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Draft:Symphony No. 2 in E minor

  • Comment: I believe this symphony is notable enough for an article on mainspace. However, the lack of cited sources is a major problem that must be fixed before this draft can be accepted. One of the external links apparently includes information on this work. It would be more helpful to use those for citations here, than to relegate them to external links. JSTOR will possibly have mentions of this work in Music, Tempo, and other specialist journals. An online search also turns up reviews from The Gramophone, MusicWeb International, and ClassicsToday, among others. These could be useful as cited sources. CurryTime7-24 (talk) 20:14, 10 July 2024 (UTC)
  • Comment: This draft cites three sources – an album booklet, the website of some sort of society dedicated to the composer, and a book (offline, and cited with insufficient bibliographical detail) – which isn't enough to determine whether the subject is notable per WP:NMUSIC (it certainly isn't per WP:GNG).
    Meanwhile, the vast majority of the content is unreferenced – where is all this information coming from? DoubleGrazing (talk) 06:13, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
Symphony No. 2
by Havergal Brian
KeyE minor
Composed1930–1931
DedicationElfreda Brian
Published1949
PublisherSchott and Co
Duration48 minutes
Movements4
Premiere
Date19 May 1973
LocationBrighton Dome, Brighton
ConductorLeslie Head
PerformersKensington Symphony Orchestra

The Symphony No. 2 in E minor is a symphony composed by Havergal Brian between 1930 and 1931. The work was inspired by Goethe's drama Götz von Berlichingen. Originally it did not bear any dedication, but in 1972 he retrospectively dedicated it to his then recently deceased daughter Elfreda Brian. It firmly falls in the style of the German Postromanticism, as seen by the eclectic lense of Brian.

Composition

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It was begun shortly after finishing editing the massive and ambitious Gothic Symphony, as well as composing the burlesque opera The Tigers. The piece was sketched between June and September of 1930, the full score being written and orchestrated between October of 1930 and April of 1931[1]

The symphony was not first performed until six months after Brian's death, on 19 May 1973, at the Dome in Brighton. It was performed by the Kensington Symphony Orchestra under Leslie Head, who gave the first of a run of three largely amateur performances. The first fully professional reading was a BBC broadcast recorded at the BBC Maida Vale Studios on 9 March 1979, when Sir Charles Mackerras conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The piece has only received half a dozen performances ever since.

Whereas The Gothic was a large-scale choral symphony that attempted to address the spiritual concerns of humanity, specially after the horrors of World War I, Symphony No. 2 was Brian's first serious essay in the classical four-movement form as expanded by the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler. Writing to Robert Simpson thirty years after he composed it, Brian described the piece as "...in the orthodox four movements – but very unorthodox inside. The slow movement 'had' me and I thought I could never leave it. The finale is a slow Rondo – rather an Irish expression".

Inspiration

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Throughout his life, Brian would hold contradicting views on his music and its supposedly extramusical content, and the second symphony reflects such opposing drives between programmatic music and absolute music. Initially, Brian conceived the symphony as almost programmatic in nature, reflecting multiple aspects of the life of the main character Götz von Berlichingen as reflected in Goethe's drama: a free spirit, a maverick, intended to be a pillar of national integrity against a deceitful and over-refined society, and the way in which he tragically succumbs to the abstract concepts of law and justice shows the submission of the individual in that society.

According to Reginald Nettel, "the four movements are associated in the composer's mind with various aspects of the character of Götz. The first, his resolution; the second, his domestic piety and love of his children; the third, the smell of battle; and the fourth, his death".[2] From this initial conception, which heavily resembles Liszt's Faust Symphony or even Sibelius' Kullervo Symphony, Brian would go on to attempt to deny ay extramusical programme and even influence from the play. Yet as recently as 1969, interviewed for CBC radio, Brian had referred to Symphony No. 2 as "the Götz von Berlichingen", and recalled showing the finale to Ernest Newman and explaining that it depicted the end of the life of Götz. The most he would allow later on, in a letter written to Graham Hatton in 1972, was that he had had in mind "MAN in his cosmic loneliness: ambition, loves, battles, death".

