Bedřich Smetana: My Life and Welcome To It – The Balourdet Quartet Opens the Season (Part One)

Who: The Balourdet Quartet
What: Haydn’s “Lark” Quartet, György Ligeti’s String Quartet No, 2, and Bedřich Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor ("From My Life")
When: Wednesday, September 24th, 2025, at 7:30
Where: Market Square Church, downtown Harrisburg
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Three-quarters of the Balourdet Quartet met at the Taos Music Festival in the summer of 2018, on their way to study that fall at the Shepherd School of Music at Houston’s Rice University where the quartet formed under the tutelage of James Dunham, a former member of the Cleveland Quartet, and other teachers at the acclaimed school. Eventually, they were accepted into the New England Conservatory’s Professional Quartet Program, working with Paul Katz, a founding member of the Cleveland Quartet.

In March, 2024, it was announced they – then graduate students at Indiana University (Bloomington) where they were being mentored by the Pacifca Quartet – had received a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. The previous November, it was announced they’d won the Cleveland Quartet Award for 2024-2025, which includes Market Square Concerts as one of eight nationwide performance venues for the award’s winners (including Carnegie Hall). (Incidentally, the Pacifica Quartet is a past winner of the Cleveland Quartet Prize.) This month, they’ve just begun a season’s residency with the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

You can read more about the Cleveland Quartet Award in the second of these two posts, along with a presentation about the works on the first half of their Market Square Concerts’ program, Haydn’s “Lark” Quartet and the 2nd Quartet of György Ligeti (which you can read here once it is available). This post takes you behind the scenes for Bedřich Smetana’s 1st Quartet which concludes the program.

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If composers are inspired to respond through their art to the reality around them – whether historical or biographical – well, speaking of reality, it doesn’t get more "Reality Quartet" than Bedřich Smetana's "From My Life."

When Beethoven was going deaf – or, more accurately, showing the first serious signs of his impending deafness – he continued to compose his 2nd Symphony. In the midst of working on the finale, he wrote the devastating Heiligenstadt Testament which, to us, reads like a suicide note, and yet there is nothing in the music he composed that would indicate what was happening in his personal life. But then, while Beethoven's struggle with Fate in his 5th Symphony is often described as “the artist overcoming his deafness” (“I will seize Fate by the throat,” he had written to a friend the year before the Testament), that struggle transcends the very nature of the music, becoming universal rather than personal.

When Bedřich Smetana was going deaf, he wrote a string quartet about it. Well, not entirely about it, but the quartet he composed at that time focused on various parts of his life, an autobiographical summing-up, perhaps, in which his impending deafness makes a dramatic appearance in the last chapter.

He had lost hearing in his right ear by September of 1874, following a throat infection (complete with a rash) that led to a blockage in the ears. Forced to take time off from his duties as artistic director of the opera theater in Prague where he'd been having run-ins with the administration – the official press release explaining his absence stated he had “become ill as a result of nervous strain caused by certain people recently” (art and politics, nothing new, there) – and by October, had lost all hearing in his left ear as well. The next January, he wrote in his journal, “If my disease is incurable, then I should prefer to be liberated from this life.”

It wasn't until the next year, however, that he composed his first string quartet which he himself subtitled “From My Life.” Completed in late-December, 1876, the quartet reflects different periods of his life beginning with a musical depiction of his romantic ideals of a nationalist style for his native Bohemia, the “love of art in my youth,” he explained, “my romantic mood and the unspoken longing for something which I could not name or imagine clearly.” The first theme, a dramatic viola solo beginning with downward leaps, stood for “Fate's summons to take part in life's combat” and that the opening falling fifth which recurs at the end of the quartet was “a warning as it were of my future misery.”

This is followed by a lively dance (a folksy polka), full of memories of a joyful youth. The third movement is one of “great emotional depth, a paean to love, which transcends the adversities of fate and finds harmony in life.” In the last movement, “the composer describes the journey that led to an understanding of the true essence of national art, only to be interrupted by the catastrophe of his incipient deafness. The end is almost resigned, with only a small ray of hope for a better future.”

It's in the last movement where, in the midst of a lively celebration, a high note in the violin played as a harmonic (giving it an entirely different, almost other-worldly sonority) represents the sound he heard inside his head, the onset of his deafness.

And yet, in reality, that high note occurs only once and at the very end of the last movement and its immediate impact is to cut off the flow of the finale (which seemed about to end, anyway), before recalling the opening motive and then reminiscing over the second theme of the first movement and an idea from the opening of the last, before ending on a long sustained if undulating E Major chord (thanks to the viola's underpinning) – resigned but, yes, hopeful. And certainly dramatic. (Curiously, the idea of leaving it as an E Minor chord at the end might have an entirely different emotional response.)

When Smetana submitted his new quartet to the Prague Chamber Music Society, they rejected the work as unplayable, too advanced in style and too challenging to play, mostly because the key signature of the Polka's middle section was in five flats with “much modulation” and too many double stops which created intonation issues for the performers.

Here’s a performance by the Balourdet Quartet of Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor, “From My Life.”It was performed recently at the Chamber Music Society of Fort Worth.

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Smetana in 1878

In July of 1874, Smetana noticed his ears were blocked and he felt giddy. His doctor advised him to avoid any musical activity (he was, at the time, composing the first of the Ma Vlast tone-poems: the famous “Moldau” is the second of the cycle). “I am to stay at home for almost a week,” he wrote in his diary. “I cannot go out and have my ears wrapped in cotton wool since I must have complete quiet. I fear the worst—that I will become permanently deaf.” He described it as “a pounding and intense hissing in the head, day and night, without ceasing, as if I were standing underneath a huge waterfall.”

Asking to be temporarily relieved of his duties at the theater, Smetana went to see his doctor again who tried electric shocks and then gave him “an ether douche.” “For the first time for ages,” he wrote, “I can again hear the entire range of octaves in tune. Previously, they were all jumbled up. I can still hear nothing with my right ear.” Twelve days later he lost what hearing he had briefly regained: he was now totally deaf. Friends sent him money to pay for trips to Germany to see specialists but there was no further improvement, temporary or otherwise.

