WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Mayer (1812-1883)

Symphony No 1 in C minor (circa 1845-47)

Adagio - Allegro energico

Adagio

Allegro vivace

Finale. Adagio - Allegro

Berlioz (1803-1869)

Les nuits d’été, Op 7 (1856)

Villanelle

Le spectre de la rose

Sur les lagunes

Absence

Au cimetière

L’île inconnue

Beethoven (1770-1827)

Symphony No 8 in F Major, Op 93 (1812)

Allegro vivace e con brio

Allegretto scherzando

Tempo di menuetto

Allegro vivace

Stormy drama, songs of love and loss, and a distinctly humorous take on a symphony make up tonight’s wide-ranging programme, in music from composers both widely known and (shamefully) seldom heard.

We begin with German composer Emilie Mayer, who was a respected and influential figure in her own lifetime, which covered a large portion of the 19th century. But – like so many female composers down the centuries – she’s been almost entirely disregarded since then. It’s a particular indignity in Mayer’s case. That’s firstly because she was so prolific – she produced eight symphonies, 15 concert overtures, and a wealth of chamber music, piano works and songs. And secondly, unlike many of her female colleagues, Mayer succeeded in defining herself almost entirely as a composer, rather than composing as a sideline to other performing activities perhaps deemed more ladylike.

The music she produced is thoroughly distinctive, with an idiosyncratic, forwardlooking approach to harmony and rhythm, and a natural sense of drama and often unexpected contrasts. She showed an interest in music from the age of just five, when she received a grand piano as a gift and began music lessons. But her life changed beyond recognition when she was 28: her businessman father committed suicide, leaving her a considerable inheritance. What was a hugely traumatic event on a personal level also offered enormous freedoms in financial terms, and Mayer threw herself into her musical passions, beginning composition studies with Carl Loewe in Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland).

She later set about publishing all her own music (and, unlike equally successful male composers with established publishers, bearing all the associated costs and financial risk herself) and her reputation steadily grew. A hugely successful concert spanning her orchestral, chamber, choral and piano music in Berlin on 21 April 1850 proved a milestone in establishing Mayer as a major voice in German music.

She wrote her First Symphony some time between 1842 and 1847, while studying in Stettin with Loewe. And while it’s been dismissed by some as merely a proficient student work, it’s far more than that. In fact, the Symphony represents one of the earliest occasions in which Mayer set out her own individual voice across a broad musical canvas. The first movement’s expectant, slow introduction sets a somewhat sombre tone, one that’s quickly dispelled by the gruff, dramatic music of the faster section that soon follows, in which Mayer makes some inventive, unpredictable deployments of her orchestral forces.

There’s a Mozartean elegance to the floating violin melody in the second movement, where Mayer continues her inventive orchestrations, with horn interjections, melodies assigned to the lower strings, and particularly rich woodwind writing. Her third movement is a darkly playful scherzo in which she sets instruments chasing each other through the same themes, slowing things down for a gentle central Minuet section. Another slow introduction launches the whirlwind activity of Mayer’s finale, which slides sideways into the brighter major for its confident conclusion.

When the 27-year-old Hector Berlioz wrote his Symphonie fantastique in 1830, he was besotted with Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, pursuing her across Paris and threatening to take his own life unless she married him – hot-headed passions that he poured into the music of his most famous work. Smithson finally relented, though their marriage was, perhaps predictably, far from a happy one.

When the 38-year-old Berlioz came to write Les nuits d’été in 1841, he was a very different man. Though he continued to care for and support Smithson, their relationship had grown cold, and the actress who had once commanded stages in the French capital was now sickly, isolated and depressed. They separated in 1844, and by 1854, Smithson was dead.

