Johann Strauss II’s music is always featured heavily at the New Year’s From Vienna concerts, and this overture shows up on that concert’s program fairly often. Die Fledermaus is an operetta by Strauss that I’ve never seen, though on the basis of this description, I think I’d like to. Who wouldn’t want to see a show that is “a sparkling confection of mistaken identities, illicit liaisons, and champagne-fueled merriment”? Not I!
Strauss was known as “the Waltz King”, since he wrote such legendary and immortal waltzes as On the Beautiful Blue Danube and Tales from the Vienna Woods. So it stands to reason that this effervescent overture contains, among other things, a waltz.
Two hundred years and two days ago, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor was heard for the first time, in Vienna. The bulk of this post is what I wrote about this symphony three-and-a-half years ago, and the performance I feature is the same, because it’s one of the greatest performances of this work I’ve ever heard–the energy this youth ensemble brings to this symphony is amazing–and because I can’t help thinking of this piece, with its themes of joy and universal brotherhood (and sisterhood!), played by this particular orchestra, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which includes Jewish and Palestinian musicians among its ranks. This music, in those hands, seems to me a far better thing than what is transpiring now between those same peoples elsewhere, and I hope the spirit of Beethoven triumphs in the end.
The post:
Whether or not the Ninth is Beethoven’s greatest symphony is a matter of debate, and I’m not going to join it here. The main contenders seem to be the 7th, 5th, and 3rd, each of which have strong cases to be made. For me it comes down to the 7th and the 9th, and I probably have a stronger personal attachment to the 9th, since it was my first real deep dive into Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonic world. Quite a starting point, eh?
It was when I was in high school and becoming keenly interested in symphonic music, to the point that I was examining orchestral scores in an attempt to unlock what secrets I could, with my level of training to that point. (Which was, ahem, not much. But I went ahead undaunted!) I remember the bookstore: A B. Dalton (remember those?) in the Monroeville Mall outside of Pittsburgh, when we were there visiting my sister, who was in college. There was a Dover edition of Beethoven’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, in full score.
Dover Publications used to make wonderful copies of music scores in fine books…and apparently they still do! I just now Googled the folks at Dover to see if they were still around, and there’s an active website, so that may be a place that starts taking my money soon…but anyway, I remember picking up the book in that B. Dalton and thumbing through it. At this point I knew nothing at all about either work, so I was completely baffled when I flipped to the last movement of the Ninth and saw…music for voices?
Was this a choral symphony?
Indeed it was…and is.
My sister actually gave me that book for either my birthday or Christmas that year; I procured a recording not long after. My band director dubbed me a cassette of the Ninth, and off I went. The recording was Herbert von Karajan, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. You never forget your first Beethoven Ninth.
That the Ninth captivated me utterly is unsurprising, as it has been captivating its audiences ever since Beethoven wrote it. The premiere is one of the legendary events in all music, with the deaf composer sitting on stage as his work crashed and hummed all around him…and he heard none of it at all. Imagine the poignancy of one of the musicians, alto soloist Caroline Unger, at concert’s end, putting her hand on Beethoven’s sleeve to turn him toward the audience, that he might see what he could not hear: their applause. When you listen to the Ninth, as with all of Beethoven’s late works, you are hearing the musical realizations of a man who could only ‘hear’ the work in his mind.
Beethoven’s Ninth went on to become one of the most influential works of music ever written. He fired the imagination of many composers with this work, and indeed, the Ninth took on a nearly mystical air as the 19th century wound on. The Ninth was one of Richard Wagner’s favorite works, and it was deep inspiration to both Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler, both of whom felt superstitious angst as they approached their own ninth symphonies, as if Nine was a sacred barrier beyond which a symphonist dare not tread. Mahler, having already written eight symphonies when he set out write Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), thought he might cheat the limit of Nine by not titling this work as a symphony, even though everyone believes it is. Even so, it didn’t buy Mahler much time: he would write his actual Ninth symphony and then die with only a few sketches written for his Tenth.
The Ninth is one of classical music’s true “event” works, often being programmed for concerts that are meant to commemorate specific events. One of the most famous of these was in 1989, when Leonard Bernstein conducted the work in East Berlin, leading an orchestra and chorus drawn from many nationalities. For this concert Bernstein changed the fourth movement’s focus from “joy” (Freude) to “freedom” (Freiheit), in celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall just a few months earlier. There really is a universality to Beethoven’s Ninth that lends itself to such things. It’s a deeply human work, encapsulating the tortured journey toward joy as imagined by a great composer brought low by deafness.
I thought about writing a lengthy annotation of the Ninth, but time didn’t allow, and besides, I’m not sure if such a thing is really necessary. But there are so many moments in the Ninth that are sheer magic. Here are some of the spots that capture my imagination:
:: The opening bars, with the strings in tremolo, playing only the tonic and the dominant, so we don’t even know if we’re in major or minor key. It’s an opening of total mystery, leading to a stormy march of a movement that is sheer musical relentlessness.
