Symphony Preview: The big D

"The Germans," observed the great violinist Joseph Joachim, "have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising, is Beethoven's." This weekend (Saturday and Sunday, January 24 and 26) James Ehnes joins the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Stéphane Denève for the Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) along with another uncompromising essay in D major, the Symphony No. 1 by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911).

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

The following comments are adapted from my own writing on both works over the last fifteen years.

Like many of the great 19th century composers, Beethoven wrote only one concerto for the violin, but it’s prime stuff. He was, unfortunately, so tardy in completing it that the soloist at the work's 1806 premiere, Franz Clement (for whom Beethoven had written the piece) had no time to rehearse and might have even been obliged sight read the thorny solo part.

The premiere took place on December 23, 1806, at the Theater an der Wien as part of what Brockway and Weinstock (in the 1967 edition of  "Men of Music") call, with classic understatement, "a singular program":

[The concerto's] first movement was a feature of the opening half of the entertainment, and the second and third movement were given during the second half. Intervening was, among other compositions, a sonata by Franz Clement, played on one string of a violin held upside down.

"Beethoven Letronne" by Blasius Höfel Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Common

Needless to say, this sort of cheesy showbiz was not the way the composer intended his work to be performed. Not surprisingly, it was poorly received and didn't begin to enter the standard repertoire until nearly two decades after Beethoven’s death. And that was likely because it was championed by Joachim, who first played it in 1844 (at the age of 12) at a concert in London with Felix Mendelssohn at the podium. Joachim also wrote cadenzas for the work that are still frequently performed.

Now the concerto is recognized as a masterful blend of solo showpiece and symphonic statement, with a substantial first movement that accounts for over half of the concerto's 45-minute running time, a mostly serene second, and a cheerfully flashy third.

There is, interestingly, a rarely heard alternate version of the Violin Concerto. As Michael Rodman writes at Allmusic.com, Beethoven later made a transcription of the concerto for piano and orchestra. He added a long cadenza for the soloist that included the tympani and published it as Op. 61a

The revised concerto was first performed in Vienna in 1807, but despite the occasional high-profile recording like the one Peter Serkin did with Seiji Ozawa and the New Philharmonia in the late 1960s, it remains, as the reviewer of that release notes at Classics Today, "a curio."

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, first performed in 1889, closes the program in spectacular fashion. Clocking in at just under an hour, the First is probably the most economical of Mahler’s symphonies. It’s also, to paraphrase Anna Russell, a kind of Mahler vitamin pill, combining all the composer’s characteristic gestures in one compact work.

Mahler circa 1889 By E. Bieber - Kohut, Adolph (1900) Public Domain

It’s all here: the vivid invocation of the natural world, the heaven-storming despair, the macabre humor, the jocular impressions of village bands and sounds that would later be labeled “klezmer,” and  a wildly triumphant finale with a full complement of brass—including an expanded horn section—standing and gloriously blazing away. The subtitle “Titan” that’s often applied to this work may have originally referred to a novel of the same title by Jean-Paul Richter, but I think it’s simply an apt description of this music. Its impact is Titanic in every sense of the word.

As music depicting a journey from darkness to the light, the Mahler First feels very welcome at a time when geopolitical darkness seems to be closing in on us. Its hushed, expectant opening, its birdcalls, and what Chicago Symphony Orchestra program annotator Phillip Huscher calls "the gentle hum of the universe, tuned to A-natural and scattered over seven octaves"—all these things bring to mind a world emerging from darkness into light.

Speaking of that opening sequence: if it sounds familiar that’s because it's remarkably close to the little sequence that underscores the words "Space: the final frontier" in the theme of the classic TV show Star Trek. If you doubt me, take a few minutes to view CBC Radio 2 host Tom Allen's tongue-in-cheek video documentary on the lineage of that theme; it's fascinating stuff. 

And since both ST:TOS and Mahler’s First are fundamentally optimistic, that seems only right.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soloist James Ehnes in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, January 25 and 26, at the Stifel Theatre downtown.