ABOUT THE MUSIC

In the banquet scene of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1788), the Don calls for music. Straight away, his house band strikes up, with a selection of tunes from new operas by Sarti, Martin y Soler and that hip young trendsetter Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Giovanni has style: naturally he’d have kept musicians on his staff. But this wasn’t the only way that the lovers of early eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music stayed abreast of fashion. In the era before recorded sound – and unless you lived in or near a major European city - opportunities to hear music played by a full orchestra might come around only a few times in a decade. Orchestral works circulated primarily through arrangements for smaller groups and solo instruments. If, like Don Giovanni, you were wealthy enough, you might employ a private wind ensemble. If not, well, it all depended upon what instruments you (plus your friends and family) could play for yourselves.

So, operas and symphonies might be sold in versions for piano, wind octet, string quartet, trio, or any kind of ensemble that might realistically be assembled at home. Beethoven himself made several scaleddown arrangements of his own music, and authorised others: the Beethoven works in this concert have been arranged for string ensemble plus optional flute (an affordable and popular instrument among amateurs). Today, of course, we can hear any Beethoven symphony with a tap on a smartphone. But these arrangements are ear-opening: presenting Beethoven’s music the way that many (probably most) of its contemporaries would first have encountered it.

The Australian Haydn Ensemble has enjoyed rediscovering them, and is delighted to share them with you today.

Egmont - Overture to Goethe's tragedy, Op.84

If Goethe's 1787 tragedy Egmont is not exactly familiar in the English-speaking world, there's no doubt that Beethoven rated it highly. Count Egmont was a leader of the Netherlands' struggle for freedom from Spanish rule. Captured and executed in Brussels in 1588, he became a martyr of the liberation struggle. Goethe turned the dry facts into a visionary drama of courage and freedom, so it’s no surprise that Beethoven was impressed. In June 1810, he completed a suite of incidental music for the play, and sent a deluxe edition of it to Goethe at his own expense.

No theatre capable of staging Goethe’s drama in the early 19th century was able to accommodate anything like a full modern orchestra. That didn’t bother Beethoven, who wrote to Goethe glowing with enthusiasm for “your glorious Egmont, which I have set to music as powerful as my emotions on reading it." And it shouldn’t prevent us from responding to this musical drama of tyranny, struggle and liberation, crowned by the ringing fanfares that accompany the hero’s final words: “Fall joyfully, as I give you the example.” Even if, instead of trumpets, we have flute and strings, reaching indomitably for the stars.

String Quintet in C minor

Allegretto

Adagio man non tanto

Minuetto Presto

When eighteenth-century music-lovers spoke of “The Wife of Haydn,” it wasn’t out of interest in the domestic life of the Father of the Symphony. It was the nickname, coined by the violinist Giuseppe Puppo, for Luigi Boccherini: virtuoso cellist and composer of some 20 symphonies, 12 cello concertos and countless chamber works. Born in Lucca, near Florence, he travelled first to Vienna and later to Paris as a performer and composer, settling in Madrid in 1768. He spent much of his career under the patronage of various members of the Spanish royal family, and later (in a form of classical-era remote working) the cello-playing King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia - but he remained based in Madrid for the rest of his life, and performed and composed until the last.

As an Italian, trained in the instrumental tradition of Corelli, Boccherini had a strong lyrical impulse - even today, there’s something operatic (Italianate, if you like) about the singing melodies and swirling ornaments that are such a feature of his music. To the eighteenth-century mindset, this made his music “feminine”. Make of that what you will, but the nickname (as nicknames will) does at least show just how widely Boccherini’s music was appreciated in his lifetime, and the affection in which it was held. He composed over 140 string quintets – adding a second cello (his own instrument, of course) to the classical string quartet – and the six quintets Op.10 date from 1771 and his earliest years in Madrid. Boccherini had them published by Venier of Paris in 1774. “Composed by Signor Luigi Boccherini, chamber virtuoso and composer of music to His Royal Highness Don Luigi, Infante of Spain” declares the title page, in florid letters, and it seems likely that when these quintets were first played at the Spanish court, Boccherini would have been expected to display his own prowess in the higher cello part. But – ever the businessman – Boccherini suggests that if a virtuoso cellist isn’t available, their part could be taken by either a second viola or (believe it or not) a bassoon; and in this performance (which uses an edition published in Paris in 1810) we’ve gone for the first option. The quintet is cast in the bittersweet key of C minor, and the extra player serves principally to intensify the shifting moods and colours of a first movement that alternates between melancholy song and courtly bustle. The expansive Adagio gives way to a strangely restless Minuet - which suddenly erupts into an imitation of warlike drums and trumpets. A stately central Trio section pours oil on the waters. And the finale races in like a summer storm. If Boccherini could do elegance like few late eighteenthcentury composers, there’s no question that he could unleash tempests too.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (17701827), ARR. MORI

Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92 Poco sostenuto – Vivace

Allegretto

Presto

Allegro con brio

New music often has a troubled birth. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was premiered in Vienna on 8 December 1813. The occasion was a benefit concert for Austrian soldiers wounded in the recent Battle of Hanau, and Beethoven's