Six Degrees of Separation: The Arianna Quartet

Four Composers, Three Compositions

Felix Mendelssohn (1831) aged 22; Gabriela Lena Frank; Bela Bartók (1910) aged 29; Ernst von Dohnányi (1920s) in his mid-40s

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There are Six Degrees of Separation between our four composers directly or indirectly on the Arianna Quartet’s program this coming Sunday:

Felix Mendelssohn knew and worked with one of the great pianists of the 19^th Century,

Clara Schumann, who was a close friend of

Johannes Brahms, who was a mentor to a young Hungarian composer named

Ernst von Dohnányi who became a friend and colleague of

Bela Bartók who would later have a significant influence on

Gabriela Lena Frank whose work commissioned by the Arianna Quartet was inspired by Bartók.

The Arianna String Quartet, long regarded as one of the finer quartets in the United States, formed in 1992 and has been in residence at the University of Missouri’s St. Louis campus since 2000. They’ve been highly involved in teaching, in mentoring young string players and ensembles, in community involvement and in frequent national and worldwide tours.

They’ll be performing works by three of those “degrees” on Sunday, Nov. 15th, at 4:00 at Temple Ohev Sholom. The program opens with Mendelssohn’s tribute to the late Beethoven (no pun intended), his String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13, and continues with Gabriela Lena Frank’s Kanto Kechua #4 – for Bela, a tribute to Bela Bartók. It concludes with Dohnányi’s String Quartet No. 3, also in A Minor, Op. 33.

Single tickets are $35, $30 for seniors, $5 for college students and FREE for K-12 school-age students with a $10 ticket available for one accompanying adult. Tickets will be available at the door but you can also either call (717)221-9599, go to the Eventbrite site, or order them through the MSC website.

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One of the questions about classical music I hear frequently is “why do these composers sound like they do?” Behind that, I suspect, is something like “Why does Mendelssohn” (as an example) “sound like Mendelssohn?”

The “recognizable sound” we associate with a particular composer is usually referred to as their “voice,” the different traits and markers we associate with their style, the way you might hear two different people talk and be able to identify them by gender, register, accent, or any numerous other qualities we don’t need to examine but just simply sense – especially if it’s somebody you already know (“well, if you can’t see them, how do you know the one’s your Uncle Jack?”). If you’re acquainted with Mendelssohn’s music, especially his most famous works, you can simply recognize the familiar ones and maybe, by a process of comparison, works that are new but sound similar.

But if you’ve heard musicians talk about Early-, Middle-, or Late-Beethoven, for example, this further subdivides those traits and markers into the different periods of their lives, works Beethoven composed early in his life, those masterpieces of his maturity, and then those incredible works of his “late style” (he was only 57 when he died, so “old age” is hardly suitable here): each period may sound different compared to the others, yet they all “sound like Beethoven.” Of course, digging into the technical stuff isn’t likely to help the average “music lover” – the Germans called them liebhaber (literally, “love-havers” deriving our word amateur from the Latin, amo- for “love”); in fact, I’m not even sure a lot of those who “know a lot” about music – some call them aficionados, but the Germans called these kenner (literally “knowers”) – would not be snowed under by all the jargon scholars like to sling around…

Just as every individual is more or less unique – different personality traits, different physical characteristics, skin complexions or hair and eye color – composers also tend to be unique, at least those who go on to become “great composers.” The ones who don’t don’t usually develop their talents to the degree the most famous ones do: maybe they “sound like” whoever the reigning Great-Composer-of-the-Day is but we’d be hard pressed to identify them because while they may be talented mimics, they may not be “original” composers. (That word “original” can also be an old bugaboo to most young composers, but that’s a topic for another volume…)

So let’s look at this program with the Arianna Quartet from the standpoint of Composers Developing Their Voices. Thanks to Ms. Frank’s new work, a tribute to Bela Bartók, we can actually include four: Mendelssohn with his first “mature” quartet (despite being published as No. 2) written when he was 18; Dohnányi and his 3rd Quartet from 1926 when he was in his late-40s; and Gabriela Lena Frank who was inspired by Bartók finding his voice in his 1st String Quartet when he was in his mid-20s – she wrote her Kanto Kechua #4: For Bela in 2025 when she was turning 53 (curiously, making her the “oldest” composer on the program).

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Felix Mendelssohn began writing this quartet in 1827. He was 18 but had already written two of the finest masterpieces of his entire life, the Octet for Strings when he was 16 and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” when he was 17½. Despite his age, it’s clear these are stylistically mature works and masterpieces in every sense of the word. By this time he was 12, he was already a talented pianist who could play any of the 48 fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier from memory, a violinist talented enough to play concertos and be a member of the ensemble premiering his String Octet. He was also conducting the chamber orchestra his father hired for their Sunday afternoon musicales when he was 12 (though he had to stand on a chair so all the players could see him over their music stands). Musically, he had absorbed the musical styles of Bach’s son, C.P.E. Bach, as well as Haydn and his contemporaries – in other words the giants of the 18th Century Classical School.

But there’s another important factor in the genesis of this particular work: he started working on it four months after the death of Beethoven. He opens the work with a musical question, quoted from one of his own songs to words “Ist es wahr? (Is it true?)” which he’d written a few months earlier. Beethoven opens the last movement of his final string quartet, composed in October, 1826, with a pair of related musical motive he labels Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß (“The Very Difficult Decision”): over the opening upward interval (questioning), he writes Muß es sein? (“Must it be?)” then subsequently answers it with a decisive downward interval labeled Es muß sein! (“It must be!). 

