Upshaw, Dennehy and Beethoven

First performance: November 5, 1954 in Zurich, conducted by Paul Sacher.

After a slow start in music, Michael Tippett developed into one of the major British composers of the twentieth century. He studied at the Royal College of Music from 1923 to 1928, and then returned for counterpoint lessons from 1930 to 1932. His first mature works emerged in the mid-1930s, at the same time that he was developing his pacifist stance and coming to terms with his homosexuality. Tippett registered as a conscientious objector during World War II, which resulted in a three-month prison sentence in 1943. His trajectory improved the next year, when his breakthrough oratorio, A Child of Time, received a belated first performance.

In 1952, Tippett was one of six composers asked to contribute to the Variations on an Elizabethan Theme, a collaborative project spearheaded by Benjamin Britten. In honor of the upcoming coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Britten proposed that each composer write a variation on a famous tune from the time of Queen Elizabeth I. The tune was “Sellinger’s Round,” as arranged by the Renaissance composer William Byrd (1543–1623). Tippett supplied the second variation, A Lament. Besides using the Byrd theme, Tippett also incorporated a quotation from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, from the famous recitative and aria known as “Dido’s Lament.” Having already designed one variation, Tippett expanded his work into a complete piece of its own.

“Sellinger’s Round,” or alternatively “Sellenger’s Round,” was already a popular dance tune by the time of Byrd’s rendition, which first appeared in 1590. The tune was first known as “St. Leger’s Round,” sharing its name with a powerful family that entered England with the Norman conquest in 1066. John Playford included the melody in his seventeenth-century dance compendium, The Dancing Master, along with instructions for a circle dance for couples.

Tippett’s Divertimento on “Sellinger’s Round” looks at the tune five different ways, each time incorporating quotations from another composer. The opening Allegro dissects the theme with neoclassical fragmentation and imitative counterpoint. Additional music by the Renaissance composer Orlando Gibbons and the prominent use of oboe and bassoon reinforce the movement’s historical character.

The second movement, A Lament, frames the theme with excerpts from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and florid violin solos. The following Presto is wry and scherzo-like; it adds music by Thomas Arne, the eighteenth-century composer most famous for penning Rule, Britannia! The Adagio fourth movement is dark and moody, with angular passages of stacked fourths taking the music further from its Renaissance source. The additional composer featured here is John Field, an Irish pianist and composer who helped pioneer Romantic forms such as the Nocturne for solo piano. The Allegro Assai finale juxtaposes lively repetitions from the strings with dry interjections from the winds and brass. Tippett included music by Arthur Sullivan from Yeoman of the Guard (1888), the eleventh of fourteen comic operas by the team of Gilbert and Sullivan.

First performance: June 23, 1943 in London by the Boyd Neel String Orchestra.

Benjamin Britten returned to England in 1942 after three years in Canada and New York, a time when he and tenor Peter Pears established what would prove to be a lifelong relationship. As conscientious objectors, they faced possible conscription or even jail time upon their return, but they were left free to continue their many joint recital performances around the country. Britten did lose a few months of productivity in 1943 to an attack of the measles; as he recovered, he completed his first major work since coming home, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.

Britten followed the Serenade with another work for string ensemble, the Prelude and Fugue, composed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Boyd Neel String Orchestra. The group’s conductor and founder, Boyd Neel, had championed Britten from early on, helping to establish the composer’s reputation in England and abroad. Prior to the Prelude and Fugue, Neel’s group had performed and recorded Britten’s Simple Symphony (1934), commissioned the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) and premiered the song cycle Les Illuminations (1939).

Any composition cast as a Prelude and Fugue evokes Baroque traditions, above all the works of J. S. Bach. There is a Bach-like austerity to Britten’s Prelude, especially during the violin solo that floats over a sparse and angular accompaniment. The Fugue splits the ensemble into eighteen individual voices, building up from the basses in lively exchanges that maximize the sonic diversity of the ensemble. The Prelude material returns near the end, capped with an energetic resurgence of the Fugue.

First performance: April 2, 1800 in Vienna. First SPCO performance: November 16–17, 1968; most recent SPCO performance: April 29–May 1, 2010. Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

At the dawn of the 19th century, Beethoven was an accomplished composer exemplifying the traditions of Haydn and Mozart. Within a few years, his voice would evolve toward unprecedented intensity and integration—fueled in part by his encroaching deafness—and the last great Classical-era composer would become the first great Romantic. Much of Beethoven’s reputation today centers on his bold and exhilarating symphonies, from the epic Third Symphony to the life-affirming Ninth. For Beethoven to become the symphonist who would overshadow all others, he first had to confront the shadows over him, a process that began in his Symphony No. 1. 

The young Beethoven shied away from the two forms most closely associated with his teacher Haydn, the symphony and the string quartet. He finally wrote his first quartets, the set of six grouped as Opus 18, between 1798 and 1800. As for symphonies, he made an attempt in 1795–96 (after hearing Haydn’s London symphonies), but he did not complete one until 1800. He debuted the work on April 2 on his first “benefit” concert at the Burgtheater, where in the 1780s Mozart had presented highly successful concerts of his own. Such events were staged for the financial benefit of the composer and featured a variety of music designed to attract paying audiences. Besides his First Symphony, Beethoven also offered his Septet (Opus 20), a Mozart symphony, excerpts from Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, a piano concerto, and some improvisations from the keyboard. 

Beethoven’s First Symphony honors the inherited Viennese tradition, and yet it also contains a germ of independence. The most striking departure comes in the very first sonority, an unstable chord that resolves away from the home key. It only cycles back to the proper tonal center of C major after a drawn-out introduction that is simultaneously dignified and tantalizing. When the main theme enters with the Allegro con brio tempo, it plays with a small three-note figure outlining an ascending fourth, echoing the relationship between the work’s two opening chords. In a precursor of the interconnected symphonies to come, the second movement starts with the same ascending interval. A distinguishing characteristic of the slow movement is its rich and independent writing for winds, with a scoring that includes trumpets and timpani. 

The third movement, though labeled a minuet, is closer in spirit to the wild scherzos of the later symphonies. The contrasting trio section especially reveals Beethoven’s sense of humor, with scampering runs in the strings popping up like mischievous critters between chorale phrases in the woodwinds. The finale brings this fledgling symphony full circle, with a slow introduction setting up a tonal resolution that solves the riddle posed by the symphony’s opening chords. The violins test an ascending scale, adding a note at a time; when they reach the top of the octave, they launch a bright and hearty valediction.