In his overture ‘Con brio,’ composer Jörg Widmann makes a nod to Beethoven

Composer Jörg Widmann reports that a suggestion by maestro Mariss Jansons led to the genesis of the concert overture Con brio. 

After further deliberation, Widmann decided to build on the musical characteristics of Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies. Using as his starting points the specific fast types of movement in the Beethoven works, Widmann translated that into his own tonal language for Con brio (2008), which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will perform Dec. 18-20 under Zell Music Director Designate Klaus Mäkelä.

Also on the same program is another work with links to Beethoven: Unsuk Chin’s subito con forza (2020). After a detour into Schumann, with that composer’s Piano Concerto (with Yunchan Lim as soloist), the program closes with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.

For Con brio, Widmann used the same instrumentation as that in the Beethoven works. Although he did not use any exact quotations, “Mr. Widmann’s overture is run through with Beethovenian riffs, flourishes and humor,” wrote New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini in a review of a 2011 performance by the New York Philharmonic featuring Con brio.

Ahead of the work’s world premiere in 2008 by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (which had commissioned the piece), led by Mariss Jansons, Widmann sat down for an interview for the BRSO’s program book about Con brio. Here is an excerpt:

In Con brio, you pay homage to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. What lead you to do that?

JW: When Mariss Jansons called me to ask me if I’d like to write a piece for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, he told me it was going to be performed as part of an otherwise all-Beethoven program. And he asked me in an unbelievably polite manner if it might not be possible for me to refer in some ways to the Symphonies No. 7 and 8.

My Beethoven references start with the instrumentation, which is very special in these symphonies. He doesn’t have four horns or trombones the way he does in the Ninth Symphony. No, Beethoven makes this incredible “noise” with just two horns, two trumpets and timpani.

In my opinion, his music makes such an incredible furor precisely because he is using such limited instrumentation. You compose differently if you have more choice. In a case like this, I have to distribute things carefully and divide the material between all of the instruments. But if you know that all of the brass attacks have to be achieved with just four people, plus the timpani, you work in a more concentrated way. This aspect alone really fascinated me. So I took on the instrumentation of these two symphonies of Beethoven’s: double woodwinds, not much brass, plus, timpani and strings.

Did you work quotes from Beethoven’s symphonies into your music?

JW: No, I don’t quote a single note. It’s more about the gesture. After the phone call with Jansons, I started to look intensively at these two symphonies by Beethoven. After some respectful hesitation, I found myself gripped by tremendous enthusiasm. That had to do with the fact that before I began composing this piece, I had been working precisely on this shift in direction. I was interested in cuts and breaks much more than in the smooth function of the transitions.

Right up until I composed my piece Armonica in 2007, I was much interested in the blending of sounds into one another — so that you can’t identify at any given moment precisely which instrument is being played. It’s a cosmos of weightlessness. But here in Con brio, I was thinking in a much more block-like manner.

Already in my orchestral piece, Antiphon, which I wrote for the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra [receiving its world premiere in February 2008], I was working with hard cuts. In that case, it was a work for a huge orchestra that begins with a quadruple trumpet fanfare.

So it was Mariss Jansons’ impulse to relate Con brio to Beethoven’s music, but it was your own decision to write a short and concentrated piece. Why?

JW: I’ve had the tremendous good fortune to play together with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra several times. I think one of the great strengths of this orchestra is that they have this extraordinary, extravagant virtuosity. On top of that, they have extensive experience from the Musica Viva [new music] concert series, which I really can’t praise highly enough. Every orchestra member is completely on top of contemporary playing techniques and has absolutely no fear of playing anything.

Do you find modern sounds and playing techniques unnatural?

JW: To make an air sound with a wind instrument is the most natural thing in the world. I go on a journey into the most remote places, to places which are not even standardized in the world of new music, in terms of sound. But I don’t use electronics. I use the wind and strings and timpani.

So the aura of the sound is always going to be there, even with the most experimental playing techniques. I’m someone who really enjoys working with the most archaic forms of sound, like in this piece, for example, the way I use the horns in fifths. I have fun with them, to make something entirely different, entirely new out of them. So I see myself completely in the tradition of Arnold Schoenberg, who from a most profound understanding of music history was able to develop a completely revolutionary tonal system. The assumption that is inherent in that is something that I feel very comfortable with: the idea of continuing because you love the music and its history so much.