Tales of Renewal and Life

Discover the spirit of renewal and life through Mozart’s dramatic Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor performed by Canadian pianist Sheng Cai, Louise Farrenc’s inspiring Symphony No. 3, and Chilean composer Carlos Zamora’s Sikuris, based on traditional music from the people of the Atacama Desert.

Saturday, March 1, 2025, 7:30 p.m.
Lincoln Center, Performance Hall

Few women of nineteenth-century Europe left behind a sustained record of professional musical accomplishment that rivaled their male counterparts. The societal expectation to devote one’s life to service of husband and family was a pressure too great for most to overcome. Louise Farrenc (1804–1875), however, stands prominently as a woman who stretched cultural barriers to become one of the most important composers and teachers of her day. Born Louise Dumont, her talents manifested early on. By age fifteen she was accepted at the Paris Conservatoire as a promising pianist. Females were allowed to study performance and encouraged to prepare for teaching, but not permitted to enroll in advanced composition classes. Farrenc took the only path afforded her and studied privately with Beethoven’s friend and colleague Anton Reicha, who was on faculty at the time. Shortly after her seventeenth birthday, Louise married flutist Aristide Farrenc, a progressive thinker who not only supported his wife’s artistic pursuits, but also championed her early compositional career. In 1842, Farrenc was hired to teach piano at the Conservatoire—the first and only full-time female professor at the revered institution through her 1872 retirement. Several years after she began her teaching duties, she lobbied for pay equal to that of her male colleagues and was ultimately successful. About the same time, Farrenc wrote two orchestral overtures and three symphonies. Although not one of these was published during her lifetime, they were all performed in Paris and beyond.

Symphony No. 3 in G minor, op. 36, rises to the level of other significant works of the era, but was a victim of its time and place. In the early-1800s, opera was all the rage in Paris. Absolute instrumental music was viewed as too Germanic. Thus, little orchestral music by contemporaneous French composers survives (programist Berlioz being one major exception). Farrenc’s experience studying with teachers such as Reicha and Hummel helped her conquer this German medium while still infusing it with her own French sensibility. Her acclimation to chamber music resounds throughout and her deft handling of woodwind lines may be another influence of her teacher Reicha. The Parisian professional orchestra that specialized in orchestral music at the time was the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, with its penchant for Beethoven and other established music of the past half-century. It took two years after completion for Farrenc to persuade a conductor that her Third Symphony should be placed on the group’s 1849 subscription series. Even then, her composition was programmed alongside Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, by far the most popular orchestral work in France for decades. While this pairing may have provided a comparison she did not seek, it was a coup that her new four-movement work was heard at all—surely a triumphal moment for this woman who spent her entire life and career in a man’s world.

In 1781, at the age of twenty-five, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) left the employ of Prince-Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg to begin an independent life in Vienna. This was a highly unusual step in an era when musicians relied on ongoing patronage from a specific noble or city or church for support. The move seemed providential and Mozart thrived at first, making his living composing operas, performing as a piano soloist, and playing chamber music. One of his main sources of income during those early Vienna years came from a subscription concert series he produced, making him the darling of Viennese musical society. It was for these concerts that Mozart composed fifteen of his twenty-one solo piano concertos: Mozart as composer, Mozart as promotor, Mozart as artistic director, Mozart as soloist —all in one setting. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall!

Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466 was written for the 1785 season. Mozart began work on the composition in mid-January and performed the piece February 11. His father arrived in town just in time to hear the premiere. Leopold wrote a favorable report home, noting that “my eyes filled with tears of pleasure.” He also relayed that, since his son was so late in copying parts for the orchestra, there was no time for a full rehearsal of the last movement, but the orchestra still played splendidly. The structure of the concerto, with its three movements and double-exposition sonata-allegro opening, is standard for Mozart, but the composer also experimented for the first time with writing a piano concerto in a minor key. It was the first of only two, the second being the C Minor concerto premiered the following year. Mozart enhanced an inherent minor tension at the start with sustained, syncopated rhythms in the upper strings that served as a springboard for one of his most popular works. The concerto was later a favorite of Ludwig van Beethoven, who performed it in concert and who wrote out cadenzas for the first and third movements. Mozart never transcribed the cadenzas he played in 1785, for he had no need as performer and probably would never have played them the same way twice anyway. This followed the convention of the time, in which performers improvised these solo-inside-a-solo sections.

© 2024, Dr. K. Dawn Grapes