Program Notes: Please hold your applause?

by Jake Cline

When Academy of St Martin in the Fields returns to the Arsht Center's Knight Concert Hall on March 21, the London-based chamber orchestra will deliver a program that is capital-R Romantic. Led by the remarkable, Indiana-born violinist Joshua Bell, the orchestra has selected familiar but stubbornly relevant compositions by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schumann. Each work offers Bell and his colleagues much opportunity to display their enviable artistry and talent, and centuries on from their creation, each piece manages to spur as much argument as applause. Following are the concert's program notes.

LE NOZZE DI FIGARO, K. 492: OVERTURE BY WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

What’s so funny about The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart’s 1786 opera, created with Italian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte and based on Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ 1778 play? To 21^st century eyes, the plot hardly reads like a laugh fest: As Figaro, a valet, and Susanna, a maidservant, are about to be married, the bride’s employer, Count Almaviva, openly considers whether he will exercise “droit du seigneur” — an odious, and possibly apocryphal, medieval legal concept in which a feudal lord reserved the right to have sex with a female subordinate on her wedding night. Understandably, Susanna and Figaro are not down with this, and with Almaviva’s wife they conspire to ensnare the count in a sticky web of betrayals and lies. Ha-ha?

Arriving in the decade immediately preceding the start of the French Revolution, Beaumarchais’ play and Mozart’s opera were concerned with more than creating screwball comedy from the carnal iniquities of the rich and powerful. Both works aim to disrupt their respective societies from the inside out. As Patrick Mackie writes in his 2023 book Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces, “In Le Nozze di Figaro, comedy does not just allow seriousness but drives it.” In other words, you’ll laugh because it hurts.

Mozart, Mackie writes, “had known that his music belonged deeply to a culture that it also saw right through.” The composer, Mackie argues, found in this opera a long-desired opportunity to challenge not only himself, but also his chosen genre and audiences who wanted to be entertained and nothing more. “The frisky, searching radiance of Le Nozze di Figaro relies on the opera’s supple loyalty to the world of disorderly aristocratic order that it also teases apart and lambastes,” Mackie writes.

That pugnacious idea has endured most famously in the opera’s overture, a deceptively lighthearted blast of controlled frenzy that has enjoyed a life beyond the stage. Among the most recognizable compositions in classical music, the overture, with its caffeinated strings and swooping woodwinds, has been used to great effect in films as disparate as The King’s Speech, Trading Places and Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. The piece has become a musical shorthand for impish dissent and acts as a raspberry in the face of cultural conformity. Of its appearance in Rogue Nation, during a scene in which a character is playing the video game Halo 5, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross writes, “This injection of Mozart into the impeccably all-American, hyper-masculine world of first-person-shooter games upends Hollywood convention so completely that the film’s writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie, has to be thumbing his nose at it.”

Trading Places, the John Landis-directed, 1983 class satire starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, dispels with ambiguity in its opening credits, as Mozart’s overture soundtracks a montage of images from across Philadelphia’s economic divide. Shots of a fish market, a trashcan fire, a shoe store and a milk-crate basketball hoop are juxtaposed against footage of a personal chef preparing breakfast in bed for a boyish-looking Aykroyd, still asleep in an uptown brownstone as less fortunate citizens crowd bus and train stations while on their way to work. Nearly 200 years after its debut, the overture was still helping people see things for what they were.

The opera itself has proved just as durable. Recent updates include a 2015 production in Salzburg — Mozart’s birthplace — that moved the story to a Downton Abbey-esque estate and a 2014 Metropolitan Opera production set in 1930s Seville. Perhaps the most infamous modern adaptation appeared in 1988, when American director Peter Sellars reimagined Le Nozze di Figaro taking place in New York’s Trump Tower. While the skyscraper was meant to symbolize income inequality during the Reagan era, Sellars in 2016 emphasized to The New York Times that the opera, with its themes of transformation and forgiveness, represented “Mozart’s highest vision of what human beings could become.”

“That’s the courage and beauty of what Mozart was trying to do at a moment in history where again there were no examples of democracy for Mozart to point to in Europe,” Sellars told the Times. “So he had to put it onstage and use a musical language that would allow people to actually listen to each other and realize that they have to sing together in harmony. Harmony is made not of people parroting or repeating each other’s notes, but the opposite: The blend of very different notes creates the chord. And so it’s not just singing in unison; it’s singing in harmony, with everyone’s diversity intact.”