Business issues regarding his salary from the theater's association led to his giving up his apartment in Prague to move in with his married daughter in a town north of Prague. He complained of a “piercing whistling sound” that “haunted” him every evening (in the quartet, it's represented by a high E; in reality, it was more like an A-flat major chord). He could not work for more than an hour at a time. Yet during this time, he was also composing perhaps his most famous, certainly his most performed piece, the tone-poem “The Moldau.” The following year he completed a new comic opera, The Secret.

About a year after completing the string quartet, he wrote to a friend, “I should like... to be able to work without having to worry, but unfortunately those gentlemen of the [theater] association – and fate – will not allow that. When I continually see only poverty and misery ahead of me all enthusiasm for my work goes, or at least my cheerful mood vanishes. ...When I plunge into musical ecstasy [when composing] then for a while I forget everything that persecutes me so cruelly in my old age.”

He was in his early 50s.

For those of us who think deafness means a loss of hearing and a descent into silence (which for many people, it may be), Smetana's descriptions sound frightening. In recent times (decades, really), more attention has been paid to a condition called tinnitus, an official name now for what used to be called simply "ringing in the ears." The impression Smetana's deafness was (or at least began as) a case of tinnitus, given its brief appearance at the end of his quartet, may seem natural: to have written music describing the actual sounds, especially the pounding and hissing sounds he experienced day and night, the idea of standing under a waterfall, may have been more than a musician, at least in the 19th Century, might have been able to recreate (or an audience to put up with).

American composer Brent Michael Davids realized he had developed tinnitus and composed his own quartet in which the pitch he heard - in his case, a high A - is played constantly by some member of the quartet throughout the entire piece. As James Oestreich describes it in his 2005 New York Times review, "As that sustained pitch slowly shifts from one instrument to another, the remaining players work around it, producing skittish tremolos, slides and scrapes that hint at other aural aberrations as well. Short-breathed, repetitive melodies break through occasionally and come to dominate in what might be called an apotheosis. But the real apotheosis follows, with the tinnitus tone surrounded by suggestions of chirping crickets." The sound of crickets can sometimes mask the intrusive sound, as Davids explains, allowing him to "tune it out for periods of time." "And the conclusion of this unsettling piece," Oestreich writes, "vividly illustrates the relief they can provide."

(When the Miró Quartet performed it here with Market Square Concerts in 2006 as part of their Cleveland Quartet Award tour, it was indeed an uncomfortable experience, allowing us to hear for fifteen minutes or so what the world sounds like to someone with tinnitus. When I asked a friend who has tinnitus if that's what it's like, that constant sound, he admitted he could not hear that specific recurring pitch: it was masked by his own.)

Perhaps the idea of writing such an autobiographical quartet was more cathartic, something to take the composer's mind off reality (again with the reality!) rather than being merely self-pitying. After all, the part of the quartet that specifically concerns his deafness is a very small part of it, yet almost the only thing about it anyone seems to mention!

Smetana's quartet is certainly the first of its kind, as far as autobiographical chamber music is concerned: it's not just the idea of its telling a story but turning a personal experience into music. Did the idea come from Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique? (He had met Berlioz when he was a student and would conduct his Romeo et Juliette in 1864.) At any rate, Leoš Janáček would later write two such string quartets, one inspired by Tolstoy's tale of adultery, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” and then “Intimate Pages,” inspired by love letters written to his mistress. 

Speaking of personal relationships, another issue plagued Smetana at the time of his deafness. He had married his second wife, Bettina Ferdinandiová, 16 years his junior, in 1860. They had two daughters, both of whom survived their father. But the relationship with Bettina became increasingly unpleasant. "I cannot live under the same roof with a person who hates and persecutes me," he'd written to her in a letter. They considered divorce but chose instead to remain, however unhappily, together.

To conclude this brief summary of a life, I should mention that, despite his continuing to compose and the belated success he was finding with the premieres of Ma Vlast, Smetana began having bouts of forgetfulness, being unable to remember what he had just written down, barely writing four measures of music a day (difficult when you're composing an opera). Forbidden any musical activity, he was not even allowed to read a book for more than fifteen minutes.

Still, five months later, he succeeded in finishing a second string quartet, worked on a new orchestral suite, started sketching another opera (this one inspired by the very un-Czech story of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night) before he suffered an attack we would describe as dementia, affecting his mental equilibrium. He began having hallucinations and had to be watched in case he injured himself. Unable to recognize his family, he tried to escape from the house and eventually had to be placed in what was then known as Prague's Kateřinky Lunatic Asylum where he died less than three weeks later.

His family (and most others) had long assumed his deafness, difficult to evaluate with the technology of the day, was the result of syphilis, something no one in polite society discussed. But modern research tends to point to other possible causes, none of which can be definitively proven.The official cause of death, however, was listed as senile dementia.

He had recently turned 60.

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It occurred to me, overhearing a concert-goer at the symphony a few years ago, surprised to find Sibelius was “that recent” (presumably meaning since he died in 1957, not that the violin concerto was written in 1905), that we often tend to overlook specifically when the composers of the music we're listening to lived. I know my dad once told me he had no idea when Bach or Tchaikovsky lived – “they could be contemporaries” for all he knew – but it didn't keep him from enjoying their music. Preparing this post, I realized I'm not all that sure where to fit Smetana into this musical time-line. He's not, I admit, a composer high on my list though I enjoy the music most of us in this country are aware of. We speak of Dvořák and Smetana as one of those “pairs” like Bach and Handel, Mozart and Haydn, or Wagner and Liszt. Usually, that leads to the misconception they were friends and colleagues, not just contemporaries, which is not the case.

Smetana is referred to as the “Father of Czech Music” but Dvořák, at least in this country, is considered the “Greatest Czech Composer” or, more accurately, the “Most Popular Czech Composer” even if few concert-goers could name many more.

First of all, let me point out that Dvořák was born in 1841. When Smetana was born – listed as Friedrich rather than Bedřich in the register since German was the official language – it was 1824 and Beethoven had not yet completed his 9th Symphony. When Smetana gave his first public performance as a budding pianist at the age of 6, Berlioz was working on his Symphonie fantastique. Mendelssohn was 21 and Brahms wouldn't be born for another three years.

