PROGRAM NOTES

Magnificat, Wq. 215  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C. P. E. Bach (1714-1788)

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the second-oldest of J. S. Bach’s many composer-offspring, was born in Weimar in 1714 to Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, and received sound early training in music from his father. In 1731 he began the study of law at Leipzig University and continued at the University of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. He supported himself there by giving keyboard lessons and by writing occasional compositions for wealthy patrons. In 1738, at the age of twenty-four, he took his degree, but he at once abandoned his prospects of a legal career and determined to devote himself to music. (His decision to study law gives some indication of the breadth of his interests and shows that he was intent on acquiring a liberal education and a degree from a respected university. This gave him a social advantage which his father had lacked and helped him to avoid many of the petty indignities to which J. S. Bach was subjected throughout his career.) A few months after leaving the university, he obtained an appointment in the service of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia. Two years later Frederick succeeded to the throne, and for the next twenty-seven years Bach continued to serve the man known as Frederick the Great. Bach’s chief function at the court was to accompany Frederick’s flute-playing (Frederick is reputed to have been an accomplished flautist and something of a composer himself), but Bach also composed nearly two hundred sonatas and other solo works for the keyboard. His Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Essay on the True Art of Playing the Clavier), a systematic and masterly treatise published in 1753, was enthusiastically embraced by the European musical community. By 1780 it was in its third edition and had solidified his reputation as the leading keyboard teacher of his time.

Bach also managed to compose a respectable body of choral works. The first of these was the Magnificat of 1749, which was probably written for Frederick’s sister, Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia. It illustrates well the stylistic changes which took place in music during the first half of the eighteenth century, as composers began to move away from literal (or “motto”) word-painting and intricate counterpoint towards greater simplicity in the presentation of a text. Its most striking musical characteristics are its sensitivity to feeling, or affect (Bach was the chief exponent of the Empfindsamer Stil or “highly sensitive style”), and its vigorous and compelling energy. The opening chorus, with its predominantly homophonic texture and strongly pulsed rhythms, already shows the influence of a new, simpler style of symphonic writing, and a comparison with the corresponding movement of J. S. Bach’s Magnificat reveals the extent to which the younger Bach had moved on from the Baroque world of his father. The work does betray the influence of his father at a number of points, however, most conspicuously in the final movement (“Sicut erat”), an astonishingly complex, florid, and lengthy double fugue. Its principal theme, which reminds many listeners of the fugue subject in “And with His Stripes We Are Healed” from Händel’s Messiah and the “Kyrie” movement from Mozart’s Requiem, was a standard musical representation during the Baroque (and later Classical) era of the sign of the cross.

In 1768 Bach succeeded Georg Philipp Telemann (his godfather) as Kapellmeister at Hamburg. As a consequence of his new position he began to turn his attention more towards church music. Between 1768 and 1788 he wrote twenty-one settings of the Passion and some seventy cantatas, litanies, motets, oratorios, and other liturgical pieces. Perhaps his greatest achievement, in the end, was his skillful combining of the traditional and the progressive at a time when many composers lapsed into the banal in their efforts to speak simply and directly. It was his skill, taste, and judgment in balancing the old and the new that won him the deep admiration of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

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Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . W. A. Mozart (1756-1791)

Mozart completed the score of his Concerto No. 25 on December 4, 1786, and probably performed the work the following day. The first sketches for it appear to date from two years earlier, but Mozart apparently laid it aside to write another—and much better known—concerto in C major (No. 21, the so-called “Elvira Madigan”). The day after he apparently gave the premiere of this concerto in Vienna, Mozart completed the score of his Symphony No. 38 in D major (K. 504), which he introduced the following month in Prague, when he was basking in the success of The Marriage of Figaro in that city. The Prague Symphony, the first one he had composed in more than three years, has been in the repertory fairly consistently since the time of its premiere, while the K. 503 concerto, without question one of the very greatest works of its kind, has suffered from an inexplicable neglect. Mozart himself performed it on several occasions, but after his death it was apparently not performed again in Vienna until 1934, when Artur Schnabel performed it with the Vienna Philharmonic under Georg Szell. It only gained acceptance into the standard repertoire in the latter part of the twentieth century.

K. 503 completes a cycle of twelve piano concertos that Mozart began in 1784. It shows Mozart at the height of his powers as a composer and also at his most subtle and complex. Even more than in many of Mozart's late works, there is a constant subtle interplay of light and shade, of cheerfulness and tragedy. The distinguished Mozart authority H.C. Robbins Landon, in his discussion of the piano concertos, designated this one “the grandest, most difficult, and most symphonic of them all,” while noting also “the complete negation of any deliberate virtuoso elements.”

In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for a flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. The opening Allegro begins with a majestic, aristocratic flourish and alternates between martial and festive motifs. A number of harmonic and expressive ambiguities appear throughout, including something relatively new for Mozart: a number of unmodulated transitions from major to minor and back again (a device later embraced by Franz Schubert). These transitions are especially noticeable in the development section, where a secondary theme (a march sounding surprisingly like the as-yet-unwritten French revolutionary song "La Marseillaise") flits back and forth between a number of major and minor tonalities within a handful of bars, while Mozart enriches the texture with canonic interplay between piano and orchestra.

The second movement (Adagio) is more austere than in many of Mozart's other concertos. Calm but not entirely serene, it is formal in tone and at the same time a little mysterious, with the piano adding half-lights of brightness here and there.

The third movement (Finale: Allegretto) begins jovially with a theme borrowed from one of Mozart’s own earlier works (the Gavotte from the ballet music in his opera Idomeneo). We are surprised, however, as the music moves into the minor key sooner than expected, and goes from there to a magnificently songful passage for piano, accompanied by cellos and basses and joined by the flute, oboe, and bassoon. The rapture of this passage soon dissolves into passion and heartache, and then we are plunged quite suddenly back into the high spirits that began the movement.

Mozart’s own cadenza for this concerto has not survived; the one heard in these performances was composed by our soloist, Peter Vinograde.