Now you can argue he doesn’t make much use of this motive, not nearly as much as Beethoven used his – but then Beethoven was a more motivically oriented guy and Mendelssohn, even then, was more about tunes – perhaps that wasn’t his point. The whole quartet is still an hommage to Beethoven. There’s a chromatic fugue theme in the slow movement that slithers around very much like the one in Beethoven’s Serioso Quartet (Op. 95) of 1810 (written the year after Mendelssohn was born). There are other similarities to passages from the Op. 132 A Minor quartet in both Mendelssohn’s first movement, and the finale, with dramatic tremolos accompanying recitative-like “cadenzas” for the 1st Violin. Only the light-hearted third movement, an Intermezzo rather than a scherzo or minuet, seems free of any Beethoven references, but one can feel shadows of Mendelssohn’s “Is it true” Motive in the violin’s main theme. It is the middle section of the Intermezzo that shows us some “familiar” Mendelssohn, the spritely music straight out of his Octet’s scherzo.

As Mendelssohn wrote to a friend about his new work and this opening motive, "You will hear its notes resound in the first and last movements, and sense its feeling in all four."

Something else, though: the “Serioso Fugue” from the slow movement reappears in the last movement. Is there a Beethoven precedent for this? Well, much was made of the re-statement of the ghostly scherzo passage from the third movement that recurs, dramatically, in the middle of Beethoven’s triumphal finale of his 5th Symphony, something quite new in Classical Music. And then Mendelssohn also restates his string quartet’s opening slow introduction, slightly extended, at the very end not only as a way of rounding it off but also of unifying the whole work.

As for the work as a whole, Lucy Miller writes in her concert guide to chamber music, Adams to Zemlinsky, "This quartet, relying heavily on compositional techniques of late Beethoven, links Classical form to Romantic expression.” Beethoven, by his “Late Period,” had long transformed the classical form, harmonies, textures, and, in general, aesthetic he’d grown up with, learning from Mozart’s music and, less so, from his lessons with Haydn. Mendelssohn, at 18, is also finding his way from the classical traditions absorbed in his youth (!) to the new style now considered Romantic: unlike the introspective, existential quality of Beethoven's late quartets, Mendelssohn's Op., 13 is “passionate and richly romantic.”

In this “score/video,” we’ll hear a recording by the Emerson Quartet. You may notice that Mendelssohn’s “Ist es wahr?” Motive is not marked in this edition of the score, but as it’s the final phrase of the opening slow introduction, one can argue how significant is it, really, to the main part of the movement which begins immediately afterward?

There is one thing I want to point out because this is not just a young impressionable composer imitating his idol. How a teenager in Berlin became so familiar with the most recent works by Beethoven is surprising: Op. 132 was published in April of 1827, the month after Beethoven died, and I could imagine Mendelssohn, in the days long before one could download things from the Internet, ordering a copy of it as soon as it became available. But what about Op. 135? It wasn’t published until September, 1827, but in fact it wasn’t even premiered until Schuppanzigh’s quartet played it on the one-year Anniversary of Beethoven’s Death.

Mendelssohn began working on the quartet in July, four months after Beethoven died, and dated the final page 27 October, 1827. So, conceivably, Mendelssohn could have purchased a copy of the quartet and completed his own six weeks later: but how could he have been working on a quartet with that motive for the previous two months – unless, perhaps, he wrote the middle two movements first, and then, after becoming acquainted with Op.135, began the first, then last movements? Did someone in Vienna write to him or his teacher, Zelter, describing the quartet in a letter (“...and the finale begins with this curious motive…”)? Is it possible that friends of Mendelssohn’s well-connected teacher got hold of a hand-written copy of the work from the publisher? Aha – wait for it – it turns out the particular publisher Beethoven was dealing with with Op. 135 was Moritz Schlesinger who was located in – Berlin!

Last piece of the puzzle solved!

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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 – a woman who was herself Peruvian-Chinese? She embraced 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." We’ve heard her music before with Market Square Concerts: her piano trio, “Four Folk Songs,” based on musical motifs and rhythms from the folk music of Peru, in March 2025 with Trio Gaia; and before that when the Arianna Quartet performed her Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout when they appeared here in 2021. This time, the Arianna Quartet brings with them a work they'd commissioned and premiered in May earlier this year.

Gabriela Lena Frank's Kanto Kechua #4 – for Bela pays homage, in a way, to Hungarian composer Bela Bartók at a time in his career when he first heard some authentic Hungarian folk music and decided to dig deeper into not only what this was – not Gypsy music, that’s something entirely different – but what it meant to his own identity as a Hungarian Composer. In this sense, it parallels Ms. Frank’s own exploration of South American music, Andean in particular, in finding her identity, her voice.

Here is a “zoom” interview with members of the quartet and the composer: while all of it is interesting, the part where she begins talking about the piece and its meaning for her starts around 7:04, growing up with various musical experiences and her “Frank music genes” passed down from her East European side of the family.

