CONCERT III: Handel, Haydn, & Cellist Ovidiu Marinescu

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Relationships matter.  For more than two decades, Kile Smith and Conductor Allan R. Scott have been friends and colleagues.  Recently, Smith has served as the host for the SPSO LIVEstream! – the live concert broadcasts that have streamed online during the 2020-2021 Season with no audience in the concert due to the global pandemic.

As part of this relationship, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Symphony Orchestra commissioned Smith to incorporate his music into one of the broadcasts.  Smith writes:

"These are four instrumental-only movements from Vespers, my 2008 work for choir and Renaissance band inspired by the music of the Lutheran Reformation.  The movements were re-ordered from the original Vespers… and are chorale fantasias – a form taking many shapes by composers using Lutheran chorales for works such as organ preludes."

The four movements are based on Lutheran hymn tunes from 1530-1630, and while sacred in origin, Smith orchestrates and decorates them in a way that gives them a dance-like character, thereby creating sense of sacred and secular simultaneously.

The original award-winning Vespers itself is a masterpiece, but so unique that it would be difficult to replicate for non-Renaissance instruments.  Kile Smith, however, by re-thinking the four instrumental-only movements from Vespers has created something nearly entirely new, and rewarding for the listener and performer. More importantly, this reimagined work allows his creativity to matter even more when we all need a sense of something sacred during a time when the secular life has been a struggle.

Handel’s operas for the English stage received mixed reception by the London audiences, and ultimately his last opera, Deidamia, flopped, closing in 1741 after only three performances.  The newly prosperous London middle class had grown tired of the elaborate productions of Italianate operas and were hungry for oratorios – un-staged operas and oratorios were usually performed in the vernacular, dispensed with costumes and staging, and dramatized mostly Old Testament narratives familiar to 18^th century audiences.

Depressed by the commercial failure of his opera, Handel, now in his 50s, reluctantly turned to the more popular oratorio form.  The ink was barely dry on his final opera when Handel began to compose Messiah in August of 1741.  The fact that the entire composition took only 24 days to compose is no surprise, for Handel traditionally wrote operas and oratorios with Mozart-like speed.

The text for Messiah consists essentially of selected passages from the Bible and from the English Prayer Book Psalter.  Despite popular belief, Messiah takes little interest in the details of Christ’s life but concentrates rather on the idea of the Messiah as a redeemer for mankind.  The Gospel story is related but not in a sacred narrativeas in the Passion oratorios by Bach.  Handel insisted that the Messiah was a dramatic work, just like every previous oratorio he composed – that despite its subject, Messiah was a theatrical composition and not a sacred work.  

Yet Messiah was not a typical oratorio.  Unlike Handel’s previous works in the genre, Messiah was not based solely on the lives of Old Testament figures like Saul, Solomon, or Samson.  Nor does Messiah have a plot featuring named characters in a series of incidents; rather, Messiah reflects the humanistic spirit of the age rather than conventional religious teachings.  A blockbuster work for the theatre – a work about a superhuman figure that saves mankind.

Although today Messiah has become a Christmas staple, its first performance took place in Dublin, 13 April 1742 during Holy Week (a traditional time for both sacred and secular works to be premiered).  The Dublin debut was a great success, but the English premiere of Messiah in

London at Covent Garden in March 1743 failed.  Religious conservatives in London were puzzled by Handel’s choice to present the work not in church but in a theatre – as one Puritan critic remarked, the most “profane of all places.”  Once the work was performed for a London charity and the London audience began to grasp Handel’s intent, Messiah grew in popularity and has never fallen from favor since.  Messiah continues to be the most performed work ever written despite that it is over 250 years old!

With the success of Messiah creating sensation with English audiences, Handel continued composing oratorios performed in English, and almost always using biblical figures.  In 1748 he composed Solomon based on Israel’s King Solomon and taken from the Bible’s First Book of Kings and Second Book Chronicles.  For each of the three parts of the work, Handel also composed an instrumental introduction, the most famous of which is the introduction to Part III.  Simply title “Sinfonia,” it has become known as “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” today.  The instrumental work is a dance that captures the state visit from the Queen of Sheba to Solomon’s kingdom.  Set for a pair of solo oboes accompanied by strings, the introduction to the final section of Solomon was composed to depict the luring sound of music, the desire for military glory, and the despair of an unhappy lover, and a storm which turns to calm – all within three minutes.  Most of all the Sinfonia to Solomon celebrates Israel under the wise ruler of Solomon as a Golden Age of peace, happiness, and prosperity.

Handel ended his career as a true entertainment icon, having written 42 operas, 29 oratorios, numerous sacred and secular choral works, and many works for orchestra and solo instrument.  Handel’s celebrity status was so great that in his own lifetime there was a statue erected in his honor in London in 1738!

As with most concertos, it is the great virtuosos who inspire composers to write them: Franz Clement's abilities prompted Beethoven’s violin concerto, Brahms wrote his violin concerto for the great Joseph Joachim, and today, musicians such as cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Mstislav Rostropovich have catalyzed countless composers to write for the solo instrument accompanied by orchestra.

Few composers over time have scored cello concertos, perhaps not appreciating the instrument’s full potential and indeed, there have been far fewer virtuoso cellists. Neither Mozart nor Beethoven composed a concerto for cello.  Of the three and one half cello concertos written by Haydn, one was never finished, one was believed to be composed by a contemporary of Haydn, and one no one knew existed until the latter half of the twentieth century.  Mainly because Haydn’s cataloguer, Anthony van Hoboken, overlooked the earlier concertos of the composer, the first two cello concertos were not identified with Haydn until recently.

Haydn composed his first cello concerto for the principal cellist of his orchestra at the Esterházy estate.  Unexplainably, the Concerto seemed to disappear with no knowledge that the work even existed.  While the Concerto predates his second cello concerto by about twenty years, the Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major demonstrates Haydn’s witty lyricism and mastery of composing for solo instrument.  Haydn always maintained a sensitivity to the abilities of the soloist, either instrumentalist or singer.  Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 1 also serves as a bridge between the Baroque style of playing (the era of J.S. Bach and Handel) and the emerging structure of the Classical period that Haydn would come to represent.  Within this structure and limitations he imposed, Haydn still crafted a brilliant concerto that is equally as prolific, exciting, and fun as any of his symphonies.