The BBC Midland Orchestra
Conducted by Regina'd Burston
At the age of twenty-four S hubcrt was an experienced writer of operas. none of which had so far been performed. He was, however, still bent on writing them, and during the winter of 1821-22 he composed Alfonso and Estrella. The three-act libretto by F. von Schober is a hotch-potch of battles, love, conspiracy, hunting, peasant life, and other operatic conventions of the day. It had no better fortune than any of its predecessors. It was, however, ultimately performed at Weimar, under Liszt, in 1854, and again, with a re-written libretto and many cuts, in 1881, at Karlsruhe.
The modern fashion of assuming all great music to be the reflection of some actual emotion or psychological experience of the composer is misleading and often quite untrue. Beethoven composed his Symphony No. 2 in D towards the end of the year 1802, when he also wrote that tragic document of despair, the Heiligenstadt Will, which was the result of the realisation that deafness was to be his fate. ' As the autumn leaves fall and wither', Beethoven wrote, ' so have my hopes withered. Almost as I came so I depart; even the lofty courage that so often inspired me in the lovely summer days has vanished.... With joy I hasten to meet death face to face.' But the charming and spontaneous music of the D major Symphony is free from the slightest hint of such melancholy thoughts.
It was not until 1800, when Beethoven was thirty years of age, that he embarked upon his First Symphony in C, which is more or less carefully modelled on the conventional lines followed by his predecessors. In the Second Symphony in D, however, he shows complete mastery over technical problems, and although he still accepts the symphonic pattern of Haydn and Mozart and uses the normal classical orchestra without trombones, the firm and unmistakable signature of Beethoven is apparent throughout, particularly in the fiery first movement. And there is one magical passage near the end of the finale that could have been written by no one else.
