Mother Nature's Greatest Hits Reimagined

Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741)
The Four Seasons, Op. 8, Nos. 1–4 (published 1725)

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Deanna Tham led violinists Keiko Araki, Inés Voglar Belgique, Erin Furbee, and Chien Vivianne Tan on December 5, 2024, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: solo mandolin (traditionally solo violin) with strings and continuo 

Estimated Duration: 37 minutes

The Venetians called him Il Prieto Rosso, The Red Priest. Antonio Vivaldi really did have bright red hair, and he really was a priest. Not that he was a particularly good one. What biographical information has come down to us points more to bon vivant than to dedicated cleric. Whatever ambiguity attends Vivaldi’s personal life and character, there can be no doubt about his place in music history, although that place was a long time coming. It was The Four Seasons, the first four of a collection of string concertos from 1725, that brought about Vivaldi’s 20th-century revival, catapulting him from obscurity to his current eminence amongst the titans of the Baroque. 

Although musical portrayals of the natural world were nothing new, The Four Seasons brought nature painting firmly into the mainstream, planting seeds that would bear rich fruit in later works by Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and a host of others. Vivaldi even added descriptive sonnets, one for each concerto, that not only took listeners on a guided tour of the musical landscape but also provided helpful hints for the performers. 

We begin in the Spring, a scene of unruffled sunny contentment, lightly moistened by a brief spring shower. In the second movement, sleepy shepherds snooze under the trees while insects buzz and dogs bark; in the third we join a happy dance, complete with bass drones representing bagpipes. 

The Summer heat sets in and a lazy torpor ensues. Nevertheless, the violin soloist (or in this case, a mandolin soloist!) is called upon for an array of imitations – cuckoos, turtledoves, breezes, and rushing winds – in passages that often anticipate the free-form sound effects of a later age. The Adagio slow movement blends a delicately chromatic solo line with orchestral tremors that hint at a change in the weather, which duly arrives in the third-movement Presto: a summer storm depicted in all its facets, flashes of lighting, booms of thunder, and streaky splashes of warm rain. 

Autumn is the time of harvest; the crops come in and celebratory dancing ensues. Sleep follows in a second movement that ranks amongst Vivaldi’s most harmonically complex inspirations, but soon enough exhortations from the violin-turned-bugle summon us to the hunt, accompanied by yapping dogs and galloping horses. 

Finally, Winter: ice, snow, freezing cold, but silvery chill beauty nonetheless. A warm and cozy fireside awaits us in the second movement, while outside the blasts of winter winds have the last word in a sonorous finale. 

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799) 
Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 11, No. 2 (1779) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: First Oregon Symphony Performance 

Instrumentation: two oboes, two horns, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 11 minutes

We possess a fine 1787 portrait of Joseph Bologne in which he embodies the very image of the pre-Revolutionary French gentleman, complete with powdered wig, billowing lace kerchief, richly textured velvet coat, gloves, and elegant rapier attesting to his fencing skill. 

But there’s something just a bit different about it: Joseph Bologne was a person of color. The son of a wealthy French planter and a slave woman, he was born in the French West Indies and probably grew up in Saint-Domingue, a wealthy sugar colony with a vibrant cultural life. All that ended abruptly with the 1791 slave revolt and the establishment of the Republic of Haiti. Well before then, however, Joseph had settled in Paris, where he happily hobnobbed with the elite in their salons, clubs, and gardens. 

Bologne’s two great passions were fencing and playing the violin, his mastery of both widely acknowledged. He was also an excellent orchestral leader, in which capacity he led Le Concert Olympique orchestra in the premieres of Joseph Haydn’s “Paris” symphonies. His compositional output is, not surprisingly, dominated by works for violin and orchestra, but he was also an active composer of opera, of which only The Anonymous Lover of 1780 has survived intact. Its three-movement Overture, also known as Symphony No. 2 in D Major, is distinctly Mozartean, so much so that it could almost substitute for a mid-period Mozart symphony. But that makes it no less effective, a vivacious and tasty bonbon symphonique by a sadly neglected 18th-century master. 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) 
Symphony No. 35 in D Major, K. 385, “Haffner” (1782) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Carlos Kalmar led the Oregon Symphony on September 1, 2011, at the Tom McCall Waterfront Park Bowl 

Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 18 minutes

The best thing Wolfgang Mozart ever did for himself was to leave Salzburg in 1781 and set up shop as a freelance composer-pianist in Vienna. It was a risky move. He had no employment lined up in Vienna nor did he have a stack of commissions awaiting. What he had was his incomparable talent, his spectacular portfolio, and his youthful self-confidence that he could make a go of life in the Big Apple.

