The Eroica, Program Notes

Bernstein, Chichester Psalms
Liebermann, Concerto for Flute and Orchestra
Beethoven, Symphony No. 3, Eroica

Chichester Psalms (1965)
Leonard Bernstein
Born August 25, 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts
Died October 14, 1990, in New York, New York

I. Psalm 108, verse 2; Psalm 100
II. Psalm 23; Psalm 2, verses 1-4
III. Psalm 131; Psalm 133, verse 1

Every summer the choirs of Chichester, Winchester and Salisbury cathedrals in England join forces to produce a festival of choral music. Chichester has a great musical tradition, going back to the famous composer of madrigals (and notorious tippler), Thomas Weelkes, who was organist at the cathedral from 1601 until 1617, when he was dismissed for drunkenness, "swearing and blasphemy." Things settled down considerably at Chichester after the 1600ss, but a spirit of reckless adventure must still have been stirring in the soul of Reverend Walter Hussey one day in 1965 when his friend Dr. Charles Solomon suggested he commission the flamboyant and very Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein (who was one of Dr. Solomon's patients) to write a choral piece for the upcoming summer festival at the venerable and very British cathedral of Chichester.

Bernstein was on sabbatical leave at the time from his job as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, using the free time to concentrate on composing. Bernstein writes: "In the course of that sabbatical year I made many experiments because I had the luxury of a whole year to do nothing but experiment. I wrote a lot of music, twelve-tone music and avant-garde music of various kinds, and a lot of it was very good—and I threw it all away. And what I came out with at the end of the year was a piece called Chichester Psalms, which is as simple and tonal and tuneful and pure B-flat as any piece you can think of, because that was what I honestly wished to write. In the case of my own music, I would have to say that it has its roots everywhere. In jazz, in Hebrew liturgical music, in Bach and Beethoven and Schumann and Chopin and Mahler and the rest. To write what is really inside you can very often cause you to write eclectically. Now this is a word that is usually used in a...derogatory sense, but it's a word of which I'm very proud because I find that every good composer in the history of music is eclectic in one sense or another..."

Chichester Psalms displays many of the influences that Bernstein mentions as sources for his "eclectic" style. Although it uses sacred texts, its music contains echoes of jazz and Broadway, and there is a strong flavor of traditional Hebrew psalmody. The work is scored modestly for a small brass section, percussion, two harps and strings. The first movement, with its exhortation to "Make a joyful noise unto the world," is powerful and dance-like, with ingenious use of the choral and instrumental forces to create striking effects of color and rhythm. Although there is no obvious use of syncopation, the constant, irregular shifts in meter contribute to a feeling of suppressed jazz under the musical surface, and the movement ends with a joyous chorus that wouldn't be out of place in a Broadway musical.

The second movement, a long-breathed pastoral setting of the familiar 23rd Psalm, features the sweet, pure voice of a boy soprano accompanied by harps and strings and the women of the chorus. The men interrupt, shouting out the words of Psalm 2: "Why do the nations rage?" and a harsh, pounding dance ensues, with brass and percussion interjecting strident chords. The men fade away in agitated whispers as the women sing the final verse of Psalm 23 and the boy soprano ends the movement in a beautiful meditation on the words of quiet faith: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life." The third movement begins with an impassioned prelude for strings which subsides into a serene, peacefully flowing melody in the chorus that recalls the angelic passages of the Requiem of Gabriel Fauré. The work ends by gently quoting the opening melody of the joyous first movement, now seraphic and distant, and a solo muted trumpet echoes the theme over the final, quiet "amen."

Concerto for Flute and Orchestra, op. 39 (1992)
Lowell Liebermann
Born February 22, 1961, in New York, New York

Moderato tempo
Adagio
Presto

Lowell Liebermann began writing music as soon as he began taking piano lessons at age eight. Formal composition lessons started at age fourteen, and he made his performing debut a year later at Carnegie Recital Hall playing his own Piano Sonata, Op. 1. He went on to study composition at the Juilliard School with David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti, receiving a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree in 1987. He has swiftly risen to become one of the most productive and popular composers of his generation, with more than sixty works for virtually every instrument and musical form, including an opera, The Picture of Dorian Gray, to his credit. His music is performed by renowned artists the world over, and his honors include a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and awards from ASCAP and BMI. He has been composer-in-residence with the Dallas Symphony and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

The Flute Concerto, written in 1992, was commissioned by flautist James Galway and was given its first performance by him on November 6, 1992 with the Saint Louis Symphony under the direction of Leonard Slatkin. Galway had asked Liebermann to create an orchestral version of his 1987 Sonata for Flute and Piano, but the composer decided instead to compose a new concerto for the famous flute virtuoso. The brilliant writing for the solo flute and imaginative orchestration have made the work a major modern contribution to the somewhat sparse repertoire for flute and orchestra. Liebermann describes the underlying structure of the jazzy first movement as "variations on the harmonic progression of its principal theme (with) the central section...a set of explicit chaconne variations on a chorale version of this progression." The Adagio second movement begins with the flute supported only by the violas of the orchestra. This lyrical melody, "spun out over a pulsating, syncopated ostinato," is eventually taken up by the full string section. The brilliant final movement is, in Liebermann's words, "a virtuoso work-out" that requires superb breath control and dexterity from the soloist. The orchestration is piquant and inventive, with the solo flute joined in duets by unexpected partners such as trumpet, piccolo and contrabassoon. Terry Teachout wrote of the concerto in TIME, "The famous flautist has put his weight behind one of America's most gifted 'new tonalist' composers, with electrifying results. The harmonies are savory, the scoring luminous—and, yes, you can hum the tunes."

