Welcome, 2025: Stuart & Friends, Part II with Dvořák's Piano Quintet No. 2

On Sunday, January 5th at 4:00, join us at Market Square Church when Stuart Malina, celebrating his 25th Anniversary as Music Director of the Harrisburg Symphony, trades in his baton for a piano to make music with friends. What else would you call the program but "Stuart and Friends"? 

There are two works on the printed program (which means there's a surprise but since it's meant to be a surprise, I can't write about it but I'm pretty sure it's going to add another dimension to the idea of "And Friends"). It opens with the Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen, an amazing work that is both powerful in its impact and personal in its perception. I've written about it in the previous post and it includes two performances you can listen to: the first one was recorded a few years ago at the Met Museum's Temple of Dendur (speaking of Timeless) with the New York Philharmonic's former music director Alan Gilbert as the violinist. The other is a 1956 recording made with the composer at the piano and the cellist who joined him in that original premiere performance in 1941 at Stalag VIII-A, a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp.

Dvořák & Wife, 1886

By comparison, Dvořák and his Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, more extroverted and accessible, need little introduction. (Therefore, I will now proceed to offer reams of introduction...)

Premiered in Prague on January 6th, 1888 (it had been composed between August 18th and October 8th, 1887), it was at the height of what is called the Belle Epoque, that period of relative peace and cultural exuberance between the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the start of World War I in 1914. Vienna was essentially the Musical Capital of Europe and dominated by two Germans, Wagner and Brahms. Dvořák, on the outskirts of the Imperial World, was just making a name for himself not just in Vienna with considerable help from Brahms (more on this, later), but had just had his newest symphony, his Seventh, premiered in London. That photo of the composer and his wife (see left) was taken in London, Dvořák's first taste of a real success. He had arrived. The next year, he composed this Piano Quintet.

Where the Messiaen is ultimately a work of hope despite the apocalyptic associations with the sources of its inspiration, both the Nazi prison as well as the Book of Revelation, Dvořák's quintet may be viewed as entertainment pure and simple. Pure yes, but "simple" is not to imply frivolous. Dvořák knew how to write a good tune and usually knew what to do with it. It's one thing to come with one good tune but so many to fill four separate movements that make a work of around 40 minutes' duration, not as easy as you might think. And, looking at its placement in the composer's output, it really is a masterpiece in its own way.

There are many recordings of it available, and I admit the reason I wanted to choose this one this time is because it features pianist Menahem Pressler and the Ebène Quartet in a recording of a special concert celebrating Pressler's 90th Birthday! Given Stuart Malina's recent allbeit considerably younger birthday, it seemed appropriate. Pressler has long been one of the mainstays of the chamber music world, most famously with the famous Beaux Arts Trio. 

Another reason I chose his performance (not to diminish the quality of the quartet he's collaborating with) was shadowed by the presence of the Messiaen on this program. He was born Max Jakob Pressler in Magdeburg, Germany, on December 16th (Beethoven's Birthday!), 1923. His parents owned a men's clothing store that was destroyed in the Kristallnacht of November 1938 and the family eventually fled Nazi Germany the following year. The teenaged boy subsequently suffered from eating disorders and was in danger of starvation; later he said playing the piano is what cured him. Incidentally, his grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins all died in Nazi concentration camps. 

While that has nothing to do with Dvořák's music, it has a great deal to do with the formation of the man who's playing the piano. Normally, I would edit the video to where the music begins, but since the audience greets the performers' entrance by singing "Happy Birthday" to Pressler... hey...

Hmmm... as luck would have it, this video is blocked from being posted on blogs like this but apparently (hopefully) can still be viewed separately on YouTube so I supply this link instead, and HIGHLY recommend it! (And a happy belated birthday, Stuart: live long and prosper and wish I could be around to hear you play this when you're 90!)

The Quintet is in the standard four movements, opening with an Allegro that's not too fast but then is. The second movement is marked "Dumka" which I'll explain after the video but which contains sections alternating between slow and fast tempos. The third movement, the true scherzo, is another Czech dance, a "Furiant." And then it all concludes with a rip-roaring Allegro. In lieu of the Pressler/Ebene video, I substitute this one complete with score, which features pianist Andreas Haefliger and the Takacs Quartet.

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I mentioned the term "dumka" which is a not so much a dance as it is a form (often used in a dance) which is actually a Ukrainian musical term that means literally "thought." Which seems rather vague, but it's usually applied to the idea of two contrasting musical episodes alternating between melancholy and exuberance. It originated in a series of lectures in Russia by a Ukrainian composer, Mykola Lysenko, in 1873, examining its use in the ethnic folk music of Ukraine. Dvořák first used the "thought" in a piano piece in 1876 and in subsequent works like the 10th String Quartet (Op.51), the Violin Concerto of 1879, the Piano Quintet of 1887, and again in each of the six movements of his last piano trio, it's always been called the "Dumky" Trio. 

But it's not just a "thought" heard in the second movement of this Quintet. Listen again to the opening, to this wistful cello theme and then how it's answered by the full ensemble, in a fast and dramatically contrasting mood. These ideas almost as act as two themes but they're really only sub-sections of the Main Theme. And yet Dvořák does this without changing the tempo: bear with me (nerd-speak ahead). The beat-pulse of the measure remains the same between the two sections, but in the opening there's a leisurely subdivision into 3+3 with a swaying feel to it. However, the faster section isn't really faster because technically the tempo stays the same but instead he subdivides it into 4+4 which, with a change in mood and dynamic, not to mention accents, you now feel like you'd want to nod your head sharply up and down in a march, not swaying back and forth in 3 like a waltz. Even if you didn't understand how it's done, can you feel it? That's a dumka. 

Listen for these kinds of contrasts throughout the piece, not that the audience should sit there swaying back and forth or bouncing up and down with each change of "thought." Whatever drew Dvořák not only to use the idea of a Dumka in the first place, but to integrate it into the micro-structure of his themes, I have no idea, but there's something we're not aware of, just from listening to one piece like the Quintet, a work of his maturity (he was 46 when he composed it), and that's how a composer who grew up in a small town (more of a village) in provincial Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic) with little benefit of hearing or studying the likes of Mozart and Beethoven when he was growing up, just playing fiddle in the village dance bands.

When he decided he wanted to become a professional musician, something of a late-bloomer, he wasn't given much incentive. And that fact that provincial Bohemians were regarded as "rubes" in Imperial Vienna, given the standard ethnic stereotyping of the day, it was amazing he was able to succeed at all. He came under the spell of Wagner and then Brahms. 

So where, then, did Dvořák come from???

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Unlike Beethoven who grew up in a musical family at a royal court in provincial Germany – even if that province is along the Rhine – and Brahms who grew up in a major city, the seaport of Hamburg, Antonín Dvořák was born in a small village not far from a small town several miles from the provincial capital of Prague. And like Beethoven whose big break was going to Vienna at 21 to study with Haydn and Brahms who met the Schumanns when he was 20, Dvořák’s big break came when Brahms saw some of his music and recommended him to his publisher – when Dvořák was 36.

If you consider that was really the start of Dvořák’s career, by that age Mozart was already dead one year...

As Grove’s Dictionary puts it, “his music is characterized by a remarkable fertility of invention coupled with an apparent, yet deceptive, ease and spontaneity of expression.” It’s interesting to trace how this musical voice evolved over the years.

His father – like Beethoven’s and Brahms’ (both, curiously, bass-players) – has been described as a musician even if his abilities were limited to playing the zither and writing a few simple dance tunes for the village dance-band where his son, taught by the local schoolmaster, would eventually play the violin. As the local butcher, his father’s intention was, of course, his son should go into the family business as he had done with his father, and though there may be much in the way of embroidered story-telling in Dvořák’s mature memories, the fact was he dropped out of school at the age of 12 to become an apprentice butcher. It’s not clear whether he finished that apprenticeship but a year later, he went off to the nearby town of Zlonice where he could better learn German and where he found more opportunities for his musical interests.

This need to learn German is significant. Ethnically, Dvořák is Slavic, specifically Czech – whether we call his country Bohemia, Czechoslovakia or the Czech Republic – but it was a province of the Austrian Empire and a fairly backwards one, once you were beyond the city of Prague, despite its great historical past as a significant Central European kingdom (Good King Wenceslaus was, incidentally, just one of many good (and bad) Bohemian kings). This cultural memory was very strong even in the peasants who hated the Austrian rule. The only way anyone was going to get beyond the rural life was to learn the language of the “occupying nation,” in this case Austria.

