CB Berwald
Play in: Dance of The Nymphs, from The Tempest Music,
Sibelius
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today, our programme showcases worksby the
Swedish composer, Franz Berwald and the Finn, Jean Sibelius.
Often thought of as the first
great Swedish Romantic composer, Franz Berwald must have felt anything but
during much of his – for the time – long life.
Born in 1796, he died less than a year after being appointed head of the
Stockholm Conservatoire, in 1868.
Rising from being a violinist in
the Court Orchestra, his best years were expended in furious bursts of
creativity and intermittent, unsuccessful attempts to assert claim to
recognition as a composer at home and in Germany. That claim denied, he busied himself with
orthopaedic surgery, design of orthopaedic instruments, managership of a
sawmill and glass-works, and advocate in social issues, including land reform.
He wrote four symphonies in the early 1840s, having essayed a Symphony in A
Major in around 1829, and thus approached the form in his musical maturity,
having gained much experience as a composer of opera, concertante works,
concert-overtures and what might be described as tone-poems. Like Schumann, he was an idiosyncratic but
brilliant symphonist, with an instinct for gaining precisely the sounds that he
wished for in his orchestrations. Unlike
Schumann, his most characteristic orchestral ‘sound’ tends to the treble
register rather than alto – it has a smart, cutting quality that might almost
be thought modern, but that in truth harks back to the clean, uncluttered sound
of CPE Bach, Mozart or Joseph Haydn. It
abounds in imaginativecombinations, interrelations and soloes, and his deft
rhythmical wranglings between sections and individual instruments, set off by
clever counterpoint, were noticed by the late romantic Danish symphonist, Carl
Nielsen, who claimed him as a major influence.
Mystery is rarely a quality that
might be associated with Berwald. His
music is terse, vital, harmonic and contrapuntal rather than melodic, within a
framework of modulation, cyclical form and motivic transformation. The terseness is scarcely noticed except as a
skill, an ability to pack incident of the right kind into the right place at
the right time.
The Symphonie
Serieuse, in G Minor, his First
Symphony, one of two that he composed in 1842, was the only one that he heard played, in a performance at
Stockholm, arranged by his cousin, in 1843.
It begins with a trademark
stuttered two chords; the first subject
resembles magnetic attractiveness in its inception of widely spaced scalic
figures in contrary motion, and remains restless, quixotic, making play with
fragments of an incomplete scale, tension ebbing and flowing; it is
automatically repeated. The second
subject is more gentle, but comes from the same source, a mere few nostalgic moments. The development begins quietly, in
counterpoint, but is doomed to frantic, busy discord, with impatient stutters, juxtapositions
and combinations that are quickly done-with for recapitulation. This is straightforward and ends abruptly
without sense of resolution.
Symphonie Serieuse, 1st
Movt , Berwald
The Slow Movement is a reminder that
Berwald was born a year before Franz Schubert.
It is indebted to the slow movements of Haydn, a short lyric such as
Schumann had written in his D Minor Symphony of 1841, but less free-seeming in
its process. It begins in contrary
motion, with the incomplete scale present in the first movement, overshot and
falling away at the sixth. Its sombre, low-register
scoring (after the brightness that went before it) is maintained in what
follows. The short-breathedness of the
material – the opening figure, a three-note sigh and a musing phrase like a
dark gleam of faith, a Beethovenian three note questioning of the sigh, and
passage over pizzicato that amplifies it
- is no impediment to pathos and charm.
A recapitulation of the opening measures is sufficient to close what
seems a brief orison.
2nd Movt
The Scherzo, termed Stretto – the term suggesting
counterpoint - is transient, almost phantasmagoric in nature,
a repetitive, ejaculatory and oddly dreamlike affair, blustering in its hunting-horn-
and trombone-hardened moments, always
airy, throwing out functions of the
Symphony’s incomplete scale in all directions in counterpoint and broken
scoring. The trio is no relief from
scales, but plays slow chords over a busy background, a technique later used with
great success by Sibelius, and anticipated by a passage of some pathos within
the scherzo section of the movement. The
trick – first used by Schubert - perhaps
suggests that time hastens the more cruelly as man reflects on happiness. The woodwind are used with great skill;
Berwald causes woodwind and strings to interact with beauty. After recapitulation of the scherzo--section,
all melts away.
3rd Movt
Berwald’s finale begins attaca,
with the sigh and consolatory musing figure from his slow movement. This was a daring innovation in the
1840s. The manner of the scherzo returns
briefly, and a brusque, instantly repeated downward broken chord in brass and some
unrepeated A Midsummer Night’s Dream woodwind-chords of opposite moods have their
contribution to make before the movement-proper seems to begin with a sudden hard-driving theme over a
running bass, allegro molto, fully scored.
This proves short in duration, but, often, Berwald shows a skill in terse continuations
– and utter contrasts that remain consistent; a short theme of utter pathos
follows. Return to the first subject
sees a change in dynamics and scoring – soft, murmurous woodwind take the lead
over the running bass – with skeletal interjections from the deeper strings -
before development provokes the brass.
