The Pretoria Bach Choir invites you to enjoy this Beethoven celebration with us today!

Mass in C Major (I Kyrie, II Gloria, III Credo, IV Sanctus, V Agnus Dei) Piano Concerto No 1 in C major Choral Fantasia Thanks to the University of Pretoria for making their facilities available for this concert. With special thanks to the Rupert Music Foundation for their generous financial contribution without which this concert would not be possible. Rupert Music Foundation About Beethoven Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Born in Bonn in 1770, the eldest son of a singer in the Kapelle of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne and grandson of the Archbishop’s Kapellmeister, Beethoven moved in 1792 to Vienna. There he had some lessons from Haydn and others, quickly establishing himself as a remarkable keyboard player and original composer. By 1815 increasing deafness had made public performance impossible and accentuated existing eccentricities of character, patiently tolerated by a series of rich patrons and his royal pupil the Archduke Rudolph. Beethoven did much to enlarge the possibilities of music and widen the horizons of later generations of composers. To his contemporaries he was sometimes a controversial figure, making heavy demands on listeners by both the length and the complexity of his writing, as he explored new fields of music. His personal life was marked by a heroic struggle against encroaching deafness, and some of his most important works were composed during the last 10 years of his life when he was quite unable to hear. In an age that saw the decline of court and church patronage, he not only maintained himself from the sale and publication of his works but also was the first musician to receive a salary with no duties other than to compose how and when he felt inclined. Though not himself a Romantic, he became the fountainhead of much that characterized the work of the Romantics who followed him, especially in his ideal of program or illustrative music, which he defined in connection with his Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony as “more an expression of emotion than painting.” In musical form he was a considerable innovator, widening the scope of sonata, symphony, concerto, and quartet, while in the Ninth Symphony he combined the worlds of vocal and instrumental music in a manner never before attempted.

The Mass in C Major

Ludwig van Beethoven composed the Mass in C Major, Op. 86, to a commission from Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II in 1807. The mass, scored for four vocal soloists, choir and orchestra, was premiered that year by the Prince's musical forces in Eisenstadt. Beethoven performed parts of it in his 1808 concert featuring the premieres of four major works including his Fifth Symphony. The mass was published in 1812 by Breitkopf & Härtel.

Both the Prince and contemporary critic E. T. A. Hoffmann were generally displeased by the work, though the latter still considered it "entirely worthy of the great master [because of its] inner structure [and] intelligent orchestration".[Wikipedia] The work has since been overshadowed by the later and better known Missa solemnis, though critics such as Michael Moore have noted the Mass in C major's superiority in "directness and an emotional content".

The critical judgement on the first of Beethoven’s two masses was only overturned by later generations, when its combination of masterly form and depth of the religious understanding of the text were finally appreciated. In the general structure of the work, the visible debt to models by great predecessors is repaid by new and original developments. These peculiarities of the work are a result of a dramatic reading of the text of the mass, of rendering different shades of meaning by careful selection of musical expression. “I think I have treated the text in a way so far unknown,” wrote Beethoven to his publisher.  [Beethoven Encyclopedia]

Text with English Translation

Piano Concerto No. 1

First performed in 1795 and subsequently revised in 1800, Beethoven’s Op. 15 was dedicated to his pupil Princess Anna Louise Barbara Odescalchi (née Countess von Keglević). Although known as First Concerto No 1, it was not the first he composed, but the first published in 1801.

Consisting of 3 movements, Allegro con brio, Largo and Rondo. Allegro scherzando, while adhering to the traditional concerto structure, it is filled with musical elements that distinguish it as a masterpiece of its time.

Expertly balancing the orchestra with the piano, whilst allowing showcases of various instruments with solo parts.

Choral Fantasia

The Fantasy for piano, vocal soloists, mixed chorus, and orchestra, Op. 80, usually called the Choral Fantasy, was composed in 1808 by then 38-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven.

The Fantasia was first performed at the Akademie of 22 December 1808, a benefit concert which also saw the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Fourth Piano Concerto as well as a performance of excerpts of the Mass in C major. To conclude this memorable concert program, Beethoven wanted a "brilliant finale" that would unite in a single piece the different musical elements highlighted in the concert night: piano solo, mixed chorus and orchestra. The Fantasia, Op. 80, written shortly before, was thus composed expressly to fulfil this role. Beethoven himself played the piano part and the opening solo offers an example of his improvisational style (at the premiere he did, in fact, improvise this section).

The work includes a sequence of variations on a theme that is widely felt to be an early version of a far better-known variation theme, namely the one to which Beethoven set the words of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in his Ninth Symphony. Beethoven himself acknowledged the kinship of the two works. In a letter of 1824, when he was writing the Ninth Symphony, he described his project as "a setting of the words of Schiller's immortal 'Lied an die Freude' in the same way as my pianoforte fantasia with chorus, but on a far grander scale.".

Members of the Ensemble