Program Notes for “Handel and Haydn,” September 26, 2008

Concerto grosso in B-flat major, Op. 3, No. 2, HWV 313
by George Frederic Handel (Halle, Saxony, 1685 - London, 1759)

“Popular music in the best sense of the word; simple, fluent, clearly articulated, and gloriously euphonious.”  Thus did musicologist Paul Henry Lang describe the six concertos Handel published as his Opus 3 in 1734.  Long overshadowed by the twelve superb concerti grossi of Op. 6 (1739), these earlier works used to be known as “oboe concertos,” which is not quite correct even though there are a number of prominent oboe solos in the set.  Yet other instruments play solos as well, taking turns from movement to movement.  For instance, the second concerto features, at different points, a duet of solo violins, a duet of solo cellos, and even two contrasting solo groups (two oboes and bassoon versus two violins and cello).

It seems certain that the composition history of these concertos reaches back a long time before their publication.  Handel borrowed and “recycled” several movements from earlier works, as was his custom.  The six concertos differ widely in form and instrumentation; some follow the pattern of the church sonata (slow-fast-slow-fast), while others resemble the Italian overture (fast-slow-fast).
   
The second concerto does neither:  it is a singular “hybrid” consisting of a quasi-overture with two dance movements added.  The unity of the first three movements is reinforced by the fact that they are played without pause; both the Vivace and the Largo end with half-cadences directly leading into the next movement.
   
After the fugal Allegro has concluded with an elaborate cadenza, the Italian overture turns into a French suite with a delicately orchestrated minuet and a graceful gavotte, whose melody is embellished, at the final repeat, with a stream of triplet figurations in the violins.

Symphony No. 6 in D major (“Le matin,” 1761)
Symphony No. 8 in G major (“Le soir,” 1761)
by Joseph Haydn (Rohrau, Lower Austria, 1732 - Vienna, 1809)

These symphonies are among the first Haydn wrote after entering the service of the Esterházy princes in Hungary.  At 29, he had more experience in symphony-writing than the single-digit catalog numbers would suggest.  According to the revised chronology established by the late A. Peter Brown, the three symphonies devoted to the times of day may have been preceded by more than twenty works that received higher numbers in the traditional listing compiled by Eusebius Mandyczewski in the 19th century.

Such matters are important because Haydn’s programmatic trilogy shows signs of maturity and individuality that would be highly unlikely in a beginner, no matter how gifted.  These works exhibit some fairly elaborate motivic development and an extremely sophisticated handling of sonata form (including such advanced techniques as “monothematic construction” and “false recapitulation”).  It is fair to say that they represent Haydn’s first real masterpieces in the symphonic genre.

The programmatic idea certainly helped.  It may have been Haydn’s employer, Prince Paul Anton Esterházy, who asked the composer to depict morning, noon and evening in a set of three symphonies.  A felicitous concept, it gave Haydn a chance to create a musical sunrise at the beginning of the first symphony, and a musical storm at the conclusion of the third one.

The works have other peculiarities, some of them without parallels in Haydn’s later works.  Most strikingly, the frequent use of instrumental solos shows that Haydn was still fairly close to the Baroque concerto grosso tradition-and also that he could count on some rather outstanding musicians in Prince Esterházy’s orchestra.  (Prince Paul Anton died in 1762, only a year after Haydn’s arrival; the composer served the Prince’s younger brother, Nicolaus “The Magnificent,” for the remainder of his active career.)
   
The Symphony in D (Le matin-“Morning”) opens with a  few measures of slow introduction representing the sunrise.  The main theme of the Allegro is introduced by the first featured soloist, the flute, answered by a pair of oboes.  The long chromatic ascent in the development section is an extremely modern moment, and the first horn does something that uncannily anticipates Beethoven, not yet born when this symphony was written.  The horn “jumps the gun” by intoning the beginning of the main theme just before the “official” recapitulation arrives, exactly like in the “Eroica.” 
   
