beethoven’s symphony no. 2

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2

June 10, 2021

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SEASON 2020-2021

The Philadelphia OrchestraThursday, June 10, at 8:00On the Digital Stage

Yannick Nézet-Séguin Conductor

Mozart Overture to The Magic Flute, K. 620

Bates Undistant, for orchestra and electronica United States premiere

Beethoven Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36 I. Adagio molto—Allegro con brio II. Larghetto III. Scherzo (Allegro) and Trio IV. Allegro molto This program runs approximately 1 hour and will be performed without an intermission.

This concert is sponsored by Jack and Ramona Vosbikian.

Philadelphia Orchestra concerts are broadcast on WRTI 90.1 FM on Sunday afternoons at 1 PM, and are repeated on Monday evenings at 7 PM on WRTI HD 2. Visit www.wrti.org to listen live or for more details.

SEASON 2020-2021

OurWorld

Lead support for the Digital Stage is provided by:

Claudia and Richard BalderstonElaine W. Camarda and A. Morris Williams, Jr.The CHG Charitable TrustEdith R. DixonInnisfree FoundationGretchen and M. Roy JacksonNeal W. KrouseJohn H. McFadden and Lisa D. KabnickThe Andrew W. Mellon FoundationLeslie A. Miller and Richard B. WorleyRalph W. Muller and Beth B. JohnstonNeubauer Family FoundationWilliam Penn FoundationPeter and Mari ShawDr. and Mrs. Joseph B. TownsendWaterman TrustConstance and Sankey WilliamsWyncote Foundation

The Philadelphia OrchestraYannick Nézet-Séguin Music Director Walter and Leonore Annenberg Chair

Nathalie Stutzmann Principal Guest Conductor Designate

Gabriela Lena Frank Composer-in-Residence

Erina Yashima Assistant Conductor Lina Gonzalez-Granados Conducting Fellow

Frederick R. Haas Artistic Advisor Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ Experience

SEASON 2020-2021

First ViolinsDavid Kim, Concertmaster

Juliette Kang, First Associate Concertmaster Joseph and Marie Field Chair

Marc Rovetti, Assistant Concertmaster

Barbara Govatos Robert E. Mortensen Chair

Jonathan Beiler

Hirono Oka

Richard Amoroso Robert and Lynne Pollack Chair

Yayoi Numazawa

Jason DePue Larry A. Grika Chair

Jennifer Haas

Miyo Curnow

Elina Kalendarova

Daniel Han

Julia Li

William Polk

Mei Ching Huang

Second ViolinsKimberly Fisher, Principal Peter A. Benoliel Chair

Paul Roby, Associate Principal Sandra and David Marshall Chair

Dara Morales, Assistant Principal Anne M. Buxton Chair

Philip Kates

Davyd Booth

Paul Arnold Joseph Brodo Chair, given by Peter A. Benoliel

Dmitri Levin

Boris Balter

Amy Oshiro-Morales

Yu-Ting Chen

Jeoung-Yin Kim

Christine Lim

ViolasChoong-Jin Chang, Principal Ruth and A. Morris Williams Chair

Kirsten Johnson, Associate Principal

Kerri Ryan, Assistant Principal

Judy Geist

Renard Edwards

Anna Marie Ahn Petersen Piasecki Family Chair

David Nicastro

Burchard Tang

Che-Hung Chen

Rachel Ku

Marvin Moon

Meng Wang

CellosHai-Ye Ni, Principal

Priscilla Lee, Associate Principal

Yumi Kendall, Assistant Principal

Richard Harlow

Gloria dePasquale Orton P. and Noël S. Jackson Chair

Kathryn Picht Read

Robert Cafaro Volunteer Committees Chair

Ohad Bar-David

John Koen

Derek Barnes

Alex Veltman

BassesHarold Robinson, Principal Carole and Emilio Gravagno Chair

Joseph Conyers, Acting Associate Principal Tobey and Mark Dichter Chair

Nathaniel West, Acting Assistant Principal

David Fay

Duane Rosengard

Some members of the string sections voluntarily rotate seating on a periodic basis.

