Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony

In September 1790, Franz Joseph Haydn’s longtime patron, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, passed into eternity. After 28 years as the Prince’s faithful musical servant, Haydn’s life was about to change.

Nikolaus’s heir, Anton, did not share his father’s interest in music; he immediately dissolved the house orchestra and, while nominally retaining Haydn, left the composer to do whatever he wished. Haydn soon departed the Esterházy palace to explore Vienna.

There, Haydn — whose music was already well-known across much of Europe — was flooded with offers, yet the invitation that most intrigued him came in the form of a stranger who appeared at his apartment with the simple words, “My name is [Johann Peter] Salomon. I have come from London to fetch you; we shall conclude our accord tomorrow.”

That agreement, quickly worked out by Salomon — a violinist, impresario, and conductor with his own orchestra — stipulated that Haydn was to receive a fee of 1,200 British pounds sterling to write a new opera, six new symphonies, and various others compositions to be performed in 20 concerts, and one benefit concert. Salomon was also to receive the music’s copyright.

Haydn knew that his greatest strengths lay in instrumental music and London, having excellently trained orchestras and eager audiences, was compelling. In addition, London offered him the adventure of a bustling city wherein he could exercise his newfound freedom. And, of course, the money to be earned was immense.

Haydn’s first stay in London lasted from January 1791 through June 1792, and by all accounts it was a stimulating and successful experience. After the first concert on March 11, 1791, an article in the Morning Chronicle concluded: “We cannot suppress our very anxious hope that the first musical genius of his age may be induced by our liberal welcome to take up his residence in England.” That July, Haydn was even invited to Oxford, where he received an honorary doctorate of music.

After returning to Vienna for a time in July 1792, Haydn once again set foot in London for a second long stay on February 4, 1794. Audiences were again captivated and appreciative, and it was under the auspices of Salomon’s new “Opera Concerts” series that Haydn premiered a new Symphony in D major — soon nicknamed the “London” Symphony and later designated as No. 104 — on May 4, 1795. Not only was this his last symphony for London, it was to be his final statement in a genre that he had played a major role in developing.

Symphony No. 104 commences with an Adagio introduction in D minor with a sighing motive that evokes the soundworld of Mozart’s Requiem (also in the key of D minor). A brief pause separates the Adagio from the main Allegro section, with its first theme in D major. Following a full-orchestra tutti transition, the Allegro theme is stated in the dominant key of A major. A closing section leads to the movement’s development, built largely on the sigh motive and the ascending arpeggio figure from the closing section. The first theme returns during the recapitulation.

The second movement, an Andante in G major, is made of a quasi-rondo “theme and variations” form boasting a dramatic development in G minor. The wit of the third movement Menuet is most notable in the use of unexpected pauses.

The folklike melody that dominates the Finale, marked “Spiritoso,” was until recently thought to have been based on a London street vendor’s cry. More recently, it has come to be recognized as “Oj Jelena,” a Croatian ballad. This last movement is not a traditional rondo, but is cast in a fuller sonata form, with the recapitulation introducing surprises almost until the final chord.

— Steven Lacoste

Steven Lacoste is a lecturer in music theory at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

The Oscar-winning score for The Godfather Part II and the love theme for Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet may have brought him his widest recognition, but Nino Rota was a fully rounded musician with rich and varied talents. Across his lifetime, he was a gifted and prolific composer for the opera house, concert hall, theater, and cinema. He was also a skilled pianist and conductor, a dedicated teacher, and director of one of Italy’s leading conservatories.

Rota was born into an artistic family in Milan and began studying music as a child with his mother, the daughter of concert pianist Giovanni Rinaldi. Nino was composing by age 8, and by 12 he had completed an oratorio titled L’infanzia di San Giovanni Battista (The Childhood of St. John the Baptist), the performance of which established him as a child prodigy. He was admitted to the Milan Conservatory later that year to study privately with the school’s director, Ildebrando Pizzetti.

In 1926, Rota entered the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome as a student of Alfredo Casella. At the time of his graduation in 1930, Arturo Toscanini, recently appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic, helped arrange a scholarship for Rota to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with composer Rosario Scalero and conductor Fritz Reiner.

Rota profited greatly during his two years in America, not just from the formal curriculum at Curtis but also from his newly forged friendships with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and other leading American musicians, as well as from his immersion in this country’s popular music and, perhaps most influentially, his first experience with talking pictures.

The year after returning to Italy in 1932, Rota composed his first movie score (Trena Popolare, or “People’s Train”). This marked the start of a productive film career, which would, by the time of his death in 1979, encompass over 150 film scores. Though he enjoyed an enduring and productive collaborative partnership with director Federico Fellini, Rota perhaps enjoyed his greatest success with Francis Ford Coppola in the Godfather movies. His score for Part I was nominated for an Academy Award, but had to be withdrawn because Rota had borrowed from his score from the 1958 film Fortunella; Part II later won the Oscar for him in 1975. Despite the great diversity of his work, Rota’s creative philosophy was simple: “I’d do everything I could to give everyone a moment of happiness. That’s what’s at the heart of my music.”

