SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA BEETHOVEN’S SYMPHONY NO. 5 A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Edo de Waart, conductor January 17 and 18, 2020 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Grosse Fuge in B-flat Major, Op. 133 (Arr. By Felix Weingartner) JOHN ADAMS Violin Concerto Quarter note = 78 Chaconne: Body Through Which the Dream Flows Toccare Leila Josefowicz, violin INTERMISSION LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 Allegro con brio Andante con moto Allegro Allegro Grosse Fuge in B-flat Major, Op. 133 (arr. Felix Weingartner) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770, Bonn Died March 26, 1827, Vienna Beethoven composed his String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 130 in 1825, and it was first performed in Vienna on March 21, 1826, almost exactly a year before his death. Long deaf, Beethoven did not attend the premiere, but waited across the street for reports from his friends. The massive six-movement quartet concluded with a long and difficult fugue, and when Beethoven’s friends told him that several of the shorter movements had proven so successful that they had to be repeated, the crusty old composer exploded: “Yes, these delicacies! Why not the fugue?” “Why not the fugue?” indeed. That fugue has been a point of contention ever since and probably will be forever. Is it the logical conclusion to a string quartet made up of quite dissimilar movements, or is that fugue – 17 minutes of some of Beethoven’s most violent and forbidding music – so independent a work that it should be removed from the quartet and performed separately? Beethoven’s publisher Matthias Artaria certainly believed the latter and wanted him to substitute a new finale and publish the fugue as a separate work. The composer’s young friend Karl Holz was sent in to brave the lion with this proposal, and to everyone’s surprise Beethoven agreed: he apparently had already had doubts about the rightness of the fugue as a conclusion to the quartet. A number of musicians, including conductors Hans von Bülow and Otto Klemperer, have arranged the Grosse Fuge for string orchestra, often adding double-basses to the four parts of Beethoven’s original. This concert offers the Grosse Fuge in an arrangement published in 1906 for string orchestra by the Austrian conductor Felix Weingartner. The Grosse Fuge is in fact not one fugue, but three different fugal sections, each in a contrasting tempo: Beethoven described it as a “Grand Fugue, freely treated in some places, fugally elaborated in others.” The brief Overtura suggests the shape of the fugue subject in three different permutations (all of which will reappear) and then proceeds directly into the first fugue, an extremely abrasive Allegro in B-flat Major that demands a great deal from both performers and audiences. Much of the complexity here is rhythmic: not only does the fugue subject leap across a span of several octaves, but its progress is often obscured by its overlapping triple, duple and dotted rhythms. The lyric, flowing central section, a Meno mosso e moderato in G-flat Major, is fugal in character rather than taking the form of a strict fugue. It gives way to the Allegro molto e con brio, which is derived from the second appearance of the fugue subject in the Overtura; here it bristles with trills and sudden pauses. Near the close, Beethoven recalls fragments of the different sections, then offers a full-throated restatement of the fugue theme before the rush to the close. Violin Concerto JOHN ADAMS Born February 15, 1947, Worcester, MA The composer has supplied a program note for this piece, which had its world premiere on January 19, 1994, at the Ordway Music Theater in Saint Paul, MN (Edo de Waart conducted the Minnesota Orchestra, and Jorja Fleezanis was the violin soloist): The proposal to write a violin concerto came from the violinist Jorja Fleezanis, a close friend and enthusiastic champion of new music. Composers who are not string players are seriously challenged when it comes to writing a concerto, and close collaborations are the rule, as it was in this case. For those who have not played a violin or a cello, the physical relation of the turned-over left wrist and grasping fingers defies logic. Intervals that ought to be simple are awkward, while gestures that seem humanly impossible turn out to be rudimentary. A concerto without a strong melodic statement is hard to imagine. I knew that if I were to compose a violin concerto I would have to solve the issue of melody. I could not possibly have produced such a thing in the 1980’s because my compositional language was principally one of massed sonorities riding on great rippling waves of energy. Harmony and rhythm were the driving