FlutesJeffrey Khaner, Principal Paul and Barbara Henkels Chair

Patrick Williams, Associate Principal Rachelle and Ronald Kaiserman Chair

Olivia Staton

Erica Peel, Piccolo

OboesPhilippe Tondre, Principal Samuel S. Fels Chair

Peter Smith, Associate Principal

Jonathan Blumenfeld Edwin Tuttle Chair

Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia, English Horn Joanne T. Greenspun Chair

ClarinetsRicardo Morales, Principal Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Chair

Samuel Caviezel, Associate Principal Sarah and Frank Coulson Chair

Socrates Villegas

Paul R. Demers, Bass Clarinet Peter M. Joseph and Susan Rittenhouse Joseph Chair

BassoonsDaniel Matsukawa, Principal Richard M. Klein Chair

Mark Gigliotti, Co-Principal

Angela Anderson Smith

Holly Blake, Contrabassoon

HornsJennifer Montone, Principal Gray Charitable Trust Chair

Jeffrey Lang, Associate Principal Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson Chair

Christopher Dwyer

Jeffry Kirschen

Ernesto Tovar Torres

Shelley Showers

TrumpetsDavid Bilger, Principal Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest Chair

Jeffrey Curnow, Associate Principal Gary and Ruthanne Schlarbaum Chair

Anthony Prisk

TrombonesNitzan Haroz, Principal Neubauer Family Foundation Chair

Matthew Vaughn, Co-Principal

Blair Bollinger, Bass Trombone Drs. Bong and Mi Wha Lee Chair

TubaCarol Jantsch, Principal Lyn and George M. Ross Chair

TimpaniDon S. Liuzzi, Principal Dwight V. Dowley Chair

Angela Zator Nelson, Associate Principal

PercussionChristopher Deviney, Principal

Angela Zator Nelson

Piano and CelestaKiyoko Takeuti

KeyboardsDavyd Booth

HarpElizabeth Hainen, Principal

LibrariansNicole Jordan, Principal

Steven K. Glanzmann

Stage PersonnelJames J. Sweeney, Jr., Manager

Dennis Moore, Jr.

SEASON 2020-2021

The Philadelphia Orchestra is one of the world’s preeminent orchestras. It strives to share the transformative power of music with the widest possible audience, and to create joy, connection, and excitement through music in the Philadelphia region, across the country, and around the world. Through innovative programming, robust educational initiatives, and an ongoing commitment to the communities that it serves, the ensemble is on a path to create an expansive future for classical music, and to further the place of the arts in an open and democratic society.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin is now in his ninth season as the eighth music director of The Philadelphia Orchestra. His connection to the ensemble’s musicians has been praised by both concertgoers and critics, and he is embraced by the musicians of the Orchestra, audiences, and the community.

Your Philadelphia Orchestra takes great pride in its hometown, performing for the people of Philadelphia year-round, from Verizon Hall to community centers, the Mann Center to Penn’s Landing, classrooms to hospitals, and over the airwaves and online. The Orchestra continues to discover new and inventive ways to nurture its relationship with loyal patrons.

SEASON 2020-2021

Jessica Griffin

THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA

In March 2020, in response to the cancellation of concerts due the COVID-19 pandemic, the Orchestra launched the Virtual Philadelphia Orchestra, a portal hosting video and audio of performances, free, on its website and social media platforms. In September 2020 the Orchestra announced Our World NOW, its reimagined season of concerts filmed without audiences and presented on its Digital Stage. Our World NOW also includes free offerings: HearTOGETHER, a podcast series on racial and social justice; educational activities; and Our City, Your Orchestra, small ensemble performances from locations throughout the Philadelphia region.

The Philadelphia Orchestra continues the tradition of educational and community engagement for listeners of all ages. It launched its HEAR initiative in 2016 to become a major force for good in every community that it serves. HEAR is a portfolio of integrated initiatives that promotes Health, champions music Education, enables broad Access to Orchestra performances, and maximizes impact through Research. The Orchestra’s award-winning education and community initiatives engage over 50,000 students, families, and community members through programs such as PlayINs, side-by-sides, PopUP concerts, Free Neighborhood Concerts, School Concerts, sensory-friendly concerts, the School Partnership Program and School Ensemble Program, and All City Orchestra Fellowships.

