They’ve just released their fifth recording, a CD of string quartets by Franz Schubert – the “Rosamunde” and “Death & the Maiden” Quartets – which will be an excuse to hold a CD Release Party at the Midtown Scholar Book Store tonight at 7pm where we’ll hear some Schubert played live and have a bit of Q&A about the life of a quartet. This event is free and coupons for a $10 discount on Thursday night’s concert with the Doric Quartet will be available to attendees.
Then Thursday night, at Temple Ohev Sholom, they’ll play three quartets – Schumann’s 2nd; the last work Ernest Chausson almost finished, his only String Quartet; and one of the monuments of the repertoire, Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op.131.
Incidentally, Market Square Concerts standard student ticket policy for all concerts offers $5 tickets to college students with a valid ID. School-aged children (K-12) attend for free and an accompanying adult can purchase a $5 ticket.
This post covers the Schumann and Chausson quartets on the program. You can read more about Schubert and his Death & the Maiden Quartet here. The Beethoven quartet requires a post of its own.
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In the past, I’ve written a great deal about Robert Schumann’s life and his Year of Chamber Music – you can read this post which is primarily about the Piano Quintet but which will give you the biographical background to that summer when he composed all three of the Op.41 String Quartets as well as the Piano Quintet and Quartet, all between June and November.
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| Schumann |
It’s important to realize, given the easily jumbled chronology of the music we’re familiar with in the concert hall or on recordings, that Schumann was writing this about 15 years after Beethoven’s death (and the Late Quartets were generally unknown and largely unpopular with the typical concert-going audiences of the day – more on that, later) but also about 10 years before he met a young composer named Johannes Brahms (when Schumann composed his quartets, Brahms was still only 9 years old).
Only Felix Mendelssohn wrote quartets during the period between Beethoven’s and Schubert’s deaths and Schumann’s article which have endured in the repertoire: the first two were written when he was 18-20; the three quartets of Op.44 were composed when he was 28-29.
It’s not unusual, then, to see Schumann sitting down to write some string quartets to see how he would fare – and then dedicating them to his friend and colleague, Felix Mendelssohn.
In the spring of 1842, Clara Schumann, one of the greatest pianists of her day, had returned home after a long tour. Plans for an American tour were receding and Robert was glad to have his wife home with him as housewife, mother and hostess rather than concert artist. It was a time they had both begun studying string quartets by Mozart and Haydn when Robert decided to put into practice what he had learned.
By June 2nd, he was sketching “quartet essays” and two days later began the 1st String Quartet. On the 11th, he began the 2nd Quartet even before the first one was finished. In between the 2nd and the 3rd Quartet, not begun until July 8th, he wrote a scathing article about Clara’s ex-boyfriend Carl Banck and his new composition (it was so nasty, Schumann did not include it later when he re-published most of his articles) and also ended up in a libel case which netted him a 6-day jail sentence which was commuted to “a five thaler fine” (I don’t know what the equivalent of the standard German unit of currency would’ve been, but an 1841 thaler recently sold on E-bay for $270). The 3rd Quartet was finished on July 22nd, seven weeks after he’d begun work on the first.
We often talk a lot about Schumann’s “split personality,” not that he was schizophrenic in the medical sense or that he was any different from any artist who might be 50/50 Right-Brained/Left-Brained, as we might think of it today. Like the ancient Greek philosophers writing dialogues between teacher and student, Schumann often wrote articles or reviews from the viewpoints or with direct conversations from characters he named Florestan and Eusebius, among others. Florestan was the free and happy one and Eusebius the more pensive and dreamy. The 2nd of these three quartets from 1842 is definitely the Florestan side – hearing the opening theme can’t help but make you smile.
It’s difficult finding decent performances (much less recordings) on-line to post as examples, here, especially of the 2nd Quartet which, for some reason, is under-represented compared to the 1st and 3rd. This performance, by a group called the Manfred Quartet which I’m unfamiliar with, may give you a good idea of what to expect or if you want to hear it again after the performance (though you could come to the concert and buy the Doric Quartet’s CD on Chandos of all three Schumann quartets!).
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Robert Schumann: String Quartet No. 2 in F, Op.41/2 – 1st Movement.
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2nd Movement – Andante
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3rd Movement – Scherzo
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4th Movement – Finale
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| Chausson |
Chausson’s string quartet is Op.35 and compared to Schumann’s Op.41, written when he turned 32, and seeing a number like Op.131 a little later in the program, we might assume it’s a fairly early work. In fact, it’s his last almost-finished composition. He wrote little, published less, and may be best known for the Poeme for Violin and Orchestra and a little less for the Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet. His songs should be better known (of course, in these days when song recitals are almost a thing of the past, any songs should be better known) and his sole Symphony could be heard more often in this country.
