Now that we’re halfway through the year – in fact, believe it or not, halfway through the decade – and there’s little doubt summer is here, it’s time for Market Square Concerts’ annual Summermusic, a series of three concerts of chamber music, all held at the Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg (where, by the way, it’s air-conditioned).
The first program, entitled “Love & Loss,” is this Sunday, July 13th, at 4:00. Wednesday’s program, “Places and People,” features Schubert’s famous “Trout” Quintet, written for a trip into the Austrian countryside (with or without a day spent fishing) and Dvořák’s String Quintet in G Major which he dedicated “to my nation.” The final concert of the series, on Saturday, July 19th, also at 7:30, is called “Trials & Triumphs,” and includes Shostakovich’s 2nd Piano Trio, written at the height of World War II, and Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio, written during the last years of more than a decade of Napoleon’s near-constant warfare.
(Stay tuned, as they say, for additional posts about the next two concerts in the series.)
Music, among its many attributes, can help us become a little “absent-minded” about the reality raging around us. French philosopher Henri Bergson described in an essay from 1911 how the artist must “put on blinders” to focus on artistic perception but not necessarily neglecting the present (or the past), “absent-minded” in the sense of the mind being “absent” from current distractions that would interfere with the creative process. In turn this allows us, the audience (in this case, the listeners), to find a few moments’ respite from the world around us, whether it’s our own personal cares or more long-term concerns about the future.
In most cases, listeners tend not to be aware of what I like to call the music’s biography, what events in the composer’s life or in the times during which it was composed may have affected its creation. Sometimes, there’s a dramatic connection that makes it obvious – Shostakovich’s trio in the third program is a case in point, whether we know exactly what its circumstances were – or, as in Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, how the music came about is immaterial to your enjoyment of it.
Many listeners also tend to think composers write their music in a vacuum, that, whatever sparks their creativity aside, they simply write. That may be true in many cases – someone commissions them to write a piece for them (like Schubert and his “Trout” Quintet); Beethoven feels like writing another piano trio – and sometimes it’s not a very “up-lifting” inspiration: say, the need for money (like it or not, artists, even the Great Beethoven, needed money to pay the rent).
Brahms’ popular Horn Trio is a case in point. We think of its finale bubbling along and imagine “pleasant impressions upon spending the summer in the countryside” even if Brahms’ publisher was not enthusiastic about the use of the horn which he thought would affect sales (money was to be made in the “amateur market” and how many horn-players out there were going to buy a piece like this?). But there’s a lot more going on behind the music than we might think.
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| Max Bruch, c.1912 |
The program opens with a suite of eight pieces for clarinet, viola, and piano which Max Bruch called, rather unimaginatively, “Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano.” Schumann might write collections of short “character” pieces with titles implying a story, and give the set an evocative title like “Carnival” or “Scenes from Childhood” with individual movements like “Harlequin” or “The Rocking Horse.” Less imaginative or literary-minded composers might call it a “Suite” or dub the components things like “Prelude No. 7 in E Minor.” So, no, Bruch implied no such direct or indirect story-telling connection with his 8 Pieces despite one being called “Romanian Melody” and another “Night Song.” Otherwise, they're designated by tempo, all but one of them in a minor key. For instance, the 4th piece could suggest something causing a state of anxiety, yet he calls it simply Allegro agitato.
It’s a rather odd combination, a clarinet and a viola with a piano. Given Brahms’ business-minded publisher who suggested he would only publish those clarinet sonatas and the clarinet trio if he prepared a version for viola instead of clarinet. What would this publisher have made of a piece for clarinet and viola?! At least when Brahms wrote his Clarinet Trio, he used a cello to balance the clarinet’s register. What was Bruch thinking when he decided to write for a combination like this? Obviously, he must have liked it: he composed a concerto for the same combination of instruments the very next year.
But we’re missing a key component of the pieces’ origins: Max Bruch wrote it for his son, Max Felix Bruch, who was at the time 25 years old and just starting his career as… a clarinetist! While I haven’t found any mention of the violist in question – otherwise, why not just write a bunch of pieces for clarinet and piano? – the concerto was written specifically for his son and the violinist Willy Hess, a friend of Bruch Senior’s whom he’d helped land a great teaching gig in Berlin. Hess’ father studied with Ludwig Spohr, one of the greatest violinists of the early-19th Century who wasn’t Paganini; and Hess himself studied with Joseph Joachim, one of the greatest violinists of the second half of the 19th Century and for whom both Brahms and Bruch wrote concertos. In 1910, Hess returned from America where he’d been concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, and that was the year he started teaching at Berlin’s famous Hochschule für Musik. It was also the year Bruch composed these 8 Pieces for his son and since Hess was equally comfortable as a violist, perhaps that was all the incentive Bruch needed to imagine something as academic as “how do I solve this problem of writing for two instruments in basically the same register?”
