Joseph Haydn´s trips to London / "London" Symphony

Of the 104 symphonies definitely written by Joseph Haydn, twelve were composed in London, but only the last of them will be known as the "London" Symphony. The work also turned out to be the symphony with which he ended all his production in the genre.

The maestro visited the island twice. The first time, in 1791, was invited by the German violinist and conductor Johann Peter Salomon, who had settled in London ten years earlier and had since become a successful music entrepreneur. Salomon was on the continent when he learned of the death of Haydn's patron, Prince Nicholas Esterházy, and the prince's son's lack of interest in maintaining the family's musical tradition. Without missing a second, Salomon left for Vienna. On a visit to the master's house, he told him all about London.

First trip: 1791 - 1792
On New Year's Day, January 1, 1791, Haydn landed at Dover. It was the first time he had set foot on foreign soil. Salomon was right: the maestro could not refuse his offer. The impresario offered a thousand pounds for an opera, six symphonies, and a couple of miscellaneous pieces, guaranteeing two hundred more for a benefit concert. The maestro remained in England for a year and a half, reaping successes and receiving tributes. He heard his music performed everywhere. He was invited to the Queen's birthday ball. The University of Oxford named him doctor honoris causa.

Second trip: 1794 - 1795
In July 1792, he returned to Vienna. He gave a few brief lessons to 21-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven, but the relationship was not one of the best. Neither his marriage nor his fourteen-year relationship with the singer Luigia Polzelli was going well. So he was delighted to receive Salomon's proposal to return to London.
The maestro left Vienna on January 19, 1794, and remained in London for another year and a half. During the visit, due to the war against France, Salomon was confronted with some serious difficulties. He was replaced by the violinist and impresario Giovanni Battista Viotti. He had the honor of organizing the premiere of Haydn's last three symphonies: the ones that today take the numbers 102, 103, and 104.

Symphony No. 104, in D major, called "London"
It premiered at the King's Theatre on May 4, 1795. The program featured exclusively music by Haydn, including Symphony No. 100, also called "Military," which had become the biggest London hit of his second visit. "The people were very pleased, and so was I," Haydn noted in his diary, adding, "I earned 4,000 gulden that night. Such a thing only happens in England."

Movements
They are the traditional four. If we discount their dramatic beginning, they are developed following the typical sequence: fast - slow - fast, with the minuet/trio inserted before the closing movement. The andante presents a simple theme that, after its development, becomes moving. The minuet is lively, with amusing syncopations; the trio is sweetly lyrical. For the Finale, the maestro turns to folklore: the main melody is a Croatian song probably once heard in Eisenstadt, where the Esterházy family had their winter palace.

00:00  Adagio - Allegro
09:42  Andante
16:53  Menuetto. Allegro - Trio
21:56  Finale. Spiritoso

The performance is by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the Dutch maestro Bernard Haitink.

Chausson, Poem for Violin and orchestra

The French composer Ernest Chausson was born lucky, but died unlucky. He was the son who survived the early death of his two brothers, a tragedy that does not count, of course, in the inventory of his good fortune. But from those specific events, he became the spoiled son, the "apple of his eye" of his beleaguered but very wealthy parents. His father, called Prosper because fate is perspicacious, was a renowned public works contractor who was there, in Paris, at the time of the Second Empire, when Napoleon III had the idea of redrawing the City of Light, remodeling its buildings, avenues, parks, and gardens.

And so Ernest never needed to work a day in his life. Possessing, since childhood, diverse talents for painting, philosophy, or literature, as a teenager he added music to his vast wealth of interests. When he finally decided on musical composition as a life project, his parents applied the indispensable correction in these cases: they sent him to the university to study law. The young Chausson was sworn in as a lawyer in 1877. But that same year he changed course. The most notable achievement of that year would not be his oath but the composition of his first song, Les Lilas.

