Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550

In the summer of 1788, during the course of about six weeks, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed three extraordinary symphonies, the last such works he would write. Nothing in the composer’s biography has provoked more speculation and debate than the origin of this late symphonic trilogy. It was unusual for Mozart to create substantial works such as these three ambitious and beautifully wrought
symphonies without having a certain, or at least probable, opportunity to present them, but no such justification was discovered by his early biographers. Modern scholars have proposed several possibilities for explaining the creation of these masterpieces. Unfortunately, their hypotheses remain unproven for lack of definitive documentary evidence, and the mystery of Mozart’s final three symphonies remains just that. Despite the best efforts of many investigators, we simply do not know what prompted the concentrated outpouring of symphonic music that occupied the composer during the summer of 1788.
The Symphony in G minor, K. 550, forms the centerpiece of this late symphonic trilogy. This work reveals perhaps even more of Mozart’s essential nature than its
bright major key siblings, the Symphony Nos. 39 and 41. Here we encounter the
remarkable fusion of opposites—of passion and formal elegance, sorrow and exultation, darkness and light—which informs the composer’s greatest music and seems to have been an integral part of his character. It is interesting in this regard how various commentators have emphasized one or the other of these contrasting traits when considering the work. For example, Robert Schumann’s often quoted description of the G-minor Symphony as filled with “Grecian lightness and grace” is countered by Otto Jahn, the great Mozart biographer of the 19th century, who declared it a work of “pain and grieving.” The varied perspectives of these and other summaries illustrate the psychological complexity of Mozart’s finest music and the exceptionally wide emotional range this symphony encompasses during the course of its four movements.
Nevertheless, a sense of agitation does seem to pervade much of the piece. Mozart establishes this quality in the opening measures. Here he dispenses with the type of formal introduction in slow tempo he had used in each of his previous three symphonies. Instead, the composer begins straight off with an energetic Allegro and a famous theme that seems to suggest agitation and longing. In developing this and the movement’s other subjects, Mozart employs his very considerable mastery of counterpoint, and his brilliant use of fugal textures here and in his other late symphonies must be counted one of his greatest achievements.
The initial theme of the Andante second movement promises an example of
that seemingly effortless grace so frequently encountered in Mozart’s music. The composer fulfills this promise but gives much more: a dark lyricism that suggests, if not sorrow, at least acquaintance with loss and heartache. The ensuing minuet is
surprising in its power, which derives in no small degree from the stretto treatment—the contrapuntal “piling up”—of the minuet theme in its second paragraph.
The finale recalls the symphony’s opening in terms of both its sheer dramatic intensity and its use of pointed harmonic inflections to maintain a sense of restless
yearning. The movement’s central “development” section commences with an extraordinary passage. In it, a statement of the main theme dissolves into a halting, angular utterance that steps to the brink of atonality, anticipating a musical language more than a century in the future. Although contrapuntal treatment of this subject again plays an important role in shaping the movement, the final impression we have is not one of learned compositional artifice but of passions barely contained.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92

Mozart’s late symphonies, along with those of his colleague and friend Franz Joseph Haydn, brought the symphony to its first great flowering. The next development in the genre’s evolution came at the hands of a composer who, as a young man, won Mozart’s admiration and went on to study with Haydn. Ludwig van Beethoven’s first two symphonies, written in 1800 and 1802, respectively, summarized the classical symphony in the mature form perfected by Mozart and Haydn. With his Symphony No. 3, the epochal Sinfonia eroica of 1804, Beethoven greatly expanded the scale and expressive possibilities of the genre. Beethoven consolidated the gains achieved in this work with his Symphony No. 5, which presented a vivid musical drama of crisis and overcoming. He then turned in an entirely different direction, composing a glowing paean to nature in his Sixth, or “Pastoral,” Symphony, completed in 1808.
Four years passed before Beethoven again brought a symphony before the public. Despite this hiatus, his Symphony No. 7, completed in 1812, picked up much where the “Pastoral” had left off. There are, of course, significant differences between the two works. To begin, the Seventh Symphony is not a programmatic piece of nature music. Having said his last word on that subject in the “Pastoral” Symphony, Beethoven had no reason to repeat himself, and he vehemently rejected attempts by his contemporaries to assign a program, a hidden story line, to the new work. But the Seventh Symphony does offer a feeling of relaxed spaciousness and the kind of warm, almost luxuriant orchestral sound otherwise encountered only in the “Pastoral” Symphony. These symphonies are, if one may use the term in connection with so thoughtful an artist, the most sensual of Beethoven’s compositions.
The two works have one other important point in common: neither expresses the drama of struggle and triumph so vividly implicit in Beethoven’s Third and Fifth symphonies. As a piece of “pure” music—that is, one without an explicit literary
narrative—the Symphony No. 7 expresses as much as anything the wonders of music itself. Forgotten for the moment are the composer’s well known battles with fate, deafness and loneliness. One senses here—more, perhaps, than in any of Beethoven’s other orchestral works—the joy the composer could find in his own creative powers, in simply combining melody, rhythm, harmony and instrumental colors for the purpose of coherent and beautiful musical invention.
The chords that punctuate the oboe’s melody in the symphony’s opening moments define one of the work’s important attributes: sheer sonority, a reveling in the physicality of orchestral sound. Another element that emerges near the end of the broad introductory passage is rhythm, manifested here as repeated note figures that decelerate incrementally, then metamorphose into a tripping rhythmic motif. In terms of melody and harmony, this passage is entirely static; Beethoven has reduced the musical activity entirely to rhythm. Having established the importance of this musical element, the composer carries it into the lively main body of the first movement. Here the tripping rhythm introduced by the woodwinds at the end of the introduction underlies all of the principal thematic ideas. Beethoven’s resort to this rhythm is only slightly less obsessive than his use of the famous four-note figure in the first movement of his Symphony No. 5, and the motif serves the same purpose of giving cohesion to a large span of music that ranges over broad harmonic terrain.
The ensuing Allegretto is one of Beethoven’s most popular creations, so much
so that orchestras in the 19th century indulged in the dubious practice of performing it apart from the rest of the symphony. This movement also builds upon a simple rhythmic motto, one that appears immediately after a prefatory chord in the opening
measures. The indefatigable rhythm supports a melody whose narrow compass promises little. But from its humble beginning, the theme soars through successive variations to quite unexpected heights. Reaching a sonorous climax, the movement gradually subsides toward silence, reaching at last the same luminous chord on which it began.
The scherzo that follows is full of delightful commotion, and its contrasting central section, or Trio, whose melody is based on an old Austrian pilgrims’ hymn, attains a degree of grandeur never before encountered at this point in a symphony. In closing the movement, Beethoven toys with our expectations: a restatement of the opening bars of the Trio promises another repetition of this section until five swift chords bring matters to a decisive conclusion.
The finale was described by the English conductor and commentator Donald Francis Tovey as “a triumph of Bacchic fury.” His compatriot Sir George Grove found in it “a vein of rough, hard, personal boisterousness.” However one might characterize this movement, there is no denying its very considerable energy or the fact that this quality springs in large part from rhythm. The opening measures present a sharply etched rhythmic motif, and as in the first and second movements, this provides the seed from which practically all subsequent developments spring.

Paul Schiavo © 2008

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