The Calidore Quartet Returns: Part Two, Korngold

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1944)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1^st Movement, Allegro moderato:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julius Korngold (1942)

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

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

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

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

The Composer composing

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

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

– Dick Strawser

The Calidore Quartet Returns: Part One, Mozart and Beethoven

The Calidore Quartet crosses the street.

The Calidore Quartet returns to Harrisburg with a performance at Temple Ohev Sholom on Wednesday, September 25th to begin Market Square Concerts’ new 2024-2025 Season. The performance, which begins at 7:30, opens with the third of Mozart’s Six Quartets Dedicated to Haydn; continues with the last quartet written by Erich Wolfgang Korngold after a decade spent writing film scores for Hollywood; and then, after intermission, concludes with the first of Beethoven’s three “Razumovsky” Quartets. This first post is about the Mozart and Beethoven quartets; you can read the second post, about Korngold and his quartet, here.

When the Calidore Quartet was here in April, 2018, performing Haydn, Beethoven, and Shostakovich, I wrote: “When music ensembles like a string quartet get together and look for a name to call themselves, the easy way out is simply to name themselves after the first violinist or their location. More challenging is to come up with a musical term that sounds... well, catchy would be good but I'll settle for “not silly.” Others prefer to honor a favorite author or painter – the Emerson or the Escher come to mind – or even a violin-maker like Guarneri. The Cypress Quartet took their name not from the tree but from a set of works called Cypresses for string quartet by Antonin Dvořák that was part of their core repertoire when starting out. There's even a Lark Quartet which, presumably, takes its name from Haydn's “Lark” Quartet.

"Formed in 2010, the Calidore Quartet explains their name this way: Using an amalgamation of California and doré (French for “golden”), the ensemble’s name represents a reverence for the diversity of culture and the strong support it received from its home of origin, Los Angeles, California, the “golden state.” (Points, here, for uniqueness.)

"Looking over the roster of string quartets crisscrossing the world performing gems of the chamber music repertoire and, occasionally – but more frequently, now – adding new works for the future, you might wonder “where are all those young quartets coming from?” Depending on your tone of voice, you might wonder “what's happened to all those great quartets I used to hear?” We forget that, at some point, the Guarneri and Cleveland Quartets were “young quartets” and who knows who the next generation's Juilliard and Emerson Quartets will be?

"In the historical line of things, remember all those winners of the Cleveland Quartet Prize we get to present to you? This is a prize founded by the Cleveland Quartet to foster excellence in the wide-open and highly competitive field of new quartets. And the Emerson Quartet mentors young quartets itself – like the Calidore.”

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

Usually, in these posts, I like to give you the “biographical” background to the music you’re going to hear with some information about the composer’s life at the time it was written. Part One is about the Mozart and Beethoven since their “stories” don’t need a lot of detail. Erich Wolfgang Korngold and his music may not be as familiar to the average listener, so I’ll go into more detail in Part Two which I hope to post soon. Like Mozart, he too was a prodigy and it’s a fascinating story when you might sit there wondering “where does this music come from?” Eventually he succumbed to the siren song of Hollywood and wrote mostly film scores at which he proved very successful. Then, in his late 40s when he was less in demand for the Silver Screen, he returned to writing “concert music,” including the 3rd String Quartet. As they say in radio, “stay tuned.”

Before we begin, here are three samples from each piece on the program. A video of the complete work will be included in the “chapter” about each composer.

Here is the Guarneri Quartet in their 1992 release of Mozart’s String Quartet in E-flat Major, K.428, playing the first movement:

Rather than go in “program order,” I usually like to do things in “chronological order,” since the stylistic development is often interesting in itself. After all, Mozart composed his quartet in 1783 when he was 27 and Beethoven wrote his in 1806 when he was 35. Korngold, who, by comparison would sound quite modern, completed his 3rd Quartet in 1945 – he was 48 – almost 140 years later. A lot happened musically – and historically – in between.

The Emerson Quartet plays the finale of Beethoven's Quartet, Op. 59 No. 1, with its "Russian Theme."

And here, the Doric Quartet plays Korngold's finale which was composed at a time news from Europe indicated the end of World War II (and Hitler with it) was now a certainty.

WHAT WAS GOING ON IN MOZART’S LIFE WHEN HE COMPOSED HIS “HAYDN” QUARTETS?

The Winter of 1782-83 began a stretch of about three years when Mozart’s focus was primarily writing piano concertos (there would eventually be 14 new ones). He'd been 25 years old when he arrived in Vienna in March of 1781, a free-lancer now after having quit (or gotten himself fired from) his job at the court of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg where his father Leopold had been Assistant Kapellmeister, a composer-in-residence, violinist and teacher who never advanced further up the courtly ladder of success. Away from his father’s dominance, Mozart met and, against Leopold’s advice, married Constanze Weber on August 4th, 1782. Their first child, named Raimund Leopold, was born on June 17th, 1783, but died barely two months later. They would have five more children but only two of those survived infancy.

