Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1829)

Just who, you may be wondering, are these “creatures of Prometheus”, and what relevance do they have to us? Well, they are we! At least, according to Greek mythology. The story is a little complicated, but Prometheus, who could see into the future, and his brother, Epimetheus, who had 20/20 hindsight, were two of the four sons of the Titan Iapetus. Of course, now you’re wondering, if he could foresee events to well, why would he want to create us? Maybe he had in mind people like Beethoven and our other composers for this concert, in which case he really did know what he was doing!

This overture, while it is not one of Beethoven’s best-known works, nevertheless typifies the wealth of lesser masterpieces, which he wrote. Indeed, we might wonder if Beethoven ever wrote any mediocre or bad music (I think not). Even his earliest opus numbers demonstrate the same brilliance he would have throughout his life.

Beethoven wrote the ballet “The Creatures of Prometheus” in the year 1800 for a performance the following year. It was his last work in the genre and, incidentally, his last year before he started noticing, with understandable alarm, the first signs of hearing loss. The overture is musically unrelated to the rest of the score so is frequently played as a concert opener. It begins, as was customary, with a slow introduction and then launches into a fast section ‘in moto perpetuo” with the strings making the running at first, then handing off to the winds, and so on, back and forth. The motion finally gets skillfully diverted into a coda (tail) and the overture comes to an orderly stop.

Larry Bell

Teacher, composer and pianist Larry Bell is a versatile and highly accomplished musician based in Boston. He graduated from the Julliard school and since 1980 has taught composition at the Boston Conservatory. He also teaches at the New England Conservatory and has a busy international career. "Songs of Innocence and Experience was written (or more accurately improvised) in three evenings in April of this year [2000]. The word improvised is important because the music was not written down while the work was being composed and I thought the best was to express the emotional directness of Blake's poetry was through improvisation.
     "William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a famous example of an adult's perspective of the child. The child in these poems is rebellious, joyful, persistently playful, Christ-like, and always natural. The adults are, on the contrary, narrow, confining, rule-laden, Catholic, and superficial. 
     "An interesting balance also exists between the poems of innocence and those of experience. The Lamb is opposite the Tyger, the Nurse's Song is transformed in The Garden of Love, and Infant Joy is answered by The Sick Rose. The piper referred to in the beginning bears a striking resemblance to the bard at the end. 
     "Very few of these songs begin and end in the same key. In fact, some songs will find their tonal conclusion in the next song giving the music a sense of continuity and connectedness typical of a cycle. 
     "If Blake's Songs of Innocence simply represented the child and the Songs of Experience the adult, this black-and-white distinction would hold little interest to the reader and would have less to recommend it for a musical setting. Precisely because of the interdependence of these points of view, I think, the poems sustain repeated readings. Ultimately, the adult poet is resurrected by the regenerative power of wonder and play that seems to spring so naturally from children. 
     "Songs of Innocence and Experience is written for children's chorus (SSA) and orchestra. The work is a joint commission from the New England Conservatory Preparatory School and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and is dedicated to the memory of Frances Lanier." –[Note by the composer].

Symphony Pro Musica last presented Bell’s music as part of our “Three Bs American Style” concert in May 1992, at that time the Sacred Symphonies.

William Blake was a few years ahead of the great English romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats and he was further distanced from them by his circumstances. He grew up, lived and died more or less in poverty. Indeed, he must have been of extraordinary character to achieve in a field generally the preserve of the more advantaged. As well as his poetry, he was an engraver and artist, having trained at the Royal Academy, and it was the combined effect of the words and images that lifted his work out of the mêlée. His lifetime, roughly contemporaneous with – and not without parallels to – that of Beethoven, was during a restless part of history: the American and French Revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, and so on. Blake himself was very much on the side of the revolutionaries, and was a friend of Thomas Paine. Songs of Innocence was written in the year of the storming of the Bastille, 1789, and was followed five years later by Songs of Experience. The latter group contains the poem known to all English schoolchildren (and included in Bell’s setting): The Tyger.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

When we consider the very long lifespan of Sibelius, it is tempting, but incorrect, to consider his musical output as spanning many generations and styles. In fact, his productive life lasted only 41 years, after which he simply retired to his country house. Promises of an eighth symphony (in addition to the seven numbered symphonies and the early “Kullervo” symphony) were made as late as the forties, but were never forthcoming. His music therefore should properly be compared with that of his contemporaries Mahler, Puccini, Debussy, Richard Strauss and, perhaps the slightly older but similarly Nationalist Janácek. Of these, however, the one most frequently cited by comparison is of course Mahler. Their paths crossed several times including the famous meeting in Helsinki in 1907 in which Sibelius expressed his admiration for the symphony’s “severity of style and profound logic”, to which Mahler replied with somewhat characteristic self-indulgence “No, a symphony must be like the world – it must embrace everything.” This exchange goes a long way in helping us understand the differences between their two styles. For myself, a lifelong fan of both composers (the first classical record I ever bought was the 3^rd and 7^th symphonies of Sibelius), it helps resolve the inevitable question of which composer I prefer. It is like asking which is better, Stilton or Wensleydale. They may both be cheese, but they are so different that the “better” must be whichever one is experiencing at the time. So it is with the music of these two giants of symphonic music.

The politico-religious background to Mahler’s artistry is well known but the situation in Finland is probably not so well understood. In the late 1890’s, the non-violent internal struggle between the Swedish and Finnish languages (and their respective classes) was put aside, when a far more serious external threat appeared: the Russian Empire started a determined effort to integrate the borderlands to Russia. This would have meant the abolition of the autonomy of Finland.