Talking about her “Kanto Kechua,” she describes it as part of a series of miniatures – it’s about nine minutes long – inspired by Quechuan songs (Quechua being the indigenous language of the Andes predating the Incas) but in this case, less an authentic folk song than it is, as Bartók would later do, transform the traits of these thousands of songs he collected from across Eastern Europe into something he called it “imaginary folk-music” that sounds like folk music but which he composed himself, music that has the flavor of Hungary at its root. This examination of folk music, actual or imagined, has been an on-going part of her compositional evolution and, as she says, “it’s symbolic of the depth of my cultural inheritance.”

Brooklyn Rider, a string quartet that (no surprise) hails from Brooklyn, performs her Kanto Kechua No. 2, written for them in 2018. A different piece with a different inspiration, it’s based on fragments of ideas she wrote down at a time following a diagnosis of a serious autoimmune disease when she was terrified of impeding surgeries and treatments, dealing with lots of pain. She sought healing in what to her, then in her 30s, was most life affirming: being creative. This is not a programmatic piece descriptive of those events or emotions in her life, merely the source of some of those fragments she had written down at a time she needed some creative therapy.

Since composing the Kanto Kechua #4 last year, there have been new developments in Ms. Frank’s life: she has won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in May of this year for her Picaflor: A Future Myth; and her 2022 opera, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego (“The Final Dream of Frida and Diego”), was performed at the Metropolitan Opera also in May of this year. (Incidentally, as much as she loves writing chamber music, she'll be very busy now since there's a new opera scheduled for a premiere in 2028.)

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Ernst von Dohnányi is the German form of his name; Ernő Dohnányi, the Hungarian. Two names in two different languages for the same person. He was born in Pressburg as it was known to the German-speaking Austrians – it’s barely 30 miles from Vienna – but to the Hungarians (and it was at the time officially part of Hungary), it’s Pozsony. Today, the city is called Bratislava, the present-day capital of modern Slovakia. One city, but three names with three different cultures.

The political boundaries of Eastern Europe have created, over the centuries, so much confusion, us poor Westerners have difficulty keeping track. Dohnányi was ethnically Hungarian but in 1864, Hungary was recognized as an autonomous kingdom within the old Austrian Empire which now became the Dual Monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Though a kingdom, it didn’t have a Hungarian king; its king was the Austrian emperor. Boundaries ebbed and flowed but with the collapse of the empire at the end of World War I, Pressburg/Pozsony became part of the newly formed Czechoslovakia. Hungary was, briefly, part of the new Soviet Union’s sphere but shortly became… well… it ended up becoming a kingdom again, but again without a Hungarian king. In lieu of one, a regent was appointed who was not related to royalty (or even aristocracy) but who was an admiral, Miklos Horthy, who ruled as a proto-fascist dictator for 24 years, through most of World War II, aligning himself with Hitler and Mussolini.

Speaking of boundaries, when Bela Bartók was born in the region of Transylvania, now part of Romania, it was then part of Hungary. When his father died, his mother moved first to a Hungarian city now in Ukraine, then eventually to Pozsony before settling in Budapest so young Bela could study piano at the Liszt Academy in the Hungarian capital.

But even though part of this Dual Monarchy, the Austrians still controlled much of the government and society; German was essentially the official language if you wanted to get ahead. German culture dominated the region regardless of one’s ethnicity.

Dohnányi was caught between this dual conundrum: his family had been ennobled by a Holy Roman Emperor in 1653 and, like the more famous (and far more wealthy) Esterházys, they were Austrian Nobles with Hungarian blood in their veins. Given the two forms of his names, he did not, as some believe, change it from German to Hungarian when the old empire and its influence collapsed: he still printed his name in German on his published compositions but he used the Hungarian form in his personal life, speaking either language as needed. His tombstone bears the name “Ernst von Dohnanyi” (without the accent).

Bartók, four years younger, was a more hot-headed nationalist, proud of his Hungarian heritage: he refused to speak German at home. He and his music (especially his stage works) were constantly running afoul of the government censors.

And yet both composers began their careers heavily influenced by Germans: Dohnányi by Brahms (who even gave the young Dohnányi’s first published work, a piano quintet, his seal of approval), and Bartók, once he became more serious about composition, by Richard Strauss after hearing a performance of Also sprach Zarathustra in Budapest.

At the time, thanks to Franz Liszt and Brahms, the world viewed Hungarian music as that created by the Gypsies who were not ethnically Hungarian and had their own separate culture (more officially called, now, the “Roma”). Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and Brahms’ popular Hungarian Dances were based on well-known Gypsy tunes; but Brahms would incorporate this Gypsy style, especially its rhythmic flare, into the finales of his 1st Piano Quartet and the Violin Concerto. Brahms liked to visit the Viennese smoky taverns where Gypsy musicians played: it would be like slumming in New York City, visiting the speak-easies to listen to jazz. We should more accurately think of this form of “Hungarian Music” as Urban Popular Music rather than actual folk music.

Generically, Dohnányi was more firmly rooted in the traditions of Brahms (in his compositions) and Liszt (in his piano playing). Yes, both Brahms and Liszt are Romantic composers and contemporaries but they are also diametrically opposed stylistically, so by the time Dohnányi adapted Brahms’ more classical structural concepts in terms of form, tonality, and harmony, he was also absorbing Liszt’s chromaticism and sense of rhapsody, often incorporating an improvisatory flexibility (Liszt) within a structured overall design (Brahms). He could be described as a traditionalist within the Romantic Style – Bartók and Kodály both thought him “not modern enough.”