Through concerts, tours, residencies, and recordings, the Orchestra is a global ambassador. It performs annually at Carnegie Hall, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and the Bravo! Vail Music Festival. The Orchestra also has a rich history of touring, having first performed outside Philadelphia in the earliest days of its founding. It was the first American orchestra to perform in the People’s Republic of China in 1973, launching a now-five-decade commitment of people-to-people exchange.

The Orchestra also makes live recordings available on popular digital music services and as part of the Orchestra on Demand section of its website. Under Yannick’s leadership, the Orchestra returned to recording, with nine celebrated releases on the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label. The Orchestra also reaches thousands of radio listeners with weekly broadcasts on WRTI-FM and SiriusXM.

For more information, please visit philorch.org.

SEASON 2020-2021 THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA

Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin will lead The Philadelphia Orchestra through at least the 2025–26 season, a significant long-term commitment. Additionally, he became the third music director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2018. Yannick, who holds the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Chair, is an inspired leader of The Philadelphia Orchestra. His intensely collaborative style, deeply rooted musical curiosity, and boundless enthusiasm have been heralded by critics and audiences alike. The New York Times has called him “phenomenal,” adding that “the ensemble, famous for its glowing strings and homogenous richness, has never sounded better.”

Yannick has established himself as a musical leader of the highest caliber and one of the most thrilling talents of his generation. He has been artistic director and principal conductor of Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain since 2000, and in 2017 he became an honorary member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He was music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic from 2008 to 2018 (he is now honorary conductor) and was principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic from 2008 to 2014. He has made wildly successful appearances with the world’s

SEASON 2020-2021 MUSIC DIRECTOR

Jessica Griffin

most revered ensembles and at many of the leading opera houses. Yannick signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon in 2018. Under his leadership The Philadelphia Orchestra returned to recording with nine releases on that label. His upcoming recordings will include projects with the Philadelphians, the Metropolitan Opera, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the Orchestre Métropolitain, with which he will also continue to record for ATMA Classique.

A native of Montreal, Yannick studied piano, conducting, composition, and chamber music at Montreal’s Conservatory of Music and continued his studies with renowned conductor Carlo Maria Giulini; he also studied choral conducting with Joseph Flummerfelt at Westminster Choir College. Among Yannick’s honors are an appointment as Companion of the Order of Canada; an Officer of the Order of Montreal; Musical America’s 2016 Artist of the Year; and honorary doctorates from the University of Quebec, the Curtis Institute of Music, Westminster Choir College of Rider University, McGill University, the University of Montreal, and the University of Pennsylvania.

SEASON 2020-2021 MUSIC DIRECTOR

Todd Rosenberg

The miraculous Mozart excelled at mixing together different kinds of music. In The Magic Flute, his last opera, he masterfully integrated delightful low comedy with the highest Enlightenment ideals and deftly combined features of the Italian operatic tradition with that of German song plays. The Overture to The Magic Flute that opens this concert sets the stage for the serious and the silly to follow.

At age 16 Beethoven traveled to Vienna to study with Mozart, but upon learning of his mother’s mortal illness stayed just a short time. After Mozart’s death, he returned to Vienna to study with Haydn, recognized as the “Father of the Symphony” with more than 100 to his name. Perhaps that is a reason Beethoven held off completing his first one until nearly the age of 30. His Second Symphony soon followed, composed at a time of great personal crisis. Although Beethoven was confronting the early stages of his hearing loss, the piece, in the words of Hector Berlioz, nonetheless is “smiling throughout.”

In between the music of these two Viennese masters we hear the United States premiere of Undistant by the American composer Mason Bates. Scored for chamber orchestra and electronica, the piece, Bates says, is a “journey of past, present, and future, beginning with the distancing we have experienced over the past nine months and looking toward the return of human contact in the coming year.” You will hear a snippet more of Beethoven in this piece as Bates quotes a fragment of the “Ode to Joy” from the Ninth Symphony.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is the only orchestra in the world with three weekly broadcasts on SiriusXM’s Symphony Hall, Channel 76, on Mondays at 7 PM, Thursdays at 12 AM, and Saturdays at 4 PM.