Apparently acquiescing to his son’s wishes to pursue music as a living, his father sent him to another town in the north of Bohemia when he was 15 specifically to learn German, where he also began more serious studies of music, including harmony and playing the organ. A year later, he was accepted at the Prague Organ School – the city’s second-best conservatory – where he was preparing for a degree as a church musician. One of his teachers there was interested in “contemporary music” – in this case, Mendelssohn (who had died ten years earlier) and even that avant-garde composer, Franz Liszt who, by then, had already composed 12 tone poems, two piano concertos and his Faust and Dante Symphonies.

Dvořák had become a decent enough violist to play in the pit for performances of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Lohengrin – at this time, Wagner, in the midst of writing The Ring had begun a new opera, Tristan und Isolde which would change the approach to traditional tonality if not the course of music history in general. He attended concerts and heard performers like Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann, though he couldn’t afford to buy scores – a senior student allowed him to borrow from his own library and also gave him access to use his piano. But he only won the 2nd Prize in the highly competitive graduation process, told he was excellent but better in practical work rather than, say, theory. It was not much of a recommendation for the real world.

So he made a living playing in the theater orchestra, in pick-up bands for restaurants and dances and the occasional student. When he was 21, he became the principal violist of the new “people’s equivalent” to the court orchestra. The next year, Wagner came to town and conducted the Tannhäuser Overture, excerpts from Meistersinger and Walküre plus the new TristanPrelude.

Dvořák at age 27

This was apparently the ignition he needed to start composing seriously and, not surprisingly, this early music imitated everything Wagner – his first two symphonies, a cello concerto, a song cycle (inspired by his love for one of his pupils: after she married someone else, Dvořák would marry her sister) and eventually his first attempts at opera which were almost produced.

It was a time of increasing nationalist cultural awareness – most recently ignited by revolutions and political uprisings around Europe in 1848-49 (the one in Dresden got Wagner, having just finished Lohengrin, in considerable hot water) and when Bedrich Smetana became the conductor, Dvořák found a strong inspiration in his music, especially his reliance on the folk music of their native Bohemia.

Dvořák was always having trouble making ends meet. At the age of 32, he was hired by a wealthy merchant to be the house musician – essentially the home-entertainment center, giving the children music lessons as well as accompanying the wife and daughters in their evening musicales. From this point on, Dvořák could rely more on teaching to earn a living which offered him more time to concentrate on composing.

A patriotic cantata was well-received but the theater again rejected his second opera, King and Charcoal Burner which he then completely rewrote from scratch. By now, he was abandoning his Wagnerian influences in light of Smetana’s, and heard Smetana conduct his 3rd Symphony not long after he’d completed his 4th. Finally, the new version of King and Charcoal Burner was produced. His music was being published by a small but limited Czech firm in Prague.

This gave Dvořák, now almost 33, the confidence to enter fifteen of his works, including these last two symphonies, for the Austrian State Prize, a major music competition in Vienna which was intended to help young but poor, struggling artists. The judges were the director of the Imperial Opera, the music critic Eduard Hanslick and Johannes Brahms. Dvořák won a prize of 400 gulden (I do not know what that might be worth today or how it compared to, say, an annual income in the 1870s). More confident, he began another symphony and a new opera. He competed for the prize several more times, winning two of them – in 1876 and 1877.

Those were the years Brahms had completed his 1st Symphony and then wrote his 2nd, still working on his Violin Concerto.

In November of 1877, Hanslick wrote to Dvořák informing him he’d just won a prize of 600 gulden and that Brahms had taken an interest in his music, suggesting to his own publisher, Simrock, they take on Dvořák’s vocal duets.

Two weeks later, Simrock took Brahms’ advice and commissioned their new client to write some piano duets inspired by Bohemian dances, considering Brahms’ Hungarian Dances had proven such a lucratively popular success. Published next year, his first volume of Slavonic Dances was well-reviewed and performed to great success in Berlin and London. His new String Sextet in A (op.48) was premiered in Berlin by Joachim’s quartet and the two Serenades (one for strings, the other for winds) also received successful premieres. In fact, his music was now being performed from Latvia to New York City.

This was also a time that makes Opus Numbers unreliable guides to the chronology of his works: not only was an early work given a higher number to make it seem more mature, because Dvořák was now having successes with several new works, he went through the pile of rejections and sent some of them out to new publishers. This time, they snapped them up.

(Incidentally, his earliest symphonies were never published in his lifetime and the latter ones not in their correct chronological order. When the other ones were brought to light, modern publishers back in the mid-20th Century decided to renumber them, leading to a generation’s confusion with “Symphony No. 7 [Old No. 2]” or “Symphony No. 9 [Old No. 5].” But I digress…)

However, when Hans Richter tried to program Dvořák’s new 6th Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic, the anti-Bohemian sentiment among the Viennese musicians strongly opposed the idea and so the work was withdrawn.

Though people loved his dances inspired by folk music, the fact he was a Bohemian (essentially a provincial hick, in cosmopolitan Vienna’s eyes) writing symphonies was similar to the American literary elite’s reaction to, say, a red-neck attempting to produce the Great American Novel. Long gone were the days when many of Mozart’s respected colleagues were Bohemians.

Hanslick and others had urged Dvořák to leave Prague and center his career – as Brahms and Beethoven had done before him – by moving to Vienna but his national pride made him refuse their offer, “acutely aware of the way his people suffered under the Hapsburgs and of the continuing animosity of the and condescension of the German-speaking people toward the Czech nation.”

His 6th Symphony, despite the reluctance in Vienna, was well received in Leipzig and his choral music – large-scale works like Stabat Mater – was all the rage in England. London commissioned him to write a new symphony – his 7th, in D Minor, resolving to make it “a work,” he wrote, “which would shake the world.”

Suggestions he write a German opera rather than a Czech one were met with a large-scale opera based on the incident of the False Dmitri of Boris Godunov fame, if not Czech, at least still a Slavic story. But it was still rejected by Vienna’s opera companies: this time he was told, “the people were rather tired of five-act tragedies.”

“What have we two to do with politics,” he wrote to Simrock when he was told he needed to spell his first name “Anton,” in the German style. “Let us be glad that we can dedicate our services solely to the beautiful art. And let us hope that nations who represent and possess art will never perish, even though they may be small. …[A]n artist too has a fatherland in which he must also have a firm faith and which he must love.”

Three months after his 7th Symphony was such a success in London, Dvořák began work on his Piano Quintet in A Major (Op. 81). He was now touring as a conductor of his own music – Budapest, London, Dresden. He was invited to teach at the Prague Conservatory (he waited two years before he accepted their offer). In June, 1889, Dvořák (now pushing 50) was awarded Austria’s Order of the Iron Crown and received an audience with the Emperor as a result.

He had just finished a number of other works: his Piano Quartet in E-flat, Op. 87 and the Symphony No. 8 in G, Op. 88.

In 1891, invited by Mrs. Jeannette Thurber to become the Director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, Dvořák made a kind of farewell tour with some of his latest works: the “Dumky” Piano Trio and the Carnival Overture.

At this point, I’ll leave the story – how he wrote his New World Symphony and the “American” Quartet, two of his most frequently performed works and then, before returning to Prague, starting his B Minor Cello Concerto (generally regarded as the cello concerto) which had been inspired by hearing a cello concerto by an Irish cellist-turned-composer/conductor named Victor Herbert, later conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony and winning more enduring fame as a composer of operettas.

While the 7th Symphony may be his first break-out international success, it's usually overshadowed by the more tuneful and leisurely 8th and practically everything else he wrote is overshadowed by the ever-popular 9th, the "Symphony from the New World." The Piano Quintet is one of his most frequently played chamber works but what makes it a success while the Piano Quartet written two years later is not played nearly as much as it should be?

When I was teaching at the University of Connecticut back in the mid-1970s and I'd mention something like this, a student would invariably ask "How do you write a masterpiece?"

"If I knew the answer to that," I said, "I wouldn't be teaching at the University of Connecticut..."

– Dick Strawser

Into the New Year with Stuart & Friends, Part I: Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time

Now that all the various end-of-the-year holidays have come and, largely, gone (and hopefully we have all survived them), we face the New Year with a program billed as “Stuart and Friends” – and what better way to spend time than with friends – which includes two very different works. Join us on Sunday, January 5th, at 4:00 at Market Square Presbyterian Church as music director of the Harrisburg Symphony, Stuart Malina, celebrating his 25th Anniversary with the orchestra, plays chamber music with clarinetist Richie Hawley, violinists Alexander Kerr and Peter Sirotin, violist Michael Isaac Strauss, and cellist Julian Schwarz in the Quartet for the End of Time by French composer Olivier Messiaen, and the Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major by Antonin Dvořák. (Oh, and I’m told there is supposed to be a surprise on the program but I can’t tell you about it because, well… it’s a surprise.)

These two works were both premiered in very different Januaries in very different eras. Dvořák’s Piano Quintet which concludes the program (I’ll cover it in a separate post which you can read here) was first heard in Prague on January 6th, 1888, three months after its completion, during an era between the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the start of World War I in 1914 known as the Belle Époque. 

