Muti’s Bridge from Haydn to Beethoven

About the Work

Haydn completed his Symphony No. 88 in 1787. It was the first symphony he wrote after the six he had sent to Paris, and it was composed for the orchestra of the Esterházy court. It has no nickname and belongs to neither of the famous sets, the Paris or the London symphonies, yet it has long been one of the most often played of the 104.

Its route to the public was irregular. Johann Peter Tost, who led the second violins in the Esterházy orchestra, travelled to Paris in 1788 with the scores of this symphony and its companion, No. 89, together with a set of string quartets, and sold them to the publisher Sieber. He also sold Sieber music that Haydn had not written. When the publisher complained, Haydn’s reply was brief: “Thus Herr Tost has swindled you.”

The orchestra is the standard one of the 1780s: flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. Haydn does something unusual with it. The trumpets and drums are silent throughout the first movement, where an audience of the day would have expected them, and are held back for the slow movement, where it would not. It was only the second time he had used them in a slow movement.

That slow movement, a Largo, has had distinguished admirers. Brahms is reported to have said of it: “I want my Ninth Symphony to sound like this.”

Riccardo Muti places the symphony at the head of a programme that runs from Haydn through Richard Strauss’s look back at the Baroque to Beethoven’s Fourth. The presenters of the Eisenstadt concert quote him calling Haydn “an architect of music” and the true bridge to Beethoven. The programme is given at the Musikverein on 8 and 10 May, and on 13 May in the Haydnsaal of Schloss Esterházy in Eisenstadt, the palace of the family Haydn served.

What to Listen For

Adagio, Allegro. A short, ceremonious slow introduction, and then the strings alone start the Allegro with a light, quick theme. Almost everything in the movement is made from that one tune: where a second theme should arrive, Haydn gives a new twist on the first. Listen for accompaniment patterns that turn out to be themes in their own right, and for the solo flute that decorates the main tune when it comes back.

Largo. A solo cello and an oboe together sing a broad melody, and the movement is little more than that melody repeated with a different accompaniment each time. Its calm is broken, without warning, by loud chords for the full orchestra. Here the trumpets and timpani are heard for the first time in the symphony, and the shock is deliberate.

Menuetto: Allegretto. A robust minuet with a rustic accent. In the trio, bassoons and violas hold a drone in bare fifths, like a bagpipe, and the drone then slides down in parallel, a progression that harmony teachers forbid.

Finale: Allegro con spirito. A rondo on a tune of repeated notes that starts on the weak part of the bar, so it always seems to arrive a fraction early. The movement runs like clockwork, with hardly a rest. In the middle Haydn springs a learned surprise, an elaborate canon, and then lets the tune back in as if nothing had happened.

About the Work

No work of Richard Strauss had a more tangled birth than this one. After Der Rosenkavalier, he and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal wanted to make something for the director Max Reinhardt. Hofmannsthal’s idea was to adapt Molière’s comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme of 1670, cut it down, give it incidental music by Strauss, and replace its closing entertainment with a short new opera, Ariadne auf Naxos. The hybrid was staged in Stuttgart in October 1912 and pleased almost nobody. Theatregoers did not want the opera, operagoers did not want the play, and a house needed two companies to put it on.

The authors pulled the two halves apart. The opera was given a sung prologue in place of the play and reached its familiar form in 1916. The play was revised as a comedy with music in its own right, for which Strauss wrote additional numbers; it was produced by Reinhardt in Berlin in 1918 and had little success. To rescue the music, Strauss chose nine numbers and made them into a concert suite, which he conducted for the first time in Vienna in January 1920. According to one account the orchestra on that occasion was the Vienna Philharmonic.

Molière’s hero is Monsieur Jourdain, a rich tradesman who is determined to become a gentleman. He hires a music master, a dancing master, a fencing master and a tailor, is courted by two aristocrats, and gives a grand dinner. The play was written as a comédie-ballet, with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, and Strauss honoured the precedent: some movements of the suite rework dances by Lully, and the rest imitate the manners of the seventeenth century with a straight face and modern harmony.

The scoring is the surprise. The composer of An Alpine Symphony uses about three dozen players: woodwind in pairs, two horns, one trumpet, one trombone, percussion, harp, and a string group that the score fixes at six violins, four violas, four cellos and two double basses. A piano sits in the middle and behaves much like a Baroque continuo. The suite, which lasts a little over half an hour, is often named among the first neoclassical scores of the twentieth century.