Instrumentation

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While not requiring forces as large as the Gothic, the instrumentation of the second symphony is still very large and even augmented in regards of the number of some instruments.[3]

Form

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The symphony consists of the traditional four movements.

I. Adagio solenne – allegro assai – attacca
II. Andante sostenuto e espressivo molto
III. Scherzo. Allegro assai – attacca
IV. Lento maestoso e mesto

The overall tonal plan is very different from that of many of his earlier pieces. The language is modem in sound: its tonal centres seem much more distant and abstract than in the Gothic. The harmonic language is reminiscent of Sibelius, particularly his Fourth Symphony. Like Sibelius, Brian makes extensive use of the tritone. It is present in almost every major theme in the piece and, again like Sibelius, it is as if Brian were treating this as a harmonic cadence for the work. That is, the rising or falling tritone forms a constant within the ever-changing musical substance. It is also interesting to see that composers such as Wagner and Schoenberg also used the tritone regarding it as ‘stable" harmony and, as it were, the overall stable referential sonority. This is very evident, for example, in Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No 1, 0p 9.

The structure of this work, in comparison to his previous works, is more free in the broader sense or the word, ie there are no sonata forms or traditional tonal arguments. Rather, it is a symphony composed from a single germ cell, namely the tritone, which acts as a form of motto for the symphony. The ensuing description lays all such programmatic considerations to one side and offers a brief guide to the purely musical events.

First movement

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The first movement begin with the mutter of three timpani on a bare fifth chord of E, reinforced by woodwind, while pizzicato cellos and basses pick out an angular, chromatic theme. Its three-note opening phrase, B–A♯–F, a tritone split into falling semitone and augmented third, is an important germinal cell; later forms of it tend to increase the first interval and diminish the second, while preserving the tritone span. The pizzicato theme is the backbone of a brooding introduction: it recurs in the bass (though not quite continuously) in the manner of a passacaglia, while above and around it the music accumulates weight and urgency, moving inexorably to the outbreak of the main Allegro assai. This begins with a hectic, aspiring first subject that compresses several salient ideas intro a short space. Chromatic and restlessly modulating, this moves swiftly, via two cadential bars for the brass, to a broad second subject melody in E major marked both semplice and sempre teneramente. With its regular rhythm and diatonic singing character – equally evident in its more intimate continuation – this contrasts strongly with the complex yet compressed first subject, though its textural complexities are quite comparable. Such marked polarities, achieved with a minimum of transition, are common in Brian's early symphonies. Ultimately they destabilise and subvert the sonata style to which his first movements appear to refer.

A sparse codetta – austere, descending phrases derived from the opening three-note cell, and a whispering passage of string figuration – leads straight into the development section. This is notably brief. A compressed version of the first subject is suddenly interrupted by a mysterious episode, Tranquillo e semplice, where flutes, glockenspiel, and harp restate the theme of the introduction against a chromatic viola counterpoint in a dreamlike, chiming texture. There ensues development of the second subject, starting with a cello solo, working up to the recapitulation, which is comparatively regular but culminates in a brief climax, a dramatic polyphonic outburst, before subsiding to a bare and sinister coda with softly marching timpani. (All four movements end quietly.)

Second movement

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The ensuing Andante sostenuto, which follows without a break, is the most free movement in form, and texturally and harmonically the most elaborate and advanced. It begins with a poignant theme for solo cor anglais which becomes the focus for the first of the movement's three great spans – though there are hints also of a funeral march, and variants of the first movement's angular introductory theme continue to haunt the extremely active bass lines, especially at a jagged climax marked, in Italian and English Sempre pesante possibile (each note hard and heavy).The second span sets in with a new woodwind theme, lyrically extended by horn and strings. This is interrupted by a grim, stiffly-marching episode, which abruptly dissolves into a return of the previous woodwind theme on solo clarinet against a cello-bass counterpoint and a shimmering, susurrating music for four flutes, celesta, and harps. Canonic woodwind entries against chromatically swirling string textures become a bridge to the movement's third span, announced by angry, descending figures in trumpets and tubas. A concerto-like violin solo now appears as the focus for a passionate and polyphonic orchestral tutti. A modulatory passage for woodwind leads to a climax of extraordinary textural elaboration, in which elements of all three of the movement's main spans are combined in cascades of scales on strings, harps, and high woodwind. After this, the textures thin out, and the coda (like that of the previous movement) is sparse and chill, even in the final cadence for strings and horns.