Dohnányi’s String Quartet No. 3 in A Minor is a case in point. At the time he was composing this, Schoenberg was developing his serial style; Berg’s Wozzeck had premiered in late-1925; Bartók would write his 3rd Quartet in 1927; Stravinsky had embraced Neo-Classicism with his Pulcinella and Renard premiered in 1926 and would write Oedipus Rex the following year; Rachmaninoff completed his little-known 4th Piano Concerto in 1926; Shostakovich premiered his 1st Symphony; Ravel would write his (in)famous Bolero in 1928. Clearly, a lot was going on in the wider musical world!

This performance, complete with score, is with the Fine Arts Quartet. The work is in three movements, opening with an edgy Allegro marked agitato ed appassionato, followed by a set of contrasting variations, Andante religioso. The lively finale is a kind of rondo, Vivace giocoso. There are Brahmsian figures and classical phrases and structures but Liszt is perhaps less in evidence in this piece (I admit I’m not familiar enough with more of Dohnányi’s works to confirm this as a mature trend or if he just didn’t feel this improvisatory sense lent itself to this string quartet). The work is dedicated “to my dear wife.”

We often think of all these composers we listen to – Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, whoever – as hermetically sealed individuals, a genius unto themselves. While it might be difficult to find any direct influence of Mendelssohn on Bartók despite the connections I’d made at the beginning, it’s almost as unexpected to find that Mendelssohn met Hector Berlioz in Rome and they became good friends, later championing each other’s music, even if Mendelssohn wrote to his father how he felt he needed to wash his hands after paging through this new piece Berlioz was working on then called the Symphonie fantastique…

But at some point in those few years while both Dohnányi and Bartók lived in Pozsony, they met. It was Dohnányi who recommended the young would-be pianist move to Budapest to study at the Franz Liszt Academy. They remained friends and colleagues, though we more often pair Bartók’s name with Zoltan Kodály.

We also often think of all these composers we listen to as being “very serious.” Yet this famous photograph would show a lighter side to three friends “goofing around” for the camera (remind anyone of silly pictures with cell phones?).

Ostensibly, this is Dohnányi wielding a weaponized guitar on the left, Bartók (seated) cowering in the face of Kodaly’s menacing walking stick and goatee (and what is that Bartók is holding?). But there seems to be some disagreement since I'd last posted this a few years ago: though I can find no proof specifically identifying these three, I’ve seen comments from people presuming to have but supplying no proof to the contrary. It certainly looks like Bartók, given a student photograph of him from 1900 and the one I posted in the banner image above, taken in 1910; but while they knew of each other at the Liszt Academy, Bartók and Kodaly didn’t become friends until 1905. So take it for what it’s worth: it’s definitely a picture of three amigos clowning around who may be Dohnányi, Bartók, and Kodály…

Dohnányi had graduated from the Liszt Academy at the age of 20 and went on to pursue a career as a concert pianist (his signature piece was Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto: he played this for his debuts in London and, in 1898, in St. Louis, MO, on his first American tour; he also had conducted it with one of his students as soloist eleven days before he died in 1960. Through Brahms, he had met the violinist Josef Joachim who invited him to teach at his conservatory in Berlin where he stayed from 1905 to 1915.

(Incidentally, speaking of meeting other composers, while Dohnányi was in Berlin, Arnold Schoenberg was also living in the German capital, and premiered his mammoth oratorio Gurrelieder there in 1913. Richard Strauss, who was also living in Berlin at the time, attended the performance. Did Dohnányi?)

After World War I began, Dohnányi returned to Budapest where he continued to teach and perform. During the short-lived post-war Soviet Republic of Hungary, he was appointed Director of the Budapest Academy, but soon the new interim government removed him because he refused to fire one of his colleagues, Zoltan Kodály, for his political views. When the “Regency” of Admiral Horthy took over the government in 1920, Dohnányi was appointed conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic where he proceeded to champion works by Bartók and Kodály, among other Hungarian-born composers. As a pianist, he also included several of Bartók’s more accessible pieces, including some of those inspired by his research into Hungarian folk music, helping establish him before he himself became recognized as a concert pianist to promote his own music.

To Bartók, Dohnányi was “not Hungarian enough” (this, in 1923). When Bartók first heard a true Hungarian folk-song sung by a young kitchen maid in 1904, this awakened something in him that initiated extensive research into the actual folk music of the Hungarian people, often traveling through the countryside, collecting songs the way a botanist might collect plant specimens. He discovered Kodály was already beginning a similar project and together they published a collection of twenty songs accompanied with their own unique, “non-classical” harmonies.

While Bartók was pining for the unrequited love of violinist Stefi Geyer, he was inspired to begin his String Quartet No. 1 in A Minor – read more about this in a post from 2009 – when he decided to incorporate some of these folk-song elements into the quartet’s fabric, expanding the idea of merely arranging them to actually absorbing them into a piece intended for a concert. It is this synthesis which created the voice we recognize as Bartók’s mature style, particularly in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th String Quartets.

Dohnányi was simply less interested in folk music. As a Hungarian, perhaps he figured being Hungarian was enough to write Hungarian music (a similar argument clouds American Music: must it sound like Copland or Gershwin to be considered “American”?). When he wrote his 3rd String Quartet in 1926, Budapest was a modern city comparable to other major cities in Western Europe or America, unlike the rest of Hungary which was primarily rural and poor. Society was divided differently than along the old German/Hungarian lines: aristocrats of various levels, even those without titles that were more like the old English gentry, were highly conscious of their social standing. Despite strict censorship, Horthy’s Regency was considered a Golden Age of literature, art, and music), even though much of the art being produced ran counter to most of the government’s proto-fascist ideology.

