Overture Magazine - 2018-19 Season BSO_Overture_Sept_Oct | Page 17

BEETHOVEN EROICA SYMPHONY The hero thereafter celebrated in the “Eroica” became an ideal rather than an actual human being. Indeed, the Symphony itself was a heroic act: shocking its first audiences and setting a new symphonic template for future composers to emulate. In a work twice the length of previous symphonies, Beethoven had expanded 18 th -century symphonic structures beyond his contemporaries’ powers of comprehension. Even more challenging was the “Eroica’s” harmonic daring and overall tone of aggression. It did not seek to please and amuse its listeners but to challenge and provoke them. We hear the challenge in the two loud E-f lat chords that open the first movement. More than introductory gestures, they are the germinal motive of the symphony. From them Beethoven builds the repeated sforzando chords, with their arresting dislocation of the beat, that we hear a few moments later. Just before the end of the exposition section, he adds teeth-grinding dissonance to this mix, and in the development section, this concoction explodes in a shattering crisis. The movement’s principal theme is a simple swinging between the notes of an E-flat -major chord that quickly stumbles on a dissonant C-sharp. It will take the rest of this giant movement, with its expanded development and coda sections, to resolve this stumble. So intense is Beethoven’s forward propulsion that his themes never have time to blossom into melody. In fact, the most compelling theme waits until the development, when oboes and cellos introduce it as part of the recovery from the hammering dissonant chords. The second-movement funeral march in C minor is one of Beethoven’s most imposing and profound movements. In his superb new biography, Jan Swafford tells us the musical style here was inspired by the grand funeral marches composed for public occasions during the French Revolution. Over imitation drum rolls in the strings, the famous threnody unfolds its majestic course. It is succeeded by an episode in C major that injects rays of sunshine and hope, with fanfares proclaiming the greatness of the fallen hero. Then the dirge melody returns and swiftly becomes an imposing fugue: counterpoint intensifying emotion. In the movement’s remarkable closing measures, the march theme disintegrates into sobbing fragments. The third-movement scherzo provides light-hearted relief after the weight and drama of the opening movements. Yet it too retains intensity as its music, in Lewis Lockwood’s words, repeatedly traces a “pattern of rapid growth from a mysterious pianissimo to a rousing fortissimo.” Beethoven re-introduces a gentler variant of the off-the-downbeat hammer blows from the first movement; eventually, they briefly push the three- beat meter into two beats. After struggle, the finale brings joy in the form of sublime musical play. It is an imposing set of variations on a theme Beethoven had used three times before: in an early set of contredances, in the Creatures of Prometheus, and for the piano variations now known as the “Eroica” Variations. Beethoven first isolates the bass line of his theme as a witty little tune in its own right, only later giving us the theme itself in the woodwinds. In Swafford’s words, “he has shaped the finale as a steady intensification from the light style of a dance to a heroic voice.” Elaborate fugal passages and a grandly martial episode culminate in a sublime apotheosis: a group of variations in a slower tempo that proclaims the hero’s immortality. The Presto climax is capped by the symphony’s opening E-flat hammer blows, now triumphant rather than tragic. SING TO YOUR AUDIENCE. WITH OVERTURE OVERTURE. Reach over 150,000 patrons of the BSO five times a year in Overture, a program that’s about more than just beautiful music. RESERVE YOUR AD SPACE TODAY! TO ADVERTISE, CONTACT: Ken Iglehart [email protected] Lynn Talbert [email protected] Call 443.873.3916 Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, Now also distributed at Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. Notes by Janet E. Bedell, © 201 8 S E P – O C T 2018 / OV E R T U R E 15