It was enough. Mozart’s move to Vienna at age 25 was the catalyst for his metamorphosis from a promising young composer into one of music’s immortals. It might seem odd to describe Mozart as a ‘late blooming’ composer, but statistically that’s precisely what he was: his full flowering happened only during the final third of his life. To be sure, had he lived a normal lifespan instead of dying at age 35, he would have had a much longer time in the sun, perhaps spending half a century at full artistic maturity. However, there’s no point in lamenting what was not. During his final decade in Vienna, Mozart gifted humanity with a lifetime’s worth of priceless treasures.

The reasons for Mozart’s Viennese efflorescence are many, but easily the most important is distance from his father. Leopold had raised and educated him, for which posterity may be duly grateful. But Leopold was also one of music history’s most obnoxious helicopter parents, controlling, manipulative, and grimly determined to maintain his iron grip over his son’s mind and heart. By 1781 he had become an obstacle to Wolfgang’s further progress. All it took was for Wolfgang to face adult life on his own without his father’s constant interference for his creative volcano to erupt in full. 

That said, Leopold and Salzburg continued to reach out to Wolfgang in Vienna. This is how the Haffner family enters the picture. Sigmund Haffner the Elder had been the mayor of Salzburg and had even helped the Mozarts finance their early tours when little Wolfgang wowed European nabobs hither, thither, and yon. In 1776 Sigmund’s son – also Sigmund – commissioned the now 20-year-old Wolfgang to write a serenade for his sister Marie Elizabeth’s wedding. The result was the wonderful Haffner Serenade, K. 250, first performed on July 21, 1776. 

Thus when the younger Sigmund was to be elevated to the nobility, he chose Wolfgang to write music for the occasion. He spoke to Leopold, who wrote to Wolfgang with the commission on July 20, 1782. But the 26-year-old Wolfgang had become resentful of his role as Leopold’s obedient little dishrag. He answered that he was “up to my eyes in work” and for once he was telling the truth and not just trying to squirm out of yet another Leopold-induced obligation. But of course he gave in, as he would to the day Leopold died. “I shall work as fast as possible and, as far as haste permits, I shall turn out good work.” 

He sent it off to Salzburg in bits and pieces. The completed six-movement piece was probably too late for the ennoblement ceremony, but it seems to have pleased everybody concerned, including Leopold. Wolfgang requested the manuscript back for a performance at the Burgtheater scheduled for March 23, 1783. Upon receiving it, he wrote Leopold that “my new Haffner symphony has positively amazed me, for I had forgotten every single note of it.” 

The “Haffner” Symphony in D Major was duly performed at the Burgtheater concert, whittled down to the standard four movements by the excision of a minuet and a march. (The latter survived as K. 385a, but the minuet is lost.) He opened with the Haffner’s first three movements, then used its finale to conclude the entire program, which consisted of two concertos, a handful of arias, piano solos including an improvisation, and several movements from a D major serenade in addition to the new symphony. That seems impossibly long by modern standards, but it must have gone splendidly, given that Emperor Joseph II stayed for the entire show instead of putting in his usual brief appearance. 

Its gestation might have been piecemeal, but the “Haffner” is flawlessly constructed. The etched unisons of the opening turn out to be the materials from which the entire movement is built, while the second-place Andante purrs along in feline contentment. The Minuet, more Haydnesque than Mozartean, is a robust peasant dance with a lyrical trio. The Presto finale bears a striking resemblance to an aria from Mozart’s recent opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, but is paced at a sprint that no singer, however virtuoso, could have possibly matched.