Sunday Classics preview: Wait for it . . .

The New York Philharmonic under then-music director Lorin Maazel gives a suitably rousing performance of Beethoven's Egmont Overture at the Seoul Arts Center, Feb. 28, 2008.

by Ken

Here's some of what the late Michael Steinberg had to say about Beethoven's Egmont Overture in a program note for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

On the morning of June 5, 1568, the counts Egmont and Horn were beheaded in the marketplace in Brussels; their heads were displayed on poles until three in the afternoon. They had been arrested the previous September on orders from the Duke of Alba, the Spanish governor of the Netherlands, and condemned to death for lèse majesté and for joining with “rebels against the holy, apostolic, and Roman church as well as for favoring the intolerable conspiracies of the Prince of Orange and other gentlemen.” . . .

Serious unrest began early in the 1560s . . . . Count Lamoral van Egmont, a popular military leader, was one of Alba’s first victims. What Egmont fought for and came uniquely to symbolize was beyond the reach of Spanish executioners. The process was slow and bloody, but in 1648, as part of the Treaty of Westphalia that concluded the Thirty Years’ War, the United States of the Netherlands were recognized by Philipp IV of Spain as an independent political entity.

Between 1775 and 1787 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a play on the subject, and in the early years of the 19th century Beethoven provided incidental music for a production. "With Napoleon, his French troops, and his puppet kings spread all over Europe," Steinberg writes, "the drama of the rebellious disaffection of the Netherlands took on a new and vivid relevance."

The Overture begins with a grave introduction, which moves into an impassioned allegro. In the striking contrast of musical characters, commentators have seen the portrayal of oppression and of pleading. The brilliant closing music is that of the drama’s Victory Symphony, played as Egmont goes proudly to his death, confident in the rightness and the coming triumph of his cause.

Do we need a reason to listen to the Egmont Overture? Not in my book, but actually I do have one, which I'll explain after we hear two more performances of it (recorded nearly 30 years apart by the Berlin Philharmonic). And then we're going to hear -- what else? -- the finale of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony.


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