Trio Gaia and Some Music in Springtime

Now that Spring is officially here, we can look forward to the next Market Square Concerts program which features Trio Gaia, performing a delightfully eclectic program ranging from Robert Schumann’s fiery Piano Trio No. 1 and Debussy’s youthful Piano Trio, to Reena Esmail’s ethereal “Saans” (Breath), written as a wedding gift for a close friend, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s Four Folk Songs inspired by melodic motifs and rhythms of her mother’s homeland, Peru.

Formed at the New England Conservatory in Boston in 2018, Trio Gaia has already won prizes at several competitions and performed across New England to the South, to the Great Lakes as well as Osaka, Japan; Trieste, Italy; and Panama City, Panama.

Their appearance with Market Square Concerts will be held at Derry Presbyterian Church in Hershey at 7:30pm on Wednesday, March 26th. For tickets, visit the MSC website. 

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What can be more “American” than a composer who grew up in Berkeley CA in the ‘70s and ‘80s, whose father was a “nice Jewish boy from the Bronx” who met his wife in Peru while working with the Peace Corps – and who is herself Peruvian-Chinese – who embraces all these different and disparate elements as she was growing up to become one of the leading composers of her generation. "I think [my] music can be seen as a by-product of my always trying to figure out how Latina I am and how gringa I am."

In this brief video, Ms. Frank talks about “the future of classical music.”

Her “Four Folk Songs” were composed for piano trio in 2012. This performance is with the Neave Trio at Skidmore College’s Mostly Modern Festival in June 2023, with violinist Anna Williams, cellist Mikhail Veselov, and pianist Eri Nakamura.

I. Canto para La María Angola (Song for the Maria Angola) / II. Children's Dance: @3:05 / III. Serenata: @5:22 / IV. Chavín de Huantar: @10:22

Since the composer provides her own program note, who am I to ignore that?

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Four Folk Songs for violin, cello and piano, loosely draws inspiration from the melodic motifs and rhythms of my mother's homeland, Perú. As an American-born Latina, so much of my understanding of this small yet culturally rich Andean nation has been necessarily fashioned from within my private imagination from the time I was a young child. Frequent trips to Perú in my adulthood, always done with my mother, leave me with a sense of belonging to something larger than myself as I connect private musings with the actual existing reality.

Seeing the María Angola church in its highland setting after reading myths about it, for instance, makes Perú's connection to colonial Spain that much more real; and this provide the inspiration for the first movement of Four Folk Songs: Canto para La María Angola (Song for the María Angola). The universality of children playing in the streets, albeit with Peruvian toys such as wooden llamas and shakers, is portrayed in the second movement, Children's Dance. The third movement, Serenata, is inspired by the ubiquitous guitar/charango-vocalist duo one sees in most pubs and eating houses; and the last movement harkens to Perú's pre-Inca past in imagining the sounds of an isolated, warlike yet artistically creative culture, Chavín de Huantar. – Gabriel Lena Frank

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If you have time, I recommend this longer interview produced by the Detroit Symphony in relation to her being their Composer-in-Residence in which she gives more detailed information about her life, her background, her influences and which uses, as examples, works composed for or performed by the Detroit Symphony.

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How often do you get to hear a work performed by the person for whom the piece was a wedding present? This is the first performance in the USA by pianist Suzana Bartal, the dedicatee, in Los Angeles (Feb 2020) with violinist Vijay Gupta and cellist Peter Myers. The work was inspired by the line, “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

Reena Esmail

Once again, the composer has supplied her own program notes:

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In recent years, I’ve realized how deeply inspired I am to write music by the very people I write it for. I’ve always found the story of the Franck Violin Sonata as incredibly moving and romantic as the music itself: Franck wrote the sonata for Ysaye and his wife as a wedding present, and they premiered it at the wedding, sight reading through the score. It is one of my favorite pieces of all time, and the love and intention with which it was written resonates so deeply through the music.

As I was finishing my Clarinet Concerto for Albany Symphony in April, I was also planning my trip to Paris for one of my closest friends, Suzana Bartal‘s wedding. As the two women in our year of the Yale DMA program, we supported each other unconditionally through some of the toughest moments of our lives, celebrated our accomplishments with each other, and developed a deep and lasting friendship. As I wrote my last commission of the season, I saw that the slow movement of my Clarinet Concerto could actually be turned into a piano trio as a wedding gift to Suzana and her husband Eric. Suzana is a world class concert pianist, and one of her chamber music specialties is playing piano trios.

Our story ended up a little differently from Cesar Frank’s: as I was at Suzana and Eric’s wedding, this trio, in an amazing coincidence, was actually being premiered in Los Angeles on the same day. Even though it was performed a world away, it made me so happy that was premiered by and for some of my dearest friends in Los Angeles.

A beautiful addendum to this story: two years later, Suzana played this trio for the first time in the United States at a concert at the Wallis Annenberg Performing Arts Center, in Beverly Hills, CA, with cellist Peter Myers and violinist Vijay Gupta. And the next day Vijay and I got married. I love that this one piece has played a central role in both of our weddings.

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Born in 1983, the only one in her family to be born in the United States, she grew up in Los Angeles.

With degrees from Juilliard & Yale, she also studied Hindustani music: her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers.

In addition to numerous choral works (she’s composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale) and orchestral works from the Seattle and Albany Symphonies (among other), there is also, as of 2019, a four-movement Piano Trio with a new string quartet scheduled to be premiered in 2026.

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As a composer, I’m always fascinated to hear where a famous composer “comes from,” and by that I mean how that familiar style evolved into the unmistakable voice of the mature composer.