Messiaen’s Quartet was given its first performance on January 15th, 1941, at Stalag VIII-A, a Nazi prison camp located near the present-day borders of Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, before some 5,000 fellow prisoners-of-war (or so the story goes).

It is impossible to separate the music you’re about to hear (“experience” might be the better word) from the conditions in which it was composed and premiered. Inspired by a passage from the Bible’s Book of Revelation (Rev10:1–2, 5–7), which includes the line, “that there should be time no longer.” It is not so much the concept of the Apocalypse which the connection with Revelation might suggest, but this concept of “the end of time.” Is it significant the original title Messiaen chose was Quatuor de la fin du Temps ("Quartet about the End of Time") – see the program booklet cover, below – which he later changed to Quatour pour la fin du temps (“Quartet for the End of Time”)? How does a composer convey a sense of Timelessness?

Here are a few facts culled from the Carnegie Hall website’s post from 2021, “Five Things to Know…”: 

Messiaen was called to active duty by the French Army in 1939, serving as a hospital nurse. Soon after, he was captured by German troops and sent to Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany. According to violinist Jean Le Boulaire, who performed in the quartet’s premiere, conditions in the camp were harsh: Nearly 50,000 French and Belgian prisoners were huddled in 30 barracks built to hold 500 prisoners each. Prisoners were underfed and unprotected from the brutally cold weather.

“When I arrived at the camp, I was stripped of all my clothes, like all the prisoners,” Messiaen said. “But naked as I was, I clung fiercely to a little bag of miniature scores that served as consolation when I suffered. The Germans considered me to be completely harmless, and since they still loved music, not only did they allow me to keep my scores, but an officer also gave me pencils, erasers, and some music paper.”

Some of the movements made us of material from earlier works Messiaen had composed. “The Intermède (Interlude) was the first movement completely written in the camp, and it was rehearsed in the camp’s bathroom.”

While there are no contemporary records of the premiere, the story goes that cellist Êtienne Pasquier played an instrument with only three strings and that five thousand prisoners attended the premiere. In an interview done shortly before his death, Pasquier said his cello actually had all four strings, and an audience of approximately 400 prisoners and German officers attended the first performance. Messiaen’s piano did have keys that would randomly stick when played, and conditions in the hut that also served as the camp’s theater were freezing. One of the prisoners designed a program booklet (see photo, above, stamped with the prison's permission).

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Given Messiaen’s title, a typical first reaction is, “I expected something apocalyptical, but I got something heavenly and beautiful.”

This performance at the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing, includes the former music director of the New York Philharmonic Alan Gilbert (violin), with friends Carter Brey, (cello), Anthony McGill (clarinet), both principal players in the Philharmonic, and Inon Barnatan (piano), recorded in 2021.

The composer added his own commentary to the published score which Lucy Murray quotes in her program notes (in case you want to follow along during the performance as the piece progresses) and which I will quote here (compared to what I’ve found on-line, I prefer her translation’s more poetic nuance). 

Some of the technical description the composer provides might prove baffling so just let it slide by… In addition to his religious mysticism, especially as it translates into music, Messiaen also makes use of Hindu rhythms, the ideas that pitches as well as rhythms can be played in longer or shorter durations – his “augmentations and diminutions” – and also in palindromic phrases. Above all, he has always been fascinated by the sounds of nature – note especially the different layers, each instrument playing independent lines, of the opening movement; then compare that to the “Dance of the Seven Trumpets” where all four instruments play a single line in unison. The two movements marked louange – the first with cello; the second with violin, accompanied by a heartbeat of soft, timeless chords in the piano – also balance each other.

I. (at 1:13) – "Liturgie de cristal" (Crystal Liturgy) – Four in the morning, the wakening of birds; a solo blackbird extemporizes, surrounded by sounding dusts, by a halo of trills which lose themselves high in the trees symbolizing the harmonious silence of heaven. Transpose this to the religious plane: you will have the harmonious silence of heaven. The piano provides a rhythmic ostinato based on unequal augmentations and diminutions – the clarinet unfolds a bird song.

II. (at 3:53) – "Vocalise, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du temps" (Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time) – The first and third parts evoke the power of that mighty angel, his hair a rainbow and his clothing mist, who places one foot on the sea and one foot on the earth. Between these sections are the ineffable harmonies of heaven. From the piano, soft cascades of blue-orange chords [Messiaen saw colors when he heard music, a phenomenon called synesthesia] encircling with their distant carillon the plainchant recitative of the violin and cello.

III. (at 9:08) – "Abîme des oiseaux" (Abyss of the birds) – Clarinet solo. The abyss is Time, with its sadness and tediums. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant outpouring of song! There is a great contrast between the desolation of Time (the abyss) and the joy of the bird-songs (desire of the eternal light).

IV. (at 16:12) – "Intermède" (Interlude) – Scherzo. Of a more outgoing character than the other movements, but related to them nonetheless by various melodic references.

V. (at 17:54) – "Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus" (Praise to the eternity of Jesus) – Jesus is here considered as one with the Word. A long phrase, infinitely slow, by the cello, expiates with love and reverence on the everlastingness of the Word. Majestically the melody unfolds itself at a distance both intimate and awesome. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

VI. (at 25:37) – "Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes" (Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets) – Rhythmically the most idiosyncratic movement of the set. The four instruments in unison give the effect of gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse attend various catastrophes, the trumpet of the seventh angel announces the consummation of the mystery of God). Use of extended note values and augmented or diminished rhythmic patterns. Music of stone, formidable sonority: the movement as irresistible as steel, as huge blocks of livid fury or ice-like frenzy. Listen particularly to the terrifying fortissimo of the theme in augmentation and with change of register of its different notes, toward the end of the [movement].

VII. (at 31:48) – "Fouillis d'arcs-en-ciel, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du temps" (Tangle of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time) – Here certain passages from the second movement return. The mighty angel appears and, in particular, the rainbow that envelops him (the rainbow, symbol of peace, of wisdom, of every quiver of luminosity and sound). In my dreamings I hear and see ordered melodies and chords, familiar hues and forms; then, following this transitory stage I pass in to the unreal and submit ecstatically to a vortex, a dizzying interpretation of superhuman sounds and colors. These fiery swords, these rivers of blue-orange lava, these sudden stars: Behold the cluster, behold the rainbows!

VIII. (at 38:49) – "Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus" (Praise to the immortality of Jesus) – Expansive violin solo, balancing the cello solo of the fifth movement. Why this second glorification? It addresses itself more specifically to the second aspect of Jesus – to Jesus the man, to the Word made flesh, raised up immortal from the dead so as to communicate His life to us. It is total love. Its slow rising to a surpreme point is the ascension of man toward his God, of the son of God toward his Father, of the mortal newly made divine toward paradise.

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The title – with its apocalyptic implications – may seem an odd work to begin a New Year (say what you want about the expectations of the year ahead). Yet despite those implications, the end result, I think, is one of hope. After all, considering the circumstances under which it was written – and especially the sheer “not knowing” of what was to come – it should give us all hope, whatever the convictions of our own beliefs (religious, political, or otherwise).

I conclude this post with notes from a post for an earlier performance (which may duplicate some of the details above). But first, I include a You-Tube audio of that 1956 recording Messiaen made with the original cellist, his fellow prisoner, from the premiere along with two additional performers replacing the violinist and clarinetist. It is worth listening to just for the historic nature of its cast – after all, one doesn’t always get to hear composers performing their own music, much less recreating (at least in part) the memories of such a cathartic premiere!

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You would think a composer planning a work inspired by an apocalyptic theme – nothing less than the End of the World as we know it – would write it for a vast orchestra with a huge brass section (with at least seven trumpets), probably numerous choruses and several vocal soloists to give proper weight and power to the terrifying words of the last book of the Bible.

At the time of the premiere of this work, Olivier Messiaen (photographed here in 1946) was a prisoner-of-war which had something to do with why such a piece of music – complete with a “Dance for the Seven Trumpets” – was composed for only four instrumentalists.

The first people to perform and to hear this amazing music were not sitting in a famous concert hall in Paris but in a Nazi prison-camp on a cold day in January, 1941. Scored only for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, it was called “Quartet for the End of Time.”

Born in 1908, Olivier Messiaen was recognized as one of the greatest composers in the world when he died in 1992, at the forefront of New Music at often as he was an outsider. His style changed as he evolved – as did Stravinsky’s or Beethoven’s – and he introduced concepts from the wider world into his own musical vocabulary – as did Debussy or Bartok – that creates an innately unmistakable voice (as do any of those lucky enough to be considered Great Composers). 

