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Overture to Rosamunde, D. 644

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Overture to Rosamunde, D. 644 The trombone parts to Mozart’s magnificent Mass in C Minor double the vocal parts extensively throughout this beautiful work. That means we PLAY MELODY! Violins, eat your hearts out. JOHN ILIKA, NCS PRINCIPAL TROMBONE Overture to Rosamunde, D. 644 FRANZ SCHUBERT BORN January 31, 1797, in Vienna; died November 19, 1828, in Vienna PREMIERE Composed 1819-1820; first performance August 19, 1820, Theater an der Wien, Vienna OVERVIEW For all his mastery of selecting and setting music to lyric poetry, Franz Schubert was disastrously inept in selecting plays and librettos for his music. None of the operas he composed ever succeeded. The closest he ever came to composing dramatic music was the incidental music to the play Rosamunde. Ironically, this piece has remained a standard in the orchestral repertory but the play itself is long forgotten and apparently lost. Rosamunde was written by Helmina von Chézy, a compulsive writer and obviously a smooth talker, known as the “terrible Frau von Chézy.” It ran all of two performances. Shortly before, she had befuddled everyone with her incomprehensible libretto to Weber’s Euryanthe, but she continued to write in the same vein and managed to persuade producers to mount her plays. Schubert began composition of the incidental music (comprising more than 50 minutes) on November 30, finishing it on December 18, 1823, just two days before the premiere. The deadline left him no time to write an overture, so he recycled an earlier composition, the overture to an 1820 melodrama, Die Zauberharfe (The Magic Harp). As a result, the music of the overture bears no relationship to the rest of the incidental music and gives us no clue whatsoever to the lost plot of Rosamunde. WHAT TO LISTEN FOR The overture opens with a lengthy dramatic introduction, followed by a typical lively and lyrical Schubertian sonata-form movement. The energetic closing theme is also in keeping with the standard 19th-century opera overture. Sometime after the failed production, the incidental music disappeared, only to be discovered in 1867 when Sir George Grove and Sir Arthur Sullivan went to Vienna in search of lost Schubert manuscripts. INSTRUMENTATION Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings Three Lieder FRANZ SCHUBERT PREMIERE Composed in 1825 (Nacht und Träume), 1817 (Die Forelle), and 1814 (Gretchen am Spinnrade); first performances unknown OVERVIEW It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Franz Schubert invented the German art song. Of course, he had help; poets of the Romantic era had discovered “das Volk” (common people), and the growing middle class soon adopted the lied as a classier and more emotionally intense substitute for the folksong in home music making. WHAT TO LISTEN FOR The Romantics favored emotional extremes, drawing inspiration from everything from scary folktales to suicide over unrequited love. Schubert was a master at creating a kind of pianistic commentary on the text. Most of his lieder open with an introductory ritornello that sets the mood of the poetry to come through tone-painting. Schubert had the gift to make songs speak directly to the listener. Arranging these songs for full symphony orchestra exchanges some of this intimacy and immediacy of approach for the orchestra’s power to build on emotion. Nacht und Träume (Night and Dreams), D. 827 German composer Max Reger orchestrated eight of Schubert’s lieder — including two being performed on this program — in 1914, and another seven in 1926. Nacht und Träume, composed in 1825 to a text by Matthäus von Collin, is a meditation on a bright night as the moonlight wanders through the house, influencing dreams. Die Forelle (The Trout), D. 550 Benjamin Britten, a great Schubert lover, performed many of the lieder on piano with his partner, tenor Peter Pears. Die Forelle, however, is the only one he orchestrated — to an English text — in 1942. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s poem recounts a fisherman’s trick to catch an unsuspecting trout by muddying the waters so that the fish can’t see him. Schubert sets the song in A–B–A form, with the accompaniment to the A section portraying the trout leaping out of the water. The B section musically reflects the narrator’s disapproval of the fisherman’s lack of sportsmanship. Originally, the poem had a moral, expressed in the fourth stanza — which Schubert omits — in which the narrator observes that many a credulous young woman loses her virginity to young men ever ready to ensnare them. Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel), D. 118 For the Romantics, German poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749- 1832) was close to God, and his verse-play Faust was his magnum opus. Dr. Johannes Faustus himself was an historical personage, described first in 15th-century German sources as an adventurer, scholar, necromancer, cohort with Satan, and dabbler in black magic. He re-emerged a century later in Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus as having sold his soul to the devil in exchange for youth, love, and knowledge — an Everyman gone wrong. Gretchen am Spinnrade is drawn directly from Goethe’s play. Faust’s quarry, the innocent girl Gretchen, sits at her spinning wheel meditating with conflicting emotions about the now-youthful Faust, his seductive promises, and his kiss. Schubert composed the lied in 1814. His accompaniment throughout imitates the whirring of the spinning wheel, pausing only as Gretchen remembers the kiss. INSTRUMENTATION Nacht und Träume: Strings Die Forelle: Two clarinets, strings Gretchen am Spinnrade: Flute, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, horn, timpani, strings Mass in C Minor “The Great,” K. 427 WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART BORN January 27, 1756, in Salzburg; died December 5, 1791, in Vienna PREMIERE Composed 1782-1783; first performance October 26, 1783, in Salzburg OVERVIEW In the face of considerable parental opposition, Mozart, now freelancing in Vienna, married Constanze Weber in the summer of 1782. His father Leopold, while raising the understandable parental objections to the marriage based on his son’s lack of regular gainful employment, clearly had a hidden agenda as well. Marriage and a family would permanently remove his son from his influence. Angry letters, the silent treatment, a fat commission for the “Haffner” Symphony, and other forms of manipulation were to no avail, and for two years father and son maintained a chilly professional civility from a distance. During the contentious time leading up to the wedding, Mozart vowed to compose a new mass as an offering of thanks, to be performed in his hometown of Salzburg when he took his wife to meet the family. Constanze was the intended soprano soloist. In July 1783, Wolfgang finally returned to Salzburg, leaving his new baby son in Vienna, but the trip was too little too late. Although he had promised to name the child Leopold, with his father as godfather, the resolution somehow got sidelined and a friend, Baron Raimund Wetzlar, held the child at the baptismal font. The young couple attempted to make peace, but Mozart’s father and sister behaved ungraciously, especially to Constanze, exacerbating the family rift. Tragically, little Raimund died while his parents were away. For Mozart, the Mass in C Minor was also a political and artistic statement. Emperor Joseph II and Salzburg’s conservative Prince-Archbishop Colloredo restricted the performance of church music with instrumental accompaniment. In a pastoral letter in 1782, Colloredo emphatically discouraged accompanied sacred vocal music and any church music over 45 minutes long. The Archbishop had been Mozart’s former boss and bête noir in Salzburg, and now that he was out from under Colloredo’s thumb (or crosier), he blatantly ignored these restrictions in the Mass in C Minor — with its full orchestration, bravura style, florid solos, and sheer length. For reasons not clear, Mozart never finished the work, yet the fragment was performed in Salzburg under Mozart’s direction with Constanze as soprano soloist, in spite of the royal edict. The fact that it was never performed as part of a liturgical service may explain why Mozart left it incomplete. The score he left behind, which musicologist Alfred Einstein called “A noble torso,” consists of a completed Kyrie and Gloria, the Credo up to Et incarnatus est, and drafts of the Sanctus and Benedictus. WHAT TO LISTEN FOR The mass, though unfinished, was conceived in the tradition of a Missa solemnis (High Mass) or “Cantata Mass.” This designation refers to the setting of the text-heavy Gloria and Credo, which are broken up into their component ideas, each one receiving a separate concerted setting. At the time of the composition, Mozart had been involved in music-making at the home of amateur musicologist Baron van Swieten, who was presenting the then-passé music of Bach and Handel at his soirées. Their influence is evident throughout the Mass in C Minor. The first three things to strike a listener are the somber mood, the heavy use of counterpoint, and the dominant role for the soprano soloist — who gets three solo arias, as opposed to none for anyone else in the solo quartet. Given the genesis of the work, this last feature is not surprising, but the other two qualities are. The dark tone of most of the mass has no obvious biographical explanation. Rather, the minor mode allows for more complex harmony, dissonance, and chromaticism, which Mozart milks for all their expressive power. The effect immediately brings to mind the mature Bach. The Gratias agimus tibi and the Qui tollis peccata mundi are ponderous movements written in a dense contrapuntal style, with harsh dissonances sliding against each other only to resolve in unexpected places.
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