The second subject returns unchanged, achingly sad. Back to hurly-burly – but the second subject
comes to haunt one last time before the first strides off again – the coda is
Mozartian in frenzy: with one last
pretty switch in its midst: a trombone plays solo the notes of the chord of the
dominant in G Major, a move anticipated in the brusque part of the movement’s
introduction, to which it adds a sotto voce scale fragment Of descending
semitones and a tone as though the chord were not uncertain In itself.
In context, the trombone part is
no doubt the clincher, for Berwald. Not
only that, but most originally presented!
4th Movt
In summation on the subject of Berwald,
one may propound that a thing worth saying is worth saying twice – or more than
twice! -and in fact, his bold, deceptively tonal ideas, being harmonically
interesting, stand up as well in repetition (and treatment in classical
patterns of sequences), as in development, which works by sudden contrasts and
swift manipulations of intervals and key-change, not to mention arrestingly
economical but imaginative orchestration.
How thoroughly abstract the process is is frequently concealed by the
moods aroused, and by the ingenuity of this music’s transformations. This is both abstract symphony and
psychology. Berwald had one foot in the
past of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert and the other in the future of
Nielsen and Sibelius. Not conventionally
romantic-classical in the age of Mendelssohn or Gade, more classical in idiom
as well as taste, than the revolutionary Berlioz, and no doubt beneath the notice
of Wagner, he found a world-audience only long after his death. Then, his true legacy was recognized, and he
was celebrated for both his classical skills and far-sighted originality of
expression. Never cautious, never insipid,
never attitudinizing, in many ways Haydnesque in character, his music seems unlikely
to date.
Our second piece in this
programme is by a Finn of Swedish extraction, Jean Sibelius. Would Berwald have wished to have the fame
that Sibelius was accorded? One doubts
it. Born less than three years before Berwald’s
death, Sibelius found that national and world-fame cost him dear.
His orchestral piece, Cassazione
– Cassation, or serenade out-of-doors (the Italian word may come from the
German for alley - Ganz) - has the
Opus Number Six in his frankly chaotic list of works. It was never published, but as he went so far
as to give the piece an opus number at all, intended at one time to revise it –
even partly carried out the intention – and did not destroy it, it is clear
that he had affection for it. His first
title for it was Fantasy For Orchestra
– and why he termed it a Cassation is not to be divined from its tone or
nature. Opus 6? - It was written swiftly by a 38 yrs-old
national hero in the first weeks of 1904, for performance at the concert during
which his Violin Concerto was presented to the public.
In the event, the Violin
Concerto’s premiere was a humiliation for the sensitive composer, and his
anomalous one movement Cassation went
largely unnoticed owing to the poor showing that the larger work made. The self-confessed slave of his themes,
Sibelius was an inveterate reviser of his work, a creature of learned instinct
on the page and therefore, touchy and extreme in his response to audience-opinion,
and Cassazione may have been a victim
of his panicked reaction to criticism – by association with the bedevilled
Violin Concerto, guilty of having misfired.
It is a single-movement piece that
may fall roughly into 4 self-contained sections: an impressive slow introduction, a stentorian
fanfare; a restless section in which a theme grows out of an agitated
background; a slow movement that begins with beautiful flute and clarinet
interplay and becomes a grand, Lutheran-style hymn-theme with asides of greater
or lesser tension, much use of woodwind and bass and alto pizzicato strings.
Having provoked the first violins to unison statement of the hymn, the asides
become resigned, even melancholy, dying out on flute and clarinet
bird-calls. We are pitched into the
last, fast section, one of Sibelius’ self-repeating themes, thick with
elaboration and syncopated rhythm; the speed that promises breadth and
boisterousness is in fact short-lived – no sooner is it established than it
subsides for brass and strings tremolando to hint abruptly at the introductory
fanfare and for the piece to end in surprize tragic terseness, a simple
pizzicato cadence in the minor, the final word, as in the first and final
movements of the First Symphony and slow movement of the Second. A fantasy.
A train of thought of incredible imagination that plays within
manipulation of intervals and tonal range, Cassation may appear to be a
premature attempt at a one-movement Symphony, a Symphonic Fantasy, like
Schumann’s Fourth Symphony, but several minutes shorter than any previous
model. It is, in fact, a prefiguration
of Sibelius’ later symphonic masterpieces in method, a daring play with
God-scattered pieces of a mosaic, and more than the sum of its parts, and Oskar
Merikanto’s dismissal of it after the premiere as “rather insignificant” is hard to understand. The wish was father to the thought,
perhaps: Sibelius’s stature oppressed many
if not all of his composer-contemporaries in Finland. In terms of his life-achievement, the great man
had barely begun! Uncertainty followedhim
into his sixties, however; his first title for the one-movement 7th Symphony,
an object-lesson in compressed development, and development by compression, was “Fantasia Sinfonica”.
Of the middle-period Fantasy or Cassazione’s in places first-rate material, only the hymn-like tune was utilized elsewhere in Sibelius’
output: it turns up as the last number, Epilogue, in his music for a Copenhagen production
of The Tempest – where Prospero calls
for his release from the bare island.
This was Classical Break, and I’m
Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was
written and researched by Mike Burrows.
We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again
soon. Goodbye!
Track 5: Cassazione, Op 6, Sibelius
Play out: Dance of The Nymphs, Sibelius