Even hearing Mozart’s earliest works, you realize the seeds of the mature Mozart’s style. But, say, in Wagner, is his early Symphony in C Major something you would expect from the composer who would later write Tristan und Isolde written about 25 years later?

One thing you can say about Claude Debussy’s Piano Trio in G Major is that if you play it unannounced for your music-loving friends (what, when I was a student in the dark ages when we only had phonographs and LP records, we called “drop-the-needle”), chances are no one will guess who wrote it. If you’re familiar with “Clair de lune” or La Mer, it lacks the hallmarks of what we think of as Debussy’s style. But even bold and innovative composers come from somewhere, some place where they learn their trade, to put it efficiently if not very aesthetically.

This is Debussy the Teen-ager, a recording of his G Major Piano Trio with members of the Berlin Philharmonic recorded in 2017. There are four movements:

I. Andantino con moto allegro / II. Scherzo: Moderato con allegro: @9:25 / III. Andante espressivo: @12:44 / IV. Finale: Appassionato: @16:34 -- Violinist, Noah Bendix-Balgley, 1st Concertmaster Berlin Philharmonic; cellist, Bruno Delepelaire, 1st Principal Cello Berlin Philharmonic; pianist, Yannick Rafalimanana

First of all, Debussy was admitted to the Paris Conservatory’s piano department at the age of 10. He went from being regarded as “a charming child… much can be expected of him” to, the next year, “desperately careless.” Winning 4th prize (“2nd Runner-Up”) for his performance of Chopin’s F Minor Piano Concerto, then advanced incrementally to 2nd prize two years later but after failing to register for any prize the following two years, in 1879 he was declared “ineligible” to continue in the piano program, though he remained a conservatory student studying harmony, solfege (as a pianist, he was also considered “an excellent sight-reader”), and only later branching into composition.

Then along came something unexpected and full of those “what-if” connections classical music is full of. In 1880, Claude Debussy the pianist was hired to be the “house pianist” for a wealthy Russian widow traveling through Europe with her daughters. She needed someone to give them piano lessons and to accompany her elder daughter who was a singer. Also, the mother enjoyed playing piano duets – piano, four-hands, two on a bench.

Her name was Nadezhda von Meck. You may have heard of her…

In the beautiful resort-town of Fiesole, overlooking Florence, Mme von Meck added a violinist and a cellist to create an in-house, private piano trio to play for her and her guests. In the photograph (below) taken two summers later, Debussy, then 20, is seated on the floor. They were expected to perform every evening, and much of their repertoire consisted of Beethoven and Schubert trios.

The widow of a wealthy Russian railroad tycoon, she is best known because of her friendship and support for Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. In 1877, Mme. von Meck began commissioning short works from him to be played at her private salon evenings and this quickly turned into a considerable (and significant) “underwriting” of Tchaikovsky’s talent so he could devote him to composing at a time when his fragile creative ego needed not just the financial support. If you consider a minor government minister had to support his family on 300-400 rubles a year, the annual stipend she gave Tchaikovsky of 6,000 rubles was quite a fortune!

The one stipulation she made was that they never meet. As a result, their frequent letters constitute a valuable document of Tchaikovsky’s creative output and personal views. Then, suddenly, in 1890, she broke off their relationship, confessing bankruptcy, though this might have been too overstated (her son, certainly, was complaining about the expense that would deplete his inheritance).

Meanwhile, during the summers between 1880 and 1882, she employed Claude Debussy as a “house pianist” who traveled with her through Switzerland and France, then later joined her at her Moscow home. He himself never met Tchaikovsky but he, no doubt, heard a great deal about him and probably played a good deal of his music as Mme von Meck liked to hear her favorite music frequently and she was quite imperious about the way she handled her servants (as she viewed her musical employees) as well as her family and friends. During his time in Moscow, Debussy arranged three pieces from Swan Lake for piano duet which no doubt got a good deal of mileage that summer.

(The young musicians Nadezhda von Meck hired during her summer holidays to form a house trio. Photographed in 1882, the summer he turned 20, the pianist, Claude Debussy, is seated on the floor with violinist Pyotr Danilchenko on the left and cellist Wladyslaw Pachulski, standing, center, who was a student of Tchaikovsky's at the Moscow Conservatory. It turns out, shortly after Debussy proposed to Mme von Meck's daughter Sophie, the young Frenchman found himself suddenly with a return ticket to Paris. On the other hand, Pachulski, who had a very high opinion of himself, married Mme von Meck's daughter Yulia in 1889.)

She had, however, sent Tchaikovsky a short piano piece that Debussy had composed for her that first summer, a Bohemian Dance. Tchaikovsky was not enthusiastic: "It is a very pretty piece, but it is much too short. Not a single idea is expressed fully, the form is terribly shriveled, and it lacks unity".

What else Debussy may have composed for her, we don’t know. Many of these manuscripts may have disappeared into family archives, the typical boxes in the attic somewhere, yet to be unearthed.

In fact the trio’s manuscript only came to light in 1982, after having been considered “lost,” found by accident among the papers of Maurice Dumesnil, one of Debussy’s piano students and a member of the Conservatoire’s Class of 1905 (whenever he may have studied with Debussy). In 1915, he began playing in a piano trio so perhaps, somehow, Debussy gave him his copy of this early trio of his. Anyhow, when Dumesnil moved to America and married a singer and composer (she herself studied at Nadia Boulanger’s Fontainbleau). After her death in 1975, their collected papers took up one linear foot of shelf-space in the archives at a University of Michigan library where this on-line “finding aid” makes no mention of Debussy’s score. 