He was something of a late-bloomer, taking up composition in his early-20s and studying with Jules Massenet, the then-reigning opera composer in France. He heard the world premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal along with his friend, fellow composer Vincent D’Indy, and this became a major influence on his style at a time when most French composers viewed the Germanic style of Wagner or even Beethoven and Brahms, as anathema, though in the late-1880s, he saw that a “period of de-Wagnerization is necessary” in order to rediscover a musical language free of “Nordic mists” and “extreme Romanticism” in favor of “a healthier, more classical expression,” again pointing out the artistic personalities of the right-brained and the left-brained artist.
You can read more about Chausson’s life in a post from one of Market Square Concerts past Summermusics which featured a live performance of the “Concert(o) for Violin, Piano & String Quartet.”
For Chausson, composing was an often painful process. Talented as he may have been, it did not flow as easily for him as it did Schubert or even Schumann (who still, for all his many bursts of creativity, had to contend with subsequent periods of depression and exhaustion). About the time he turned 40, mid-life crisis or not, he became increasingly pessimistic, though whether that was a natural development or the result of discovering Russian authors like Dostoievsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev (or perhaps what drew him to these writers), who can say? He was also heavily influenced by the Symbolist poets of the day. Some say his music sounds more influenced by Debussy with whom he was on friendly terms until the mid-1890s when Chausson disapproved of Debussy’s promiscuous lifestyle. But realistically, it would be more his being influenced by the same things – poetry and painting especially – that influenced Debussy.
His String Quartet is a work I’ve never heard either in performance or in recordings. I’ve heard his Piano Trio and his Piano Quartet, both live, but the only thing I can find written about the String Quartet beyond the story of its composition is this, from the Grove Dictionary:
“…and the austere String Quartet, begun in 1897 and left unfinished at his death.”
And this:
“He wanted to prove, above all…, that a sonata or a quartet may contain as much music as a whole opera. In the first bar of the String Quartet Op. 35, the basic elements of the work are superimposed on each other – a 3rd in the first violin, a 5th in the second violin and viola, and a 6th in the cello; the principal theme is composed of just these three intervals.” This sounds definitely like he’d given up his intense Romanticism for the more intellectual world of the classical architect.
As for the biography of the quartet itself, Chausson was spending the summer at one of his country estates in 1899 when he decided to go for a bike ride. Though details are sketchy (there being no witnesses), he was riding downhill, perhaps lost control of the bike and, in those days before safety fanatics urged everyone to wear helmets, crashed into a wall (stone or brick, according to different accounts I’ve read) and died instantly. One source inferred he had recently been depressed and therefore implied possible suicide but that would also suggest a decision to put everything in order beforehand, which he didn’t seem to do.
An undated quote may impose a certain context, here: "There are moments when I feel myself driven by a kind of feverish instinct, as if I had the presentiment of being unable to attain my goal, or of attaining it too late.”
The quartet was left “unfinished” but how unfinished, I’m not aware. If it’s mentioned anywhere, it seems he was “almost finished” with it but are we talking the last several measures or simply going through an otherwise complete draft and doing some editing? Whatever needed to be done, Vincent D’Indy prepared the work for its premiere the following January.
Curiously, Chausson appears to have “adopted” (consciously or otherwise) a theme from Wagner’s Das Rheingold in the second movement.
When we think of composers who’ve died young, Franz Schubert and Mozart come first to mind, Schubert at 31 and Mozart at 35. We forget that Mendelssohn was 38 or Schumann was 44 when he tried to commit suicide, dying a few years later in a mental institution.
Chausson was also 44 when he went on that last bike-ride through his country estate, just as his career was taking a whole new turn.
And Beethoven, who seems so universal and agelessly titanic compared to every other composer even vaguely familiar to the mass audience today, was 56 when he died, not long after he had completed his last five string quartets.
When a friend asked him which he thought was the best, Beethoven responded “Each of them, in their own way.” But one of them – the C-sharp Minor, Op.131 – was his favorite and it concludes the Doric Quartet’s program for Market Square Concerts.
I’ll write about that in a separate post, which you can find (eventually) here.
Dick Strawser
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The photos of the Doric Quartet are copyrighted by the quartet. The photo of Julia Rosenbaum was taken at the Harrisburg Symphony concert, Nov.10th, 2012, by Kim Isenhour.
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