It’s perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that Berlioz similarly poured his later, more bittersweet emotions into Les nuits d’été, a song cycle that focuses on the joys and sorrows of love, from youthful ardour through separation and loss, to a final sense, perhaps, of love’s rebirth. Indeed, it was shortly after completing Les nuits d’été in its original version for voice and piano that Berlioz met soprano Marie Recio, who soon became his lover and, in 1854, his second wife. It was for Recio that he made an orchestral arrangement of the cycle’s fourth song, ‘Absence’, for a concert in Leipzig in 1843. He orchestrated the rest in 1856, completing a rather complicated transformation from chamber to orchestral work that has obscured the fact that Les nuits d’été is almost certainly the earliest example of an orchestral song cycle.

For these songs of love and loss, Berlioz set six poems from the collection La comédie de la mort by his friend and near-neighbour Théophile Gautier, a leading figure in French Romantic literature. The blithely buoyant opening ‘Villanelle’ recounts two lovers taking a springtime walk in a forest, though its unexpected harmonic swerves may indicate that all is not quite as it seems. In the wistful ‘Le spectre de la rose’, the spirit of a rose returns from paradise to recall the night it spent pinned to the dress of a beautiful woman at a ball, while Berlioz’s undulating accompaniment suggests a boat rocking on the waves in ‘Sur les lagunes’, in which a sailor grieves for his dead beloved. The composer pares his music back to the barest simplicity for ‘Absence’, in which two lovers are separated by a vast distance, and in the brooding ‘Au cimetière’, the ghost of a departed lover calls from beyond the grave. Only in ‘L’île inconnue’ does the opening song’s optimism return, as the singer sets sail in search of an island where love is eternal. Berlioz’s hopeful, spirited setting suggests that he believes the isle is real – even if it remains beyond his reach. which the composer unburdened his surging emotions to his still unidentified ‘Immortal Beloved’. He’d also had a serious run-in with his brother Johann, attempting to break up the younger man’s relationship with Therese Obermayer, of whom he strongly disapproved. He failed – Johann and Therese were married a few months later – but succeeded in driving a wedge between himself and his sibling. And of course, Beethoven’s hearing was steadily deteriorating. He conducted the Eighth Symphony’s premiere on 27 February 1814 in Vienna’s Redoutensaal, but, reportedly, ‘the orchestra largely ignored his ungainly gestures and followed the principal violinist instead’.

Earlier in tonight’s programme, we heard a dramatic symphony from an unjustly neglected composer. To end, we turn to probably the best-known symphonist of them all, but to what must surely count as one of his least-known symphonies.

So iconic and influential are Beethoven’s nine symphonies that it’s almost inevitable some get overshadowed by others. In between the heroic grandeur of No 3 and the death-tolife journey of No 5, for example, sits the far more modest No 4. Likewise, between the obsessive dance rhythms of No 7 and the choral grandeur of No 9 comes little No 8.

It’s indeed the shortest of all Beethoven’s symphonies, and one that the composer himself was rather modest about: he described it as ‘my little Symphony in F’, partly to distinguish it from his far longer and more ambitious ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, No 6, in the same key.

There’s little evidence, however, of any of Beethoven’s misfortunes in the Eighth Symphony’s music. Indeed, it contains some of his most overtly comic writing, surely intended to raise a smile. It’s even been suggested – not without evidence – that Beethoven may have been poking gentle fun at the whole idea of what a symphony is. Just as he’d made the point of replacing the symphonic form’s traditional minuet dance movement with a more tricksy, playful scherzo, it’s not inconceivable to view the Symphony No 8 as a large-scale, four-movement ‘scherzo’ in place of an entire symphony – one that delights in defying expectations, thwarting conventions and subverting traditions across melody, harmony, rhythm and much more.

He began work on it in 1812 at the age of 41, straight after he’d finished the Symphony No 7. It was a time of great personal turmoil, as revealed in the notorious unsent letter in

Even Beethoven’s very opening seems gently subversive. He launches straight in with his hearty opening theme, but it’s suddenly interrupted by a quiet, tentative response from the woodwind, an answer that has to be repeated more forcefully across the full orchestra just in case we hadn’t noticed it. Elsewhere, there are unexpected accents, rhythms that confuse the ear, and sudden silences that keep the listener guessing as to what’s coming next. Listen out, too, for the grand return of the movement’s opening theme towards the end of the movement. It’s hardly difficult to spot: Beethoven cranks up the musical tension almost to breaking point, only to then bury the theme itself deep in the bassoons, cellos and basses, where it can barely be heard for the joyful clamour from the rest of the orchestra.

