Warren Philharmonic Orchestra

Program Notes

4 October 2025

 

Overture to Egmont

Ludwig van Beethoven

 

As the musicologist Paul Mies has remarked, heroism was a major concern of Beethoven’s times. Not surprisingly, the composer gravitated toward protagonists who dared much against repressive forces in his rare forays into music for the theater.

 

Egmont is a case in point. In 1809 Beethoven was commissioned to compose incidental music for the Vienna revival of the play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). This was Goethe’s free interpretation of Count Egmont’s 16th-century struggle for Dutch liberty against the autocratic imperial rule of Spain. Egmont is imprisoned and sentenced to death, and when Klärchen, his mistress, fails to free him, she commits suicide. Before his own death, Egmont delivers a rousing speech, and his execution becomes a victorious martyrdom in a fight against oppression.

 

Beethoven’s incidental music begins with a powerful, strikingly original overture that summarizes the course of the drama, from its ominous slow introduction (suggesting the oppressive tread of Spain with the rhythm of a sarabande) to the manic transformation of tragedy into triumph in a brilliant coda, which Beethoven echoed at the end of the play as a “Symphony of Victory.” 

 

—From the Los Angeles Philharmonic archive 

 

Siegfried Idyll

Richard Wagner

 

Richard Wagner's Siegfried Idyll was a personal, intimate musical gift to his wife, Cosima, for her 33rd birthday and the first Christmas after their son Siegfried's birth, featuring motifs from his opera Siegfried, a lullaby, and personal references like "Fidi" (Siegfried's nickname) and the "orange sunrise" from their home in Tribschen. Originally for a small chamber ensemble, the work was later expanded for publication. 

 

—Note by Michael Clive

 

Habanera

Emmanuel Chabrier

 

The French composer Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894) was greatly admired by a wide range of composers including Debussy, Stravinsky and Richard Strauss.  He was also close to some of the finest painters of his age, and works he collected by artists like Claude Monet and Édouard Manet now hang in some of the finest museums in the world.

 

Chabrier and his wife toured Spain in 1882, and he was deeply impressed by the country and its music.  When he returned to France, he wrote his best known work, a rhapsody for orchestra known as España, which was a huge and immediate success.

 

Two years later he wrote a lesser known, but very beautiful, work for piano called Habanera.  He reworked the music a bit and orchestrated it in 1888, producing a lovely miniature for orchestra.

 

Habanera is the name used outside of Cuba for the contradanza, an elegant dance style that was especially popular in Cuba in the 19th century.

 

—Note by Bruce Brown

 

Symphony No. 4, “Italian”

Felix Mendelssohn

 

Mendelssohn went to Italy in October 1830. The trip lasted 10 months—he started in Venice and worked his way south to Rome, stopping in Bologna and Florence along the way. During his stay in Rome, he witnessed the coronation of Pope Pius VIII and the city’s festivities during Holy Week (the week leading up to Easter). From Rome, he went on to Naples and visited Pompeii before returning to Germany through Genoa and Milan. 

 

His impressions of the trip were recorded in a series of watercolors and sketches—Mendelssohn was a decent amateur artist—and in the present Symphony. There is nothing particularly Italian about the symphony until its final movement. Rather, the work strives more to convey a series of impressions of Italy—Mediterranean sunshine, religious solemnity, monumental art and architecture, and open countryside. 

 

The symphony opens with a burst of sound—woodwinds and pizzicato strings—whose irrepressible eighth notes become the accompaniment to a jubilant string melody. The winds play an especially prominent role in this movement, with Mendelssohn treating them with a great degree of freedom that gives the movement a transparent, airy texture. It’s like a musical rendition of the Italian blue sky that impressed Mendelssohn.

 

In the second movement, an Andante con moto in D minor, Mendelssohn recalls the impressive processions he had witnessed during his time in Rome. He evokes these with a dusky melody (oboes, clarinets, and violas) that unfolds over an ambling bass line. This alternates with two contrasting, relaxed, major-key sections. 

 

The flowing minuet (Con moto moderato), with its legato writing for strings and winds, offers a musical equivalent of the symmetrical forms and restrained beauty of some of the architecture Mendelssohn saw during his Italian sojourn. The trio sounds vaguely militaristic, with its fanfare-like melodic figure for horns and bassoons. 

 

In the finale, Mendelssohn uses another dance, the raucous Neapolitan saltarello, as the basis of the movement. He never relaxes the tension during the movement, which hurtles to a close with a minor-key reiteration of the first movement’s opening theme. 

 

—Note by John Mangum