By a coincidence that the programme’s planner can hardly have missed, it shares its opus number, 60, with the Beethoven symphony that follows.

What to Listen For

There are nine movements. The Overture is a portrait of Jourdain, bustling and self-important, in a pastiche of Baroque gestures. The Minuet is his dancing lesson. The Fencing Master is a short character sketch, all flamboyant energy. In the Entry and Dance of the Tailors the tailors arrive to a gavotte and go on to a polonaise.

The next three movements are the most openly antique. Lully’s Minuet is an old tune in new clothes. The Courante takes up another dance of the seventeenth century. The Entry of Cléonte borrows twice from Lully: a grave sarabande frames a livelier dance for the woodwind, punctuated by the triangle.

The Intermezzo is a double portrait of the two aristocrats in Jourdain’s circle.

The Dinner, the longest movement, is a banquet with a musical joke for every course. The guests enter to a march. The salmon arrives to the wave music of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, since the fish comes from the Rhine. The mutton is served with the bleating sheep from Strauss’s own Don Quixote. Small roast birds bring birdsong from Der Rosenkavalier, and one annotator also hears a snatch of Verdi’s “La donna è mobile”. A solo cello muses between courses, and the suite ends when a kitchen boy appears with the last dish and dances a lively waltz.

About the Work

Beethoven wrote his Fourth Symphony in the summer and early autumn of 1806, once his long struggle with the first versions of his opera Fidelio was behind him. He spent that summer in Silesia at the country estate of Prince Lichnowsky, and from there visited Count Franz von Oppersdorff, who kept a private orchestra at his castle in Oberglogau. The orchestra played Beethoven’s Second Symphony for its composer, and the Count commissioned a new one. The Fourth is dedicated to him.

It seems that Beethoven set aside a symphony already in progress, the one in C minor that became the Fifth, to write it. The six months that followed were among the most productive of his life: the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto were finished in the same year, and all three works share a broad, lyrical manner that is far from the heroics of the Eroica. The first performance was a private one in March 1807 at the Vienna palace of Prince Lobkowitz. The public heard the symphony at the Burgtheater in April 1808.

Standing between the Eroica and the Fifth, the Fourth has always been the least played of the three. Schumann is said to have called it a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants, a phrase that has done the piece no favours, because slender is the last thing it sounds in performance. Schumann admired it all the same, and so did Berlioz, who heard in it a return to the manner of the Second Symphony, lively and alert in some places and of a celestial sweetness in others.

The orchestra is smaller than the one the Eroica needs: there is only one flute, with pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, timpani and strings. The piece lasts a little over half an hour. Its humour, and its habit of building long spans out of scraps, point back to Haydn, who had been Beethoven’s teacher and was still alive when it was first played. Heard directly after a Haydn symphony, as it is in this programme, the kinship is hard to miss.

What to Listen For

Adagio, Allegro vivace. The symphony in B-flat major begins in B-flat minor, very quietly: a plucked note, a long-held chord in the winds, and strings moving slowly beneath it. Nothing in these thirty-eight slow bars predicts what follows. A few loud chords break the spell and the Allegro bursts in at full speed. Its second group is a conversation passed between bassoon, oboe and flute. The most original stroke comes at the return of the main theme, which is prepared by a very long, very soft drum roll that swells until the whole orchestra arrives on top of it.

Adagio. The strings set up a ticking rhythmic figure and the violins lay a long, singing melody over it. That ticking rhythm hardly ever stops; it passes round the orchestra and ends up alone on the timpani in the last bars. The second theme is a wistful solo for the clarinet.

Allegro vivace. A scherzo in all but name, although many printed scores head it Menuetto, and far too fast to dance to. Beethoven extends the usual plan: the trio comes round twice, and the scherzo three times, the last cut short by a call from the horns.

Allegro ma non troppo. A finale in perpetual motion. The bassoon has a famously awkward moment when it has to play the racing main theme alone, and sweetly, to lead back to the reprise. At the very end the tune is slowed to half speed and broken up by pauses, a joke straight out of Haydn, before the orchestra slams the door.