Morihiko Nakahara constructed his Oktoberfest concert with the S.C. Philharmonic like a true scholar. Using Vienna as a template and Haydn and Mozart as the major players, he took his audience on a musical time-travelogue of the great Austrian metropolis as it existed in the late 1700s and early 1800s. There were other Viennese delights too, and a look backward at the turn of the century when all the lavish entertainment and music and dancing of the city’s high society began to disintegrate.

But rarely is the story behind great music as neat and orderly as it seems. Even Haydn’s especially neat and orderly “Surprise” Symphony, which ended the printed program, was actually not composed for Vienna. It was written for London, where Papa H had been lured to produce his last dozen symphonies. And the offer came from London none too soon, as his patron, Prince Nikolas Esterhazy, had just passed away and his orchestra disbanded.

But the music is Viennese through and through, including the second movement’s “surprise” chord that tradition says was meant to wake up a drowsy audience in the middle of an hours-long concert. Haydn, always the gentleman, denied it of course, but it remains one of the iconic sounds in all of symphonic music.

The other Haydn on the Philharmonic program was born and bred in Vienna, or at least down the road in Eisenstadt, and commissioned by the Empress Maria Theresa. The “Te Deum” is also fairly late Haydn, sort of a boisterous liturgical hymn of thanksgiving. Unlike his big oratorios, “The Creation” and “The Seasons,” this “Te Deum” has no solo voices.

Both of those oratorios were performed in Carnegie Hall that same week by John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestra Revolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir. Gardiner is the epitome of a scholar himself, a true pioneer of early and classical period music. In his review of “The Seasons” for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini notes that Gardiner also has “a wild side… Take the extended chorus in the Summer section, a scene of country folk and hunters. The brash music depicts blasts of hunting horns, shouting hunters, barking dogs, the thumping hooves and steaming breaths of galloping horses and the delirious hurrahs of onlookers when the exhausted deer falls.”

Apparently Haydn had a wild side, too. Tommasini goes on: “Haydn shows himself to be a proto-film composer. Take that, John Williams!” Tommasini summarizes: an “arresting performance of this astounding music,” but speculates that this oratorio perhaps “dabbles too much in literal-minded scene painting, with evocations of twittering birds, leaping fish and droning bagpipes,” whereas “The Creation” is a “searching, monumental piece” where “Haydn may have aimed higher.” Well, I’m all for searching and monumental, but I got nothing against Haydn’s wild side and delirious hurrahs.

The New Grove Dictionary points out how the late oratorios were an unexpected and brilliantly successful final phase of Haydn’s work. He heard Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” in London, and the Dictionary’s contributor says it provided the “strongest impulse for The Creation,” and agrees that, at least in my words, “Creation” is music for the heavens and “Seasons” is music for those of us not above celebrating the joys here on the good old earth. Haydn himself quipped that the country folk of “The Seasons” are scarcely the equivalent of the three archangels of “The Creation.”

Recent scholarship has revised the stereotypical picture of the old-fashioned, bewigged composer. That he was old-fashioned and proper doesn’t mean that creativity and diversity are lacking in his music. Indeed, some scholars refer to a “sturm and drang” period after he moved from Eisenstadt to Esterhaza (then near, now in, Hungary) in 1766. Here also, sacred music led the way, including the “Cecilia” Mass and the “Stabat Mater.” His symphonies of the time were dramatically called things like “La passione” and “Trauersinfonie,” and moved eons away from the older Baroque and the then trendy “galant” style.

In the first half of this concert, Morihiko chose music of Viennese composers Mozart and Salieri.  But again, the Mozart Bassoon Concerto was not written for Vienna, but for Salzburg, where the young Mozart eked out a living as a court musician. It’s probably not mature Mozart–but keep in mind that if there is such a thing as immature Mozart, it’s still wonderful. Here, the second movement begins with such a lovely set-up that you expect a soprano to pop out and sing a glorious aria; nor are you disappointed that it’s a bassoon that actually gives voice to it. The outer movements perfectly define that courtly and elegant “galant” style mentioned above. And say what you like about Salieri, anyone who numbered among his pupils Beethoven, Czerny, Hummel, Schubert, Liszt and Mozart’s younger son must have had quite an impact on the musical life of Vienna. But we have to admit that Salieri was Italian, though he moved to Vienna at a teenager.