SEASON 2020-2021 FRAMING THE PROGRAM

SEASON 2020-2021

1791MozartOverture to The Magic FluteMusicCherubiniOverture to LodoïskaLiteraturePaineThe Rights of Man, Part IArtMorlandThe StableHistoryVermont becomes a state

1801BeethovenSymphony No. 2MusicHaydnThe SeasonsLiteratureChateaubriandAtalaArtGoyaThe Two MajasHistoryFulton produces first submarine

PARALLEL EVENTS

SEASON 2020-2021 THE MUSIC

Overture to The Magic Flute Wolfgang Amadè Mozart Born in Salzburg, January 27, 1756 Died in Vienna, December 5, 1791

Mozart’s last opera, The Magic Flute, premiered in triumph just two months before the composer’s death in December 1791 at the age of 35. In many musical, dramatic, and philosophical senses it was a fitting conclusion to his compositional career, one that so brilliantly interweaved instrumental and vocal music, the sacred and the secular, that embraced both comic and serious opera, Italian and German texts. For years Mozart’s father had urged him to write more for the public, to take common taste into account, and to stop showing off so much. In The Magic Flute Mozart created something the public loved. It was his greatest popular success, but one that also has much deeper and lasting meanings.

The Magic Flute was commissioned by a friend, Emanuel Schikaneder, who ran one of Vienna’s suburban theaters that catered to a more diverse audience than attended the official court theaters in the inner city. Mozart had worked with his troupe before and knew what they could do. Schikaneder wrote the libretto, perhaps with some assistance from others, and also played the part of the bird-catcher Papageno, the work’s principal folk character. Both composer and librettist were Freemasons and their beliefs influenced the opera or, more accurately, Singspiel (song play), as dialogue is interspersed among the musical numbers. The fairy tale tells of a young Prince, Tamino, who rescues the lovely Pamina and then undergoes a series of initiation rites that ultimately lead to enlightenment and a place in wise Sarastro’s temple of wisdom.

The individual numbers in The Magic Flute vary from simple folk-like songs and lyrical Italianate arias to ornate Baroque showpieces and serious philosophical mediations. The philosopher T.W. Adorno thought it the last great work to reconcile the popular and elevated spheres.


A Closer Look The juxtaposition of high and low begins with the Overture. Mozart opens with solemn music, three chords in E-flat major (the key of much of his Masonic music) that will return later in the Overture, as well as in the opera. The use of trombones, rare at the time except in religious music, adds further to the initial seriousness. But this mood does not last long. A delightful allegro, which starts as a fugue, carries the music into a jubilant realm.

Mozart took great pleasure in the success of this late work. He conducted the premiere on September 30, 1791, and went to as many performances as his health allowed. Even when he was taken ill later that fall, he is said to have followed performances in his mind, looking at the clock and imagining what point in the drama was being presented at that very moment.

—Christopher H. Gibbs

Mozart composed The Magic Flute in 1791.

The Overture to The Magic Flute received its first Philadelphia Orchestra performance on February 16, 1905, with Felix Weingartner conducting. Most recently on subscription, it was heard in February 2020 with Stéphane Denève.

The score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.

The Overture runs approximately six minutes in performance.


Undistant

Mason Bates Born in Philadelphia, January 23, 1977 Now living in Burlingame, California

Raised in Richmond, Virginia, Grammy Award-winning composer Mason Bates showed an interest in both creative writing and music from an early age. He attended a joint program at Columbia University and the Juilliard School of Music, receiving a B.A. in English literature and a Master of Music in composition, while concurrently studying playwriting. He also studied at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a Ph.D. in composition. He has received the Rome and Berlin prizes as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Tanglewood Festival. Bates has composed for symphony, opera, chamber ensemble, chorus, and film, and he has extended his range further as a diverse artist continually exploring the ways in which classical music can be integrated into contemporary culture. He was awarded the 2019 Grammy for Best Opera for the recording of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, premiered in 2017 by Santa Fe Opera.

