Program Notes—Eroica
Program Notes
EROICA
April 13 | 4:00 PM—Lensic
The Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra
Guillermo Figueroa, Music Director
David Felberg, Violin
JESSIE MONTGOMERY
Starburst for String Orchestra
Born 1981, New York City
The daughter of theater and musical artists, Jessie Montgomery learned to play the violin as a child and earned her Bachelors Degree in violin performance from Juilliard and her Masters in composition from New York University. She is one of the featured composers of the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19, in which 19 female composers have been commissioned to write a work in celebration of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave American women the right to work.
Montgomery is currently a Graduate Fellow in composition at Princeton as well as a Professor of Violin and Composition at The New School in New York City. In 2021, she began her tenure as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
The composer has supplied an introduction to Starburst:
This brief one-movement work for string orchestra is a play on imagery of rapidly changing musical colors. Exploding gestures are juxtaposed with gentle fleeting melodies in an attempt to create a multidimensional soundscape. A common definition of a starburst: “the rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly” lends itself almost literally to the nature of the performing ensemble who premiered the work, The Sphinx Virtuosi, and I wrote the piece with their dynamic in mind.
—Program Note by Eric Bromberger
JENNIFER HIGDON
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
1726
Chaconni
Fly Forward
Born 1962, Brooklyn, New York
Jennifer Higdon grew up playing flute in marching bands in Tennessee and received her bachelor’s degree in flute performance from Bowling Green State University. But she found herself drawn to composition, and she earned her master’s and doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied with George Crumb and Ned Rorem. She currently teaches composition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Higdon has had remarkable success as a composer, with commissions from the Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, and many others. Her Piano Concerto was premiered by Lang Lang and the National Symphony Orchestra, and she currently averages about 200 performances of her music each year. Her blue cathedral has proven one of the most popular works written in this century: Since its premiere in 2000, it has been performed by more than 100 orchestras.
Higdon composed the Violin Concerto in 2008. Hilary Hahn gave the premiere with the Indianapolis Symphony on February 6, 2009, and the work was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music. On her Website, Higdon has provided an introduction to her Violin Concerto:
I believe that one of the most rewarding aspects of life is exploring and discovering the magic and mysteries held within our universe. For a composer this thrill often takes place in the writing of a concerto…it is the exploration of an instrument’s world, a journey of the imagination, confronting and stretching an instrument’s limits, and discovering a particular performer’s gifts.
The first movement of this concerto, written for the violinist Hilary Hahn, carries a somewhat enigmatic title of “1726”. This number represents an important aspect of such a journey of discovery, for both the composer and the soloist. 1726 happens to be the street address of The Curtis Institute of Music, where I first met Hilary as a student in my 20th Century Music Class. An exceptional student, Hilary devoured the information in the class and was always open to exploring and discovering new musical languages and styles. As Curtis was also a primary training ground for me as a young composer, it seemed an appropriate tribute. To tie into this title, I make extensive use the intervals of unisons, 7ths, and 2nds, throughout this movement.
The excitement of the first movement’s intensity certainly deserves the calm and pensive relaxation of the 2nd movement. This title, “Chaconni”, comes from the word “chaconne.” A chaconne is a chord progression that repeats throughout a section of music. In this particular case, there are several chaconnes, which create the stage for a dialog between the soloist and various members of the orchestra. The beauty of the violin’s tone and the artist’s gifts are on display here.
The third movement, “Fly Forward,” seemed like such a compelling image, that I could not resist the idea of having the soloist do exactly that. Concerti throughout history have always allowed the soloist to delight the audience with feats of great virtuosity, and when a composer is confronted with a real gift in the soloist’s ability to do so, well, it would be foolhardy not to allow that dream to become a reality.
Higdon’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was commissioned by The Indianapolis Symphony, The Toronto Symphony Orchestra, The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and The Curtis Institute of Music. This commission was made possible with the generous support of the LDI, Ltd., and the Lacy Foundation, the Randolph S. Rothschild Fund, as well as the commissioning orchestras. The concerto was dedicated to Hillary Hahn who subsequently made the first recording of the work.
— Program note by Eric Bromberger
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 3 in E-Flat Major, op.55, “Eroica”
Allegro con brio
Marche funebre: Adagio assai
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Finale: Allegro molto; Poco andante
Born 1770, Bonn
Died 1827, Vienna
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In May 1803, Beethoven had just come through a devastating experience—the realization that he was going deaf at age 32 had driven him to the verge of suicide—but now he resumed work. He moved a few miles north of Vienna to the village of Oberdöbling, where he sketched a massive new symphony, his third. To his friend Wenzel Krumpholz, Beethoven confided: “I am only a little satisfied with my previous works. From today on I will take a new path.” The composer later said that of all his symphonies, Eroica was his favorite.