At some point – the facts are a little vague – Mozart met Haydn, regarded as one of the greatest of living composers. According to reliable witnesses (who recalled these events years after Mozart’s death), it probably was in December, 1783, when both composers had works performed at the Tonkünstler-Societät ("Society of Musicians"), fairly normal for Haydn, but a point of recognition for a newcomer like Mozart. 

Haydn & Mozart playing string quartets at a party

As often happens with musicians, rather than socialize like “normal” people they get together and play music. A friend held a party and among the guests were Haydn and Mozart, along with composers Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Johann Baptist Vanhal, who played string quartets. Now, none of these were primarily performers on their instruments: Haydn was never much of a performer and was probably a proficient violinist while Dittersdorf had at least more experience as a player of the violin. Vanhal was a cellist (he wrote cello concertos) and Mozart, though primarily a pianist, had played the violin well enough to perform all of the violin concertos he’d written while working at the court in Salzburg. He preferred, however, to play the viola not because it was traditionally an instrument handed to less proficient violinists (it was, even before “viola jokes” were a thing, referred to as a “third violin”) but because it placed him in the middle of the melody in the violins and the bass line in the cello so he could listen to everything going on around him. We assume, because of Haydn’s reputation as a composer he would’ve played first violin but in terms of his proficiency he might have deferred to Dittersdorf’s more advance technique and played second.

Another of Mozart’s early friends in Vienna was Baron Godfried van Swieten, a diplomat and librarian to the Emperor Josef II. In addition to creating the first card catalogue – what old people used before Google – Swieten was also a collector of old manuscripts, particularly Bach and Handel, then generally unknown or certainly overlooked. Examining some of these, Mozart began to study not just counterpoint – the art of combining independent voices both melodically and harmonically – but how it was used in the more complex textures of the Baroque. This would reach its high-point in, say, the seemingly effortless but incredibly complicated final moments of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony.

We usually think of Mozart as this genius from day one, like a latter-day Athena springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus. He had no known teacher – and his father, no Zeus, was a pretty mediocre composer who might’ve been able to teach him the basic clichés of music but that doesn’t explain the level of perfection, as we regard his music today, which he eventually achieved. Even if Haydn was an ineffective teacher for Beethoven, what Beethoven learned was basically from studying Mozart’s music.

And what Mozart learned without studying with a “master teacher” (much less attending an accredited music school) was from absorbing the music he came in contact with, especially as a traveling child prodigy. One of the earliest and most significant influences was Johann Christian Bach, Johann Sebastian’s youngest son who, in his day, after settling in London, had become a more acclaimed composer than his father (at the time). Mozart arrived in London when he was 8 and the family spent over a year there, during which he met (or was paraded before) every potentially influential musician and aristocrat who might facilitate the Boy Wonder in landing a position at the Royal Court. We know Mozart played some of J.C. Bach’s keyboard works in public performances and we know at some point the two met. There was a report that Bach took the boy on his lap and “they played alternately on the same keyboard for two hours altogether, extempore, before the King and Queen.”

At some point during that visit, between 1764 and 1765, Mozart heard some symphonies by J.C. Bach and decided he would write some symphonies himself. The first one, in E-flat K.16, was written while his father was ill and for a period of several weeks the the boy suddenly found himself free from being bandied about like a trained monkey (when the symphony was eventually performed in a concert, there, Leopold complained he had to write out all the parts himself rather than spend a shilling per page to have them done by a professional copiest).

His earliest keyboard concertos are all arrangements of other composers’ solo keyboard pieces – a standard assignment for a young student if he’d had a master teacher – including three based on sonatas by J.C. Bach. It was one way of absorbing technique, by finding out how other composers handled the rigors of theory, not just harmony but also structure and style. The idea was, eventually, to sort all of this out and find your own way.

Mozart would continue “absorbing” the music of composers he would meet on these trips with his father, giving him an opportunity to become acquainted with music (and musicians) he would never have met had he spent his entire childhood stuck in Salzburg (which he loathed) doing hackwork for his father. While people often remark how these years on the road had been a failure – Leopold never did succeed in landing a job for his son, even in later years – what he learned in the process however is quite probably the reason we have the Mozart we know today.

