The Magic Harp

1-3 APRIL 2020

THE MAGIC HARP –––––

2019/2020 PROGRAMME NOTE SCO.ORG.UK

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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR –––––

WEBER (1786–1826) Overture, Der Freischütz (1821) MOZART (1770-1827) TRANSCR. DE MAISTRE

Piano Concerto No 19 in F, K459 (1784) Allegro Allegretto Allegro assai

SCHUBERT (1797-1828) ED. NEWBOULD

Suite Die Zauberharfe UK Premiere (2019)

––––– Harpists are, without doubt, a magical bunch. Maybe it’s the enchanting, melancholy ripplings of their instrument, or even the fact that, as with pianists, there’s a certain distance between them and other orchestral players. The harp is an instrument with its origins in the mists of folklore, after all. An old Gaelic legend from Skye tells of a youth so obsessed with a mysterious harp he finds washed up on a beach that his mother sells her soul so that he’s able to play it. It’s an instrument that crops up in countless Nordic myths and legends, as protector, betrayer, even seducer – and, not coincidentally, it’s also the instrument of choice for Tolkein’s elves. It was the favourite of medieval monarchs, too, who often took their harpists as good-luck accompanists into battle – where the musicians were traditionally spared death for fear of their mysterious, otherworldly powers.

So it’s entirely fitting that tonight’s concert features plenty of harp music, and plenty of magic too. No harps in tonight’s opener, unfortunately, though there’s more than enough magic to make up for that. Weber did nothing less than revolutionise German opera with Der Freischütz, a sensation at its premiere in Berlin in 1821, and a work that quickly swept across Europe.

Weber had become music director of Dresden’s Staatskapelle four years earlier, following a childhood in which he’d been pushed to become the next Mozart, with some degree of prodigal success. And at that venerable Dresden institution, he dispensed with the likeable but lightweight Italian opera that the city’s audience had grown used to, replacing it with ambitious, pioneering, all-German Romantic operas from the new artistic movement he felt very much part of. It’s no exaggeration

to say that without Weber, there would have been no Wagner, and even later composers including Debussy and

month. He had moved to Vienna three years earlier in search of greater fame and fortune than he was able to achieve

Stravinsky acknowledged his influence.

in his birthplace of Salzburg, but quickly found how fickle and fashion-led Viennese audiences were, and therefore how he had to create fresh music and showcase his talents to keep their attention. What he created here was one of his sunniest, most optimistic concertos, and one whose buoyancy and transparency also make it a natural fit for the harp. Following the first movement’s deceptively simple opening theme, contrapuntal exchanges develop between orchestra and soloist, and also between instruments within the orchestra.

The second movement puts the soloist in a touching dialogue with the winds, and Mozart contrasts an unashamedly populist, toe-tapping opening theme with some rigorous Bachian fugal writing in his finale.

And you can see why. Der Freischütz is one of three operas by himself – alongside Euryanthe and Oberon – that Weber produced in Dresden, and in it he piled on the new, Romantic elements he found so exciting: stories and tunes from folklore, a dark undercurrent of the supernatural, dance, a tragic yet all-conquering marksman hero, all wrapped up in an improbable but hair-raising story of magic bullets, forbidden love and pacts with the devil. No wonder audiences lapped it up. Its Overture, frequently played as a stand-alone concert work, is virtually a miniature tone poem in its own right, its quartet of horns representing the opera’s heroic hunters, while low grumblings on strings, clarinets and bassoon summon up demonic powers. You’ve been warned.

We turn from magic to the harp in tonight’s second piece. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 19, K459, was originally written for – well, keyboard, obviously, though French harpist Xavier de Maistre has made a thoroughly convincing version for his own instrument, arguing that in the Concerto, Mozart tends to exploit the upper registers of the keyboard, notes that ring particularly clearly on the harp as well.

He’s also observed that (ironically) the work is written more idiomatically for the harp than even Mozart’s own Concerto for Flute and Harp.

At last, tonight’s twin themes of magic and the harp come together in the closing work, a suite of music from Schubert’s Die Zauberharfe, reconstructed by composer, conductor and Schubert scholar Brian Newbould. He writes:

Mozart completed the Concerto on 11 December 1784, according to his own catalogue, and he probably wrote it for

“The purpose of this suite is to make available for the listening ear today, music that is scarcely known but that reflects a phase in Schubert’s stylistic development that had consequences for his later works.

To achieve this aim, it was necessary to take into account criticisms that attended the one and only run of performances the opera enjoyed, at Vienna’s Theatre an der Wien in 1820, as well as the views of score-reading musicologists since. Die Zauberharfe is a ‘magic opera’, cast with supernatural beings as well as humans, the latter’s actions being at times determined

himself to play at an Advent concert that

by spells cast by the former. It was also

a visual extravaganza, using elaborate stage machinery that was in vogue in Vienna at the time.

