Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770-1827. Grand Overture in C Major, ``Namensfeier'' (``Name Day''), Op. 115. Completed 1814, first performance December 25th, 1815, in Vienna. Scored for 2 each flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, tympani, and strings.
When Beethoven was a young man, one of the most respected writers in Germany was Friedrich Schiller, dramatist, poet, and philosopher. Beethoven revered Schiller's works, and as early as 1793 he had begun thinking about setting a favorite poem, An die Freude (better known as the ``Ode to Joy''), to music. It would take almost twenty years for him to act on the idea, and another decade for it to come to fruition as the famous last movement of the Ninth Symphony.
When Beethoven finally sat down to work on the Ode to Joy, he had not yet conceived the radical departure of adding a choral section to a symphony. Instead, he planned a simpler approach, a concert work made up of a few movements ending with the poem. The first sketches along these lines appeared in 1811.
The work did not progress particularly rapidly, and as it developed. Beethoven apparently realized that Schiller's Ode was worthy of a more significant piece than the relatively innocuous composition he had been planning. Eventually he separated the poetic setting from the other themes and converted the latter into an overture. As it happens, he finished the score, labeling it ``in the first vintage month (October) 1814, in the evening, on the name-day [birthday] of our Kaiser.'' It is this indication that has produced the overture's nickname.
The overture is truly ``grand,'' not only in the sense of being a relatively lengthy piece, but also in that it is much more weighty and complex than a Mozart or Rossini operatic overture. In it we can hear the fully mature Beethoven, an innovator who no longer shied away from extending a form or challenging audiences, yet also a man wise enough to put aside a portion of his work when it needed further development, even though it would take almost ten more years to produce something he would consider a worthy capstone to his career.
© 1999, Geoff Kuenning
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