Beethoven had intended to dedicate the symphony to Napoleon, whose reforms in France had seemed to signal a new age of egalitarian justice. But when the news reached the composer in May 1804 that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor, he ripped the title page off the score and blotted out Napoleon’s name, angrily crying: “Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!” (That title page —with Napoleon’s name obliterated —has survived.) Historians have used this episode to demonstrate Beethoven’s democratic sympathies, though there is evidence that just a few months later Beethoven wanted to restore the symphony’s dedication to Napoleon, and late in life he spoke of Napoleon with grudging admiration. When the work was published in 1806, the title page bore only the cryptic inscription: “Sinfonia eroica—dedicated to the memory of a great man.”
There were several private performances before the public premiere on April 7, 1805. Early audiences were dumbfounded. Wrote one reviewer: “This long composition, extremely difficult of performance, is in reality a tremendously expanded, daring and wild fantasia. It lacks nothing in the way of startling and beautiful passages, in which the energetic and talented composer must be recognized; but often it loses itself in lawlessness . . . The reviewer belongs to Herr Beethoven’s sincerest admirers, but in this composition he must confess that he finds too much that is glaring and bizarre, which hinders greatly one’s grasp of the whole, and a sense of unity is almost completely lost.” Legend has it that at the end of the first movement, one outraged member of the audience yelled, “I’ll give another kreutzer [a small coin] if the thing will but stop!” It is easy now to smile at such reactions, but those honest sentiments reflect the confusion of listeners in the presence of a genuinely revolutionary work of art.
There had never been a symphony like this, and Beethoven’s “new directions” are evident from the first instant. The music explodes to life with two whipcracks in E-flat major, followed immediately by the main ideas in the cellos. This slightly-swung theme is simply built on the notes of an E-flat major chord, but then settles on a “wrong” note–C#–and the resulting harmonic complications will be resolved only after much violence. Another striking feature of this movement is Beethoven’s choice of 3/4 instead of the duple meter customary in symphonic first movements; 3/4, the minuet meter, had been thought essentially lightweight, unworthy of serious music. Beethoven destroys that notion instantly: This is not simply serious music, it is music of the greatest violence and uncertainty. What Beethoven’s biographer Maynard Solomon called “hostile energy” is admitted for the first time into what had been the polite world of the classical symphony. This huge movement (longer by itself than some complete Haydn and Mozart symphonies) introduces a variety of themes and develops them with a furious energy. Its development, much of it fugal in structure, is full of grand gestures, stinging dissonances, and tremendous forward thrust. The lengthy recapitulation (in which the music continues to develop) drives to a powerful coda: The main theme repeats four times, growing more powerful on each appearance, and finally it is shouted out in triumph.
The second movement brings another surprise: It is a funeral march, something else entirely new in symphonic music. Beethoven moves to dark C minor as violins announce the grieving main idea over growling basses, and the movement makes its somber way on the tread of this dark theme. The C-major central interlude sounds almost bright by comparison, but when the opening material and tonality return, Beethoven ratchets up tensions by treating his material fugally. At the end, the march theme disintegrates in front of us, and the movement ends on muttering fragments of that theme.
Out of this silence, the propulsive scherzo springs to life, then explodes. For all its revolutionary features, the Eroica employs what was essentially the Mozart-Haydn orchestra: pairs of winds, plus timpani and strings. Beethoven makes only one change: He adds a third horn, which is now featured prominently in the trio section’s hunting-horn calls. But that change, seemingly small by itself, is yet another signal of the originality of this symphony: the virtuosity of the writing for horns, the sweep of their brassy sonority — all these were new in music.
The finale is a theme-and-variation movement, a form originally intended to show off the composer’s imagination and the performer’s skill. Beethoven transforms this old form into a grand conclusion worthy of a heroic symphony. After an opening flourish, he presents not the theme but its bass line played by pizzicato strings, and offers several variations before the melodic theme itself is heard in the woodwinds, now accompanied by the same pizzicato line. This tune had special appeal for Beethoven, and he had already used it in three other works, including his ballet Prometheus. Was Beethoven thinking of Prometheus, stealer of fire and champion of mankind, when he used this theme? He puts it through a series of dazzling variations, including complex fugal treatment, before reaching a moment of poise on a stately slow variation for woodwinds. The music pauses expectantly, and then a powerful Presto coda hurls the Eroica to its close.
What seemed “lawlessness” to early audiences must now be seen as an extraordinary leap to an entirely new conception of what music might be. Freed from the restraint of courtly good manners, Beethoven found in the symphony the means to express the most serious and important of human emotions.
—Program Note by Eric Bromberger