The libretto Josef Hofmann wrote to meet this specification was not perhaps the wisest choice for a composer keen to make his name in opera. Yet it seems it was the very melodramatic (in the modern sense) nature of the plot that fired Schubert’s interest – the musical spark being ignited particularly in the several ‘melodramas’ (in the historic sense) it contains. These melodramas entail short bursts of spoken dialogue from the stage (anything from one word to 30-something), interspersed with utterances by the orchestra (from one note to c50 bars).

“After eight performances, the opera was withdrawn, detailed records of the staging destroyed, and the libretto lost.

Only the music (or most of it) survives, including (again, for the most part) the texts set. But reviews of that 1820

Carl Maria von Weber

advances’, these being qualities that severely tested the critical faculties of the press of the day, who could but find the ‘orchestration overdone’, and the ‘harmonic

production (in the Viennese press) suggest the plot was complex but nonsensical, the texts feeble and muddled. One local critic found in the piece nothing but ‘nonsense and tediousness’. ‘Wretched trash’, wrote Rosenbaum in his diary. In her standard critique of Schubert’s stage works, Elizabeth McKay writes of the melodrama texts as ‘unspeakably awful’.

Clearly the loss of the libretto makes the opera now unstageable, but there is little chance in any event that a modern staging could redeem either the work itself or its long-faded genre. Yet there has been general agreement that the music is of some value, especially in the context of the composer’s creative development. McKay rightly observes ‘progressive thinking’ in

progressions… too harsh’.

the melodramas, and ‘striking technical

of the Vienna Conversationsblatt, which

“An orchestral suite will by definition omit the choruses, which tend to be formulaic by comparison with the melodramas (‘dull and feeble’ was the harsh verdict of a Leipzig critic on these choruses). Salvaging the arguably most interesting numbers, the melodramas themselves, can only be done at the cost of compromise. A modern audience could not be expected to suffer the spoken texts they include, which may well produce today an effect comic rather than dramatic. (In other words, the Dresden critic who thought Schubert ‘has too often interrupted the words with music’ should have considered the opposite standpoint – more in line with the view

was that it was a pity that ‘Schubert’s wonderfully beautiful music has not found a worthier subject’.) At the same time, the

texts, whose libretto and music reportedly underwent changes in the rehearsal period, and possibly even during the

music was intended to reflect the fleeting words and images as they come and go (fiery, threatening, tender, pleading and so on). In that sense our textless version brings us ‘effect without cause’. Never mind. More importantly – and this is a possibly more severe compromise in the case of a suite for concert use – in these melodramas Schubert does not apply theme and key to forge unified, cumulative structures (like those of symphonic movements) that will stand well in the concert hall. Nor is there much trace of the principle of long-term thematic recall that gives shape to symphonic music.

performance run, it appeared sensible to determine the order of items in the suite on musical grounds rather than in accordance with the dramatic order of events, such as it might have been. (A precedent for not following the action of the source work, if such is needed, is Prokofiev’s own Suite No 2 from his Romeo and Juliet ballet.)

“But the suite does include a few more conventional and shorter pieces, such as the Overture to Act III, which sounds like a medley of Austrian dances, building towards something like a symphonic conclusion. There are shorter pieces for wind, or mainly wind, which are listed as melodramas but are more conventional and explicit in form (movements 5 and 7), as well as the ‘Chorus of Spirits’ with its delicate contribution from not just one but two harps. And within the melodrama ‘Der Funke fing’ (‘The spark has flared up’) is an ‘aria’ or ‘romance’ with added harp, which I place at the end of my third movement. (A harp? In Schubert? Although the loss of the libretto means that the plot is unclear, McKay made a brave attempt to reconstruct an outline from the texts to the musical numbers, suggesting that love and familial loyalties are involved, with the harp having a love-inducing role.)

“Ideally this mélange (to use a term familiar in the Vienna coffee-houses) of a suite should be framed by music that does as well in the concert hall as in the opera house – with a resounding coda to end the whole suite. Happily such a piece exists – and could hardly be more appropriate. The overture Schubert wrote for Die Zauberharfe was not ‘wasted’ when the opera itself flopped: it was recycled for the incidental music to another feeble play, Rosamunde. And it carries that name today.