Morihiko spoke with some seriousness to the audience about a seemingly musical trifle, “Perpetuum mobile” by Johann Strauss II and a 1981 rethink of that musical tidbit called “Charivari” by Heinz Karl Gruber. Leave aside the scientific work under way during the industrial revolution to discover a real perpetual motion machine, and focus on the high-flying and partying society life in the city that celebrated so much of that merriment with gay and danceable waltzes of the Strauss family and all the others. As the conductor hinted and the printed program stated, “The strains of Strauss’s music insulated the moneyed classes from the political and ethnic conflicts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century.” You could say that the “perpetual” partying that never stopped entertained the people from the grim militaristic realities being set in place throughout Europe. (For a uniquely American perspective of a similar blindness to change, look up Neil Postman’s 1985 “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”)

Gruber writes, “‘Charivari’… is based on the motif from Strauss’s “Perpetuum mobile” polka which I had previously borrowed… In a purely musical sense “Charivari” is an attempt to repay that debt. But… Strauss himself was already describing an endangered species… [H]is motif alarmingly calls to mind that official mask of Gemutlichkeit [cozy, cheerful, comfortable] behind which post-Hapsburg Austria has so often hidden its reactions to even the most drastic changes of fortune, and its complicity with some of them.”

The Maestro didn’t say all this, but it was in the program for everyone to read. Choosing his words wisely, he did, however, lay out the scenario of turn of the century Vienna that was about to implode, as related through Gruber’s musical metaphor. The orchestra played the two back-to-back. A Charivari (Shivaree in frontier America) recalls a raucous ceremony usually involving newly-weds, banging metal things loudly, wearing disguises and masks. In Gruber’s work, “Perpetuum mobile” starts out just fine, but degenerates into musical chaos, and we can imagine the disguises and masks gradually coming off as the partygoers’ eyes open to the militarism that had come to the ascendency while the people danced the nights away.

All right, it wasn’t that simple, but there’s a germ of truth there. Herr Gruber was a Viennese himself and had a lively taste for history and politics. Hence another of his works: “Frankenstein!! A pan-demonium for voice and orchestra.”

The composer himself says, “The title of the volume from which I took the poems of Frankenstein!! – Allerleirausch, neue schöne kinderreime (Noises, noises, all around – lovely new children’s rhymes) – promises something innocuous; but Artmann [the poet] himself has described the poems as being, among other things, ‘covert political statements’. Typically he refused to explain what he meant. But his reticence is eloquent: the monsters of political life have always tried to hide their true faces, and all too often succeed in doing so. One of the dubious figures in the pandemonium is the unfortunate scientist who makes so surprising an entry at mid-point. Frankenstein -- or whoever we choose to identify with that name -- is not the protagonist, but the figure behind the scenes whom we forget at our peril.”

How timely for us today: several monstrous names from the Beltway come to mind instantly. Sounds like a perfect choice for next Halloween, Maestro! As I said at the outset, great music is not always neatly and exactly what it seems. Even the concert itself: Was there a hidden agenda behind this program, a scheme to encourage us to look deeper into the music we enjoy, but also into our own collective and civic lives?

The “Surprise” Symphony followed Gruber. Was this Marihiko’s own scholarly metaphor for the surprise that destroyed Vienna and most of Western Europe at the apogee of all the high-flying society, and brought an end to that wonderful Gemutlichkeit? Did he mean it a cautionary tale that the notorious Wall Street high-flyers surprised us with last year? And the unannounced encore, Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro,” a complete surprise and unexpected overture at the end of the concert: Was that his own look backward? The end is just another beginning?

Is Marihiko going cerebral on us?