At heart, a “Catholic Mystic” who brought a bit of the Medieval Past into the 20th Century Present long before the pop world became fascinated by Gregorian Chant (a music fad long faded from memory, now), he also absorbed serial techniques and applied them to aspects of music other than just the notes. He built vast structures out of smaller building blocks borrowed from Indian music. He collected the songs of birds from around the world and quoted them in his music as other composers collected and quoted folk-songs. Time, in many of his works, stands utterly still whether it’s in the static meditations of his opera, St. Francis of Assisi or the ecstatic whoops in some of the wilder moments of his Turangalila Symphony. The Quartet is certainly his most famous single work and probably the most frequently performed: every time it is, it’s an event to experience.

Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” is a long work in eight movements that alternates between despair, terror and, despite the implications of the title (especially in this day and age), hope. With its emotional sweep, this is a work that must be as emotionally draining to play as it is difficult technically to perform. One of the biggest challenges, after all that, is for the clarinetist and the cellist to sit absolutely still during the final movement so as not to distract from the violinist and the pianist!

The clarinet’s solo movement, “The Abyss of the Birds,” covers an enormous dynamic range between the low-register despair of the abyss itself and the contrasting innocent-sounding bird-song which is the element of hope: beginning almost imperceptibly, the sound grows sometimes to a roar, sometimes to a wail, without ever distorting its core. The two serene movements, the meditations on Jesus’ eternity and on His immortality, are almost motionless but with an intensity that underscores the simplicity of the music to bring out its interior ecstasy, supported just with simple steady chords, the pulse behind the music but also the world-force that rises at the climaxes to drive the music into another sphere of awareness.

There are, considering the subject with many of the movements’ titles taken from The Book of Revelation, more violent moments as well – the Dance of Fury for the Seven Trumpets where everyone plays in unison or octaves throughout (no harmony) and the next-to-last movement depicting the angel who announces the End of Time – that in some performances sounded more apocalyptic to me than I thought possible with only four players and more fearsome than I remembered them in the several live performances and recordings I’ve had the chance to experience since I first heard the work when I was a student at Susquehanna University in the early-70s.

This is music Olivier Messiaen composed while being held as a prisoner-of-war in a Nazi prison camp in World War II. The music is inspired by lines from the Revelation of St. John (most of Messiaen’s music in based directly or indirectly on his strong Catholic faith). How do you write a piece like this, with its implication of the end-of-the-world, when you are a prisoner-of-war in a Nazi prison camp? If you’ve ever been distracted from something you really needed to focus on, perhaps by the radio in your co-worker’s cubicle, the every-day sounds of life coming from your neighbors, or the incessant jangling of the telephone, multiply that by the questions and privations of living (if one can call it that) in a prison camp! This was not a concentration camp – Messiaen was in the army and had been captured by the Germans following their invasion of northern France – but it was, still, a prison camp, and the composer, his performers and his audience were all prisoners. I can think of no other great musical work of art that came about under such circumstances.

The story Messiaen tells may be slightly different from the reality of the events themselves. The instruments were certainly not in the best shape: he said the piano was missing some keys and then there is the legendary cello with only three strings which may have been a partial fabrication of the composer’s memory (the cellist apparently chided Messiaen later for this little-white-lie, saying “I had four strings and you know it”). He and the cellist met the clarinetist, Henri Akoka, on the train while the prisoners were being transported to the prison. Akoka had his clarinet with him and the first performance of the solo clarinet movement of the Quartet, “The Abyss of the Birds” (or at least a draft of it), took place in an open field during their move from France to Stalag VIII-A in Silesia (now in Poland).

The idea of the entire work appears to have begun before Messiaen was captured: the “Abyss” may have been composed en route to the prison. What could be more of an abyss than being in a train herded across Europe to an unknown future? It is true that the commandant of the camp cut Messiaen some slack and German guards supplied him with manuscript paper and pencils so he could compose. It is also true, ultimately, that Messiaen, a recognized composer even before his incarceration, was released because of his status as an artist, and the other three musicians of that performance were released with him. Though the clarinetist, a Jew, would survive the war, his father would die in another Nazi prison camp, one that had become a concentration camp instead.

The musical language is Messiaen’s own, absorbing Hindu rhythms to create great palindromic phrases that ebb and flow in units of time outside the standard Western Classical vocabulary, melodies that are built on scales of an equally exotic nature and harmonies that, on one hand, are based on “non-traditional” chords that have their own inner logic and tension but, on the other hand, can often be pure traditional triads, sometimes with added notes that remind one of popular songs from the ‘20s and ‘30s.

At one of those “talk-back” session at a performance I heard years ago, now, one questioner asked about this language and remarked that, for a composer who had won a conservatory prize in counterpoint (the art of creating a harmonically integrated fabric out of recognizably independent musical lines: you might think of a round as its most innocent form, or a fugue as a more intellectual conception), there was almost "no counterpoint in this piece."

True, in the more limited 18th Century sense of the word when "counterpoint" was synonymous with "Bach." But in the Quartet's opening movement, for instance, Messiaen creates a sense of suspended time with each instrument playing an independent and virtually unchanging line without apparent reference to one another, a “temporal” counterpoint not too far removed from the opening of Schubert’s expansive C Major String Quintet, another work that manages to suspend a listener’s sense of time, with its interior line of long sustained chords moving slowly in between the cello in the bass and a bird-like line of the first violin.

This is just one element of the variety of textures Messiaen employs throughout his great musical arc: as it begins with time suspended in the liquid flow of all four instruments, it ends with the simple heart-beat-like pulsations of the piano’s supporting chords for one final meditation rising to the heavens and ultimately beyond the scope of our hearing and our earthly experience.

In a 2004 article in the New Yorker magazine, Alex Ross wrote of this music, “In the end, Messiaen’s apocalypse has little to do with history and catastrophe; instead, it records the rebirth of an ordinary soul in the grip of extraordinary emotion, which is why the Quartet is as overpowering now as it was on that frigid night in 1941.”

It is a long work, as I mentioned, but how long in most performances I’ve been lucky to hear, I couldn’t tell you: if the performers manage to translate Messiaen’s transcendence of time with the proper intensity, it becomes but the flash of a moment, one that may live long in your memory.

-- Dick Strawser

A Step Back in Time: Tempesta di Mare and the Early-1600s

On Saturday night at St. Michael Lutheran Church on State Street in downtown Harrisburg – that's between Front & 2nd Streets, if you're not familiar with it – the ensemble known as Tempesta di Mare brings a program of... well, how best to describe this? Italian Music written between 1601 and 1643 will do. It includes 14 short works by 11 different composers, some of them better known than others, setting (or inspired by) poetry of three Italian poets of the age. They will all be performed by a group of musicians consisting of two tenors accompanied by a “bouquet of theorbos” played by three lutenists. The program is called “Cruel Amaryllis.”

More accurately, this is a contingent from Tempesta di Mare, a Philadelphia-based ensemble specializing in Baroque music played on “historically-informed” instruments. Checking out their YouTube channel, you can find several videos of the fuller ensemble playing this suite by French composer, Jean-Fery Rebel or, if you prefer the more familiar, Pachelbel’s Canon (and its accompanying Gigue).

I will leave the two burning questions posed by the program’s title – who is Amaryllis and why is she cruel? – to Richard Stone, one of the lutenists as well as a co-founder and co-director of the ensemble-at-large. 

Suffice it for me to say, the ensemble takes its name from one of Vivaldi’s more programmatic works, part of the dozen that includes his Four Seasons, the Violin Concerto in E-flat Major, Op. 8 No. 5, La tempesta di mare (published in 1725) which translates as “The Storm at Sea” (something lagoon-bound Venice and its far-flung maritime empire would’ve been well acquainted with). (He also used the title for a flute concerto in Op. 10, a completely different work from a few years later.) This particular program itself takes its name from one of the most popular poems of the day, Crudele Amarilli, by Battista Guarini, a poet and diplomat from Farrara, a poem we know was set to music at least 22 times by different composers between 1590 and 1626 including the one on this weekend’s program by Sigismondo d’India written in 1609. The composer was not, as his name might imply, from India: more likely, he was born in Palermo, Sicily, but is mostly associated with Turin in the northwestern region of Piedmont, then the Duchy of Savoy. The poem, incidentally, comes from a rustic romance, the play Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd), which was first staged in Turin for the Duke’s wedding in 1585. Whether as a series of poems, the play itself, or just the imagery of its name (and fame), the title turns up among numerous composers of the age, including a set of flute sonatas long attributed to Vivaldi, and to an opera of Handel’s in 1712.

Since this is a different kind of program – and I highly recommend reading Richard Stone’s guest program notes – I thought, since it's more difficult for me to get “behind the scenes” with 11 different composers, I would present a “pre-concert essay” on the background to the times in which these different composers lived and worked.

