In 1893 Jean Sibelius set in music, for mixed choir, three texts from a traditional poem’s compilation published in 1840 by the writer Elias Lönnrot. The composition was entitled The true-lover. In 1898 Sibelius made a second version of the piece, for male choir and string orchestra. But tonight we hear the third and definitive score, printed in 1911, for strings, timpani and triangle; it was composed respecting the original three-movements form, entitled for this new version The Lover, The Path of the Beloved, Goodmight-Farewell. The opera reflects Sibelius’ early period, when he was influenced by the Scandinavian musical tradition, showing his distinctive melodic fullness and a harmonic refinement written in a Late Romantic taste.
Beethoven composed the Concerto no. 5 for Piano and Orchestra in 1809, which artistically was a happy year in which he released other masterpieces such as the “Harp” Quartet and the “Les Adieux” Sonata. The first execution was held rather privately at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on the 28th November 1811 with soloist Friedrich Schneider and conductor Christian Schulz, while the first public performance dates back to the 12th February 1812, when the Concerto was performed by keyboard heavyweight Carl Czerny. This was a full and grandiose page which the author would have liked to call the Gran Concerto but which the publisher Cramer styled “Emperor” for the grandiloquence, boldness and the “definitiveness” of style.
And with regard to definitive matters, a question which the work poses for the hearers arises precisely from the realisation that it is not only the last of a series for piano and orchestra (otherwise Beethoven would have lived for another 18 years) but the last of a concert genre tout court. Rather strange that the Bonn composer, an authentic instrumentalist, had abandoned this significant part of his catalogue exactly when, with the Emperor and the previous, most beautiful Quarto, he had brought along with him the most original and innovative results. And yet, a piano virtuoso like Beethoven, who above all founded his possibilities of affirmation on such instrument, it is strange that he started ignoring a genre which, exalted by Mozart, continued being frequented by active musicians in Vienna at the beginning of the century: Eberl, Cambini, Kozelu, Gelinek, Hoffmeister…
On the other hand it is not a misplaced thought to see in this composition a sort of celebration of the end of an epoch and, with that epoch, of one of the genres celebrating it: the epoch having an exact heroic style, not any longer seen as the instrument of a revolutionary project, or of the aspiration to change the world with the sound of cannon, but like a thing of pure aesthetic contemplation. In other words, it recalls the “Eroica”, the Fifth Concerto. Yet it is like an impoverished Eroica of the fighting soul which is there profuse and of emotional contents giving it form.
A powerful orchestral agreement towers over like an incipit of the composition: a spectacular opening of the curtain. The soloist responds to the orchestra at this beginning of the Allegro in 4/4 with a wide series of progressions of half chromes, repeated after the other two strong “fortissimo” pieces of the orchestra. This is a kind of anticipation of the soloist’s cadence preceding the arrival of the first theme, full and solemn, of the strings, followed by a singular second idea produced by the violins with the support of the violas, cellos and clarinets. In developing this material, the luxuriant background of the wood instruments (the bassoon, in particular) are then noted, “heroic” styles like the resumption at full orchestra of the second theme and the piano score for octaves in succession, with an extended excursion of the hands and with a rhythmic incisiveness of full, cheeky aggressiveness.
It is thus so much more surprising to be reached by the subsequent Adagio with little movement, in which Beethoven creates an image of a sweet and serene nocturnal elegy comparable to that of the corresponding movement of the Concert for violin. Another contrasting element with the rhetoric emphasis of the Allegro arrives then from the long, suspended, abstract phrasing of the piano line: a changeable line, lunar, leading the listener to the fringes of the charm of the moonlit and nocturnal fantastic world of Carl Maria von Weber.
Softly announced by the piano, the Rondò theme instead carries in the ascendant the festive climate of the first tempo. More than being heroic, the intonation is now humoristic and popular. The central motive is formed from two main phrases and is marked by a syncopated movement contrasted by the soloist’s descending melodic idea constituting a kind of questioning nuance. The rhythmic air of the theme has, however, the upper hand. The orchestra inflates itself with substance up to the forceful and ardent explosion of the end piece, with an intervention of extreme power of the Only One who heralds the definitive, blaring intervention of the All.
In the symphonism between the 1800s and the 1900s, having an original and modern address, all suffused in Decadentistic elements like soft psychology, sentimental exasperation and theosophical esotericism, penetrates the five compositions for orchestra by Alexander Skrjabin. Of these, the first three are numbered in traditional mode (though also showing a programmatic title), while the other two, entitled The Poem of Ecstasy and The Poem of Fire, are ascribed to the genre of Symphonic Poem.
Symphony no. 3, also called The Divine Poem, dates back to 1902-03 and was performed for the first time at the Châtelet in Paris on the 29th May 1905, directed by Arthur Nikisch. It is programmed in such manner as to imagine that the three tempos represent just as many instants of the «evolution of the human spirit which, having been rescued from a past of beliefs and mysteries, arrives, after having passed through pantheism, at the inebriated and happy affirmation of one’s own freedom and unity with the universe». The paternity of this programme, drawn up after that the Symphony had already been fully composed, is not however by Skrjabin but by Tatiana de Schloezer. Thus, the opera is a true and proper symphony and not a symphonic poem, for a greater reason if you consider that the first and third tempos are structured according to the classical scheme of the sonata-form, while the central tempo reflects the episodic scansion of the lied-form. A specific structural weight covers the peremptory and affirmative theme heard in the incipit: a theme expounding a clear Wagnerian influence and trimming, in several ways, the materials of all three tempos of the composition, which are executed without any solution to continuity. The principle of unity in variety is thus respected.
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