For one night only, join MTT as he honors Viennese masters and innovators in this thrilling performance at the New World Center. In her U.S. debut, soprano Asmik Grigorian captures the darkness and madness of tormented wife Maria in Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. Great in scope and substance, Franz Schubert’s final chapter to the symphonic genre is a true tour de force, as the genius songwriter infuses his expansive offering with fearless exuberance.

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Program

Anton Webern

Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6b (1909; 1928 revision)
Approximate duration: 13 minutes

Arnold Schoenberg had brought about a “liberation of the dissonance” for melody and harmony, but his student Anton Webern went even further by giving timbre and duration equally significant roles in his aphoristic compositions. This aesthetic of color and condensation found appeal with an extraordinary variety of later composers, who discovered whole universes made from painstaking combinations of texture and palette, both with the traditional orchestra and other media.

The preoccupation with compression is a signature feature of Webern’s works and is already apparent in his early pieces. Webern absorbed other progressive influences of the time—such as Richard Strauss and particularly Mahler, who was revered alike by Schoenberg and his fellow pupil Alban Berg—but he rapidly adopted a style of minimal gestures that markedly contrasted with the contemporary “maximalist” tendency toward gigantic works with vast orchestral forces.

Webern’s meticulous pinpointing of particular instrumental sections and solo sonorities, coupled with the work’s brief temporal dimensions, puts the Six Pieces on a plane utterly removed from the rhetoric of post-Romantic musical statements. In fact, when the work was first presented to the public on March 31, 1913, the concert turned into one of the legendary scandals of early Modernism, comparable to the riot sparked that same year by the premiere of The Rite of Spring. The virulent response had a devastating effect on Webern (as it did on Berg and Schoenberg, whose music, along with pieces by Zemlinsky and Mahler, was also on the program).

The pieces are abstract, yet they resonate with intense emotions. Webern had been profoundly distraught by the death of his mother in 1906 and later confessed that many of his compositions relate to that loss. From the haunting flute heard at the work’s beginning, the prevailing dynamic is soft, which makes the sudden explosions of the second movement all the more shocking. 

After the haiku-like concision of the third piece (just 11 measures) comes the longest, the pivotal funeral march of the fourth that concludes with an overwhelming climax of percussion. The fifth follows like a shadowy epilogue, reassessing what remains after the devastation. The sixth piece, beginning with a stoic English horn, makes highly effective use of pauses, coming to a final rest after gentle strokes from celesta and harp.

-- Copyright © 2008 Thomas May

Alban Berg

Three Excerpts from Wozzeck, Op. 7 (1917-1922)
Approximate duration: 20 minutes

Until the age of 19, Alban Berg’s only formal training in music consisted of piano lessons from the family’s governess during his childhood. His early, self-guided attempts at composing focused on lieder, and he wrote some 80 songs in a Romantic style indebted to Schumann and Brahms. Berg entered a new phase in 1904, when he began seven years of private study with Arnold Schoenberg. Only 11 years separated the two composers, and Schoenberg was still finding his own voice, having yet to reach the musical realms of intuitive atonality and ultimately 12-tone composition that defined his later works. But Schoenberg was a natural leader and teacher, and the two star pupils who both joined him in 1904—Berg and Anton Webern—would remain his most celebrated disciples.

Even as Berg adopted new musical tools that opened pathways beyond tonality, he maintained vestiges of triadic harmony and expressive melody that preserved a lush Romanticism in his compositions. Schoenberg may have been the ringleader and Webern the most uncompromising practitioner within the “Second Viennese School,” but now, with almost a century’s hindsight, Berg’s music stands out as notably attractive and durable, especially his operas: Wozzeck, first staged in 1925, and Lulu, not quite finished when Berg died in 1935.

Based on a 19th-century play by the German writer Georg Büchner, Wozzeck depicts the troubled relationship between the title character, a soldier, and his common-law wife, Marie. While Berg was waiting for a debut production to materialize, he extracted the Three Excerpts from Wozzeck heard here. They were first performed in Frankfurt in 1924, a year before the complete opera reached the stage in Berlin.

The initial excerpt from Act I begins with a languid interlude between scenes, until a military band parades by, led by a hunky drum major who catches Marie’s eye. The scene continues with a lullaby that Marie sings to her daughter.

The next excerpt comes from the start of Act III, when Marie is reading aloud verses of scripture concerning adultery—which she has by this point committed with the drum major. The music unfolds as an “Invention on a Theme,” consisting of variations and a fugue. (Each scene in the opera observes a formal musical structure, with Act I comprising five character pieces, Act II functioning as a symphony in five movements, and Act III constructing inventions on particular musical elements.)

The final excerpt picks up at an orchestral interlude structured as an “Invention on a Key.” The dizzying chromatic ascents, coming after action in which Wozzeck has murdered Marie and then drowned himself, settles into a tragic meditation on the key of D minor. Continuing with music from the final scene, the soprano sings from a child’s perspective, the nursery rhymes providing a disturbing coda as we are left facing a child orphaned by his parents’ violence and deception.

