PROGRAM NOTES

Beethoven had begun a symphony in C Major in 1795 and let the project drop. He returned to it five years later and decided the abandoned movement's first theme ought to appear as the new symhony's last movement. Symphony No. 1 was premiered on April 2, 18 00, in the Viennese Hofburgtheater; therefore it was probably composed during the previous months. In keeping with the longer concerts in the 19th century than in the 20th, the program included a piano concerto, a Mozart symphony, Beethoven's own popular Septet, and an aria and duet from Haydn's The Creation. In addition, Beethoven improvised at the piano.

Since the first two symphonies are Classical, their four movements, regular in form, can serve as a model for an 18th-century symphony. Their third movements, labeled Minuets, turn into scherzos, a kind of hyped-up minuet, from the Second Symphony on. The memorable Minuet in the First Symphony is really a scherzo in all but name. Beethoven attempted to please the audience with this symphony, less radical than his contemporary sonatas and quartets.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 1 in C Major
The slow introduction to the first movement of the First Symphony, however, shows Beethoven's originality, even in a standard form. Rather than beginning in the tonic key, C major, in the opening bars Beethoven converges upon it from opposite sides: First the subdominant (F) is briefly established, then the dominant (G). We do not hear a cadence in C major until the first chord of the Allegro, 13 bars after the opening. The short introduction to the last movement, the finale, incorporates another Haydnesque gesture. Donald Francis Tovey described its theme being introduced as similar to "letting the cat out of the bag."

Beethoven: Symphony No. 2 in D Major
The Second Symphony, begun in 1800 and finished in 1802, was premiered on April 5, 18 03, at the Theater an der Wien and published a year later in piano score. Beethoven revised his symphonies, even after the first performance, right up until the time of their publication. The work is begun by a much longer Adagio introduction than the First symphony's, one that announces its larger overall scale. To help balance this, the first movement has a long coda, which, unusually, includes new development of the principal material. Beethoven learned this trick from the music of his teacher, Joseph Haydn, who frequently left the listener guessing as to where he was in the formal scheme. Such a long coda with developmental properties blurs the distinction between the usual Classical sonata-form sections: slow introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. The slow movement's tempo marking, Larghetto, is new in Beethoven's instrumental music. (He used it again for the slow movement of the Violin Concerto.) It begins quietly and nostalgically; Berlioz described it as "a delineation of innocent happiness hardly clouded by a few melancholy accents."

The manic finale movement suggests both a sonata form and a rondo (because of extra iterations of the first theme, producing ABACABA), and its first theme occurs in two unexpected places: at the end of the exposition and in the coda. The coda itself is as long as the development section. (In sonata form the first theme usually appears at the beginning of the exposition, expanded in the development, and lastly at the beginning of the recapitulation. Normally, it does not appear at all in the coda, unless one views this coda as the last statement-A-of a rondo theme.) Critics found the work bizarre, possibly because of the breaks in both the texture and continuity and its sudden stops. Lockwood wrote, "This symphony signaled that from now on in Beethoven's orchestral works power and lyricism in extreme forms were to be unleashed as never before, that the stark dramatization of musical ideas was to be fundamental to the discourse, and that contemporaries, ready or not, would have to reshape their expectations to keep up with him."

MOZART: Clarinet Concerto in A Major
Whereas high Classical symphonies are in four movements, concertos are typically in three. Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major, written in 1791, dates from October during his last, and furiously productive, year. It was written for clarinetist Anton Stadler. He had finished the Concerto by October 7, having borrowed 199 measures from his unfinished basset horn concerto, K. 621b, written over a year earlier. Although we think of Mozart as borrowing money, after his death two debts to him were left outstanding: One loan of 500 florins was to Stadler.

Charles Rosen notes that the Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, "is very close in its lyricism and even the shape of its themes and their harmonic content to the A major Piano Concertos, K. 414 and K. 488. The last Piano Concerto, K. 595 in B-flat major, written six months before, also has the same freely lyrical quality, here gradually permeated by an expressive, even painful chromaticism that dominates everything by the beginning of the development section. Both concertos give the sensation of an inexhaustible and continuous melodic line, somehow both seamless and yet clearly articulated. The structure, nevertheless, is neither a loose succession of melodies nor an unvaried flow. This balance between clarity of shape and continuity makes the first movement of the clarinet concerto seem like an endless song-not a spinning out of one idea, but a series of melodies that flow one into the other without a break."

-Andrea Olmstead
Ms. Olmstead has been the Society's Christopher Hogwood Research Fellow since 2005. The author of three books on Roger Sessions and of Juilliard: A History, she has published numerous articles and CD liner notes, produced recordings, and taught Music History for 32 years.

ERIC HOEPRICH ON THE CLARINET CONCERTO

By far the most important recent discovery regarding the Mozart Clarinet Concerto is Pamela Poulin's unearthing of several concert programs in Riga. These document performances given in 1794 by Anton Stadler, one of which includes K. 622. Somewhat astonishingly, Anton Stadler's unique "basset clarinet" is actually illustrated in the programs, which can be seen here. Several descriptions of the instrument have come down to us, but in light of what the engraving in the Riga program shows, they are misleading. Stadler's instrument clearly resembles the eighteenth-century clarinette d'amour, with its curved neck and bulbous bell. Backing up a few years, we first encounter Stadler's new instrument, together with a reference to the instrument maker Theodor Lotz, in an advertisement for a concert on February 20, 1788.

"Herr Stadler the elder, in the service of his majesty the Kaiser, will play a concerto on the Baß-Klarinet and a variation on the Baß-Klarinet, an instrument of new invention and manufacture of the court instrument maker Theodor Loz [sic]; this instrument has two more tones than the normal clarinet."