William Tell Overture

In 1824, Gioachino Rossini left his native Italy to take up residence in France, contracting with the French Government to compose a grand opéra for the Paris Opéra. He settled on Friedrich von Schiller’s famous play Wilhelm Tell, which dealt with the revolt of the Swiss forest cantons against the oppressive rule of the Habsburg Dynasty. A superstar of the opera world, he had amassed enough wealth to secure an entirely comfortable future and was starting to think about early retirement, but he had one last masterpiece in him. “Tell is the first [grand] opéra that Rossini has written expressly for the French stage,” a Parisian newspaper reported in September 1828, when Rossini had started work on the piece, “and perhaps it will be the last of his compositions, he having manifested the intention of discarding his pen and retiring … to enjoy in peace his glory and his well-earned fortune.”

Guillaume Tell is rarely produced due to its inordinate length, but its overture quickly became a standard concert item. Whereas most Rossini overtures have little connection to the action of their operas, this one is structured as four self-contained episodes specifically prefiguring the action—and some of the musical content—that would follow. It opens with a pastoral depiction of the Swiss countryside, starting with the imaginative orchestration of five solo cellos; Hector Berlioz was especially enamored of these pages, which he heard as suggesting the “silence of nature when the elements and the human passions are at rest.” There follows a storm on the lake, a bucolic ranz des vaches (a herdsman’s melody) played by solo English horn with a birdlike flute warbling above, and a spirited final section that would become one of classical music’s most famous melodies.

Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466
     Allegro
     Romance
     Rondo: Allegro assai

Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
     Allegro con brio
     Andante con moto
     Allegro [attacca]
     Allegro

No work in the orchestral canon has been analyzed and discussed more exhaustively than Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but familiarity has not made it any less potent. Wrote Robert Schumann, “No matter how frequently heard, whether at home or in the concert hall, this symphony invariably wields its power over people of every age like those great phenomena of nature that fill us with fear and admiration at all times, no matter how frequently we may experience them.”

In this music we may imagine Beethoven’s state of mind during the four-year period in which he wrote this symphony. He was losing his hearing—a great adversity for anyone, but a catastrophe for a musician. In March 1808, about when he finished this work, a raging infection threatened the loss of a finger, which would have spelled further disaster for a musician greatly attached to the keyboard. He was surrounded by a nervous political climate as Vienna bent beneath Napoleon’s occupation beginning in November 1805. In late 1807 he found himself rejected in love, and his personal life was generally chaotic: in the course of 1808 he moved to no fewer than four apartments. But there was also a calmer side to his being. He frequently escaped to the suburban parks and countryside surrounding Vienna; that’s where we imagine the composer when we hear his Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, which was roughly coeval to the Fifth. We are not necessarily wrong to suppose that biographical overtones reside in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but we shouldn’t be blind to the sheer breadth of character they cover. When all is said and done, this is a unique work, just as all of Beethoven’s masterpieces are, a vehicle in which the composer explores and works out strictly aesthetic challenges that he has set for himself.