Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 ("Pastoral")
Saariaho: Orion
R. Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks

Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 ("Pastoral")
by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn on or around December 16, 1770 (his baptismal certificate is dated December 17), and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. He completed his Sixth Symphony in 1808. The first performance took place on December 22 of that year at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna at a "marathon" concert that also included the premiere of the Fifth Symphony. Actually, the numbering of the two works was reversed at this concert: the "Pastoral" was billed as No.5 and the C-minor work as No.6). The orchestral parts were published in 1809 and the full score in 1825 with a dedication to Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz and Count Andrei Razumovsky. The first performance in the United States took place in Philadelphia on November 26, 1829, at a concert of the Musical Fund Society, with Charles Hupfeld conducting.

This symphony runs about 40 minutes in performance. Beethoven scored it for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, and strings.

The Cleveland Orchestra first presented Beethoven's Sixth Symphony in December 1922, under Nikolai Sokoloff's direction.

The Cleveland Orchestra has recorded Beethoven's Sixth Symphony three times, with George Szell in 1962, Lorin Maazel in 1977, and Christoph von Dohnányi in 1986.

Many musicians and writers on music in the eighteenth century were preoccupied with music's expressive and representative powers. Time and again, composers attempted to demonstrate that music was able, even without the help of words, to depict specific feelings and emotions, and even to narrate a sequence of events. Examples abound, from Johann Kuhnau's Biblical Sonatas (1700) to Vivaldi's Four Seasons (1725) to Dittersdorf's symphonies based on Ovid's Metamorphoses (1785). One Justin Heinrich Knecht advertised his 1784 symphony, Musical Portrait of Nature, in a music journal on the very same page on which the notice for the 14-year-old Beethoven's first published works (three piano sonatas) appeared. Knecht's program, with its shepherds, streams, birds, thunderstorm, and clearing of the sky, is so similar to what Beethoven would use in his "Pastoral" that it is almost certain Beethoven knew Knecht's work.

It seems that Beethoven was often inspired by extra-musical images in his compositions. Occasionally, he responded to literary works such as the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliet in the second movement of his String Quartet in F (Op.18, No.1), or The Tempest in the Piano Sonata in D minor (Op.31, No.2) -- though it is not always clear how the connection has to be understood. With the Sixth Symphony, the evidence is much more concrete than in the other cases, since we have Beethoven's own titles for the individual movements. On the other hand, we also have his partial disclaimer about those titles, intended, as he insisted, "more [as] an expression of feeling than painting." On one of the sketch pages for the symphony, Beethoven noted: "All painting in instrumental music fails if it is pushed too far"; and indeed, for every bird call or thunderclap there are long stretches of highly evocative if not exactly descriptive music throughout the symphony.

Beethoven's attitude towards nature was different from other composers writing "characteristic" symphonies (which is how programmatic works were often called) in the early 19th century. Beethoven not only loved nature but, as many of his friends attested, worshipped it. Haydn and Mozart were not known for roaming the Austrian countryside; Beethoven, for his part, spent long and happy hours in the woods. He often retreated from Vienna to outlying areas such as Heiligenstadt, Döbling, or Gneixendorf, where he admired Nature with a capital N as a true spiritual child of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress") movement. "His response to Nature was too deep and intense to be called anything less than mystical," English author Basil Lam commented, "though one would not have dared to use the expression in his presence."

Beethoven became fascinated with the musical sounds of nature years before the composition of the "Pastoral" Symphony: as early as 1803, he notated in one of his sketchbooks a musical rendition of the sound of water in a stream. Even earlier, he made a musical reference to nature in the "Heiligenstadt Testament," the tragic document in which Beethoven first wrote about his encroaching deafness in 1802 (the Testament was addressed to Beethoven's two brothers but never sent). "What a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing." It is difficult not to think of this mention of the shepherd when listening to the "Shepherd's Song" in the finale of the Sixth Symphony. The love for the sounds of nature became inseparable from the pain of not being able to hear them.