Third movement

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The scherzo announces itself with a kind of excited thrumming in the air, on harps and muted strings. Over rapid ostinati on pianos and timpani, the horns, one group after another, enunciate an ebullient hunting-call, or a call to battle. Thus begins a headlong movement of torrential sonic invention, centred on the pounding and flickering patterns provided by timpani, pianos, and, as Brian envisaged it, sixteen horns disposed in four separate groups. (The sixteen horns are an operatic requirement, heard off-stage in Wagner's Tannhäuser and Lohengrin and taken over by Richard Strauss in his Alpensinfonie. It is, strictly speaking, possible to perform Brian's symphony with only eight horns). The whole scherzo seems less an evocation of a battlefield than a virtuosic orchestral toccata of Dionysiac rhythmic drive. The various groups of horns eventually come together in a wild tutti, after which the music builds with ever-accumulating textural complexity to a shattering climax of repeated chords, reinforced by full organ. In a quiet coda, a single horn restates the main theme as if fading away into the distance, and woodwind, in descending order, spell out the notes of a dissonant harmony against flickering violins.

Fourth movement

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Abruptly, the finale breaks in – a tragic funeral march, entirely conceived in Brian's own terms, yet unafraid to evoke echoes of Siegfried's Funeral March from Götterdämmerung. In form it is, as Brian noted, a slow rondo. (He described it thus to Ernest Newman, only to receive the immortal rejoinder – "Well, why not make it fast?") The movement opens with, and is repeatedly punctuated by, a terse, recitative-like figure, stem yet slithering, announced at the outset by violas and cellos. Every appearance is slightly different, and the short-score drafts bear witness to Brian's painstaking work on these slightly but significantly varied shapes, The main rondo idea, a melancholic theme on clarinet and bass clarinet, with its horn-call pendant, is a transfiguration of the bass theme from the symphony's introduction. The first episode, brass and timpani evoking dark Wagnerian pageantry, brings the first of several Götterdämmerung-like climaxes.

A new lamenting idea, teneramente, leads via a ghostly processional to recurrences of the slithering recitative and the rondo theme. This then gives way to the second episode – a wonderful, elegiac lament, deeply English in expression. Beginning eloquently on cellos and basses in seven parts, it builds to a tremendous tutti outburst, during which the two pianos re-enter the orchestral fabric. Another processional, this time with insistent brass fanfares, prepares for expressive string writing that leads to the symphony's final catharsis, a huge tutti for the entire forces, built out of Götterdämmerung figures and parts of the rondo theme. It is abruptly cut short, and the teneramente theme reappears on solo violin and cello before a reminder of the ghostly processional leads to the final statement of the rondo subject, on solo clarinet. The bass recitative grumbles for the last time, and clarinet and bass clarinet cadence into the enveloping gloom of E minor. The last sound is the bare fifth drum-roll, on three timpani, with which the symphony began.[4]

Recordings

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Conductor Orchestra Recording Date Format Label
Sir Charles Mackerras (falsely credited as Ernest Weir) BBC Symphony Orchestra (falsely credited as Dresden Symphony Orchestra) 1979 LP Aries Records (Bootleg recording)
Anthony Rowe Moscow Symphony Orchestra 1996, released 2007 CD/Digital Naxos Records
Martyn Brabbins Royal Scottish National Orchestra 2015, released 2016 CD/Digital Dutton Epoch

References

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  1. ^ Chronology of events in Brian’s life
  2. ^ Nettel, Reginald (1945). Ordeal by music: the strange experience of Havergal Brian. Oxford University Press
  3. ^ Details on composition and Instrumentation
  4. ^ Malcolm MacDonald (2007) Naxos Records Booklet
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