Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber

Marsch

By no means as ponderous as its title, the Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber is a spontaneous celebration of melody and virtuoso orchestral colour. It originated in the United States in 1940 as ballet music for Léonide Massine but the choreographer didn’t like the way Hindemith had treated Weber’s tunes and the composer didn’t like Massine’s plans for the production, least of all the idea that it would be designed by Salvador Dali. So the project was shelved and the score was revised as a concert piece three years later. An instant success when it was first performed by the New York Philharmonic under Artur Rodzinsky in 1944, it has remained the most popular of all Hindemith’s works.

The first and last movements of the Symphonic Metamorphoses are based on tunes from the Eight Pieces for piano duet, Op.60, that Weber completed in 1819, at much the same time as he was working on Der Freischütz. Material described by Weber in Op.60, No.4, as all’ongarese (in the Hungarian-gypsy style) inspired the exotic flavour of Hindemith’s opening Allegro, where vigorous syncopations on horns and woodwind urge the strings into the zestful tune introduced by violins in the opening bars. The middle section offers the double contrast of an exuberant fanfare theme on trumpets and an oriental-sounding episode on woodwind.

Perhaps the oriental allusions were intended as a preparation for the second movement, which is based on a “Chinese” melody Weber had found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de la Musique and had used in both the Overtura Chinesa and the incidental music to Friedrich Schiller’s translation of Gozzi’s play Turandot (which was to be the source of Puccini’s opera of the same name more than a hundred years later). An authentically pentatonic tune apart from one intriguingly wrong note, it is first heard here on flute and other woodwind in the Moderato introduction and is then driven in a lebhaft (lively) tempo through a series of highly coloured repetitions to a climax of swirling strings and woodwind trills. The most fundamental metamorphosis in the whole work is the middle section of this movement, which makes the Chinese theme the subject of an entertainingly jazzy fugue before it is reintroduced, by way of a version for percussion alone, in its original form.

The lyrical Andantino, based on material from one of Weber’s earlier piano-duet pieces (Op.10, No.2), makes a timely intervention. It is a peaceful and beautifully scored pastorale featuring two main themes - one awarded to a solo clarinet in the opening bars and recalled by the same instrument with an elaborate flute obbligato at the end, the other introduced on the expressive A-string of the cellos. The closing Marsch (March) makes witty use of material described by Weber in Op.60, No.7, as a Marcia funebre (Funeral March). Signalling his intentions with an eerie fanfare on trumpets, trombones and muted horns, Hindemith amuses himself at first himself by exaggerating the lugubrious qualities of Weber’s minor-key march. In the end, however, and in spite of further sinister manifestations, the cheerful tune introduced by the four horns triumphs over adversity in a splendidly engineered climax.