Nature, then, acquired a transcendent meaning for Beethoven. More than a place replete with forests, brooks, birds and shepherds, Nature is a stage where an entire human drama unfolds: it is Beethoven's personal drama that receives universal significance through the musical treatment. In this sense, the happiness, the storm, and the reconciliation of the elements must be understood on a symbolic level as well as in a literal sense. The Sixth Symphony, composed almost simultaneously with the Fifth, then, has more in common with that work than one might think. In its own way, the "Pastoral" also represents a triumph over Fate, but the same conflicts are played out in a different arena. One similarity between the two works is the linkage of the last movements. Just as the Fifth Symphony's gloomy C-minor Allegro is connected to the finale without a pause, the last three movements of the "Pastoral," the country dance, the storm, and the thanksgiving song, form an uninterrupted sequence.

Of course, the differences between the two symphonies are no less important than the similarities. The most striking of these is, perhaps, the reduced role of musical contrast in the "Pastoral" -- nowhere else does Beethoven spend so much time on one melody, a single harmonic turn or rhythmic figure. While the Fifth Symphony is characterized by an unrelenting impulse to move forward and a constant modification of its motifs, the Sixth favors identical repetitions and extensive pedals (long-held bass notes), in order to emphasize the basic subject matter, which is the peaceful contemplation of nature and people in it.

There is no doubt that Beethoven was inspired by sounds he had heard (when he could still hear) during his long walks in the countryside. The calls of the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo at the end of the second movement are the most obvious examples, but there are others. Beethoven's secretary, the often unreliable Anton Schindler, reported the following anecdote which he could hardly have invented himself:

Beethoven asked me if I had not observed how village musicians often played in their sleep, occasionally letting their instruments fall and remaining entirely quiet, then awakening with a start, throwing in a few vigorous blows or strokes at a venture, but generally in the right key, and then falling asleep again; he had tried to copy these poor people in his "Pastoral" symphony.

Schindler then proceeded to point out those measures in the symphony's third movement in which "the sleep-drunken second bassoon [repeats] a few tones, while contra-bass, violoncello, and viola keep quiet; on page 108 we see the viola wake up and apparently awaken the violoncello -- and the second horn also sounds three notes, but at once sinks into silence again."

More often than not, however, the symphony expresses feelings, rather than depicting scenes or objects, as Beethoven himself had said. It expresses them with an amazing directness, apparent in the simplicity and warmth of the melodic ideas and the obvious pleasure taken in orchestral color. We have seen that in the "Pastoral" Beethoven dwelt on individual melodies and chords for much longer than he did in other works; by contrast, he varied the orchestration by constantly shifting the same melodies and melodic fragments from instrument to instrument, from one register into another. Rarely does one section of the orchestra retain prominence for more than a few measures at a time; from the point of view of orchestration, this is definitely one of Beethoven's most innovative scores.

Another unprecedented idea is the introduction of two solo cellos with mutes, playing their own individual parts throughout the second movement. In the storm music of the fourth movement, there is a slight discrepancy between the cello and the double bass parts: the former have rapid scale passages that span five notes, while the latter play similar passages with only four notes. The beat being divided into five parts by the cellos and into four parts by the basses, the notes don't exactly coincide, resulting in a continuous rumble that undoubtedly resembles the sound of the thunder. It is at this point that the trumpets and the timpani are first heard in the symphony. Their sonorities add power to the storm music; the climax is marked by the first entrance of the trombones, who have also been silent until now. The trumpets and trombones are retained in the finale, enhancing the solemn mood of the "thanksgiving song." But the timpani drops out and, as a result, the "Allegretto" sounds much more intimate and serene.

