{ Program Notes
Symphony No. 8 in F Major
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born in Bonn, Germany, December 16, 1770;
died in Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827
Ch r is Lee
In his respected and entertaining guide to
Beethoven’s symphonies, British musicologist George Grove said of the Eighth
Symphony: “The hearer has before him
not so much a piece of music as a person.”
That person, of course, is Beethoven himself, but not the serious, brooding artiste of
his portraits. No, the Eighth is a musical
image of the composer in the mood he
called “aufgeknöpft” — “unbuttoned.”
In his “unbuttoned” state, Beethoven was
given to explosive pranks — once upending a bowl of pasta over a waiter’s head
at a favorite restaurant — silly puns, and
practical jokes on his friends accompanied
by howls of laughter. And in the summer
of 1812 when much of this Symphony was
written, he was often in this antic mood.
Troubled with a cranky digestion, he
spent the summer at Teplitz, a fashionable
spa in Bohemia. There he relaxed with
friends and met the poet Goethe, who
described him as “an utterly untamed personality.” But the more serious Beethoven
was also on the scene at Teplitz; here he
wrote his famous letter to the “Immortal
Beloved,” yearning for a permanent union
with a mysterious woman, now believed
to have been the married and unattainable
Antonie Brentano. And in October, as he
was finishing the Eighth, he revealed another side of his mercurial nature as he descended on Linz and his younger brother
Johann who had formed an illicit union
with his housekeeper. Now quite properly
buttoned up, Beethoven denounced the
woman to the Bishop of Linz and commandeered the police to throw her out of
the city. Fortunately, Johann married his
lady just in the nick of time.
Even though it is less than
eight minutes long, Donald
Francis Tovey rightly calls the
finale “one of Beethoven’s
most gigantic creations.”
The lighter side of these wild personality shifts animates the Eighth, the second
shortest of Beethoven’s symphonies.
The composer doesn’t waste a second,
immediately hurling his terse principal
theme at us as the Allegro vivace first
movement begins. This sonata form is
an extraordinary mixture of grace and
bluster: a bull in a china shop. The grace
appears in a second theme for violins, but
the bluster upsets its flow with barking
dotted rhythms, rude sforzando jabs, and
ungainly octave pogo jumps. These harry
the poor opening spiral idea throughout
the development section, which ultimately
explodes in one of Beethoven’s rare triple
fortes at the beginning of the recapitulation. Buried in the mayhem is the reprise
of that hapless theme, now in the cellos
and bassoons.
Instead of a slow movement, Beethoven
offers a merry second movement, which
lives up to its expressive marking “scherzando” — “joking.” This is a send-up of
the marvelous mechanical devices of his
friend Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, inventor of the metronome. To the tick-tick-tick
of the woodwinds, the violins play like
little automatons, periodically pausing to
rewind themselves in a whir of 64th-notes.
In the final seconds, the machine breaks
down altogether in a rattle of B-flats.
Because he has already played his
Scherzo card, Beethoven reverts to the old
courtly minuet for his third movement.
But its aggressive, heavy-footed accents
wouldn’t be welcome in a proper court
and remind us that this composer was
reputedly a clumsy dancer.
Even though it is less than eight minutes long, Donald Francis Tovey rightly
calls the finale “one of Beethoven’s most
gigantic creations.” The violins open with
a nervously scurrying theme that is soon
ambushed by a loud, dissonant C-sharp,
definitely NOT part of the key. Soon with
a startlingly sudden shift to A-flat major,
a beautiful second theme leaps in. After
a thundering F-major chord has restored
us to the home key, the nervous theme is
extremely reluctant to venture out again.
The movement’s most remarkable feature
is its lengthy coda. Here the nervous
theme is whipped from pillar to post and
eventually chased by an angry chorus of
nasty C-sharps into the distant key of
F-sharp minor. Trumpets yell at it in F
major until it scrambles home. Beethoven
completes his pranks with the most hilariously overextended final cadence in the
symphonic repertoire.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns,
two trumpets, timpani and strings..
The BSO
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