George Frideric Handel Royal Fireworks Music, HWV 351, arr. Hamilton Harty
The treaty of Aachen in 1748 put an end to the War of the Austrian Succession, a war nobody wanted. George Frideric Handel, who enjoyed the favor of the British royal court during the many years in which he influenced the national and international musical scene from his home base in London, was commissioned to compose music to celebrate the occasion. On April 25, 1749, a Thanksgiving service was held at the Chapel Royal, for which Handel produced the short anthem "How Beautiful Are the Feet," and two days later the public was invited to a grand celebration in Green Park, where fireworks of unsurpassed magnificence had been promised. For that occasion, Handel composed the Royal Fireworks Music, his last solely instrumental work.
The fireworks were a bust – it rained and the launch platform caught fire – but the music wasn’t. King George II had commanded Handel to write “martial music” for winds and timpani; the Duke of Montague, Master General of the Ordnance added that he “hoped there would be no fidles [sic].” While Handel had no choice about initially accepting the royal command, he felt that the piece would profit from the addition of strings. The performances during the celebrations followed the royal dictum – the original score called for 24 oboes, 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 sets of timpani, 12 bassoons, a few serpents and a few contrabassoons – but the composer soon thereafter added the missing strings.
As befits music for a gala, there were 12,000 in attendance at the premiere. The Overture is not in the complex French form, so popular at the time, but rather in Handel’s grandest, but simpler and ear-catching style. Following this slow and stately introduction, Handel employs in the Allegro a series of different instrument groupings – trumpets, oboes and then horns – to create contrasting sonorities that gradually increase in complexity to a crowd-pleasing crescendo.
Considering the unwieldy original orchestration, everyone and his brother, including Handel himself, subsequently made arrangements of the work. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, baroque orchestration was considered quaint, and a number of grander and noisier arrangements for modern orchestra appeared. In the early 1920s, Irish conductor and composer Hamilton Harty (1879-1941), newly appointed conductor of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra, transcribed and rearranged sections of the Water Music, as well as the Royal Fireworks Music for modern orchestra. He gave the suites enriched sonorities and added harmonic color to the original baroque orchestration. In the Royal Fireworks Music Harty omitted the fourth movement, the Allegro “La Réjouissance” (The Rejoicing).
In this familiar piece, the most interesting feature is Harty’s orchestration. He manages to create more noise with a conventional modern orchestra than Handel with his 24 oboes. Note particularly the accompaniment to the Alla Siciliana, where an indoors venue allowed Harty to give a prominent role to the strings.
1. Overture: This is a typical overture for a dance suite: a stately opening followed by an Allegro.
2. Alla Siciliana: In a stroke of genius, Harty creates an accompaniment for pizzicato basses – unheard of in Handel’s time.
3. Bourée: This lightly orchestrated movement featuring the woodwinds balances the orchestration of the Siciliano.
4. Minuet: Only the meter remains of what anyone would consider a minuet. This was the real fireworks music, and both Handel and Harty provide appropriate trumpets and drums.
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93
Premiered in Vienna at an all-Beethoven Musikalische Akademie (self-promoting concert) in February 1814, the Eighth Symphony suffered from comparison with the Seventh, which was very popular at the time and had preceded it on the program. Beethoven had a giant orchestra for the occasion: “At my last concert in the Large Redoutensaal there were 18 first violins, 18 second violins, 12 cellos, 7 double basses, 2 double bassoons” he noted in his diary.
After the rhythmic spree of the Seventh, the new symphony sounded tame and more traditional – not what the audience expected from Beethoven. Unfortunately, this unfavorable comparison is still made today, although Beethoven insisted that the Eighth was the better of the two. The reviewer of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitschrift was perceptive in his appraisal of the symphony and its lukewarm reception: “This reviewer is of the opinion that the reason does not lie by any means in weaker or less artistic workmanship...but partly in the faulty judgment that permitted the symphony to follow the one in A Major, partly in the surfeit of beauty and excellence...if this symphony were performed alone, we have no doubt of its success.”
Beethoven began working on the Symphony in the summer of 1812, immediately after finishing the Seventh, while he was taking the cure at the baths of Teplitz and Carlsbad in Bohemia. He was in a bitter mood at the time: nothing could be done at this point in his life to improve his hearing and he suffered unremitting digestive difficulties, which may have been caused by ulcers. Certainly, his personal life was in disarray; he was frustrated in love, and was involved in bitter family squabbles. Suicide and death were never far from his mind, as the following letter dated May 2, 1810 to his friend Dr. Franz Wegeler indicates: “A year or two ago my more quiet, restful life came to a halt, and I was dragged by force into worldly affairs…But who could be immune from the effect of the external storms? Yet I should be happy…had not the demon pitched his camp in my ears. Had I not read somewhere that men must not part voluntarily from this life as long as they are capable of doing a single good deed, I should have ceased to exist long ago, and this by my own hand. Oh, life is so lovely, but for me it is poisoned forever…” But none of this misery is reflected in the Symphony.