The "Pastoral" Symphony has often been cited as the starting point of 19th-century program music. There is an important difference, however. In the works of Berlioz, Liszt, and other Romantic composers, it is often the literary program that dictates musical structure. In Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the extra-musical ideas begin to impinge upon musical form, yet the Classical symphonic structure remains basically intact. Despite the extra movement between the scherzo and the finale and despite several idiosyncrasies due to the program, classical sonata form, with its own, purely musical dramaturgy still holds sway. Beethoven may have been responsive to extra-musical inspirations, yet he was first and foremost a musician. And he was never a more "absolute" musician than he was in his programmatic Sixth Symphony.

—Peter Laki

Orion
by Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952)

Kaija Saariaho was born in Helsinki on October 14, 1952 and currently resides in Paris. She wrote Orion on commission from The Cleveland Orchestra and completed the score on May 14, 2002.

Orion runs approximately 25 minutes in performance. Saariaho's score calls for 4 flutes (third doubling alto flute and piccolo, fourth doubling piccolo), 4 oboes (fourth doubling English horn), 4 clarinets, 4 bassoons (fourth doubling contrabassoon), 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (crotales, glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, tubular bells, triangle, shell chimes, small bell, suspended cymbals, tamtam, bell chimes, glass chimes, bass drum, 4 tom-toms, bass drum, 2 bowl gongs, 2 Chinese cymbals, thunderstick), 2 harps, piano, organ, and strings.

The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst performed Saariaho's Du cristal in October 2001. Orion was last performed at Severance Hall in January 2003.

Images of the night, dreams, myths, and distant mysteries have always loomed large in Kaija Saariaho's work. The Finnish composer's extensive catalog contains evocative titles like From the Grammar of Dreams, Wing of the Dream, Caliban's Dream, For the Moon, Graal Theater, The Castle of the Soul and, most recently, her opera performed with resounding success at Santa Fe this past summer, Love from Afar ("L'Amour de Loin"). Orion, the mysterious and adventurous hunter of Greek mythology, was the mortal son of Neptune (Poseidon), the god of the seas. After his death, Orion was placed by Zeus in the sky as a radiant constellation. He is, thus, at once an active (even hyper-active) human being and an immobile heavenly object, and Saariaho has fully exploited that contrast in the present three-movement work that is, for all intents and purposes, the composer's first symphony.

Orion begins its musical journey in a kind of amorphous "interstellar space." The first movement, titled "Memento mori" ("Remember that you must die"), evolves from a mysterious introduction towards a powerful orchestral outburst marked by the entrance of the organ. This moment also brings an expansive string melody and an insistent - one would like to say inexorable - rhythmic idea in equal eighth-notes, played fortissimo by the woodwind. The music then becomes more animated, with a new, excited figure all in rapid sixteenth-notes gradually taking hold of almost the entire orchestra, repeated furioso and con violenza until it is abruptly cut off.

The second movement, "Winter Sky," opens with a haunting piccolo solo, continued by solo violin, clarinet, oboe, and muted trumpet. As the orchestral soloists pass the melody around, the other instruments provide a colorful and atmospheric accompaniment. The orchestral texture later fills out with multi-layered polyphony, yet the movement remains calm and contemplative. For the ending, the already slow tempo becomes even slower as the piano emerges from the background with a "sky-high" melody repeating a few notes in changing permutations, over expressive string glissandos and the sound of chimes, bowed vibraphone and crotales.

We come back to earth with the energetic final movement, titled "Hunter." It is a study in perpetual motion - or almost, since the fast motion is repeatedly interrupted by short, mysterious episodes in slow tempo. The third such interruption, more extended than the first two, momentarily recalls the second movement, before the music returns to its former dynamic and joyful self. The excitement grows apace, but as the tempo increases, the volume decreases. More and more instruments drop out, and by the end, Orion has once again assumed his position on the night firmament.

—Peter Laki

Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks
by Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Strauss wrote Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche in 1894-95. The first performance took place on May 6, 1895, in Cologne, conducted by Franz Wüllner. On November 15 of the same year, the work was introduced to the United States by Theodore Thomas and the Chicago Orchestra (later known as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra).

