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Siete qui: Home Festival Festival 2011 The peaks of German romanticism
The peaks of German romanticism PDF Print E-mail
Beethoven’s concert overtures were hugely popular in the 20th century. The Coriolanus overture was not in fact composed to accompany Shakespeare’s play – as Wagner mistakenly thought – but as the music for a tragedy by Heinrich Joseph von Collin, freely adapted (we might say almost plagiarized today) from Plutarch’s Lives of Famous Men. The plot could hardly have seemed more inviting for a composer like Beethoven: the warrior’s revolt against his country, and the people pleading with him to take a more noble stance. The Overture seems to project through the orchestra the never-ending conflict between individual desire and the forces of destiny, between being free and dutifully observing conventions. Coriolanus was performed for the first time chez Lobkowitz, in Vienna, in March 1807, with the composer conducting.
Beethoven’s Third Concerto holds a central position that makes it stylistically ambiguous and undeniably complex – a bit of a puzzle. On the one hand it seems the gilded epilogue of the classical tradition, at least in the sense that Mozart brought it to perfection. It has all the typical touches – for instance, the orchestra concludes the first movement together with the piano, rather than on its own. However, there are also unexpected opportunities for the piano – for instance, the imposing double octaves that mark the soloist’s entrance – and the decidedly virtuoso tone of some passages seems the prelude to new beethovenian ideas.
It might sound like a word game, but Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony is not actually number five! He wrote it as his second, between 1829 and 1830, when he returned to Berlin from his travels in England and Scotland and it was intended to commemorate the tricentenary of the Augustan Confession, a crucial moment in the Lutheran reform. The Symphony was first performed at the Berlin Singakademie with Mendelssohn conducting, but it did not enjoy great success. The composer himself said this was because the piece had been orchestrated bar by bar, without properly shaping the main themes and accompanying parts. This homage to the Lutheran faith, which Mendelssohn had adopted in 1825, offers two main themes: the Dresden Amen, well known in the Saxon liturgy, which Wagner used later as the Grail motif in Parsifal, and a famous chorale, Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott (A mighty fortress is our God). The Dresden Amen turns up in various guises in every movement, like an idée fixe: this brings to mind the symphonic procedures that Berlioz, for example, was working on, in his Symphonie fantastique and Harold en Italie.
The opening Andante is based on three ascending notes which build up a melody but with so many dissonant hesitations that it follows a tense, tormented path. But then a triumphal trumpet blast lights up the Allegro with heroic fire, haunted by the mystic sound of the Dresden Amen.
The last movement is also weighty with Lutheran sentiment. The Allegro maestoso throbs with Bachian counterpoint, its steadfast ideological solidity making up for the melancholy mood of the introduction.

Luigi Di Fronzo