Celebration in Motion: Beethoven 7 SoNA
November 2, 2025
Walton Arts Center
David Glover, Guest Conductor
Festive Overture (1944)
William Grant Still
b May 11, 1895 in Woodville, Mississippi
d December 3, 1978 in Los Angeles, California
William Grant Still’s long career saw him active in an almost overwhelming variety of musical activities. He was the first Black composer to have a symphony
performed by a major orchestra and the first Black conductor to lead a major orchestra. He played the oboe in theater orchestras for Eubie Blake, Sophie Tucker, Artie Shaw, and Paul Whiteman. He arranged music for NBC radio shows. He wrote nine operas. He arranged music for film composers, including Dimitri Tiomkin for Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. He was on the musical staff for the TV show Perry Mason. And he wrote prolifically for
the concert hall – so much so, in fact, that much of his output awaits broader discovery.
Still’s 1944 Festive Overture got its start in a typically American way: via a competition, in this case in honor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s 50th anniversary. 39 composers vied for the $1,000 Jubilee Prize. The judges — Eugene Goossens, Pierre Monteux, and Deems Taylor, high-profile American musicians all — were unanimous in selecting Still’s Festive Overture. Goossens praised the work’s specifically American flavor that “bespeaks the pride of the composer in his native land, the warmth of the American people, and the grandeur of Scenic America.”
slowly, Smetana’s was sudden and devastating, enveloping him in ceaseless roaring and the cacophony of “shrieking demons in a furious rage.” He lived for eight years after the onslaught of the frightful malady, each year more tormented than the last. Eventually his mental health collapsed and he ended his days in an asylum.
Smetana was the pathfinder of a nationalist Bohemian music, as he helped establish a potent creative culture that was eventually to produce composers as varied as Antonín Dvořák, Josef Suk, and Bohuslav Martinů. In the opera The Bartered Bride, Smetana brought Czech music to international attention, and with the vast suite Má vlast (My Fatherland) he created an imperishably passionate manifesto of his love for his homeland.
Vltava (The Moldau) and Šárka, from Má vlast (1875)
Bedřich Smetana b March 2, 1824 in Litomyšl, Bohemia d May 12, 1884 in Prague, Bohemia
Beethoven wasn’t the only composer to lose his hearing. Bedřich Smetana was also beset with deafness, and his misery was even worse. Whereas Beethoven’s affliction developed
Vltava (The Moldau) is the best known of the six tone poems making up Má vlast. This expansive portrait of a mighty river covers a lot of ground, from its opening depiction of sunlight darting off the flowing water, through a hunting scene, a wedding dance, torrential rapids, and a final grand passage through Prague before it heads for the sea.
Šárka tells the story of the eponymous female warrior from the ancient Czech legend The Maiden’s
War. After winning the princely knight Ctirad’s heart by pretending to be a helpless captive, she drugs both him and his soldiers, then calls in her warrior maidens to murder the lot. (Karma dictates that she and her followers are soon rendered equally posthumous.)
Starburst (2012)
Jessie Montgomery
b December 8, 1981 in New York City, New York
Think of a modern musician’s career, not as a straight line, but as an ever-expanding sphere. Possibilities, potentialities, and commitments arise and are in turn embraced and explored as need be. Think of flexibility, of imagination, of curiosity, of boldness.
Then think of Jessie Montgomery, violinist, teacher, and composer with an expansive vision across multiple disciplines and deep commitment to social justice. Consider her recent album Strum: Music for Strings, which writer Thomas May describes as demonstrating “her work as both composer and performer; her fluent command of classical language, of the vernacular idioms of African American spirituals and folk music, and of the intersectional potential
of the string quartet; and her engagement with social justice.”
Montgomery tells us that Starburst “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 that premiered the work, the Sphinx Virtuosi, and I wrote the piece with their dynamic in mind.”
Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 (1813)
Ludwig van Beethoven
b December 16, 1770 in Bonn, Germany
d March 26, 1827 in Vienna, Austria
Although there is no evidence that Beethoven intended the Seventh Symphony as an expression of victory against Napoleon, audiences certainly considered it as such at the time of its earliest performances. The premiere in December of 1813 must have been quite a tony affair. Announced as
a patriotic fundraiser on behalf of soldiers wounded at the battle of Hanau, all the Viennese glitterati were in the audience while the cream of the musical establishment took part in the performance.
Oddly enough, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony wasn’t the concert’s pièce de résistance. That honor went to the Battle Symphony, a.k.a. Wellington’s Victory, a collaborative affair between Beethoven and Johann Mälzel, producer of the evening’s festivities and future inventor of the metronome. That night, great art rubbed shoulders with crass sensationalism as the audience roared its approval of both. It is sad to relate that, despite the excellent reception accorded the Seventh Symphony, Wellington’s Victory took home the gold.
The people’s choice notwithstanding, it was the Seventh Symphony that belonged on Olympus, but even some of Beethoven’s colleagues failed to recognize what now seems so obvious. Composer-conductor Carl Maria von Weber, flummoxed by a particularly obsessive passage in the first movement, wondered if Beethoven might have taken leave of his senses. (He hadn’t.)
Hector Berlioz toyed with the notion that Beethoven intended the first movement as a “peasant rondo.” (He didn’t.) Critic François-Joseph Fétis, a silly fellow with a penchant for rejecting the major composers of his day, suggested that the outer movements were victims of Beethoven’s encroaching deafness. (They weren’t.) Beethoven himself, on the other hand, referred to the Seventh as “one of the happiest products of my poor talents.” (It is.)
Program notes by Scott Foglesong, copyright 2025