Beethoven marks his slow movement

Allegretto scherzando, indicating not only that it’s not slow, but also that we should expect a few jokes. And with its sudden contrasts in volume, its ticktocking woodwind accompaniment, and its songlike melody, it sounds like it might have been lifted straight out of a fashionable comic opera of the time. This is, however, an entirely instrumental opera in which the orchestra’s musicians play the characters: when an immovable figure from the violins never wants to settle during the movement’s closing bars, for instance, it takes a loud, growling response from the rest of the orchestra to make them see reason.

And, perhaps predictably, where we might expect to find a typically Beethovenian scherzo as a playful third movement, the composer gives us – what else? – a minuet. It’s as if he’s returning to the kind of music that his own innovations had rendered obsolete. This is no straightforward dance, however: Beethoven sets strings, woodwind and trumpets apart as though they should be playing in time but keep missing their cues, and there are sudden, military-style intrusions from thunderous trumpets, horns and timpani into what might be the elegance of the ballroom.

Beethoven is at his most overtly comic, however, in his boisterous finale, kicked off squarely by the loud, parping ‘wrong’ note that interrupts the flow of its dashing main theme early on. He takes his music through so many unexpected key shifts that at a certain point it simply breaks down, seemingly unsure of where it should head next. And he fills his supposedly short and pithy sign-off coda section with so much incident and activity that it fills nearly half the whole movement’s length. Listen out for a remarkable passage just before the movement’s final peroration where everything seems to get stuck, with the same bell-like chord passed down from flutes to oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons, and then all the way back up again – all very pretty, but going nowhere. No wonder the Symphony received a somewhat lukewarm reception as its Vienna premiere – though it’s a piece that demonstrates beyond doubt what good bedfellows music and humour can make.

© David Kettle

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Berlioz (1803-1869)

Les nuits d’été, Op 7 (1856)

Villanelle

Quand viendra la saison nouvelle, Quand auront disparu les froids, Tous les deux nous irons, ma belle, Pour cueillir le muguet aux bois. Sous nos pieds égrenant les perles, Que l’on voit au matin trembler, Nous irons écouter les merles Siffler.

Les printemps est venu, ma belle, C’est le mois des amants béni; Et l’oiseau, satinant son aile, Dit ses vers au rebord du nid.

Oh! Viens donc sur ce banc de mousse Pour parler de nos beaux amours, Et dis-moi de ta voix si douce:

“Toujours !”

Loin, bien loin, égarant nos courses, Faisons fuir le lapin caché, Et le daim au miroir des sources, Admirant son grand bois penché; Puis chez nous, tout heureux, tout aises, En paniers, enlaçant nos doigts, Revenons, rapportant des fraises Des bois.

Villanelle

When the new season has come , When the cold is over, We two will go, my sweet, To pick lilies-of-the-valley in the woods. Our feet scattering the pearls Which are seen quivering in the morning, We will listen to the blackbirds Whistling.

The spring has come, my sweet! This is the month blest by lovers, And the bird glossing its wing, Perched on the edge of its nest, twitters in verse. Oh, come, sit on this mossy bank To talk of our beautiful love, And say to me in your gentle voice: “Always!”

Far, very far let us wander, Startling the hidden rabbit And the deer which, reflected in the pool, Stoops to admire its great antlers. Then let us go home, happy and content; Twining our fingers for baskets, Let us carry back wild strawberries From the woods.

La spectre de la rose

Soulève ta paupière close

Qu’effleure un songe virginal ! Je suis le spectre d’une rose Que tu portais hier au bal. Tu me pris encore emperlée

Des pleurs d’argent de l’arrosoir, Et, parmi la fête étoilée, Tu me promenas tout le soir.

