THE FLORIDA ORCHESTRA | 2019-2020 49
Program Notes
works to the dawn of the 20th century, lots had
changed: Instruments improved, orchestras grew,
and concert halls expanded to accommodate
more people. Beethoven’s music, Mahler believed,
needed to catch up with the times. So the
performance you will hear tonight “doubles’’ on
some of the instrumental ranks, creating a bigger,
more vibrant sound than what listeners heard in
Beethoven’s time, said TFO Music Director Michael
Francis.
“Does it need it? That’s debatable,’’ he said. “Is it
interesting? Yes. It’s a case of doubling up. More
musicians will be involved, that’s all.’’
The evolution of instruments, orchestras, and halls
prompted Mahler to modernize Beethoven, notes
Egon Gartenberg in his book Mahler: The Man and His
Music. “Such developments, coupled with concert
halls possessing a size and acoustics undreamt of
by Beethoven, forced a sensitive musical poet of the
stature of Mahler to redress the imbalance which he
heard and felt.’’
After conducting his retouched version of the Ninth
Symphony in 1900 in Vienna – a city that revered
Beethoven as a favorite child – many people were
outraged, accusing Mahler of waging war against
authenticity. The composer Albert Bertelin said
touching up a Beethoven symphony was like
painting over a Rembrandt canvas. “What was
offered yesterday as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
is a deplorable example of this aberration, this
barbarism,’’ wrote the critic Richard Heuberger of
the New Free Press.
In his own defense, Mahler explained that “this is in
no way a case of re-instrumentation or alteration,
let alone improvement of the work of Beethoven.’’
He said his views were less about arbitrary change
than playing the music as Beethoven would have
wanted had he lived 75 or 100 years later – with the
formidable Vienna Philharmonic at his disposal.
The Symphony No. 3, the famous Eroica, is a
watershed work in the history of music, one that
changed the nature of the symphony. Mahler
wanted listeners of his day to fully appreciate the
impact it had at its premiere in April 1805, when
it struck with the force of a boxer’s jab to the jaw.
Breathtaking in its technical assurance, originality
and size, the Third Symphony was epic, and changed
our view of the form.
The Eroica is the longest and most emotionally
charged symphony up to its time. The opening
movement alone is gigantic – nearly 700 measures
– and Beethoven pushed the boundaries of classical
form further by inserting a funeral march and a finale
of 10 variations based on a theme from his own
Creatures of Prometheus. It is the slow movement, a
searing adagio in C minor, that has had the greatest
impact over the centuries, taking listeners into a
ghostly realm that was entirely original.
The Eroica was something new, far removed from
Haydn and Mozart, a massive coagulation of
themes, counter themes and convolutions that
Beethoven forged as his symphonic ideal, one
that would inspire his masterpieces through the
Ninth Symphony as well as a nascent Romantic
age. No longer a past-time for wealthy patrons,
the symphony now had become a psychological
agent, stretching sonata form to its limit with an
expression – and ferocity – unrealized until that first
performance nearly 215 years ago. It demanded a
lot from performances and listeners back then, and
still does today, notes Lewis Lockwood in his 2003
book Beethoven: The Music and The Life.
“The work expanded the time-space of the
symphony as never before,’’ he writes, “demanding
an unprecedented degree of patience and
concentration from concert audiences.’’
Program notes by Kurt Loft, a freelance writer
and former music critic for the Tampa Tribune.