It was apparently composed in September and October of 1880. The assumption is Debussy composed it so he could play it for Mme von Meck: after all, he was her house-pianist and just beginning to express an interest in becoming a composer. Considering she’d sent Tchaikovsky that little dance of his, did The Master’s reaction imply she shouldn’t waste his time sending him a larger work like a four-movement piano trio? What was her reaction or those of her friends who might have heard it? Did they hear it? Or did their lack of enthusiasm for it make Debussy put it aside and presumably forget about it?

Clearly an early work in more ways than one, it’s often dismissed under the umbrella “juvenalia.” François Lesure, who catalogued Debussy’s music chronologically and published it in 1977, refers to it as L.3 and describes the manuscript as “lost.” While the score was found in a “linear foot of collected papers” deposited in a Michigan library in 1975, if it wasn’t “discovered” until 1982, apparently Lesure hadn’t found any paper-trail regarding its whereabouts. So, now that it’s been found, now what? Record and perform it, of course!

Two critics reviewed different recordings: Harold Schonberg, wrote about an incomplete 1984 recording, that “It is sweet, sentimental, and sugared; it verges on the salon." And Charlotte Gardner wrote in 2012 for the BBC: "Debussy's teenage Piano Trio doesn't often get to see the light of day, mostly because it reveals him very much still in feet-finding mode. Still, it's an enjoyable listen…” Of the performers, she added, “They're an effortless partnership, making much of the work's smoochy, romantic leanings, the high beauty of many of its passages, and its light, clear textures.”

While it may not be a lost masterpiece (as one often hopes when such things miraculously reappear), it has its own value in letting us know where the Debussy we do know came from. Does it sound like Debussy? Are there fingerprints we might hear? Not really – they might be things he picked up imitating other composers who influenced his contemporaries like Chausson (who wrote his own Trio in 1881 at the start of his career) or Chabrier (he had not yet reached his own maturity in 1880), music that is not generally known to American audiences, these days (even Massenet is unfamiliar to most of us today aside from a few works, though he and Saint-Saens were the leading composers of their day in France). (Do I hear a taste of Puccini in that opening theme? Unlikely – Puccini’s first opera wasn’t premiered until 1884!) The opening of Debussy’s scherzo reminds me of some of the popular dance-parodies he wrote in his some of his later piano pieces, like the Children’s Corner or the Preludes for Piano. Whether he borrowed anything directly from this youthful (or shall we just call it “immature”) work isn’t the point, the element of parody could be enough of a common denominator.

Whatever critics think about the piece or how you react to it (listening to it in hindsight compared to the works you’re already familiar with), it’s important to remember that even great composers were young once.

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(Robert & Clara Schumann in 1847, the year Robert composed his D Minor Piano Trio)

The last work on Trio Gaia’s program is Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op.63. Here’s their performance recorded with their previous pianist. There are four movements,

I. Mit Energie und Leidenschaft (With energy and passion) / II. Lebhaft, doch nicht zu rasch (Lively but not too fast):@ 9:50 / III. Langsam, mit inniger Empfindung (Slow, with more intimate feeling): @14:58 / IV. Mit Feuer (With fire): @21:02

Here are Trio Gaia with violinist Grant Houston; cellist Yi-Mei Templeman; and pianist Andrew Barnwell.

If you attend concerts of chamber music regularly and have heard any works by Robert Schumann, one of the leading 19th Century Romanticists, you’re probably familiar with the “Year of Chamber Music,” 1842, when he composed in quick succession all three of his string quartets and both the Piano Quartet and the Piano Quintet (a repertoire staple), all written between early-June and late-October. But in December, he wrote a Piano Trio in A Minor which, however, didn’t satisfy him and he set it aside. Later, after writing two piano trios that did satisfy him, he took material from this earlier trio and turned it into a trio for clarinet, cello, and piano (not technically a “piano trio”) but because the publishers produced a “version with violin,” it occasionally shows up on “piano trio” performances.

As the string quartets grew out of a period of “study” in which both he and Clara studied the classic quartets of Beethoven and Mozart following a period of “deep melancholy” while Clara was away on a concert tour and Robert’s health was too precarious to deal with the stress of merely being Mr. Clara Schumann. Another period of poor health, when he complained to his doctor of bouts ranging from “insomnia, general weakness, auditory disturbances, tremors, and chills in the feet, to a whole range of phobias.” 

Meanwhile, Clara was composing her G Minor Piano Trio, what would become her largest work (except for her Piano Concerto, written in her early-teens, she wrote mostly piano pieces and songs; this was her only full-scale multi-movement sonata-form composition of her maturity), begun a few months after the birth of her fourth child, Emil. While she was working on it, the family took a summer vacation to a North Sea island where, instead of rest and relaxation, Schumann was bored and Clara suffered a miscarriage but still managed to complete her trio by her birthday in September, 1846.

Some months later, Robert wrote in his diary (both he and Clara kept separate diaries), “Thoughts about a piano trio.” Further entries described the process of getting a new work started and in a matter of 13 days he had completely sketched the complete D Minor Piano Trio published the following year as his Op.63. It was ready for a house performance for Clara’s birthday in 1847 – a year after she had finished her own piano trio which had, only recently, just been published. Presumably, he’d been inspired by her trio to begin writing his own – and not just the D Minor: he began the 2nd Trio, the F Major, in August which he completed in late-October – but instead, Clara looked at her own trio and, by comparison, found it “effeminate and sentimental.” It’s quite likely Robert was completely unaware of Clara’s disappointment – she had her own creative insecurities, not to mention being a composer contending with raising children, concertizing, and looking after an often challenging and demanding husband who was, increasingly, ill.

