Ludwig van Beethoven, a man of big ideas and unbridled ambition, was naturally drawn to the grandest platform available to composers of his era: the operatic stage. Despite his best efforts, he never gained traction as an opera composer, with his one major effort, Leonore, landing as a flop in 1805. It took him nine years to get it staged again, in a revised version titled Fidelio, and all that time he was desperate for other routes back to the theater.

One strategy he tried was taking it upon himself to write an overture for a play that had enjoyed a successful run five years earlier, Heinrich Joseph von Collin’s Coriolan. A patron arranged for a private staging of the play, prefaced by the new overture, but the ploy to show off Beethoven’s theatrical chops failed to spark any new opportunity, and the play itself faded back into obscurity, leaving the Coriolan Overture as a worthy addition to the concert repertoire.

Coriolan follows a Roman general who defects to the enemy camp and raises an army against Rome, reaching the gates of the city before his mother convinces him to stop. The choice of key for the overture, C minor, foreshadows the fateful Fifth Symphony that Beethoven composed the next year, and like that symphony, the Coriolan Overture generates its power from the most compact material. The signature motive here is a drawn-out C that bursts into a short, explosive chord. The unresolved harmonies, like hanging questions, suggest a battle waging within the protagonist’s own conscience. After a developmental sequence of brittle motives over a running bass line and a return of the opening material, a final whiff of the sweet counter-theme gives way to even more brutal chords and pauses. The last phrases bow out quietly, ending with barren plucks on the keynote.

Aaron Grad ©2024

In the prosperous Mendelssohn household, support for young Felix went beyond just nurturing his musical ambitions. The family socialized with the likes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the bookshelves were stacked with the world’s finest literature, including a new German translation of William Shakespeare’s plays published in 1825. At age 17, Mendelssohn used A Midsummer Night’s Dream as inspiration for a sensational concert overture, making reference in the music to the comedy’s magical elements and bawdy humor.

Mendelssohn returned to the same themes seventeen years later when he contributed incidental music for a new production of that Shakespeare comedy in Potsdam. The selections included the earlier Overture, as well as thirteen new sections using chorus, vocal soloists and orchestra. The movements for orchestra alone — the Scherzo, Intermezzo, Nocturne and Wedding March — originally served as entr’actes interspersed among the plays five acts.

The Nocturne was designed to follow Act III, which ends with the play’s four young lovers asleep in the woods. This night music begins with a dreamy melody for solo horn, and it builds to a more impassioned central section driven by throbbing strings. The bewitching Scherzo prefaced the first entrance of Puck, a mischievous fairy, at the start of the second act.

Aaron Grad ©2024

When Jean Sibelius was born in 1865, his homeland was controlled by the Russian Empire, and his family spoke Swedish, like many in that territory that had been ruled by Sweden since the Middle Ages. The Finland that now reveres Sibelius as a national hero did not exist as an independent nation yet, nor did it have a unified identity or language, until artists and intellectuals of Sibelius’ generation advanced the cause of political autonomy.

After spending 1889–90 in Berlin and then 1890–91 in Vienna, Sibelius returned home with a solid grounding in German musical techniques, along with the life-altering recognition that a truly Finnish musical language must be rooted in the Kalevala, an epic poem developed and passed down through the centuries by singers who memorized the thousands of verses. Versions had been transcribed and published earlier in the century, but Sibelius himself traveled to the Karelia region around the present border between Finland and Russia, the epicenter of the oral tradition, to absorb the folk material firsthand.

The Kalevala fueled Sibelius’ most successful works from the 1890s, including the orchestral suite of Four Legends from the Kalevala that began as sketches for an abandoned opera. The second section of that suite was The Swan of Tuonela, depicting a scene that Sibelius summarized in the score: “Tuonela, the realm of the dead, the underworld of Finnish mythology, is surrounded by a wide river with black water and raging current, but the Swan of Tuonela advances majestically and sings.”

This arrangement by The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s own Jonathan Posthuma preserves the iconic solos for English horn (the lower-pitched sibling of the oboe), representing the swan, along with the luminous textures that Sibelius created by subdividing the strings into 17 parts. Thinning out the brass section and assigning each string part to an individual player heightens the transparency of this atmospheric score that helped put Sibelius on the map as Finland’s musical conscience.

Aaron Grad ©2024

Working for the musically ravenous Prince Nikolaus Esterházy and spending much of each year at a remote country palace, Franz Joseph Haydn acknowledged, “I was forced to become original.” When the prince’s tastes shifted from instrumental music to theater in the 1770s, Haydn rose to the challenge by writing his own new operas and leading dozens of productions of existing works. The theatrical elements that Haydn embraced in those years seeped into his instrumental music, whether in wholly new symphonies that played up the heightened drama, or in works spliced together from existing theater music, which was the case with Symphony No. 60.

This symphony originated with incidental music that Haydn wrote for a 1774 production of a French play translated into German, with a title that means “The Distracted.” Going beyond mere mood-setting, Haydn let the orchestra get in on the running joke of distracted characters, like when they insert quotations of his Symphony No. 45 (“Farewell”) midway through the first movement, as if they forget which symphony they were playing, or when the oboes and horns step on the toes of the strings in the Andante with an incongruously loud fanfare figure. After a Menuetto filled with Haydn’s typical high spirits, the Presto provides what could have been closure for the symphony, but the theatrical origins gave Haydn extra material to work with, and he put it to good use in an additional slow movement (featuring beautiful music “of lamentation”) and a speedy finale with one last joke that has the violins pretending that they forgot to tune and needing to start over.

Aaron Grad ©2024