The urban middle class was divided by religion, the Christians dominating the government bureaucracy and the Jews taking on those jobs deemed unsuitable for “Christian gentlemen and ladies” (trades and business, but also doctors, lawyers, scientists and many others, not just menial jobs). Eventually, with the advent of the 1929 Great Depression and the Rise of Hitler and Mussolini, Horthy, a dictator regardless of his role as Regent, turned the country into a Fascist ally in the 1930s. This would lead to serious complications for Hungarian artists used to the cosmopolitan world of Budapest.

One other aspect of Dohnányi’s life should mention his family, especially his grandson, Christoph von Dohnányi, who became one of the major conductors of the late-20th Century, serving as Music Director with the Cleveland Orchestra from 1984 to 2002. Officially listed as “a German conductor,” Christoph had been born in Berlin in 1929 and raised there. His father, Ernst’s son Hans, a jurist, worked along with other members of his family in the German Resistance during World War II. He helped Jews escape from Germany but was then arrested by the Nazis for his involvement in “Operation Valkyrie,” the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. Just as the Soviet Army was preparing to attack Berlin, Hitler personally ordered Hans von Dohnanyi’s execution in April, 1945, hanged using piano wire instead of rope (presumably in honor of his concert pianist father) only days before Hitler himself committed suicide, finally bringing down the Third Reich and ending the war.

As Nazi Germany had been assuming more influence and outright control in Hungary during the '30s, Bartók left for America in 1940, but both Dohnányi and Kodály stayed. Dohnányi was never a political person, choosing to take the long view of being a care-taker to preserve the arts and the artists he worked with as conductor and director of the Academy. While this falls outside the time of the 3rd Quartet, it’s important to note that accusations of his being a Nazi Collaborator were enough to compel him, at 71, to leave Hungary in 1948 and settle in America where he ended up teaching piano at Florida State University and dying in Tallahassee in 1960. Curiously, in 1953, he composed an “American Rhapsody” which quoted “Turkey in the Straw,” “On Top of Old Smokey,” and “I am a poor wayfaring stranger.” 

 - Dick Strawser

The Terra Quartet Opens the Season: Part II, Britten's 2nd String Quartet

With Market Square Concert's first concert of its 45th Season this Thursday at 7:30 at uptown Harrisburg's Temple Ohev Sholom, the Terra String Quartet, winner of the prestigious Naumburg Chamber Music Competition, performs two major string quartets: Franz Schubert's String Quartet in A Minor, D.804, the "Rosamunde" Quartet, and Benjamin Britten's String Quartet No. 2 in C Major, Op.36.

In the previous post which you can read here, I wrote about the Schubert and also gave you the background on how the Terra Quartet came to step in for the previously scheduled Galvin Cello Quartet who had to cancel their October Tour due to last-minute, unforeseen complications.

Benjamin Britten, February, 1945

In this post, it's Britten's turn with his 2nd Quartet, completed in mid-October of 1945.

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The inception for his new string quartet was a specific concert at Wigmore Hall, one of the major chamber music venues in London, to be held on Nov. 21st, 1945, marking the 250th Anniversary of the Death of Henry Purcell, long regarded as one of the leading English composers and generally (if sadly) acknowledged at the time as the last English composer to have earned any international recognition. 

On the next day, November 22nd, the Feast Day of St. Cecilia, the Patron Saint of Music, there was another concert planned at Wigmore Hall featuring another premiere by Benjamin Britten. 

The 22nd was also Britten’s 32nd birthday. 

And more importantly, this all came five months after the premiere of a work that would place Britten at the forefront of English Composers on the International Front: his first full-length opera, Peter Grimes. 

Shortly after that auspicious debut on June 7th, 1945, Britten conducted his orchestral suite from Grimes, the “Four Sea Interludes,” which would soon become a concert staple for orchestras world-wide (even in the 1990s, it was referred to as “the most recent work to have entered the mainstream repertoire”). In a short time, Britten would find himself not only famous but regarded as “the first English composer to receive international recognition since the death of Henry Purcell.” 

Then he composed two new works: a setting of nine sonnets by 17th-Century English poet John Donne, ending with the famous “Death Be Not Proud,” which he completed on August 19th; and a string quartet commissioned for the Zorian Quartet’s concert at Wigmore Hall to mark the Purcell anniversary, which he completed on October 14th. 

Another date puts much of this into a different kind of context: the Year 1945. Oh yes, you may remember, thinking of History in General. The End of World War II. Officially, the long-awaited end of the European phase of the war (that which most closely affected England) happened on May 8th, 1945, when Germany surrendered to the Allies days after Hitler committed suicide. 

After years of bombings across England (the Nazi Blitzkrieg had leveled more than great swaths of London), shortages and privation, including food rationing, would continue for yet another nine years in the United Kingdom, so it wasn’t a burst of euphoria followed by an immediate Return to Normal. Peter Grimes, an intense examination of life in a simple fishing village on the English coast where Britten had grown up, was written while the war was still raging. It would be premiered only a month after the Germans surrendered. Its success gave English music lovers hope in the future of English music.