Ernst Chausson (1855 - 1899)

At Paris Conservatory
Chausson will never practice the profession. Two years later, in 1879, when he was 24 years old, the lawyer entered the Paris Conservatory to study composition with master Jules Massenet. Later, integrated into the circle that surrounded César Franck, he was encouraged to compose music despite his very late musical initiation.

His lyricism 
He was not a virtuoso composer, but an innate lyricism helped him overcome his technical limitations. With all the time in the world to mature his compositions without being disturbed by any extra-musical occupation, Chausson wrote songs, choral music, some operas, and chamber music. Today he is remembered mainly for two imaginative orchestral works: a Symphony, and the Poem for Violin and Orchestra, from 1896.

The fateful end
He lived in Paris with his wife all his lifetime but every summer the couple would take off to the provinces. In the summer of 1899, while riding a bicycle, he lost control of the vehicle and crashed his head against a wall. He died on the spot.
His funeral was attended by the most conspicuous personalities of French music and arts.

Poem for violin and orchestra, op. 25
Chausson hardly had any reason to be sad during his lifetime. However, much of his music exudes an undeniable melancholy. The Poem for Violin does not evade it, during its 17 minutes of beautiful nostalgia, or "spleen", to use the word Baudelaire invented during those years.

Premiere 
Composed between April and June 1896, the work had its public premiere on December 27 of that year, with the participation as soloist of the Belgian master Eugène Ysaÿe, to whom it is dedicated and who would have been its applicant.

Janine Jansen, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Johannes Gustavsson.

Mozart, Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major

The first sonatas for piano four hands or for two pianos composed by Mozart were intended to be performed together by him and his sister Nannerl, five years older. With them they toured most of Europe between 1763 and 1766, dazzling with their prodigious virtuosity every prince and noblewoman who had the opportunity to listen to them. The august audience entertained them with kisses and from time to time with a gift, once a watch, another time a gala dress, like the one Mozart as a child, wears in the picture below, a gift from the Empress Maria Teresa of Austria.

Settled in Vienna
In 1781 Maria Theresa was no longer in this world and Mozart had long since ceased to be a child prodigy. He was 25 years old and had long since stopped "rolling around the world like a beggar," in Maria Theresa's not very restrained words ten years earlier.
And he had settled in Vienna, after his patron, Prince-Archbishop Colloredo, had removed him from his position at the irrelevant court of Salzburg, following a bitter dispute a few months earlier.

As a free-lance pianist and composer, he obtains in Vienna his first "considerable success" with the opera Idomeneo. He falls in love with Konstance and plans to marry. Mozart, hunter and gatherer, gets some pupils and prepares and produces concerts in which he presents his own works, but his talented sister is no longer there to accompany him. Nannerl leads a simple life in Salzburg, cared for by her father Leopold, somewhat oblivious to her art.

Sonata for two pianos in D major, K. 448
Premiered in November 1781, it was composed for the occasion and performed in the company of fellow pianist Josephine von Aurnhammer, with whom he had already duetted in the Concerto for two pianos of 1779.
Written in gallant style, luminous and brilliant, it is in the three "classical" movements:

00        Allegro con spirito
08:00  Andante
18:01  Molto allegro

The Mozart Effect
The sonata was part of a scientific study aimed at testing the theory of the Mozart Effect, which postulates that classical music increases brain activity more than any other type of music. The research continues.

The rendition is by Russian pianists Anatalia Injushina and Vlatseslav Novikov, in a performance at Helsinki's brand new Temppeliaukio Lutheran stone church, inaugurated in 1969.

Scriabin Études - Étude Opus 2 No 1

The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin is part of the long list of talented composers who left this world at an early age without seeing their most daring projects come to fruition."Mysterium" was the name of his last work, a piece of grandiose characteristics that would last a whole week, destined to be premiered in the foothills of the Himalayas, incorporating the senses of sight, sound, smell, and touch. After the premiere – the author believed – the world would end, vanishing amid great joy, giving way to a new human race composed of nobler beings.
Impossible to say that Scriabin did not aim high. But fate was not with him. Alexander Scriabin died in Moscow at 43 from septicemia caused by a mosquito bite.

