The Hallé: Online Concert Programme | Wed 8 May 2024

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor

1. Maestoso
2. Adagio
3. Rondo: Allegro non troppo

Brahms’s First Piano Concerto is a work of breath-taking ambition, in terms of both scale and emotional complexity. To follow the process by which he got to grips with it is to watch the young and already highly self-critical composer struggling to establish a technique that would cope with what he had taken on, and attempting to mark out his position on Germany’s cultural map.

In 1854, a year after he had met and been befriended by Robert and Clara Schumann, and shortly after the attempted suicide that signalled the final stage of Robert’s mental decline, Brahms began work on a sonata for two pianos. He then decided – no doubt with Schumann’s description of his early piano sonatas as “veiled symphonies” at the back of his mind – to re-work it as an orchestral symphony, turning to his friends, the violinist Joseph Joachim and choral conductor Julius Otto Grimm, for advice to bolster what he felt was his inadequate command of orchestral technique. Partway through the finale, and with only the first movement orchestrated, he changed tack again. Setting the rest of the work aside, he recast the first movement for piano and orchestra and composed a new slow movement and finale, eventually completing a first draft of the concerto in late December 1856.

A private rehearsal in March 1858 in his home town of Hamburg left Brahms dissatisfied, and it was only after a good deal of further work on the score that he felt able to risk a public premiere. This took place in Hanover in January 1859. While not a wild success, its reception was positive enough to encourage Brahms to arrange a second performance in Leipzig. Leipzig was, at the time, Germany’s most prestigious musical centre; a success there would have made Brahms’s career and would have encouraged him to leave Hamburg and settle there. But neither audience nor critics were prepared for a concerto on such a massive scale and of such unremitting seriousness, and with a solo part completely devoid of ear-tickling virtuoso brilliance. Not since Beethoven’s Fifth had a piano concerto made such demands on its listeners and it got a hostile reception. A leading Leipzig critic stated bluntly: “This work cannot give pleasure … it has nothing to offer but hopeless desolation and aridity … a desert of the shrillest dissonances and most unpleasant sounds.” Even today, it is still possible to recapture something of the shock that the Leipzig audience must have experienced.

THE MUSIC
The opening, with its stark colouring and angry, leaping string theme, seething with trills, is blackly tragic, in spite of the warm, lyrical string theme that follows. In fact, the movement abounds in gentle, lyrical passages, moments of calm amid the general darkness and turbulence. At one point the tone becomes almost playful, until we sense a growing tension and realise that Brahms is preparing for the climactic return of the opening music. Indeed, he seems to labour the point unnecessarily, so obvious does it all sound. But then we hear why – as the music arrives firmly back in the home key of D minor, the soloist crashes in with a chord of E major. It is more than just a startling contradiction of what we were led to expect – this sense of dislocation lies at the heart of what this music is struggling with.

The second movement provides the expected emotional relief, though there is something reticent about its flowing tranquillity, its hushed restraint the only appropriate response to the tragedy of the first movement. There appear to be two impulses behind the music: Brahms called it a “gentle portrait” of Clara Schumann; in addition, he wrote the words “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini” (Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord) under the main theme in his initial sketch. He often referred to Schumann as “Mynheer Domini” – in his book on Brahms, the late Malcolm MacDonald suggested that it might have been intended as “an instrumental requiem for [Schumann’s] troubled spirit”.

In resisting any hint of superficial brilliance in rounding off the work, the finale substitutes a kind of truculent energy. The central episode is a fully worked-out fugue that owes much to Brahms’s study of J. S. Bach – the Leipzig audience certainly wouldn’t have expected that. Even the two short cadenzas towards the end are not conventional display pieces but serve to advance the musical argument. After the first of them, horns and woodwind tell us that D minor is now D major and that some kind of resolution is in sight. Brahms even gets the bassoons to slow the main theme down for an episode of amiably rustic piping, before the music gathers momentum again for the fiercely determined exhilaration of the final pages.

© Mike Wheeler

George Butterworth (1885-1916): A Shropshire Lad: Rhapsody for Orchestra

George Butterworth, perhaps the most gifted of the British composers who were killed in the First World War, set eleven of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad poems in two cycles in 1909-1911. In 1911 he composed an orchestral rhapsody which he first called The Land of Lost Content and then The Cherry Tree before settling on A Shropshire Lad. It is an epilogue to his two sets of songs, the intention being “to express the home¬thoughts of the exiled Lad”. The chief theme is taken from his setting of “Loveliest of Trees”. This is heard on solo clarinet after an evocative quiet introduction in which a four-note figure in thirds, alternating between clarinets and violas, is heard above a quiet A minor chord for muted strings. Thereafter other vocal lines of the song are quoted instrumentally and a passionate climax is reached. The coda re-states the introduction and a solo flute quotes from his setting of “With rue my heart is laden”. A Shropshire Lad was first performed at the Leeds Festival on 2 October 1913 conducted by Arthur Nikisch. It is now almost impossible to hear this potently nostalgic work without thinking of “the lads that will die in their glory and never be old”, like Butterworth himself.