Ô toi, qui de ma mort fus causé, Sans que tu puisses le chasser, Toutes les nuits mon spectre rose

À ton chevet viendra danser.

Mais ne crains rien, je ne réclame Ni messe ni De Profundis, Ce léger parfum est mon âme, Et j’arrive du paradis.

Mon destin fut digne d’envie, Et pour avoir un sort si beau Plus d’un aurait donné sa vie; Car sur ton sein j’ai mon tombeau, Et sur l’âlbatre où je repose

Un poète avec un baiser

Écrivit: “Ci-gît une rose, Que tous les rois vont jalouser.”

The ghost of the rose

Raise your closed eyelids

Softly touched by a virginal dream; I am the ghost of the rose

Which you wore last night at the ball. You took me still pearled

With the watering can’s silver tears. And through the starlit festivities

You strolled all evening with me.

Oh, you, the cause of my death, Have no power to drive away

My rose-red ghost who each night

Will dance at your bedside. Have no fear that I shall claim A mass or De Profundis; This fragrance is my soul, And I come from Paradise.

My fate was worthy of envy; To have such a beautiful death, Many a man would have given his life For I have your breast for my tomb, And on the alabaster where I rest A poet with a kiss

Wrote: “Here lies a rose

Which all kings will envy.”

Sur les lagunes

Ma belle amie est morte, Je pleurerai toujours;

Sous la tombe elle emporte

Mon âme et mes amours.

Dans le ciel, sans m’attendre, Elle s’en retourna;

L’ange qui l’emmena

Ne voulut pas me prendre.

Que mon sort est amer !

Ah! sans amour, s’en aller sur la mer !

La blanche créature

Est couchée au cercueil;

Comme dans la nature

Tout me paraît en deuil!

La colombe oubliée

Pleure et songe à l’absent;

Mon âme pleure et sent

Qu’elle est dépareillée.

Que mon sort est amer !

Ah! sans amour, s’en aller sur la mer !

Sur moi la nuit immense

S’étend comme linceul.

Je chante ma romance

Que le ciel entend seul.

Ah! Comme elle était belle

Et comme je l’aimais !

Je n’aimerai jamais

Une femme autant qu’elle.

Que mon sort est amer !

Ah! sans amour, s’en aller sur la mer !

On the lagoons

My lovely one is dead; I will weep for ever.

Into the tomb she carries

My soul and my love.

Into heaven, without waiting for me, She has returned.

The angel who led her

Would not take me too.

How bitter my fate is!

Ah! without love to set out on the sea!

The white creature

Lies in her coffin;

To me all nature

Seems to be in mourning!

The forgotten dove

Weeps, thinking of the absent one. My soul weeps and feels

Deserted too.

How bitter my fate is!

Ah! without love to set out on the sea!

Over me the immense night

Extends like a shroud.

I sing my sad ballad

Which only heaven hears.

Ah! How beautiful she was

And how I loved her!

I will love no other woman

As much as I loved her.

How bitter my fate is!

Ah! without love to set out on the sea!

L’absence

Reviens, reviens ma bien-aimée ! Comme une fleur loin du soleil, La fleur de ma vie est fermée Loin de ton sourire vermeil!

Entre nos cœurs, quelle distance! Tant d’espace entre nos baisers ! O sort amer, o dûre absence ! O grands desires inapaises !

Reviens, reviens ma bien-aimée ! Comme une fleur loin du soleil, La fleur de ma vie est fermée Loin de ton sourire vermeil!

D’ici là-bas que de campagnes, Que de villes et de hameaux, Que de vallons et de montagnes, À lasser le pied des chevaux!

Reviens, reviens ma bien-aimée ! Comme une fleur loin du soleil, La fleur de ma vie est fermée Loin de ton sourire vermeil !

Absence

Return, return, my beloved!

Like a flower far from the sun, The flower of my life is closed, Far from your rosy smile.

Between our hearts such a distance! Such a space between our kisses! O bitter fate! O hard absence!

O great and unappeased desires!

Return, return, my beloved!