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Historically speaking, if it’s written after 1600, that's “Baroque” Music but since most American concert-goers hear “Baroque” and think “Bach and Handel,” this is actually from a century or more before that. Technically, this is “Early Baroque” and when ensembles specializing in the music of Bach, Handel or Vivaldi are often called “Early Music Groups” (especially when using instruments made to match the period that music was written in) I guess that makes Tempesta di Mare an “Earlier Music Group. (As a former musician, I have to admit to me “Early Music” means anything you have to play before 9am... but I digress.)

The truth is, as with most trends in history, Baroque Music did not make the official change from Renaissance Music on January 1st, 1600. Most of these composers and poets were often as much in a Renaissance frame of mind as they were aware of what new ideas were gradually coming into play as the style (in all the arts) was clearly evolving. The question, then, is to what?

A span of 42 years might seem rather narrow for a program of classical music which is usually expected to range from Mozart to the 20th, maybe even the 21st Century, a span of maybe 240 years. A string quartet program that might include one of Beethoven's Op. 18, published in 1800, some early Mendelssohn (or we could throw in his Octet instead), plus one of the quartets Schumann composed in 1842 and – well, there you have it: a span of only 42 years. Today, that would cover the equivalent of a program including the world premiere of a brand new piece, where the earliest piece on the program dated all the way back to 1982 (which, to many young people today, is now being considered “the Late 1900s”).

Call it “cultural saturation,” if you want: a capsule of a particularly interesting time in music, and then only from one country, Italy (given global music and political awareness today, not only limited to White Male Composers from Europe but only from the Western Hemisphere). And historically, it seems Humanity goes through some kind of convulsion whenever it sees a year-ending-in-'00 when the local reaction tends to think it's hit Rock Bottom: with 1800, it was the aftermath of the French Revolution and 15 years of near-constant warfare as Napoleon tramped across Europe which ended in not only his defeat but an establishment of political boundaries that set up the next conflict, reaching its boiling point in 1914 with World War I, the War that turned out, alas, not to End All Wars. Counting not only the political but economic fall-out of the solution to that one, resulting in the inevitability of World War II, then with the Cold War stirring the pot and terrorism on the rise, that we are now in the 2000s. You can turn on the news to follow the latest developments there: not even the weather forecast is a respite from anxiety.

So what was going on in 1600? What would Giovanni Publico be thinking if he could turn on some contraption like a television set and see what was going on in his local and world news?

By comparison to the previous century, there were fewer wars involving Italy, but as a result of a near-constant succession of these wars between 1494 and 1595, there were few parts of the Italian peninsula not directly affected by their outcomes. Primarily between France on one side and the Hapsburgs of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (or sometimes just Austria) on the other, much of Italy was caught literally and figuratively in the middle. Keep in mind, Italy was not a nation-state like it is today: like “Germany,” it was a collection of smaller states, some more powerful than others, and if they weren't fighting the French or the Hapsburgs, they were fighting each other.

For much of this time, France occupied Lombardy (Milan), the Holy Roman Empire (or, simply, The Empire) controlled Tuscany (Florence), while Spain conquered Southern Italy after invading Naples and Sicily. The Papal States, a large swath across Central Italy, stretched from Rome to Ravenna on the edge of Venice, but they were heavily involved in various factions against both the French and The Empire to maintain its hold on its secular lands. Venice, a Republic with an elected Doge who ruled for life, was a maritime power frequently dealing with attacks from the Ottoman Empire especially along its Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean possessions.

All of this military and political turmoil brought with it frequent plagues which helped to ruin the Italian economy by the start of the 1600s. Perhaps all this turmoil might explain the popularity of such idyllic poetry as Il pastor fido and the vagaries of love, with or without our lovely Amaryllis.

Also, keep in mind there was no unified Italian language at the time: what we consider Italian today resulted primarily in the selection of a novel published in the 1820s, Alessandro Mazoni's I promessi sposi (“The Betrothed”) which was written in an upper-class Florentine dialect which, as the Risorgimento gradually absorbed all these states into a unified nation, was adopted as the basis for some serious language reform. Thus, while Naples and Venice might have their own dialects. In fact, Venetians argue Venetan is a language spoken in a large area of northeastern Italy called The Veneto which pre-dated Italian by centuries. It did not mean they could easily understand each other, all these different regions of the peninsula, something very different from, say, a man from New Orleans and a woman from Vermont reading the same article in the New York Times but in their own individual accents (then throw in ethnic and generational slang and… well, never mind, as usual I digress.)

Curiously, Manzoni's novel is set in Milan in the 1620s during a particularly challenging time of political struggles complete with an ensuing plague! (Manzoni, by the way, was the man Verdi memorialized in his famous Requiem of 1874.)

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Now, just to put some of those famous Italian artists we’re all familiar with into some kind of perspective, here is a time-line for you to compare with our concert's span between 1601 and 1643:

Perhaps the most famous Italian poet is Dante whose Divine Comedy (especially The Inferno) is considered one of the Great Works of Western Literature. He was Florentine, ran afoul of the politicians there and was exiled, and died in Ravenna (then part of Venice’s wider-ranging Republic) in 1321.

Two other famous poets of Italy were Petrarch who is often credited with the evolution of Renaissance Humanism in his Sonnets and other poems. He was from Florence and, after traveling around Northern Italy and living for some years in Avignon (during the years the Papacy abandoned Rome and settled in southern France), before dying in Padua in 1374. And Boccacio, represented by his Decameron, was also from Tuscany (the area around Florence) and who died there in 1375.

Two authors that survive in our cultural consciousness are Machiavelli who wrote The Prince about life in politics (once the guiding light for those seeking to attain, then maintain power, his name provides the adjective Machiavellian which today is not considered a compliment); and Torquato Tasso with his epic poem Jerusalem Liberated set in the Crusades which was a major work in its day if largely overlooked today. Machiavelli was a Florentine who died in 1527; Tasso, a Neopolitan, born in Sorrento, died outside Rome in 1595.

Among the painters and sculptors who come to mind when we think of Renaissance Italy are Leonardo (from the town of Vinci in Tuscany) who died in 1519; and Michelangelo (Buonarotti), also a Tuscan though mostly associated with Rome through his masterpieces at the Vatican, who died there in 1564. Two other painters perhaps less familiar to the General American Public are Titian and Tintoretto, two Venetians: Titian died in the Plague Year of 1576 and Tintoretto, in 1594.

The musicians I'll mention are more specific to our given Time Period: perhaps the most famous of the Renaissance composers was Palestrina, known by the name of his birthplace near Rome. He was a leading figure of what was known as the Counter-Reformation, following on Martin Luther's Reformation which tore up so much of Northern Europe earlier in the 16th Century. His musical style became the standard when we think of Music for the Church in the Renaissance. He died in 1594.

Given to summaries and glib generalities, “Introduction to Music Literature” and “Music Appreciation” courses (the latter geared more for those majoring in non-music) mention a few other famous names: Claudio Monteverdi who was born in Cremona – they made violins there! – and spent most of his career in Venice, and died in 1643. He was involved in the development of a new art form called Opera – when I was a student on a university tour passing through Florence in 1970, I stumbled upon the Casa Bardi, the house where Count Bardi and various artistic friends of his were supposed to have met and formulated the basic tenets of writing an opera around 1600, one of the earliest of which was Jacopo Peri's Orfeo – which embraced a New Style of harmonic and textural simplicity as opposed to the complex counterpoint of Renaissance polyphony. But he also composed one of the glories of the choral repertoire in his clearly no-longer-Renaissance style in his “Vespers of 1610.”

One news story from Monteverdi’s day, by the way, affecting the first piece on the program, was the 1630 Hapsburg invasion of Mantua (not far from Venice) already dealing with a major outbreak of the plague. A friend of Monteverdi’s was involved with a delegation from the Venetian Embassy to the city, and that delegation brought the plague back to Venice, resulting in the deaths of some 45,000 people there over the next three years. Among those victims were Monteverdi’s assistant at St. Mark’s, and possibly Monteverdi’s younger brother who died at the same time (presumably of the plague). Book 8 of his “Madrigals of War and Love” were published in Venice in 1638. One of them opens this weekend’s program.

Another famous name of the day was Giovanni Gabrieli, a member of a family of Venetian musicians who, a generation before Monteverdi, also worked at St. Mark's. The major cathedral in Venice had all these nooks and crannies which offered opportunities to place small groups of singers and instrumentalists that created such an amazing layering of sound (long before there was such a thing as “stereo”), the music reverberated through every one of those nooks and crannies. (Again, forgive me for mentioning my own student days, but we sang one of Gabrielli's motets in St. Marks in the very place for which it was composed and the experience of hearing it there and being at the heart of all those reverberations remains one of my most intense musical memories).

