A Fortieth Birthday in Tokyo

About the Work

Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture is an overture to a play that almost nobody remembers, and it has long outlived its source. It was not written for Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, as is often assumed, but for a tragedy of the same subject by the Viennese playwright and court official Heinrich Joseph von Collin, which had been staged at the Burgtheater in 1802 and had some success there. Beethoven composed the overture in 1807, when the play was no longer a fixture of the repertoire, and it was first heard not in a theatre but in a concert: at the private subscription concerts given at the palace of his patron Prince Lobkowitz in Vienna in March 1807, the same series that introduced his Fourth Symphony. It is, in effect, a free-standing concert overture, one of the first great examples of a genre that Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Brahms would later make their own.

The story it depicts comes from Roman legend, retold by Plutarch. Gaius Marcius, called Coriolanus after his victory at the town of Corioli, is a proud and brilliant general who despises the common people of Rome. Banished from the city, he goes over to its enemies, the Volscians, and leads their army to the gates of Rome, intent on revenge. The city sends envoys to plead with him, and he refuses them all, until his mother and his wife come out to beg him to spare his homeland. Torn between wounded pride and love, he yields, and withdraws the army. In Collin’s version, unable to live with the dishonour on either side, he takes his own life.

Beethoven, who admired heroic defiance and was himself no stranger to stubborn pride, found in this material a perfect image of inner conflict. He did not attempt to narrate the plot. Instead he distilled it into two opposed musical characters: the implacable, violent will of Coriolanus and the gentle, pleading voice of the women who confront him. The overture is in C minor, the key Beethoven reserved for his most intense, combative music: the key of the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata, the Third Piano Concerto and the Fifth Symphony, which he was working on at around the same time. In only eight or so minutes it achieves a dramatic concentration that few of his larger works surpass.

Its most striking feature is its ending. Where a conventional overture would close with a brilliant flourish, Coriolan simply disintegrates. The main theme breaks apart into fragments, the tempo seems to slacken, and the music fades out in a few quiet, isolated notes in the low strings, one of the most daring and disquieting endings in the orchestral repertoire, and an unmistakable image of a proud man’s collapse. Richard Wagner, who wrote a programmatic commentary on the overture in the 1850s, heard in it the whole tragedy of the hero’s defeat by his own heart. In this programme it also has a pleasing historical connection with what follows: the Fourth Piano Concerto belongs to the same years, and is generally thought to have received its first, private hearing at those same Lobkowitz concerts in 1807.

What to Listen For

The overture opens with one of Beethoven’s most arresting gestures. The strings play a long, held unison C, which swells and then is cut off by a sharp, slashing chord from the full orchestra. This happens three times, each time on a more dissonant chord, before a silence. Then the main theme bursts out in the violins, agitated and restless, pressing forward in short, driven phrases. This is Coriolanus himself: proud, stubborn, perpetually in motion.

The contrast comes soon. Listen for the second theme, in the brighter key of E-flat major: a flowing, yearning melody in the violins, far gentler than anything around it, often heard as the voice of Coriolanus’s mother pleading with him. Notice how Beethoven keeps undercutting it with the restless figures of the opening; the two forces are never allowed to rest side by side for long. Through the central part of the overture the music argues back and forth between them, the aggressive material growing more fragmented, the gentle theme returning in different keys.

Save your closest attention for the end. The opening held notes and slashing chords return, but instead of building to a triumphant close, the main theme starts to break apart. It is passed down through the strings in ever smaller pieces, growing quieter and slower, until only the bare outline remains in the cellos and basses. The last three quiet notes, plucked in the low strings, are among the most final sounds Beethoven ever wrote. Let the silence after them register before the next piece begins.

About the Work

Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, composed largely in 1805 and 1806, belongs to the same astonishing burst of creativity that produced the Fourth Symphony, the Violin Concerto, and the three ‘Razumovsky’ string quartets. It stands at the heart of what is often called Beethoven’s ‘heroic’ middle period, yet it is anything but heroic in the conventional sense. Where the Third Concerto had been dramatic and stormy, and the later ‘Emperor’ would be all blazing grandeur, the Fourth is intimate, lyrical, and inward, a work that achieves its effects through poetry rather than force. It is, for many listeners and pianists alike, the most beautiful of the five.

