A pre-cursor to his Ninth Symphony
On December 22, 1808, a monumental concert was held in the recently opened Theater an der Wien in Vienna. For his own benefit, Beethoven organized an evening of his own works in which he would perform as a pianist and conductor. The works to be presented required the participation of a full orchestra, choirs, soloists, and piano. The program included no less than the simultaneous premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Piano Concerto No. 4. In addition, excerpts from the Mass in C minor were performed, and as usual, a couple of arias were sung.
To conclude the evening of this memorable four-hour concert "in a cold and unpleasant theater", Beethoven opted for a brilliant finale that should fuse all the musical components of the evening – orchestra, choirs, and piano – in the same work. The genre chosen was the Fantasy.
The concert indeed took place under disastrous conditions, due to the prevailing cold, the length of the concert, and the fact that the orchestra's performance was calamitous, as its members had been hastily assembled and had only one rehearsal. To make matters worse, the Bonn maestro had decided on his "grand finale" only a fortnight before.
The Fantasy for piano, choirs, and orchestra, also called Choral Fantasy, was composed in the second half of December, an unusually short time by the maestro's standards. So, a possible error in its performance was highly probable. And this is how J.F. Reichard tells it, in his Selected Letters, written on a trip to Vienna.
"Finally, a long Fantasia, with the intervention of the piano, the orchestra, and, finally, the choir. This strange and interesting idea had a desolating manifestation in the performance, for the orchestra fell into such a state of complete bewilderment that Beethoven, possessed by the artist's fire, forgot his audience and those around him and rose from the piano shouting, "Stop, stop and start again from the beginning!" You can imagine how all of us present suffered for him. At that moment, I even wished I had dared to leave the theater much earlier...".
What had happened? The maestro had agreed with the concertmaster that a certain piece was to be played without the repetitions. But at the time, Beethoven forgot his own suggestion and repeated the parts while the orchestra went the other way. It is also said that it was the concertmaster who stopped the performance and who reportedly asked Beethoven: "With repetitions this time? to which the maestro replied positively.
Fantasia for piano, choirs and orchestra, opus 80
The work, dedicated to King Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria, is conceived in two parts of unequal length: an Adagio (initiated by an improvised piano solo cadenza of 26 bars) and a Finale formed by several sections of different tempo: allegro, meno allegro, allegro molto, adagio ma non tropo, marcia, allegro, allegretto, presto.
The theme developed – universal brotherhood through the meeting of the arts – is quite similar to that of Schiller's Ode to Joy, which took its final form in the finale of the Ninth Symphony. The texts, by the poet Christoph Kuffner, are also similar, as is the choral treatment.
Beethoven was aware of the kinship of the two works. In a letter of 1824, when he was writing the Ninth Symphony, he described his project as "an arrangement of the words of Schiller's immortal Ode to Joy, in the same manner as my fantasia with piano and chorus, but on a much larger scale."
The work lasts just over twenty minutes.
The Singapore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Litton, performs this version.
At the piano, Malaysian piano wunderkind Tengku Irfan.
