My second set of notes for the San Francisco Symphony has been published and printed. I wrote about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for a concert conducted by the great Michael Tilson Thomas. I also wrote about St. Louis native and Sumner graduate Olly Wilson, but unfortunately that part of the concert had to be canceled, so only the Beethoven notes were published. I considered holding them until the work is performed again, as I fervently hope it will be, but ultimately decided to publish the Olly Wilson notes anyway, even though that part of the concert never happened. I was paid for them, so that’s not the issue; I just want to evangelize on behalf of an underprogrammed composer whose life story is compelling to me and (I am vain enough to presume) other people also. 

Anyway, Ben Pesetsky, one of my SFS editors and a prince of a fellow, not to mention a top-notch music writer and editor, sent me this photo of the concert last night, from his seat at Davies Symphony Hall, with the program open to “my” spread. You’d think I would be used to this by now, but it’s always a thrill and a weird shock to see something in print that has lived only as a Word document in your mind. 

As Joshua Kosman of the SF Chronicle wrote in his sensitive and insightful review of the concert Thursday night, the mood in the hall was elegiac, with the musicians and audience all too aware of the Maestro’s precarious health. It doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to say that many of those present must have been weeping openly.

When I submitted my notes for this concert to Ben, the program was supposed to open with a work by the brilliant and underprogrammed late Berkeley composer Olly Wilson. Michael Tilson Thomas has been one of Wilson’s most passionate and persuasive advocates, but his fragile health forced him to streamline the repertoire so that he could marshal his reserves of energy for the enormously demanding Ninth Symphony. An understandable decision, especially under the circumstances.

To make up for my lamentable inconstancy these days, I will include the Olly Wilson notes even though this part of the program had to be cut. My hometown pride (or hyperprovincialism) demands it! Shango Memory really is an exciting and cunningly constructed piece. Please listen for yourself, especially if you don’t know it. Here is a recording by the SF Symphony led by MTT himself. While you’re at it, listen to some of Wilson’s groundbreaking electronic compositions, too, which he began making when electronic music was in its infancy.

Shango Memory

OLLY WILSON

Born: September 7, 1937, in Saint Louis
Died: March 12, 2018, in Berkeley, California

Composed: 1995
SF Symphony Performances: First and only—September 18, 1997. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (triangle, antique cymbals, suspended cymbals, high‑hat, sizzle cymbal, wind chimes, bell, large gong, tubular chimes, timbales, bass drum, steel drum, vibraphone, xylophone, and marimba), and strings
Duration: About 8 mins

Over a long and productive life in music, Olly Wilson distinguished himself as a composer, jazz musician, electroacoustic innovator, musicologist, professor, university administrator, and arts activist. Born to working-class parents in segregated Saint Louis, Wilson graduated from Sumner High School, founded in 1875 as the first secondary school west of the Mississippi for Black students. By the early 1950s, when Wilson enrolled, Sumner was a jewel of the city’s public school system, renowned for both its academic excellence and its superb arts curriculum. Among his classmates was future opera star Grace Bumbry; other illustrious Sumner alumni include the musicians Chuck Berry, Tina Turner, Robert McFerrin, Lester Bowie, Oliver Lake, and Oliver Nelson.

Wilson, who played jazz piano and double bass, stayed in Saint Louis long enough to earn his bachelor of music degree from Washington University before leaving to complete his master of music at the University of Illinois and a PhD in music composition at the University of Iowa. He taught at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and in 1970 joined the music faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. A respected leader who helped establish programs in African and African-American musical studies, he chaired the department from 1993–97 and was appointed emeritus professor in 2002, when he retired.

In 1968 Wilson won Dartmouth College’s First International Electronic Music Competition. Over the decades he collected many other awards and honors, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and a residency in Italy funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1971, after his first full term teaching at Berkeley, he used his inaugural Guggenheim grant to travel in West Africa, where he studied the indigenous musical traditions with a scholar’s analytical acumen and a jazz player’s devotion to a real gone groove.

