Marek Janowski/40 years of Sinfonia Varsovia

Joseph Haydn: Symphony in B-flat major La Reine (The Queen), Hob.I:85

The concert life of Paris in the second half of the 18th century was based on numerous societies that had their own orchestras. They organized various subscription music events, even competitions. The best known of these guilds was the Concert Spirituel (Spiritual Concert), but the best was the Concert de la Loge Olympique (Concert of the Olympic Lodge). It had a superb orchestra of 55 to 67 musicians, three times larger than that of Joseph Haydn, who had not traveled outside Eszterháza for years. The ensemble, supported by Freemasonry, was led by François-Joseph Gossec as conductor; he later became the leading composer of the French Revolution. The most important patrons of the orchestra included Claude-François-Marie Rigoley, Count d'Ogny, an influential music lover, cellist and owner of a massive music library, in which he also had 34 Haydn symphonies. It was thanks to him that in 1784 the composer was commissioned to write 6 symphonies numbered 82–87 (and later three more, Nos. 90–92), which became revolutionary in design and became known as The Paris Symphonies. The first three are dated 1785, the second three – the following year. The Paris Symphonies were successfully premiered during the 1787 Olympic Lodge season at the Tuileries Palace (Haydn was absent, he never visited Paris), and later repeated at the Concert Spirituel. According to the anecdote, Queen Marie Antoinette, who, by the way, certainly listened to the premieres, took a liking to these works, especially Symphony in B-flat major No. 85 (contrary to the numbering, the third, not the fourth in the sequence). Paris publisher Jean-Jérôme Imbault soon eagerly labeled the work with the nickname La Reine de France (The Queen of France), which, when juxtaposed with Gossec’s name as the conductor of the orchestra, would prove to be a future historical irony. It wasn’t long before the symphony became known as “the most French” of The Paris Symphonies, a symbol of the ancien régime (the old, monarchical system). This was also due to the fact that Haydn based the work’s second movement, a variation Romanza, on the popular French folk tune La gentille et jeune Lisette (The nice and young Elisabeth). The first movement of the symphony is accompanied by a slow introduction (which, starting from the first Paris symphony, would be an obligatory element of the first movement in Haydn’s symphonies), here alluding in punctuated rhythms to a French-style overture, undoubtedly symbolic of royal power. The graceful ländler in the middle section of the third movement (trio) was entrusted to the woodwind instruments, which would become a canonical solution to the genre, while the fourth movement is an example of a sophisticated sonata rondo form, in which the two themes of the movement are broken into motifs and subjected to transformation.

Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 in E-flat major Romantic, WAB 104 (1878/80 version, ed. Leopold Nowak 1953)

The reception of the symphonic works of the greatest 19^th century Austrian religious composer, Anton Bruckner, was in his times – in a century of “religion of art” rather than pure sacrum – ambiguous. Performances of his successive symphonies, criticized for their size and organ-like grandeur, proved to be a failure. This modest, shy man was born in Ansfelden near Linz, in the rural environment of Upper Austria, and grew up mainly in Linz’s St. Florian Abbey, where he was organist for years and where he was eventually buried. Full of fervent religiosity, the “simpleton of God,” as he was sarcastically called in Vienna, was enamored of the Viennese classics’ music, but also the Renaissance and early Baroque works of Palestrina, Giovanni Gabrieli and Jacobus Gallus. He left behind eleven symphonies – nine mature symphonies (he completed only three movements of the last one) and early F minor (from his days as a composition student) as well as D minor, the so-called Symphony No. 0, not counting sketches for two more early works. They share a Beethovenian panache, vast thematic planes constructed from freely processed short motifs, ardent Wagnerian harmonics and subtle instrumentation, dividing the orchestral instruments into choirs. The influence of organ art is evident in these works, as can be seen in the improvisatory melodicism and great contrasts in sound and texture. After all, Bruckner was an accomplished organist and improviser known throughout Europe, and with such fame in 1868 – at the age of 44 – he settled in Vienna, where he immediately became professor of basso continuo, counterpoint and organ at the conservatory. The most important part of his symphonics was written during this period, and had to wait several more years for its discovery. For Bruckner, as a fervent follower of Wagner, had inadvertently enrolled himself in the company of the composer’s admirers, thus siding passively with the “New German” art that Brahms’ conservative Viennese supporters – headed by Eduard Hanslick – were fighting against. Excellent performances of his symphonies, conducted by great Kapellmeisters such as Franz Schalk, Arthur Nikisch, Hermann Levi and Gustav Mahler, were yet to come in the 1880s, when the aforementioned dispute had already begun to dim. Meanwhile, the composer, plagued by insecurity and depression, improved his works endlessly, creating successive versions – enough to mention that the Symphony No. 4 Romantic eventually had six authorial variants. An important role in reconstructing the composer’s original intentions was played in the 20th century by musicologists Alfred Orel, Robert Haas and, above all, the great Viennese researcher, librarian and editor Leopold Nowak. His 1953 edition of the Symphony No. 4 is a combination of the composer’s original intentions with a fourth authorial revision, taking into account the autograph of 1878–80. Although the work was written in 1873–74, it achieved undisputed success in its later version – a February 20, 1881 performance by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Hans Richter.

On the score of the Fourth, for the only time in his entire symphonic output, Bruckner outlined the title Romantic, suggesting an extramusical program. Indeed, under the mask of medieval or early Renaissance allegory, it conveys a mystical, pantheistic union with God, nature and the whole world. Filled with painterly imagery straight out of the Italian quattrocento, it is the only expression of literary self-awareness of the era on the part of this contemplative, naive loner. The first part, emerging as usual in Bruckner’s work from nothingness, is a picture of a medieval town from which horsemen set out to hunt. The second movement presents an elegiac, dignified chorale, as if to illustrate a scene in the woods when a wanderer feels the absence of their loved ones. The scherzo, entrusted mainly to the horns, is a very picturesque representation of the hunt. The finale introduces the listener to the awe-inspiring mood of the forest storm, creating a kind of theatrum mundi (theater of the world) in which man feels his fragility in the face of the God’s power. Reminiscences from the previous movements lead to an impassioned climax with a mystical, redemptive chorale, which the composer himself called “the swan song of Romanticism.” In this way the composer clothes himself, as Bohdan Pociej put it, with “the element of divine madness,” with Kantian sublimity, a solemnly ecstatic state, which, with the awareness of transience, means ascending the steps of the divine ladder – towards infinity.

– Michał Klubiński

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  Thanks to the Warsaw Presidential Hotel for lending their space for the interview with Maestro Marek Janowski.