Symphony No. 2 (Brian)

Symphony No. 2
by Havergal Brian
Havergal Brian, c. 1900
Key	E minor
Composed	1930–1931
Dedication	Elfreda Brian
Published	1949
Publisher	Schott and Co
Duration	48 minutes
Movements	4
Premiere
Date	19 May 1973
Location	Brighton Dome, Brighton
Conductor	Leslie Head
Performers	Kensington Symphony Orchestra

The Symphony No. 2 in E minor is a symphony composed by Havergal Brian between 1930 and 1931. The work was inspired by Goethe's drama Götz von Berlichingen. Originally it did not bear any dedication, but in 1972 he retrospectively dedicated it to his then recently deceased daughter Elfreda Brian. While it appears to be a traditional, four-movement symphony in the German postromantic tradition, Brian greatly deviates from convention and his personal approach to the symphonic discourse only shares superficial elements with other composers.^[1]

It was begun shortly after finishing editing the massive and ambitious Gothic Symphony, as well as composing the burlesque opera The Tigers. The piece was sketched between June and September 1930, the full score being written and orchestrated between October 1930 and April 1931.^[2] In October 1931, Adrian Boult, in his capacity as Director of Music at the BBC, was sent the score of the symphony, which was rejected on November 4.^[3]

The symphony was not premiered until six months after Brian's death, on 19 May 1973, at the Dome in Brighton. It was performed by the Kensington Symphony Orchestra under Leslie Head, who gave the first of a run of three largely amateur performances.^[4] The first fully professional reading was a BBC broadcast recorded at the BBC Maida Vale Studios on 9 March 1979, when Sir Charles Mackerras conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The piece has been performed half a dozen times since, with three recordings also being made.

Whereas The Gothic was a large-scale choral symphony that attempted to address the spiritual concerns of humanity, specially after the horrors of World War I, Symphony No. 2 was Brian's first serious essay in the more classical four-movement form. Writing in a letter to Robert Simpson, thirty years after he composed it, Brian described the piece as "...in the orthodox four movements — but very unorthodox inside. The slow movement 'had' me and I thought I could never leave it. The finale is a slow Rondo — rather an Irish expression".^[5]

Throughout his life, Brian would hold contradicting views on his music and its supposedly extramusical content, and the second symphony reflects such opposing drives between programmatic music and absolute music.^[6] Initially, Brian conceived the symphony as almost programmatic in nature, reflecting multiple aspects of the life of the main character Götz von Berlichingen as portrayed in Goethe's tragedy: a free spirit, a maverick, intended to be a pillar of national integrity against a deceitful and over-refined society, and the way in which he tragically succumbs to the abstract concepts of law and justice shows the submission of the individual in that society.^[7]

According to Reginald Nettel, "the four movements are associated in the composer's mind with various aspects of the character of Götz. The first, his resolution; the second, his domestic piety and love of his children; the third, the smell of battle; and the fourth, his death".^[8] From this initial conception, which heavily resembles Liszt's Faust Symphony or even Sibelius' Kullervo, Brian would go on to attempt to deny any extramusical programme and even influence from the play. Yet as late as 1969, when he was interviewed for CBC radio, Brian referred to Symphony No. 2 as "the Götz von Berlichingen", and recalled showing the finale to Ernest Newman and explaining that it depicted the end of the life of Götz. The most he would allow later on, in a letter written to Graham Hatton in 1972, was that he had had in mind "MAN in his cosmic loneliness: ambition, loves, battles, death".^[9]

While not requiring forces as tremendously large as the Gothic Symphony, the instrumentation of the second is still very large and even augmented regarding the number of some instruments.^[10]

The symphony is divided in four movements linked in pairs of two, an approach reminiscent of Saint-Saëns' Organ Symphony.

I. Adagio solenne – allegro assai – attacca

II. Andante sostenuto e espressivo molto

III. Scherzo. Allegro assai – attacca

IV. Lento maestoso e mesto

The language of the symphony is modern in sound, although not quite avant-garde. The harmonic scheme of the work is diffuse, and its tonal centres are unstable and distant, bringing tonality nearly to its limits. The harmonic language is reminiscent of Sibelius, particularly his Fourth Symphony. Like Sibelius, Brian makes extensive use of the tritone, which is present in almost every major theme in the piece and serves as basis for the whole symphony. Other's composers, such as Richard Wagner and Arnold Schoenberg had used the tritone as a form of "stable" harmony. The formal structure of the work is also more free, as we find no discernible sonata forms nor traditional tonal conflicts.^[11] The ensuing description lays aside all programmatic considerations and offers a brief guide to the purely musical events.

