Authentic page mp3s - Piano Concerto nr4 Op.58

[Rod]

Originally posted by Peter:
Aside from the scores, do we have any other evidence that Beethoven would have performed these concertos this way and why do you think this is no longer the case?

I presume the practise stems form the time when the soloist was also the director of the orchestra. When the role was passed over to the conductor i further assume these passages were deemed unessessary - on the further assumption still that they only served the purpose of maintaining some kind of directoral link between the soloist and the orchestra and having no real musical purpose other than this. As for Beethoven using them, I'm not sure if i have evidence, but by logic if he composed them I presume he must have played them sometime at least.

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"If I were but of noble birth..." - Rod Corkin

[This message has been edited by Rod (edited 10-15-2004).]

[ruudp]

What's with the programme franz liszt attributed too this piece?Is it really about the famous orpheus legend or is that a farce aswell just as the moonlight??

Regards,
Ruud

[Rod]

Originally posted by ruudp:
What's with the programme franz liszt attributed too this piece?Is it really about the famous orpheus legend or is that a farce aswell just as the moonlight??

Regards,
Ruud

I think there is something to this, I've posted an artice on this issue here a couple of times before.


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"If I were but of noble birth..." - Rod Corkin

[Peter]

Originally posted by Rod:
I think there is something to this, I've posted an artice on this issue here a couple of times before.

Here is that article posted a while back:

By Owen Jander

The Fourth Piano Concerto comes from a period when Beethoven was engrossed in two new musical challenges: how to infuse music with poetic meaning, and how to unite the several movements of a larger work with a single idea. The chief examples of these concerns are the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies — both patently cyclic and programmatic. The two symphonies were premiered in a single concert on 22 December 1808 (the concert opened with the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony); and between them occurred the first public performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto. Not surprisingly this concerto turns out also to be cyclic and programmatic, its programme based on the ever-popular legend of Orpheus.

This, too, is not surprising, in view of the fact that Vienna, at the turn of the century was caught up in the discovery of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the greatest source of classical mythology In just these years Viennese audiences were treated to a wave of works based on favourite classical myths
— and for musicians, of course, Orpheus has always been the classical myth. (Interestingly enough, many of these new treatments of classical mythology were of a parodistic nature, testimony to the fun that Viennese audiences were having with these old tales).

The Orpheus legend is in three chapters: the Song of Orpheus, Orpheus and Euridice (or Orpheus in Hades), and Orpheus and the Bacchantes. These three chapters inspired the three movements of Beethoven’s concerto.

The Op.58 concerto seems to have originated with its second movement, which is Beethoven’s most amazing experiment in the realm of programme music. This movement was inspired by the Infernal Scene in Gluck’s Orfeo, the most famous scene in all eighteenth-century opera (a relationship already detected by Adolph Bernhard Marx 125 years ago). Internal evidence makes it clear, furthermore, that this concerto movement is a transcription of a brief work (only 72 bars long) originally conceived for solo piano. (Both Fanny Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt are known to have performed this movement by itself, as a solo piece). In 1803 Beethoven acquired a new piano that featured triple stringing and an una corda pedal. On such an instrument, through deft use of tbe shifting pedal, two distinct voices emerge. This suggested to Beethoven a dialogue between the Furies of Hades (tre corde) and the gentle-voiced Orpheus (una corda). The next step a very simple one — was to score the speeches of the Furies for strings, in angry fortissimo octaves.

The programme for the Andante con moto is amazingly detailed. The first 46 bars not only mirror the dialogue between Orpheus and the Furies in the famous Cluck opera, but translate into music a sequence of lines found in the Infernal Scene of an Orpheus opera that was performed in Vienna in 1807 — the same year as the first performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. Both the libretto and the score of this Orpheus were the work of Friedrich August Kanne, a close friend of Beethoven. To wit:
Ceister: Ha! Wer wagt es hier zu nah’n!
Orpheus: Ich wandle froh die Schreckensbahn.
Geister: Ha! Verwegner, geh zuruck!
Orpheus: Ich suche meines Lebens Cluck.
(Spirits: Ha! Who dares to approach this place!/Orpheus: I tread this path of terrors gladly/Spirits: Ha! Trespasser, get out of here!/Orpheus: I seek Euridice, who is my life’s joy)

The continuation of the programme in this movement is based on lines drawn from the classical Orpheus narratives of Ovid and Virgil. (The details of this programme are set forth in my article published in the Spring 1985 issue of l9th-Ceuturt1 Music).