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, op. 55, Eroica
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn-on-Rhine, Germany
Died March 26, 1827, in Vienna, Austria

Allegro con brio
Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Finale: Allegro molto

The Eroica Symphony's title has an ironic story behind it. Beethoven originally intended the Third Symphony to be an homage to Napoleon Bonaparte, the general who had led the struggle for freedom in France. He identified with and admired Bonaparte, who had begun life as a lowly commoner, had fought for freedom and justice, and had exhibited courageous leadership in restoring order in post-Revolutionary France. But he deplored Napoleon's megalomania and obsession with military victory and conquest. Just two years before Beethoven started the Eroica, the French general had invaded and defeated Austria, and he was threatening war again even as Beethoven wrote it in the summer of 1803. But as much as Beethoven hated Napoleon's war-lust, he hated the arrogance and despotism of Vienna's upper-crust society even more and he continued to work on the symphony, with the single word Bonaparte inscribed defiantly on its title page. Shortly after finishing the symphony, Beethoven heard the news that Napoleon, the First Consul of France, had declared himself emperor. This is how Beethoven's friend Ferdinand Ries describes the composer's reaction:

"Beethoven esteemed him greatly at the time and likened him to the greatest Roman consuls...I was the first to bring him the intelligence that Bonaparte had proclaimed himself emperor, whereupon he flew into a rage and cried out: 'Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others and become a tyrant!' Beethoven went to the table, took hold of the title page of the symphony, tore it in two, and threw it on the floor."

From then on the work was titled the Eroica, or Heroic symphony, and Beethoven wrote on the new title page: "Composed to celebrate the memory of a great man."

Even now, two hundred years later, there are passages of this symphony that sound startlingly original and daring. The first two chords, bursting abruptly and unceremoniously from the orchestra like two sledgehammer strokes, command us to sit up and pay attention, and no whispering in the back rows there, either. The first theme that follows—a bare, unadorned statement of the notes of an E-flat major chord that slides unexpectedly into a diminished seventh chord and never quite goes where we expect. A softer second theme that is just repeated notes in the woodwinds. Then there are all those big sequences of tremendous, dissonant chords that pound at us so mercilessly, and the silences between them that sound almost as loud as the chords. And how about that place where everything dies down to a little tremolo in the violins and the Second Horn misses the cue for the recapitulation and comes in four bars early in front of God and everybody? And, despite all this strangeness, the music is grand and exhilarating and really doesn't seem long at all.

The Funeral March that follows the first movement is also a stunningly original gesture, as well as being the emotional centerpiece of the entire symphony. Here blooms the first flower of true 19th-century Romanticism, exploring an emotional palette that ranges from deepest grief and despair through nostalgic yearning and noble acceptance to triumphant joy and back again. The elegiac fugal section and the emotionally shattering climax that follows it are things of wonder, and the entire movement is one of Beethoven's most transcendent creations. The third movement Scherzo is no less original, beginning with the merest rustling whisper in the strings and building to a robust, unbuttoned peasant dance with some nimble horn licks in the Trio section (the Second Horn gets to make amends here for missing his cue in the first movement!). The Finale is a series of variations on a theme that Beethoven had created in 1801 as one of the principal themes in his ballet suite The Creatures of Prometheus. Beethoven may have had in mind some allegorical connections between this melody about a heroic Titan who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humanity and his Eroica Symphony. Or maybe it was just a good tune and he wanted to play around with it some more. In any case, he doesn't try to scale the emotional peaks he reached in the first and second movements, but is content to end the symphony with a movement that is joyful and satisfying without being overwhelming.

Jonathan D. Kramer writes: "Once the Eroica existed, no subsequent composer could ignore it. The development of 19th-century symphonic music is traceable more to the Eroica than to any other single work, and it took composers more than a century to exhaust its implications." It was not easy, however for Beethoven's contemporaries to immediately recognize the symphony's greatness. A Viennese music critic wrote after the premiere performance in 1805 that the audience could be divided into three camps: first, Beethoven's friends who "assert that if the public is not cultured enough artistically to grasp all these lofty beauties, after a few thousand years have passed it will not fail to have its effect"; a second faction "denies that the work has any artistic value"; and the third group, "a very small one, admits that the symphony contains many beauties but concedes that the inordinate length…wearies even the cognoscenti." Perhaps the most candid reaction came from some unidentified person in the gallery at the premiere who threw down the ticket he'd bought for a kreuzer and cried out, "I'll give another kreuzer if the damn thing will just stop!"