Domingo Hindoyan
Domingo Hindoyan was born in Caracas in 1980 to a violinist father and a lawyer mother. He started his musical career as a violinist in the ground-breaking Venezuelan musical education programme El Sistema. He studied conducting at Haute Ecole de Musique in Geneva, where he gained his masters, and in 2012 was invited to join the Allianz International Conductor’s Academy, through which he worked with the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra and with conductors like Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sir Andrew Davis.
He was appointed first assistant conductor to Daniel Barenboim at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin in 2013, and in 2019, he took up a position as principal guest conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. In the same year, he made his debut with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and was appointed as the Orchestra’s new Chief Conductor in 2020, taking up his position in September 2021. He has now extended his contract with the Orchestra to 2028.
Joseph Haydn
The industrious Joseph Haydn was the pre-eminent figure in the development of the Classical style through the 18th Century. He did perhaps more than any other single composer to establish the form and, coupled with his prodigious output, it earned him the titles ‘Father of the Symphony’ (he famously composed 106) and ‘Father of the String Quartet’ (Haydn left 70 to posterity). While perhaps eventually overshadowed by the more flamboyant and mercurial fellow Austrian (and friend) Mozart, Haydn’s importance and legacy cannot be overstated.
Coming from a humble home in Rohrau (his father was a wheelwright and his mother a cook), he was a village boy who certainly made good. Diligence and hard work, coupled with talent, good fortune and judicious networking, took him to the Esterházy court where he was given support to develop his art. Joseph Haydn remained in the service of the Esterházy household for more than 40 years, although in the 1790s a change at the head of the family led the aging composer to be somewhat sidelined.
He ended up spending four years on and off in London, where on first arriving on New Year’s Day 1791, he was surprised to discover how famous he was. The composer was feted in the capital, where the Prince of Wales (the future George IV) became his main patron. His dozen ‘London’ symphonies (including Symphony No.102, described as one of the greatest works of all time) were composed during this period.
But he ended his days at home in Austria, in a besieged Vienna in May 1809. Entering the city, Napoleon reportedly placed a guard of honour at Haydn’s door, and despite the turmoil in the city outside, the great man passed away peacefully in his own bed aged 77.
In addition to his symphonies and string quartets, he also left a huge number of sacred works – including cantatas, oratorios (The Creation being one of his masterpieces) and masses – as well as lieder, keyboard pieces, dozens of concertos, many overtures and operas.
Enjoy a performance of the overture to Joseph Haydn’s L'Isola disabitata.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God,” says a marvelling (and insanely jealous) Antonio Salieri in Liverpool playwright Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Revered down the centuries as a genius who left a legacy of musical masterpieces, Mozart – this ‘voice of God’ – was essentially a jobbing composer for hire, constantly seeking out the next patronage or commission to further his career and pay his often extravagantly large bills. Of all composers, the ‘story’ of his life is perhaps the best-known. And most embroidered.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756, where his father Leopold was a violinist in the Prince-Bishop’s court. Leopold toured the salons of Europe with the young Wolfgang and his equally talented sister Maria Anna, and the children performed at the keyboard for the great and good. In 1764 they came to London and performed for George III. It was where the precocious musical genius composed his first symphony, which included a four-note musical motif, CDFE, which popped up in subsequent pieces including, 24 years later, his longest and last symphony, nicknamed Jupiter.
At the advanced age of 17, Mozart followed his father and entered the employ of the Price-Archbishop of Salzburg, for whom he was required to compose masses and other works on the modest salary of 150 florins a year. By the time he was 21, and maturing compositionally, he was keen to fly the nest and after his request for a sabbatical was turned down, he set out on the road in search of new patronage and fresh, more lucrative commissions. He ended up in Vienna where he would live for the remainder of his days, marry his wife Constance, and compose his best-known works, particularly in the final ‘golden’ decade of his life. Along with his great operas The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan Tutte and The Magic Flute, they included his mature symphonies, masterful Piano Concerto No.21 and Mass in C Minor. In fact, over the course of his short lifetime, the prolific Mozart composed more than 600 works in a wide range of forms.
Aged just 35, he died in Vienna in December 1791, famously leaving the Requiem commission which had filled his final autumn unfinished. His funeral service was conducted at St Stephen’s Cathedral, but Mozart, the creator of some of the most remarkable music ever composed, was buried in an unmarked plot.
Did you know? Among the actors to have played Mozart in Amadeus on stage are Simon Callow, Tim Curry, Michael Sheen, Peter Firth and, during his Star Wars years, Mark Hamill.
Listen to the finale of Mozart’s Symphony No.41, ‘Jupiter’.
Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss was a young composer in a hurry – by the time he was 18 he already had 100 works to his name. Over the course of a seven-decade career, he produced more than 200 major compositions, among them the operas and tone poems for which he is best known.
The first child of horn player Franz Joseph Strauss and his wife Josepha, Strauss was born in Munich in 1864 and showed an early aptitude for music. He started piano lessons at four, violin at eight and also learned from sitting in on rehearsals of the Munich Court Orchestra, whose assistant conductor gave him tuition in theory and orchestration. At the age of 21 he was appointed assistant conductor to Hans von Bülow at the Meiningen Orchestra. One of the other candidates he beat to the post was Gustav Mahler.
Described as a Post-Romantic, Strauss’ breakthrough as a composer came with Don Juan in 1888, and by the turn of the 20th Century he had consolidated his international standing as both composer and conductor. His opera Salome was so successful he could then afford to build a home in the Bavarian alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen (a favourite spot for conductors, composers, singers and authors), where he lived until his death in September 1949.
