Zimmerli Series: Carefree

Zimmerli Concert Series

now feeling Carefree

SATURDAY March 5

7:00 pm @ Twichell Auditorium, Zimmerli Performance Center 2022

Overture to L’amant anonyme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Geroges 8 min

I. Allegro presto II. Andante III. Presto

Violin Concerto no. 3 in G Major, K. 216 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .W. A. Mozart 24 min

Callie Brennan, violin

I. Allegro II. Adagio III. Rondo: Allegro

Intermission

Symphony no. 2 in D Major, Op. 35 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Louise Farrenc 35 min

I. Andante – Allegro II. Andante III. Scherzo: Vivace IV. Andante – Allegro

Programs subject to change | All timings are approximate.

Avid readers of HearHere (as if there could be any other kind!) will remember, in Fall of 2020, encountering the man with possibly the most fascinating life story in all of classical music, the Chevalier de St.-Georges. Just as St.-Georges’ music undoubtedly merits repeated performance, his story merits a full recapitulation.

TThe Chevalier was born Joseph Bologne on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe in 1745. His father, Georges Bologne, was a minor French nobleman and plantation owner there; his mother, Anne, was a young enslaved Black woman of Senegalese descent. Most children born in such circumstances were, of course, studiously ignored by their fathers; by contrast, young Joseph was packed away to boarding school in Paris at the age of seven, and two years later his both his parents followed him to Paris, where they set up house in a spacious apartment on the left bank. France’s “Black Laws” forbade his parents to marry and prevented Joseph from inheriting his father’s title, but the young man was raised as a gentleman and mastered the arts of swordsmanship and horsemanship.

Young Joseph gained his first fame as a fencer, moving King Louis XV in 1766 to bestow the title “Chevalier de SaintGeorges” on the young man. As his fame in Paris and the court at Versailles waxed, the young Chevalier pursued a very different career, appearing first as a violinist and then as an orchestra leader on the stages of Paris. In 1776 St.Georges was tapped to be the new music director of the Paris Opera, but three of the opera’s most celebrated leading ladies objected to Marie Antoinette that they could not possibly accept the direction of a mere “mulatto, and St.-Georges withdrew from the appointment.

St.-Georges remained active in Paris’ musical life even as he grew in stature as a public figure, supporting the causes of slavery’s abolition and the upstart colonials in the War of American Independence. In 1785 he commissioned and premiered Haydn’s “Paris” symphonies, only to see his career take a sudden turn when the politically vulnerable King Louis XVI dispatched him to London on a diplomatic mission that also, conveniently, removed the independent St.-Georges from France’s political scene. St.-Georges became both fencing tutor and a close friend of the Prince of Wales, but when the French Revolution finally came in 1789 St-Georges had been marginalized in London for so long that – ironically – his relative political moderation was unhelpful to the King, who shortly thereafter made his way to the guillotine.

When in 1790 Austria massed troops for an invasion of France, St.-Georges convinced the revolutionary government to allow him to recruit a regiment of Black soldiers. Under his command they fought heroically, but by 1794 the revolutionaries were turning on one another, and as part of Robespierre’s bloody Reign of Terror St.-Georges was sentenced to death. But Robespierre himself was led to the gallows before St. Georges could be executed; on gaining his freedom St.-Georges led a delegation to Haiti, in an unsuccessful attempt to mediate the bloody slave rebellion there, ultimately wound up back in Paris at the head of another orchestra in 1796, and finally died of bladder cancer in 1799. It’s unarguably the stuff of movies, and in fact Disney subsidiary Searchlight Pictures will release a biopic sometime in 2022.

While we wait for the movie to come out (evidently it’s currently held up in production somehow), we have the music. St.-Georges’ music epitomizes the gentlemanly virtue of bonne grace. Understated and deceptively simple, it piques the interest not with the emotionality of Mozart or the rhythmic gamesmanship of Haydn but with smaller, subtler virtues: a surprising melodic leap

Overture to L’amant anonyme Joseph Bologne Chevalier de SaintGeorges

(1745-1799)

(Overture continued)

Violin Concerto No. 3 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

(1756-1791)

here, an unexpected turn of phrase there. L’amant anonyme, a comic opera with ballet, premiered in 1780; it’s the only one of his six operas which survives in its entirety. Its three-part, fast-slow-fast overture reflects the love triangle at the

It has become almost a truism that a child prodigy’s life is a stressful and demanding one, but Mozart, probably the most prodigious prodigy of them all, had no such experience. Despite his extensive tours from city to city and country to country, despite his frequent performances for Europe’s most powerful nobility, despite his near-total lack of playmates his own age, Mozart’s childhood was, by all accounts, generally a happy one. For him, the trouble came later – but that’s a story for another program note.

At least some small portion of his childhood contentment – and some large portion of his musical development – must be credited to the city that was his home. As oppressive and confining as Salzburg seemed to the adult Mozart, and as contentious as his relations with the Prince-Archbishop who employed him, they in many ways provided a perfect situation during the composer’s childhood. Salzburg was big enough and sophisticated enough to offer a variety of opportunities, yet small enough to be supportive and unthreatening. He performed on violin and viola as well as the keyboard instruments, and heard his music as soon as it was written (a privilege today’s young composers can only dream of). By the time he was 18, Mozart had written two dozen symphonies, concertos for several instruments, and choral and chamber works of all kinds.

So when, in 1775, Mozart turned his hand to the violin concerto, he was already mature enough both to sum up the recent advances of his compositional contemporaries and to push beyond them center of its plot; its oscillation between major and minor mode reflects the story’s secret-admirer ambiguities. Here, as he did in all those duels, St.-Georges makes it look easy.

to new heights of expressivity and formal inventiveness. He had spent many an hour in the Salzburg of his youth writing and performing serenades, the looselystructured, melodious instrumental pieces that served as background music for the Prince-Archbishop’s many outdoor soirées. And on his travels he was never happier than backstage in the opera houses of Italy.

Both opera and serenade shape the third violin concerto, the one on tonight’s program. The first movement’s opening theme is nothing less than an extended quote of one of the arias in his own opera Il re pastore; the songlike secondmovement Adagio would have been equally at home played outdoors, in a serenade, or sung on the stage of an opera house, in an aria. (In the second movement Mozart instructs his oboists to swap that instrument for the softer sounds of the flute, a trick Salzburg’s oboists were often called on to do.) Even more serenade-y (to coin a word) is the piece’s finale, where lively but remarkably unrelated dance episodes sandwich another borrowed melody, this one by Dittersdorf (whom keen-eyed readers will surely recall from his appearance on a Spartanburg Philharmonic program last Spring!).

What all this adds up to a masterwork written by a 19-year-old. It already bears the ultimate mark of the mature composer’s genius: an effortless ability to extract what is useful from the music of his contemporaries and predecessors without ever being hemmed in by their conventions.