Czech Philharmonic • John Eliot Gardiner

Leopold Koželuh, who was baptised as Jan Antonín, studied music first with the cantors in Velvary, then in Prague with his cousin Jan Antonín Koželuh (1738–1814) and with František Xaver Dušek (Franz Dussek, 1731–1799). The fact that he shared the same name with a well-known relative who was already established in Prague’s musical life may have been one reason why he adopted the name Leopold in the early 1770s. By then, the young composer’s works had already been given their first public performances; his ballets and pantomimes were especially popular with audiences. In 1778 he left for Vienna in order to advance his career. He found great success as a piano teacher, and through his male and female pupils, he gained access to high society including the imperial court. By the early 1780s, Leopold Koželuh was a respected figure in the Viennese music world and was an acquaintance of Joseph Haydn, Dittersdorf, Salieri, Clementi, Czech musicians who had immigrated to Vienna, and of course Mozart. Over the decades that followed, he had success as a prolific composer, publishing not only in Austria, but also in Germany, London, Amsterdam, and elsewhere. In 1784, he founded his own publishing company in Vienna, and not long afterwards (1792) he rose to the supreme rank of court composer and Kapellmeister. The period after 1800 was less successful for the aging and ailing composer as he became less active and was confronted, for example, with Beethoven and the rise of Romanticism, although Koželuh had helped pave the way for Romanticism especially in his piano music and chamber works.

He wrote most of his symphonies in the spirit of Viennese Classicism in the 1780s. According to Milan Poštolka, the author of a thematic catalogue of Koželuh’s works, the Symphony No. 5 in G minor (I:5) dates from before 28 March 1787 on the basis of the composer’s correspondence and of publishers’ catalogues. Printed editions from 1787 (Vienna, Paris) and 1790 (London) and period copies show the work’s quickly growing popularity. It is the only one of Koželuh’s symphonies that is written in a minor key. The pathos-laden work is laid out three movements, lacking the usual dance movement (menuet). The outer movements (Allegro and Presto) are in sonata form, while the middle movement (Adagio) is in ternary form. The work’s carefully conceived handling of motifs and themes results in a compact composition of expressive power. The symphony is sometimes compared with Mozart’s later Symphony No. 40 in G minor (KV 550) from the year 1788.

Stylistically, Josef Suk’s Fantasy in G minor for violin and orchestra, Op. 24, belongs to a completely different era. Suk wrote it before he reached the age of 30 in 1902–1903, at the threshold of the 20th century. After his juvenilia influenced by Dvořák’s music and the period of Radúz and Mahulena, he was now advancing into new territory with his Fantasy without having entirely rejected his earlier sources of inspiration. Once time had passed, in a fit of needless self-criticism, in a letter to Otakar Šourek the music journalist, he characterised the Fantasy as “ingenious nothingness” and “playing around with notes”, when “being well armed with technical experience and a surprisingly firm hand” he had managed “this material full of contradictions”. In terms of its length and especially its technical demands, the composition resembles a violin concerto, but it is written as just a single movement with sonata elements, the intermingling of various forms, monothematic and polythematic features, subjective lyricism, and a range of other emotions (such as restlessness and inner conflict). The music is sometimes said to reflect Suk’s premonitions of ill fortune (his wife Otilie became ill after the birth of her son Josef in 1901 and died four years later), but this is unfounded. The composer explained the tense, ballade-like expressive atmosphere of the Fantasy as arising from the essence of the music. In Suk’s maturing as a man and an artist, the enterprising Bohemian Quartet certainly played an important role. He played second violin in the quartet, with which he appeared all over Europe, and in 1902 he was celebrating the ensemble’s tenth anniversary.

The Bohemian Quartet also had a connection with the premiere of Suk’s Fantasy at the Rudolfinum on 9 January 1904: the quartet’s first violinist Karel Hoffmann, Suk’s close friend since their student days at the conservatoire, played the solo part with the Czech Philharmonic under the baton of the quartet’s violist Oskar Nedbal, who was showing promise a conductor. Together, they performed the composition, which has been called a very difficult work to interpret by many leading violinists including the composer’s grandson, the violin virtuoso Josef Suk. In this context, Suk’s dedication of the autograph to his friend the painter Hugo Boettinger is a bit amusing. Although the finger exercise inscribed on the first page are a reminder that as a boy, Boettinger had briefly taken violin lessons from Suk, he had never excelled as a violinist. The Berlin publisher Simrock issued the printed edition of the Fantasy in 1905.

Speaking of Fritz Simrock, he was the publisher who assigned excessively high opus number 76 to Dvořák’s Symphony No. 5 in F major when the composition was issued in print in 1888. What we would now call a marketing ploy was intended to create the impression of the symphony being a newer work than it really was, having actually been written in 1875. In addition, he called the Symphony in F major the Third, following the Symphony in D major, Op. 60 (now the Sixth) and the Symphony in D minor, Op. 70 (now the Seventh), but in fact it preceded both of them chronologically. Antonín Dvořák wrote it in just six weeks at a time when he was experiencing the joys of fatherhood, and although his financial situation was far from ideal, he was by then able to rely on a stipend from the state. The composition fills the form of the classical symphony with new content, and it stands at the transition between Dvořák’s early symphonies and his mature symphonic works. The pastoral character usually attributed to the key of F major permeates the first movement (Allegro ma non troppo) thanks in part to the prominence of the woodwinds. A lyrical second movement (Andante con moto) is followed immediately by a scherzo in a mood comparable to that of the Slavonic Dances. The dramatic last movement (Finale. Allegro molto), full of “grand inspiration” and “masterful form” (according to a review in the English press after a performance of the symphony at the Crystal Palace in 1888), shows us Dvořák’s “Slavonic period” in the best light.

Adolf Čech conducted the premiere of the Symphony in F major in Prague on 25 March 1879 at what was aptly called a “Slavonic Concert”. Much had changed in Dvořák’s life during the four years between the composing and the performing of the symphony: his first three children had died, and Otilie, the future wife of Josef Suk, was born. Again, a rather long time passed before the work, having been revised by the composer, received its foreign premieres. August Manns led a performance in London in 1888. Dvořák was not present then, but he conducted performances of what is now called his Fifth Symphony at several concerts at home and abroad, for example on programmes of his works in Dresden (1889) and Moscow (1890). The revised version of the symphony is dedicated to Hans von Bülow, a great conductor and a promoter of Dvořák’s music.