(See photo, left. Here's something not every composer can claim: Bruch as a statue on his hometown's City Hall.)
Bruch, in his day, was perhaps best known as a composer of choral music. Not surprisingly, he married a singer, Clara Tuczek, from a family of well-known singers and her niece was a pianist who studied with Clara Schumann. She was an alto. Bruch admitted he always had an affinity for the alto voice, whether that was before or after he met Clara Tuczek. And both the viola and the clarinet play in the alto register. Hmmm…
Oh, and just for the biography’s sake, Bruch and Clara married in January of 1881. Their first child, Margarethe, was born the following year; Max Felix, in May, 1884. By the age of 25, young Max was a theory teacher at the music school in Hamburg “and a promising clarinetist.” Oh, and here’s another biographical detail: young Max married Gertrude Kadner in 1910.
Wedding Present, anyone?
Remember Brahms’ publisher Simrock’s concerns about those clarinet pieces of his? Simrock also published Bruch’s music and they published an arrangement of the 8 Pieces for Violin, Cello, and Piano – in other words, your garden-variety Piano Trio. Simrock also issued each individual piece separately, if the musicians wanted to “mix and match.”
When Bruch wrote his 8 Pieces, it was 1910 and he was now 72. If you hear the music first, you might be surprised to discover it was composed two years before Schoenberg wrote Pierrot Lunaire, and Stravinsky was beginning work on The Rite of Spring. Yet even if you’re familiar with Bruch’s other music – and he wrote over 200 works, including operas, symphonies, concertos, and many choral works – the fingerprints of Robert Schumann are often not far beneath the surface (listen especially to No. 4, Allegro agitato).
Bruch may never have been the innovator that Beethoven or Schumann were, and while he was considered a “conservative” like Brahms in an age dominated by contemporary composers like Wagner and Liszt, once the musical fashion shifted with the new century, his musical style went from being “conservative” to “passé.”
He may be best known for his first Violin Concerto, written in the 1860s, and a setting of the Kol nidrei dating from 1881. His Scottish Fantasy, a violin concerto in all but name, which Peter Sirotin performed last year with the Harrisburg Symphony, is another favorite work of his, if less played than respected. His most popular piece during his own lifetime was his adaptation of twelve scenes from Homer’s Odyssey for chorus and orchestra (listen to Scene No. 5, “The Tempest at Sea”), premiered in 1873, though less played than talked about these days, if either.
Bruch died in Berlin in 1920 at 82, a little over a year after his wife. His tombstone is inscribed with the words, “Music is the language of God.” Among his last works were two string quintets and a string octet completed in the year of his death. Listening to this peaceful opening of the octet, it’s hard to believe this was composed in the depressing days following the end of World War I. Not only that, Schoenberg was developing what would become his “serial” style and Stravinsky, after The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, and L’Histoire du soldat, was evolving what would become his “neo-classical” style.
Because Bruch, a Protestant, composed a setting of the Kol nidrei, a Jewish prayer, in 1881, many assumed he was therefore Jewish. (However, he used Scottish folk songs in his Scottish Fantasy and wrote several works based on Swedish folk music, though no one has ever accused him of being a Scotsman or a Swede that I’m aware of.) Nonetheless, this association was enough for the Nazi Government to ban all of Bruch’s music throughout Germany between 1933 and 1945 for his being “a possible Jew.” Since his music was out-of-fashion with the times, anyway – and otherwise overshadowed by Brahms – it didn’t take much for his music to practically disappear in Germany.
Incidentally, Young Max Felix did not stick with music. Like many musicians and teachers, he eventually abandoned his career (for whatever reason) to become “a salesperson for a recording company,” and died in Berlin in 1943 (speaking of “difficult times”) at the age of 59. His younger brother Hans, a promising painter, unfortunately died in 1913 of blood poisoning at the age of 26. The youngest of Bruch’s children, Ewald, became a police officer and “fastidiously collected his father’s musical scores and manuscripts, which he bequeathed to the Institute of Musicology at the University of Cologne,” Bruch’s hometown, before he died in 1974.