From here, it would be easy to examine the output of Robert Schumann’s productive year, how their 1845 study of counterpoint, writing many exercises together, mostly for a curious hybrid instrument, the pedal-piano (a combination piano with an organ-like pedal board) helped focus Robert’s creative process. Before, he would work almost exclusively at the keyboard, but now he found himself able to compose away from it, relying on his ear, for one, and his intellectual awareness of counterpoint. He was surprised how he could now take a motive in one of his themes and incorporate it into the inner parts of the harmony and especially in the bass line. Counterpoint is more than the writing of fugues: it also turns something that could be a melody accompanied by chords into a more organically controlled multi-voiced texture often with completely independent and melodically integrated instrumental lines. The D Minor Piano Trio is the first new work of his using this new approach.

He admitted – considering his health – that this was “a time of gloomy moods” which is clearly reflected in the turbulent first movement, marked “with energy and passion,” more emotional (and Romantic) than a more abstract “Allegro con moto.” While the substantial first movement is full of restlessness and agitation and the second movement scherzo is by contrast lively and sunny, it is the slow third movement that is the tragic heart of the piece: music filled with a world-weariness in the piano’s slowly resolving harmonic suspensions (I can still hear a beloved college professor describing such music as “yearning, churning, burning…”). Though the movement ends with an unresolved harmonic vagueness, the finale – “with fiery passion” – may focus more on the “burning” side of the equation, it is less complicated and easier to comprehend emotionally, boiling up to a decidedly emphatic conclusion.

Alas for Clara that her husband should have written just such a piece after her own gentle trio which made no pretense to the barnstorming emotionalism her husband was capable of – not to mention their future friend Brahms who was yet to show up on their doorstep until seven years later. Curiously, while a lot of Robert’s psychological issues may have stemmed from his wife being a more famous musician who captivated Europe – he was terrified when she suggested an American tour! – Clara had to deal with her own issues, not the least of which was she could never escape the fact her husband was a “better” composer. What if – indeed – Clara had had the kinds of opportunities Robert (or any man) would’ve had to produce symphonies and operas, the time to dedicate to composing, even to delegate some of the responsibilities of being a housewife and mother?

While the next few years became another productive span of time for Robert, there came the inevitable decline (just as it followed the first years of their marriage with its Year of Songs, the Year of Symphonies, and the Year of Chamber Music): Schumann’s later diagnosis of being “bi-polar” was not initially called “manic-depression” for nothing, intense bouts of manic creativity followed by long periods of creative stasis and depression.

Curiously, it was this D Minor Piano Trio that first showed a crack in the outwardly happy relationship of this incredible husband-and-wife team: it was after a November 1850 performance of it that Robert blamed the audience’s cool reception on her playing (and telling her her accompaniment of the soprano on the same program was “terrible” didn’t help). His mental decline is well documented – from his enthusiasm for the parlor game of “table rapping,” communing with ghosts which so embarrassed her, to his auditory hallucinations which terrified him, all led, despite the happy interlude with meeting Brahms in 1853, to his attempted suicide in February, 1854, throwing himself off a bridge into the Rhine. He was immediately taken off to a sanatorium (an insane asylum, in those days) and they never saw each other again until two days before he died (officially of pneumonia) at the age of 46 in 1856, only nine years after writing this turbulent piano trio.

- Dick Strawser

Mark Markham & the Roaring 20s: Brahms and a Bunch of Other 20-Somethings

Who: Pianist Mark Markham 

What: The Roaring 20s: The Genius of Youth – Works by Bartók, Brahms, Ravel, David Shapiro, Zev Malina, and Liszt.

When: Saturday, February 22nd, 2025, at 7:30pm

Where: Market Square Presbyterian Church, Harrisburg PA

One thing always worth pointing out is the old adage, “every piece of music was, at the time it was first heard, ‘contemporary music’…” This comes in handy when there are listeners to a brand new piece of music who might dismiss it as “modern noise.” I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a man of, shall we say, “a certain age” before a concert with the Harrisburg Symphony who complained about the “new music” they’d played on the previous concert which he thought was the worst thing he’d ever heard (it was Jennifer Higdon’s Blue Cathedral). “Why would I want to listen to music by someone who’s younger than my son!?”

(My sympathies immediately went out to the man’s son…)

While I wasn’t exactly sure how old his son was at the time, I wondered if this father’s disdain for composers “younger than his son” applied to music written by Great Composers he admired?

For instance, Rachmaninoff, one of his favorites. I asked him if he liked Rachmaninoff’s most popular piece, the famous C-sharp Minor Prelude. He looked at me like I must be stupid: of course he liked it!

“You know he was 19 when he wrote that?”

Mark Markham calls his program for this concert “The Roaring Twenties” which immediately brings to mind George Gershwin and flappers dancing the Charleston. However, none of the music you’ll hear actually dates from the 1920s: all the pieces were written by composers who, at the time, were in their 20s, and certainly some of them had come “roaring” onto the New Music Scene of their day.

In all, there are six pieces by composers who might be better known by other works. But in these selections, do we hear a musical style that is the “mature voice” or are we intrigued by what we know of his later pieces and listen for tantalizing clues to what influenced him as a young composer and evolve into what he will eventually become?

For reasons of time, I’m not going to go into my usual great detail about each piece, forensic musicology aside. But it might give you enough to go on to think about not just the music you’ll be listening to, but to the future development of those composers you’re familiar with.

For instance, David Shapiro is a Philadelphia-based composer whose “Through a Child’s Eyes” was commissioned by Mark Markham and written in 1999. The composer writes on his website, “My music explores and integrates diverse musical styles, driven by rhythm. I find music that displays complex interweaving rhythmic layers to be fun and stimulating. Like, for example, the music of Bartok and the Afro-European group Zap Mama. I also enjoy the systematically altering rhythmic patterns in the music of composers such as Steve Reich, Elliott Carter and Conlon Nancarrow. My own work often starts as a scribbled rhythmic sketch in the corner of a book or piece of scrap paper. I then play around with that idea, adapting it to various musical genres and styles that I know and love. Each piece takes on a shape and life from there.”