As a fervent patriot in his mid-20s, Smetana participated briefly in the “uprisings” in the spring of 1848, only one part of a continent-wide series of uprisings and revolutions that led to the national awareness of many ethnic minorities then under German or Austrian control. There were other issues as well – in Paris, in Dresden (where Wagner and Schumann were both affected by it) – but in Prague it was primarily a revolt against the German-speaking oppressors. Like most of these revolts, this one too ended in failure. (It's interesting to note the new, young Emperor of Austria who held sway against the 1848 uprisings was the same one still in power at the start of World War I in 1914!)

Smetana had married Katerina Kolářová in 1849 and they had four daughters, three of whom died in infancy. One of them showed early talent as a musician but died of scarlet fever in 1855, prompting him to write an elegiac Piano Trio in G Minor in her memory.

Unable to establish a career in Prague (perhaps because of his recent political role), Smetana and his family moved to Göteborg in Sweden where he heard they were looking for music teachers. With the exception of a few visits home – during one of these, his wife, already in frail health, died en route – he remained in Sweden until the early-1860s when “a more liberal climate” in Bohemia prompted him to return to Prague. The Provisional Theater (so called because it was intended to be a temporary home for Czech music until a National Theater could be built) opened in 1862. The building eventually became part of the new theater when it finally opened in 1881.

During the early-1860s, his first years back at home, Smetana began work on two operas on Czech stories: a historical “grand” opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, and a comedy about a romantic tangle involving a marriage broker, a village girl, and the boy she'd rather marry, The Bartered Bride.

Dvořák in 1868

One of the musicians in the theater's orchestra in 1862 was a violist named Antonin Dvořák.

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Dvořák started his musical life as a fan of Wagner, even played viola in the orchestra when Wagner came to Prague to conduct an all-Wagner program of opera excerpts. Not surprisingly, some of Dvořák's early works (those rarely played early symphonies and operas, for instance) have a Wagnerian sound about them, not the folk-inspired voice we associate with the mature composer. He had been composing since 1861 (when he was 20) – this is about the same time Smetana was trying to establish himself in Prague – but his first public appearance as a composer didn't occur until ten years later.

Then, in the mid-1870s, he started entering the competitions for the Austrian State Prize (keep in mind that Bohemia, as the Czech Republic was known then, had been a province of the Austrian or Austro-Hungarian Empire from the 16th Century until 1918) and, in addition to winning some grants and prizes, in 1877 garnered the attention of Johannes Brahms who agreed to ask his own publisher to publish some of Dvořák's music.

Now, so far, there's not much mention of Bedřich Smetana in Dvořák's story. True, in 1866, Smetana became the director of Prague's Provisional Theater where Dvořák was one of the players, the same year The Bartered Bride was not a success and they may have known each other but there was never anything like a friendship between them and Smetana never seemed to have any role as a teacher or mentor to the younger composer. They certainly would never have "hung out" together, discussing how to create a national music style! Or did they?

It was Smetana's job, as artistic director and conductor, to foster new Czech music. But when Dvořák submitted his opera, The King and the Charcoal-Burner, in 1871, the score was returned, declared to be “unperformable.” Given the musical politics of the day, espousing Wagnerian concepts of opera was to many musicians the equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. And Smetana, who not only admired Wagner, he was a friend of Liszt's, had enough political problems with the theater management not to champion a young and inexperienced Wagnerite like this Dvořák fellow.

As it was, Smetana was forced to resign in 1872 following opposition from prominent subscribers but was reinstated after the management received an ultimate signed by most of the theater's musicians, including Dvořák. Now given more authority, he planned to produce more Czech operas, though he himself had little time for composing.

Then, in 1874, Smetana became ill, lost his hearing, and retired from the theater. Moving to a town outside of Prague where he could live with his one daughter while hoping to recuperate, as I mentioned, he composed his first string quartet in 1876 which he himself subtitled “From My Life.”

This was the year Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung was given its first full production at Bayreuth, and the year Brahms finally finished his 1st Symphony.

Dvořák's career didn't really get started until 1877 when he received the backing of the great Brahms (and more importantly, his anti-Wagnerian friend, the critic Eduard Hanslick). By this time, Dvořák had passed over from being a Wagnerite to following in the footsteps of Brahms, but it was his use of Bohemian folk music that caught Brahms' attention which resulted in his request for Dvořák to compose a set of dances for piano duet, modeled after Brahms' own “Hungarian Dances” which would be attractive to the amateur audience. And so, with the appearance of his “Slavonic Dances,” Dvořák's career was on its way.

By this time, Smetana was out of the active music scene, though his music, what he had already composed – at this time, much of Ma Vlast and several more operas were in the future – proved enough to influence a whole generation of younger composers.

As for one bit of connectivity between Smetana's and Dvořák's time-lines, there's this tantalizing bit: after Smetana's string quartet was finished in December of 1876, it was given a "private performance" in Prague sometime in 1878 (the public premiere wasn't until March of 1879) in which the violist was Antonin Dvořák.

And Dvořák began writing his Slavonic Dances, the fruits of his new connection with Brahms & Co., sometime in 1878. These do not quote actual Bohemian folk-songs but incorporate the essence of the sound in its use of dance-forms and -rhythms, similar to what Smetana had done.

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As for being the “Father of Czech Music,” or at least the Nationalist School that developed in Bohemia following the 1848 uprising, Smetana did not do it by utilizing existing folk-songs which is what we normally assume. He did not learn to speak Czech until the 1860s when he was already in his late-30s – before then, he spoke only German, the official language of society, education and commerce – and much of the music he composed followed certain guidelines established by Wagner though not necessarily imitating his style (as one writer more knowledgeable of Smetana's operas pointed out, people who complained of his Wagnerism apparently were not familiar with much of Wagner's music). He was a patriot which might seem a problem in a German-dominated society like Prague's, but he was a “radical patriot” as opposed to a “conservative patriot” and that was the problem, Wagner or not.