Then, now that the war was over and they had survived six years of constant hardships, Britten focused his creativity on new works with no doubt a sense of relief and hope. 

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Purcell’s influence manifests itself primarily in the 2nd String Quartet’s last movement, clearly the most significant of all three movements, clocking in at around 18 minutes, more than twice the length of the other two movements combined. The opening of the quartet, marked calmo, creates a sense of space as well as peace. Keep in mind, this will be heard for the first time a little over six months following the long-awaited end of The War. The tension created by the build up to the rhythmic outburst about three minutes in seems like an inevitable flash-back and these two elements, the calm and the tense, become like “contrasting themes” in a traditional sonata form. 

The scherzo is fast and brief, barely four minutes long. The quartet plays with mutes which gives it an eerie sound, a bit like Bartók’s “night music” but frenzied, though it may have more in common with the scherzo in Bartók’s 4th String Quartet, written in 1928. It had also been described as a tarantella, a folk dance inspired by the bite of a tarantula: the only way to overcome the poison was to dance madly about. The music’s frequent shifting between duple and triple meter and sharp contrasts gives it an air of instability as well. 

The forensic musicologist in me wants to point out the weird scherzo in Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite” of 1926 and remind listeners the 19-year-old Britten shocked his friends and family by wanting to go to Vienna to study with Alban Berg, a student of Arnold Schoenberg who was, at this time, developing "serialism," a process of composing with all twelve notes. When his mother was told Berg “would not be a good influence” on the boy, Britten later assumed she took it to mean “morally,” not necessarily “musically,” the advice coming from a friend who had, Britten said, “an almost moral prejudice against serial music.” Berg would die two years later, as it happened, but still it does make one ponder… 

Now comes the “crowning glory” of the quartet. Britten labeled it “Chacony,” the 17th Century English equivalent of the French chaconne or the Italian ciaconna, the work's first homage to Purcell. 

Unlike the famous Chaconne in D Minor of Bach – again, a finale that’s half the five-movement suite’s entire length – Britten takes his structural inspiration from Purcell’s use of counterpoint and different variation techniques, particularly his love of what we call “ground bass variations” where a motive or short theme in the bass repeats over-and-over, while he composes his variations over it in the upper voices. 

By way of introduction, listen to this six minute “Chacony,” Purcell's single movement Trio Sonata in G Minor (Z.730):

  

Listen first to the cello part, but then notice how the upper strings weave their variations often completely independently, frequently overlapping the harpsichord’s barely audible harmonic progressions. 

In Britten’s structural solution, he creates an 18-minute span with 21 variations based on the opening “theme” of 9 measures presented by all four players in unison. These are subdivided into three groups of six variations each with an additional three at the end. Each group is set off by a solo cadenza, an almost operatic recitative, first for the cello, then the viola, and finally the first violin. 

Britten, in his initial program notes, pointed out each group of variations “reviews” different aspects of the theme: first, its implied harmony; the second, its rhythms; the third, with new superimposed melodies. The final group of three variations examines “formal aspects”, not that, as a listener, you need to follow all of this precisely to appreciate the tight-knit structure of the movement: basically, follow the strongly accented opening idea’s jagged, descending intervals and be aware how, as the variations unfold, lines and intervals change from descending to ascending. The theme may be in the foreground, at other times in the background (as happens in the third set), but it is always present. The final set builds up to the ending’s slashing chords, all four instruments repeating four-note C Major chords against the last statement of the theme.  

(For anyone interested in following one of those score videos, click on this link.) 

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Another context follows the composer’s chronological trajectory leading up to this work. What came before it? What was going on in the composer's life that would eventually be revealed in it?

Preparatory work on Peter Grimes had started as early as 1941 while Britten and his life-partner, the tenor Peter Pears, were in America. They had left England in the spring of 1938, hoping to find new paths for their careers and a climate more in keeping with their pacifist views. Homesick before he’d even finished the crossed, one thing would have more impact on Britten’s future than all the excitement and potential they would discover during their stay in the United States: ever on the look-out for literary texts for songs or a new opera, he happened upon a copy of George Crabbe’s The Borough which describes the events that eventually became Peter Grimes.

Koussevitsky, director of the Boston Symphony, had graciously offered to commission the work for a premiere at Tanglewood but when the festival was canceled in 1942 for the duration of the war, Britten and Pears decided to return to England, hoping to arrange for the premiere of the opera there. After having some of his manuscripts confiscated by customs authorities in New York (fearful his music could contain coded messages for the enemy!) You would think this was a joke, right? But one of the sketches was for a new clarinet concerto he had started writing for Benny Goodman! Britten instead occupied his time during what proved a harrowing crossing (they traveled on “a rather decrepit old boat” as part of a convoy amidst the threat of Nazi torpedoes) by writing A Ceremony of Carols (speaking of compartmentalizing your creativity from your reality) while Pears worked out a scene-by-scene outline for the new opera’s structure. 

They were much affected by seeing the impact of The Blitz on London. Eventually, they decided to settle in Britten’s home area Suffolk on the North Sea coast, finding an old mill in Snape which became their permanent home. This, of course, was Crabbe’s country, the place and people he wrote about in The Borough. Having grown up in Lowesoft, 28 miles to the north, Britten now felt he was home. 

It was a challenge re-establishing themselves into English life both socially and professionally and it didn’t help that, while in London, Britten came down with measles in March of 1943 and had to be hospitalized (“isn’t this a major bore? – and at my age, too!”). 

