Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes Online Henry E Rensburg Series Beethoven’s Emperor Thursday 7 June 2018 7.30pm

GUSTAV HOLST (1874-1934) Ode to Death chorus and orchestra Gustav Holst wasn’t your average English gent. He was, in fact, a radical. And he must have seemed so to his friends and colleagues in Cheltenham and London in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Holst’s interest in Indian literature and religion led to an intense study of Sanskrit, which he used to translate hymns from the Rig Veda before setting them to music. He was fascinated by transcendentalism and mysticism, holding the pursuit of material success to be the world’s last bastion of evil. That, in part, explains the serene atmosphere behind Holst’s musical depiction of death. Holst wrote his Ode to Death in the summer of 1919, at which time the bloodshed of the First World War would have been lodged in his memory (the composer apparently wrote the words ‘For C.C. and others’ on the manuscript score, referring to his colleague Cecil Coles, killed in action). But it was poetry by Walt Whitman composed on the occasion of the death of Abraham Lincoln that Holst turned to for his piece, specifically the poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Holst described Whitman as “a prophet of tolerance and internationalism”. His work for chorus and orchestra, first performed in October 1922 by the Leeds Festival Chorus and London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates, reflects Whitman’s non-judgmental, visionary view of death using melodic and harmonic techniques that were relatively new in

Holst’s musical voice at the time. We hear a sustained pedal (a long-held, underpinning bass note) under the opening invitation, ‘come, lovely and soothing death’, before the chorus subdivides into eight parts. The gait shifts on the words ‘Dark mother always gliding near’ onto an ostinato – a circular pattern with, in this case, five-beats-in-a-bar (a distinctive Holst hallmark). Eventually, the work bids death ‘come’, almost as a friend; it then disappears into silence. “It does for Walt Whitman just what music should do”, wrote The Musical Times of an early performance of the piece: “not reproduce the spirit of the poem but get deeper into it – telling of the mystic lower straits that the average reader of the poem might not contemplate.” Andrew Mellor © 2018 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827) Piano Concerto No.5 in E-flat major, Op.73 ‘Emperor’ Adagio un poco mosso / Slow, but moving forward Allegro / Fast Rondo: allegro / Rondo: fast A deal of mystery surrounds the nickname of the so-called ‘Emperor Concerto’, but it is certain that Beethoven himself did not coin the soubriquet. If, as some sources claim, an awestruck French soldier, on first hearing the work, exclaimed “C’est L’empereur”, Beethoven would not have approved. A committed republican, he had angrily removed a dedication to Napoleon on the title page of his Eroica Symphony after his one-time hero proclaimed himself emperor of France. More likely is that the composer and piano-maker J.B. Cramer (1771-1858) once described it as “an Emperor among concertos”, an opinion with which it remains hard to disagree. Compared to any concerto written hitherto – that is, apart from Beethoven’s own violin concerto – it is conceived on a vast scale, makes unprecedented

technical demands on the soloist and is outstandingly original in both form and content. The work’s outer movements were composed in the ‘martial’ style then highly popular with concert audiences, but its military associations run deeper than that. Much of the concerto was written during 1809, as Napoleon’s army lay siege to Vienna. Beethoven was often forced to take refuge from the bombardment in a basement, where he would cover his ears with a pillow to block out the terrible noises of war. “The course of events has affected my body and soul,” he wrote, “life around me is wild and disturbing, nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers …” After the French occupation of Vienna, Beethoven was unafraid to vent his spleen at Napoleon and the French. He was once seen in a coffee-house angrily shaking his fist at a French officer, “If I were a general and knew as much about strategy as I know about counterpoint,” he bawled, “I’d give you something to think about!” Beethoven’s increasing deafness prevented him from giving the work its first performance – as he had done with his previous four piano concertos – and the pianist to do so was Friedrich Schneider at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1811. Vienna first heard it in the following year when it was played by Carl Czerny. It was enthusiastically received by the audience and one reviewer described it as “undoubtedly one of the most original, imaginative, effective but also most difficult of all existing concertos”. ‘The Emperor’ was soon a staple of the piano concerto repertoire. First movement While the concertos of Haydn and Mozart invariably begin with an orchestral introduction, here Beethoven breaks the classical mould as the piano enters with three audacious flourishes, each punctuated by bold orchestral chords. As the movement proper gets on its martial way, its two main themes are then introduced by the orchestra in the traditional manner. When the piano

