Violinist, composer and music educator Jessie Montgomery, who began a three-year term as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in July 2021, started studying violin at age four at the Third Street Music School Settlement in her native New York City. She was composing and improvising by age eleven, and while still in high school twice received the Composer’s Apprentice Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Montgomery went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in violin performance at Juilliard and a master’s from New York University in film scor- ing and multimedia; she is currently a Graduate Fellow at Princeton University.

In 2020, she was appointed to the faculty of the Mannes School of Music in New York. As a performer and educator, Montgomery was a co-founding member of PUBLIQuartet (an ensemble made up of composers and arrangers, featuring their own music as well as that of other New York-based composers), a member of the Catalyst Quartet and Providence String Quartet (dedicated to using music as a means of exploring possibilities for social change in under-served communities in the Providence area, where she taught violin, improvisation and composition to Community MusicWorks students), Music at Port Milford in Canada, and Third Street Music School Settlement in New York, and a long- time affiliated artist with Sphinx, an organization that supports young African- American and Latino string players, in which she was a two-time laureate; she is also currently an active participant in the New York classical and new music scenes. As a composer, Montgomery has created works for concert, theater and film (one of which was in collaboration with her father, Ed Montgomery, also a composer and an independent film producer), and held residencies with the Deer Valley Music Festival, New York Youth Symphony, American Composers Orchestra and Sphinx Virtuosi.

Among Montgomery’s rapidly accumulating distinctions are the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence. Jessie Montgomery is currently working on a commission for Project 19, the New York Philharmonic’s multi-year celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states the following year, which granted women the right to vote. The Philharmonic began premiering these new compositions by 19 women com- posers in February 2020. In September 2021, Montgomery was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera along with two other Black composers — Valerie Coleman and Joel Thompson — to develop new works in collaboration with the Lincoln Center Theater.

Jessie Montgomery wrote, “The brief one-movement Starburst for string orchestra is a play on imagery of rapidly changing musical colors. Exploding gestures are juxtaposed with gentle fleeting melodies in an attempt to create a multidimensional soundscape. A common definition of a starburst — ‘the rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly’ — lends itself almost literally to the performing ensemble who premiered the work: The Sphinx Virtuosi.”

The Sphinx Virtuosi is the touring ensemble of the Sphinx Organization, which addresses the under-representation of people of color in classical music though training and performance opportunities.

Early in 1873, the 32-year-old Antonín Dvořák had his opera King and Charcoal Burner accepted for performance by Prague’s Provisional Theater. After a few rehearsals, however, the Theater’s staff reconsidered its decision, and returned the score to the young composer as “unperformable.” The Provisional Theater’s rejection tempered the delight Dvořák had gained from the successful premiere of his cantata Hymnus during the spring, and caused him to undertake a wholesale reevaluation of his existing works. So extensive was his 1873 pruning of his juvenilia that he later kidded about “always having enough paper to build a fire.” Some of his frustration of those months following the rejection of King and Charcoal Burner was poured into a String Quartet in F minor that was apparently intended to have an autobiographical significance, similar to that of Smetana’s Quartet No. 1 in E minor, “From My Life,” composed three years later. Dvořák may have conceived his piece for a chamber music society founded in Prague the preceding spring, but the society did not care for the Quartet, and the score lay in the composer’s desk unpublished and unperformed for six years.

In 1879, after Dvořák had become associated with the Berlin publisher Simrock through the advocacy of Brahms, he returned to the early F minor Quartet and adapted from its slow movement the Romance for Solo Violin and Small Orchestra. Simrock issued the piece that year as Dvořák’s Opus 11. (The complete Quartet was not published until 1929.) The Romance is a sweetly melancholy nocturne, filled with tender emotions. Following an ethereal introduction floating high in the strings, the solo violin quietly sings the work’s soulful principal melody above a simple, rocking background. The center of the piece comprises a soaring theme for the violin supported by a subtle flute accompaniment, a gently swaying motive for the woodwinds in waltz rhythm, and a more strongly marked section for the string choir. The soloist recalls the thoughtful mood of the opening before turning from the expressive key of F minor to the brighter tonality of F major to bring this lovely Romance to a contented close.

The Oxford English Dictionary, that wondrous repository of information on the history of our language, traces the word “Romance” as a literary term to the early 14th century, when it came to denote the vernacular tongue of France. The entry on “Romance” continues: “A tale in [French] verse embodying the adventures of some hero of chivalry, especially those of the great cycles of mediaeval legend, and belonging in matter and form to the ages of knighthood.” The taste for entertaining poetry in the everyday language — as opposed to learned disquisitions in Latin — soon spread throughout Europe. By the 16th century, the term “romance” had come to include fictional narratives in prose, and, two centuries later, was the generic name given to the incunabula of the modern novel. The elements of distant times, places and people, thickly larded with fantasy, was common to all these manifestations. “Romantic,” therefore, seemed to apply appropriately to the extravagant emotionalism that began creeping into art and music late in the 18th century (the Oxford Dictionary defines such music as “characterized by the subordination of form to theme, and by imagination and passion”), and was to become the designation for the great age to follow.

Fourteenth-century Spain produced the earliest musical Romances, sophisticated settings of long stanzaic poems. In 18th-century France, the Romance denoted a short song of melodious character. The name was taken over into French instrumental music as the designation for some lyrical pieces of sweet sentiment. It was in this sense that Mozart applied the title “Romanza” to the second movement of his D minor Piano Concerto, K. 466. As Louis Biancolli noted about the addition of such a title, “Where it is used, the purpose is to show in advance that melodic invention and lyric feeling predominate.” The two Romances for violin and orchestra by Beethoven flow from this tradition.