What do we hear in this piece written 26 years ago? What would we hear in the next piece he will compose?

Something I’ve always told composition students is it’s your job as a student to be a sponge and soak up everything you hear and like, whether you try to imitate it or absorb it (“I like that, let me see if I can do it my way”). Eventually, you’ll find what suits you best and discard the rest of it; also, as we mature, our perspectives change and things that attracted us before we might later wonder why we were so fascinated by that. Plus we discover new things that might act as kindling for a fresh approach, an idea that had never occurred to us before, something that opens up whole new vistas to our creative imaginations.

As a listener, there is another element to keep in mind: if you know, say, Bartók’s string quartets, let's say those written in the 1920s (though not exactly “Roaring Twenties” music unless you’re a Hungarian ethnomusicologist), his earliest works might not show you the way to his later style but if you listen carefully not only might you hear influences of composers he’d recently discovered, a man in his mid-20s who’d primarily been more influenced by Richard Strauss and Brahms looking for a new direction. And there’s a shift in that direction with the short Bagatelles he wrote in 1908 when he was now in his late-20s. What prompted that?

It turns out he’d just discovered Claude Debussy, a composer he’d been unfamiliar with. His friend Zoltan Kodály had just come back from Paris with a bunch of new scores. The year before, these two friends had tramped around the countryside of Hungary, listening to the folk music of the Hungarian people, not the art music heard in Budapest’s concert halls which was usually all German or German-trained composers. The take-away was immediate: there’s a different way of writing music that does not have to be in the standard “tonal” style of German Romanticism, the legacy of Beethoven and Brahms, and so these Bagatelles become, essentially, an experiment in how to get beyond the present.

Bartók, like Brahms or Liszt or Ravel, is what we might call a “closed system.” Unless there really is a parallel universe somewhere where the Great Composers of the Past are still alive and still composing, we can compare these early pieces to everything else they wrote.

The difference with the other two composers – David Shapiro and Zev Malina – is basically that they’re not dead yet (and we wish them both long and productive careers!) so who knows what they might be composing 20 or 50 years from now (or, like Elliott Carter, still composing past their own Centennials)? It would be instructive (to say the least) to come back decades from now and listen to their latest works. But given the limitations of Time Travel into both the past and the future, we’ll have to make do with our (and their) imaginations in the present.

Many of us in Central Pennsylvania have been listening to Zev Malina grow up. Mid-May will bring the premiere of a new work tentatively called “New Work” as it’s listed on the Harrisburg Symphony’s website. The composer’s father will not only conduct it, Stuart Malina will then play George Gershwin’s quintessential Roaring 20s piece, Rhapsody in Blue. The work on this weekend’s Market Square Concerts’ program is a tribute to another Roaring 20s composer, Zez Confrey, called “Schemin’.” There’s no point in going through “structural and technical details” because that would be pedantic (something I have a great talent for). Let me say that while being a sponge and turning something you like into a piece of your own music is not just “imitating” it. There’s a difference between listeners thinking, if they don’t know what exactly they’re listening to, “that sounds like Zez Confrey” (even if all they know is his “Kitten on the Keys” and a few other novelty pieces he was famous for) and listeners thinking “that’s by Zez Confrey, isn’t it?” It’s like a painter copying a famous artist’s style – brushstrokes as much as subject matter – and doing it so well, even the experts might not realize it’s not an original (“forgery” is a matter of legality and morality: an hommage is not a forgery but a well-meaning tribute fully attributed.) The fact I can listen to Zev’s “Schemin’” and feel he’s really captured Zez’s spirit is not just a matter of “imitation.”

Here is Zev Malina playing “Schemin’” as a young artists’ “warm-up” presentation to a Market Square Concerts program in April, 2021, a month before his 20th birthday.

Oh, and no slouch as a pianist, either!

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The care and feeding, much less “training” (or perhaps a better word would be “guiding”) of child prodigies depends on many things, not just the level of prodigyhood (I think Jascha Heifetz coined the term). A prodigy – someone who expresses a high level of talent at an early age (for anything, be it music or playing chess) – is more susceptible to the surrounding environment than the trickiest kind of hot-house plant (to use a bad metaphor frequently abused). Consider some famous prodigies of the past – let’s stick to music – like Mozart (writing his first pieces by the time he was 6), Mendelssohn (anyone who could write that String Octet would’ve been a great composer, but to write it when he was 16 is more than mind-boggling for us mere mortals), or Shostakovich (his 1st Symphony, written at 19, on the cusp of adulthood, became an instant international sensation not just because he was a teenager).

The transition to adulthood, challenging enough under normal circumstances, is especially dangerous for the prodigy: gone are the days when people will be delighted with anything you’d compose because now, putting aside your childhood things (with or without 1 Corinthians 13:11), you’re going to be regarded and judged as an adult, and the pressure can be… well, dangerous, for one, too much pressure. Creativity is a very fragile thing, even in those who would seem to us to be so secure and self-confident. Even the Great Beethoven struggled with it almost constantly and if we need proof of that struggle, we have several of his surviving sketch books to prove it.