forces in my music of that decade; melody was almost non-existent. The “News” aria in Nixon in China, for example, is less melody than it is declamation riding over what feels like the chords of a giant ukelele. But in the early 1990’s, during the composition of The Death of Klinghoffer, I began to think more about melody. This was perhaps a result of being partially liberated by a new chromatic richness that was creeping into my sound, but it was more likely due to the need to find a melodic means to set Alice Goodman’s psychologically complex libretto. As if to compensate for years of neglecting the “singing line,” the Violin Concerto (1993) emerged as an almost implacably melodic piece – an example of “hypermelody.” The violin spins one long phrase after another without stop for nearly the full 35 minutes of the piece. I adopted the classic form of the concerto as a kind of Platonic model, even to the point of placing a brief cadenza for the soloist at the traditional locus near the end of the first movement. The concerto opens with a long extended rhapsody for the violin, a free, fantastical “endless melody” over the regularly pulsing staircase of upwardly rising figures in the orchestra. The second movement takes a received form, the chaconne, and gently stretches, compresses and transfigures its contours and modalities while the violin floats like a disembodied spirit around and about the orchestral tissue. The chaconne’s title, “Body through which the dream flows,” is a phrase from a poem by Robert Haas, words that suggested to me the duality of flesh and spirit that permeates the movement. It is as if the violin is the “dream” that flows through the slow, regular heartbeat of the orchestral “body.” The “Toccare” utilizes the surging, motoric power of Shaker Loops to create a virtuoso vehicle for the solo violin. After Jorja Fleezanis’ memorable premiere, many violinists have taken on the piece, and each has played it with his or her unique flair and understanding. Among them are Gidon Kremer (who made the first recording with the London Symphony), Vadim Repin, Robert McDuffie, Midori and, perhaps most astonishingly of all, Leila Josefowicz, who made the piece a personal calling card for years. The Violin Concerto is dedicated to the memory of David Huntley, longtime enthusiast and great champion of my and much other contemporary music. -John Adams Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN None of us can remember the first time we heard Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – this music is so much a part of us that we seem to be born knowing it. The Fifth surrounds us: as background music for chocolate and motor oil commercials, as the symbol for Victory in World War II, as the stuff of jokes. Even children who know nothing about classical music sing its opening four notes on playgrounds. Those four notes are the most famous in classical music, and Beethoven’s Fifth is certainly the most famous symphony ever written. Music so white-hot in intensity, so universal in appeal, cries out for interpretation, and over the last two centuries many have been ready to tell us what this symphony “means.” To some, it is Fate knocking at the door. To one nineteenth-century critic, it told the story of a failed love affair. Others see it as the triumph of reason over chaos and evil. Still others have advanced quite different explanations. But engaging as such interpretations are, they tell us more about the people who make them than about the music itself. The sad truth is that this music is so over-familiar that we have almost stopped listening to it: the opening rings out, and our minds go on automatic pilot for the next 30 minutes – we have lost the capacity to listen to the Fifth purely as music, to comprehend it as the astonishing and original musical achievement that it is. Beethoven made the first sketches for his Fifth Symphony in 1804, soon after completing the Eroica, but did not begin work in earnest until after finishing the Fourth in 1806. Most of the composition took place in the summer of 1807, and the score was completed that fall. The first performance took place on December 22, 1808, six days after Beethoven’s 38th birthday. The stark opening of the Allegro con brio, both very simple and charged with volcanic fury, provides the musical content for the entire movement. That (seemingly) simple figure saturates the first movement, giving it extraordinary unity. Those four notes shape the main theme, generate the rhythms and pulse insistently in the background – they even become the horn fanfare that announces the second theme. One of the most impressive features of this movement is how short it is: the Fifth has the shortest first movement in all Beethoven’s nine symphonies.