Orpheus program December 2019

Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Born in Salzburg, January 27, 1756 Died in Vienna, December 5, 1791 OVERTURE, FROM LE NOZZE DE FIGARO, K. 492 Completed in 1786; arranged by Johann Wendt for winds in 1786; 4 minutes

The Marriage of Figaro, the first of Mozart’s three collaborations with the Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, adapted a French play from 1778 that Pierre Beaumarchais wrote as a sequel to his earlier hit, The Barber of Seville. The farce was banned in Vienna at the time for the unflattering view it presented of the aristocracy, and da Ponte had to scrub the libretto of its political overtones to get it past the emperor’s censors.

The Marriage of Figaro transpires over the course of “one crazy day,” when Figaro, the head servant to Count Almaviva, is due to wed the maid Susanna, who must first scheme her way out of the count’s lecherous grasp. The music of the overture has no major presence later in the opera, but its frenetic presto tempo and insistent eighth notes set the scene for the mayhem that ensues.

The arrangement heard here was produced not long after the opera’s premiere by Johann Wendt, who played oboe in both the opera orchestra and the emperor’s harmonie, a type of wind band that was at the height of its popularity among Austrian aristocrats. As the cover bands of their day, such groups often played arrangements of hit tunes from the opera house, and Wendt was the king of such transcriptions, with five Mozart operas among his more than 50 suites adapted from theater music.

KURT WEILL Born in Dessau, Germany, March 2, 1900 Died in New York City, April 3, 1950 CONCERTO FOR VIOLIN AND WIND ORCHESTRA, OP. 12 Composed in 1924; 30 minutes

Kurt Weill crystallized the freewheeling, truth-telling ethos of 1920s Germany when he presented The Threepenny Opera in 1928, featuring his wife Lotte Lenya’s insouciant singing and searing social commentary from librettist Bertolt Brecht. Between his provocative theater works and his Jewish faith, Weill was an early target of the Nazi party, and he fled Germany two months after Hitler’s rise to power, setting up a marvelous second act as a songwriter for Broadway and Hollywood.

Before all those triumphs on the stage, Weill was a music student in Berlin, where he took composition lessons with Ferrucio Busoni and played piano in a cabaret. With the Violin Concerto from 1924, written just after he completed his studies, Weill was trying on a brash new identity that aligned with the neoclassical austerity of Stravinsky and the unvarnished objectivity of his near-peer Paul Hindemith. Both of those composers had modeled writing for woodwind ensembles in recent works, and Weill followed suit when he used only winds, brass, percussion and bass to accompany the svelte concerto that he wrote for the

Hungarian virtuoso Joseph Szigeti. (A different violinist ended up giving the premiere the next year in Paris.)

Besides Stravinsky—whose towering influence is felt from the concerto’s first notes, which sound quite a lot like a famous clarinet moment in the ballet Petrushka—Weill was also attuned to jazz, at a time when American bands were all the rage in major European cities.

In the first movement, for instance, the chords played by bassoons, horns, trumpets and snare drum approximate the kind of punctuated accompaniment that might have been played by a big band of saxophones, trumpets, trombones and rhythm section. In a movement that relishes its split personality, these rowdy dance rhythms rub up against abstract counterpoint one moment and menacing, chant-like tropes the next.

The middle movement is built as a triptych, starting with a scherzo-like Notturno full of bone-rattling xylophone, progressing through a Cadenza that supports the violin with sporadic accompaniment, and ending with a Serenata that dances through off-kilter rhythms and playfully muddled harmonies. The Cadenza aside, Weill clearly felt no obligation to flatter his soloist with the kind of grandiose heroics that marked the concertos of yesteryear, and it’s notable how often the violin finds a place for itself within the ensemble, like in the delightful flute solo in which the violin strums guitar-like chords in conjunction with a plucked bass line.

Surges of perpetual motion and sequences of double-stops and chords make the finale a virtuosic workout for the soloist, but as in other parts of the concerto, the violin seems most commanding when it serves as a lyrical voice of reason, rising elegantly above the fray.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART SERENADE NO. 10 FOR WINDS IN B-FLAT MAJOR, K. 361/370A “GRAN PARTITA” Composed circa 1782; 48 minutes

After Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781 to try his luck as a freelancer, he was eager to catch the ear of Emperor Joseph II and those in his court. One trend Mozart picked up on was the emperor’s interest in “harmoniemusik,” or music for small wind ensembles; being relatively loud and portable, such groups were perfect for outdoor parties. Back in Salzburg, Mozart had written a number of Divertimentos for a similar ensemble, scored for pairs of oboes, bassoons and horns. The emperor’s newly formed group added a pair of clarinets, and so Mozart introduced those instruments in two Serenades composed in his first years in Vienna.

The Serenade in B-flat (K. 361), known colloquially as the “Gran Partita,” was an extension of that harmoniemusik tradition. The instrumentation expanded upon the basic harmonie setup, adding a pair of basset horns (the tenors of the clarinet family), a second pair of French horns and a contrabass or contrabassoon to anchor the low end. Besides its hefty instrumentation, this work’s seven sophisticated movements and length approaching an hour far exceeded the typical standards for Serenades, which other composers treated essentially as disposable background music.

The exact origins of this Serenade are unknown, but Mozart may have written it for his friend Anton Stadler, the clarinetist for whom he later composed three pillars of the clarinet repertoire (the “Kegelstatt” Trio, Clarinet Quintet and Clarinet Concerto). We do know that

Stadler led an ensemble in a performance of four of the seven movements in March of 1784, although analysis of the manuscript paper suggests that it was composed earlier. Even the nickname is a source of uncertainty, since it was a hand other than Mozart’s that added “Gran Partita” to the autograph score.

Amid the lack of hard facts, the Serenade has taken on a mythical significance thanks to its appearance in the play and subsequent film Amadeus. Recalling when he heard the boorish young Mozart conducting it in an ornate salon, Salieri declares, “It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.” That scene features the work’s Adagio, and its melodic exchanges among oboe, clarinet and basset horn show off Mozart’s gift for treating the members of the ensemble like impassioned opera characters. Before that iconic Adagio, a slow introduction and spirited Allegro molto create a symphonic breadth of sound with wide-ranging dynamics and highly varied articulations. Then comes the first of two Menuetto movements, with this example making an especially bold statement by incorporating two distinct trio sections for contrast, including one full of minor-key drama and stirring horn calls.

After the Adagio, another Menuetto lightens the mood (even with the appearance of another minor-key trio), and then a second slow movement offers more voice-like melodies, a quality that aligns with its title of Romanze, derived from a type of simple song. A cheerful Theme and Variations recasts music that Mozart originally composed in Salzburg for a flute quartet, and then the closing Rondo wraps up this expansive Serenade with as much energy and punch as any symphonic finale, especially once everyone ratchets up to a fortissimo dynamic at the end.