His first opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, was a historical drama about a 13th Century German occupation, and most of his subsequent operas were about legendary heroes rather than real-life people like the peasants who populated The Bartered Bride. This would seem to be his “masterpiece,” viewed from its world-wide popularity, but it wasn't until 1870 that the fourth and final version of it – which also added those three famous dances – became a hit. Still, when it was staged in St. Petersburg, Russia, the next year, one critic said it was “no better than the work of a gifted fourteen-year-old boy.” (Odd, you might think, considering the famous school of Russian nationalists known as “The Five” or “The Mighty Handful,” not having any sympathy for Czech nationalism, but keep in mind, at that time, their familiar works were several years in the future, including Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, its first complete performance not until 1874; Tchaikovsky had so far not yet composed even his 2nd Symphony.) The Bartered Bride wasn't heard in Vienna until 1892, eight years after the composer's death, and only then started to gain any gradual international success, the only one of his eight operas to do so.

When we think of “Czech Nationalism” (or any ethnic nationalism in music), we tend to think of those pleasant peasants who dance beside the waters of the Moldau (how ironic the Bohemian river is known internationally by its German name rather than as the Vltava) or frolic through the village square of The Bartered Bride. Dvořák became a “Czech Nationalist” because he used folk songs and dances in his music – and even when he used what he thought were American folk songs in the mid-1890s for his “New World” Symphony, they still sounded like Czech tunes.

(The same argument continues today regarding “American Music.” Can “American Music” only be something like Aaron Copland's folk-song-inspired Billy the Kid or is Elliott Carter an example of American Music because he happens to be a composer who spent most of his 103 years writing in the United States?)

If your argument is popularity, then when you visit the Czech Republic, you should be aware that there Smetana is held in much higher regard than Dvořák and more of his works are heard in the opera and concert repertoire. When Smetana began conducting new Czech works in the 1860s, there really was no “tradition” of Czech music, especially music sung in Czech: these composers may have been Czech-born (like Smetana) but their music was German in style and ethos. Anything in Czech was more on the level of operetta and even then, pretty poor. The most “famous” Czech composer of operas immediately before Smetana was a fellow named František Škroup who died in 1862, few of whose 16 stage works, according to a couple of sources, ran for more than two performances. There were dozens of famous Bohemian musicians in the late-18th and early-19th Centuries, many of them fine composers, but they all gravitated toward Vienna or Paris if they wanted to make a living, especially back in the days of Haydn and Mozart. Prague, musically, was basically a vacuum as far as its national musical identity was concerned. And it was slow to change.

If nothing else, Smetana did change all that, making a case for music in the native language with a national "voice." Without him, even without the direct contact of teacher or mentor, it's quite possible Dvořák might have continued imitating Brahms.

- Dick Strawser

Summermusic 2025: Part Three "Trials & Triumphs," Part Two: Shostakovich's Tribute to a Lost Friend

Dmitri Shostakovich in 1944

The final concert of our Summermusic 2025 series will be performed Saturday night at 7:30 at Harrisburg’s Market Square Presbyterian Church by the Mendelssohn Piano Trio which consists of Market Square Concerts co-directors Peter Sirotin and Ya-Ting Chang, and cellist Fiona Thompson. The program begins with Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67 and concludes with Beethoven’s last piano trio, known as The “Archduke” Trio (you can read about Beethoven’s trio in this previous post).

Each of this summer’s concerts explore what inspired the music on the program. “Love & Loss” explored pieces by Max Bruch, written for his son who was about to start a career as a clarinetist, and Johannes Brahms, whose Horn Trio was written in memory of his mother. “Places & People” introduced us to the friends and locations behind Franz Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet and Antonín Dvořák’s 2nd String Quintet. In Saturday’s final program, we explore more dramatic events, with Shostakovich expressing his grief over the loss of his closest friend during the darkest days of WWII in his Piano Trio No. 2; and Beethoven creating one of his most life-affirming compositions, the “Archduke” Piano Trio, while facing a complete loss of his hearing. 

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In January, 1944, Shostakovich, who had composed his first string quartet in 1938 and then his famous Piano Quintet in 1940, wrote to an interviewer that “chamber music demands from a composer supreme command of technique and profound thought. It would be misleading if I didn’t tell you that very often behind the glamour of orchestral sound the composer conceals his paucity of thought. The rich timbre at the disposal of the modern symphony orchestra is out of reach for small chamber ensembles. I repeat, while it is still possible to listen to thin thoughts concealed behind rich and colorful orchestration, such thoughts would be simply unbearable in a chamber work. From this it would be wrong to conclude that I like chamber music better than symphonies. No, I really enjoy both good symphonies and good chamber music. What I cannot stand is bad music, regardless of whether it has been written for a symphony or a quartet.”

Whatever may have been the genesis of the Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, he was apparently sketching something already in July. He mentioned in October he was working on a piano trio based on Russian folk songs, and, on December 8th, wrote to his friend, the critic Isaac Glikman, “at the moment I am writing a Trio for piano, violin and cello.”

He was in Moscow at the time and almost done with the first movement – which so far included no Russian folk songs – when he received the news that his closest friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, had died at the age of 41. 

Shostakovich & Sollertinsky in 1942 at the time of the Novosibirsk performance of his new 7th Symphony, the "Leningrad" Symphony

Usually described as “a Soviet polymath,” Sollertinsky could speak over 20 languages, specialized in the fields of linguistics, literature, theater, history, and philology, but was best known as a music critic and musicologist.

Years later, Shostakovich recalled meeting his friend in 1927, “at the house of a Leningrad musician... During our conversation it emerged that I didn’t know a single foreign language and Sollertinsky couldn’t play the piano. That’s how it came about that the very next day Sollertinsky gave me my first German lesson and I gave him his first piano lesson. These lessons, incidentally, very soon came to an end. The end was pathetic: I didn’t learn any German and Sollertinsky was unable to play the piano, but since then and up to the last moment of Sollertinsky’s marvellous life we were great friends.”

At the time of the Nazi invasion in 1941, Sollertinsky was evacuated from Leningrad along with the Philharmonic to Novosibirsk (Sollertinsky was then the orchestra’s artistic director). After making plans to leave Novosibirsk in February 1944 and return to Moscow to resume working, Sollertinsky spoke at the orchestra’s February 5th performance in Novosibirsk of Shostakovich’s recently premiered 8th Symphony, then died in his sleep a few nights later.