eventually re-enters it is not merely to restate this material, but to process and elaborate it with both originality and virtuosity (though the virtuosity is always part of the musical argument and never gratuitous). Later, two upward piano flourishes recall the opening and herald an unaccompanied cadenza for the piano, one that, unusually for the composer, was written out note for note. Second movement After the martial splendour of the first movement, the Adagio un poco mosso could hardly provide more of a contrast. At the hushed opening, muted strings introduce its noble, hymn-like main theme on which the piano first elaborates and then simplifies into its own exquisite shape. Third movement As the slow movement draws to its close, a soft French horn note is heard and the piano, tentatively at first, suggests a fresh idea with increasing confidence, and eventually leaps headlong into the Rondo, a movement that despite its dance-like boisterousness retains a steely strength of intent. Anthony Bateman © 2018 RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958) Symphony No.7 ‘Sinfonia antartica’ Prelude: andante maestoso / Prelude: at a majestic walking pace Scherzo: moderato / Scherzo: at a moderate pace Landscape: lento – / Landscape: very slow – Intermezzo: andante sostenuto / Interlude: at a sustained walking pace Epilogue: alla marcia, moderato (non troppo allegro) / Epilogue: like a march, at a moderate tempo (not too fast) By the outbreak of the Second World War, Ralph Vaughan Williams was well established as composer of true significance

for Britain, not least in the realm of the symphony. But the necessities of the war brought with them a new weapon in Vaughan Williams’s creative armoury: film music. In 1945, the composer wrote an essay advocating the teaching of film composition by professors throughout the country, so convinced was he of the genre’s benefits. Two years later, Vaughan Williams was contacted by Ernest Irving, head of music at the film studios in Ealing. Irving wanted a score for a new film telling of Captain Scott’s doomed expedition to Antarctica. Not only did Vaughan Williams agree, he had written pages of music before he’d even read the screenplay or seen the first rushes. In fact, he wrote far too much music, giving Irving free reign to make any necessary cuts. Vaughan Williams’s relative relaxation in that regard might have been due to his knowledge that any notes winding up on the cutting room floor would have an afterlife. That was partly down to his regard for film music’s potential and seriousness. But it was also, in this case, because Scott’s story resonated with Vaughan Williams on both a personal and symphonic level. The composer’s first such work, A Sea Symphony (1910), had taken the tangible narrative of a sea voyage and used it to reflect the broader idea of man’s journey through life. The story of Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition struck Vaughan Williams in a similar way. Though there are some suggestions that the composer was shocked by the amateur nature of Scott’s undertaking, he was fired by the heroism and stoicism of the man and his colleagues, whose remains were discovered dead eight months after they had died from starvation and exposure on their return from the South Pole in 1912. Not long after the film Scott of the Antarctic was premiered on 29 November 1948, Vaughan Williams started to fashion a symphony from its score. In the words of Simon Wright from Oxford University Press (the symphony’s publisher), the result

was “not a patchwork sewn together from the film score, but a re-ordering and in many cases a re-composition of the original material.” What inextricably links the symphony to the film score – beyond most of its musical themes – is the curious sound-world Vaughan Williams conjured to reflect the eerie, frozen stillness experienced by Scott. He did so using an orchestra with added organ, piano, celeste, glockenspiel, vibraphone, bells, wordless chorus of women’s voices, soprano solo and wind machine (much of the criticism levied at Vaughan Williams following the symphony’s first performance in Manchester on 14 January 1953 was induced by the inclusion of the machine). First movement: Prelude Vaughan Williams appended poetic verses to each movement with the intention that they be considered silently as an accompaniment to listening. ‘To defy power which seems omnipotent’ is among the lines from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound that the composer attached to his ‘Prelude’. The movement contains imposing material from the film’s title sequence and a principal theme that will be treated as a recurring motto. Second movement: Scherzo ‘There go the ships / and there is that Leviathan’, read the verses from Psalm 104 which Vaughan Williams associated with the musically warmer ‘Scherzo’, depicting the ship’s journey south, the play of penguins and the crew’s spotting of a whale. Third movement: Landscape In ‘Landscape’ we properly encounter the realm of icy desolation that make both the original film score and the symphony so distinctive; the combination of flute, horns, timpani, cymbals and harp – as well as full orchestra spiced by a piano and the organ’s pedals – are the composer’s chosen textural tools. Harmonically, he makes use of repeated and displaced intervals of the second

and the fourth. ‘Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow / Adown enormous ravines slope amain’ are among the lines from Coleridge’s Hymn before Sunrise, found in his Vale of Chamouni, that Vaughan Williams attached to this movement. Fourth movement: Intermezzo ‘Intermezzo’, framed by an oboe theme, makes use of material originally conceived to accompany the scene in which Lawrence Oakes sacrificed his life for the good of the expedition. The line ‘Love, all alike, no season knows’ is inscribed above this movement, taken from John Donne’s The Rising Sun. Fifth movement: Epilogue ‘Epilogue’, recalls the motto theme and pits the spirit of a march against the nullifying forces of a bleak, inhospitable landscape; we hear the bells, the wind machine and the women’s voices before all is swept away. ‘I do not regret this journey; we took risks, we knew we took them, things have come out against us’, reads Vaughan Williams’s inscription. The words are from Scott’s last journal entry. Andrew Mellor © 2018 THE TITLE: ANTARCTICA OR ANTARTICA? Until only nine days before the premiere, Vaughan Williams was planning using the title Sinfonia Antarctica, using the English spelling of the continent. It was pointed out to him that the Italian for the continent – to match Sinfonia – was Antartica (without the first ‘c’), and finally Vaughan Williams accepted this version, leaving us with the title Sinfonia antartica.