Finland had been separated from Sweden in the War of 1808, in the larger context of the Napoleonic wars. Ever since the enlightened conqueror Alexander I, in 1809, when attaching Finland to the Russian Empire as a Grand Duchy, had pledged to respect the Finnish Constitution – Finland has had a Constitution since 1772 – the Russians had left the Finns pretty much alone. Besides the natural differences, like a language not related to Russian, and the Protestant religion of the Finns vs. Eastern Orthodox religion of the Russians, and the absence of feudalism from Finland, over time the Finns developed their society in ways ever more divergent from Russia. Even the calendar ran differently in the Grand Duchy and the Empire: when you crossed the border from Finland to Russia, you stepped back 13 days in time – from the Gregorian calendar to the Julian calendar.

In February 1899, the ominous clouds already gathering on the Eastern horizon thickened: the Tsar issued a Manifesto aimed at the abolition of Finland’s autonomy. The weak Tsar Nicholas II was sympathetic to the pan-slavist movement that ill tolerated anything but Russian language and culture within the Empire. With the extensive autonomy enjoyed in Finland, it was obvious that all its institutions could not be abolished overnight with a stroke of the pen. The struggle would be long. The Finnish people in its entirety was electrified to meet the demands of the new struggle. The Swedish-speakers, who formed the upper crust of society (Swedish was Sibelius’ mother tongue), and the Finnish-speakers, put aside their differences. It was clear to most that there would be only two possible outcomes: subordination and the disappearance of Finnish culture as it was then known, or determined resistance and, ultimately, independence. The struggle against Russian domination would roughly coincide with the Golden Era of Finnish art.

This was the landscape in which Jean Sibelius composed the First Symphony. It was obvious that art would play its role in the struggle – as so well befits the people whose national epic, the Kalevala (first published in 1835, compiled from oral tradition), has a musician (Väinämöinen) as its principal hero. Sibelius was the man holding the musical front with authority. His friend, painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, wielded his paintbrush in the service of his homeland. Both men, and many others who joined them, drew inspiration from the Kalevala. Sibelius had already composed major works based on texts from the Kalevala: the Kullervo Symphony (1892) and the Four Legends for Orchestra (Lemminkäinen-suite). When he tackled his first symphony, he was a well-established and well-traveled composer, with studies in Berlin and Vienna behind him. Sibelius conducted almost all of the premieres of his works himself. The Helsinki premiere of the First Symphony on 26^th April 1899 was a success. The performance at the Paris World Fair of 1900 was less so (but neither was Mahler’s reception there favorable).

The struggle for independence, which, in the end, may have been shorter than the old combatants had feared, culminated in Finland’s unilateral declaration of independence on December 6^th, 1917. At this time, Sibelius was revising his Fifth Symphony. With the bulk of his national romantic oeuvre behind him, the symphonies were to be closer to the mainstream of European music. Sibelius denied any programmatic elements to his Symphonies and abhorred any suggestions of that kind. The few known programmatic labels are due to others. Against that background, it is logical that he did not include Kullervo and Lemminkäinen in the numbered symphonies, although he could have.

The opening of the symphony sets the tone for the whole work in a unique and quite arresting manner. A plaintive solo clarinet above a pp tympani roll evokes a stillness and remoteness with a sense of foreboding. Harmonically and rhythmically, there is no obvious form to this melody (unlike the superficially similar opening of Tchaikovsky’s 5^th symphony with its two clarinets), and it appears to die, ending an octave below its first note. The drum drops out and the clarinet appears to make a second effort, but this too is soon extinguished (marked ppp morendo) and lost as the second violins introduce the Allegro energico. Without further ado, the first violins introduce the soaring main theme of the movement, which in turn is immediately followed by the second theme stated by the oboes, bassoons, horns and timps. This use of the tympani here to underscore the theme is absolutely typical of early Sibelius and is common throughout this symphony. Another aspect of the Sibelian style very prevalent in the first and last movements especially is the extensive use of tuba, basses, bassoons and horns in their lower registers to add a dark tone to the music. However, in this symphony at least, he counteracts that feeling of gloom with its antithesis, the harp, which has a major part to play as the symphony unfolds.

The second movement, andante, has the allure of a Finnish folk-song without actually being one. It is quite possible – albeit taking some liberties – to sing texts from the Kalevala to this music. Unfortunately, the rhythm and so much else is lost in any attempt at translation. Without the knowledge of this background, the rhythms may seem to make this music somewhat clumsy as a romance, but they make perfect sense if you imagine hearing a lonely rune-singer – in Finnish – on a luminous summer night on the lakefront.

The third movement, in the style of Beethoven’s great scherzo from the 9^th symphony, has some elements of Bach about it too. The “trio” section, marked Lento (ma non troppo) is in the form of a Ländler, again with a direct contrast of the bird-like flute melody over the growling of the bass instruments. The finale opens with a boldly stated reprise of the clarinet’s opening theme in the strings, marked forte, broad and passionate. There is no sense of plaintiveness here, but again it is short-lived. However, this time, it becomes transformed, after an unrelated staccato theme has been developed, into one of Sibelius’ “big” tunes which appears first in the section Andante assai in the violins on the G string (the lowest). Embellished by the harp, this develops into a full climax for the orchestra that leads into one of his long drawn out but thoroughly satisfying endings.

I am grateful to Hannu Harjunmaa for his help in preparing the program notes on Sibelius. Incidentally, long-time SPM Bass player Hannu is our direct link to Sibelius, as he is not only Finnish, but has met one of Sibelius’ daughters in person in connection with the premiere of a Sibelius work which his university orchestra was performing. I am also grateful to Larry Bell for his website (www.larrybellmusic.com), my source for information on himself and his music.

Robin Hillyard