“Given our sketchy understanding of a

“Two features of this well-known overture suggested a further compromise might be appropriate – an artificial solution to the shaping of a suite which already involves inevitable artifice. First, the overture has no central development section, but leads directly from exposition to recapitulation (via hints of the returning first theme in Rossini fashion). And second, it begins with a slow introduction. This second fact is of special relevance, because the leading idea of that introduction, the seven long notes each accompanied by its own chord, returns to begin several later numbers of the opera – as well as providing the subject of a striding fugato for orchestral tutti heard twice in Melodrama 3 (‘Furie bebe!’)

reputedly weak opera with second-rate

(sixth movement of suite).

“Since Schubert, in his First Symphony, began his recapitulation not with the first Allegro theme but with his slow introduction, there would be some sort of precedent for me following this overture’s development with a return of its slow introduction. This I do, to the extent of reintroducing those first seven long notes. But I do so to begin a subsequent movement of my suite, as Schubert does to begin a later number in his opera. If at this point I have moved, then, to a further movement, what has happened to the overture’s actual recapitulation? That, with its fine coda, becomes the finale of my suite. The Overture thus becomes the ‘wrapper’, with the other movements serving as a substitute development. I would like to think that the composer forgives me for seeing this radical move as an effective – and justified – way of salvaging the best of his failed opera in a manner more acceptable to a concert audience.

“There is one curiosity to be explained.

When studying Schubert’s stage works in

Franz Schubert

front). Schubert separates the original from the reversal (or retrograde), placing a few minutes of action and music between them, thus allowing the plot to develop with such a

the early 1990s, I discovered a palindrome in Die Zauberharfe. Palindrome, a technique known to Bach, entails the presentation of a passage of music followed by its reversal or retrograde. Haydn’s Symphony No. 47 (c1772) has its minuet built as a palindrome, and likewise its trio. The composer manages this by confining his harmonic vocabulary to the two most basic chords for nine-tenths of its course. Schubert’s palindrome is longer (19+19 bars rather than Haydn’s 10+10 for his minuet and 12+12 for his trio), is scored for a larger orchestra including trombones, and is more exploratory in its harmony, involving a spell of sliding chromatic harmony. Its relevance in a magic opera derives from the fact that a spell cast by a supernatural being upon a human may turn

turnaround of fortune between times.

that human’s fortunes inside out (or back to

modules of the palindrome have been

“It appears that the palindrome had remained undiscovered until the 1990s.

It did not attract notice or mention in the 1975 Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition). Given the spacing of the two modules several minutes apart, it is possible that the conductor and players in 1820 were unaware of it; that, indeed, the secret died with Schubert. It is also a remarkable fact – further denting that old image of Schubert as an instinctive, tuneon-back-of-menu composer – that the only known orchestral palindrome in 19thcentury music should be by Schubert.

“For the purpose of the Suite, the two

brought together, one immediately following the other, to make identification by ear easier. This is the substance of the short second movement, after the seven long notes already mentioned. In a fast 6/8 time, strings begin pp, wind soon enter p, a crescendo leads to a tutti ff, the harmony slides chromatically, swirling figures follow with accents on and off beat, and a final chord is heard on the offbeat. All that occupies some 20 seconds. A short silence; the final chord is heard, the swirling figures, the chromatic harmony reversed, brass drop out as a decrescendo begins, then woodwind drop out, and strings return to pp: end of second movement.

“Could there have been other sources of inspiration for Schubert’s palindrome?

A caricature in the magazine of a ‘Nonsense Society’ to which the composer belonged shows Schubert looking into a kaleidoscope and walking into the path of his friend Kupelwieser on the newly

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

the mirror in one way (to produce a palindrome), while in 1822 he was to apply the mirror in the other way, producing in the Wanderer Fantasy for solo piano a

invented bicycle. The kaleidoscope, invented by Sir David Brewster in Scotland in 1815 and patented by him in 1817, had reached Vienna by 1818. Either the exported gadget came with details of how it worked (with multiple angled mirrors) or Schubert and his friends worked it out for themselves. Did the composer then ponder how he might apply the mirror principle to music? Did he find that a mirror placed to the right of printed music displayed that music backwards? And that a mirror placed above the music shows ascending notes as descending and vice versa, and also inverts the relative position of the staves – for example in piano music placing the right-hand part above the left-hand part? It is of interest, then, that here in

passage (at bars 83-66) that would be subjected to the inversive processes just described (bars 90-93). Of course, minor musical adjustments have to be made in both cases, but the reversal or inversion is in both cases exact enough to leave the mirror origin in no doubt, and creates an outcome of musical value, as a way of deriving diversity from unity or combining contrariness with coherence.

this opera of 1820 he is found applying

©David Kettle

“The cause that drives my project is, then, not to rescue an unrescuable opera, but to etch in a step in Schubert’s creative self-discovery. The suite was premiered in Vienna by the Junge Philharmonie Wien conducted by Michael Lessky on 23 May 2019”.

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