On February 13th, Shostakovich wrote to Glikman, a mutual friend, “Ivan died on February 11th, 1944. We shall never see him again. There are no words that can express my grief which is eating away at my whole being. May our love for him and our faith in his great talent and phenomenal love for the art, to which he devoted his magnificent life - music - serve to immortalize his memory. Ivan is no more. It is very difficult to come to terms with this. My friend, don’t forget me and write to me. I have a request: wherever you can, get hold of some vodka and on March 11th at 7 p.m. Moscow time let’s drink (you in Tashkent and I in Moscow) a glass and by doing so mark the month that will have passed since Sollertinsky’s death.”

On February 15th, 1944, according to the date on the manuscript, Shostakovich finished the first movement of the Trio but then stopped working on it for some time: illness, on the one hand; the “deep psychological trauma” over the death of his friend, on the other. Returning to the “House of Creativity and Rest” at Ivanovo, a government-run artists’ colony where he’d worked on his 8th Symphony the previous summer, he did not resume work on the trio until late-July. The second movement was dated August 3rd; the entire trio, August 13th, 1944. Almost immediately he began work on his 2nd String Quartet, the piano sketch dated September 2nd. The score of the completed quartet was dated September 20th.

Recently graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, composer Mikhail Meyerovich described his visit to Ivanovo during August and September, 1944. Keep in mind this was during a particularly brutal war – beyond just the Nazi siege of Leningrad – and Meyerovich mentioned how Ivanovo was “very popular [with composers] during the war as it had its own farm and the food was good and plentiful.” Shostakovich, who was about to turn 38 that September, “was not too fond of the other composers of his own age, and he spent most of his time with me and my friend, his former pupil… We were the youngest composers there,” Meyerovich later recalled. Shostakovich would suggest they play four-hand piano duets and take long walks together. “He would play billiards, now he played football. He insisted we join him in a game of football; he played with passion, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the game. Once I inadvertently knocked his glasses off his nose. I was embarrassed, but he said, ‘That’s all right. That’s what the game is about.’”

When he found time to compose was a mystery to them. “He had just finished his famous piano trio and was working on his 2nd String Quartet. I wondered when he did the actual composing. The trio took him a month. The quartet was written in under four weeks before my very eyes. But nobody saw him at the desk or at the piano. ...He would play football and fool around with his friends, then he would suddenly disappear. After forty minutes or so, he would turn up again. ‘How are you doing? Let me kick the ball.’ Then we would have dinner and drink some wine and take a walk, and he would be the life and soul of the party. Every now and then he would disappear for a while and then join us again. Towards the end of my stay, he disappeared altogether. We didn’t see him for a week. Then he turned up, unshaven and looking exhausted. He said to me and [my friend,] ‘Let’s go to an empty cabin with a piano in it.’ He played us his 2nd Quartet. He had only just completed it, as the score had that very day’s date on it. He played somewhat haltingly, as if sight-reading.”

In the midst of working on the quartet, he wrote to his friend and fellow-composer Vissarion Shebalin, “I am concerned about the lightning speed with which I am composing. It’s no good, I feel sure. One should not compose with this kind of speed. ...I am composing with infernal speed and cannot stop… It is tiring, not very pleasant and when it’s over I have no confidence that the time has been spent usefully. I can’t shake off this bad habit though and I am composing much too fast as before.”

While there are no similar eye-witness accounts about the time he was composing the trio, chances are pretty good, since that was only a month earlier, the “process” was essentially the same.

Shostakovich & members of the Beethoven Quartet playing the world premiere of the Piano Trio No. 2 in 1944

The Piano Trio was premiered on November 14th, 1944, with Shostakovich at the piano, and with two members of the Beethoven Quartet. The 2nd String Quartet was also premiered on that concert with the complete Beethoven Quartet. The “original cast” of the premiere subsequently recorded the trio in 1946; the following year, Shostakovich and David Oistrakh, with Czech cellist Miloš Sádlo, recorded it in Prague. Oistrakh said, “Without meaning to boast, I believe that this recording of the trio is the best of all that I have heard.”

The trio is in four movements. The opening starts with an austere, slow fugue, a simple and rather eerie melody made more eerie by being played on the cello using “artificial harmonics,” the high-pitched, ethereal sound in the instrument’s uppermost register. The violin enters, then, in its lowest register, creating a unique sonority by reversing the roles. Also typical of Shostakovich, the piano part often consists of a single line with wide-octave doublings. When the tempo changes to Moderato, we’re in a kind of neo-classical vein, not without violent contrasts. According to Sollertinsky’s sister, the scherzo, similar to that of the Piano Quintet, was “an amazingly exact portrait” of her brother, whom she said Shostakovich “understood like no one else.”

The slow movement is a mournful passacaglia, a vague sequence of eight chords repeating in the piano, ending with an “unstable” diminished chord. Over this, the strings play dirge-like canons. It’s interesting to realize the 8th Symphony of the previous year also includes a passacaglia as its mournful slow movement. In 1975, the piano trio’s passacaglia would be played at Shostakovich’s public funeral service.

This unresolved diminished chord continues directly into the finale, described as a “Dance of Death,” inspired by the composer having read newspaper accounts of the Red Army’s liberation of Nazi death camps in Poland, particularly Treblinka, and telling a friend he was particularly horrified by reports Nazi guards made their victims dig their own graves, then dance beside them before they were executed.

This movement is the first time Shostakovich used Jewish music as a source-material for his own works. “The distinguishing feature of Jewish music is the ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations," Shostakovich told a friend. "Why does a man strike up a jolly song? Because he feels sad at heart.” This sort of black humor – “laughter through tears” – struck a deep chord in Shostakovich.

The folk-like dance tune begins the finale, whispered, then answered by an impassioned tune full of klezmer-like “intonations.” As the intensity builds, it’s impossible not to imagine, whatever its programmatic implications, this music “must mean something,” and no doubt something horrific.

Like other material from earlier movements, the passacaglia chords then return near the end of the finale: it is only there that that final unstable diminished chord resolves to a quiet – perhaps hopeful? – series of repeated E major chords. If not a triumph over tragedy, perhaps – and again Shostakovich has said nothing specific about this, one way or another – it is at least the awareness we have survived.

