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SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES CONCERT David Danzmayr, conductor February 23, 2017 JOHANN STRAUSS II An der schönen blauen Donau (On the Beautiful Blue Danube), Op. 314 VILÉM TAUSKÝ Coventry: Meditation for String Orchestra INTERMISSION LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 Poco sostenuto – Vivace Allegretto Presto Allegro con brio An der schönen blauen Donau (On the Beautiful Blue Danube), Op. 314 JOHANN STRAUSS II Born October 25, 1825, Vienna Died June 3, 1899, Vienna On the Beautiful Blue Danube has become the most famous and best-loved of all Strauss waltzes, and so it is strange to learn that this waltz was originally composed for voices on an absurdly empty text by a minor Viennese police official. Not surprisingly, the music was a failure at its premiere on February 23, 1867, and – in a spectacular misjudgment of his own work – Strauss said: “The waltz was probably not catching enough.” But, freed of the text, it quickly caught on in a Vienna still recovering from military defeat the year before at the hands of the Prussians, and since then this waltz has become a virtual symbol of the city. On the Beautiful Blue Danube is a celebration of the city’s setting and of the great river that runs through Vienna on its way (eventually) to the Black Sea. In a larger sense, this waltz is a celebration of Vienna itself, and it is worth quoting Strauss on the meaning of that city to him: “If it be true that I have some talent I owe its development to my beloved native city, Vienna. Vienna! I drink to her! May she grow and prosper!” The Blue Danube, as it has become known, begins with a slow introduction full of the rich sound of horns and cellos, and gradually this is transformed into the opening waltz. There are in fact five different waltz-sequences in the Blue Danube, each of a slightly different character. These waltzes – by turns graceful, animated and always elegant – need little description: this is music simply to enjoy, and at the end Strauss drives his dances to a suitably sparkling close. Coventry: Meditation for String Orchestra VILÉM TAUSKÝ Born July 20, 1910, Prerov, Moravia Died March 16, 2004, London First, a historical note. On the night of November 14-15, 1940, the Germans bombed the city of Coventry in the midlands of England. That attack, which lasted eleven hours and involved 450 bombers, destroyed the center of Coventry, killed or wounded over a thousand people and cut every rail line out of the city. The All Clear was not sounded until 6:15 the next morning, and only then did the extent of the damage become clear. Among the structures destroyed were the Cathedral of St. Michael, built in the fourteenth century and the third tallest structure in England, two hospitals, police and postal stations, as well as the city’s water and gas supply. Curiously, the destruction of Coventry inspired two pieces of music. One was Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, composed over 20 years later for the 1962 consecration of the rebuilt cathedral. The other, Vilém Tauský’s Coventry: Meditation for String Orchestra, was composed in the immediate aftermath of the raid. Tauský was an interesting figure. As a very young man, he was one of Leoš Janáĉek’s final students, and he made his early career as an opera conductor in Europe. But the rise of the Nazis and the war forced Tauský, who was Jewish, to flee first to France and then to England. He spent the war years in England as a band leader for the Free Czech Army in exile, and after the war he decided to make his career in England. It was a distinguished career. Tauský served as music director for the Carl Rosa Opera Company and the Welsh National Opera. He was for some years conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra, and for over 25 years he taught at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Tauský’s Free Czech Army unit was stationed in nearby Warwickshire in November 1940, and the morning after the raid they were called to Coventry to help search the ruins for survivors. Tauský was struck by the horrifying destruction of the city and by the strength of its citizens, and in response he composed a brief work for string quartet that he titled Coventry: Meditation. This was first performed in London in 1942 by the Menges Quartet, but Tauský later arranged it for string orchestra, and that is the version performed at the present concert. Though it is somber and spare music, the Meditation does not depict actual events nor does it agonize. Tauský bases the piece on the ancient Czech anthem, the St. Wenceslas chorale, and that beautiful melody can be heard throughout the Meditation. The music grows more animated as it proceeds, but this eventually gives way to a quiet conclusion, as Tauský remembers Coventry’s suffering and takes note of the resilient spirit of a devastated city. Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770, Bonn Died March 26, 1827, Vienna Beethoven turned 40 in December 1810. Forty can be a difficult age for anyone, but for Beethoven things were going very well. True, his hearing had deteriorated to the point where he was virtually deaf, but he was still riding that white-hot explosion of creativity that has become known, for better or worse, as his “Heroic Style.” Over the decade-long span of that style (1803-1813) Beethoven essentially re-imagined music and its possibilities. The works that crystalized the Heroic Style – the Eroica and the Fifth Symphony – unleashed a level of violence and darkness previously unknown in music, forces that Beethoven’s biographer Maynard Solomon has described as “hostile energy,” and then triumphed over them. In these violent symphonies, music became not a matter of polite discourse but of conflict, struggle and resolution. In the fall of 1811, Beethoven began a new symphony – it would be his Seventh – and it would differ sharply from those two famous predecessors. Gone is the sense of cataclysmic struggle and hard-won victory that had driven those earlier symphonies. There are no battles fought and won in the Seventh Symphony; instead, this music is infused from its first instant with a mood of pure celebration. Such a spirit has inevitably produced a number of interpretations as to what this symphony is “about”: Berlioz heard a peasants’ dance in it, Wagner called it “the apotheosis of the dance,” and more recently Maynard Solomon has suggested that the Seventh is the musical representation of a festival, a brief moment of pure spiritual liberation. But it may be safest to leave the issue of “meaning” aside and instead listen to the Seventh simply as music. There had never been music like this before, nor has there been since – Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony contains more energy than any other piece of music ever written. Much has been made (correctly) of Beethoven’s ability to transform small bits of theme into massive symphonic structures, but in the Seventh he begins not so much with theme as with rhythm: he builds the entire symphony from what are almost scraps of rhythm, tiny figures that seem unpromising, even uninteresting, in themselves. Gradually he unleashes the energy locked up in these small figures and from them builds one of the mightiest symphonies ever written. The first movement opens with a slow introduction so long that it almost becomes a separate movement of its own. Tremendous chords punctuate the slow beginning, which gives way to a poised duet for oboes. The real effect of this long Poco sostenuto, however, is to coil the energy that will be unleashed in the true first movement, and Beethoven conveys this rhythmically: the meter of the introduction is a rock-solid (even square) 4/4, but the main body of the movement, marked Vivace, transforms this into a light-footed 6/8. This Vivace begins in what seems a most unpromising manner, however, as woodwinds toot out a simple dotted 6/8 rhythm and the solo flute announces the first theme, a graceful melody on this same rhythm. Beethoven builds the entire first movement from this simple dotted rhythm, which saturates virtually every measure. As theme, as accompaniment, as motor rhythm, it is always present, hammering into our consciousness. At the climax, horns sail majestically to the close as the orchestra thunders out that rhythm one final time. The second movement, in A minor, is one of Beethoven’s most famous slow movements, but the debate continues as to whether it really is a slow movement. Beethoven could not decide whether to mark it Andante (a walking tempo) or Allegretto (a moderately fast pace). He finally decided on Allegretto, though the actual pulse is somewhere between those two. This movement too is built on a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the first five notes (long-short-short-long-long), and this pattern repeats here almost as obsessively as the pattern of the first movement. The opening sounds like a series of static chords – the theme itself occurs quietly inside those chords – and Beethoven simply repeats this theme, varying it as it proceeds. The central episode in A Major moves gracefully along smoothly-flowing triplets before a little fugato on the opening rhythms builds to a great climax. Beethoven winds the movement down on the woodwinds’ almost skeletal reprise of the fundamental rhythm. The Scherzo explodes to life on a theme full of grace notes, powerful accents, flying staccatos and timpani explosions.

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