Till Eulenspiegel runs about 15 minutes in performance. Strauss scored it for 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, english horn, small clarinet in D, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 (or 8) horns, 3 (or 6) trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, rattle) and strings.

The Cleveland Orchestra first performed Till Eulenspiegel in December 1923, conducted by Nikolai Sokoloff. The most recent performances prior to this season were given in September 1997, conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi.

The Cleveland Orchestra has recorded Till Eulenspiegel seven times: in 1940 with Artur Rodzinski, in 1949, 1954, and 1957 with George Szell, in 1979 with Lorin Maazel, in 1988 with Vladimir Ashkenazy, and in 1991 with Christoph von Dohnányi.

When Richard Strauss first contemplated a musical version of the story of Till Eulenspiegel, he was planning a comic opera for which he attempted to write his own libretto. The 30-year-old composer had already written the words and music to an opera, Guntram, a thoroughly Wagnerian music drama. Guntram had been a failure, however; and Strauss was looking for a less esoteric subject for his second opera.

Till Eulenspiegel is a familiar figure in German folklore, a prankster who lived in the 14th century and who became the hero of a Volksbuch, a sort of popular novel widely disseminated in the 16th century. (It also appered in an English translation at the time, in which Eulenspiegel's name [Eule = owl; Spiegel = mirror] was translated as "Howleglas".) Eulenspiegel was a master of practical jokes, a defender of the simple people against the powers that be, whether secular or ecclesiastic. He outwitted the learned, poked fun at the rich and typically beat others at their own games.

However, Strauss soon dropped his plans for an Eulenspiegel opera. Opting for a purely instrumental treatment of Till, he wrote his fourth tone poem. Although his preceding works - Macbeth, and especially Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration - had established him as the leading young composer in Germany, with Till he created what many regard his orchestral masterpiece.

Strauss chose to give his Till Eulenspiegel tone poem the form of a rondo, in which a recurrent central theme alternates with various episodes. With its constant repetitions of the main theme, the rondo hardly seems to be an appropriate way to tell the successive stages of a story. But Strauss's rondo is not the classical form of Mozart and Beethoven in which each recurrence of the rondo theme is exactly identical. Strauss varies his rondo theme extensively each time, subjecting it to ingenious transformations that completely alter the theme's character while preserving its pitch sequence. It is through these transformations that Till's adventures are told. The theme is adapted to many different situations, such as Till quarreling with the market-women, wooing a girl, mocking a priest and so forth. The episodes represent some of the other characters in the story such as the townspeople or the learned professors whom Till confounds.

The music of Till Eulenspiegel quickly became known for the virtuoso treatment of the orchestral instruments. The main theme is presented by a horn solo that is one of the most magnificent (and most difficult) in the entire orchestral literature, and shows Strauss's special fondness for the instrument. (His father, a member of the Munich Court Orchestra and professor at the Royal School of Music, was one of the greatest horn players of the day. Strauss had written works for the horn when he was fourteen, and wrote a concerto for the instrument in 1883.) Equally famous in Till is the use of the D clarinet, a smaller clarinet with a high-pitched sound that had seldom been used before as a solo instrument.

Unlike the historic Till who died in bed as a victim of an epidemic, Strauss's hero is put to death for his pranks. The condemnation and the execution are depicted by a sudden interruption of the Till theme, some menacing drumrolls, and a descending major seventh in the bassoons, horns, and trombones that seems to say der Tod ("death"). Till is hanged and his last breath is marked by a final D-clarinet solo followed by a loud trill on the flute. The tone-poem concludes with the archaic-sounding "once-upon-a-time" melody with which it began, adding a theatrical touch to the tone poem after all. It is in fact as if the curtain rose and then fell on the story of the great rogue.

—Peter Laki

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