Mysteries, Marvels, and Mischief - November 4 & 5, 2023

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges

(Born near Basse Terre, Guadeloupe, in 1745; died in Paris, France, in 1799)

Overture to L’amant Anonyme (also published. as Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 11, No. 2)

Allegro presto
Andante
Presto

Joseph Bologne was born on the French-ruled Caribbean island of Guadalupe to a French plantation owner, Georges Bologne de Saint-Georges, and an enslaved 16-year-old young woman from Senegal, known as Nanon. It was common for French nationals in the colonies to send their children, regardless of their race, to Paris to receive the best education. Thus, at the age of seven, Joseph found himself in Paris where he soon distinguished himself both in fencing and as a violinist. It was his great prowess as the finest fencer in Paris that led to the title by which we know him today, “the Chevalier de Saint-Georges” (chevalier being the noble rank of knight.)

It’s hard to capture just how exceptional Joseph Bologne was in his time. Along with being one of the finest fencers of his generation, he also excelled at boxing, dancing, horsemanship, and later, soldiering. These talents, along with his charm and good looks, prompted American president John Adams to call Bologne “the most accomplished man in Europe.” And amid all this swashbuckling, Bologne also found time to excel in the musical world.

His musical abilities earned him the nickname “the Black Mozart” — a sobriquet reflecting both Bologne’s formidable gifts and 18th-century prejudice. He was acclaimed as a violinist and conductor, and he was at the heart of commissioning and premiering Haydn’s delightful set of “Paris” symphonies (1785–86). In 1788, circumstances led Bologne and Mozart to lodge at the same palace in Paris — and the 22-year-old Mozart was apparently somewhat daunted by Bologne’s success and confidence. Later, Bologne was considered for the directorship of the Paris Opera, but the era’s racism ended that possibility.

Bologne’s compositions included some extremely fine sinfonias (early versions of symphonies), concertos, string quartets, sonatas, vocal works, and operas. In his time, the Parisian taste for classical music was planted in the style gallant, a trend that favored clarity, lightness, and brevity. Such is the flavor of the overture to his comic opera L’amant Anonyme (The Anonymous Lover). Based on a play by Madame Stephanie Genlis, the opera premiered in 1780 and it is the only opera of the six that Bologne wrote that has survived in full. It was fairly common at the time for French operas to begin not with overtures (as we know them today) but with sinfonias — three-movement works, like sonatas in structure, but for orchestral performances. The overture to L’amant Anonyme is just such a sinfonia, being a three-movement work and hardly 10 minutes in length. Later, Bologne recast this overture as a stand-alone sinfonia, and called it his Symphony No. 2. Regardless of its title, the music is lyrical and spirited yet sophisticated in dramatic effect.

The first movement, Allegro presto (fast, lively), sets off at a delightfully brisk pace. Bologne uses a small orchestra — two horns; two oboes, violins, and violas; and a bass stringed instrument (designated as the basso continuo) — but even with those few instruments, the music is filled with joie de vivre. The first part of the main theme features the upper strings playing three repeated notes followed by a longer note; this longer note repeats several times, each at a higher pitch, and the effect is winningly optimistic. When the oboe plays a new phrase over plucked bass at about 30 seconds into the overture, the feeling turns delicate and tender. A contrasting section in a minor key gives this brief three-and-a-half-minute movement a kind of shadow relief, making it a concise little marvel of infectious joyfulness.

The second movement, Andante (leisurely, not fast), is scored for strings only. The themes are quietly melancholic but nonetheless gentle, and the very first bars feature a canon-like repetition between the upper violins and the violas and bass. The music evokes the pathos of the slow movements used by Bologne’s French Baroque forbears, like Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau, whose slow movements had the uncanny ability of reaching emotional depths with surprisingly uncomplicated melodies. Bologne’s Andante here is, similarly, disarmingly nostalgic.

The third movement, Presto (very fast), sprints out with a feeling of purpose. Each measure is motored along with at least one of the instruments in the orchestra playing driving triplets. The first part of this finale is in a major key and is fanfare-ish and exuberant. Soon, however, a section in the minor key answers that jubilance with a feeling of caution, eventually ending in a moment of rather unexpected silence. And then the minor key’s cautious music repeats, to be quickly replaced by the return of the major key’s jubilant music. The triplets then drive the movement to its sunny and resolute ending bars.