:: And that fiery scherzo, whose opening motifs echo the main theme of the first movement, but in a rhythm that drives, drives, drives forward. Even the timpani gets into the act, pounding out that rhythm in moments that seem to come out of nowhere, no matter how many times I hear the work. But wait! Halfway through the scherzo, Beethoven changes his original time signature and provides, charmingly shocking, a genial “drum and fife” section that eventually yields back to the original scherzo.
:: The double variation of the third movement? I used to have trouble with this movement, not really understanding what Beethoven was up to. It’s certainly a very long movement that leads us into the depths of Beethoven’s mind, as one of the great writers of variations in music history. Somehow Beethoven finds new and enthralling textures each time he winds his way through the long melody that sustains the movement, and then toward the end come the two sets of giant fanfares that are answered by the strings. The woodwinds sing throughout, and the time is marked by pizzicato strings. It’s an amazing movement that once bothered me.
:: And then we arrive at the fourth movement, that gigantic movement that is by itself longer than some of Mozart’s entire symphonies. A stormy passage opens, leading to a remarkable passage where Beethoven quotes each of the first three movements, almost questioningly, only to have the low strings reject each one. After one last declaration by the low strings, we finally arrive where the entire symphony has been leading all along: the famous “Ode to Joy” chorale theme, played first by pianissimo low strings. Beethoven repeats the theme four times, adding to the voices each time (my favorite is the second statement of it, before he adds in the violins but also writes the most wonderful countermelody for the bassoons).
Then the original stormy passage from the movement’s opening bars reprise, before we hear the first of our voices: the baritone soloist, declaring that it is time for a more joyful sound. “Freude!” he cries out, and the choral passage arrives, with the soloists leading through a set of variations on the chorale theme, variations which are answered by the chorus, all of this building to an immense chord that is one of the greatest single chords in all of music…and then the bottom drops out and a Turkish march begins, with Beethoven doing one of his favorite tricks of off-setting the beat.
I won’t describe more than that, save to note that the symphony’s closing moments are one of classical music’s true moments of magnificence. I have never heard the Ninth in a live performance, but I can only imagine that if performed well, it can be an almost overwhelming experience. There is a vastness to the Ninth that makes it a colossus in itself, but this is not at all unique to the Ninth: Beethoven’s greatest works all enjoy this expansive quality, but none are quite so big in their concept as the Ninth. Few works achieve this sense of containing a universe in itself. With the Ninth, Beethoven moved beyond composing music and instead created a world.
French composer Charles Gounod is probably the closest thing Hector Berlioz had to a successor in the musical world; Berlioz was too much the iconoclast to really found a “school” of composition reflective of his own thought. Gounod, however, counted Berlioz among his influences. Gounod was prolific and wrote a great deal of fine music, especially his operas–but for the most part, except for his operas Faust and Romeo et Juliette, Gounod is not much heard anymore. The apotheosis of French music was to come not in late Romanticism but in Impressionism.
When I was in high school, our band briefly toyed with the Grand March from Gounod’s opera The Queen of Sheba. Operatic grand marches are a particular delight, and this one is as grand as any. If memory serves we ended up putting this piece aside when the band director, Mr. Roosa, resigned suddenly mid-year and we ended up being rudderless as a band until a fresh face out of college, Mr. Fancher, arrived to take over in the last few months of my high school career. I remember that this Grand March was not much to his liking, and out it went. Pity, that…the trumpets have some really fun things to do in this piece.
There was news this week on the TRON front: Jeff Bridges is returning to the franchise for the third film that is apparently getting made soon. I’m a longtime TRON fan, all the way back to the original film in 1982, and I enjoyed the eventual follow-up, TRON LEGACY, which doesn’t seem to have been received terribly well, but who cares about those people, anyway.
The 1982 film featured a “futuristic” (for 1982) score, dominated by synthesizers, by composer Wendy Carlos. Carlos is a noted pioneer of electronic and synth music, and her work for TRON at this point in time sounds both groundbreaking in its approach to scoring a mainstream film with electronic music, and dated because of the state of the electronic gear at the time. But never mind the dated qualities; Carlos did an amazing job at suggesting the otherworldly nature of the World Inside the Computer, but she also composed music of genuine wonder and excitement.
I’ve just read that most of Carlos’s recorded music is unavailable for listening, in any format. This seems to me something of a cultural crime.
Part mix tape, part sonic love-letter, the Open Ears Project is a daily podcast where people share the classical track that means the most to them. Each episode offers a soulful glimpse into other human lives, helping us to hear this music—and each other—differently.