While early works were influenced by the Romantics, including Wagner, Strauss developed his own musical style over time, one which has been described as encompassing rich, textured orchestration and dramatic, expressive power, and utilising dissonance and extended tonality. Towards the end of his life his work became more conservative. In 1920, Strauss co-founded the Salzburg Festival. He received many honours over the years, including the French Croix de Chevalier and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal.
Enjoy images from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey set to Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra.
About the Music
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809): Overture, L’isola disabitata (‘The Uninhabited Island’)
Composed: 1779
First Performed: 6 December 1779, Esterhaza (now Hungary), Court Opera, cond. Haydn
L’isola disabitata was the tenth of around twenty-five operas written by Joseph Haydn. No one’s quite sure of the exact number. None of them have established themselves in the repertoire (this one wasn’t published until 1976), but the overture to L’isola disabitata has done rather better in the concert hall – not surprisingly, as it’s a concise, compelling symphonic piece in its own right. The opera tells of the fortunes of a group of people marooned on an island, probably somewhere in the Mediterranean, and the Overture sets the scene with powerful depictions of storms to come – sea-storms perhaps, but also surging passions. There’s a brighter, cheerier slower section towards the end, but ultimately it’s the raging elements that prevail.
Mozart: Symphony No 41 in C major, K.551 (‘Jupiter’)
1. Allegro vivace
2. Andante cantabile
3. Menuetto: Allegretto
4. Molto allegro
Composed: Vienna, 1788
First Performed: 1789/90?
Astonishingly little is known about the creation and performance history of Mozart’s last symphony – and we’re talking about one of the most important and influential symphonies ever written! Mozart gave concerts featuring symphonies in Leipzig, Frankfurt and his home city Vienna in 1789-90, so it’s likely that his newest symphony would have been amongst them, but more than that it’s hard to say. The nickname ‘Jupiter’ is a bit of a mystery too. According to Mozart’s son Franz Xaver, it was invented by the London concertmaster Johann Peter Salomon, who rightly assumed it would enhance the Symphony’s commercial appeal. For many though it was a good choice: there is something uniquely majestic and masterly about this music.
But is that the whole story? The stern, unison opening idea is followed by questioning strings, and after the massive C major ‘entry of the god’ fortissimo that follows, the quiet questioning intensifies, now enriched by solo woodwinds. Part of the drama of the first movement lies in the contrast between massive, regal assertion, the old order resplendent with ceremonial trumpets and drums, and these smaller, fainter, but persistent voices of doubt. It isn’t too far-fetched to hear this as a musical cross-section of life in Mozart’s Vienna.
In the Andante cantabile the strings are muted throughout, giving a strangely veiled quality to their tone. Throughout the movement, yearning for peace alternates with restless ambiguity, even moments of genuine anguish. And despite its breezy opening, the Minuet also has its darker moments, not least the angular fortes that disturb the complacency of the central Trio section. Six different motifs are introduced near the start of the finale. Mostly they are played off against one another to exhilarating and moving effect but in the grand coda, five of them are combined in a superb demonstration of fugal mastery – each ‘voice’ in the texture ‘first amongst equals’. There’s no evidence Mozart had any inkling that this Symphony was to be his last, but if he had, he could hardly have signed off with a more impressive flourish.
Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Also sprach Zarathustra (‘Thus spake Zarathustra’)
Composed: 1895-6
First Performed: 27 November 1896, Frankfurt, Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra, cond. Strauss
Richard Strauss was one of many young Germans who were enthralled by Friedrich Nietzsche’s epic philosophical poem ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ (1883), with its message of radical individualism and ecstatic prophecy of a new, transformed humanity – the ‘Superman’. Soon Strauss was thinking of giving form to his feelings in music. He took phrases and images from Nietzsche and used them as subtitles for his audacious new orchestral tone poem, which he completed in 1896. But it’s unlikely that Strauss ever wanted his audiences to relate his music point by point to Nietzsche’s ideas. His ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ was, he said, composed ‘freely after Nietzsche’. ‘I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s great work musically’, he wrote. ‘I meant rather to convey in music an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origin, through various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman.’
Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra begins with a stupendous musical sunrise – made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Strauss’ scheme it signifies the dawning of human consciousness. But then comes a step backwards, as the organ joins richly divided strings for a portrayal of the ‘false’ consolations of religion. Human ‘Joys and Passions’, burst out in a downward sweeping harp glissando, then comes a search for a new stability in ‘Of Science’ - a dryly methodical fugue, beginning deep in cellos and basses. More turbulence follows, culminating in a terrifying reminder of the work’s opening theme. The tempo increases, with cockcrows on high trumpets (promise of a new dawn), leading to a luxuriously elegant waltz, ‘The Dance-Song’ - the absolute opposite of the sombre, rigid gravity of the ‘Of Science’ section. Twelve bell strokes sound midnight, the moment of ultimate revelation in Nietzsche’s poem. But from this point onwards, Strauss seems to question Nietzsche’s vision (as Nietzsche himself did in his darker moments). Also sprach Zarathustra ends with an eerie question mark: high woodwind, violins and harp harmonies clashing quietly but irreconcilably with deep pizzicato cellos and basses. Can humanity really ‘overcome’ itself? Can joy really be stronger than suffering, as Nietzsche had proclaimed? Strauss leaves room for doubt.