© Michael Kennedy

Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934): Variations on an Original Theme, ‘Enigma’

Theme (‘Enigma’)
Variations:
1 C.A.E.
2 H.D.S.-P.
3 R.B.T.
4 W.M.B.
5 R.P.A.
6 Ysobel
7 Troyte
8 W.N.
9 Nimrod
10 Dorabella (Intermezzo)
11 G.R.S.
12 B.G.N.
13 * * * (Romanza)
14 E.D.U. (Finale)

The “Enigma” Variations is the work with which Edward Elgar won international recognition after years of struggle when his reputation was not much more than provincial. He sent the score to the great Austro-Hungarian conductor Hans Richter, a regular visitor to Britain and about to take up his post as conductor of the Hallé. Richter immediately included it in one of his London concerts in June 1899 in St James’s Hall. He conducted it with the Hallé in February 1900 in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Bradford. Other continental conductors followed suit, including Richard Strauss in Berlin and Gustav Mahler in New York.

Behind the ‘Enigma’
On 21 October 1898 Elgar had sat at the piano, lit a cigar and begun to improvise. His wife Alice interjected: “Edward, that’s a good tune. Play it again, I like it. What is it?” “Nothing yet,” he replied, “but something might be made of it.” He began to vary the theme, saying, “Powell would have done this” or “Nevinson would have looked at it like this”. Elgar went on playing – “Who does that remind you of?” “Why,” Alice replied, “that’s Billy Baker going out of the room.” The idea kept him busy that weekend, for on the Monday he wrote jauntily to A. J. Jaeger, his friend at the publisher Novello’s, to say that he had started a set of variations on an original theme. “The Variations have amused me because I’ve labelled ‘em with the nicknames of my particular friends … I’ve written each one to represent the mood of the ‘party’.” He finished the short score during January, began to orchestrate it on 5 February and completed it a fortnight later. Seventeen weeks from start to finish was fast work for Elgar. The personalities of this musical portrait-gallery were mostly friends of Elgar and his wife in Malvern. In 1968 Sir Frederick Ashton devised a brilliant ballet depicting all the individual “variations” gathered in Elgar’s garden (which never happened). His daughter Carice went to a performance and remarked: “They were all exactly like that. And I never liked any of them, except Troyte.”

Why ‘Enigma’?
Why “Enigma”? The word was added to the score only about a month before the first performance. It is written in pencil in Jaeger’s handwriting. Elgar later said that the theme represented “the loneliness of the creative artist” and one may now safely assume that it therefore represents Elgar himself. That’s easy. But what did Elgar mean when he informed the writer of the programme note for the first performance: “I warn you that the connection between the Variations and the theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’, but is not played …” This set off a guessing-game that continues to this day. Is it, as he hinted strongly, a well-known tune? Or is it an abstract theme such as friendship? Guesses at the tune range from Auld Lang Syne, Rule! Britannia and God Save the King to Pop Goes the Weasel and the Dies Irae (the Latin hymn of the Last Judgement and a musical image of death). Or was it a joke or a publicity stunt? We shall never know. How could a familiar tune be concealed in “Dorabella”, which was partly written before the Variations as a whole were conceived? But in 1900 Elgar gave another clue to the Musical Times, which reported that “Mr Elgar tells us that the heading ‘Enigma’ is justified by the fact that it is possible to add another phrase, which is quite familiar, above the original theme that he has written”.

The music
Fascinating as the work’s enigmas may be, the music is sufficiently great to stand apart from its autobiographical trappings. Its importance lies in its astonishing use of orchestral colour, applied with the touch of an assured master, and its combination of technical skill with human warmth and humour. The work is so full of happy touches, so well designed, with its emotional high peaks so cunningly placed, that one forgets the artistry that contrived all this, and is content to marvel at its perennial freshness and originality.

Theme The theme (“Enigma”) is an Andante in two wistful contrasted strains, its principal features being musical intervals of falling thirds, fourths and sevenths. The first six bars are for strings alone in G minor, followed by a G major section with a counter theme in the bass and the poetical entry of the woodwind. The music glides without a break into …

Variation 1: C.A.E. (Andante, G minor) Elgar’s loyal and devoted wife, Caroline Alice, is portrayed in a radiant and serene expansion (“prolongation” was Elgar’s word) of the theme, in second violins and violas, with flute and clarinet.