Inspired by Technology Although orchestral concerts were cancelled worldwide this past year, Bates was able to realize several musical achievements in a shutdown world. His 2020–21 season schedule was to have included the premiere of Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra, a 25-minute animated film co-commissioned by the Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Pittsburgh, and National symphonies, for live performance and later release on television. This work explores the connection between creativity and technology with the help of a magical “Sprite” that flies among instruments as they are played. The premiere of this work has been rescheduled for the 2021–22 season, but Bates recently recorded the piece with the Chicago Symphony.

Todd Rosenberg


This past year, Bates also created Mercury Soul: Cathedral, a four-part immersive miniseries fusing meditative classical music and electronica, showcasing a new way of presenting live music digitally. Mercury Soul, a non-profit organization co-founded by Bates, seeks to bring new music to new audiences through a unique combination of performance, imaginative stagecraft, innovative programming, and ground-breaking electro-acoustics. Mercury Soul: Cathedral was filmed in the expansive St. Joseph’s Arts Society in San Francisco and featured a nonstop gliding camera moving from one musician to the next against a backdrop of Persian rugs, decorative art, and light installations to complement the musical performance.

Composer, DJ, and Curator Throughout his multifaceted career, Bates has sought to imaginatively transform the way classical music is created and conveyed while bringing new music to new spaces. His current position as the first composer-in-residence at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts enabled him to create Curating the Concert Experience, a miniseries that explores the ways in which audiences experience music in the 21st century using the wide variety of venues in the Kennedy Center. As part of his residency, Bates also created the popular KC Jukebox, which features an unusual blend of classical music and non-classical artists that allows audiences to walk through installations with accompanying playlists. This unique series has been described as a “diverse use of information outreach through technology, transforming the program book into an immersive combination of video and projections that take the audience into composers’ and performers’ minds.”

A Closer Look Undistant was premiered December 4, 2020, in a digital performance by the Orquesta Sinfônica de Estado de São Paolo, conducted by Marin Alsop in a socially distanced hall. Scored for chamber orchestra and electronics, Undistant is a “journey of past, present, and future, beginning with the distancing we have experienced over the past nine months and looking toward the return of human contact in the coming year.” The orchestra is divided into three groups—winds, brass, and a third ensemble of strings and percussion— and the piece opens with cold string harmonies and percussion, muted brass chords, and plaintive woodwinds. The sound world is augmented by “the cold sound of digital stutters” from communication platforms Zoom and Skype, and continues to unfold with an extended


melody containing a fragment of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from his Symphony No. 9, creating a muffled effect reminiscent of Beethoven’s deafness. As Bates describes the piece, “strings descend from the stratosphere into arpeggiations, brass and woodwind swells quicken their overlaps, and a soulful melody emerges that connects all elements.”

As a composer in a world where the concept of “distance” took on a life of its own, Bates has remained focused on animating the live performance experience, acknowledging the challenges of this past year for orchestras through this lyrical response to the COVID crisis. With its slow-motion amalgamation of musical elements and compositional roots in challenging times for music and fellowship, Undistant is a musical affirmation of human connection.

—Nancy Plum

Undistant was composed in 2020.

This is the United States premiere performance of the piece.

Bates’s score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, percussion (crotales, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, triangles, vibraphone, xylophone), piano (doubling celesta), electronica, and strings.

Performance time is approximately nine minutes.


Symphony No. 2

Ludwig van Beethoven Born in Bonn, probably December 16, 1770 Died in Vienna, March 26, 1827

In the summer of 1801, while composing his Second Symphony, Beethoven disclosed the secret of his deteriorating hearing in a long letter to a childhood friend, Franz Wegeler. After recounting assorted professional successes, the 30-year-old composer related that “that jealous demon, my wretched health, has put a nasty spoke in my wheel; and it amounts to this, that for the past three years my hearing has become weaker and weaker.” Since Wegeler was a physician who lived in the composer’s native Bonn, he provided a detailed account of symptoms and lamented the constraints placed on his personal life (“I have ceased to attend any social functions just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf”) and professional situation (“… if my enemies, of whom I have a fair number, were to hear about it, what would they say?”).