The concerto received its first public performance on 22 December 1808, in one of the most legendarily overstuffed concerts in history. At the Theater an der Wien, in a freezing, under-rehearsed marathon lasting some four hours, Beethoven premiered not only this concerto but also the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, parts of the Mass in C, the concert aria ‘Ah! perfido’, and the Choral Fantasy. He played the solo part of the concerto himself, in what would prove to be his last appearance as a concerto soloist before deafness forced him from the platform. Contemporary accounts suggest the audience, numbed by cold and length, scarcely registered the concerto’s subtleties. It took decades for the work to find its place; Felix Mendelssohn championed it in the 1830s, helping rescue it from neglect, and it has never since left the repertoire.

The most celebrated feature of the concerto announces itself in its opening bars. By long convention, a Classical concerto begins with an orchestral introduction, the soloist entering only after the orchestra has laid out the themes. Beethoven overturns this at a stroke: the piano begins entirely alone, unaccompanied, with a hushed, gentle phrase in G major, marked dolce. Only after the soloist has spoken does the orchestra answer, and it answers, remarkably, in the distant key of B major, a soft and luminous surprise. In a single gesture Beethoven redefines the relationship between soloist and ensemble, replacing rivalry with conversation, and confrontation with mutual listening.

The slow movement is one of the supreme achievements in all of Beethoven, and one of the most original in form. It is a stark, almost theatrical dialogue between two opposed forces: the strings alone, playing in gruff, dotted unison, stern and implacable; and the piano, answering with phrases of pleading, song-like tenderness. The two alternate without compromise at first, but gradually the piano’s gentleness prevails, and the strings, softening, fall silent and subdued. Since the nineteenth century this movement has been heard as a depiction of Orpheus taming the Furies (the mythological singer soothing the guardians of the underworld with the beauty of his music), and the parallel is irresistible, even if Beethoven left no such programme. The finale, which follows without a pause, breaks the spell with a sparkling, dancing rondo, full of high spirits and rhythmic vitality, bringing the concerto home in radiant good humour.

Throughout, the Fourth Concerto reveals Beethoven thinking less about display than about colour, intimacy, and the persuasive power of a single melodic line. It asks the soloist for refinement rather than thunder: for a singing tone, a sensitivity to silence, and the patience to let a quiet phrase carry enormous weight. In an age that prized virtuosity, Beethoven wrote a concerto whose deepest virtuosity is one of feeling.

What to Listen For

Listen, first, for the very opening. Before any orchestra is heard, the solo piano alone plays a soft, tender phrase: five gentle chords resolving into a quiet melody. This is the work’s signature, and it asks you to lean in rather than be swept up. Notice how the orchestra then replies not in the home key but a step away, in a warmer, more distant colour, before the music settles. From this first exchange, the whole first movement unfolds as a dialogue of give and take: the piano rarely dominates, more often it muses, decorates, and converses, weaving filigree around the orchestra’s themes. Listen for the cadenza near the movement’s end (the soloist’s extended solo flight) and for how the music sinks back to quietness afterward rather than ending in a blaze.

The slow movement (Andante con moto) is the heart of the concerto, and it works as a piece of wordless drama. Track the two characters carefully. The strings enter alone, playing in harsh, clipped, dotted rhythms: stern, even menacing, all in unison. The piano answers, every time, with soft, flowing, beseeching phrases. Follow this alternation as a contest: the strings stern, the piano gentle. Hear how, little by little, the piano’s tenderness wears the strings down. Their phrases grow quieter, shorter, less aggressive, until they are subdued altogether and the movement dissolves into a hushed stillness. This is the Orpheus-taming-the-Furies effect, and once you hear it as a dialogue you will not forget it.

The finale follows immediately, without a break, and the change of mood is delicious. A bright, bouncing rondo theme springs up in the strings, soon caught by the piano, and the music turns playful, dancing, full of rhythmic spring. Listen for trumpets and timpani entering here for the first time in the concerto, adding a festive sparkle the earlier movements deliberately withheld. Enjoy the wit of the exchanges between piano and orchestra, the surprising harmonic side-steps, and the gathering energy toward a brilliant, high-spirited close that crowns the whole work with joy.