Var. 2: H.D.S.-P. (Allegro, G minor) Hew David Steuart-Powell was an amateur pianist in a trio with Elgar and the variation makes kindly fun of his characteristic diatonic run over the keys before he began to play (staccato violin and woodwind). The theme is in the basses.

Var. 3: R.B.T. (Allegretto, G major) Richard Baxter Townshend was noted for playing old men in amateur theatricals (shaky voice on bassoon), and this caricature has what one commentator calls a “skittish charm”.

Var. 4: W.M.B. (Allegro di molto, G minor) William Meath Baker was a country squire. He is depicted reading out the day’s plans to guests and banging the door behind him. That is what Alice Elgar noticed on the evening of 21 October 1898.

Var. 5: R.P.A. (Moderato, C minor) The poet Matthew Arnold’s son Richard is shown as a profound man (the tune is in bassoons, cellos and basses) and also as a witty conversationalist (woodwind).

Var. 6: Ysobel (Andantino, C major) Isabel Fitton was an amateur viola player and was taught by Elgar. Crossing the strings, a difficulty for beginners, opens this lovely variation, which also conveys something of Miss Fitton’s romantic charm.

Var. 7: Troyte (Presto, C major) This vigorous vignette, dominated by timpani and brass, represents the Malvern architect Arthur Troyte Griffith, especially, Elgar said, his “maladroit essays to play the pianoforte”. The unusual time signature is 1/1, requiring one beat in a bar.

Var. 8: W.N. (Allegretto, G major) The elegant woodwind phrase answered by violins stands equally for Winifred Norbury and for her 18th-century home, Sherridge, where Elgar was a frequent guest.

Var. 9: Nimrod (Adagio, E flat major) Here, in the favourite Elgarian key of E flat, is the wonderful tribute to August Jaeger, the publisher who recognised the composer’s genius when most others were deaf to it. The variation’s subtitle is a typical Elgarian pun: Jäger is the German word for “hunter”, while Nimrod is described in Genesis as “a mighty hunter before the Lord”. It is not a funeral elegy, as it is now often used, but a memory of a summer evening when Jaeger spoke eloquently to Elgar about Beethoven’s slow movements (hence the oblique reference in the opening bars to the “Pathétique” Sonata).

Var. 10 (Intermezzo): Dorabella (Allegretto, G major) The perfect contrast to “Nimrod” in its delicacy and affectionate humour. “Dorabella” (nicknamed after the more frivolous sister in Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte) was Dora Penny, a young girl who could always cheer up Elgar when he was in one of his black moods. The music, she said, mimicked her slight stammer. She and Elgar often went bicycling together. As Mrs Richard Powell in later life, she wrote a delightful memoir called Memories of a Variation. Sadly, Elgar ended their friendship in 1912.

Var. 11: G.R.S. (Allegro di molto, G minor) George Sinclair was organist of Hereford Cathedral but Elgar said this music was about his bulldog Dan falling into the River Wye, floundering about, scrambling out and barking. A school of thought rejects this and relates it to Sinclair’s superb pedalling of Bach’s organ music, but the fact remains that on the original sketch Elgar wrote the word “Dan”. However, music can be two things at once, so Dan’s frantic paddling and his owner’s virtuoso pedalling come to much the same thing.

Var. 12: B.G.N. (Andante, G minor) Basil Nevinson was the cellist in the trio mentioned in Variation 2 and this is a moving tribute to their friendship.

Var. 13 (Romanza): * * * (Moderato, G major) The asterisks, Elgar said, stood for Lady Mary Lygon of Madresfield Court in Worcestershire who, at the time the work was written, was on a voyage to Australia with her brother Lord Beauchamp, but his memory was at fault because she didn’t sail until April 1899, three months after the work was completed. The drums and lower strings sound like a liner’s engines and the clarinet quotes a phrase from Mendelssohn’s concert overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. It is a very intense and poetic little tone-poem and some have speculated that Elgar was thinking back to his engagement to a Worcester violinist, Helen Weaver, who contracted tuberculosis and sailed out of his life in 1885 to New Zealand (where she lived until 1929). There is no doubt, however, that the sketch is marked “L.M.L.”. Another enigma. One theory is that Elgar withheld Lady Mary’s initials for fear of gossip.

Var.14 (Finale): E.D.U. (Allegro, G major) This is Elgar’s self-portrait – “Edoo” was his wife’s nickname for him. The Variations were written when Elgar’s friends were “mostly discouraging”, so he said (not quite accurately), and there is in this finale an assertive determination to win through against the odds. In the longer revised ending that Elgar produced (at Jaeger’s suggestion) following the work’s London premiere, the recall of “C.A.E.” (Var. 1) is preceded by the personal whistle with which Elgar used to announce his return home, while the triumphant end of the new coda anticipates the opening notes of the great theme which, in 1908, was to begin Elgar’s First Symphony.

© Michael Kennedy