While no one could ever complain their performance is “underplayed,” Martha Argerich, Gidon Kremer, and Mischa Maisky recorded Shostakovich’s trio in Tokyo in 1998:

Shostakovich would later use this “dance of death” theme in the shattering climax of his String Quartet No. 8, a clearly autobiographical work full of quotes from several of his earlier works. Written in 1960 shortly after he was forced to (finally) join the Communist Party (the fact that he had not yet become a card-carrying member would surprise many of us), the work is, on the surface, dedicated to the victims of Fascism and War, and written while he’d been working on a film score in Dresden, a city destroyed at the end of World War II by the allied bombings. But it was also a time when Shostakovich was in deep despair, and, as he told a close friend after returning to Moscow, on the verge of suicide. In his usual joking fashion, he introduced the work by telling Glickman, “when I die it’s hardly likely someone will write a quartet dedicated in my memory. So I decided to write it myself.” At the climax of the quartet, he quotes the “dance of death” theme from the trio’s finale but interweaves it with his own “musical signature,” the famous DSCH motive, his “initials” spelled out in German pitches, D–E-flat–C–B-natural. The implication couldn’t be more autobiographical than that...

– Dick Strawser

Summermusic 2025: Part Three, "Trials & Triumphs," Part One, Beethoven and his Archduke

The third and final concert of Summermusic 2025 takes place Saturday evening at 7:30 at the air-conditioned Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg. I mention this air-conditioning for those of you who might be suffering from heat frustration and who thought the weather reports couldn't possibly be more anxiety-laden than the news. Which might mean a program called "Trials and Triumphs" could be just the thing.

The program opens with the 2nd Piano Trio of Dmitri Shostakovich (you can read about it, here) written in the midst of World War II. Given its association with the recent death of a close friend and the news the Nazis had established concentration camps in Poland, the music possesses a cathartic intensity far beyond the scope of just three musicians. But, like other compositions from Shostakovich's career, there is always, however distant they might seem at the time, a sense of survival in the face of the inhumanity of history.  

The “Archduke” Trio is usually considered the greatest of Beethoven’s piano trios, not a medium where one would expect a composer to be writing “heroic” works of the stature of symphonies like 3rd or 5th. It is certainly the grandest of the trios and, given all the details of Beethoven’s life around the time it was written and premiered, definitely a triumph over adversity – and not just his deafness. While we often listen to music “out of context” and even more often without really listening to it (the difference between “hearing” it and listening to it are two separate levels of involvement), what context can we place the piece in that would help a listener appreciate the music even more?

 

Beethoven composing around 1811, a painting by Carl Schloesser

Since writing about Beethoven’s music can reveal an infinite number of rabbit holes, I thought I would begin with something I’d found a few months ago and jotted down (alas without referencing its source: a biography, I assume, either the one by Maynard Solomon or a more recent one by Jan Swafford, both of which I recommend for more avid rabbit-hunters):

“During the Congress of Vienna which was busy reshaping Europe following the Napoleonic Wars, Beethoven's cantata "The Glorious Moment," "Wellington's Victory" and the 7th Symphony were performed on November 29th, 1814, to great acclaim. But on Nov. 30th, the head of the Secret Police wrote in his report "The recital given yesterday did not serve to increase enthusiasm for the talent of this composer who has his partisans and his adversaries. In opposition to his admirers... is formed an overwhelming majority of connoisseurs who refuse absolutely to listen to his works hereafter."

Since we normally consider Beethoven one of the Greatest Composers of All Time, possibly The Greatest, this might put “The Master” in a more realistic context, especially regarding the work that concludes this year’s Summermusic Series, the Piano Trio No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 97, better known as “The Archduke Trio,” which was given its first public performance on April 11th, 1814, just seven months before the concert mentioned in the Secret Police’s report.

Before digging deeper, here is a performance of Beethoven’s last piano trio – with score – played by pianist Daniel Barenboim, violinist Michael Barenboim (yes, Daniel Barenboim’s son), and the Austrian-Iranian cellist Kian Soltani. Both string players had long played in Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, comprised of young Jewish and Islamic musicians formed in 1999.

Whatever prompted Beethoven to write the trio – does the noble and expansive opening represent a musical portrait of the Archduke as some writers suggest? – we know he began “sketching” it during the summer of 1810 at the same time he began work on the next string quartet which would become the Quartetto Serioso (one of the few works he would give a title). It was Beethoven’s habit to compose works in contrasting pairs, sometimes concurrently – in the course of the sketches, the “Pastoral” Symphony almost became No. 5 and the C Minor Symphony, No. 6 – and this would continue until the end. Having completed the 9th Symphony, Beethoven began sketching a 10th and the pages found in his desk after his death suggest it too would be, by comparison, a more lyrical, expansive work than the incredible 9th (if you’ve ever wondered “how could he possibly follow that…?”).

Personal history and health issues aside, what were the purely “academic” considerations Beethoven would address in writing a piece contrasting to the “Serioso”? Obviously, it should not be “so serious,” and that becomes fairly obvious when you listen to the scherzo and to the finale of the trio. Honestly, reading some descriptions of the music, you would almost think you were about to hear a slap-stick comedy (I suspect at least one annotator had heard a bad performance which colored his approach to the music itself). But, given the times – 1811 was still in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars and Vienna was still reeling from the French Occupation of 1809 – and given the memory of “Papa” Haydn (who coincidentally died during that occupation) who had his own unexpected twists that brought smiles of delight to his listeners, Beethoven was doing nothing new, though perhaps, for some, doing it “more new” than they’d expected.

Case in point – the opening “theme” of the scherzo is a simple scale in the cello with rhythmic punctuation. “That’s it?!” you could imagine Standard Music Lover No. 10 sitting there in the audience’s third row wondering if Beethoven weren’t in fact pulling their collective leg. But if the main theme of the first movement is generated by triads – not unlike the building blocks used in his 3rd and 5th Symphonies’ opening themes – why not, if you’re looking for contrast, built the next movement’s theme on a scale?