So naturally, coming across music by a man regarded as the Greatest Composer Alive, Franz Josef Haydn, it was no surprise he would start to absorb how Haydn wrote not only music but specifically symphonies and string quartets. By the time Mozart escaped from Salzburg, he was already familiar with Haydn’s Op. 17, Op. 20, and Op. 33 sets, and it was most especially the latter, published in 1781, the year Mozart arrived in Vienna, that inspired the now 25-year-old Mozart to “absorb” Haydn’s quartet style, his “new and special manner.” Not by writing imitative works “in the style of Haydn,” but by studying them to find out as much as he could find and then write his own original quartets. Whether this project was inspired by actually meeting Haydn or not is not known, so far as I can tell, but before he actually did become personally acquainted with The Great Man at that December 1783 concert, Mozart had already completed the first three of the proposed six quartets he’d already mentioned to his publisher.

Compared to his earlier quartets, no doubt written for household use for the Prince-Archbishop and perhaps not approached with the same kind of seriousness he would apply now that he was trying to earn a living in Vienna, these “Haydn” Quartets as they’re generically called show a world of improvement in his melodic writing, his harmonic inventiveness, his grasp of stylistic and structural nuance, and above all the independence of the individual instruments (again, counterpoint, perhaps absorbed from the works of Bach and Handel he’d studied in Swieten’s library).

After writing a series of piano concertos for immediate use – for concerts to earn money – he took some time to compose these quartets more leisurely. Examining the original manuscripts, they also show he took considerable pains, making corrections, rewriting passages, something he rarely did (many of his works amaze us simply because he seemed to be writing them down so effortlessly, these were not “first drafts” but completed works). 

Mozart in 1782

The first one, K.387, is dated December 31st, 1782. The next two are undated but Constanza recalled later how he’d been working on the D Minor Quartet, K. 421, one night while she had gone into labor with the birth of their first child on July 17th, 1783, and that the third of the set, the E-flat Quartet, K.428, was being written around the same time, judging from evidence with the paper and ink Mozart was using. (Imagine writing a string quartet while your first child was being born! At least it gave him something to do rather than pace the floor…)

After a break (which included five more piano concertos, some miscellaneous chamber pieces, and a batch of dances), Mozart resumed work on the second set of three quartets, the first of which he completed on November 9th, 1784; the last two were entered into his handwritten thematic catalogue in January of 1785. There were two private performances in Haydn’s presence, the first three on January 15th, 1785, and the second three on February 12th. Leopold Mozart was visiting in February, and Haydn informed him after the concert, “Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name; he has taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition.” 

High praise indeed, and one wonders what it meant to Mozart who never received that kind of support from his own father.

The dedication to Haydn may not have been part of the original plan. Clearly, Haydn’s quartets were the inspiration for them. Ignaz Pleyel, however, had just dedicated a set of his own quartets to Haydn, much in the way composers would dedicate works to their teachers or to influential musicians more as a marketing tool or a kind of political act in a very competitive world, not just to wealthy patrons thanking them for the commission or hoping for a future one. So given Haydn’s approval of Mozart’s new quartets, perhaps the idea of dedicating them to his “inspiration” – it was after all the result of a form of studying with him – was the logical next step. All six were eventually published on September 1st, 1785, with a dedication to Haydn. And have always been referred to ever since as Mozart’s “Haydn Quartets.”

WHAT WAS GOING ON IN BEETHOVEN’S WORLD WHEN HE COMPOSED HIS RAZUMOVSKY QUARTETS?

When Beethoven arrived in Vienna in 1794, three years after the death of Mozart, it was a city of grand stone palaces and large, open parks enclosed within the old city walls built in the 16th Century to keep out the invading Turks. But as Napoleon’s Empire swept across Europe in a series of ever-expanding wars, the question now was would these walls keep out the French?

In early November, 1805, there was an encounter between the French and the Austrian armies (along with their newly arrived Russian allies) at Hollabrünn, about 33 miles from Vienna. At the moment, I’m rereading Tolstoy’s War & Peace and, almost 300 pages in, the current scene is set at this small skirmish en route to Austerlitz (about 100 miles north of the capital) which, on December 2nd, would prove a decisive victory for the French. But Napoleon had already occupied Vienna: rather than fighting, the government decided to surrender to the French generals who presented their demands and, on November 13th, 15,000 French troops entered the city.

So, what impact did this have on Beethoven, you ask? He was in the midst of rather contentious final rehearsals for his opera, Fidelio (or, as it was still called, Leonore; by opening night, it would be renamed Fidelio over Beethoven’s protests), hurrying to compose the overture (this would become known as the “Leonore Overture No. 2” despite the chronological order in which they were composed), and dealing with a case of chronic colic pains (comparable to that caused by kidney stones).

