How not to conduct a false ending, #1 – In the last week of November 2014 guest violinist Leonidas Kavakos conducted Symphony No 82 in C major, The Bear. The reading was genial but could have been peppier. In the final measures of the last movement there are several bars of orchestral hits on C major, which sound like (and in fact are) the closing of the work. But then Haydn puts in a repeat sign back to the middle of the movement. Kavakos came to a full stop and tried to sneak his way back into the music with a slow, building tempo. He over-finessed the moment, not giving clear direction to the orchestra. The entrance was sloppy.
How not to conduct a false ending, #2 – In the first week of January 2015 music director Andris Nelsons led the BSO in Haydn's Symphony No 90, also in C major. Nelsons was having fun with the work, sometimes not even conducting at all. He would clasp his hands and just smile as he listened to the balance of a woodwind passage, for example. When the music came to an apparent end in the fourth movement Nelsons kept his arms suspended to hold audience applause (as he often does, especially when the concert is being recorded). After about seven seconds he gave a surprised glance at the score with a look of "What? There's more music? Oh!" There were some chuckles from the audience as he brought the orchestra back in.
It was a lame bit of "accidental" comedy from a conductor who has studied and rehearsed the work. Even if he were sight reading, there is clearly more music on the page. It just keeps going after four measures of rest, no repeat, no need even to turn back pages. Nelsons tried to force the humor with a dramatic pause, but as a wise director once said, "There are no dramatic pauses." They only make a show longer.
So how do you conduct a false ending? Answer: Do nothing at all.
Joseph Haydn was a supreme classicist, meaning musical architecture took precedence over everything else. He also had a sense of humor. He devised these deceptive endings as jokes that were built into the very structure of the music. The humor is not that the orchestra stops and then starts again. The humor is HOW the orchestra comes back in to startle an audience that has already begun to applaud. The conductor doesn't have to do anything except keep the time going in his head and give the next downbeat. Haydn takes care of the rest.
(German conductor Bruno Weil understands this perfectly. Hear how he handles the false ending to The Bear in this YouTube clip [click here]. Scroll the time bar forward to 22:54 and listen to the next 20 seconds.)
Here is some musicology behind Haydn's technique. The last movement of Symphony No 82 "ends" in C major, but then the bassoons and middle strings start a droning scoop from G sharp to A, two notes very much NOT in a C major chord. This implies the key of A major, whose middle note (C sharp) would be a pungent clash against C, a musical pie in the face. But the low strings come in with a pedal F, establishing the key of F major, the subdominant of C major. The subdominant lowers the musical tension, as if Haydn is saying "Nope, nothing going on here" as he glances away with a suppressed smirk.
The fact is we have already heard this music the first time through the middle of the movement, but there it was a logical continuation of the previous passage. The jarring return to G#–A is not a random gimmick Haydn pulled out of his sleeve; he set up that motif in the very first measure of the movement, where a B scoops up to the droning root note, C. This carefully constructed interplay of beginning, middle, end and middle again is just one example of Haydn's mastery of the classical style.
Symphony No 90 "ends" with a clearly defined cadence in C major, followed by about four seconds of silence. A quiet D flat major passage then makes a tentative peep. D flat is a very odd neighbor to C major. It sounds like Haydn made a mistake and the wrong key is poking its head through the door. But this is all part of the master plan and things eventually sort their way back to C major. When Andris Nelsons held the pause and pandered to the audience for a laugh, he lost the tonal juxtaposition, missing the beat, so to speak, on the composer's intent.