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The Brahms Horn Trio is a work Peter Sirotin told me was one of his favorites. There are many performances available on YouTube with the usual caveat about recording sound or video quality, but one of my favorites, despite its old mono sound, is this amazing 1957 recording with the incomparable Dennis Brain, one of the greatest horn players ever, recording shortly before his death in an automobile accident. Though you may not have heard of his colleagues, pianist Cyril Preedy and violinist Max Salpeter, I hope you'll find the performance as vital as I did when I first heard it years ago. Alas, it is only available in individual movements:
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1st Movement (Andante)
2nd Movement (Scherzo)
3rd Movement (Adagio)
4th Movement (Finale)
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| Brahms in the mid-1860s |
The youngest child, Fritz, long supported himself as a pianist who taught and performed in Hamburg, even playing Brahms' “Handel Variations” in public which Clara heard and reported were “totally beyond him.” (Small wonder: I could say the same of many pianists I've heard play them...)
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| Christiane Brahms in 1862 |
Three days after she'd mailed the letter, Fritz sent his brother a telegram: “If you want to see our mother again, come at once.” He hurried home to Hamburg but arrived two days after she had died suddenly of a stroke.
He wrote to his friend, Clara Schumann, who volunteered to come to Hamburg if she could be of any help, but Brahms hardly knew what to do himself, after getting his sister situated with friends (she, who never had a job, never had anything of her own beyond a tiny allowance from her mother, never knowing what to do without her mother telling her). When he returned to Vienna a week after the funeral, a friend stopped by to visit and found the composer playing Bach's Goldberg Variations. Without stopping, through his tears he told his visitor about his mother's death – and then after that rarely spoke of her publicly again.
Meanwhile, Clara, after taking a treatment for her arthritic hands called “animal baths” (“plunging her hands into the entrails of some freshly killed creature” – who knew?!), resumed her concertizing, a London tour because she needed the money. As he often did with a new work, Brahms sent her some sketches for “a so-called German Requiem” but not one setting the traditional liturgical text. Coming so soon after his mother's death, it would be easy to assume it was written in her memory but he had been thinking about it for some time. Even the melody he had used for the movement, “All Flesh is as Grass,” was a sarabande originally from his first attempt at a symphony (if you can imagine that sombre dance as the substitute for a scherzo!) begun shortly after his mentor Robert Schumann, Clara's husband, threw himself into the Rhine a decade earlier (that symphony's opening theme had already found a home in the first movement of his D Minor Piano Concerto).
Then it was time for his annual summer vacation – a working vacation when Brahms, just turned 32 and recently moved to Vienna where he'd become the director of the Vienna Singverein, escaped the urban distractions in order to compose. This summer he chose a village outside Baden-Baden, a quaint town near the Rhine deep in the Black Forest, mostly because Clara Schumann and her family were there and had recommended it. His day consisted of a fairly predictable schedule, awaking at dawn, then taking a walk after some strong coffee, followed by four hours of composing, then lunch either at Clara's or at a local inn, more work, then more coffee, and another visit to the Schumanns' where he usually stayed for dinner. From the windows of his rooms, he could see the forest-covered mountains just beyond the road into town.
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| the modern "French" Horn |
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| Natural Horn (with a bunch of crooks) |
This is the reason why all four movements of Brahms' trio are in E-flat, rather than branching off into any number of possible related keys for variety's sake, meaning once set-up and tuned, the horn player didn't have to deal with additional, extraneous lengths of pipe. Now, while a horn could play the pitch G in the key of E-flat Major, it could not play the pitch G-flat which you'd need for E-flat Minor. But in order to manage this and other such notes, a horn player would insert his hand deeper into the instrument's bell and “stop” the pitch, which required additional control of the emboucher (the pressure of the lips on the mouthpiece) in order to “lower” the played pitch. This gave the note a distinctly darker tone, one the modern valved (“French”) instrument would not have. But Brahms wanted this effect specifically and it is most tellingly used in the third movement, the slow, mournful movement in E-flat Minor.
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| A scene in Germany's Black Forest |
There is a natural (no pun intended) sound especially in the opening movement if we remember that the dawn of German Romanticism in the early-19th Century often evoked hunting calls from deep in the German forests (like the mysterious Black Forest around Baden-Baden) – think of the whole story behind Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz with, its sinister elements aside, all those hunting choruses full of the folksy sound of men's voices and the more prevalent sound of the horn both as a solo instrument and as a quartet. Bringing such an instrument into a small concert space – much less a family's living room – would have been very different from having a violin or a piano imitating these very sound effects. But it is only in the finale that Brahms lets the horn “go,” romping through the woodlands – off on the hunt! – with a barrage of traditional horn-calls.
Yet, coming back to that odd slow movement where the player has to “stop” the note to play the darker minor third of the key – the G-flat – that is the very pitch Brahms chose to end the movement with and he would not have done that if he didn't specifically want that “veiled” tone (he could just as easily have ended the horn on an E-flat and avoid this different sounding note). The whole movement is a mournful dirge and though he may not have specifically said so, how could it not have been inspired as a gentle memorial to his mother who'd died only six months earlier?