A week later, the opera premiered to a largely empty theater, populated mostly by officers of the French army who were hardly sympathetic toward a work that, years earlier, might have had fans of the French Revolution cheering. Needless to say, along with a rather lackluster performance and dim critical reviews, Beethoven’s only opera was a failure and, revisions in early-1806 (and a new overture – No. 3) notwithstanding, withdrawn. And buried in a desk drawer.

He had premiered his famous 3rd Symphony in April, 1805, having originally dedicated it to Napoleon but then, after the Revolutionary Hero of the Enlightenment had crowned himself Emperor of the French on December 2nd, 1804, he changed the name to reflect a more generic Hero. He would call it Eroica but, he wrote to his publisher, “it is really Bonaparte,”using the last name of the earlier Hero as opposed to the current tyrant Napoleon. 

Beethoven in 1806

On May 29th, 1806, Beethoven’s brother Karl married Johanna Ries (their son, Karl, the future famous nephew of the composer, would be born on September 4th, 1806 – do the math…). The next day, Beethoven began work on the first of three string quartets commissioned by the Russian ambassador to Vienna, Count Andrei Razumovsky. He was an avid amateur violinist, often sat in on performances by his “house quartet” – musicians-in-residence led by violinist Ignaz Schupannzig – and he wanted something new. In fact, he’d wanted to study the art of quartet writing from Beethoven already in 1800, shortly after the premiere of his six Op. 18 Quartets (Beethoven suggested he contact Aloys Förster instead). Back then, Beethoven, even as he approached 30, was still in awe of his former teacher, Haydn, then still master of both the symphony and the string quartet, but six years later, Haydn’s health was in decline, his career was essentially over, and Beethoven, following the Eroica, was in a whole new place, creatively.

Andrei Razumovsky in 1810

Considering his nationality, representing the Russian tsar at the court of the Austrian Emperor, the count requested Beethoven employ a Russian melody in each quartet, not something he was prone to doing (in 1803, he’d turned down a commission from a British publisher for six sonatas based on Scottish themes by suggesting a fee far too high for the publisher to accept). Given a book of suitable choices, he found two: in the 1st Quartet, it becomes the basis of the finale; the one in the 2nd Quartet is more familiar to us because Mussorgsky later used it in the Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov. There is no Russian Theme in the third quartet: there is no comment about it (did Beethoven give up on the idea?) nor is there any reaction I can find from Razumovsky about its absence.

By August, Beethoven was writing to his publisher he had finished the first of his quartets for Razumovsky. By the end of the year he would have completed or nearly completed not only the remaining two quartets, presumably by early-September, but also his Violin Concerto (premiered on December 23rd), most of his 5th Symphony (with which the Harrisburg Symphony opens its new season on September 28th and 29th) which he interrupted to write a freshly inspired 4th Symphony, and, by the end of the year, his 4th Piano Concerto.

Clearly a busy and productive time in Beethoven’s career, despite the political and social turmoil of the French Occupation! Oh, and by the way, after his victory at Austerlitz, the French Emperor signed a “treaty of friendship” with Austria on December 15th. Follow a concert at the Schönbrünn Palace (where Napoleon had been living much of this time), the French agreed to leave the city on December 27th, much to the relief of the Viennese. Including, one could easily imagine, Beethoven.

Things would not go quite so smoothly the next time Napoleon occupied Vienna. That would be in 1809 but this time, there was a siege complete with a bombardment before the city capitulated. A bomb fell and exploded in a yard next to the school where a 12-year-old Franz Schubert was attending classes; Franz Josef Haydn was dying – Napoleon posted a guard of honor outside his house to protect him; and Beethoven, unable to escape the city like his aristocratic patrons and the Imperial family, hid in the basement, covering his ears with pillows to protect his delicate hearing from the noise of the bombs and artillery.

Which brings us to one other thing that everyone knows about Beethoven: he was deaf.

His deafness was not complete (as we’d normally assume) until years later, the notebooks where people wrote down their part of the conversation since Beethoven could no longer hear them, weren’t used until 1818. His first symptoms began to appear intermittently around 1798, later impeded by a form of tinnitus. But during the summer of 1802, while working on his 2nd Symphony, these symptoms became so bad, he wrote the heart-rending Heilgenstadt Testament in which he described his despair over eventually becoming totally deaf, even contemplating suicide (“Oh Providence, grant me but one day of pure joy – it is so long since real joy has echoed in my heart”). And yet, during those weeks, he was writing this…

Four years later, he would write those three quartets for Count Razumovsky. Fortunately for us, he chose not to commit suicide and continued writing until the last year of his life 21 years later – including, when he was totally deaf, those last incredible “Late” Quartets!

Here is a performance recorded by the Emerson Quartet, with the compete score, of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59 No. 1:

 

Part Two and the 3rd Quartet of Erich Wolfgang Korngold will be posted soon.

Dick Strawser