Behind the Musik: Beethoven & Farrenc

The score of Gail’s La Sérénade was published and was generously made available by the Palazzetto Bru Zane—Centre de musique romantique française.

Program Notes

By Patrick G. Jordan

Sophie Gail (1775–1819) was born in Paris to a musical family; she was a pianist, singer, and published composer. Tafelmusik’s performance of her Overture to La Sérénade marks our first performance of this unjustly neglected composer. Like many others, her family fortune was lost in the turmoil of the Revolution and she naturally turned to music to support herself and four children. In 1813 she had a great success at the Opéra-Comique with her one act opera Les Deux Jaloux, on a libretto by Jean-Baptiste-Charles Vial. Her next two offerings for the Opéra were less well received, but in 1818 she found her mojo again with La Sérénade, on a libretto by the nearly-identically named novelist Sophie Gay. It is a setting of Jean-François Regnard’s 1694 satirical farce that concerns the “rescue” of a beautiful young woman from an untoward marriage to a wealthy old geezer.

The Overture has a small but significant detail of orchestration. Most unusually for 1818, timpani are present without their co-conspirators, the trumpets. The horns do double duty here, fulfilling their usual role as harmonic support with an occasional soloistic flourish, but also taking on the trumpets’ role of punctuation with the timpani. The piece runs about six minutes and may to some listeners be reminiscent of Felix Mendelssohn. A quick arithmetic check will reveal that Felix, while precocious, was a mere nine years old at the premiere. Perhaps it would be more fitting to accept that that flavour was already in the air and that we associate it with Mendelssohn out of a mixture of “great man” myth, and ignorance of others such as Sophie Gail.

Louise Farrenc (1804–1879) was also from a family of strong artistic lineage, including several women who were royal painters. In 1842 she was named Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatory, a post she retained until her retirement in 1873. While she was not the first woman appointed to the faculty (that distinction belongs to Hélène de Montgeroult who was hired at the founding of the institution in 1795, teaching for three years), she was the only woman in the 19th century to hold a permanent position of such a high rank. Her early career was as a pianist, but she excelled as a composer. As a pedagogue, she made a remarkable contribution with Le trésor des pianistes, which was the first 19th century collection to include French keyboard music of the 17th and early 18th centuries.

Her Symphony no. 3 in G Minor from 1847 is her last work for orchestra, although she continued composing works for piano and chamber ensembles. The premiere concert included Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5, which was by that time already a war-horse. Predictably, this pairing provoked immediate comparisons between the two works, and not a small amount of anticipatory anxiety on the part of one of the first critics, Hortense Wild. In L’opinion des femmes she wrote, “scarcely half the work had been played before we had forgotten our role, our anxieties, and the composer’s gender; our emotions, deeply stirred, blossomed freely and happily as we listened to this magnificent piece.”

The entire work lasts approximately 30 minutes. The first movement offers a tentative and dreamy opening, which explores sound colours, including plucked accompaniments in the strings. Remarkably dramatic material ensues and the movement can be heard as a push and pull of these two worlds. The second movement, in E-flat major, begins with an extraordinarily calm and slow-moving theme marked by persistent rhythmic underpinning in the timpani and horns (again, the trumpets are absent from the score, which is less unusual by 1847—the thirty years between these pieces were a time of great broadening of the roles of orchestral instruments). The calm melody is given several expressive framings throughout, and is contrasted with a flowing triplet melody, punctuated by dramatic appearances of a heavily dotted rhythmic figure, announced initially by the humble violas. The third movement Scherzo, again in G minor, is a swirling, mysterious scene of wonder, which could be sprites in the forest; the contrasting trio is introduced by that most pastoral of instruments, the horns, with plucked accompaniment in the violins and flowing clarinet lines. The dramatic Finale is an energetic storm in the strings; the clouds clear for a flowing and slightly cheeky contrasting theme. Eschewing a repeat she instead heightens the tension and creates a very compact movement by launching directly into a dramatic development beginning in the relatively distant key of B minor, this time with the winds along for the ride. The flowing theme is fragmented by intense interruptions of the stormy music. The timpani is finally fully emancipated and enjoys its own part, free now even of the horns.

Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 was an overwhelming critical and popular success from its first performance. There is a sense in the enthusiastic and possibly relieved reaction of the critics that Beethoven was back and in better form than ever. Reviews of his 5th and 6th symphonies from five years previous were rather muted or perplexed, especially in the case of the 6th, with its expansive length (five instead of four movements), and its experimental programmatic pastoral scheme. In any case, neither piece was well served by an initial performance as part of a gargantuan four-hour concert presented by a poorly rehearsed orchestra in a freezing cold concert hall!

By contrast, the premiere of the 7th on December 8, 1813 was a gala affair organized by the gifted and highly self-serving musician, inventor, and impresario, Johann Nepomuk Maelzel. Maelzel may also be familiar as the individual who perfected the metronome. The two met when Maelzel supplied Beethoven with state-of-the-art ear trumpets to help mitigate his encroaching deafness. For the premiere concert, Maelzel persuaded Beethoven to compose a piece, Wellington’s Victory, for the panharmonicum, a mechanized instrument of Maelzel’s devising that used pinned cylinders and compressed air to automatically play back the sounds of a military band or orchestra. Beethoven later expanded the work for an actual orchestra.

The 7th Symphony opens with a remarkably extended Poco sostenuto introduction that lays out the harmonic scheme of the entire symphony. In particular, he explores relatively distant key relationships which he will later exploit fully. The fast part of the movement, Vivace, launches out of this introduction like a rocket, and the whole movement is propelled forward. The Allegretto was a smashing success from the first performance and was frequently encored during subsequent performances. It is a theme and of variations which grow in complexity with a pair of interludes that give moments of repose in that development. The whole movement is held together by an insistent rhythmic motif in the bass of long, short-short, long, long. The third movement Presto, which is essentially a scherzo with trio, follows the ABABA form that Beethoven embraced after the 3rd symphony—we hear the scherzo three times, and the more bucolic woodwind-driven trio twice. The second appearance of the scherzo is marked “always soft” and creates something of a reminiscence of the opening. The Finale is something of a bookend, capturing a boosted version of the relentless energy of the first movement’s Vivace. And lest the timpani be excluded, they are paired here, as expected, with the trumpets!

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