JOHANN STRAUSS, JR. — Frühlingsstimmen, op. 410

Johann Strauss, Jr. was the undisputed king of dance music in 19th century Vienna. Starting around the age of nineteen and following in the footsteps of his father and namesake, Strauss composed over 500 waltzes, , and quadrilles that earned him the title of “Waltz King” among Vienna’s musical elite. Straus’s penchant for writing so-called “light music” rather than heavier concert fare—symphonies, concertos, and chamber music—has occasionally led to his marginalization in musical histories, but Strauss’s contemporaries clearly counted him among the brightest lights in the crowded Viennese firmament. One famous story recounts Strauss’s wife Adele approaching the great master Johannes Brahms for an autograph. Upon such a request, Brahms would typically inscribe a few measures of his most well-known music, and then sign his name underneath. On this occasion, however, he chose instead to inscribe a few measures from Strauss’s famous “Blue Danube” waltz, and then wrote beneath it: “Unfortunately, NOT by Johannes Brahms.”

Frühlingsstimmen (“Voices of Spring”) began as so many of Strauss’s compositions: intended to entertain the audience at a charity performance for Vienna’s elite. The original performance featured the orchestral waltz you hear today augmented by a soprano soloist. The soprano part was written for Bianca Bianchi, a star of the Vienna Court , with a text evoking the singing of birds as the landscape awakens from its winter slumber. The text was provided by Viennese poet Richard Genée, a frequent collaborator with Strauss and the librettist for Strauss’s most famous , Die Fledermaus. The piece was such a smash success at the charity performance that Strauss quickly retooled the piece for orchestral performance and debuted the instrumental version seventeen days later. In subsequent years, the piece became a staple in performances by Viennese artist Hans Tranquillini, who performed under the stage name of Baron Jean and described himself as a Kunstpfeifer (“artistic whistler”). While you may not be up to the standards set by Tranquillini, don’t be surprised to find yourself whistling this charming tune on your way out of the hall this evening.

ROBERT SCHUMANN — Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, op. 38

Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1, also known as the Frühlingssinfonie (“Spring Symphony”), came at a crucial juncture in his life and career. Throughout the 1830s, Schumann built his reputation as one of Germany’s preeminent musical virtuosos by composing and performing increasingly daring and inventive suites of piano music most famously represented by Kinderszenen (“Scenes From Childhood”) and Kreisleriana, both of which premiered in 1838. He also spent the majority of these years living under the roof of his piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, in the famously musical town of Leipzig. During this time, Schumann developed a strong affection for Wieck’s daughter, Clara, and the two were engaged to be married in 1837. This engagement, however, was not approved by Clara’s father, who feared that

marrying an indigent and unreliable artist like Schumann would halt her own burgeoning career as a piano virtuoso and composer. This set off an acrimonious three-year legal battle between Schumann and Wieck that finally ended with Robert and Clara’s marriage in the fall of 1840.

Clara strongly urged Schumann to try his hand at composing for forces beyond the piano even writing in her diary at the time, “It would be best if he composed for orchestra; his imagination cannot find sufficient scope on the piano…my highest wish is that he should compose for orchestra—that is his field! May I succeed in bringing him to it!” Schumann clearly heeded her advice, and in the year following their marriage, he wrote extensively for orchestra including completing two of his four symphonies. In fact, Schumann appears to have finished the first drafts for Symphony No. 1 in a period of only four days during January 1841. The piece premiered under the baton of Schumann’s friend and fellow composer Felix Mendelssohn just eight weeks later.

One of the biggest problems facing music historians when dealing with Schumann’s symphonies is that the composer was a fanatical reviser of his own works. Schumann made near-continuous changes and revisions to the score of Symphony No. 1 until he finally allowed the definitive score to be published in 1853—twelve full years after the premiere. Though he withdrew them from the score prior to its eventual publication, Schumann’s earliest versions of the piece actually carry programmatic or narrative subtitles for each movement. The gradually unfurling first movement is designated as “The Beginning of Spring,” the gorgeous and meditative second movement as “Evening,” the stately third movement as “Merry Playmates,” and the grand final movement as “Spring in Full Bloom.” Regardless of Schumann’s desire to include them in the score, these designations give listeners a good blueprint of what to expect from the piece. Consider these movements as a musical foretaste of what’s to come as we similarly wait for February to melt away into glorious spring.

JOHANNES BRAHMS — Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, op. 15

An understanding of Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 must begin with the second half of the story related in the notes above about Schumann’s Symphony No. 1. In the decade following his marriage to Clara, Schumann developed a reputation as one of the most important musical voices in Germany. His reputation as a composer grew as his music expanded and diversified, but he also continued to sharpen his skills as a music writer and critic in the pages of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (“New Journal of Music”), a journal he co-founded in 1834 with his teacher and eventual father-in-law Friedrich Wieck. In 1853, Schumann wrote an infamous profile of the then totally unknown 20-year-old Brahms in which he declared him “the Chosen One” of German music and assured his readers that Brahms alone was “destined to give expression to our times in the highest and most ideal manner.” As if this forceful passing of the mantel wasn’t pressure enough on the young composer, Schumann attempted suicide five

months later, which lead to his commitment to an asylum until his eventual death in 1856. During those years of his institutionalization, the young Brahms became the defacto head of the Schumann household, helping to manage financial affairs on Schumann’s and Clara’s behalf and visiting Schumann regularly at the sanatorium since Clara was forbidden to see him until just days before his death. During this period of turmoil for nearly five years after Schumann’s suicide attempt, Brahms published no new music and was largely kept afloat by Clara’s continued commitment to programming his published compositions on her public recitals.

Brahms’s only focus during this time was completing his first piano concerto that finally premiered in January 1859 with the composer at the keyboard. It is no accident that Brahms used the key of D minor this work, the same as Beethoven’s monumental Ninth Symphony. Brahms traveled to Cologne to hear his first performance of the Ninth in the spring of 1854 and that masterwork left its mark on his musical sketchbooks in the succeeding months. He finally began to shape his sketches into a piano concerto by 1856 as a kind of compromise after considering using the material for both a solo piano sonata and a full-fledged symphony. Despite the concerto format, Brahms ambition in this piece is clearly symphonic in register. In the same way that Beethoven’s towering Ninth Symphony is often said to attempt to capture the entirety of human experience in a single work, Brahms seems to have put the full emotional freight of his early career and tumultuous personal life into this single concerto. From the youthful exhilaration of being named Germany’s “Chosen One” to the tragic institutionalization and eventual death of his mentor, and even the burgeoning romantic infatuation Brahms was developing for Clara Schumann, all are present in a kind of delicate and frenzied balance that probably mirrors something of Brahms’s psyche at the time.