Ciprian Porumbescu

(Born in Bukovina [now Shepit], Ukraine in 1853; died in Stupca [now Porumbescu; renamed after the composer in 1953], Romania in 1883)

Balada for Violin and Orchestra

Molto cantabile e espressivo (Very songlike and expressive)

Ciprian Porumbescu was born in Bukovina (today an area that straddles northern Romania and southwestern Ukraine) at a time when Romania was striving for independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a musical prodigy, studying piano at the age of four with Karol Mikuli, one of Chopin’s students. And although his first formal adult studies began in theology and philosophy, he continued his musical pursuits by composing religious chorales and patriotic anthems for the Romanian Unionist independence movement at his school. Austrian authorities imprisoned him briefly in 1877 because of his political activities, and he contracted tuberculosis while he was detained. After his release, he studied with Anton Bruckner at the Vienna Conservatory and then returned to Romania. Back home, his musical career began to flourish, and he became the most celebrated nationalist composer of his time. But his death from the tuberculosis he caught in prison cut short his career at the height of his fame. Nevertheless, he left an important musical legacy for his Romanian successors.

Many of the more than 250 works Porumbescu composed in his short life were influenced by Romanian folklore and folksong. Two of them would become especially important to Romania: his operetta Crai Nau (New Moon) based on Romanian folk tales and heroes, and his 1880 romantic showpiece, the balada for violin and orchestra. The balada ultimately became his most popular work. It is rich in pathos and lyrical beauty and steeped in a celebrated style of folksong called doina.

The doina was a unique type of Romanian folksong meant for quiet meditation. Typically sung or played in private on a solo instrument, it was a free-flowing tune with wandering melodies. Its performance style depended on the performer’s mood but its main purpose was to bring solace and to ease one’s soul. It was in this spirit that Porumbescu composed his exceptional balada in 1880, during a break from his studies in Vienna.

True to the doina genre, Porumbescu’s balada at once evokes a feeling of rumination and heartache. It captures a deep sense of intimacy, the kind that brings tears to the cheek in silence. The first part of the work features a gentle kind of inner dialogue by the solo violin playing rubato (stretching the length of notes for expressive effect). The soloist’s reflections also observe many fermatas (moments where the forward momentum stops), as though stopping often to contemplate. Underneath this songful meditation the orchestra provides pizzicatos and quiet harmonic undertows. At about six minutes into the work, Porumbescu changes the character: the tempo quickens sharply, and the violin and orchestra join in a folk dance with two brief parts. The first part includes bracing runs by the violin, as if the dance partners are twirling with exuberance. The second part is somewhat sensual, as though the partners have slowed their dance to whisper affections to each other. This dance, however, is quite brief, almost as though it were a memory. The bittersweet music from the beginning then returns to bring this beautiful work to its final bars, marked morendo (dying away).

Camille Saint-Saëns

(Born in Paris in 1835; died in Algiers, Algeria, in 1921)

Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for violin and orchestra, Op. 28

The prolific Camille Saint-Saëns might well be considered the professor emeritus of French music. Over the eight and a half decades, he composed more than 300 works in a vast range of genres; performed as a piano and organ soloist in hundreds of concerts; taught countless pupils; championed new composers even as he helped revive the works of Bach and Handel (composers he adored); and was known in every corner of the music world. The French composer Hector Berlioz quipped famously of his younger genius compatriot, “Il sait tout, mais il manque d’inexpérience” (“He knows everything but lacks inexperience”). Music poured forth from the young Saint-Saëns almost from the beginning. He learned the piano at age two and a half, was composing at three, and became a concert pianist at the age of ten. As he later said of himself, he produced music as naturally as an apple tree produces fruit.

In his late twenties, Saint-Saëns’s popular status brought him into the circles of the finest musicians of his era. One of them was one of the world’s greatest violinists, the Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908), for whom everyone seemed to be writing compositions. Saint-Saëns followed suit, penning his Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso specifically for the young Spanish virtuoso in 1863. Sarasate premiered the work in Paris that same year. It instantly became a favorite for both violinists and audiences, and its popularity has never diminished. And no wonder: this virtuosic showpiece offers many exquisite musical fruits.