 

Additional Resources

Video of Wozzeck with English subtitles

Synopsis of the opera

Detailed guide to the opera’s music and origins

 

Franz Schubert

Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944, "The Great" (1825-26)
Approximate duration: 48 minutes

The disconnect between Franz Schubert’s talent and his public recognition in his lifetime is hard to reconcile. This was a composer who produced hundreds of first-rate songs as a teenager, not to mention symphonies and chamber music, before even a note of his music had appeared in performance or in print. His songs gained a bit of traction in his lifetime, but his many attempts to break into opera were disastrous. As for his symphonies, not a single one reached the public before he died. As one publisher wrote to Schubert, in rejecting his manuscripts, ‘The public does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps now and then somewhat curious procedures of your mind’s creations.”

Schubert’s first six symphonies, composed between the ages of 16 and 21, are beautiful and original but hardly controversial, with their strong resemblances to late Haydn and early Beethoven. Schubert took a more bold approach with the symphony he began in 1822, but he abandoned it after two movements, leaving what we now know as the “Unfinished” Symphony No. 8. Perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, he set down that symphony around the same time that he suffered through the first phase of the syphilis infection that claimed his life six years later.

A letter from 1824 attests to Schubert’s continuing ambition to compose a “grand symphony,” a desire that could only have been stoked further when he attended the premiere that year of Beethoven’s epic Symphony No. 9. The next year, while vacationing on an Austrian lake and enjoying his best health in years, Schubert began his massive symphony in C major, the one that would eventually earn the nickname “The Great.” He revised it in 1826 and sent the score to Vienna’s Society of the Friends of Music, writing in his dedication, “I venture, as a native artist, to dedicate to them this, my symphony, and to commend it most politely to their protection.” The society acknowledged Schubert with a small payment, but they declined to perform the unwieldy work after trying it out privately.

It is a mystery why Schubert later wrote a date of 1828 on the manuscript—perhaps to make it look fresher as he tried again to publicize it—but he made no headway with the symphony before his death that November at the age of 31. A memorial concert in December marked the first performance opportunity for a Schubert symphony, and the planners seem to have considered mounting the large C-major symphony, but they opted instead for the more manageable Symphony No. 6 (known as the “Little C major” to differentiate it from “The Great”).

The numbering of Schubert’s symphonies is quite a mess, so it is worth clearing up that the Symphony in C major, nicknamed “The Great,” and listed as D. 944 in the comprehensive catalog by musicologist Otto Erich Deutsch, appears in various sources as Schubert’s Seventh, Eighth, Ninth or even Tenth Symphony. The “Unfinished” No. 8 was actually the seventh chronologically, followed by “The Great,” most often listed as No. 9 and mistakenly dated to 1828. Deutsch left a blank space (No. 7) for a missing symphony from 1825 mentioned in Schubert’s letters, in the hopes that it would turn up; we now know that the 1825 project was in fact “The Great.”

The fate of “The Great” finally turned in 1837, when Robert Schumann, an admirer and champion of Schubert, visited the late composer’s brother in Vienna. Among the stacks of scores—music essentially deemed worthless by publishers—Schumann found several symphonies, including the 130-page manuscript of “The Great.” As a journeyman critic and composer, Schumann didn’t yet have an orchestra at his disposal, but his friend Felix Mendelssohn did as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Schumann forwarded the score to Mendelssohn, who finally conducted the first performance (albeit one with numerous cuts) in 1839.

Schumann was not exaggerating when he praised the symphony’s “heavenly length,” which can stretch to nearly an hour depending on tempos and whether sections are repeated as indicated. Somewhat like Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Schubert’s first movement places a substantial and not-so-slow introduction before the main body of the movement, with the two sections spliced neatly together through the shared motive of triplet accompaniment figures.

The second movement likewise makes a point of moving forward more purposely than most symphonic slow movements, with the tempo marked Andante con moto, or “At a walking pace, with motion.” (Again Beethoven’s Seventh provided a model, with its nimble Allegretto). Schubert’s symphonic construct builds toward militaristic intensity, but his knack for intimate songwriting makes its presence felt too, with the oboe taking the first turn as a surrogate singer.

Schubert’s Scherzo, as huge as the preceding movements, follows the boisterous and hearty template Beethoven developed in his symphonies as an answer to Haydn’s more polite minuets. The scale of this movement matches the supersized scherzo from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, but Schubert is much more effusive with his melodies, supporting them with freewheeling shifts between major and minor harmonies along the way.

In some of Schubert’s most famous songs, he generated unrelenting momentum with fleet-fingered piano accompaniments. For this symphonic finale, the violins often fill the same function, churning through streams of rapid triplets in smooth slurs or brittle bursts—a workout for the performers either way. 

 

Additional Resources

PDF score from the IMSLP Petrucci Music Library

Guide to the Symphony from The Guardian

Video introduction to the symphony from the New York Philharmonic

-- Copyright © 2017 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.

Audio clips provided by Naxos of America, Inc.