Rota composed his Trombone Concerto in 1966 for Bruno Ferrari, principal trombone of the La Scala Orchestra and professor at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan. Ferrari premiered it in May 1969 in the Great Hall of the Conservatory with the Orchestra dei Pomeriggi Musicali di Milano, the city’s leading chamber orchestra, which specializes in contemporary music.

The concerto’s opening movement follows a compact sonata form that takes an angular, fanfare-like strain as its main theme and a rising line in tight, dotted rhythms as its subsidiary subject. The angular motive is treated in a brief development section before the earlier materials are recapitulated and the movement comes to an energetic close.

The second-movement Lento is arranged in three broad structural paragraphs, with somber music moving at an almost funereal tread in its outer sections and a more lyrical episode led by the soloist at its center.

The third-movement finale is an ingeniously modified sonata form. The trombone announces both the spirited, scale-based main theme and the melodious second subject. The development section is based on not just the finale’s scalar main theme but also on variants of the angular fanfare motive from the first movement. The ensuing recapitulation begins, as expected, with the return of the main theme, but the music abruptly slows and changes mood as the arching second subject is given a dreamlike setting strewn with the soloist’s pearly arpeggios. The concerto closes with a rousing coda derived from the finale’s main theme.

— Richard E. Rodda

Richard E. Rodda has written program notes for orchestras and chamber series across the country and internationally. He previously taught at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music and is the recipient of a 2010 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. 

With his third and final symphony, Camille Saint-Saëns set out to write a masterpiece. At 51, he was — and had long been — one of the most famous musicians in France, equally successful as a composer, conductor, pianist, and organist, having served in this capacity for many years at the Madeleine, one of the landmark churches in Paris. His career started with the unqualified endorsement of such luminaries as Berlioz, Liszt, and Gounod, and he had come to be considered a luminary himself.

At the same time, he had reason to feel that some of his best efforts in the field of composition were not sufficiently appreciated. He had won great acclaim for his concertos and other virtuosic solo pieces. However, his symphonic poems were met with little enthusiasm in Paris, and his opera Samson and Delilah premiered, thanks only to Liszt’s unflagging support, in Weimar. At home, Saint-Saëns found himself locked in a rivalry with César Franck, his senior by 13 years, who wrote some of the best French Romantic instrumental music. Saint-Saëns was antagonized by Franck’s students and was increasingly isolated in the Société nationale de musique (which he had founded), a situation that, soon after the premiere of the Third Symphony, led to his resignation as the society’s president.

Saint-Saëns wanted to make a major statement, and the invitation of the London Philharmonic Society to write a symphony provided just the incentive he needed. In fact, Saint-Saëns had already sketched the work, and before long, he reported that the project was “well under way.” He played parts of his work-in-progress for Liszt in 1885, when the older man passed through Paris for the last time in his life. Saint-Saëns conducted the premiere of his completed symphony in London on May 19, 1886, to a standing ovation. With this concert, Saint-Saëns, who had long been well-known in England, definitively established his popularity there. The symphony proved to be a success in France, as well.

The composer himself wrote the first program note about his symphony, offering a detailed outline of the themes, referring to himself in the third person throughout:

This symphony is divided into two parts, in the manner of Saint-Saëns’s Fourth Piano Concerto and his Sonata for Piano and Violin. ... It nonetheless includes practically the traditional four movements. The first, checked in development, serves as an introduction to the Adagio. In the same manner, the scherzo is connected with the finale. The composer has thus endeavored to avoid in a certain measure the interminable repetitions that are now more and more disappearing from instrumental music.

The composer thinks that the time has come for the symphony to benefit [from] the progress of modern instrumentation.

Some of the innovations in orchestral writing in Saint-Saëns’s symphony clearly came from the symphonic poems of Liszt, who had used the organ in his Hunnenschlacht (Battle of the Huns). Saint-Saëns’s method of motivic transformation also follows Lisztian models to some extent. The four movements are telescoped into two parts, with the opening Allegro and the slow movement constituting the first part, and the scherzo and finale the second. Moreover, motivic relationships permeate all of the movements so that the entire work is rich in internal connections.

All four movements share a rising four-note motive, which is first heard in the oboe. Further versions are played by the trombones and soon afterward by the violins. A second, lyrical idea completes the opening Allegro’s melodic material.

We first hear the organ, for which the symphony is nicknamed, in the Poco adagio, in the first of many extended solos. Its entrance also transforms the initial motive as both as a hymnlike melody and as a fairly conspicuous accompaniment figure.

In the Allegro moderato that opens the symphony’s second half, we hear new variants of our motive, followed by the Trio section, distinguished by fast piano scales as a special orchestral color. A short contrapuntal section based on the motive serves as a transition to the finale, which begins with the lush sounds of the organ and the piano. The basic idea builds into a solemn chorale and then into a fugue reminiscent of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony. The work ends with a glorious climax, magnificent in its effect.

Saint-Saëns was well aware of the symphony’s significance as a supreme achievement in his career. He never attempted to write another symphony; instead, he returned to writing operas, concertos, and chamber music. He wrote about the “Organ” Symphony in later years: “I have given all that I had to give. What I have done I shall never do again.”

— 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.