{ program notes
Absolute Jest was written for the San Francisco Symphony’ s 100 th anniversary and premiered by that orchestra under its music director Michael Tilson Thomas on March 15, 2012. It was directly inspired by Adams’ hearing the San Franciscans perform Stravinsky’ s neo-Classical Pulcinella.“ I heard how one composer, Stravinsky, could take the material and vitality of another composer, the Italian Baroque composer Pergolesi, and weave it into his own style and language,” he recalled.“ And I have long been a huge musical fan of the late Beethoven string quartets. Most of those quartets people know as heavy music full of gravitas, but there are these scherzo [ movements ] that are as light and as powerful and energetic as the slow movements are deep and lyrical. So I took fragments of these scherzos and wove them together into what I think is the world’ s longest scherzo— a 25-minute high-energy scherzo.”
Adams at first thought he’ d make this just an orchestral piece,“ but the Beethoven music is so fast and so virtuosic and it lives on this speed-of-light, laserpoint precision of playing so that the mass of the orchestra can’ t possibly travel at that hyperspace rate. So I got the idea of incorporating the string quartet,” specifically the renowned Canadian-American St. Lawrence String Quartet.
“ The string quartet plays a lot of the Beethoven [ quotations ],” Adams explains,“ but it’ s Beethoven that’ s been passed through a hall of mirrors, a kind of Einsteinian universe where the time and structure and harmonies get warped. I don’ t mean that it’ s been warped in a grotesque way; in no way is it a satire or deconstruction. The music is still highly identifiable … though the orchestra sounds more like John Adams.”
At its first performance, Absolute Jest began with music based on the scherzo of Beethoven’ s famous opus 131 C-sharp minor Quartet. But Adams soon replaced it with vivacious music in the rollicking 6 / 8 rhythmic patterns of the Ninth Symphony’ s scherzo. About a third of the way through, the string quartet introduces the“ high-spirited triple-time scherzo to the F-Major opus 135 [ Quartet ],
Beethoven’ s final work in that medium. … It becomes the dominant motivic material for the remainder of the piece, interrupted only by a brief slow section that interweaves fragments of the Grosse Fuge with the opening fugue theme of the C-sharp-minor Quartet.”
Though the title Absolute Jest might suggest the piece is intended as a joke, Adams stresses that is not the case.“ The‘ jest’ … should be understood in terms of its Latin meaning:‘ gesta’ equals‘ doings, deeds, exploits.’ I like to think of‘ jest’ as indicating an exercise of one’ s wit by means of imagination and invention. … The act of composing the work … was the most extended experience in pure‘ invention’ that I’ ve ever undertaken. Its creation for me was a thrilling lesson in counterpoint, thematic transformation, and formal design.”
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta and strings.
Since his teenage years, Beethoven had loved this verse, written in 1785 by his favorite poet, and planned to set it to music.
Symphony No. 9 in D minor
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born in Bonn, Germany, December 16, 1770; died in Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827
The Ninth Symphony comes from the visionary last years of Beethoven’ s life during which he also created the Missa solemnis and his celebrated late string quartets. He had not written a symphony since the Eighth in 1812. The years that followed had been a period of emotional struggle and artistic stasis. Only when Beethoven resolved the battle for custody of his nephew Karl in 1820 did his creative powers flow freely again. Now virtually stone deaf, he had, in biographer Maynard Solomon’ s words,“ reached a stage where he had become wholly possessed by his art.”
Nevertheless, before devoting himself fully to the creation of this most ambitious of all his works, he had been sketching ideas for a grand symphony in the dramatic key of D minor for at least a decade. Beethoven always believed music had a higher purpose than merely the making of beautiful sounds, that it could express and inspire human aspirations toward a more exalted life, in closer harmony with neighbors and strangers alike, and ultimately with God. In the Ninth, he drove home this message by crowning his instrumental symphony with an unprecedented choral finale: a setting of Friedrich Schiller’ s poem“ Ode to Joy,” in which joy is defined as a state in which“ all men are made brothers.” Since his teenage years, Beethoven had loved this verse, written in 1785 by his favorite poet, and planned to set it to music. He was not the first, for by the 1820s this poem in the German traditional style of the“ geselliges Lied”— a social song to be sung by groups of friends usually with a glass in hand— had already been set more than 40 times, including by the young Franz Schubert. When Beethoven made the unprecedented decision to risk a vocal movement for the Ninth’ s finale, he edited this poem to make it express a higher joy for mankind than could be found in any tavern.
Premiered at Vienna’ s Kärtnertor Theater on May 7, 1824, the first performance reportedly moved its audience to tears as well as cheers. Beethoven was on the podium, but the real conductor was Michael Umlauf; the musicians had been instructed to follow only his beat and ignore the deaf Beethoven’ s. The performance would probably have sounded terrible to us today: orchestra and singers had had only two rehearsals together of a work that many found beyond their capabilities. And yet the magic of the Ninth somehow won out. At the end of the Symphony, the alto soloist, Caroline Unger, had to turn Beethoven around to see the audience’ s tumult; unable to hear them, he had remained hunched over his score.
September – November 2016 | Overture 51