A little more than a year later, just as he was completing the Second Symphony, Beethoven penned his “Heiligenstadt Testament,” the famous unsent letter to his brothers in which he expressed utter despair over his loss of hearing. In this revealing confession he stated that on account of his torments, “I would have ended my life. Only my art held me back. It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt was within me.” What if Beethoven had killed himself in the fall of 1802, at age 31? What had he accomplished at this point in his career and how would he have been remembered? The question assumes a special poignancy when one considers that Schubert died at the same point in his life. Mozart had not lived much longer. Beethoven, fortunately, had another 25 years.

A “Smiling” Symphony in Difficult Times The Beethoven who contemplated killing himself at 31 ultimately


became the legendary figure who redefined music and whose life in so many ways epitomizes that of the Romantic artist. During his 20s he was better known as a performer—a brilliant pianist and improviser—than as a composer. He had written a good many works in various genres, but nowhere near what Mozart, Schubert, and other masters accomplished by the age of 30. He was about to embark on a “new path,” as he told his student Carl Czerny.

The genre of the symphony, of which his idol Mozart had written some 50, and his teacher Haydn more than twice that, offered new challenges. Beethoven had ventured to write one during his teenage years in Bonn, but did not get very far. A later attempt in Vienna, during the mid-1790s, likewise proved unsuccessful, although some of the musical ideas in it eventually made their way into his First Symphony. He began sketching the Second Symphony as early as 1800, but most of the work took place during the summer and early fall of 1802—exactly at the time he confronted the crisis explained in the “Heiligenstadt Testament.”

The boundless humor and vitality of the Second Symphony—French composer Hector Berlioz later remarked that “this Symphony is smiling throughout”—challenge the simplistic connections so often made between the immediate events at a given time in Beethoven’s life and the music he then created. Indeed, as with his witty Eighth Symphony (1812), also written during a period of considerable personal distress (in the aftermath of his affair with the “Immortal Beloved”), Beethoven may have sought refuge in musical “comedy” at times of personal “tragedy.”

First Reactions Despite its good cheer, the Second Symphony initially challenged listeners. One critic remarked in 1804:

It is a noteworthy, colossal work, of a depth, power, and artistic knowledge like very few. It has a level of difficulty, both from the point of view of the composer and in regard to its performance by a large orchestra (which it certainly demands), quite certainly unlike any symphony that has ever been made known. It demands to be played again and yet again by even the most accomplished orchestra, until the astonishing number of original and sometimes very strangely arranged ideas becomes closely enough connected, rounded out, and emerges like a great unity, just as the composer had in mind.


Today we might assume such an observation would be about the monumental Third Symphony, or perhaps his Fifth or Ninth—almost any of his symphonies but the Second. Yet this early reaction is echoed by other contemporaries, who also initially found the Second Symphony difficult, imposing, and puzzling.

Early-19th-century listeners, of course, were hearing it in the context of the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, and of Beethoven’s own initial one. In fact Beethoven premiered the Second Symphony at a concert in Vienna on April 5, 1803, that also featured the First Symphony, as well as the premieres of the Third Piano Concerto and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives. Comparisons were therefore inevitable—and his First Symphony won, in part because “it was performed with unforced ease, while in the Second a striving for novel and striking effects is more visible.” The “striking effects” begin with the slow introduction to the first movement, which is far more imposing than what Beethoven had provided for the First Symphony. Other sections that follow, especially in the third-movement scherzo and in the humorous finale, elicited the word perhaps used most often to describe Beethoven’s music at the time: “bizarre.”

A Closer Look: Berlioz on Beethoven Berlioz, who penned some of the greatest music criticism of the century, wrote extensively about Beethoven, especially about the symphonies. It is interesting to consider what he valued in Beethoven and how he heard the symphonies, especially as they so inspired his own orchestral music, such as the Symphonie fantastique. Here is his discussion of the Second Symphony:

In this Symphony everything is noble, energetic, proud. The Introduction [Adagio molto] is a masterpiece. The most beautiful effects follow one another without confusion and always in an unexpected manner. The song is of a touching solemnity, and it at once commands respect and puts the hearer in an emotional mood. The rhythm is already bolder, the instrumentation is richer, more sonorous, more varied. An Allegro con brio of enchanting dash is joined to this admirable introduction. The fast motif which begins the theme, given at first to the violas and cellos in unison, is taken up again in an isolated form, to establish either progressions in a crescendo or imitative passages between wind instruments and the strings. All these forms have a new and animated


physiognomy. A melody enters, the first section of which is played by the clarinets, horns, and bassoons. It is completed by the full orchestra, and the manly energy is enhanced by the happy choice of accompanying chords.