Since this Andante con moto is narrative from beginning to end (and was presumably not originally devised to serve as a concerto movement), its form is unique and unprecedented. The first and third movements of the Concerto, on the other hand, are highly innovative treatments of existing classical forms. They are inspired by Ovid’s text, and so dozens and dozens of unusual events in the music reflect details in the poetic source. The famous opening of the concerto, for example — those five, tentative measures for the solo piano: Ovid says that before Orpheus sings his sdng he quietly tests the strings of his lyre with his thumb (Ovid, X, 143-47). And then there is that mysterious entrance of the strings, pianissimo, without the double-basses, and with the second violins playing below the violas — this is the strange key of B major! Here is Beethoven’s depiction of the amazement of Nature in response to the magical sound of the Orphic lyre (Ovid, X, 86-90).

In the Op.58 Concerto we encounter,as it were, three orchestras: in the first movement an orchestra of strings and winds; in the second, an orchestra of strings only; in the third, an orchestra of strings and winds plus trumpets aud timpaoi.

This third movement is fascinating! As the legend goes, Orpheus has offended the Bacchantes, so they decide to destroy him. To this end they must drown out the protective sound of his magical lyre; and so they pounce on him, howling in defiance, with an uproar of wind instruments, trumpets and drums (‘tibia, cornu, timpanaque’ — Ovid,XI, 1-19). The orchestral fortissimo at bar 32 — where the trumpets and timpani enter for the first time in this concerto — is the most jolting explosion in all of the music of Beethoven.

This finale is a study in dynamic violence like nothing in the history of the concerto —and it was made possible, of course, by the comparatively huge new pianos of the moment.

Just at the time that Beethoven was beginning to envision his Fourth Piano Concerto he commissioned a portrait of himself from his friend Willibrord Josef Mdhler. The Mahler portrait contains a network of symbolic devices, some of which have to do with the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, and some of which concern the ‘Orpheus’ Concerto. In his left hand, Beethoven grasps a lyra-guitar, symbolic of the ‘Song of Orpheus’ (even of those opening five bars). In the background is a lucus (Lat., a grove sacred to the dead), planted with cypress trees, in the vicinity of a temple —.and Virgil reports that Orpheus, on his way to Hades, journeys through a lucus. In the upper right-hand area is a writhing oak tree, a reference to the finale of the concerto. When the Bacchantes destroy Orpheus they are in turn punished by being metamorphosed into writhing oaks, their toes rooted into the ground (Ovid, XI, 67-84). At the very end of the concerto, as the Bacchantes’ theme is heard for the last time, the basses and bassoons, fortissimo, thrash about in frantic triplets.

Beethoven’s teacher in Bonn, Christian Cottlob Neefe, published an essay about instrumental music of pictorial intent. ‘The charlatan composer talks about painting in music, but fails to achieve that goal’, said Neefe; ‘the great, genuine artist, however, does indeed paint in music, but never talks about it.’ In Beethoven’s generation programme music was a fiercely debated issue. Quite understandably Beethoven found wisdom in presenting his Fourth Piano Concerto to his audience with no mention of the famous legend that had inspired it.



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'Man know thyself'

[Joy]

Very intresting story! Here is a site to view the portrait you mentioned for anyone interested. Please scroll down to the 1804/1805 Mahler's portrait and click the portrait to enlarge,
http://www.lvbeethoven.com/Portraits...Portraits.html

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'Truth and beauty joined'