Heiligenstadt

"Heiligenstadt is made of sterner stuff and traces its origins to a request from Marin Alsop – who, this year, will become the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms – for a work to precede Beethoven’s Fifth. It has elements of collage with Beethovenian slivers and shrapnel inbuilt in collegiate synergy with McNeff’s often slowly evolving cantilena."

"Heiligenstadt was premiered in 2005 with Marin Alsop conducting the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. The work was the result of a specific request from Marin Alsop for a piece to go before Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It is inspired by Beethoven's 'Heiligenstadt Testament', the moving document in which the composer attempted to come to terms with his deafness. McNeff's music is not programmatic, instead he uses fragments from Beethoven's songs, like Sehnsucht, to create an overall arching structure, slow-fast-slow. It is a substantial work, lasting over 13 minutes.

It starts from a single melody, a wistful remembrance of a Beethoven song. The opening section is spare, even when the textures develop, with a constant feeling of wistfulness and melancholy, its intensity gives the feeling of waiting for something. The middle section is more dramatic, its rhythmic complexity recalls to mind Tippett again. But the music then relapses into quite foreboding with an expressive violin solo, finally evaporating but intense till the end."

"Heiligenstadt ended almost too soon: not quite enough time for the pity and the fear to be purged after the succession of orchestral climaxes at the eye of the storm. But perhaps that was the point.

The ear, meanwhile, could keep its focus, even on a first hearing, through the little quotations from two of Beethoven's songs, Longing and Prayer — each one sweetly introduced by woodwind soloists, fragmented, and worked on motifically, in true Beethovian style."