Italia and Germania (Friedrich Overbeck, 1828)

Julia Grella O’Connell, D.M.A., Director of Education and Community Engagement

Time is the basic element of musical form: rhythm, tone, and melody become music only when organized over time. And musical time can seem either fleeting or interminable: think, for instance, of Chopin’s “Minute” Waltz or Wagner’s complete Ring cycle. Over the course of history, time itself has been measured by changing principles. While in feudal society it was cyclical, based on patterns of the natural world, the rise of trade and the Age of Discovery ushered in a new, chronological understanding of time. Likewise, while the music of the Renaissance and Baroque eras utilized older notions of cyclical time, eighteenth-century composers had begun to think of time as sequential and their music as a linear series of events rather than a continual recurrence of themes. The works on today’s program engage with these shifting concepts of time, each piece showing its maker exquisitely conscious of the ebb and flow of history.

Caroline Shaw describes Entr’acte, which she wrote in 2011 after hearing a performance of a Haydn string quartet, as “riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further.” Shaw deliberately evokes the music of the past while using the tools of time to fracture classical style into scraps of memory. Her dizzying shifts among unusual time signatures, including 7/8 and 11/8, expand and curtail musical time as she lays fragile melodies over this shifting metric structure, instructing the strings to play “like recalling fragments of an old tune.” This old tune scaffolds Shaw’s new vision: as her homage to Haydn gradually gives way to silence, Shaw shows herself as much a master of the tools of time as she is of the modern fragmentation of experience.

In 1775 Mozart was music director at the court of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, a position he would grow to hate as he sought freedom from courtly servitude and control over his musical output. Already the composer of ten operas and thirty symphonies, 1775 proved a banner year for his concerto writing with the completion of four of his five violin concertos, including the No. 3 in G Major. This work foreshadows the greatness of Mozart’s mature style, as we hear him begin to manipulate musical conventions to fashion a new kind of expression containing both brash wit and heartfelt poignancy, balancing the formal structures of classical style with the bittersweetness of the whole human experience. In the first movement, he quickly shifts from G Major to its parallel minor, casting a contemplative shadow over this normally sunny key. In the slow second movement, the solo violin ascends in phrases of profound longing that almost cry out for accompanying words, answered by the orchestra with sighing motifs of consolation. The concerto’s final movement is a rondo, a cyclical holdover from the Baroque representing a kind of homecoming, with repeated returns to the main theme after forays into new musical territory. In this lovely finale, Mozart plays on a simple Alsatian folk dance known as the “Strasbourger,” adding brilliant variations before slyly inserting a gavotte, the courtly dance of an earlier era. In the end, the peasant dance is victorious, and the woodwinds, the most pastoral of instruments, have the final say, suggesting that the vitality of the natural world with its cyclical rhythms triumphs over the clock-time artificiality of court. 

In 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn made a trip to Great Britain, memories of which he recorded in the Hebrides Overture played by the Philharmonic last season. In 1830 he extended his European tour southward to Italy, remaining there for the better part of a year and transcribing his recollections in the Symphony No. 4, his “Italian” symphony. As with the Hebrides Overture, Mendelssohn strove to set in sound a series of sensory impressions: reveling in the southern sunshine after months in bleak Scotland, he called the bounding, expansive first movement “blue sky in A Major,” and in letters home promised that this symphony would be “the merriest piece I have yet composed.” After conducting two performances to great success in 1833, however, he became dissatisfied with the work, continuing to revise it sporadically until the end of his life. 

For all its lightheartedness, the “Italian” Symphony exhibits Mendelssohn’s preoccupation with themes of time and memory. As a young teenager when the works of Bach had been all but forgotten, his grandmother presented him with a copyist’s manuscript score of the St. Matthew Passion, a gift that would change the course of his life: he would go on to conduct the Passion at the Berlin Singakademie in 1829, reintroducing it to the public after a hundred years of obscurity. Indeed, it is only because of Mendelssohn’s efforts that we recognize Bach’s greatness today.

In the Italian Symphony, Mendelssohn reveals this sense of historical time, while staking his own claim within it. We hear Italy from the perspective of the young traveler, who in addition to blue skies vividly paints the ponderous tread and yearning, anthemic melodies of a religious procession in the second movement; evokes the timelessness of Italy’s classical architecture with a beautifully-ordered, flowing minuet in the third; and finally sets into motion a whirling Neapolitan peasant dance, the saltarello, in the fourth. While fixing his individual memories in musical form, Mendelssohn is always keenly aware of his place in historical time. The German word for the Grand Tour undertaken by nineteenth-century travelers like Mendelssohn is Bildungsreise – a journey to cultivate the inner life. In his Italian Symphony, Mendelssohn marries this cultivation of his own spirit with the storied Italian past, showing us, the listeners, that we are participants both in personal memory and in the stream of music history.