About the Work

Hikaru Hayashi was one of the most prolific and versatile Japanese composers of the twentieth century, and one of the most important figures in the history of Japanese film music. Over a career of more than half a century he wrote the scores for well over a hundred films, alongside symphonies, more than thirty operas, choral works and a large body of songs, and he moved between the concert hall, the theatre and the cinema without ever treating one as less serious than the others. His inclusion in this anniversary concert at Suntory Hall, with the Vienna Philharmonic and Riccardo Muti, brings a distinctly Japanese voice into an otherwise all-Viennese programme of Beethoven and Mozart.

Hayashi’s film career began in the mid-1950s and was defined above all by one long partnership. From the 1959 film Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Daigo Fukuryū Maru), about the Japanese fishing boat caught in the fallout of an American hydrogen-bomb test, until the director’s final film, Postcard (Ichimai no hagaki, 2011), Hayashi scored a long run of films by Kaneto Shindō. Their collaboration produced some of the landmarks of Japanese cinema. The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960) follows a farming family on a tiny island in the Seto Inland Sea as they carry water, day after day, up a barren hillside; it has almost no dialogue, and Hayashi’s music, built on a simple, haunting theme, does much of the work that words would normally do. The film won the top prize at the Moscow International Film Festival and made both men internationally known. Hayashi went on to write the music for Shindō’s darker, stylised period dramas Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), both of them tales of the supernatural set among the wars of medieval Japan.

He also worked with Nagisa Ōshima, the leading figure of the Japanese New Wave, on films including Band of Ninja (1967) and Death by Hanging (1968), and with many other directors, as well as writing extensively for television. Across this wide output his film writing is marked by economy: rather than lush, continuous underscoring in the Hollywood manner, he tended to favour a few clear, memorable ideas, carefully placed, that could carry the emotional weight of a whole film.

At the time of writing, the organisers have not announced which three film scores make up this set, nor details of the arrangement being played, so it is best approached with open ears rather than a fixed expectation. What can be said is that Hayashi’s film music grew from the same roots as his concert works: a strong gift for melody, a deep attachment to Japanese song and the rhythms of the Japanese language, and a conviction, inherited from his teacher Hisatada Otaka and shared with his friends in the ‘Goat Society’ (Yagi no Kai), that music should speak directly to ordinary listeners. He founded that group in 1953 with Yūzō Toyama and Michio Mamiya.

What to Listen For

Since the exact selection has not been published, listen above all for the qualities that run through Hayashi’s work for the screen. The first is melody. Hayashi was a songwriter at heart, and his best film themes are simple, singable tunes, often in a gently modal idiom that recalls Japanese folk song without quoting it directly. Notice how a single melody can be restated with small changes of colour (a solo woodwind, then strings, then the full orchestra) so that it seems to grow more poignant with each return. This is how film music works on an audience in the cinema, and heard in the concert hall it takes on the character of a series of short, lyrical tone poems.

Listen, too, for the economy of the writing. Hayashi rarely fills every bar. He often lets a theme sit over a sparse, repeated accompaniment, or leaves space and silence around it, trusting the listener’s imagination to supply the images. If one of the pieces comes from The Naked Island, you may hear a slow, patient, circling tune, suggesting the endless rhythm of labour on the island; if from Shindō’s supernatural dramas, expect starker, more percussive textures and a sense of menace.

Finally, listen for the meeting of worlds that this performance represents. The Vienna Philharmonic’s sound, with its warm, rounded Viennese horns and oboes and its singing strings, is the sound of Mozart and Beethoven. Hearing it applied to music written for Japanese films, in the hall that hosts the orchestra’s regular visits to Tokyo, is part of the point of this celebratory evening.

About the Work

In the summer of 1788, within the space of roughly six weeks, Mozart composed his last three symphonies: the E-flat major, No. 39, dated 26 June; the G minor, No. 40, completed on 25 July; and the C major ‘Jupiter’, No. 41, finished on 10 August. It is one of the most concentrated feats of creative energy in the history of music, and it came at an unpromising moment in Mozart’s life. The war with the Ottoman Empire had drained Vienna’s aristocracy of money and of appetite for concerts; the subscription series that had made him the toast of the city earlier in the decade had dried up; and the surviving letters from that summer include anxious appeals for loans to his friend and fellow Freemason Michael Puchberg. His infant daughter Theresia died in June. Why he wrote three large symphonies at such a time, with no documented commission or performance in view, remains one of the enduring puzzles of his biography. The most likely answer is that he intended them for concerts he hoped to give, perhaps in Vienna, perhaps on a tour abroad, but no firm record survives of the G minor being performed in his lifetime.