I’ve talked to many composers who, when young, likened the creative process to listening to a kind of inner radio that was always playing and many times it was a scramble to write all this constantly flowing music down. (Schubert, not that I’ve ever talked to him, would tell friends he wrote music as effortlessly as a tree produced fruit.) But at some point, this “radio” connection slows down or stops: the question now becomes “now what do I do?!” Suddenly, it becomes work, you have to consider what to do with these ideas you’ve come up with. This is why so many newly emerging composers begin this new, uncertain world by writing short pieces: if an etude is a “study” in some technical skill for the performer to focus on, these short pieces become studies in creativity, not just in dealing with the technical aspects of composition – harmonic language, structural considerations – but in evolving an individual creative voice and establishing a confidence that makes the process less fearsome. It’s not just “training.” You can’t teach someone to be a genius.

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As listeners sitting in the audience, we might not be aware the earliest pieces by Beethoven we usually hear at a concert were written around the time he was pushing 30. We also might not think about, had Beethoven lived only as long as Schubert (who died at 31), all of the great music that turned Beethoven into the colossus who dominated the rest of the 19th Century would never have been written.

Brahms in 1853 (age 20)

And if Beethoven’s footsteps weren’t there to tramp behind the young Brahms, what would’ve happened to him?

On September 30th, 1853, the famous story goes, a young composer shows up unannounced on the doorstep of Robert and Clara Schumann. Robert Schumann was not only one of the Greatest Living Composers of the Day, he was one of the most famous critics and writers about music as well. His wife Clara Schumann was also one of the greatest pianists of the day, second only to Franz Liszt. This composer – also a pianist – was an unknown, only 20 years old. His name was Johannes Brahms.

Unfortunately, as the Schumanns’ daughter Marie told the visitor, her parents were out but he could return the next morning, maybe at 11:00. This time, Schumann was at home, answered the door in dressing gown and slippers, and found the tongue-tied young man a bit of a challenge at first, but he invited him in. Their mutual friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, had mentioned this shy young man with the long blonde hair and blue eyes, so Schumann, himself an introvert, decided perhaps, if words were not working, it would be better if the young man played some of his music.

“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius” is how Schumann was supposed to have introduced the young man to his reading public, but, alas, the story is not quite accurate. That was Schumann’s reaction to another young composer/pianist named Frederic Chopin way back in 1831 when both he and Chopin were barely “out of their teens.” But Schumann, now in his early-40s, did hail Brahms as “the heir to Beethoven.” As if a young composer stepping out for his first appearance on the musical stage needed pressure like that!

The whole idea of Brahms forever being a “slow” (say “painstaking”) composer was the result of that review. It’s why his 1st Symphony took over 20 years to complete (along with his 1st String Quartet and what became his 3rd Piano Quartet), decades spent on the back burner because Brahms (even in his mid-40s) was not so secure with himself to feel these works were worthy to be compared to Beethoven. As he put it, “You have no idea what it’s like to hear the footsteps of a giant like that behind you.”

All that, of course, is in the future on that autumnal day in Düsseldorf when Brahms started to play some of his piano pieces – he had come prepared with a backpack full of his compositions – when Schumann interrupted him. “I must call my wife,” he said, and told her, as she settled down beside the piano, “here you shall hear music such as you have never heard before. Begin your sonata again, young man.”

That sonata was a vast piano sonata in C Major – it would become his Op. 1 but it was the second of three sonatas he had written during the past year – and it contained shadows of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier and Waldstein Sonatas (and that was just in the opening bars). Most young composers would be producing shorter (if not short) pieces because the understanding of craft, especially the ability to control something so long with such cohesion, was something many composers never quite learned even in their maturity (it was one of Schumann’s own shortcomings, no pun intended).

After listening to the complete C Major Sonata (which lasts just under a half-hour), the Schumanns invited him back the next day for lunch but he was so nervous, he failed to show up at the right time, so Clara went out to find him and drag him back to the house. Here, he played more of the music he’d brought with him, including a Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor (actually, the first one he’d composed, but he thought the C Major was more impressive), the brief Scherzo in E-flat Minor and the third sonata, the one in F Minor, which he was still working on. Schumann would later refer to them as “veiled symphonies,” so far did they push the bounds of a normal piano in a household parlor.

Clara wrote in her journal “a great future lies before him for when he comes to the point of writing for orchestra, then he will have found the true medium for his imagination.” In other words, real symphonies.

Schumann wrote a more laconic entry in his journal: “Visit from Brahms (a genius).”

The Schumanns talked him into extending his visit – Brahms had planned on only spending a day in Düsseldorf. In the meantime, music-making aside, Brahms joined some friends of his who lived in town who, along with the Schumanns and their children, played parlor games – Schumann was a big fan of seances – and reading from the works of Schumann’s favorite author, E.T.A. Hoffman. Soon, this new circle of friends, including the newly arrived Joachim, began calling young Brahms “Kreisler,” after Hoffman’s alter ego, his fictional kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler. Presumably, for so young a man, they felt the connection was more than just the first name: Kreisler – no relation to the famous 20th Century violinist, Fritz Kreisler – was a “moody, asocial composer, a musical genius whose creativity is stymied by an excessive sensibility.”

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In the midst of this domestic environment, Brahms continued working on his F Minor Sonata. Schumann, meanwhile, wrote and published an article he called “New Paths” in which he made his fateful prediction about Brahms being Beethoven’s Heir with enough Christian symbolism to imply even weightier (and potentially destructive) implications. Of course, without having even heard the young man’s music, a musician like Hans van Bülow, a famous conductor and champion of Wagner, wrote to his friend, Franz Liszt, that he did not expect much from Schumann’s new protege: fifteen years earlier, Schumann had written the same thing about a young Englishman studying with Mendelssohn, William Sterndale Bennet (Bülow spelled it ‘Benêt,’ a pun on ‘blockhead’) who had turned out to be a flash-in-the-pan. Wagner and his circle began referring to Brahms – remember, he was still 20 and still untested – as “St. Johannes.”