The Introduction, marked Andante malinconico (not fast, in a melancholy manner), is one of Saint-Saëns’s most beautiful melodies: lyrically melancholic, it is imbued with an inner glow, made even more alluring by the darkly hued harmonies from the orchestra. But its somberness seems agitated: quickly there are wild little flourishes from the violin soloist as though the violin wants to break free. Then, within a minute and a half, the spell is broken and the spirit of the music changes completely as the piece moves into the wonderfully sultry beginning of the Rondo Capriccioso section.

Here, deliberate chords are repeated at a pace that evokes a Spanish flamenco dancer approaching his partner, fire in his eyes, steady and lusty. The violin then joins in with an equally lusty theme that is Roma-like in character, and indeed capriccioso (capricious, temperamental): it dances between coyness in flirty, fluttery ornamentation in the higher register and temperamental boldness with gritty turns in the lower register. This is the main theme of the Rondo (a structure in which a main theme returns periodically between other themes). Then a second theme is introduced, marked con morbidezza (softly and tenderly, smoothly), a melody of remarkable poetic beauty.

These two themes will return several times but along the way, Saint-Saëns adds increasingly delightful new and brief musical moments — both lyrically and in imaginative variation-like treatments in the orchestral accompaniment. There truly is never a moment in this work that does not dazzle. Most marvelous are the progressively virtuosic passages for the soloist, culminating in a brief cadenza of demanding triple-stops (playing three notes simultaneously). The ending section then sprints off, with sparks flying off the violinist’s strings, to the work’s final, exciting bars.

Ludwig van Beethoven

(Born in Bonn, Germany, in 1770; died in Vienna, Austria, in 1827)

Symphony No. 4 in B Major, Op. 60

Adagio – Allegro vivace
Adagio
Allegro vivace
Allegro ma non troppo

In 1806, Beethoven was commissioned to write a new symphony for Count Franz von Oppersdorff, a Prussian arts patron who was very much enamored with Beethoven’s bright and mischievous Second Symphony (1802). Beethoven obliged the count’s preferences with his Fourth Symphony, his most good-humored and joyful symphony. Though less fiery than its predecessor, the Third (the Eroica), the Fourth is equally a masterpiece and significant in Beethoven’s composing growth as he entered his middle, or “heroic,” period of composition. The techniques that Beethoven experimented with here, particularly with forward motion, became inspirational both for him and for future composers.

The first movement begins with an introduction steeped in timelessness. Over a static, sustained chord, the winds open with a passage of sinking intervals. This passage glows with an inner strength as it meanders through sound and time, gravitating toward a delicious surprise: the orchestra essentially cranks up the symphony’s motor with several upward “rips” in the strings to begin the Allegro vivace (fast and lively), the main section of the movement. It’s a wonderful bit of humor, and when the motor starts moving, there’s hardly any stopping it but for one brief and delightfully unexpected moment: As the movement builds up momentum, a sudden pause occurs — all sound stops, save for a tremolo (a roll) on the timpani — sounding as though all the energy had escaped out of hand and was slung away, like the silent speed of a catapulted object. Then the motor is revved up again and it reels towards the ending bars, when it again seems to just quit working.

The second movement displays both motion and beauty. For motion, Beethoven turns again, mainly, to what is called the “timpani motive” (although it’s heard first immediately in the strings) to tap out a subtly motoric motive — one to which all the instruments contribute — underneath a serenely floating theme. That rhythmic motive has an easy, happy pace and serves as a kind of gentle and steady heartbeat. The themes above it are beautiful, with variations and wanderings that are as fresh and simple as any music Beethoven ever wrote. Berlioz was mesmerized by this movement, saying:

“[It] seems to have been breathed by the archangel Michael … standing on the threshold of the empyrean.”

The third movement scherzo is a fun romp full of devilish energy. In the first part, Beethoven creates a kind of motion dissonance by fitting two-beat phrases into three-beat measures (prompting Berlioz to comment whimsically that the “cross-rhythms have in themselves real charm, though it is difficult to explain why”). Then a countermelody appears in which the bassoon — an integral instrument in this symphony — recalls the winds’ timeless, sinking interval from the introduction to the first movement but humorously recasts it so the listener feels at first as though the downward intervals will continue forever.

To end such symphony of movement and gracious fun, Beethoven chooses the grandest of all motion makers — perpetual motion — launched by wonderfully whisking sixteenth notes that immediately begin this movement. From there, it’s a whirlwind of motion, joy, and excited tidings until the end.