The first movement begin with the mutter of three timpani on a bare fifth chord of E, reinforced by woodwind, while pizzicato cellos and basses pick out an angular, chromatic theme. Its three-note opening phrase, B–A♯–F, a tritone split into a falling semitone and augmented third, is an important germinal cell; later forms of it tend to increase the first interval and diminish the second, while preserving the tritone span. The pizzicato theme is the backbone of a brooding introduction: it recurs in the bass (though not quite continuously) in the manner of a passacaglia, while above and around it the music accumulates weight and urgency, moving inexorably to the outbreak of the main Allegro assai. This begins with a hectic, aspiring first subject that compresses several salient ideas into a short space. Chromatic and restlessly modulating, this moves swiftly, via two cadential bars for the brass, to a broad second subject melody in E major marked both semplice and sempre teneramente. With its regular rhythm and diatonic singing character — equally evident in its more intimate continuation — this contrasts strongly with the complex yet compressed first subject, though its textural complexities are quite comparable.^[12]

Such marked polarities, achieved with a minimum of transition, are common in Brian's early symphonies. Ultimately they destabilise and subvert the sonata style to which his first movements appear to refer. A sparse codetta — austere, descending phrases derived from the opening three-note cell, and a whispering passage of string figuration — leads straight into the development section. This is notably brief. A compressed version of the first subject is suddenly interrupted by a mysterious episode, Tranquillo e semplice, where flutes, glockenspiel, and harp restate the theme of the introduction against a chromatic viola counterpoint in a dreamlike, chiming texture. There ensues development of the second subject, starting with a cello solo, working up to the recapitulation, which is comparatively regular but culminates in a brief climax, a dramatic polyphonic outburst, before subsiding to a bare and sinister coda with softly marching timpani. (All four movements end quietly.)^[13]

The ensuing Andante sostenuto, which follows without a break, is the most free movement in form, and texturally and harmonically the most elaborate and advanced. It begins with a poignant theme for solo cor anglais which becomes the focus for the first of the movement's three great spans — though there are hints also of a funeral march, and variants of the first movement's angular introductory theme continue to haunt the extremely active bass lines, especially at a jagged climax marked, in Italian and English Sempre pesante possibile (each note hard and heavy).The second span sets in with a new woodwind theme, lyrically extended by horn and strings.

This is interrupted by a grim, stiffly-marching episode, which abruptly dissolves into a return of the previous woodwind theme on solo clarinet against a cello-bass counterpoint and a shimmering, susurrating music for four flutes, celesta, and harps. Canonic woodwind entries against chromatically swirling string textures become a bridge to the movement's third span, announced by angry, descending figures in trumpets and tubas. A concerto-like violin solo now appears as the focus for a passionate and polyphonic orchestral tutti. A modulatory passage for woodwind leads to a climax of extraordinary textural elaboration, in which elements of all three of the movement's main spans are combined in cascades of scales on strings, harps, and high woodwind. After this, the textures thin out, and the coda (like that of the previous movement) is sparse and chill, even in the final cadence for strings and horns.^[14]

The scherzo announces itself with a kind of excited thrumming in the air, on harps and muted strings. Over rapid ostinati on pianos and timpani, the horns, one group after another, enunciate an ebullient hunting-call, or a call to battle. Thus begins a headlong movement of torrential sonic invention, centred on the pounding and flickering patterns provided by timpani, pianos, and, as Brian envisaged it, sixteen horns disposed in four separate groups. (The sixteen horns are an operatic requirement, heard off-stage in Wagner's Tannhäuser and Lohengrin and taken over by Richard Strauss in his Alpensinfonie. It is, strictly speaking, possible to perform Brian's symphony with only eight horns).

The whole scherzo seems less an evocation of a battlefield than a virtuosic orchestral toccata of Dionysiac rhythmic drive. The various groups of horns eventually come together in a wild tutti, after which the music builds with ever-accumulating textural complexity to a shattering climax of repeated chords, reinforced by full organ. In a quiet coda, a single horn restates the main theme as if fading away into the distance, and woodwind, in descending order, spell out the notes of a dissonant harmony against flickering violins.^[15]

Abruptly, the finale breaks in — a tragic funeral march, entirely conceived in Brian's own terms, yet unafraid to evoke echoes of Siegfried's Funeral March from Götterdämmerung. In form it is, as Brian noted, a slow rondo. (He described it thus to Ernest Newman, only to receive the immortal rejoinder — "Well, why not make it fast?").^[16] The movement opens with, and is repeatedly punctuated by, a terse, recitative-like figure, stem yet slithering, announced at the outset by violas and cellos. Every appearance is slightly different, and the short-score drafts bear witness to Brian's painstaking work on these slightly but significantly varied shapes, The main rondo idea, a melancholic theme on clarinet and bass clarinet, with its horn-call pendant, is a transfiguration of the bass theme from the symphony's introduction. The first episode, brass and timpani evoking dark Wagnerian pageantry, brings the first of several Götterdämmerung-like climaxes.^[17]

A new lamenting idea, teneramente, leads via a ghostly processional to recurrences of the slithering recitative and the rondo theme. This then gives way to the second episode — a wonderful, elegiac lament, deeply English in expression. Beginning eloquently on cellos and basses in seven parts, it builds to a tremendous tutti outburst, during which the two pianos re-enter the orchestral fabric. Another processional, this time with insistent brass fanfares, prepares for expressive string writing that leads to the symphony's final catharsis, a huge tutti for the entire forces, built out of Götterdämmerung figures and parts of the rondo theme. It is abruptly cut short, and the teneramente theme reappears on solo violin and cello before a reminder of the ghostly processional leads to the final statement of the rondo subject, on solo clarinet. The bass recitative grumbles for the last time, and clarinet and bass clarinet cadence into the enveloping gloom of E minor. The last sound is the bare fifth drum-roll, on three timpani, with which the symphony began.^[18]

• The Havergal Brian Society has a number of essays and further details on the symphony.
• Link to a complete recording of the piece on Youtube