VIOLIN CONCERTO IN E MINOR, OP. 64 BY FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)

In his short life, Felix Mendelssohn wrote approximately 750 musical works. He only published 103 of them, including Violin Concerto in E Minor, which itself is but one of the 72 compositions he assigned an opus number. Given that rather conservative ratio, Mendelssohn evidently regarded the concerto worthy of attention. He wanted people to hear it and his peers — the piece was written for violinist Ferdinand David — to perform it. What he did not want, however, was for anyone to appreciate the composition so much that they couldn’t hold their applause until its final note had stopped ringing.

As he declared more than once, Mendelssohn could not abide spontaneous clapping. He said so in his letters and in the composer’s notes for his “Scottish” Symphony, in which Mendelssohn directed the piece to be played without pause between movements in order to ward off “the usual lengthy interruptions.” A whistling audience, one imagines, would have caused his own lips to curl.

Although he divided his violin concerto into the standard three movements (Allegro molto appassionato, Andante and Allegretto non troppo – Allegro molto vivace), Mendelssohn wished for it to be performed as one continuous, roughly 30-minute piece. Mastering it has become a rite of passage for serious violinists, and even with the posthumous publishing of hundreds of Mendelssohn’s compositions, the violin concerto remains among his best-known works.

Meanwhile, its prohibition on premature clapping continues to be cited anytime debates about etiquette at classical-music concerts are reignited. Advocates for sitting still and shutting up (Mendelssohns?) are increasingly in the minority. Which is not to say the concert hall — or, if you will, this concert hall — is the place to let loose your obnoxious side.

However. “If it’s really hot music, how can you keep it back?” Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra music director Manfred Honeck told the Associated Press in 2018. “People should react to what they hear onstage. You should let it go. Let it happen.”

SYMPHONY NO. 2 IN C MAJOR, OP. 61 BY ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Another gone-too-soon genius, Robert Schumann appeared to have spent his life beset by one agony after another. As a teenager, he lost his father and sister in a single month, likely contracted a terminal case of syphilis and is believed to have ruined his hands — along with his hopes of becoming a piano virtuoso — through an odd series of finger-strengthening exercises. He may also have been bipolar and almost certainly suffered from depression.

Since his death in an asylum in 1856, Schumann has been the subject of all manner of speculation and debate. One theory posits that he paralyzed the fingers in his right hand not by sticking them inside a weight-bearing contraption (though he reportedly did this), but because he’d poisoned himself with mercury — which he was taking to treat his syphilis. Most of the arguments surrounding Schumann concern what effect the composer’s sea of troubles had on his work, and how his listeners should feel about it.

“Though it’s dangerous to romanticize mental illness,” music critic Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times, “one can’t help thinking that Schumann’s unhinged imagination, counterbalanced by a probing musical intellect, led to some of the Romantic era’s most original music.”

Writing for The Guardian, Tom Service noted that Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C major offers an example of how difficult it is to separate this artist from his work. “Schumann said that he had started to feel better by the time he wrote the finale,” Service wrote, “but the whole of the second symphony bears witness to an astonishing creative vigor and strength that Schumann found at one of the most difficult times of his life.”

As Service pointed out, Schumann knew how much of a role his physical and mental health played in the writing of the symphony, which took place from 1845 to 1846. “I would say that my resistant spirit had a visible influence on it, and it is through that that I sought to fight my condition,” Schumann wrote. “The first movement is full of this combativeness, is very moody and rebellious in character.”

The raw, personal nature of Schumann’s work, along with his avowed erraticism, has long unsettled conventional listeners, and countless articles and essays about the composer describe his music as being an acquired taste. Even Leonard Bernstein, in a 1953 lecture, outlined popular gripes about Schumann — his romanticism, his supposed inability to orchestrate well, the relative weakness of his symphonies — before the conductor stood forth as one of his strongest advocates.

“Schumann is one of those special tastes that can send casual shipboard acquaintances rushing into each other’s arms,” Bernstein said, “or it can make enemies of otherwise loving friends. But nobody will deny Schumann’s great gifts: the inspired lyricism that soars out of his best works, the uncanny stream of newnesses that succeed each other in such profusion, the warmth, the singing tides, the rhythmic ingenuities and the daring experimentalism.”

(Photo of Joshua Bell and Academy of St Martin in the Fields by Daniel Azoulay.)