Composer-violinist Jessie Montgomery characterizes herself as a “hunter gatherer”: Her music combines elements of the European concert-hall tradition with Black and other vernacular influences—including folk idioms, spirituals, and blues—that have expanded and enriched the vocabulary of contemporary American classical music. A member of the multicultural Silkroad Ensemble, she sees music as “a meeting place at which all people can converse about their unique differences and common stories.” Montgomery has long been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization, a pioneer in the movement to promote diversity in the arts by advocating for Black and Latino classical musicians. Her ongoing musical exploration of the Black experience is reflected in such works as Five Slave Songs, a nonet inspired by the Great Migration, and a “re-envisioning” of Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, scored for an ensemble of African and Western instruments.
Montgomery’s compositions range from somber meditations to joyful, Ivesian jamborees. In the former category is Hymn for Everyone, commissioned in 2021 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where Montgomery is currently composer-in-residence. She explains that the 12-minute piece “is based on a hymn that I wrote in the spring of 2021 that was a reflection on personal and collective challenges happening at the time. I had resisted composing ‘response pieces’ to the pandemic and social-political upheaval and had been experiencing an intense writer’s block. But one day, after a long hike, this hymn just came to me—a rare occurrence.” Among the challenges Montgomery confronted was the death of her mother, Robbie McCauley, a prominent performance artist and theater director who often dealt with racial themes in her work. “I also found that my mom had written a poem called ‘Poem for Everyone.’ I didn’t know she had written it. When I made that discovery, I thought I had to lean into this a little bit more. I’d expand the hymn and make it into sort of a musical tribute. It was a bit of catharsis for me.” The work’s simple, hymn-like structure freed Montgomery to concentrate on orchestration. “The melody traverses through different orchestral ‘choirs’ and is accompanied by the rest of the ensemble,” she writes. “It is a kind of meditation for orchestra, exploring various washes of color and timbre through each repetition of the melody.”
—Harry Haskell
The practice of retrofitting existing operas with substitute arias, often by a different composer, was commonplace in the 18th and 19th centuries. Not surprisingly, it coincided with the heyday of superstar castratos and divas, who insisted on tailoring scores to show off their voices to best advantage. (Verdi helped put an end to the practice in 1847, when he inserted a clause in his publishing contract that specifically prohibited such unauthorized alterations.) Mozart and his contemporaries were only too happy to indulge the whims of singers like Louise Villeneuve, for whom he wrote the role of Dorabella in Così fan tutte in 1790. He had already obliged the soprano by writing a pair of substitute arias for her in a 1789 revival of Martín y Soler’s Il burbero di buon cuore, or The Good-Hearted Grouch, in Vienna. (The Spanish composer was unavailable, having decamped to St. Petersburg.) Set to a libretto by Mozart’s collaborator Lorenzo Da Ponte, Martín y Soler’s frothy rom-com features a rich, curmudgeonly bachelor and his nephew’s wife, Lucilla, a flibbertigibbet with a taste for expensive clothes and jewelry. Belatedly realizing that her profligacy is driving her husband to bankruptcy, Lucilla expresses her contrition and uxorial love in the coloratura aria “Vado, ma dove?,” which deftly captures her emotional fragility and volatility.
—Harry Haskell
Mozart was just 13 years old when he composed this charming and highly accomplished recitative and aria for the birthday of his well-liked employer, Archbishop Sigismund von Schrattenbach, in Salzburg. (The celebratory music may have been encored in 1772 at the installation of the archbishop’s successor, Hieronymus Colloredo, with whom Mozart would have a more problematic relationship.) “Sol nascente” is what is known as a “licenza,” a laudatory aria appended as a postscript to an existing work—in this case Vologeso, a long-forgotten opera seria by Giuseppe Sarti. Immediately following the reunion of the Parthian king Vologeses and his fiancée, Berenice, the two-part coda reinforced the opera’s conventional happy ending with a nod to the beneficence of its princely sponsor. Mozart’s precocious gifts as composer, pianist, and violinist had recently been validated by his appointment as Konzertmeister at the Salzburg court. “Sol nascente” and its accompanying recitative are notable for the brilliance of the vocal and instrumental writing, and for Mozart’s vivid tone painting of the rising sun, emblematic of his patron’s “bright and worthy splendor.”
—Harry Haskell
When it came to the composing of symphonies, Johannes Brahms was for many years a haunted man. Beethoven’s symphonies—which had already become legendary fixtures of the repertoire by the time Brahms began writing his mature works in the 1850s—cast such a long shadow over the genre that most mid–19th-century composers dared not attempt their own. Brahms, the most Classical-minded of the great Romantics, was particularly menaced by Beethoven’s legacy—a neurosis fueled by critics, impresarios, and the general public, all of whom had tabbed Brahms early in his career as the successor to that legacy. “There are asses in Vienna who take me for a second Beethoven,” complained the preternaturally grumpy composer, who probably did not help himself by installing a marble bust of his tormentor overlooking the room in his home where he composed. In 1870, after some 15 years of false starts and failed attempts, Brahms lost heart. “I shall never write a symphony!” he told conductor and friend Hermann Levi. “You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!”
Happily, Brahms did not give up. In 1876, at long last, the music-loving public got its symphony—and what a symphony! In the end, Brahms proved his provocateurs right. His First Symphony is everything they could have hoped for: an obvious homage to Beethoven that nonetheless speaks unmistakably with Brahms’s individual new voice and is, as infamous critic Eduard Hanslick pronounced upon its premiere, “one of the most individual and magnificent works of the symphonic literature.”
Though it ends with exhilarated affirmation, the Symphony No. 1 is, in the composer’s own words, “not exactly amiable,” tracing a long and often turbulent course from the ominous, thumping C-minor opening of the first movement to the triumphant blaze of C major in the coda of the finale—a harmonic journey that calls to mind, surely not by accident, Beethoven’s Fifth. After its menacing introduction, the first-movement Allegro is moody and episodic, shifting between melancholic rumination and urgent desperation but never emerging from the gloom. The Andante that follows offers some respite, moving into E major and remaining relatively restrained. Still, there is something wistful and lonely about the solo passages for oboe, clarinet, and violin that are its most striking features. Of the four, the brief third movement departs most significantly from the stylistic pattern Beethoven favored. Where his predecessor usually employed breathless, often rustic and rambunctious scherzos, Brahms dials back the tempo and the horsepower, returning to the more graceful and reserved model of the Classical minuet.
Finally, with the slow introduction to the sprawling finale, the symphony returns to the brooding C minor with which it began, seeming to offer little hope of reprieve. But soon, a hymnlike strain for French horn shines forth like a ray of sunlight, a moment of simple yet profound beauty that takes the breath away after so much time spent in darkness. This in turn leads to the most famous section of the piece, a chorale for massed strings that could not be more conspicuous in its allusion—nearly quotation—of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth. For a composer so paralyzed for so long by the specter of Beethoven, this is a remarkable act of exorcism—a statement of hard-won self-assurance that invites the inevitable comparison, confident that the work will withstand it. In its wake, the remainder of the movement builds to a thunderous, jubilant conclusion that is difficult not to hear as a celebration of the symphonic liberation the composer had finally achieved.
—Jay Goodwin