Actual composing on the opera didn’t begin until January 1944 and, despite serious doubts in June, thinking “my bloody opera stinks and that’s all there is to it,” he finished scoring the complete work on February 10th 1945. 

So, while in America trying to find himself, Britten instead found a copy of a work that would inspire the opera set in a location close to where he was born and where he would eventually set up housekeeping, a work that would make him internationally famous and establish him, at 31, as one England’s leading composers. 

Amidst the reshaping of English Life after the war and the re-establishing of his professional career, Britten was talking to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin who was going to undertake a tour through post-war Germany and Britten, who had been “casting about for some commitment to the human condition whose terrible depths had been so newly revealed,” begged to go along as his pianist. One of their stops was on June 27th, at Belsen, the site of one of the worst Nazi concentration camps that had been liberated only four months earlier. Writing home to Pears, we “spent the night in Belsen and saw over the hospital – & I needn’t describe that to you…” Pears explained, shortly after Britten's death, how “that experience had colored everything he had written subsequently.” 

After the quartet's premiere, he wrote to Mrs. J. L. Behrend, the dedicatee, how “to my mind it is the greatest advance I have yet made & altho' it is far from perfect, it has given me encouragement to continue on a new line.”

Returning deeply affected after the experience of this German tour in August, Britten began composing a new song cycle, the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, with its final "Death Be Not Proud" presenting its argument against the power of death. These songs, to be premiered by Britten and Pears on November 22nd, were completed on August 19th. 

Next, he was commissioned to write a string quartet that would be premiered on the anniversary of Henry Purcell’s death 250 years ago, November 21st. It would be finished on October 14th. And so we’ve come full circle. 

One personal insight: Britten was sitting in on a rehearsal at the flat of the Zorian Quartet’s first violinist who was the wife of the music critic John Amis. Amis recalled how they only had four chairs in the whole apartment, which were needed for the quartet, so that meant Amis and the composer had to sit on the floor. When Amis, as the curious music critic, pointed out how “'oh, I see... this new tune is really the old one upside down,' ...Ben would look hard at his score and say ‘Oh, is it? Fancy that!’ and then wink at the musicians.”

After the premiere, Britten donated his commission fee to famine relief in India. He soon began work on his next commission, music for a film about the instruments of the orchestra which would be a set of variations with a climactic fugue based on a theme by Henry Purcell, usually known as “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” which he finished on New Year’s Eve. 

In October of the following year, the Zorian Quartet recorded Britten’s 2nd Quartet on seven sides of a four-disc set of 78rpm records (anyone remember those?). The eighth side was taken up suitably by Purcell’s Fantasia Upon One Note, generally considered a kind of novelty piece. It consists of four independent parts while the “one note,” a Middle C, plays like a drone throughout the whole piece. In this arrangement, it's played by the second viola. 

Aside from the Purcell association, I think if you follow the score (you may need to enlarge it to full screen to be able to read it), watching (and listening) for lines “ascending and descending” and how the tempo seems to change between segments with varying shorter or longer note values before returning to the original “slower” tempo (“diminution and augmentation”), you’ll have an idea how Britten found some inspiration in Purcell’s music to write the chaconne that concludes his string quartet on this program.  

By the way, in the Zorian’s recording, the second viola part was played by Benjamin Britten. 

– Dick Strawser

The Terra Quartet Steps In with Schubert & Britten: Part I, Schubert's "Rosamunde" Quartet

You've heard of "changes in the program" before, substituting one piece for another, whatever the reason. Sometimes it's a personnel change, somebody who's indisposed or has left the ensemble and been replaced. But this time, it's not only the whole program, it's even all the performers. 

The Galvin Cello Quartet was planning on returning to open our 45th Season this Thursday at 7:30 at Temple Ohev Sholom, but with weeks to spare, it turned out in late-September they would have to cancel their entire October tour!

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"Due to the recent changes to the practical training work authorization rules for foreign students, one of the Galvin Cello Quartet members is not allowed to tour with the ensemble, forcing the group to cancel all upcoming performances including our opening concert. 

"While we regret this development, we are thrilled to announce that the Terra String Quartet, winner of last year's Naumburg Chamber Music competition, as well as a prize winner of both Wigmore Hall and Bordeaux string quartet competitions, has graciously agreed to open our season.  

"If you have already purchased tickets for the opening concert, they remain valid for this performance. Alternatively, you may apply your tickets to any other performance this season. If you prefer a full refund, please contact Ali at akoch@marketsquareconcerts.org or at 717-221-9599."

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The Terra Quartet, based in New York City, consists of graduates from Juilliard, New England Conservatory, Harvard, and Curtis. "Known for their sincere storytelling, commitment to artistic excellence, and versatile approach to repertoire, TSQ strives to foster conversation and genuine human connection through their performances and pedagogy." 

On Thursday, Oct. 8th, (7:30 at Temple Ohev Sholom), they will be performing the String Quartet in A Minor, D.804, the "Rosamunde" Quartet by Franz Schubert, and Benjamin Britten's String Quartet No. 2 in C Major. 

The Terra String Quartet (not with their usual mode of transportation) -- Sophie Kaye, photographer

This post will focus on the Schubert. Check back soon for the Britten...