And who could forget an actual Prince: the Prince of Venosa, Don Carlo Gesualdo who hailed from southern Italy (Venosa was part of Naples). He wrote mostly madrigals and short motets in a dense and often chromatic style that still makes people wonder what this must have sounded like to the ears of the late-1500s with the chromatic harmony moving (or rather, slipping) in ways that sound modern even today. Of course, because in 1590 he caught his wife and her lover deep in the old flagrante delicto and killed them both – he was quickly found not to have committed a crime – he is usually described as “a composer and murderer.”

While most of the composers on the Tempesta di Mare's program would draw blanks after seeing Monteverdi as first and last – I'll let the performers fill you in on their details – you might notice what looks to be an interloping German named Kapsberger. He might be Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger but then, keep in mind, German composers often styled their first names in French or Italian – there are many manuscripts bearing the name Luigi Beethoven – but in Kapsberger's case, he was born and spent most of his career in Italy. His father was involved with the Austrian military diplomatic corps in Rome – think back to all those Italian wars of the 16th Century – and while his composer-son was born in 1580 in either Rome or maybe Venice, he also later traveled through much of Europe himself involved in diplomacy for The Empire, all the while becoming one of the foremost performers of (and composers for) the lute.

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One more historic discipline to mention: science, in this case, a major facet of the Renaissance which was not just about art. This “rebirth” came as the result of discovering many of the ancient scientific treatises of the Ancient Greeks (many only preserved in the libraries of Arabic universities in Baghdad and in Spain who were experiencing a Golden Age when the rest of Europe loaned its cultural state to what was often called “The Dark Ages”).

Between the poems of Dante and Petrach in the early-1300s and the mid-1600s, there evolved a new way – a modern way – of thinking about man and the world and Man's place in that World, that Man (as in Humanity but, in essence, a gift rarely offered to Woman) was the Center of his own Universe.

This became most significant in the work of the astronomer Nikolas Copernicus born in a German family in what was then part of what would eventually become Poland (again, with the fluid political boundaries and itinerant ethnicities). He began work on it around 1514 though he was hesitant to publish it well into the 1530s for fear of the controversy it would cause: that it wasn't the Earth at the center of the Universe, but the Sun!

Suddenly Man was not at the Center of Everything but living on a planet somewhere out there, rotating around the sun with a bunch of other planets. While it didn't go over well with those who felt the World revolved around Them, one scientist (among other things), Galileo – whose father was a composer – championed Copernicus theory and went before a Roman Inquisition in 1615.

And the world-at-large was still reeling, as all this wealth pouring into Spain from the New World, from the adventures of an Italian sailor named Columbus who'd argued that, even in 1492, the world was not flat...

The world has always been involved in the ups-and-downs of history, of cultural as well as political and social change. The tumultuous years of the Renaissance (complete with its “rebirth”) gave way to simplifications in the Early Baroque before becoming the gaudy splendor of the Late Baroque in the first half of the 1700s – and on into another simplification with the Classicism we associate with Haydn and Mozart, followed by the transition of Beethoven on into the chromatic complexity of Wagner and Schoenberg, in turn followed by the simplification of Ravel or later-Stravinsky’s “Neo-Classicism” and a bit of “minimalism” which, as we live and breathe today, finds us at yet another crossroads. With each of these shifts – whether history moved in circles or a series of waves – we find numerous events that shaped that artistic life. And somehow that artistic life survives, sometimes outside its social context, but it survives.

Let’s take a moment to immerse ourselves in but a small slice of that Time-Line to experience what happened during one of those periods of change: the Early-1600s.

– Dick Strawser

The Calidore Quartet Returns: Part Two, Korngold

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1944)

Now that it’s officially Autumn, it’s time to begin our New Season with the Calidore Quartet’s performance at Temple Ohev Sholom on Front Street in uptown Harrisburg on Wednesday at 7:30. The program opens with the third of Mozart’s Quartets Dedicated to Haydn, continues with the last quartet written by Erich Wolfgang Korngold after a decade spent writing film scores for Hollywood, and then, after intermission, concludes with the first of Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Quartets. You can read about Mozart and Beethoven in Part One, here; this post is about Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Given names like Mozart and Beethoven on the program, much less their music, it’s safe to say Korngold and his music, especially for the concert hall, will be unfamiliar to many listeners today. So I’ll offer a little more background to his biography in hopes it may help you enjoy “where the music comes from.”

First, the music. His String Quartet No. 3, the last he would compose, was completed in the summer of 1945. The date is important but I’ll get to that later. It came after a decade of writing almost nothing but film scores for Hollywood where he completely changed the idea of a “sound track” (along with several other composers who’d arrive from Europe in the ‘30s to escape the rise of Hitler). Disillusioned with his work for Warner Brothers studios – “When I first arrived,” he explained, “I didn’t understand the dialogue – now, I do” – he wanted to get back to writing “concert music” and in the fall of 1944 “secretly” began work on a new string quartet which he completed in July of 1945, just two months after the Fall of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II. Also in that year, he completed his famous Violin Concerto sometime in September, 1945. While he wrote a few more film scores (rather lackluster by comparison to his earlier fame), he tried to pick up his earlier career but found so many things had changed with the War, his musical style – which hadn’t – was now out-moded.

The quartet is in the traditional four movements of a “classical” quartet except the slow movement is in third place. It opens as if he’s attempting to sound “more modern” than he had been in the years before arriving in Hollywood but after the first two movements seemingly coming to terms with the “modern” world, the last two movements return to the lush melodies and harmonies of his earlier (and apparently more natural) “romantic” world. This also can be seen as the difference between the “serious” world of his concert music and the “popular” world of his operetta arrangements of the ‘20s and the 18 films he would score between 1935 and 1946. His father Julius Korngold, the famous and formidable critic who dominated Viennese musical life while the composer was growing up, considered his son was wasting his time on such trivial music.

A theme from his recently completed score for Between Two Worlds (appropriately enough) found its way into the middle section of the 2nd Movement’s scherzo. The main theme of the haunting slow movement is taken from the 1940 film, The Sea Wolf, while the main theme from the finale would later be used in one of three films he would compose in 1946, Devotion.

Rather naive about Hitler’s rise to power, he was in Hollywood to work on the film The Adventures of Robin Hood when the Nazi’s occupied Austria in 1933. Friends at his publisher’s office in Vienna broke into the Korngold house to retrieve various scores and manuscripts and managed to ship them to America (bundled in between Beethoven and Brahms which he figured the inspecting officials would not tell from the others). Days later, the Gestapo raided the house and ransacked it, looking to destroy Korngold’s manuscripts, now that his music was banned by the authorities.

By 1944, with the Nazis in retreat, Korngold’s spirits may have been revived. Certainly the last movement reflects the feeling of impending joy at the end of the war. The Nazis surrendered in Berlin on May 8th, 1945, and the final page of the quartet is dated July 31st, 1945.

Here is a performance of each of the four movements of Korngold’s String Quartet No. 3. I wanted to use a performance by a quartet who’ve appeared before with Market Square Concerts and I’ve always enjoyed the Doric Quartet’s recording of Korngold’s quartets. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a single video of them performing it, so here are four individual clips, two from their Chandos recording, and the last two from a live performance at the Library of Congress in 2010:

1^st Movement, Allegro moderato:

2^nd Movement, Scherzo, Allegro molto (very lively):

3^rd Movement, Sostenuto (sustained), Like a Folk Song:

4^th Movement, Allegro con fuoco (lively, with fire): 

WHAT WAS GOING ON IN ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD’S WORLD THAT LED TO HIS 3rd STRING QUARTET?

One might as well start the story of Erich Wolfgang Korngold at the beginning. His father would become the leading music critic in Vienna between 1904 and 1934. But before that, he was born in Brno (now in Moravia, Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1860 where his second son, named Erich Wolfang (partly in tribute to Mozart), was born in 1897. By 1900, Julius Korngold had arrived in Vienna, writing for the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s only newspaper with an international significance, where he wrote feuilletons or short articles (though some of them ran to 2-3 pages of newsprint – my kind of “short articles”!) about music designed primarily to entertain (think “Talk of the Town” in The New Yorker magazine). Two years later, he was handpicked by the chief critic, the famous (or, if you’re a fan of Wagner, infamous) Eduard Hanslick, Friend of Brahms and champion of conservative causes, to be his successor. Then, when Hanslick died suddenly from heart failure, he was thrust into the limelight.

As a relative new-comer in a close-knit field of long-established staff critics, he fielded a great deal of opposition – the critic had his critics – but essentially Korngold continued Hanslick’s preference for “abstract” music (like Brahms’ symphonies and chamber music) over “program” music (especially Wagner and his operas, but also the Romantic fancy for symphonies telling detailed stories) with its lack of structural development.