Alexander Scriabin (1872 - 1915)

A piano virtuoso
Simultaneously with his mystical stage, the author also flirted with dodecaphony at the end of his life. But in his beginnings, as a piano virtuoso, he was influenced by the romantic pianists of the first half of the 19th century. It is a period in which he wrote mainly for the piano, working in the genres that Chopin used without rest: preludes, nocturnes, and studies written in an openly tonal language. Unusual textures and harmonies will come later.

He also wrote sonatas and a Piano Concerto but is today remembered mainly for his earliest works, which today turn out to be essential pieces of the piano repertoire, among them the 24 Preludes of Opus 11, brimming with lyricism and poetry.
Also noteworthy for their precocity are the Three Pieces of Opus 2, a set of three Etudes written in the period 1887-1889, the first of them when the author was fifteen years old, at a time when, of course, he was a fervent admirer of Chopin and Liszt.

Etude Opus 2 No 1, in C sharp minor
The influence of the Polish musician is undeniable here. Moreover, it is not difficult to guess Chopin's Etude which is inspired by: No. 7 of Etudes Opus 25, those dedicated to Marie d'Agoult, Liszt's partner at the time.

The harmonies are "Chopinian" and so is the emotional tone of the piece. However, the melody brings to mind, characteristically, Russian gypsy music, for its exoticism, somewhat melancholic. It is a slow and rather somber piece, yet, in its scarce three minutes of length, it presents the interpreter with no few difficulties while offering the listener an undeniable attraction.

The performance is by the Russian master Vladimir Horowitz.

Franz Liszt, "Les Preludes", symphonic poem

Although it is customary to point to Franz Liszt as the inventor of the symphonic poem, the term is not of his authorship, and it seems to be born almost unthinkingly. While in Weimar (1842-61), the master wrote twelve works in this genre, in the company of his writer Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, who collaborated with the texts that usually accompanied them.

The third of these, called "The Preludes", was the first to bear the title "symphonic poem", although, in a letter to one of his publishers, dated February 1854, Liszt presents the work simply as "one of my new orchestral works: the Preludes".

A new genre
Two days later, however, a Weimar newspaper announced the work's premiere with the words: "Les preludes - symphonische Dichtung" (Dichtung = poem). Thus was born a new genre, the symphonic poem, which will have exalted continuers of the stature of Smetana, Dvorak, or Richard Strauss.

Considered the seed of the "programmatic music" of the 19th century, it is defined, in general terms, as a musical form in which a literary or other source provides the narrative basis for a single-movement orchestral work. Liszt's symphonic poems, in particular, are intended to inspire the listener to evoke scenes, images, or moods.

Liszt, in 1856
(1811 - 1886)

Lamartine Preludes
In the case of The Preludes, the most popular of them, the maestro "reconditioned" musical materials he already had, organizing them in such a way that they would tell a certain story, that would contain some kind of plot. It was not easy.
But he found the solution in a poem by Lamartine, precisely called The Preludes.
Now, the precise connection between Lamartine's poem and Liszt's music is rather vague, apart from the fact that both works mix, compare, or contrast, elements of idyll and stark reality. The work contains four sections that focus, successively, on love, war, country life, and fate.

Liszt's words
And since it was a matter of beginning the path of programmatic music, Liszt added to the premiere program a long text that begins with these words:

"What is our life but a series of preludes to an unknown song, of which the first solemn note is the one that sounds death?"

The text continues, wearily romantic, with references to love, fate, and death here and there. The audience who attended the premiere, on February 23, 1854, in Weimar, went home convinced that they had been given pieces of Lamartine's prose. Today, they are believed to have originated in the boundless stylistic loquacity of Carolyne, the princess writer.

Some pieces of the work have become part of popular culture. The most recognizable makes its first appearance at minute 2:35.

Daniel Barenboim conducts Berlin Philharmoniker - Staatsoper Berlin.