Mozart in G Minor, Métaboles, and a Boléro in Linz

About the Work

In the summer of 1788 Mozart wrote three symphonies in quick succession: No. 39 in E flat, No. 40 in G minor and No. 41 in C, the “Jupiter”. He kept a catalogue of his finished works, so the dates are exact: he entered the G minor Symphony on 25 July 1788, between the other two. Nobody knows for certain what occasion he had in mind. Plans for a series of subscription concerts that summer have left little trace, and it is not clear whether they took place.

That uncertainty fed a long-standing romantic myth that Mozart never heard these symphonies and wrote them for posterity. The evidence suggests otherwise, at least for No. 40. It exists in two versions: the original, and a revision in which Mozart added a pair of clarinets and rewrote some of the other wind parts to make room for them. He would hardly have gone to that trouble without a performance in view, and the revised version was probably played at Vienna concerts conducted by his colleague Antonio Salieri.

The G minor Symphony is one of only two Mozart symphonies in a minor key, and both are in G minor. The other, No. 25, was written when he was seventeen. The later work is darker and more concentrated. Mozart left out trumpets and drums, whose ceremonial brilliance had no place here, and he does not end in the major: the finale stays in G minor to the last chord, which to eighteenth-century ears was an unusually stark way to finish.

The symphony has been heard very differently over the centuries: some found mostly grace and charm in it, others a work of pain and grief. It has become the most famous of Mozart’s symphonies. Its intensity is held in check by Classical proportions: the passion is real, but it is expressed through balanced phrases and clear forms.

What to Listen For

I. Molto allegro. There is no slow introduction. The symphony begins with a murmuring accompaniment in the lower strings, and over it the violins whisper the famous main theme, a sighing figure of two short notes and a longer one, repeated with urgent insistence. The second theme, in B flat major, is smoother and passed between strings and woodwinds. In the development Mozart takes the sighing figure through remote keys and sets it against itself in counterpoint.

II. Andante. The slow movement moves to E flat major and to a gentle 6/8 time. It opens with the violas and violins entering one after another on repeated notes, building up a soft chord step by step. The mood is calm on the surface, but chromatic turns and unexpected changes of key keep it uneasy.

III. Menuetto: Allegretto. This is not a courtly dance. The minuet is gruff and heavily accented, with phrases that cut across the three-beat bar and make it hard to dance to. The trio in G major offers a brief, gentle release, with strings and winds taking turns, before the minuet returns.

IV. Allegro assai. The finale opens with a theme that leaps up through a chord like a rocket, followed by a loud, rushing answer from the whole orchestra. A more lyrical second theme gives brief contrast, but the development is one of the most turbulent passages Mozart wrote, twisting the opening figure through harsh harmonies. The movement ends as it began, in G minor.

About the Work

Henri Dutilleux worked slowly and threw a great deal away, and his catalogue is small as a result. Métaboles took him years. It was commissioned by George Szell for the Cleveland Orchestra’s fortieth anniversary season in 1958 and 1959, but Dutilleux did not finish it until 1964. Szell conducted the Cleveland Orchestra in the first performance on 14 January 1965.

The title explains the method. In rhetoric, a “métabole” is a figure in which the same words are repeated in a different order or from a different angle, so that their meaning shifts. Dutilleux described his intention like this: “to present one or several ideas in a different order and from different angles, until, by successive stages, they are made to change character completely.” A musical idea (a melody, a chord, a rhythm) is gradually transformed until it has turned into something new, and that new idea then becomes the starting point for the next stage. Dutilleux was interested in forms that grow from the logic of a particular piece rather than following a standard pattern, and Métaboles is his clearest demonstration of it.

The work is in five sections played without a break, each with a French title that describes its character. In the first four, one section of the orchestra takes the lead in turn: woodwinds, then strings, then brass, then percussion. In the fifth, everyone joins together. That has led people to call the piece a concerto for orchestra in miniature, a showcase for the players as much as a study in transformation.

Dutilleux stood apart from the main currents of French music after the Second World War. He kept his distance from the serialist avant-garde of the postwar years without writing in an old-fashioned style either. His music descends from Debussy and Ravel in its fascination with colour and resonance, and on this programme it sits naturally between Mozart and Ravel’s Boléro, another piece about transformation, though of a very different kind.

What to Listen For

Incantatoire. The piece opens with a series of pungent chords in the woodwinds, circling around the note E, punctuated by plucked strings and harp. It has an incantatory, ritual quality, and many listeners hear an echo of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Linéaire. The strings, divided into many parts, spin out long, slow lines in a luminous, otherworldly texture. Listen for how the idea has grown out of something the strings touched on briefly in the first section.

Obsessionnel. The brass take over with clipped, aggressive figures that keep coming back in altered forms, as the title suggests.

Torpide. A slow, drowsy section led by the percussion, a slowed-down memory of what came before, with shimmering, fragmentary sounds.

Flamboyant. The full orchestra gathers the threads of the earlier sections. Near the end, the chords from the very opening return, and the piece rushes to a brilliant, exhilarating close.

About the Work

Boléro began as a practical solution. In 1928 the dancer Ida Rubinstein asked Ravel for music for a ballet, and he decided to write something new, based on the bolero, a Spanish dance in triple time. On holiday in the resort of Saint-Jean-de-Luz he found the tune: a long, sinuous melody with an insistent quality that he planned to repeat again and again without developing it, changing only the orchestration and building the volume.

The ballet opened at the Paris Opéra later in 1928, with Rubinstein dancing, and was a sensation. Within two years the piece had been recorded and conducted by leading conductors of the day, among them Serge Koussevitzky in Boston and Willem Mengelberg in Amsterdam, as well as by Ravel himself. It soon became a concert work far more often than a ballet, and by the mid-1930s it had even lent its name to a Hollywood film.

Ravel was strict about the tempo. When Arturo Toscanini conducted it with the New York Philharmonic in Paris in 1930, taking it much faster than the composer wanted, Ravel objected afterwards, and the dispute became famous. For Ravel the effect depended on a steady, unhurried pulse, maintained without speeding up from beginning to end.

On this programme Boléro makes a pointed partner for Dutilleux’s Métaboles. Both are about transformation. In Métaboles the ideas themselves change shape until they become something new. In Boléro almost nothing changes except the instruments playing: the melody, the rhythm and the tempo stay the same, and the whole drama lies in the way the sound grows.

What to Listen For

The rhythm. A snare drum begins, very quietly, with a two-bar rhythmic pattern that it will repeat throughout the piece. Listen to how it grows from a whisper to a roar without ever changing.

Two tunes, many colours. Over the drum and plucked strings, a flute plays the first melody. It is followed by a second melody, with a more jazzy, bluesy inflection. The two alternate, each passed to a new instrument or combination of instruments: clarinet, bassoon, the high E flat clarinet, oboe d’amore, then tenor and soprano saxophones, and on to trombone and full sections. Listen for the passage where horn, celesta and piccolos play the tune together in different keys, creating an organ-like, slightly eerie sound.

The crescendo. The whole piece is one long crescendo from pianissimo to fortissimo, all in C major and all at the same tempo. Only at the very end does Ravel break the pattern: the music lurches suddenly into E major, then back, and the whole orchestra collapses in a final crash.