While one of his early reviews castigated Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande in 1905, a nearly hour-long symphonic poem, Korngold soon became a champion of Gustav Mahler (more as the conductor at the Vienna Opera than as a composer) which displeased a lot of his conservative friends and colleagues. Considering Vienna was always a hotbed of antisemitism, too complex to go into, here, this created controversy around the partiality of a Jewish-born critic’s support for a Jewish-born composer (not that it had helped Schoenberg, earlier). In fact, Richard Strauss would later accuse Korngold of “only being interested in promoting Fellow Israelites” (Strauss would have his own problems under the Nazis, but that’s another long and difficult story). But, as Korngold would later point out, he spared no punches when it came to the Modernes he loathed, many of whom were also Jewish (like Schoenberg) and one, the pianist Moritz Rosenthal, sued Korngold’s newspaper for defamation of character.

But as the Senior Korngold’s reputation solidified, he was able to afford his young son, Erich, a battery of connections which Leopold Mozart was incapable of handing to his young son, Wolfgang: well-placed, influential connections who could actually offer his son much needed support, especially when it came to performances.

On June 11th, 1906 (not 1909 as several sources state), Korngold the critic took his son, Erich the composer, two weeks after his 9th birthday, to meet Mahler at his home, shortly after the premiere of his 6th Symphony, The boy played his newly composed cantata, “Gold,” and Mahler “pronounced him a musical genius,” and suggested he study with Alexander von Zemlinsky rather than the “dry-as-dust” Robert Fuchs at the Conservatory who had been a friend of Brahms and Mahler’s own teacher. This must have surprised Julius who never missed an opportunity to trash Zemlinsky for sacrificing melody on the altar of French Impression. Besides, he was also the brother-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg whom Julius considered the maddest of all composers – and this was two years before he’d written his first attempts at atonal music in his 2nd String Quartet. Julius became very concerned about protecting his son from the “undue influences” of The Moderns.

In this caricature which appeared in a rival newspaper, the child, Korngold, given a head suggestive of a man much older than his years, is attentively if not skeptically examined by some of the leading musicians of the day: Siegfried Wagner (Richard Wagner’s son), composer Max Reger, conductor Arthur Nikisch, Richard Strauss, and pianist-composer Eugen d’Albert. Of course, many insisted a child of those tender years was incapable of such creative maturity and accused the father of hiring a famous composer to write the pieces for him.

A two-act ballet pantomime, Der Schneemann (“The Snowman”) with its original story something of a cross between comedia dell’arte and Hans Christian Andersen, was premiered in April of 1910 when Erich was still 12. Originally for piano duet, an orchestral version was premiered in October for the Emperor’s Name Day celebrations.

His first published piece had been completed that same month, April 1910, a piano trio which premiered in November. In the general amazement a boy of 12 could write such a piece, it’s easy to lose sight of what he’s actually accomplished musically: the harmonic flexibility and rhythmic subtlety, not to mention his melodic inventiveness and ability to expand his material into a work a half-hour long. Small wonder one commentator thought Korngold must have spent a lifetime in the womb in order to produce music of such maturity at such an early age. To anyone familiar with Korngold’s later music, this immediately sounds recognizably like Korngold, not some childish imitation of a favorite model. The performers for that premiere, by the way, included Mahler’s brother-in-law and concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic, Arnold Rosé, and Mahler’s assistant, conductor and pianist Bruno Walter.

Both Erich and his teacher wrote separately about their working together: Zemlinsky wrote Erich “admired Puccini to a point of near obsession” while Korngold gives us an account of Zemlinsky directing his musical gifts along a non-disciplinarian route, and also improving his piano technique. Meanwhile, Korngold Sr. expressed concern over some of the more daring harmonies and modulations his son was writing, no doubt concerned where exactly all this chromaticism might lead.

His first orchestral work was his Schauspiel-Overture (Drama Overture) premiered in November of 1911, dedicated to its conductor, Arthur Nikisch, followed shortly by a Sinfonietta, Op. 5, completed in 1912 (Sinfonietta implies a “short symphony,” yet – perhaps inspired by his father’s not-so-short feuilletons – this one is about 45 minutes long). Begun when he was still 15, the first draft was completed in August but the process of orchestrating it too until September of the following year, by which time he’d written the first of two one-act operas, The Ring of Polycrates, a modern-day adaptation of an ancient myth, soon to be premiered in Munich by Bruno Walter.

Two important events had occurred, however, by the time Felix Weingartner conducted the premiere of the Sinfonietta: Gustav Mahler left the Vienna Court Opera in 1907 for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, creating a scandal that outraged Julius Korngold, that this had been allowed to happen. Anyone succeeding him was not good enough for Korngold the critic and apparently, as one source put it, “Felix Weingartner and Richard Strauss were hounded out of the Opera.” Then, when Mahler died in 1911 at the early age of 50, Korngold became something of an “avenging angel” and alienated a great many prominent artists in Vienna. The only conductor good enough to succeed Mahler was Bruno Walter, his former assistant. One of the challenges of the young prodigy then was to somehow remain loyal to his father while still seeking the support of those his father attacked in his reviews!

The political and social situation in Vienna is another long and complicated story. The Austrian Empire, later becoming the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a polyglot entity ranging from Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) across Hungary to southern Poland and parts of modern Romania and south into the Balkans. By the time World War I finally erupted after the 1914 assassination of the heir to the throne in Sarajevo (now in Bosnia which Austria-Hungary annexed in 1908), the collapse of the dominating culture of Austria and its imperial capital Vienna was imminent. (For literary-minded readers, I’d recommend Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, one of the great but unfortunately unfinished novels of the 20th Century which chronicles the mindset of a handful of characters in Vienna in the year before the war.)

And here we have a 17-year-old composer navigating the creative challenges above and beyond the usual problems any teenager has to deal with. Attempts to protect the young composer from military service, despite the efforts of his famous father, failed, but a helpful recruitment doctor at least kept him from being sent to the front. Instead, held down a kind of desk job composing, arranging, and conducting his regiment’s military band. This also allowed him time to compose “privately,” among other things incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in 1918. After the war, the production was revived and expanded in 1920. Korngold conducted the chamber orchestra in the pit but when the play’s success extended the run and most of his musicians had to honor previous commitments, Korngold arranged the entire orchestral music for violin and piano. Later, he created both an orchestral suite and a suite for violin and piano. The famous “Garden Scene” (Intermezzo) occurs only in the violin suite. Take a few minutes to listen to this performance – a private recording made years later in Hollywood – with violinist Toscha Seidl and Korngold at the piano.

Another project Korngold began during his military service in 1916 would become his most famous work (outside of Hollywood), the three-act opera that was premiered until 1920, Die Tote Stadt (“The Dead City”) with its famous aria “Marietta’s Lied” (in the opera, it becomes a duet) as the tenor’s late wife appears to him as a ghost. It’s easy to hear where the Korngold of all those Hollywood films “would come from”: he was already there.

To gloss over other works he composed once he was past the age of being regarded as a child prodigy and had to make the transition to an adult composer needing to make a living, I’d rather take a quick look at why he decided to leave all this success in Vienna behind.

His father’s generation dealt with an on-going anti-Semitism even against those who, like the Korngolds, were not religious, or even those who converted to the state-sanctioned Catholic church as Mahler had to do in order to be offered the job as music director at the Court Opera. In post-war Vienna, this quickly devolved into a kind of “Jewish apartheid” where the world of wealthy and talented Jewish families revolved around their own social universe, parallel to the social world of non-Jewish Viennese bourgeois.

Eventually, along with the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the long-held hatreds against “foreigners” from the rest of the Empire – if they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, how could they be “foreigners” or immigrants? -- began to boil over in what remained of a once glorious empire in the tiny, land-locked Austrian Republic. It had existed long before Antonin Dvořak, a provincial Bohemian, felt Viennese prejudice, requiring Brahms’ seal-of-approval to get his music accepted by the Vienna Philharmonic.

There was also the split between Julius’ world of the concert hall and the world of popular music. An older son, Robert, was ignored (in favor of the talented Erich) long before the family moved to Vienna (from provincial Moravia, btw) and, a talented musician in his own right, started a (horrors!) jazz band. Given the increasing friction between Erich and his father, the now independent composer chose to extricate himself from his father’s world by turning to a career in operetta. First, he managed arrangements of popular Johann Strauss works and re-orchestrated several other, established pieces in the repertoire before writing his own. This apparently was successful: not only had he made enough money to buy an expensive house in a fashionable district in Vienna, he bought a “small palace” in the Austrian Alps, and married the love-of-his-life, Louisa (nicknamed “Luzi”), daughter of a famous theatrical family, against his father’s wishes – and in the process completely alienated his father.

