so many ideas that he was almost dizzy.

Then Sibelius, short of money, decided to bring the premiere forward and hold it in Helsinki. Burmester could not come. The solo part went to Victor Nováček, a teacher at the Helsinki conservatory, who had little time to learn an extremely difficult piece that the composer had barely finished. The first performance, on 8 February 1904 with Sibelius conducting, was not a success. The critic Karl Flodin, normally a supporter, wrote that the composer had given in to conventional virtuosity.

Sibelius withdrew the concerto and rewrote it. He shortened the first movement, removed a second cadenza and a good deal of display, and tightened the finale. The new version was introduced in Berlin on 19 October 1905, with Karel Halíř as soloist and Richard Strauss conducting. Burmester, passed over a second time, was so offended that he never played the work. It is the 1905 version that became established, though slowly: the concerto’s worldwide popularity dates from the 1930s, when Jascha Heifetz recorded it. The original score stayed in the family’s keeping and was first recorded only in 1991.

What sets the piece apart from most virtuoso concertos is its seriousness of construction. The orchestra has real material of its own, dark in colour, and the solo cadenza in the first movement is not an interruption but the place where the themes are developed. The scholar and critic Donald Tovey wrote that he had not met ‘a more original, a more masterly, and a more exhilarating work’.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro moderato. There is no orchestral introduction. Over a soft, pulsing cushion of strings the soloist enters at once with a long, wandering melody that seems to come out of the far distance. A second theme arrives dark and low on the violin’s G string. Where a development section would normally stand, the orchestra falls silent and the soloist plays a long cadenza built on the opening theme, full of double stops, trills and runs. When the themes return they are darker in colour, and the movement ends with the main theme’s dramatic material at full strength.

II. Adagio di molto. A short phrase from clarinets and oboes leads in the violin’s broad, heartfelt melody, played over plucked strings. It asks for restraint and simplicity more than brilliance. The orchestra turns stormy in the middle of the movement, and the violin answers with plaintive double stops before the opening melody returns and the music sinks to a serene close.

III. Allegro, ma non tanto. Four bars of drumming rhythm from timpani and low strings set the pace, and the violin leaps in on its lowest string with a dance theme of fierce energy. Tovey called this movement ‘a polonaise for polar bears’, a joke that has stuck to it ever since. A second theme, with something of the waltz about it, is given first to the orchestra. The solo part grows steadily harder, with passages in thirds, arpeggios, octaves and high harmonics, and the major key is won only in the final bars, where the violin’s line climbs upward and the orchestra seals the ending with it.

About the Work

In June 1884 the Philharmonic Society in London elected Dvořák an honorary member and asked him for a new symphony. He had just had a great success in England with his Stabat Mater, and he knew what the invitation meant: this was the society that had commissioned Beethoven’s Ninth. There was a second spur. He had recently heard the Third Symphony of his friend and supporter Johannes Brahms, and he was determined that his own next symphony should stand beside it. To a friend he wrote that the new work must be capable of stirring the world.

He worked on it through the winter and finished the score on 17 March 1885. Beneath the main theme of the first movement he noted that it had come to him at the station in Prague, on the arrival of a festive train from Pest carrying Hungarians and Czechs to a patriotic gathering at the National Theatre. Writers have drawn various conclusions from that note and from the troubles of these years in his life, but the symphony has no programme. What can be said is that it differs sharply from its neighbours. The Sixth and Eighth are sunny works, full of the dance rhythms of Bohemia. The Seventh is in D minor, tense and closely argued, with almost none of the folk colouring for which he was famous, and it is scored for a plain classical orchestra in which the brass are used sparingly.

Dvořák conducted the first performance himself at St James’s Hall in London on 22 April 1885. It was an immediate success. Publication was another matter. His Berlin publisher, Fritz Simrock, offered 3,000 marks, half what Dvořák thought fair, and suggested that he would do better to write more Slavonic Dances than symphonies. The composer held out for 6,000 and got it. He also objected to being printed as ‘Anton’, the German form of his name, on the title page. Many musicians have come to regard the Seventh as the finest of his nine symphonies.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro maestoso. The symphony begins in the dark. Over a low held note in the basses and horns, violas and cellos mutter the main theme, which circles within a narrow range before it suddenly flares up. A gentler second theme, given to flute and clarinet, brings some warmth, but the development is among the stormiest music Dvořák wrote. The ending is unexpected: after a fierce climax the movement dies away into the gloom from which it came, with nothing settled.

II. Poco adagio. A clarinet opens with a melody like a quiet hymn. The calm does not last, and the movement passes through several waves of strong feeling, with fine solos for the horn, before it finds its way back. After the premiere Dvořák cut some forty bars and told Simrock that there was now ‘not a single superfluous note’.

III. Scherzo: Vivace. The nearest the symphony comes to a Czech dance. Violins play a lilting tune while cellos and bassoon sing a different one against it, and the rhythm keeps shifting between two beats and three. The minor key holds the gaiety in check, and the gentle middle section brings only passing relief.

IV. Finale: Allegro. The main theme opens with a leap of an octave, strained and defiant. A broad, singing tune for the cellos offers contrast, and the two ideas are fought out at length. Only in the final bars does the music turn from D minor to a hard-won D major.