Wilson once defined music as “experience consciously transformed,” adding that his own compositions reflect his experience as an African American. He understood “Africanness” as “a way of doing something, not simply something that is done.” Shango Memory, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic in 1997, reveals both his passion for ethnomusicology and his aversion to genre constraints. In interviews he cited influences ranging from Luciano Berio to Charlie Parker, from Edgard Varèse to Miles Davis. Although it’s difficult to generalize about his eclectic catalogue—which includes everything from free jazz improvisation and electroacoustic provocation to conventionally notated large-scale projects for organ and symphony orchestra—the impulse behind all his work is syncretic, filtering a choice blend of cultural traditions through a singular imagination. Shango Memory translates Stravinskyan dissonance and syncopation to a post-bop jazz idiom, transforming field research into felt experience. In his own program notes, Wilson discussed how his source materials help connect the cultures of the African diaspora: 

“Shango Memory is inspired by the Yoruban deity Shango, the god of thunder and lightning, who holds a prominent position in the pantheon of deities of not only the Yoruba people of West Africa but also in many places of the African diaspora, particularly the Caribbean and South America. In this composition I attempted to use Shango as a metaphor for West African musical concepts that were reinterpreted in the American context and became the basis for African-American music.”

—René Spencer Saller

René Spencer Saller is the main program annotator for the Dallas Symphony and has also written for the Saint Louis Symphony and Tippet Rise Art Center. Formerly music critic and editor for The St. Louis Riverfront Times, she won first prize in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards.

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Baptized: December 17, 1770, in Bonn
Died: March 26, 1827, in Vienna

Composed: 1822–24
SF Symphony Performances: First—April 1924. Alfred Hertz conducted with Claire Dux, Merle Alcock, Mario Chamlee, and Clarence Whitehill as soloists.
Most recent—December 2022. Xian Zhang conducted with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus and Gabriella Reyes, Kelley O’Connor, Reginald Smith, Jr., and Issachah Savage as soloists
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, and triangle), and strings.
The Finale (Ode “To Joy”) adds 4 vocal soloists (soprano, mezzo‑soprano, tenor, and bass) and chorus.
Duration: About 65 mins

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony feels like a unifying force across the globe, a cultural common good, even in our hyperpolarized times. The fourth-movement choral setting of a Friedrich Schiller poem—the ultra-hummable “Ode to Joy”—has been recycled countless times. It’s the official anthem of the European Union. It pops up in movie soundtracks and television commercials. Huge crowds belt it out before sporting events. Beethoven’s immortal earworm marks occasions, endings, and beginnings around the world.

But the price of ubiquity is steep. Monuments get buried beneath layers of interpretive grime. Something that means so many different things—international diplomacy, Enlightenment values, pasteurized cheese product—might even start to seem meaningless after two centuries or so.

For Beethoven, who mulled over parts of this music for decades, the meaning of the Ninth Symphony was urgent, immediate, vital. He wanted his music to enact a journey of transformation, exploring themes of struggle and salvation, community and compassion. Although he wasn’t a churchgoer, he found spiritual sustenance in his art. In a letter from 1821, a few years before he completed the Ninth Symphony, he explained to his pupil and patron, the Archbishop Rudolph, what composing music meant to him: “There is nothing higher than to approach the Godhead more nearly than other mortals and by means of that contact to spread the rays of the Godhead through the human race.” (A lofty claim, but it ain’t bragging if it’s true.)

“Always keep the whole in mind,” Beethoven liked to say, a maxim that the Ninth embodies. Everything leads to the inevitable finale, the apotheosis of the “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy) motif. He first read Friedrich Schiller’s “An die Freude” as a teenager in Bonn, and set a few of its lines in a cantata marking the accession of Emperor Leopold II, in 1790. Three years later, in a letter to the poet’s wife, Charlotte Schiller, Bartholomäus Fischenich praised Beethoven as “a young man of this place whose musical talents are universally praised… [who] proposes also to compose Schiller’s ‘Freude,‘ and indeed strophe by strophe.” Some evidence suggests that Beethoven may have composed a setting of the ode in 1798, although the score was lost, if it ever existed. Schiller’s ‘Freude’ seems to have been on Beethoven’s mind, but he moved it to a backburner, where it simmered in his subconscious for more than 20 years.

In the decades after his first exposure to Schiller, Beethoven had seen his cherished Enlightenment ideals trampled by Napoleon and other repressive forces. The conservative Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859), appointed by Emperor Francis II, cracked down on all forms of expression, political and artistic, that promoted liberal democracy or otherwise diminished the Habsburgs’ domestic and global power. Since 1819, when Metternich and his allies imposed the draconian Carlsbad Decrees, German and Austrian universities had been intensively monitored and censored. In collaboration with a network of spies and informants, a commission in Mainz investigated all the academic institutions, branding and then blacklisting the supposed dissidents. The Decrees were renewed in 1824, the same year that Beethoven finished his final symphony. At a time when ordinary Austrians could be arrested for saying the word “freedom” or gathering in groups of more than a few unrelated people, resurrecting Schiller’s humanist anthem was a subversive act.