[The second-movement Larghetto] is not treated after the manner of that of the First Symphony: It is not composed of a theme worked out in canonic imitations, but it is a pure and simple song, which is first stated sweetly by the strings, and then embroidered with a rare elegance by means of light and fluent figures whose character is never far removed from the sentiment of tenderness that forms the distinctive character of the principal idea. It is a ravishing picture of innocent pleasure, which is scarcely shadowed by a few melancholy accents.

The Scherzo is as frankly gay in its fantastic capriciousness as the previous movement has been wholly and serenely happy; for this symphony is smiling throughout; the warlike bursts of the first Allegro are entirely free from violence; there is only the youthful ardor of the noble heart in which the most beautiful illusions of life are preserved untainted. The composer still believes in immortal glory, in love, in devotion. What abandon in his gaiety! What wit! What sallies! Hearing these various instruments disputing over fragments of a theme, which no one of them plays in its entirety, hearing each fragment thus colored with a thousand nuances as it passes from one to the other, it is as though you were watching the fairy sports of Oberon’s graceful spirits.

The finale [Allegro molto] is of like genius. It is a second scherzo in duple meter, and its playfulness has perhaps something still more delicate, more piquant.

—Christopher H. Gibbs

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 was composed from 1801 to 1802.

The Second Symphony was first performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra in March 1903, with Fritz Scheel on the podium, as part of the Orchestra’s first Beethoven symphony cycle. It was most recently performed on subscription concerts in December 2016 with Cristian Măcelaru conducting.

The Philadelphians have recorded Beethoven’s Second Symphony twice:


in 1962 for CBS with Eugene Ormandy, and in 1987 for EMI with Riccardo Muti. A live recording from 2005 with Christoph Eschenbach is available as a digital download.

Beethoven scored the work for an orchestra of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

The Second Symphony runs approximately 35 minutes in performance.

Program notes © 2021. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association and/or Nancy Plum.

SEASON 2020-2021 MUSICAL TERMS

GENERAL TERMS

Aria: An accompanied solo song (often in ternary form), usually in an opera or oratorio

Arpeggio: A broken chord (with notes played in succession instead of together)

Canon: A device whereby an extended melody, stated in one part, is imitated strictly and in its entirety in one or more other parts

Chord: The simultaneous sounding of three or more tones

Fugue: A piece of music in which a short melody is stated by one voice and then imitated by the other voices in succession, reappearing throughout the entire piece in all the voices at different places

K.: Abbreviation for Köchel, the chronological list of all the works of Mozart made by Ludwig von Köchel

Meter: The symmetrical grouping of musical rhythms

Mute: A mechanical device used on musical instruments to muffle the tone

Oratorio: Large-scale dramatic composition originating in the 16th century with text usually based on religious subjects. Oratorios are performed by choruses and solo voices with an instrumental accompaniment, and are similar to operas but without costumes, scenery, and actions.

Scherzo: Literally “a joke.” Usually the third movement of symphonies and quartets that was introduced by Beethoven to replace the minuet. The scherzo is followed by a gentler section called a trio, after which the scherzo is repeated. Its characteristics are a rapid tempo, vigorous rhythm, and humorous contrasts. Also an instrumental piece of a light, piquant, humorous character.

Singspiel: A type of German opera established during the 18th century; usually light and characterized by spoken interludes

Ternary: A musical form in three sections, ABA, in which the middle section is different than the outer sections

Trio: A division set between the first section of a minuet or scherzo and its repetition, and contrasting with it by a more tranquil movement and style

SEASON 2020-2021 MUSICAL TERMS

THE SPEED OF MUSIC (Tempo)

Adagio: Leisurely, slow Allegro: Bright, fast Con brio: Vigorously, with fire Larghetto: A slow tempo

TEMPO MODIFIERS

Molto: Very

DYNAMIC MARKS

Crescendo: Increasing volume

beethoven’s symphony no. 2

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