The Romances (Op. 40 in G and Op. 50 in F) probably date, respectively, from 1801-1802 and 1798. The G major was published in 1803; the F major, two years later. Though the Romances are simple in expression, they require a high degree of musicianship and technical proficiency from the soloist. The celebrated Russian violin pedagogue Leopold Auer wrote that they should sound like “a tender dialogue” between soloist and orchestra, “and in keeping with this colloquial style should be played with unaffected beauty of tone and expression.”

Each of the Romances is based on a beautiful melody presented immediately by the violin, with two intervening episodes, darker in emotional coloring, separating the full and slightly embellished returns of the main theme.

“He was short, about 5 feet, 4 inches, thickset and broad, with a massive head, a wildly luxuriant crop of hair, protruding teeth, a small rounded nose, and a habit of spitting whenever the notion took him. He was clumsy, and anything he touched was liable to be upset or broken. Badly coordinated, he could never learn to dance, and more often than not managed to cut himself while shaving. He was sullen and suspicious, touchy as a misanthropic cobra, believed that everybody was out to cheat him, had none of the social graces, was forgetful, and was prone to insensate rages.” Thus the late New York Times critic Harold Schonberg, in his book about The Lives of the Great Composers, described Ludwig van Beethoven, the burly peasant with the unquenchable fire of genius who descended, aged 22, upon Vienna in 1792. Beethoven had been charged by his benefactor in his hometown of Bonn, Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, to go to the Austrian capital and “receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.” He did study for a short time with Haydn, then universally regarded as the greatest living composer, but young Ludwig proved to be a recalcitrant student, and the sessions soon ended, though the two maintained a respectful, if cool, relationship until Haydn’s death in 1809.

Beethoven was not to make his first impression upon the Viennese as a composition student, however, but as a pianist — a pianist unlike any seen before. In a world still largely accustomed to the reserved, genteel musical style of pre-Revolutionary classicism, he burst upon the scene like a fiery meteor. Rather than the elegant, fluent style of a Mozart (dead less than a year at the time of Beethoven’s arrival), he played with a seeming wild abandon, thrashing upon the keyboard, breaking strings, trying to draw forth orchestral sonorities from the light, wood-frame Viennese pianos that regularly suffered under his onslaught. He repeatedly entreated piano manufacturers to build bigger, louder, sturdier instruments. (By the 1820s, they had.) Like his style of performance, the music he composed reflected the impassioned, powerful emotions that drove him throughout his entire life.

The Viennese aristocracy took this young lion to its bosom. Beethoven expected as much. Unlike his predecessors, he would not assume the servant’s position traditionally accorded to a musician, refusing, for example, not only to eat in the kitchen, but becoming outspokenly hostile if he was not seated next to the master of the house at table. The more enlightened nobility, to its credit, recognized the genius of this gruff Rhinelander, and encouraged his work. Shortly after his arrival, for example, Prince Lichnowsky provided Beethoven with living quarters, treating him more like a son than a guest. Lichnowsky even instructed the servants to answer the musician’s call before his own, should both ring at the same time. In large part, such gestures provided for Beethoven’s support during his early Viennese years. For most of the first decade after he arrived, Beethoven made some effort to follow the prevailing fashion in the sophisticated city. But though he outfitted himself with good boots, a proper coat, and the necessary accoutrements, and enjoyed the hospitality of Vienna’s best houses, there never ceased to roil within him the untamed energy of creativity. It was only a matter of time before the fancy clothes were discarded, as a bear would shred a flimsy paper bag.

The year of the First Symphony — 1800 — was a crucial time in Beethoven’s artistic development. He had achieved a success good enough to write to his old friend Franz Wegeler in Bonn, “My compositions bring me in a good deal, and may I say that I am offered more commissions than it is possible for me to carry out. Moreover, for every composition I can count on six or seven publishers and even more, if I want them. People no longer come to an arrangement with me. I state my price, and they pay.” Behind him were many works, including the Op. 18 Quartets, first two piano concertos, and “Pathétique” Sonata, that bear his personal imprint. At the time of that gratifying recognition of his talents, however, the first signs of his fateful deafness appeared, and he began the titanic struggle that became one of the gravitational poles of his life. Within two years, driven from the social contact on which he had flourished by the fear of discovery of his malady, he penned the Heiligenstadt Testament, his cri de coeur against that wicked trick of the gods.

The C major Symphony stands on the brink of this great crisis in Beethoven’s life. The First Symphony begins with a most unusual slow introduction. The opening chord is a dissonance, a harmony that seems to lead away from the main tonality, which is normally established immediately at the beginning of a Classical work. Though not unprecedented (the well-known and influential C.P.E. Bach consistently took even more daring harmonic flights), it does reinforce the sense of striving, of constantly moving toward resolution that underlies all Beethoven’s works. The sonata form proper begins with the quickening of the tempo and the presentation of the main theme by the strings. More instruments enter, tension accumulates, and the music arrives at the second theme following a brief silence — a technique he derived from Mozart to emphasize this important formal junction. The development section deals exclusively with the main theme. The recapitulation follows the events of the exposition, but presents them in heightened settings.

The Andante, another sonata form, has an imitative main theme and an airy secondary subject. The development employs the melodic leaps of the subordinate theme; the recapitulation is enriched by the addition of contrapuntal accompanying lines. Though the third movement is labeled “Menuetto” it is really one of those whirlwind packets of rhythmic energy that, beginning with the Second Symphony, Beethoven labeled “scherzo.” Its tripartite form (minuet–trio–minuet) follows the Classical model, with strings dominant in the outer sections and winds in the central portion. The finale begins with a short introduction comprising halting scale fragments that preview the vivacious main theme. Yet another excursion in sonata form, this bustling movement, indebted to the sparkling style of Haydn, ends with ribbons of scales rising through the orchestra and emphatic cadential gestures.