Symphony in D major

Program notes

About the Work

A note of caution first. The orchestra’s listing says only ‘Symphony in D major’ and gives no catalogue number, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote more than one symphony in that key. The description published with the concert, a rollercoaster of quirky rhythms and strange harmonic turns written some fifty years after his father’s cantata, fits the best known of them: the first of the four ‘Orchestral Symphonies with twelve obbligato parts’, Wq 183, composed in Hamburg in the mid-1770s. This note assumes that this is the work to be played.

Emanuel Bach had by then left Berlin, where he had spent nearly thirty years as harpsichordist to Frederick the Great, and succeeded his godfather Telemann as director of music for the principal churches of Hamburg. The four symphonies of Wq 183 were written to a commission in 1775 and 1776; the name of the patron has not come down to us. They were published in 1780. They are the most richly scored of all his symphonies: pairs of flutes, oboes and horns and a bassoon join the strings, and the ‘twelve obbligato parts’ of the title means that every one of these instruments has a line that matters.

The music is like nothing else of its time. Emanuel Bach was the great exponent of what his contemporaries called the ‘sensitive style’, in which a piece changes mood as abruptly as a person might, and in his symphonies he pushed this to the edge of eccentricity: sudden silences, lurches into distant keys, phrases that break off halfway. Haydn and Mozart admired him, and it is hard not to hear in this music something of what Beethoven would later do with surprise. The symphony is short, little more than ten minutes, and its three movements run into each other without a pause.

What to Listen For

The beginning is one of the oddest in eighteenth-century music. The violins play a single note, D, alone, and repeat it in a quickening, off-beat rhythm, so that for several seconds the ear has neither a beat nor a key to hold on to. When the full orchestra bursts in, the harmony swerves somewhere unexpected. That stuttering opening idea keeps coming back, in the oboes, in the strings, at the start of the central section, and the home key of D major is not properly settled until late in the movement.

There is no full close. The first movement dissolves into a short, stately Largo, a moment of calm. It too is left hanging, and the Presto finale breaks in: a quick, boisterous movement full of jokes, with violins that seem to get stuck in swirling arpeggios and sudden drops from loud to soft.