The finale is also rather light-hearted and is generally taken as a comfortable country-dance. (Curiously, Beethoven had remarked, in rehearsal, that his fellow musicians shouldn’t be so gentle with it, playing instead with “much energy and force.”) But there are also unexpected turns – Beethoven had established the disruption of the forward flow by extending a note’s duration in the opening theme, extending a four-bar phrase into five bars; and that trait shows up in delayed resolutions of up-beat chords in the finale. First of all, it starts right on top of the slow movement’s final chord, without a break and only a single chord preparation: bam! Between the sudden changes in dynamics, the almost snickering motive going back-and-forth between the strings and piano, and Beethoven’s favorite off-beat accents (hardly something a genteel courtly dancer would do), you already have something that amounts to a second scherzo (not so serious, now). And then when you get to the coda with its sudden change of tempo (fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride), here you are in the key of A Major. Okay, so it’s only a half-step away from B-flat, but in the universe of traditional 18th and early-19th Century tonality, it’s light-years away from the expected tonic. And then, once back home in B-flat Major, it’s over.

Compared to the taut structure that creates the tension in the Serioso Quartet (the Emerson Quartet’s performance clocks in at 23 minutes), the Archduke Trio is expansive, taking about 40 minutes. Compare the openings: the quartet’s is like a corkscrew, drilling into you in 3 seconds; the trio’s unfolds in a leisurely 8 measures (maybe 20-some seconds). The first movement alone takes about ten minutes compared to the Serioso’s less than half that. The quartet is relentless in its rhythmic and harmonic tension; the trio is, by comparison, a pleasant day’s walk in the park.

It’s also odd that in 1816 Beethoven would write in to Sir George Smart, the man who had introduced Beethoven to the English public that would lead to the commission for his 9th Symphony the following year, he thought "the Quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public." Most would agree Beethoven didn’t mean that as a literal injunction (concerts in those days were different than they are today, anyway; music was still most likely to be heard, especially chamber music, in the “music rooms” of aristocrats like Prince Lobkowitz). Basically, it was the composer’s way of saying “this work is not recommended for popular consumption,” merely for entertainment. Perhaps, given his love of contrasts, he was specifically writing the Piano Trio to be exactly that: meant to appeal to popular taste and suitable for all ages.

The slow movement, placed between the scherzo and the finale for better contrast, continues this generally idyllic quality of the first movement. It is the only movement not in B-flat Major and is in the not very typical key of D Major (one would expect F Major or even E-flat; or, for a more serious tone, G Minor, the relative minor of B-flat Major, all sanctioned by the Classical Era’s text-book concept of tonality). But D Major has a brighter tone, due to the overtones of the open strings of the violin and cello, and it gives a different aura (so to speak) to a set of variations marked with an usual tempo indication: Andante cantabile ma però con moto. Thinking però could mean something distinctive, qualifying the singing character of cantabile – perhaps something like “whistfully”? – I looked it up and realized ma però con moto only means “but however with motion.” (Sigh...) By contrast to the scherzo (and the up-coming finale), the long-flowing singing melody, like a hymn, is accompanied by sustained harmonies that, as Beethoven’s lyrical imagination combines with his sense of the profound – think of the 9th Symphony’s slow movement – to create poetry that transcends its heart-felt simplicity.

from Beethoven's sketches for the 3rd & 4th movements of the Archduke Trio (if you're wondering about his handwriting, I refer you to the painting, fanciful or not, above...)

When Beethoven’s new trio was premiered – a private musical evening at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz – Beethoven was the pianist. The Archduke was not only present, he also performed as a pianist in another composition on the program.

About that premiere – for one thing, it didn’t take place until three years after the trio was completed which is odd in itself, considering most of the piece was composed over a short period of three weeks. Beethoven had been plagued by symptoms of his increasing deafness for more than a decade, now, and by the time it was performed, he was almost completely deaf. Ludwig (or Louis) Spohr, a famous violinist and highly regarded composer of the time – enough that Beethoven knew who he was when they met and subsequently became good friends – “witnessed” a rehearsal for the premiere and wrote this in his Autobiography:

“On account of his deafness there was scarcely anything left of the virtuosity of the artist which had formerly been so greatly admired. In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys until the strings jangled, and in piano he played so softly that whole groups of notes were omitted, so that the music was unintelligible unless one could look into the pianoforte part. I was deeply saddened at so hard a fate.”

Ignaz Moscheles, another leading pianist and composer of the day, wrote about the premiere: “in the case of how many compositions is the word 'new' misapplied! But never in Beethoven's, and least of all in this [piano trio], which again is full of originality. His playing, aside from its intellectual element, satisfied me less, being wanting in clarity and precision; but I observed many traces of the grand style of playing which I had long recognized in his compositions.”

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Another rabbit hole opened up when, googling information about the trio and asking the seemingly innocent question, sans Siri, “What did Beethoven compose in 1810,” the year he had begun sketching the Archduke Trio. And up came, “April 26th, 1810, Beethoven writes Fur Elise,” which of course makes it seem like (a.) we actually know when Beethoven wrote this ubiquitous little piano piece (scholars’ best guesses usually fall between 1808 and 1810, but sure, this is the internet we’re talking about), and (b.) this is the Greatest Piece of Music Beethoven Ever Wrote. But it is certainly one of the pieces most people, lovers of classical music or not, would recognize (and probably reach for their phones when they hear it). Without digging any deeper, it does present part of the problem when trying to place both composer and composition into some kind of context: we know he began sketching the piano trio in the summer of 1810 and saying he was “sketching” it is different from his actually writing it, which occurred during the month of March – one reference says “between March 3rd and March 26th” of the following year, 1811. If you want to consider what events were going on in Beethoven’s life at the time the work was conceived and written, you must consider he wrote very little around this time – why? – and what was going on in his personal life that might influence this.

