An Evening with Itzhak Perlman

We don’t know exactly when or why Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his two romances for solo violin and orchestra, although it is fairly clear that they were published (and, thus, numbered) in reverse order of composition.

The two romances were, in part, a natural expansion of the chamber music for violin and piano Beethoven had been writing throughout the late 1790s. While he was certainly a great pianist, he had also studied violin as a youth and understood the instrument with a practitioner’s insights.

The two romances are often looked at as early trial runs toward creating a full violin concerto (which would eventually appear in 1806). Each of the two — one in G major and the other in F major — is a compact vessel for melody, invention, and pleasingly Classical contours. The music may not yet be the revolutionary Beethoven, who soon found his true voice in the Third Symphony of 1803, but the melodic flow still heralds the emotional expression of the Romantic era.

The Romance in G major offers ample opportunity for showcasing the soloist’s skills and artistry and reflects Beethoven’s great abilities in synthesizing material across a work. From a quiet, reflective opening, it is cast in a rondo variation form (A–B–A–C–A–Coda), with two contrasting sections (B and C) coming between the returning variations of the symmetrical A section.

— adapted from a program note by Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.

The Romance in F major — the longer and more complex of Beethoven’s two romances for solo violin and orchestra — manifests a Romantic sensibility even more strongly than does its G-major companion. It is also cast as a rondo, with the beguiling main theme alternating with episodes in which the minor mode, always a harbinger of “stormy” moods, comes to the fore. These darker, Romantic moments are balanced by rapid virtuosic passages. The final return of the rondo theme closes the work on a dreamy note.

— adapted from a program note by Eric Sellen

Eric Sellen is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Editor Emeritus. He previously was Program Book Editor for 28 seasons.

Across his lifetime, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nearly a dozen overtures, some as concert works, several for his only opera (Fidelio), and the rest attached to incidental music for dramatic stage works. All of them are serious in subject matter. Most of them are related to Beethoven’s lifelong faith in humanity, encompassing its need to both “fight for Good” and for heroes to lead us forward by example or sacrifice.

Between 1809 and 1810, Beethoven created his overture and incidental music to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play Egmont (1788), at the invitation of the German National Theater in Vienna. (Beethoven’s own First Symphony premiered at this same theater in 1800.) The play tells the story of a 16th-century Dutch hero, Lamoral, Count of Egmont, who rallied the populace to fight against Spanish subjugation of the Netherlands. Beethoven readily agreed to write incidental music for the play’s revival, given a plot so well attuned to his own political beliefs in freedom and justice.

The overture, often played by itself in the concert hall, is quintessentially Beethoven. Grand chords begin a slow, ominous introduction. The chords are repeated along with slow melodic themes before a sudden outburst of energy carries us rapidly into eager anticipation. The musical fight continues in strong jabs and tuneful stirrings, building and developing not unlike one of Beethoven’s great symphonic movements. Eventually, a climactic and heroic call issues from the brass, carrying the overture to a shining, triumphant finish.

— Eric Sellen

Eric Sellen is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Editor Emeritus. He previously was Program Book Editor for 28 seasons.

The year 1812 was a momentous time for Ludwig van Beethoven, just as it was for Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet things turned out badly for both of them. Napoleon’s foolhardy invasion of Russia, begun that year, led inevitably to his defeat at Waterloo three years later, and to exile away from the excitement and commanding commotion of human (and French national) society. Beethoven’s own inner exile was also coming to a new finality in 1812, as he had to face the social difficulties arising from his deafness. It was clear now that his future would be quite isolated from the everyday world of others.

1812 is also the year of Beethoven’s famous letter to the “Immortal Beloved,” likely Antonie Brentano, an aristocratic Viennese woman married to a Frankfurt businessman. The letter is ambiguous in many ways, but it suggests a mutual passion and a profound sense of resignation to the impossibility of a future together.

In any event, the great stream of music that had been flowing abundantly since the “Heiligenstadt” crisis 10 years before — the “middle-period” masterpieces that stemmed from his first coming to terms with his growing deafness — now began to dry up. The rest of the decade is marked by recurrent bouts of depression and the production of very little music.

Out of these troubles were ultimately born the transcendent works of his final years — the last piano sonatas, the late string quartets, and the Ninth Symphony. Although Beethoven completed his Seventh and Eighth symphonies before the curtain of silence fell completely, he made little progress with the Ninth, conceived at that time as part of a three-symphony group. The Seventh was, in fact, mostly in place before the drama of 1812 unfolded.

The Seventh has always been regarded as one of the mightiest of the nine, less forceful perhaps than the Fifth, less ambitious than the Ninth, smaller than the Third, but broader in range and spirit than any other. The key-color of A major is unusual in Beethoven’s orchestral music, depending partly on the exultant sound of horns in A major, one of that instrument’s highest registers. The sense of a “divine dance,” as Richard Wagner called the Seventh, is very strong in both first and last movements as well as in the scherzo, driven by powerful rhythmic energy and heavy instrumentation. Meanwhile, the Allegretto, though full of charm, has a sense of inexorable fatality.

The slow introduction to the first movement is a huge free-standing structure of its own, only slowly giving way to the persistent Es that herald the start of the main Allegro section and its relentless dancing rhythm. Two striking moments in this great movement should have our attention. First, in the recapitulation, the texture suddenly lightens to allow the oboe to take the melody in a thinner, fresher texture, like a brief clearing of persistent clouds. And, at the end, the lower strings set up a bizarre, grumbling ostinato that seems to be stuck in a groove until the final cadences come to the rescue. This is the passage that elicited Carl Maria von Weber’s famous remark that Beethoven had shown himself “fit for the madhouse.”

So popular was the Allegretto second movement in the 19th century that it was often played as a concert piece on its own and even, on occasion, substituted for the slow movements of other symphonies. Yet, of the entire symphony, this is the movement that most strongly looks forward to the Romantic sensibilities of Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Mendelssohn, and others — all of whom seem to have derived creative benefits directly from it. Schubert must have been bewitched by its hypnotic rhythm, which he often adopted. The opening A-minor passage, gradually growing in sound like an approaching procession, leads, somewhat surprisingly, to a glowing section in major, scored for winds over a still-pulsating string accompaniment. Each section is heard once more before the close, a characteristic parting passage with melodic fragments thrown from one instrument to another. Almost no other movement in all Beethoven leaves such haunting memories as this.

The scherzo third movement is a persistent alternation of a loud and vivacious triple-meter dance, with a calmer, static trio melody that weaves its way over low horns and basses. Thus, one part of the movement takes wing, the other is rooted to the ground.

The old tradition that symphonic finales should be light and breezy is firmly buried by the Seventh’s fourth movement, the heaviest blockbuster in the symphonic repertory to date. Constant off-beat hammer blows and a shortage of quiet music puts Beethoven in the role of a prankish ringmaster. Elsewhere, Beethoven’s humor takes the form of subtle subversions of the audience’s expectations. But here the trick is not subtle at all. We are mesmerized, amazed, and dumbfounded, even as we see exactly how it’s done.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.