Three weeks after the article appeared in print, Brahms, back in Hanover, wrote to Schumann to thank him for his praise. He also informs him, “Further, I wish to tell you I have copied out my F Minor Sonata” – meaning the work was not only complete, it was now ready to be sent to a publisher – “and made considerable alterations in the finale.”

He decided he would publish the C Major first, followed by the first one he completed, the F-sharp Minor as No. 2, then some songs (Op. 3), the Scherzo as Op. 4, and then the new sonata, No. 3 in F Minor, a grand sonata in five movements. (When asked by a friend why he hadn’t led off with the shorter Scherzo, which she thought “flashier,” Brahms replied, “When one first shows oneself, it is to the head and not the heels that one wants to draw attention.”)

Wherever Brahms’ future career would take him, I imagine anyone – certainly Schumann – would’ve been surprised to find out these three sonatas would be the only piano sonatas Brahms would ever compose. He would go on eventually to write three violin sonatas, two cello sonatas, even a pair of clarinet sonatas (also available in viola…) as well as a sonata for two pianos which eventually was turned into his Piano Quintet. But considering the significance of the piano in his repertoire and all the short piano pieces he would produce throughout his life, there would not be another large-scale work for solo piano.

The work is basically a standard four-movement sonata except Brahms interpolated an “extra” movement between the scherzo and the finale. Whether that was part of his original plan or something he inserted for greater contrast between the two “regular” movements, I don’t know. The other option would’ve been to reverse the slow movement and the lively scherzo (Beethoven had done that), but that may not have been the optimal contrast he was looking for. This way, he creates a longer arch form – Fast / Slow / Faster / Slow / Fast – and the fact this Intermezzo harks back to the slow movement also gives it more cohesion than just being “another slow movement.”

Here is a recording (with score) by Yevgenny Kissin of Brahms’ Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Minor, Op. 5:

00:00 – 1^st Movement, Allegro maestoso – There are two opening gestures: a grand flourish (tonic leading to dominant on a C Major chord) then switching to C Minor, over a left-hand drum beat reminiscent of the “Fate Motive” from Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Note the similarity between the second fragment's "melodic shape" and the flourish's second beat. The real “2nd Theme” arrives at 1:30 in a contrasting key and in a completely different mood. The standard “development section” begins at 4:48, tears around through these different motives (not really “themes”), and eventually builds up to the expected “recapitulation” at 7:24, complete with the “2nd Theme” at 8:15 as expected in the original tonic major key, before ending in F Major rather than the darker key of F Minor. There’s a great deal of variety in the course of this varied movement, but there’s also a great deal of cohesive unity – motives, thematic outlines, harmonic progressions – that we tend to feel it all belongs together whether we’re aware of it or not.

09:58 – 2^nd Movement, Andante espressivo – This is one of the great slow movements and every time I hear this – it really is a love song-without-words – I am amazed it was composed by somebody only 20 years old. Again, there will be melodic shapes and rhythms that we’ll recognize and we’ll hear them again in other movements as well. Brahms prefaces the score with a few lines from a poem by Sternau: “The evening dims, / The moonlight shines. / There are two hearts / That join in love / And embrace in rapture.” Beginning in A-flat Major (F Minor’s relative major), the final segment, beginning at 18:38, is one of those “to-die-for” moments that appears unexpectedly in D-flat Major, then builds to a heart-throbbing climax. “Genius,” indeed...

22:26 – 3^rd Movement, Scherzo – A straight-forward contrast to the previous two movements, this is a rollicking if somewhat driven dance back to the home key (as expected) of F Minor with a contrasting middle section (the “trio”) in a hymn-like D-flat Major – yet note the Beethoven 5th Motive in the bass. The opening then is restated as you’d expect, all in the old classical format.

27:00 – 4^th Movement, Intermezzo – Called an Intermezzo and subtitled Rückblick (“Reminiscence” or, literally, “Look-back”), it’s in B-flat Minor (the relative minor of D-flat Major) and with its opening chain of thirds – a frequent musical fingerprint of Brahms’ melodic style, all the way through to his 4th Symphony and the late piano pieces of his old age – it’s a ghostly, almost grief-stricken reflection of the sonata’s slow movement (given the poem prefacing the Andante, a reflection on lost love?). But notice the bass, again, with its persistent rhythm, the motive from Beethoven’s 5th but here bringing to mind the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica. But what to make of that oddly undulating chord at 28:26? It’s basically a G-flat minor 9th chord, a most unusual chord for 1853 but would be perfectly at home in a piano piece by Maurice Ravel! (Oh, and look what Mark Markham has programmed next – a short piece by Ravel from 1905!) Hardly a “look back,” that. Another thing that always strikes me, hearing these last measures: imagine if the next music could be from the first movement of Mahler’s Fifth...! (That, by the way, was written in 1902 and of course has absolutely nothing to do with Brahms, but it’s just the way my imagination works. Clearly, I need to get out more.)

30:53 – 5th Movement, Finale – In the Standard Sonata Form Textbook (if there were such a thing), you’d read the last movement of a long-form work like a symphony or sonata was usually a light-hearted Rondo – a main theme with contrasting “interstitial” elements in different keys while the original main theme recurred before the next one. It’s usually diagrammed A-B-A-C-A or, given the sonata-like recurrence of the B-Theme, A-B-A-C-A-B-A, which helped “elongate” the structure. It’s the recurrence of the A-Theme that makes it a Rondo but with a bit of the Sonata-Form lurking in the foreground. But once Beethoven decided to ignore the handbook, composers had trouble figuring how to solve the Finale Problem. Even here, Brahms, still working on the sonata when he visited the Schumanns, didn’t finish it until almost two months later. I’m still not convinced it’s the best solution, but it is interesting to think toward the end of his life, Brahms thought about revising this early work of his – he did revise the Op. 8 Piano Trio around the time he was writing what would become his 3rd Violin Sonata, Op. 108 – but for some reason never got around to it.

