Heinrich Joseph von Collin’s play Coriolan—not to be confused with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, based on the same story from Plutarch—debuted in Vienna in 1802. The drama 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 play was dormant by the time Beethoven wrote his overture in 1807, and his motivation for undertaking the project remains unclear. (It may have been meant to draw the attention of the new managers of Vienna’s main theater, or it was also possible that Beethoven was courting the playwright for an opera collaboration.) Beethoven’s overture appeared in conjunction with the play for one single performance in 1807, and since then it has lived on as a concert work.

The choice of key, C minor, foreshadows the fateful Fifth Symphony, composed the following year. Like that symphony, the Coriolan Overture generates powerful emotions from elemental material. The signature motive is a drawn-out C bursting 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 ©2018

The concert overture that Mendelssohn composed in 1826, based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, must be the most impressive composition ever issued by a seventeen-year-old. Mendelssohn returned to the same inspiration seventeen years later when he contributed incidental music for a new production of the Shakespeare comedy in Potsdam. The incidental music included the earlier overture as well as thirteen new selections for chorus, soloists and orchestra. The movements for orchestra alone—the Scherzo, Intermezzo, Nocturne and Wedding March—originally served as entr’actes interspersed among the play’s five acts. They have all joined the overture as concert hall staples, while the Wedding March has earned a special recognition as the recessional of choice in many wedding ceremonies.

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 solo horn (supported by the bassoons) cooing a gentle melody in an Andante tranquillo setting. A more impassioned central section builds over pulsing strings before remnants of the initial melody return.

In the stage production, the spry Scherzo prefaced the first entrance of Puck, a mischievous fairy, at the start of the second act. The bewitching texture of the music captures the fanciful essence of Puck’s trickery.

Aaron Grad ©

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 the 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 ©2022