PROGRAM NOTES "Night Music "
Franz Joseph Haydn, Symphony No. 8 in G Major, Le soir
In 1761, shortly after he entered the patronage of the Esterházy court, Franz Joseph Haydn composed a symphonic trilogy based on times of day: Symphony No. 6, Le matin (Morning), Symphony No. 7, Le midi (Afternoon), and Symphony No. 8, Le soir (Evening). Although Prince Paul Anton reportedly suggested the topic to Haydn, both men may have been thinking of a fashionable pantomime ballet that had premiered at the Burgtheater in 1755, where the Prince had a regular box—Les quatres parties du jour en quatres ballets différens (The four parts of the day in four different ballets, subtitled “Le matin,” “Le midi,” “Le soir,” “La nuit”). Another compelling subtext is at work in Symphony No. 8, which is written for flute, bassoon, pairs of oboes and horns, and strings. The first movement is based on a popular song about tobacco from Gluck’s comic opera Le diable à quatre, which had premiered at the Burgtheater in 1759 and was revived in 1761. Why did Haydn use this tune? The Prince may have proposed the melody, or as one scholar suggests, perhaps Haydn wanted to remind listeners of festive evenings at the theater. Musicologist Richard Will has recently suggested that Haydn may have been equally drawn to the opera’s dramatic conflict. In the song Haydn borrows, “Je n’aimais pas le tabac beaucoup” (I didn’t like tobacco very much), a dissatisfied wife confesses that her husband’s disdain for tobacco makes her like it even more. According to Will, Haydn uses this tension to help create formal structure in the movement. The “Tempesta” finale, which vaguely recalls Vivaldi in its solo flourishes, is also noteworthy.
Benjamin Britten, Nocturne, Op. 60
While Haydn’s symphony takes its inspiration from popular theater, the nocturne depicts nighttime in a more literal fashion. Derived from the Italian notturno (a piece written to be performed outdoors at night), “nocturne” eventually came to describe a piece that evoked one of night’s unique qualities. While some nocturnes are quiet and meditative, others conjure up a wilder side of nighttime—especially in connection with dreams. Benjamin Britten’s Nocturne for tenor and orchestra brings together eight poems by disparate authors under the rubric of sleep or dreams. Although each poem comprises a distinct section of the work, Britten elides them in his exploration of night’s paradoxes, creating a single entity that is at once eerily beautiful and slightly disorienting. As Imogen Holst writes of the piece, “In the Nocturne there is no room for ordinary time-by-the-clock, which means that there is no need to set each new scene. Without any suggestion of incongruity the mewing of the cats on the roof in a minor Elizabethan comedy merges into Wordsworth’s terror at the evils of the French Revolution. The result is overwhelming.”
Musical expression of the text is the Nocturne’s driving force—a concern Britten shares with Henry Purcell, with whom he felt a particular affinity. Britten especially admired the “form which Purcell perfected—the continuous movement made up of independent, short sections mysteriously linked by subtle contrasts of key, mood, and rhythm,” and he uses precisely this structure in the Nocturne. In the opening section, taken from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Britten uses undulating vocal lines and respiring string figures (the latter reappear throughout the work) to create a nebulous, dreamlike evocation of “shapes that haunt thought’s wilderness.” Sea monsters come to life in obbligato bassoon figures in Tennyson’s “Kraken,” while ethereal harp music paints the silvery moonlight in “Encintured with a twine of leaves” from Coleridge’s “The Wanderings of Cain.” The horn wears many different hats in the “Night Song” from Thomas Middleton’s Blurt, Master Constable, morphing from a bell, to a cricket, to a mouse, to a cat throughout the section. The timpani serves as “substantial dread” in Wordsworth’s nightmare, which gives way to frightening reality at the cry “Sleep no more!” Sleep and death are bound in Wilfred Owen’s World War I dirge, “The Kind Ghosts,” and Britten communicates a sense of stillness and lament in the elegiac exchanges between voice and English horn. Sudden torrents of virtuosity from the flute and clarinet herald the lighthearted excerpt from Keats’s “Sleep and Poetry,” whose playful tone dissolves into a brief recapitulation of the opening music. The entire ensemble comes together in the lushly romantic setting of Shakespeare’s sonnet “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,” whose eloquent paradox seems to provide the key to the entire work—“But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,/And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.”
George Frideric Handel: “Total Eclipse” from Samson, Act I, Scene II
In “Total Eclipse,” from George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Samson, darkness—in this case, complete obliteration of the sun—is a metaphor both for Samson’s blindness and his complete despair. Imprisoned after the betrayal of his wife Delilah, Samson—who has been placed in chains and temporarily allowed outside—becomes an unwilling bystander as the Philistines celebrate their god Dagon. He is soon approached by Micah and a group of Israelites, and bemoans his state. Handel’s setting of the impassioned text is restrained and remarkably effective, communicating Samson’s resignation and hopelessness through melody alone while the instruments underscore his words.
Henry Purcell: Night sequence from The Fairy Queen, Act II
Felix Mendelssohn: Nocturne from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61
Night serves as the backdrop for a magical fairy-world in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which supplies the subject of both Purcell’s semi-opera The Fairy Queen (1692) and Mendelssohn’s incidental music for a German production of the play just over a century and a half later in 1843. Based on an anonymous Restoration adaptation of Shakespeare’s original, The Fairy Queen is comprised of spoken dialogue interspersed with musical scenes reserved for magical or supernatural characters. In the night sequence from Act II of The Fairy Queen, Titania—who has just been entertained by the fairies—asks them for a lullaby, and Night, Mystery, Secresie, and Sleep sing to her until she falls asleep. Night and romance freely commingle in the airs that follow, culminating in a final farewell to the slumbering queen. The Mendelssohn Nocturne occurs between Acts III and IV of the play as Lysander, Hermia, Helena, and Demetrius sleep in the forest. With noble horns, lilting flutes, and lyrical strings, Mendelssohn creates a reassuring serenity that foreshadows the play’s imminent resolution.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Serenade in G Major, K. 525, Eine kleine Nachtmusik
Yet another term for nocturne, Nachtmusik generally referred in the eighteenth century to a piece intended for a particular kind of night festivity, often performed around 11 PM. Mozart’s popular Serenade in G Major, K. 525, composed in 1787, was most likely written for one of these occasions. Subtitled Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the diminutive may have referred to its minimal scoring—the work is the only serenade Mozart wrote for strings alone. The piece is also “little” in structure; while serenades frequently had many movements, Eine kleine Nachtmusik consists of only four, more akin to a symphony: an opening Allegro, a slow Romanza, a Minuet and Trio, and a closing Rondo. (Interestingly, an extant autograph of the title page, which reads A Little Night Music, consisting of an Allegro, Minuet and Trio, Romance, Minuet and Trio, and Finale, suggests that the work may originally have had five movements.) Although we don’t know exactly why Mozart wrote Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein hypothesized—perhaps tongue in cheek—that it was an antidote to Ein musikalischer Spaß (A Musical Joke), a work full of deliberately clumsy and satirical musical gestures composed seven or eight weeks earlier. (Music of the Baroque will perform this piece for the first time this coming January.) As Einstein writes of Mozart, “A pair of ears such as his requires that mistakes be corrected; for him, as for Bach, every false note was an offense against the cosmic system.”