Like a flower far from the sun, The flower of my life is closed, Far from your rosy smile.

Between us now, so many plains. So many towns and villages, So many glens and mountains

To weary any horses’ hooves.

Return, return, my beloved!

Like a flower far from the sun, The flower of my life is closed, Far from your rosy smile.

Au cimetière

Connaissez-vous la blanche tombe

Où flotte avec un son plaintif

L’ombre d’un if ?

Sur l’if une pâle colombe, Triste et seule au soleil couchant, Chante son chant:

Un air maladivement tendre, À la fois charmant et fatal, Qui vous fait mal

Et qu’on voudrait toujours entendre; Un air comme en soupire aux cieux L’ange amoureux.

On dirait que l’âme éveillée

Pleure sous terre à l’unisson

De la chanson,

Et du malheur d’être oubliée Se plaint dans un roucoulement Bien doucement.

Sur les ailes de la musique

On sent lentement revenir

Un souvenir.

Une ombre, une forme angélique, Passe dans un rayon tremblant, En voile blanc.

Les belles de nuit demi-closes

Jettent leur parfum faible et doux Autour de vous.

Et le fantôme aux molles poses murmure en vous tendant les bras : “Tu reviendras ?”

Oh! jamais plus, près de la tombe, Je n’irai, quand descend le soir Au manteau noir, Écouter la pâle colombe

Chanter sur la pointe de l’if Son chant plaintif.

At the cemetery

Do you know the white tomb

Where a shadowy yew sways

With a plaintive sound?

On the yew, a pale dove, Sad and lonely at sunset, Sings its song:

A tune achingly tender, At once enchanting and deathly, Which hurts you, And which you long to hear forever; A tune like the sigh in heaven Of an angel in love.

It seems that the wakened soul

Weeps under the soil as one With the song

And for the sorrow of being forgotten Coos its lament

Very softly.

On the wings of music

One senses a memory

Slowly returning; A shadow with an angel’s shape Passes in a quivering beam of light, White-veiled.

The flowers, half shut, Waft perfume faint and sweet

Around you.

And the phantom with vague gestures Stretches his arms out to you, murmuring: “Will you come back?”

Oh! Nevermore will I walk

Near the tomb as evening closes Its dark cloak, Or listen to the pale dove

Singing from the top of the yew Its plaintive song.

L’île inconnue

“Dites, la jeune belle, Où voulez-vous aller?

La voile enfle son aile, La brise va souffler !

L’aviron est d’ivoire, Le pavillon de moiré, Le gouvernail d’or fin; J’ai pour lest une orange, Pour voile une aile d’ange, Pour mousse un séraphin.

“Dites, la jeune belle, Où voulez-vous aller?

La voile enfle son aile, La brise va souffler !

Est-ce dans la Baltique ?

Dans la mer Pacifique ?

Dans l’île de Java ?

Ou bien est-ce en Norvège, Cueillir la fleur de neige, Ou la fleur d’Angsoka ?

“Dites, dites, la jeune belle, Où voulez-vous aller?

“Menez-moi,” dit la belle, “À la rive fidèle

Où l’on aime toujours!”

“Cette rive, ma chère, On ne la connaît guère, Au pays des amours.”

Où voulez-vous aller ?

La brise va souffler !

The unknown isle

“Tell me, young beauty, where do you wish to go? The sail puffs out its wing, The breeze is going to blow!

The oar is of ivory, The flag of watered silk, The helm of finest gold; I have an orange for ballast, For sail an angel’s wing, My ship’s boy is a seraph.

“Tell me, young beauty, where do you wish to go? The sail puffs out its wing, The breeze is going to blow!

Shall it be to the Baltic, To the Pacific Ocean, To the Isle of Java?

Or else to Norway, To pick the snow flower, Or the flower of Angsoka?

“Tell me, tell me, young beauty, where do you wish to go?

“Take me,” said the beauty, “To the faithful shore where love lasts for ever!”

“That shore, my dear, is hardly known at all in the land of love.”

Where do you wish to go? The breeze is going to blow!