There is, however, a strong piece of circumstantial evidence that it was heard. Mozart later revised the score, adding a pair of clarinets and rewriting the oboe parts to make room for them, and a composer does not usually take such trouble over a piece nobody will play. Both versions survive, and both are performed today; the version with clarinets is the more common, its darker, woodier blend softening the edges of the wind writing. It has often been suggested that the revised version was played at the benefit concerts of Vienna’s Tonkünstler-Societät in April 1791, conducted by Antonio Salieri, which included ‘a grand symphony’ by Mozart, though which symphony that was cannot be proven.

The G minor is one of only two symphonies Mozart wrote in a minor key, and both are in G minor: the other is the youthful ‘little’ G minor, No. 25, of 1773. The key held a special charge for him. It is the key of the Piano Quartet K. 478, of the great String Quintet K. 516 written only a year earlier, and of Pamina’s heartbroken aria ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’ in The Magic Flute. In each case it carries a quality of restless, contained grief: not the tragic grandeur of Beethoven’s C minor, but something more private and more unsettled. The scoring reinforces that intimacy. There are no trumpets and no timpani, the instruments of ceremony and brilliance in a Classical orchestra: just flute, oboes, clarinets (in the revised version), bassoons, two horns and strings.

What made the symphony so important to the generations that followed was the way it holds agitation and perfect formal balance in tension. The nineteenth century heard it as a work of passion and turmoil; Robert Schumann, by contrast, famously described it as a piece of ‘Grecian lightness and grace’, and the two readings have argued with each other ever since. Both are right. The four movements follow the Classical pattern exactly (a fast sonata movement, a slow movement, a minuet and a fast finale), yet within that frame Mozart pushes harmony and phrase structure further than he had before. The finale’s development section in particular, with its jagged unison outburst that tumbles through almost every note of the chromatic scale, looks forward startlingly to music written a century later. Written in Vienna by the city’s most famous adopted son, it is music the Vienna Philharmonic plays as part of its own inheritance.

What to Listen For

The first movement (Molto allegro) begins without any introduction or call to attention. The violas start a soft, murmuring accompaniment, and over it the violins enter almost mid-thought with the famous main theme: a falling two-note sigh, repeated, that gives the whole movement its breathless urgency. Listen for how rarely the music settles. Even the gentler second theme, passed between strings and woodwinds in a major key, is short-lived, and in the development section Mozart drives the sighing motif through a chain of distant keys with an intensity that sounds, for a moment, like genuine anguish. When the second theme returns in the recapitulation, it comes back not in the major but in G minor, and the movement closes in the shadow in which it began.

The Andante, in E-flat major and a lilting 6/8 time, offers relief but not quite calm. Its opening builds up gradually, one string section entering after another. Listen for the tiny, fluttering pairs of quick notes that pass through the woodwinds and strings: they give the movement a restless, glinting surface, and in the middle section they darken as the harmony moves into minor-key territory.

The Menuetto is no courtly dance. Its main theme is written so that the strong beats fall across the bar lines, producing a stubborn, lurching three-against-two feeling, and its counterpoint is tight and severe. Everything changes in the Trio, which turns to G major: here the horns, silent or in the background until now, come forward in a warm, open-air passage, one of the few moments of unclouded sunlight in the symphony.

The finale (Allegro assai) opens with a rising arpeggio that shoots up like a rocket and a quiet, answering phrase. The movement is swift and compact, but wait for the start of the development section. The orchestra suddenly breaks off into a harsh unison figure, leaping angularly through a whole series of unrelated notes, as if the music has lost its footing. From there Mozart spins a passage of dense, argumentative counterpoint before finding his way back to the opening material. The symphony ends as it began, in G minor, with no consoling turn to the major: a close as terse and unsentimental as anything in Mozart.