Michele Mariotti

In September 1872, Carl Ferdinand Pohl, librarian of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music, brought to the attention of its artistic director Johannes Brahms six Feldparthien: six divertimenti for wind instruments attributed to Haydn. In the summer of 1873, Brahms wrote variations on a chorale taken from these six divertimenti, “training” himself in the progressive transformation and development of musical elements and motifs, as well as in the orchestral writing that would later characterize his symphonic work. With his only Violin Concerto, completed in 1806, Beethoven further developed a genre that had evolved from the concertos of the Italian Baroque masters up to Mozart. With its symphonic conception and an unusually expansive first movement, the work seems closer in spirit to the violin concertos of Brahms, Tchaikovsky, or Sibelius than to those of his 18th-century predecessors. On May 12, 1926, Shostakovich’s First Symphony—his graduation work at the Leningrad Conservatory—was premiered, later brought to international attention by Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini. From the outset, Shostakovich revealed himself as a prankster: in the score of the 19-year-old, influences of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Mahler, and Hindemith merge into an original, sharp-edged tonal language, filled with acrobatics born of irony and comedy that one might then encounter in the circus or silent films, but not yet in the concert hall.