Two Symphonic Openings

As a child of the 60s I grew up, musically, surrounded by rock n roll and ragas, the Rolling Stones rhythm section and Alla Rakha on tabla. So I had a special interest in rhythm, even more than melody and harmony. The instrument I wanted to start on was the drums, but I got switched onto bass guitar instead. All this is by way mentioning that in recent decades interest in the rhythmic structure of music has grown more and more. Some older theorists, like Heinrich Schenker, tended to diminish the role of the rhythmic structure of music into mere surface activity, having little real importance. It makes one long for a Schenkerian analysis of Drumming by Steve Reich!

I got to thinking along these lines from reading Matthew Riley's recent book The Viennese Minor-Key Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Mozart in which he looks into the rhythmic structures quite thoroughly. The book finishes up with a magnificent discussion of the Symphony No. 40 by Mozart in which he goes a long way to explaining both why this symphony is so compelling but at the same time, so confusing. Here is how he describes the opening of the first movement:

The idea that this opening is a sped-up gavotte that has been overlaid with the breathless repetitions of an aria agitata and then squeezed into the form of the main theme of a fast symphony movement (statement-response presentation) accounts for the sense of something strange in a recognizable guise.

I'm going to have to explain all of that, but you can see that the foundation of the analysis rests on rhythmic character.

All this, in turn, reminds me of another symphonic opening that also has considerable rhythmic sophistication, the beginning of the first movement of the Symphony No. 2 by Sibelius. I had a lot of enjoyment a while back looking into all the different ways Sibelius found to end his seven symphonies. In today's post, I won't have any real original research, I am going to just talk about two brilliant analyses of two great symphonic openings.

First, let's listen to the two movements. This is The Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt playing the first movement of the Symphony No. 40 by Mozart:

Here is the first movement of the Symphony No. 2 by Sibelius conducted by Charles Mackerras:

What the two openings share is a deceptive or misleading presentation of meter and phrase.

The opening of the Mozart, now that I come to think of it, has always bothered me and it is mostly because of the accompaniment that starts just before the theme. You don't quite know what just happened.

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It opens with the strings alone, piano, which is itself mysterious. But while the accompaniment starts on the downbeat, the theme begins on the upbeat. While rare, it was not unprecedented for the first movement of a symphony without a slow introduction to begin quietly. Beginning with this sort of accompaniment figure is unusual for a symphony at this time, but again not totally unprecedented. Let's let Riley isolate what is really unusual:

There are three genuinely distinctive aspects of the opening of K. 550/i: topic, accompaniment figuration, and rhythmic and metrical organization. The first is the buffa idiom of the aria agitata. A short rhythmic motive is repeated continually, as though breathlessly, in a way that would support a fast, syllabic text setting. [p. 251]

What he is referring to here is the eighth-note motive in the violins and its resemblance to a typical brisk aria from an opera buffa. It has long been noticed that a good part of the classical style owes a lot to the vivacious sparkle of opera buffa. Follow the link for the Wikipedia article on opera buffa which will give you some context. The innovation of the composers in the classical style was to humanize their instrumental music by giving it the bounce and immediacy of the opera buffa style.

Riley points out that the theme has a lot more motivic repetition than is usual. The basic idea is four measures, what I quoted above from the score. (It begins on an upbeat and goes to the second beat of the fifth measure.) That little E flat to D motive is repeated three times in the presentation phrase (the first two measures). What is unusual here is that buffa allusions are more usual in the subordinate theme, not the main one which is more likely to be in seria style (see the Wikipedia article on opera seria).

Typical of the first movements of minor-key symphonies is a "stormy" kind of texture that Mozart suggests with the busy accompaniment figure in the violas.

The whole presentation of the theme takes eight measures. I quoted the first four above. Here is the whole phrase:

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The time signature is alla breve, or with the half note as the beat, but Riley argues, citing the theorist William Caplin, that an eight-bar presentation in Classical period music is typically a standard four-bar presentation with the meter renotated. That makes this opening in 2/1, not 2/2 (for the whole argument, see Classical Form by William E. Caplin, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 35). There is another twist: underlying this surface meter is the rhythm of a gavotte, a formal, aristocratic dance form. Here is how Riley analyses this:

Hypermeter is when you have the "real" meter at a higher level than the notated meter. There are fast movements, for example, in 3/4 time where the actual meter is one beat per bar. The actual felt meter might consist of three or four of these notated measures. This why, by the way, there are instances of compositions that end with a blank measure--it was needed to complete the hypermeter. Looking at the sketch above, we see the 2/1 meter in the bass notes, one per bar. Then, looking at the speculative gavotte rhythm at the top, this clarifies how we should hear that theme. The first little motive is really an "upbeat to an upbeat" as the gavotte itself starts with an upbeat. The first big downbeat here is really the beginning of measure three. The organization of the theme bears this out. Go back and listen to that movement a few times.

I think I will just post this part as it is and leave Sibelius to tomorrow.