And why the horn in the first place? His publisher would only agree to the piece if he allowed an “alternate” version with a viola instead of a horn since, viola-jokes aside, there were more violists for family musicales than there would be horn-players. The same thing would happen almost 30 years later when his late Clarinet Sonatas also entered the world as Viola Sonatas despite originally being inspired by the brilliant playing of clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld for whom he'd composed them (as well as the Clarinet Trio and that indescribable Clarinet Quintet, another masterpiece of the chamber music repertoire), sounding so different when played with a viola (no matter how well) instead.
As far as I can tell, there is no mention of a famous horn player to inspire Brahms to write this trio in 1865, like the musician Josef Leutgeb for whom Mozart composed at least five concertos in the 1780s.
So why did Brahms choose to write a Horn Trio? Why not a Piano Trio (he had already written at least one of those)? He had already completed two Piano Quartets (the third, begun earlier, wasn't finished for another ten years), not to forget the unforgettable Piano Quintet, another masterpiece, published the previous year (it was originally a sonata for two pianos before it became a string quintet before Brahms decided it should really be a quintet for one piano and string quartet!).
Or, if he were writing a tribute to his mother and he was now the conductor of the finest choir in Vienna, why not a choral work? Ah, yes, well... there's the German Requiem (for a time, he considered calling it “A Human Requiem”) which would find its final form three years later when he added the last movement to be composed, the soprano solo setting the text “You now have sadness” and ending with “I will comfort you as one whom his mother comforts.”
Perhaps – and this is only a matter of conjecture since Brahms never mentioned the connection and would likely have scoffed at the suggestion (he usually brushed off any reference to his mother's death inspiring such music in the first place) – it is because, when Brahms was a child, his father played the old natural horn and taught his son Hannes how to play it as well (in addition to the piano, the boy also took cello lessons). There are few surviving references to his mother in the family history anyway, but perhaps there was some memory, something he recalled – did she like the way he played the horn? something he played on it that she especially enjoyed? – that made the connection a personal one, not just the idea “why, I think I'll write a horn trio”?
Brahms who loved his family now saw his family in shambles: his father had left his mother and not long after that, coincidentally one assumes, she died. His elder sister Elise needed caring for but his younger brother Fritz was not so inclined and so it was Hannes, writing from Vienna, who made what arrangements she needed and sent money to her. Not long after their mother died, he and Fritz (never close) had a further falling out and rarely communicated.
Perhaps the loss of his family is more behind the Horn Trio than just the death of his mother? Again, pure conjecture – but what goes through one's mind in the quiet times of such situations?
Who has not been there, metaphorically in Brahms' shoes, receiving a long and loving letter only to find out it is too late to respond? Such news rocks the very foundation of our world and those things you think of, things you should have done, could have done, perhaps put off doing, maybe recalling an argument or something that could have been better handled, even a chance to say good-bye, continue to haunt us. But now it is too late.
In October, then, back from Baden-Baden with a completed Horn Trio in his suitcase, Brahms receives a three-page letter from his usually tongue-tied father. In a long round-about way, Johann Jakob introduces Karoline Schnack, the woman he has cautiously asked to marry him (he is 59; she is 18 years younger). Brahms, fortunately, took the news gladly and developed a warm relationship with his new step-mother, soon even calling her “Mother.” Her own son, also named Fritz, with his frail health was a special concern for her and, calling him “the Second Fritz,” Hannes in his quiet generosity saw to it he was also cared for.
Clara Schumann, of course, had dealt with the death of her husband Robert nine years earlier, kept from seeing him during the last years of his life after that horrible afternoon when he suddenly threw himself off that bridge and was then locked away in an asylum outside Bonn which might as well have been half a world away.
Later, Brahms had returned to Vienna after his mother's funeral when Clara wrote to call off an intended visit. He'd half-expected the news, he replied, joking how he'd even cleaned up his room, bought new coffee cups, cleaned the plates and ordered fireworks and preserves (!). That she was well and “bracing [her]self with all sorts of edifying things such as philosophy” was, however, good to hear, even if he meant it ironically.
“The world is round,” he continued, “and it must turn; what God does is well done; consider the lilies [the equivalent of “stop to smell the roses”], etc; or better still, don't think at all, for things cannot be altered and a wise man repents of nothing.”
– Dick Strawser
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(I can write a symphony but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to keep the fonts consistent in a Google Blogspot post... My apologies...)
