Program Notes
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
TRAGIC OVERTURE. Op. 81
Duration: ca. 12 minutes
When Symphony Hall opened in Boston in 1900,
the prominent and opinionated critic Philip Hale
suggested signs be posted over the doorways
reading, “Exit in case of Brahms.” A fire wasn’t
needed to empty the auditorium, he quipped;
merely a few bars of Brahms would do the trick.
A distaste for Brahms was fashionable among the
lingering pro-Wagnerians of the time, who elevated
themselves above what they regarded as dated and
dusty. Brahms, they felt, was too busy looking over
his shoulder at Beethoven to focus on the “music
of the future.” Tchaikovsky threw his own tomatoes,
calling Brahms full of “self-inflated mediocrity,” and
Benjamin Britten stepped outside the composers
club long enough to say, “It’s not bad Brahms I
mind; it’s good Brahms I can’t stand.”
All this makes good fodder today, as Brahms is as
much at home at Symphony Hall as the Straz Center,
Mahaffey Theater and Ruth Eckerd Hall. His stature
as a symphonist is undisputed. His two dozen
chamber works are pinnacles of the literature,
and his concertos, serenades, sonatas and German
Requiem form a singular and commanding voice.
Almost all of his music is abstract and can be
enjoyed as music for music’s sake. Typical Brahms
has a rich, earthy quality, as if he planted notes as
seeds, tilled the ground and harvested music in full,
aromatic bloom.
Brahms often composed works in pairs, such as
his Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80, followed by
the Tragic Overture, Op. 81, which he had originally
called the Dramatic Overture and may well have
been inspired by Goethe’s Faust. The two couldn’t
be more different: the former loose and jovial
and based on drinking songs, the latter dark and
serious. Brahms summed it up best: “One laughs,
the other weeps.’’
Scored for large orchestra, the overture sounds
like the opening movement of a symphony, and in
fact follows the same sonata-allegro design as his
symphonic pieces. It begins with two massive D
minor chords that serve as anchors for the work’s
THE FLORIDA OR 40 CHESTRA | 2018-2019
fugal elements, climbing scales and abrupt starts
and stops. In his usual masterly way, Brahms builds
both mystery and urgency, slicing tempos in half for
contrast, then quickening the pace in a shattering
climax that ends with five pronounced chords and
a timpani roll.
“In this work we see a strong hero battling with
an iron and relentless fate,’’ the music critic and
biographer Herrmann Dieters wrote after the work’s
premiere in 1880. “We do not care to inquire whether
the composer had a special tragedy in his mind, or
if so, which one; those who remain unconvinced
by the powerful theme, would not be assisted by a
particular suggestion.’’
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874-1951)
VERKLÄRTE NACHT (TRANSFIGURED
NIGHT), Op. 4 (rebv. 1943)
Duration: ca. 30 minutes
Arnold Schoenberg was a musical chemist, his
notes the elements, the orchestra his laboratory. He
experimented with sounds, coming up with strange
concoctions, some unstable and explosive. And
when he was done, his theories knocked the music
world on its ear.
Although Schoenberg began composing in the
shadow of Brahms and Wagner, he soon created a
groundbreaking language: 12-tone music. With this
new system, Schoenberg tossed harmony out the
window, but not order. His music is highly organized
and precise in its use of the chromatic scale (an
octave divided into 12 equal parts) and free of the
constraints of major and minor tonality and the
relationship of consonance and dissonance.
“Schoenberg is a devil who seduced composers
away from the universally comprehensible musical
grammar that had evolved since medieval times,’’
notes Allan Kozinn in his book the Essential Library
of Classical Music, adding that he replaced the
sweep and lushness of 19th-century music with
“cragginess.’’ But in doing so, he liberated music
from what might have become a harmonic dead
end.
For all this revolutionary work, Schoenberg is not
always a popular choice in today’s concert halls.