In the second movement, a stately dance in 3/4 is framed by a rather unusual Adagio, a free fantasy on a single scale.  The winds are silent here, and the concertmaster takes over the role of the soloist.
   
The flute shines once again in the minuet, but the trio (middle section) lets the lowest-pitched instruments take center stage:  the bassoon, the viola and cello, and most unusually, the double bass.  Flute, violin and cello come to the fore in the spirited finale; the central violin solo would not be out of place in a concerto.  The sudden moment of hesitation just before the end is the kind of surprise we would often find in later Haydn and especially Beethoven:  an important rhetorical device is born before our very ears.

As musicologist Daniel Heartz discovered in 1981, the opening melody of the G-major symphony (Le soir-“Evening”) is identical to a song from Gluck’s French comic opera Le diable à quatre (approximately, “The Devil to Pay”), performed in Vienna in 1759.  The words of this song are rather funny:  “I don’t like tobacco very much, I don’t use it much, often not at all, but my husband objects.  Presently, I find it tempting, if I take a little when alone, because it relieves boredom, no matter what my husband says.”  Maybe Prince Esterházy saw the opera in Vienna and told Haydn to use it (they didn’t have to worry about copyright in those days).

Haydn constructed a brilliant sonata form out of this material; he even managed to fashion the second theme from Gluck’s melody.  The second movement is another concerto with multiple soloists:  two violins begin, a cello and a bassoon follow suit; their melodies alternate with the grand tutti gestures of the entire orchestra. 

In the minuet, the orchestra is contrasted with a smaller concertino, or solo group, of woodwinds; the trio section once more features the solo double bass.  The last movement is one of the great orchestral storms of the literature.  Lightning strikes at least six times in the course of this remarkable finale (that’s if the repeat signs are not observed).

Peter Laki

Concerto Grosso 1985
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939)
(read her bio)

In 1984 the Washington Friends of Handel commissioned New York composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich to write a work in commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of Handel’s birth. Ms.Zwilich almost immediately thought to base her own work on that of the composer’s D-major Violin Sonata. “I performed the work many years ago,” she said. “And I especially love the opening theme of the first movement-the striking head motive and the beauty of the generative tension between the theme and the elegant bass line.” The resulting composition, she says, is a “twentieth-century response to the spirit of George Frederic Handel. My concerto is both inspired by Handel’s sonata and, I hope, imbued with his spirit.”

The concerto is in five movements, in an overall arch form. The first and fifth, and the second and fourth movements are pairs, with the middle movement functioning as the keystone in the arch. It is in the first and fifth movements, both marked Maestoso, that the Handelian “spirit” is most obvious.  The two, in fact, can almost be regarded as the ornate Baroque frame around the edges of the Concerto’s three middle movements. The first movement of the Violin Sonata is in a rough binary form. Zwilich’s first movement has imbedded within it-in the form of numerous quotations-the entire A section of Handel’s work; her fifth movement contains the entire B section. Each of the two movements is written in a musical language that is undeniable hers, but she has woven into the texture-almost like the dominant colors of a tapestry-the Handel quotations. The end result is somewhat sectional, the old contrasting with the new.  The composer, in fact, wants the differences to be as marked as possible, and has instructed the instrumentalists, when playing the Handel sections, to perform in obvious Baroque continuo style.

The three inner movements are freely composed, with no interpolated quotations.  Movements 2 and 4, both marked Presto, are a pair of free fantasias; the fourth, in fact, is essentially a da capo repetition of the second. These two function as an inner frame for the middle Largo movement which, according to the composer, is the most important of the work.  “The third movement is the emotional peak, the most personal movement of the concerto,” she says. “It, too, is a free fantasy, inspired by Handel’s theme, but without the direct quotations I used in movements one and five. Throughout the work, I found myself using compositional techniques typical of the baroque period, including terraced dynamics, repeated melodic phrases, and suspension-like constructions. These are techniques I would not normally use, but I felt inspired to do so because of the fact that this piece was based on Handel.”

Katherine K. Preston