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n o t e s
Although the combination of organ and orchestra had long been in use in Handel’s time, the
organ usually played a subordinate role, serving as part of the basso continuo (along with a viola
da gamba and/or bassoon) that accompanies nearly all Baroque music. The promotion of the organist
to the rank of concert soloist was an invention of one of the great organists of the day: George Fridric
Handel ( 685– 759). Tonight’s concerto was one of his first, and it was performed by the composer
himself, in between acts of one of the earliest of his famous oratorios.
The first movement is in the style of a French overture: its stately dotted rhythms and regular phrasing
are reminiscent of the overtures that Jean-Baptiste Lully wrote for the royal opera at Versailles. The
soloist plays along with the orchestra (as he would if he were merely a member of the continuo), but
steps into the spotlight during the final cadence. The second movement, however, is an Italian form in
which an ensemble ritornello (or “thing that returns”) alternates with solo passages. In each solo passage,
the level of harmonic complexity and virtuosic display increases.
The solo part in the third movement is written for the right hand alone, offering possibilities for the
organist to embellish a simple melody, with each phrase punctuated by orchestral chords. Although
Handel probably played something new in each performance, he wrote out one of his solos when
the concerto was published, giving us a fortunate opportunity to see the inner workings of Baroque
improvisatory performance practice.
The last movement was popular enough to earn a nickname, “the Minuet in the Oratorio Esther,” thus
allowing us to guess at the date of its first performance. It starts off with a rollicking tune, but, in
contrast to the solo concerti of the classical era, it ends quietly—an appropriate way to “dissolve and
fade” back to the action of the oratorio.
The familiar bust of Beethoven depicts a heavyset man with a luxuriant head of hair and a ferocious
scowl: a commanding presence that radiates power and purpose. Yet the man who wrote
the Ninth Symphony was in reality old (a decade beyond the average Viennese lifespan), sick much of
the time and concerned about his finances. His music, too, presents itself to us in a false light: long
familiarity causes us to hear the Ninth Symphony as a succession of events that are both logical and
inevitable. In 8 4, they were neither.
Take, for example, the first movement. Initially, both key and meter are unclear. The open fifth A–E
is ambiguous, and there is no discernable melody. It is not until we hear the lyrical, major-key second
theme that we realize that the jerky dotted rhythms on open fifths were in fact the primary theme.
The listener is on no firmer ground in the second movement: instead of the expected slow movement,
we hear a scherzo. It features an unexpected timpani solo and a tempo so fast that the conductor must
treat measures as beats: Beethoven marks some passages ritmo di tre (or quattro) battute, that is, beating
one 3/4 pattern for every three measures or one 4/4 pattern for every four measures. The timpani
solo signals the change from four-measure patterns to three-measure patterns. These shifts do not
disturb us today but they would have seemed peculiar to listeners who still thought of a scherzo as a
sort of modernized minuet-and-trio dance form.
The third movement gives the listener some respite: it is calm variation set in a major key. But
Beethoven has once again done the unexpected: it is a double variation form. There are two alternating
themes in contrasting, almost-unrelated keys (B-flat and D major, which have only three notes in
common). The contrast solves the problem of how to write a symphonic-scale variation set that holds
the listener’s interest; Mahler and Bruckner used this technique in several of their symphonies.
These movements were unsettling to their first audience, but the last movement was nothing short of
revolutionary. The startling clash of a fortissimo A against B-flat in the opening chord, the imitation
of an operatic recitative by the double basses, the verbatim quotation of the themes of the earlier movements,
the continuation of the third-movement variation form, and, of course, the vocal soloists and
chorus: none of these things had ever been heard in a symphony before. Equally revolutionary, perhaps,
was what the voices sang: in joy, all men become brothers. The words were Beethoven’s own, added to lines
taken from a poem by Friedrich Schiller. As a new musical world emerged from the chaos of this last
movement of Beethoven’s last symphony, so the common people emerged from the end of feudal society
and the devastation of the Napoleonic wars, to create the modern, and postmodern, world.
—Beverly Wilcox
handel: concer to for
organ and orchestra,
op. 4 no. 2
for organ solo; oboes I-II, strings
composed early in 735 in
London
first per formed March
735 as an entr’acte for the oratorio
Esther
published by John Walsh,
London, 738
Duration: about 0 minutes
Beethoven: symphony
no. 9 in D minor, op. 125
for soprano, alto, tenor, and
baritone solo, chorus; flutes,
piccolo, oboes, clarinets,
bassoons, contrabassoon; 4
horns, trumpets, 3 trombones;
timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass
drum; strings
composed 8 3– 4.
Text of finale excerpted from An
die Freude, written by Friedrich
Schiller in 785, with added
words by Beethoven.
first per formed May 7,
8 4 at the Kärntnertor Theater
in Vienna
published by B. Schott’s
Sons, Mainz, 8 6
Duration about 70 minutes