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Schumann was not the only famous composer young Brahms met in 1853. This sonata was being written “on the road” while he was touring with the great Joseph Joachim (acclaimed, yes; the “great” still lies in his future). As a result of their tour, they were in Leipzig where Joachim took his young pianist-friend to meet Franz Liszt who had already gathered around him a coterie of other like-minded composers including the great French composer, Hector Berlioz, composer of the Symphonie fantastique who was, by then, nearing the end of a difficult and unfulfilling career. For them, young Brahms played some of his recent works, including the Op. 4 Scherzo and the Andante from his “new work,” the Piano Sonata in F Minor.

Berlioz later wrote to Joachim, “Brams [sic] has had a great success here… I am grateful to you for having let me make the acquaintance of this diffident, audacious young man who has taken it into his head to make a new music. He will suffer greatly.”

Liszt playing for some friends, including Berlioz, in 1853

Liszt, long acclaimed as a great pianist and futuristic composer, thought Young Brahms might be a good addition to his and Wagner’s circle. Whether the newly-arrived Brahms fell asleep because of whatever you’d call jet-lag in the days of traveling by horse-and-carriage or because he was bored to tears during Liszt’s playing his vast B Minor Piano Sonata one afternoon, things did not go well. Brahms found both the man and his music repellent and they soon parted ways. A few months later, after Schumann declared Brahms the future of German music, the heir to Beethoven, the rift was complete and for the rest of their lives and well into their posthumous careers, there were two irreconcilable polarities in German music: Wagner and Liszt on one side, Brahms on the other.

1853 was also the year after Franz Liszt had published a set of twelve Transcendental Etudes (simply calling them Etudes was not enough). Whenever he may have composed (or re-composed) the individual etudes before the time they were published, these were reworkings, revisions, or re-imaginings of a set of twelve Grand Etudes (again, simply Etudes was not enough) published in 1837 which were, in turn, elaborations of a set of twelve etudes written between 1825 and 1826 called simply “Etudes in 12 Exercises.” That means Liszt was 14 when he wrote the first draft; 26 when he produced the Grand Etudes; and 41 when he published the final version, the famous Transcendental Etudes. It also means the work itself was, in effect, 27 years old… The 7th of the 1837 Grand Etudes formed the basis of the 11th of the Transcendental Etudes, given the picturesque title, Harmonies du soir (which sounds so much more Romantic than “Evening Harmonies”).

Here is another video-with-score of the 11th of Franz Liszt's Twelve Transcendental Etudes (the 1852 version) recorded by Yevgenny Kissin:

Considering how straight-forward (say, “old-fashioned”) Brahms was about his style, both in terms of standard structure and his use of tonal harmony, listening to this could have been either a revelation toward music’s “New Path to the Future” or it could’ve made his skin crawl. Nominally in D-flat Major (the first minute is basically a prolonged dominant chord), it proved to be so chromatic – note all the accidentals in the score – someone in the 1850s would certainly be excused if they felt themselves completely at sea. The term “atonal” would not become a thing until much later – Liszt himself would write some very strange short pieces late in his life, like the “Bagatelle Without Tonality.”

One of the standard expectations of classical music, so far as Western Europe was concerned, was this gravitation toward a tonal center – say, C Major – so that any divergence from this, wherever the harmonic progressions took you, was a way of increasing the dramatic tension. True, Liszt does return to chords closely related to the key of D-flat Major, and firmly in D-flat Major by the end, but in between, he pulls you away from it in such a way, you might never feel quite sure where you are. That also fits in with the whole programmatic idea of “Night” and man’s fear of the darkness, of the unknown: it can be beautiful, it can be fearsome. In one sense, the awareness of its psychological implications (in hindsight) is at the root of what we call Romanticism. It’s about our emotional responses – not, like Brahms’ implications of the poetry he quoted at the start of his F Minor Sonata’s Andante, just about being in love.

Liszt declared he was writing “Music of the Future.” Haydn, certainly, never cared about posterity in his day – few artists did, then – but Liszt felt if listeners today could not appreciate what he was writing, they would understand what he was doing in time.

I admit I’m not familiar with Liszt’s 1837 set of Etudes to know what exactly changed in the fifteen years in between – I would imagine Liszt-in-1852 was more extreme in his harmony even if much of the structural and melodic ideas are similar – but it’s interesting to note that in 1852, Wagner, considered one of Liszt’s leading acolytes, was just beginning work on what would become Das Rheingold, a few years after completing Lohengrin. He would begin composing the music for his more harmonically extreme Tristan und Isolde in 1857 and, once premiered in 1865, its impact on the Future of Music was decidedly strong. As Beethoven had been the giant standing behind (if not over) most composers of the 19th Century, Wagner was the dominating figure over most of the composers for the rest of it, long into the 20th Century. If you didn’t follow Wagner’s Path, you reacted against him and took the other one, and that would’ve been Brahms’. Curiously, the 20th Century composer usually blamed for the Death of Tonality, Arnold Schoenberg, eventually found more influence in the skeletal workings beneath the surface of Brahms’ music even as he broke away completely from all sense of a tonal center which we usually attribute to Wagner’s influence.

And yet, if you listen carefully, many of those core values of Brahms' maturity – the use of underlying motives to unify often completely contrasting passages, the fact that everything seemed to stem from something else in an organic manner, not just a succession of pleasant themes and pretty harmonies – are already present when, a young man of 20, he made his first appearance on the musical stage.

– Dick Strawser