Late choral music : incidental music to König Stephan, OP. 117

Abstract

As the Napoleonic wars turned nineteenth-century Europe inside out, members of the nobility and the well-to-do found themselves with increasingly fewer locations at which to spend their summer holidays. Because it was in neutral territory, Teplitz (Teplice, now in the Czech Republic) became the destination of choice for numerous Viennese aristocrats and other citizens. It was here, in the summer of 1811, that Beethoven quickly composed the incidental scores to both König Stephan, Op. 117, and Die Ruinen von Athen, Op. 113 while taking "the cure" under doctor's orders.

Both works had been commissioned for the opening of the new imperial theater in Pest on February 10, 1812. The occasion was patriotic, and though König Stephan is ostensibly a tribute to an earlier Hungarian king (the work's subtitle is "Hungary's First Benefactor"), it actually pays homage to the then-current Austro-Hungarian Kaiser, Franz.

The overture, in the key of E flat major, is the only section of König Stephan that is still regularly performed. Marked Andante con moto—Presto, it opens with a brief brass outburst that initiates a slow introduction. The main theme is a syncopated, arpeggiated tune that almost immediately dissolves into a transition to a new key. An arching melody in which each note is of equal duration heralds the second theme group; the closing theme is similarly built of equal note values. Typically, overtures in sonata-allegro form forego a repeat of the exposition, and König Stephan is no exception, though a return of the introductory material momentarily suggests that a return of the exposition will follow. Woodwinds initiate the development with part of the first theme, and an exhilarating dynamic expansion from pianissimo abruptly halts at total silence before the recapitulation. A further key change marks the beginning of a coda that further develops themes from all three parts of the exposition.

The women's choruses in the body of the work owe a debt to similar sections in Haydn's oratorio The Seasons (1799 - 1801). Most curious to twentieth-century listeners are the melodramas of numbers 5, 7, and 8, in which spoken dialogue is accompanied by the orchestra—a common form of entertainment in eighteenth-century Austria that was only occasionally revisited in subsequent centuries.