Perhaps the biggest rabbit hole of all, then, is the whole warrenful of rabbit holes that opens up in 1812, all focused directly or indirectly around “The Immortal Beloved.” And while that seems to involve a period of time after the Archduke Trio, it is, naturally, not that simple. But I will do my best to refrain from taking you on a tour of the usual suspects regarding her mysterious identity. Just like no one seems to know who, exactly, Elise was, regarding that little, otherwise seemingly insignificant piano piece of a few years earlier…

More to the point, of course, is “Who Was the Archduke of Beethoven’s Title?” Unlike the Emperor in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto – that title refers to no specific person and the nickname was possibly supplied by Beethoven’s English publisher who’d called it “an emperor among concertos” (or perhaps some French officer who’d heard the premiere in 1811 and thought it was about the French Emperor, Napoleon, which was, given Beethoven’s politics and the fact Napoleon’s Army had occupied Vienna, making everybody’s life miserable for all of 1809, highly unlikely. The concerto is, however, dedicated to the Archduke Rudolf who happened to be the youngest brother of the Austrian Emperor, Franz I.

Rudolf was born in 1788, the youngest son of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and brother of the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II (he of Amadeus fame who actually did say there were too many notes in Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio). But when Joseph died without an heir, Rudolf’s father became Emperor Leopold II and when he died less than two years later, his eldest son inherited the throne as Francis II of the Holy Roman Empire. Since that nation ceased to exist in 1806, thanks to Napoleon, he then became just Francis I of the Austrian Empire. Now, barring some cataclysmic dynastic extinction, Rudolf never had a chance at becoming an emperor. Besides, he ended up dying four years before his older brother, anyway.

So, his chances of being anything remotely imperial beyond being the youngest son of a Grand Duke (or Archduke), Rudolf was allowed to pursue his primary interest: music. He was a talented pianist and exhibited an early talent in composition, so in 1803 or so, when Emperor Franz (or Francis, as he’s usually called in English) was looking around for a possible music teacher for his little brother, they landed on Beethoven as a possibility. Ironically, as far as we Americans are concerned, Emperor Franz is not one of those historical personalities to gain much of a gleam of recognition; but because he’d studied with Beethoven, and Beethoven dedicated several works to him, including both the 4th and 5th Piano Concertos, three piano sonatas (Les Adieux, the Hammerklavier, and Op.111), as well as the last of his piano trios, the “Archduke” Trio. Beethoven also wrote his Triple Concerto for the Archduke to play, writing it around the time the 16-year-old Archduke started to study with him.

Since the boy suffered from epilepsy and a military career was out of the question, a life of music and scholarship was deemed more satisfactory; subsequently, he pursued a career in the church, and was appointed Archbishop of Olmütz (now Olomouc in the Czech Republic) when he was 31 (curiously, he was named a cardinal a few months later, ordained a priest a few months after that, and less than a month after that, consecrated a bishop). Sorry about that particular rabbit hole, but his student’s sudden elevation in the ecclesiastical world inspired Beethoven to compose a mass for his investiture which took place in March, 1820. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be), Beethoven’s inspiration turned his mass into a massive project which became his Missa Solemnis which, unfortunately, was not completed until 1824… The fact he also wrote his 9th Symphony at the same time, between 1822 and 1824, didn’t help with the deadline.

But it wasn’t just Beethoven cozying up to a member of the Imperial Family: Rudolf was well known as a patron of the arts and in particular of Beethoven, having arranged in 1809 for him and two of his aristocratic friends to present Beethoven with a “guaranteed annual salary of 4000 florins” to convince the composer not to leave Vienna. Yes, there had been almost immediate problems: the French occupied Vienna (again) in 1809, when much of the city’s nobility, including the Imperial Family, evacuated the city, leaving behind social and financial chaos. In 1811, the Austrian currency was devalued “fivefold,” placing an undue burden on the aristocrats’ contributions to Beethoven’s pension. When Prince Kinsky was thrown from his horse and died in 1812 and Prince Lobkowitz went bankrupt the following year, Rudolf alone maintained Beethoven’s pension.

So there you have, more than less, all you need to know about Beethoven and his Archduke.

Oh, and one more thing… Rudolf studied piano as well as composition with Beethoven, and Beethoven rarely taught anyone composition. The Archduke composed several piano pieces and chamber works (including a septet for winds and strings and a clarinet sonata) but due to his royal status, these had to be published anonymously; nor could he appear on the stage as a performer as a professional musician – it just wasn’t done. 

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Among several questions I haven’t mentioned, one that bothers me is “If Beethoven finished the work in March of 1811 – especially if it only took him three weeks to finalize the piece – why did he wait until April, 1814, three years later, to premiere it? And then two more years before he’d publish it?” He did the same thing with the Serioso Quartet, completed presumably in October 1810, which wasn’t premiered until May of 1814, or published until 1816. These are two major works – “serious” works, I was going to say – so why the delay? Could he have had reservations about them? He was publishing other things at the time, so why not these two?

In the post about the Dvořák String Quintet, I mentioned how careful one had to be about using the publisher’s Opus Number when trying to sort out when a work was composed. In this case, Beethoven completed his previous string quartet, known as “The Harp”, in 1809 and published it as Op. 74 in 1810 and dedicated it to Prince Lobkowitz who held a musical evening at his palace after the French withdrew from Vienna in December of 1809. This soiree included the quartet’s first performance. The “Emperor” Concerto, also completed in 1809, was published as Op. 73 in 1810 (and premiered in Leipzig in November, 1811).

Beethoven was frequently tardy with his publications: the oratorio, Christ on the Mount of Olives, for instance, was composed in 1803 and premiered the following year. But he was “quite critical” of the piece and the performance, only revising it in 1811 for publication as Op. 85. This was a time when apparently Beethoven dumped a lot of earlier works on his publisher, for whatever reason, including a trio for oboes and English horn which became Op. 87 despite being written in 1795 (if you want another rabbit-hole to explore, this piece along with other arrangements of it for string trio, has also appeared as Op. 29, Op. 55, and Op.55bis.) By comparison, the “Eroica,” completed in 1803 was published in 1806 after several private performances as Op. 53.

Given how composers’ styles often change within the span of a few years – Beethoven’s especially – it can be challenging to place a particular work in its stylistic context if the opus numbers are so skewed they “misrepresent” when they were composed. And there’s also the problem that many listeners (and program annotators) mention a work was written in such-and-such a year when, in fact, that was the year it was published. Normally it wouldn’t make much difference, if it would matter at all to the average listener, but there are those who would complain mightily if I mentioned the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series in 1959 – no, they didn’t, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1957!

I rest my case…

– Dick Strawser