Now, does all of this sound familiar? Remember Mozart and the problems he had with his father, Leopold, and the issue of his wanting to marry Constanze Weber over his father’s objections? The only thing that would complete the parallel was the equivalent of a move from Salzburg to Vienna to get out from under Leopold’s domination. 

Oh wait: Korngold left Vienna for Hollywood. Does that count? Except he took his father with him. By the way, Korngold Sr.'s full name was Leopold Julius Korngold, but I digress...

Julius had not entirely succeeded in protecting his “fragile” son from the dissonance of Modern Music both before the war and after. While Puccini may be a major influence behind works like Die tote Stadt, there is also a great deal of composers like Richard Strauss or Franz Schreker, both of whom Julius the Critic detested. Erich understood the Viennese need to be entertained – it had been the status quo in Mozart’s, Beethoven’s and Brahms’ days – especially after the disastrous impact of losing the war and going from being a Major Political Power in Europe to a small, backwater republic (even without a seacoast, Austria still maintained a navy). What the public wanted was an escape from reality of the times, not music with social and political agendas or that reflected the dismal times people didn’t want to face.

What Korngold the Composer managed to do was write “serious” music that was popular. He avoided the “New Objectivity” of contemporary composers like Hindemith, and especially Schoenberg as his style began to evolve into what we call “serialism” (his “composing with twelve-tones”). When Krenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf (“an African-American jazz musician steals the violin of a European classical concert artist, and in the end comes away victorious”) drew intense criticism across Germany from the National Socialists when it premiered in 1927 and by Nazi-sympathizers when it appeared in Vienna later that year, calling on “Christian Viennese” to come out and protest the “Jewish Filth” being put on “at our Staatsoper” (the former more elitist Court Opera, the Hofoper, was now the State Opera). Korngold’s new mythologically inspired opera, Das Wunder des Heliane (“The Miracle of Helen”), dovetailed with performances of Jonny spielt auf. Curiously, Krenek wasn’t Jewish – but Korngold was. While a success, Korngold’s opera made its way across Germany, but it was viewed as entirely irrelevant: many singers avoided performing it; Bruno Walter, conducting it in Berlin, began to distance himself from Korngold as a result.

Korngold realized the public – his public – was going in a different direction. So, between the premiere of Heliane and the rise of Adolf Hitler, Korngold turned to more abstract music and wrote his first string quartet, a third piano sonata, and a suite for piano left-hand (for Paul Wittgenstein who’d also commissioned Ravel’s concerto) and strings. In the mid-1920s, he’d met the famous (and fabulously wealthy) director Max Reinhardt who married a childhood friend of Erich’s wife Luzi. They embarked on some projects to “up-scale” some operettas like Offenbach’s La belle Helene and Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus (renamed “Rosalinda”). Both became financial and artistic successes far beyond Germany and Austria.

Then, in January, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul Hindenburg. The Nazi Party was now in control of the German government.

In 1934, Reinhardt produced a staged version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Hollywood Bowl, using Mendelssohn famous music. Not much a “straight theater” town, nonetheless Hollywood producers wanted Reinhardt to turn it into a film and he insisted Korngold be brought over from Vienna to re-work Mendelssohn’s music and add his own touches. And so he did.

But he didn’t stay: he returned to Vienna despite the increasing political and social tension (and against the advice of his father) to work on a new opera, Die Kathrin, which turned a politically charged plot into a harmless love-story. It premiered in March, 1938, which coincided with the Nazi Occupation of Austria, the Anschluss, and so the performances were canceled by the new government. The work was eventually dismissed after its premiere it Sweden as “outdated.” One later writer said it “reflected the same irresponsible blindness to world events” that almost stranded Korngold’s family after Hitler’s take-over.

After the success of Midsummer Night’s Dream, Korngold accepted an invitation from Hollywood to write the music for a new film, a swashbuckling pirate romance featuring a new actor, Erroll Flynn, called Captain Blood. Initially, the idea of the story did not appeal to him. Even though he wrote almost an hour’s worth of music for it, because he had only three weeks to do it in, Korngold ended up culling bits from Liszt tone poems to save time and only wanted to be credited with “musical adaptations.” A huge success, it tempted him to accept their next offer, Anthony Adverse, his fourth original film score, which eventually won him his first Oscar. The first half-hour of the film contains “continuous scoring” and Korngold found himself approaching his film scores as “operas without singing.” Ever a fan of Puccini, he once described Tosca as “the best film score ever written.”

In all, Korngold produced 18 film scores for Hollywood. If his father had thought his orchestrating and arranging 9 operettas to be beneath his talents, he thought even less of his film work (not that he minded the lifestyle it afforded him). Julius Korngold had joined his son in Hollywood soon after the Anschluss – leaving Erich’s older son with his sister-in-law so he could finish his school exams but, badly miscalculating local events, barely getting him out of the country before it was too late. Julius, once the fiercely independent critic who dominated Viennese musical life as Hanslick had ruled it during the age of Brahms and Wagner, now found himself without purpose in a strange environment, especially considering his prejudice against “popular culture,” and, perhaps in a twist of irony, now neighbors with some of the musicians he'd attacked in the press decades before! But thirty years and the times being what they were, he found himself becoming friends with another Los Angeles resident, Arnold Schoenberg (who lived across the street from Shirley Temple and whose frequent tennis partner was George Gershwin).

Given the number of films Korngold scored, it’s surprising this occupied only ten years of his life. In the midst of this busy schedule, Korngold and his wife became American citizens in 1943. They lived in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, close to the Warner Brothers Studios (later on, the house would later be owned by Boris Karloff, then Roy Disney; it sold in 2019 for $5.2 million), and it was there Korngold toyed with the idea of a violin concerto, which he'd already begun sketching in 1937, using a theme from Anthony Adverse but the project went nowhere and after two years, he put it aside. 

Then, in 1945, his friend, violinist Bronislaw Hubermann requested a concerto – apparently, something he’d been asking Korngold for decades, though there's some doubt about that; it appears to be a family legend – and this time Korngold decided to dig out those old sketches and this time finish it. Each movement made use of various themes he’d written for some of his film scores. It would seem to be the first concert work he’d composed since he began immersing himself in the movie business, but he'd already written a substantial amount of a new string quartet, his third. Incidentally, it’s probably no coincidence he dedicated the newly completed Violin Concerto to Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav Mahler, who was herself also now living in Los Angeles. Apparently, at some point before he finalized the piece, he played through it for her on his piano at Toluca Lake.

Julius Korngold (1942)

What his father thought of this sudden change in Erich's musical life, I’m not sure. I would assume he’d’ve been overjoyed, finally, his son back to composing the kind of music he was born to write. But Julius Korngold, never comfortable with life in California, died in Hollywood at the age of 85 on September 20th, 1945, after a long illness. His son had, however, completed now two pieces of "concert music."

The new quartet would not be premiered, for some reason, until 1949, though there is some confusion since it’s usually listed as 1946. Turns out, the Roth Quartet was giving the American premiere of his Second String Quartet on that 1946 program.

As for Korngold’s career after that, he did write, reluctantly, a few more film scores, nothing that was successful, and he realized not only his new concert music but even his once well-received works like Die tote Stadt were being dismissed as “out-of-date.” Following a near-fatal heart attack in 1947, a delayed return to Vienna proved disappointing both musically and emotionally. Aside from one last attempt at a film score, arranging Wagner’s music for a film biography, his last work, an inconsequential set of variations for orchestra, was dated 1953, following the dismal reception of his Symphony in F-Sharp, completed the year before. 

Following a stroke in 1956, Korngold "endured several physical and emotional difficulties" as he recuperated, and died the following year at the age of 60, disappointed his star had already set.

The Composer composing

Without his film scores or the eleven operetta arrangements on the list. since they weren’t technically published, there are only 42 opus numbers in his output, a rather small legacy in the end for a composer who had such a promising start. If this is his legacy, was he, as his father complained, “wasting his time” dabbling in the popular world just to achieve a temporary success? Ironically, the Violin Concerto aside, he is best remembered as a film composer today, and even though many of the films have been forgotten, orchestral suites from several of them appear regularly in concert halls around the world.

But in Korngold’s personal life, this particular string quartet holds a very important place. He’d had begun it in secret in 1944 (before or, perhaps, as a result of his father’s illness? – he was, after all, 85). He presented the sketches to his wife as a Christmas present in 1944, catching her by surprise: “I had suspected nothing about the quartet,” she wrote to a friend. “He had avoided the subject, and had not struck even a single note on the piano.” He completed it the following summer, dating the manuscript July 31st, 1945, marking his return to writing concert (“serious”) music after a decade’s hiatus in Hollywood. World War II had ended in Europe in May, 1945, so what was begun under the seemingly never-ending shadow of Hitler and his war, ended with a sense of relief.

– Dick Strawser