I’ve been listening for a while, though I’m behind on episodes right now, and the most recent one I’ve heard is the episode with Tom Hiddleston in which he shares a work called Spiegel im Spiegel, by Estonian composer Arvo Part. Part is apparently the most frequently performed composer alive today, after John Williams, which is really saying something. I’ve heard very little of Part’s music, but what I have heard I always find hypnotic in its minimalism, and that’s certainly the case with Spiegel im Spiegel, which breaks from my usual habit of featuring orchestral music here. This is a chamber work featuring solo violin and piano, and it’s simply wonderful.
Spiegel im spiegel translates to “Mirror in the mirror”, and according to the notes on Wikipedia this refers to an “infinity mirror”, where two mirrors face each other and produce infinite reflections into the eternal distance. This makes me remember something as a kid, in all the department stores: the clothes sections had mirrors so you could see how something looked as you tried it on. The nicer stores had a three-mirror set-up so you could see how something looked from several angles. And if you were really lucky, the two angled mirrors on the sides were hinged so you could bring them in around you. I’d go up to one of those and enclose myself in a triangle of mirrors, and this was pretty trippy fun for a seven or eight-year-old kid. (My mother, for some reason, did not approve when I would do this. To this day I don’t see the problem.)
Spiegel im Spiegel is delicate and contemplative, and the sound is open and clear…almost infinite, like a perfectly mirrored pane of glass. Listening to it I can certainly hear an aural version of the imperfect infinity of endless reflections that bend slightly to one side, since you can never get the perfect vantage point to see all the way into infinity because your head is in the way. What a wonderful piece.
(And I heartily recommend The Open Ears Project. I won’t even accuse them of stealing my Tone Poem Tuesday idea for a podcast!)
We recently watched The Holiday, a rom-com written and directed by Nancy Meyers, and we liked it a great deal, despite our inability to quite buy into the idea that both Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz are lovelorn women with zero luck in love. I enjoyed the movie for many reasons, one of which is the score by Hans Zimmer. Zimmer is not always the first thought people might have when thinking about scores for rom-coms, but he has some chops in this regard! One of my favorite Zimmer scores is, after all, his wonderful work for As Good As It Gets, and now I’m enjoying this one. Here’s a selection.
Composer Eric Whitacre, whom I have featured several times in this space before, is an always fascinating voice to return to. I had, in fact, forgotten about him until the week before the eclipse, when I looked up classical music selections inspired by space (that were not Holst’s The Planets, which is a work with which I’ve had a strained relationship over the years). Whitacre’s name came up for a piece called Deep Field, which sounded interesting. It turns out that the background of Deep Field is even more interesting.
If you’re up on your Hubble Space Telescope lore, you’ll recognize the title Deep Field as referring to one specific image: the “Hubble eXtreme Deep Field”, and here it is:
Bigger versions are available here. By way of background:
This image, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), combines Hubble observations taken over the past decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax. With a total of over two million seconds of exposure time, it is the deepest image of the Universe ever made, combining data from previous images including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (taken in 2002 and 2003) and Hubble Ultra Deep Field Infrared (2009).
The image covers an area less than a tenth of the width of the full Moon, making it just a 30 millionth of the whole sky. Yet even in this tiny fraction of the sky, the long exposure reveals about 5500 galaxies, some of them so distant that we see them when the Universe was less than 5% of its current age.
The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field image contains several of the most distant objects ever identified.
It’s one of the most awe-inspiring images of our Cosmos ever captured, particularly when you realize that (a) this comprises just the tinies part of what we can see from here, and (b) the Cosmos looks like that in every direction. The vastness of space-time captured here and implied by the strange smallness of this specific infinity is utterly humbling.
The XDF image inspired the making of a film celebrating the years of Hubble’s service to astronomy, and Mr. Whitacre was brought in to score the film. The result is an amazing ethereal work that builds and builds and builds with intensity, before subsiding with the entrance of a choir. The work is open and yet dense, peaceful and yet driving…it’s music that stands alongside our images of the depths of our universe.
Grammy® award-winning American composer Eric Whitacre’s symphonic work Deep Field was inspired by the world’s most famous space observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope which celebrated its 30th year in orbit in 2020, and its greatest discovery – the iconic Deep Field image. The film – Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of our Universe – illuminates the score by combining Hubble’s stunning imagery, including never-seen-before galaxy fly-bys, with bespoke animations to create an immersive, unforgettable journey from planet Earth to the furthest edges of our universe.
The film is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Grammy® award-winning composer & conductor Eric Whitacre, producers Music Productions, scientists and visualizers from the Space Telescope Science Institute and multi award-winning artists 59 Productions. The score and film paint the incredible story of the Hubble Deep Field. Turning its gaze to a tiny and seemingly dark area of space (around one 24-millionth of the sky) for an 11-day long period, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed over 3,000 galaxies that had never previously been seen, each one composed of hundreds of billions of stars.
Here is Deep Field, first performed in concert at the Royal Albert Hall, and then the film with the work alongside it. This is amazing stuff.