Because Beethoven wanted his choral finale to seem like the inevitable outcome of the preceding three movements, he needed to keep his foundational motif in mind from the outset. He wrote the first eight measures of the “Freude” tune fairly quickly, but he went through dozens of drafts before he figured out a way to finish it. Simplicity is hard.

After some tense negotiation with local patrons, performers, and financiers, the first performance took place on May 7, 1824, at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna. There were only two full rehearsals before the premiere, and at least one singer walked out in a snit because the score was, in his opinion, “impossible.” The symphony was commissioned by an organization in London and Beethoven had threatened to hold the premiere in Berlin, but he agreed to Vienna after extracting certain concessions. He successfully lobbied for extra musicians to augment the standard orchestra, thereby balancing out the 90-voice chorus. He also insisted on conducting the performance, never mind that he was by that point profoundly deaf. The musicians and singers, who had all been discreetly instructed to follow the concertmaster, did their best to ignore the wildly gesticulating man at the podium. In the words of one witness, the composer “threw himself back and forth like a madman. At one moment he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor. He flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.”

Beethoven was so intently focused on the music in his head that he failed to notice when the music in the hall stopped. The mezzo-soprano soloist, Caroline Unger, made him turn around and see what he could no longer hear: all those cheering faces, clapping hands, waving handkerchiefs. The sons and daughters of Elysium, drinking joy at nature’s breast. 

The Music

Marked Allegro ma non troppo e un poco maestoso (Cheerful but not excessively and slightly majestic), the first movement begins with a stark open fifth and dissonant tremolos. Out of this void emerges the first faint sign of the “Freude” theme, inverted here as three descending notes. Just as the universe arose from nothingness, the theme seems to arise, in fits and starts, from a yawning abyss. Set in 2/4 meter, the opening Allegro develops in complex and unexpected ways. Two keys are dramatically juxtaposed: D minor (the home key, or tonic) and B-flat major. Throughout we get brief flashes of D major, foreshadowing the euphoric finale.

The second movement, a scherzo with fugal and sonata-form elements, is also in the home key, at least nominally. Marked Molto vivace, it combines an anarchic opening (check out that hell-raising timpani) and a pastoral central interlude, where the key changes to D major and triple meter shifts to duple. The first notes of the “Freude” theme return, but they’re tricked out in a different rhythm: another subliminal glimpse of future pleasures.

Structurally, the ravishing slow movement is a loose adaptation of a theme-and-variations form. Beethoven marked it Adagio molto e cantabile, or “very slow and singing,” and the indication reminds us why the chorus has been waiting there patiently all this time, waiting to let loose with the part we’ll be humming as we leave Davies Symphony Hall, and possibly for weeks afterward. But Beethoven was the master of deferred gratification. Never mind those brief rebukes from the brass: in this paradise of hushed strings and gentle winds, melodies linger, suspended in bliss.

The choice of key—B-flat major—signals a break from the tonal tumult, the minor-key chaos of the preceding movements. “Melody must always be given priority above all else,” Beethoven explained in a letter. His sketchbooks suggest that he worked intensively on the Adagio in 1823, hashing out the first theme in several stages; his secondary theme, in 3/4 time, came to him more or less intact.

Even when you know what’s coming, the first moments of the finale are a visceral jolt. Richard Wagner called it a “terror fanfare,” Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford called it a “brassy burst of fury,” and no matter what you call it, you will flinch when it smacks you at full volume. It’s supposed to hurt a little: a bracing slap to wake you up for the Big Reveal, when the theme bursts loose in a torrent of delirious variations. Never has the transition from minor to major felt more satisfying, more essential. For listeners the ecstasy only mounts, but for singers the finale is downright scary, a brutal tessitura that demands impossibly high notes to be held for an impossibly long time.

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” the critic Walter Pater famously observed, and the saying resonates because it feels true. So why do we expect music to do more when it already gives us everything? We want it to tell us a story about ourselves, but music tells its own stories, in its own language. If it’s not the Godhead, it’s close enough. —R.S.S.

Copyright 2023 by René Spencer Saller

These notes ran in a slightly different form in the SFS Program book. I owe Ben Pesetsky much thanks for his excellent suggestions and thoughtful feedback. He always makes my work better, and I’m eternally grateful to him for it.