(Duration: 17 min)

Desperate for a job away from his hometown of Salzburg, the 22-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart traveled with his mother to spend part of 1778 in Paris, a city that had adored him as a child prodigy. The only job lead he generated was for a post as an organist at Versailles, which he declined, and amid the professional disappointment, he faced personal tragedy when his mother fell ill and died.

One of the few bright spots in that dismal trip was a commission to compose a symphony for the Concert Spirituel, a series that featured one of Paris’ biggest and best-established orchestras. Active for more than fifty years by that point, the orchestra even had its own signature flourish, the premier coup d’archet: a unison bow-stroke at the start of a work that showed off the ensemble’s precision. Mozart used all the forces at his disposal in his “Paris” Symphony, writing for an unusually large orchestra that included clarinets. And he even incorporated the stereotypical coup d’archet at the start of his symphony, but this was perhaps a bit cynical, considering that Mozart wrote to his father, “These oxen here make such a to-do about it! What the devil! I can see no difference — they merely begin together — much as they do elsewhere.”

The symphony’s opening motive rises rapidly up the scale, a gesture that circulates throughout the first movement. In a sly moment of the development section, that scale-figure makes the shocking “mistake” of going a half-step too far. The Andante middle movement plays like a scene from a comedy of manners, with calm and courtly themes that pause politely to let each other speak. Forgoing a minuet and instead using the older three-movement pattern, the symphony proceeds directly to the finale that draws the listeners in with a scurrying piano start and then blasts a forte response. The contrapuntal treatment of the second theme foreshadows the famous fugal conclusion to Mozart’s last symphony, No. 41 (“Jupiter”), composed a decade later.

Aaron Grad ©2023

When Shostakovich was hospitalized in January of 1969, his thoughts, understandably, turned to death. It had been more than a decade since a form of polio had begun to rob him of the use of his right hand, and a heart attack three years earlier had ended his concert career. He had broken both legs in separate falls, could barely walk, and was in terrible pain. In his hospital bed, he worked feverishly on vocal settings of poems that grappled with death, taking a cue from Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, which Shostakovich had orchestrated in 1962. The new work took shape, in a matter of weeks, as a series of eleven linked movements, scored for two vocalists, a small string orchestra and percussion. Shostakovich declared it his Symphony No. 14.

The chosen texts, from different centuries and in various source languages, shared the aspect of confronting death directly and painfully, with no pretense of redemption. The four poets also all died prematurely, three of them in manmade circumstances. The cycle begins with the words of Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), who was executed without a trial during the Spanish Civil War.

In the first song, De profundis, the “hundred lovers sleep forever.” Violins establish the aura of death with fragmentary quotations of the Dies irae plainchant, and the music lays itself out like a skeleton, with no flesh to soften the stark, independent lines that surround the solo bass. The soprano takes the next Lorca setting, Malagueña, the title referencing a flamenco style. Some of the music evokes a strumming texture, as in the passage in which “Black horses and sinister people pass through the deep pathways of the guitar,” and castanets reinforce the dark, twisted take on a Spanish dance.

The next six songs use texts by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), who died in the 1918 flu pandemic, weakened by wounds received during World War I. Lorelei is the most overtly dramatic passage in the symphony, in which the two voices recreate the German tale—first penned in this form by Clemens Brentano in 1801—of a woman who, after being spurned by her lover, is accused of being a witch and of driving men to their deaths. A bishop can barely muster the resolve to condemn the temptress to a convent, and the knights assigned to convey her there fall victim to her charms as well, allowing her to climb a giant rock over the Rhine River, from which she jumps to her death, thinking she sees her lover. A manic fugue based on a twelve-tone row and a fleeting quotation from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Dukas contribute to the wild, unhinged aspect of this music.

The Suicide places a solo cello in counterpoint to the soprano, who sings from beyond death of “three large lilies on my grave.” The soprano continues with On Watch, which foretells the death of a young soldier, who is both her brother and her lover; she sings, shamelessly, “I want to make myself beautiful in both incest and death, these two magnificent deeds.” Madam, Look! continues in a dark and twisted mood, with the soprano laughing at “the beautiful loves scythed down by death,” spurred on by bone-dry commentary from the xylophone.

The bass restores the solemn mood in At the Santé Jail, based on the week that Apollinaire was (wrongly) jailed on suspicion of having robbed the Louvre. An extended passage of plucking and col legno tapping of the bows captures the maddening stasis of a jail cell. There are hints of the deathly Dies irae motive again, and even an oblique reference to Shostakovich’s own musical signature, D-S-C-H (spelled according to European note names).

Apollinaire’s The Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople shares its title with a nineteenth-century Russian painting, based on a legendary episode from 1676. When the leader of the Ottoman Empire demanded that the Cossacks submit to his forces, they responded with a letter filled with the most imaginative vulgarities they could come up with—a missive delivered here by the bass, in the company of frenzied strings.

O, Delvig, Delvig! is the one song based on words of a Russian poet, albeit one with a German name: Wilhelm Küchelbecker (1797-1846), who was exiled to Siberia, and went blind and died there, after participating in the failed Decembrist Uprising of 1825. The poem pays tribute to another persecuted poet, Anton Delvig. The musical language is distinctly more consonant than anywhere else in the symphony, and the consideration of a poet’s immortality offers a glimmer of hope among the otherwise bleak sentiments.

The final two sections bring in the voice of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the Prague-born poet who died of leukemia at age 51. As at the beginning of the symphony, the violins circle around a motive reminiscent of the Dies irae, and the soprano returns to sing of The Poet’s Death. The short Conclusion has the voices singing together for the first time, in Rilke’s pronouncement that “Death is great. We belong to her with laughing mouths.” The symphony strives for no grand resolution at its end; it simply offers a dissonant death rattle, accelerating into an unknown void.

Aaron Grad ©2014