The Eighth Symphony’s more traditional structure harks back to the composer’s early symphonies in which he paid tribute to the spirit of his Viennese predecessors, especially Haydn. The orchestration and development sections, however, belong to the mature Beethoven. And while the Seventh is powerful and dramatic, the Eighth is good-natured, cheery and humorous – as if the composer needed a rest from the tension of the earlier symphony. The first movement gets right down to business with no slow introduction. Its second theme follows right on the heels of the first with a minimal bridge passage. The contrast comes in the development as Beethoven shows a dark side of his two optmtimistic themes.
Of special interest has always been the second movement, which by tradition would normally be slow but which Beethoven marks an Allegretto scherzando (Playful allegretto). Some musical historians claim that its rigid ostinato repeated chord is a tribute to the inventor of the metronome, Beethoven’s sometime friend and rival Johannes Nepomuk Mälzel. The movement ends with an unexpected abruptness.
Since one scherzo is enough, Beethoven wrote an old-fashioned Minuet as the third movement, with an unusual duet between the horns and solo clarinet in the Trio. & The symphony ends with a Finale full of Haydnesque humor and surprises, the chattering opening becoming a rhythmic motto for the movement – something like the four opening notes of the Fifth Symphony. The highlight is a long coda bursting with energy and vitality. The prolonged and repeated final cadence, a counterweight to the sudden ending of the Scherzo, seems almost a parody of symphonic grandiosity.
Antonin Dvorák
1841-1904
Antonin Dvorák
Symphony No. 9 in e Minor, Op. 95,
Antonín Dvorák’s sojourn in the United States from 1892 to 1895 came about through the efforts of Mrs. Jeanette B. Thurber. A dedicated and idealistic proponent of an American national musical style, she underwrote and administered the first American music conservatory, the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Because of Dvorák’s popularity throughout Europe, he was Thurber’s first choice for a director. He, in turn, was probably lured to the big city so far from home by both a large salary and convictions regarding musical nationalism that paralleled Mrs. Thurber’s own.
Thirty years before his arrival in New York Dvorák had read Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha in a Czech translation and was eager to learn more about the Native American and African American music, which he believed should be the basis of the American style of composition. He also shared with Mrs. Thurber the conviction that the National Conservatory should admit Negro students. One of them, Henry Burleigh, who became an important African American composer in his own right, is credited with exposing his teacher to African American spirituals.
While his knowledge of authentic Native American music is questionable – his exposure came through samples transcribed for him by American friends and through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show – he became familiar with Negro spirituals through one of his students, as well as indirectly via the songs of Stephen Foster. He incorporated both of these styles into the Symphony No. 9, composed while he was in New York.
Just as Dvorák never quoted Bohemian folk music directly in his own nationalistic music, he did not use American themes in their entirety. Rather, he incorporated characteristic motives into his own unsurpassed gift for melody. Nevertheless, any listener with half an ear can discern fragments of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” in the second theme of the first movement, as well as “Massa Dear” (also known as “Goin’ Home”) in the famous English horn solo in the second movement. We can deduce the importance of these musical motives from the fact that they appear as reminiscences in more than one movement, especially in the finale. The symphony, however, is hardly an American pastiche; the second motive in the largo movement is a phrase of wrenching musical longing that many listeners interpret as the composer’s nostalgia for his native Bohemia. Other melodies, such as the principal theme of the first movement, seem to have no particular origin beyond the composer's inspiration.
It is curious that Dvorák seemed to make no distinction between the folk music of American slaves and American Indians. While the second movement uses a theme from African America spirituals, the composer also claimed that it had been inspired by Longfellow’s epic, perhaps by Minnehaha’s forest funeral. The third movement as well, in its rhythmic thumping, its use of the pentatonic scale and the orchestration dominated by winds and percussion is meant to portray an Indian ceremonial dance described in Longfellow’s poem. Incidentally, Dvorák had also intended to compose an opera on Hiawatha, which never even approached completion. But his symphonic use of what he believed to be an authentic Native American musical idiom may have represented his initial ideas for the opera.
One of the most important features of the Symphony is its thematic coherence. Whatever the origin of the melodies, they all have a modular characteristic in that they can be mixed and matched in many different ways. In the finale Dvorák brings nearly all of the Symphony's themes together, sometimes as one long combined melody, sometimes in contrapuntal relationship to each other.