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When you listen to a piece of music, you are creating a context: maybe you’re at a concert and everyone around you is (hopefully) quietly and intently listening; maybe you’re playing the video in this post while you read the background information about it. In one case, you’re absorbing the music as it’s being performed (with any luck, the way the composer intended it); in the other, you’re just “hearing” the music – call it “passive listening” as compared to the concert-goer’s “active listening.” 

Of course, you can read the text of this post and then listen to the video actively. Your reaction to it could be different depending on your experience: as a trained musician and a composer, I would tend to listen differently than a person who enjoys classical music but doesn’t know much about it. But there are times when I’m not really paying attention to it because something else is in the foreground: I have the CD player on but I’m getting dinner ready. 

Perhaps you listen “analytically” – “that must be the main theme – now it’s in the cello… and the viola is playing something contrasting to the theme…” (it may be funny, but Peter Schickele’s “sports-style commentary” to Beethoven’s 5th is not that far-fetched). 

And of course it isn’t necessary for the listener to know what key we’re in or how a harmonic progression creates dramatic tension to be able to enjoy the music: every level of understanding helps with our overall appreciation. Perhaps you listen “aesthetically” – which basically implies “for the pleasure of the moment.” Does the music present a mood to you, a color, an image? 

The opening of the Britten is expansively calm – are you thinking “sunrise”? – and then it becomes rhythmically and harmonically agitated – are you thinking “storm-clouds on the horizon”? Does it become the background music for a scenario you begin to develop in your mind (not difficult for anyone raised on Walt Disney’s Fantasia or MTV) and you might tell someone after the concert “I particularly liked that bit where everyone’s arguing about who picks up the check.” 

Or perhaps you’re not connecting with the music or the performance at all, thinking “I’m glad I’m recording ‘Dancing with the Stars’ tonight…” 

Everybody’s experience is unique and everybody’s perception is different. 

As an example: it was a dreary December morning in 1976 and I’d just turned on the radio. I had no idea what I was listening to, some string quartet – and I didn’t really have time to pay attention to it, getting my day started. All I knew was I didn’t recognize the piece and didn’t have time to play “Guess the Composer.” Primarily, it didn’t grab my interest and besides, I’d only heard maybe five minutes of it. 

I admit, though, I was “shocked” when the host back-announced the piece as the String Quartet No. 2 in C Major by Benjamin Britten. 

At the time Britten was probably my favorite living composer. I’ve been familiar with a lot of his music over the years since I first heard his opera Peter Grimes when I was in high school, thanks to the record collection of the Harrisburg Public Library. But that my first reaction to this piece was “dislike”? How was that possible? 

The radio host continued: “...who died earlier this morning at the age of 63…” Consequently, I have always felt guilty about my response to this particular work: was it the performance? Or, more likely, my level of inattention? 

So I started checking out other recordings and found that it was not the music at fault because, after a few more outings with it, it became something I liked very much, and eventually, one of my favorites. 

Over the years, I’ve learned if you hear a performance of Beethoven’s 5th and you don’t like it, it’s the performers’ fault (maybe the orchestra’s playing or the conductor’s interpretation). You’re not likely to change your mind about Beethoven’s 5th as one of the Great Symphonies (however over-played it might be). 

But if we hear a new work, perhaps by a composer we don’t know, and we don’t like it, we tend to blame the composer. Isn’t it possible the musicians are struggling to play the notes? Is it possible they haven’t made sense out of the piece, how it gets from Point A to Point B? Usually, the first response of a new listener is not “I need to hear this again.” 

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Franz Schubert, one of the Most Beloved of the Great Masters, would most likely not suffer from such a reaction: most members of the audience, if not familiar with the “Rosamunde” Quartet, have at least heard several other pieces he’d written in his short life: most likely the Quartettsatz or the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, and certainly the famous “Trout” Quintet. 

Even if Schubert is new on the listener’s menu, the whole style of the period he lived in would be familiar, somewhere between Mozart-and-Beethoven and Schumann-and-Brahms. His harmonies might be more adventuresome in some cases but not startling enough to be disconcerting to the novice-listener. Plus he has tunes – and no tune is more memorably Schubertian than the lovely stretch of lyricism in the second movement that gives the quartet its nickname, taken from his Incidental Music for a play called “Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus.” 

In addition to the listener’s personal context, each piece of music has its own individual context: the composer’s life-and-times, specifically the time it was composed and what else maybe have been going on in the composer’s life which I usually call the work’s “biographical background.” Then there’s the “brick-and-mortar” context of the piece itself, how it’s put together (and the extent one cares to go into this can be more technical than the average listener needs in order to appreciate it). 

In this performance, the Escher Quartet (who’ve been in Harrisburg before with Market Square Concerts), recorded at the La Jolla Summerfest in 2015, perform Schubert’s String Quartet in A Minor, the “Rosamunde” Quartet. It’s in four movements: the opening Allegro ma non troppo; the slow movement, the Andante that gives the work its subtitle; the minuet, Allegretto; and the finale, Allegro moderato.

  

In 1823, Schubert told his friend Moritz von Schwind the violinist Ignaz von Schuppanzigh had asked him for a new work he and his quartet could perform the following March, obviously a sign of Schubert’s acceptance in Vienna’s musical sphere considering this was the ensemble who’d premiered Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets and would be entrusted with the impending Late Quartets. 

On March 6th, 1824, Schwind wrote to Franz von Schober, a former roommate of Schubert’s who now lived outside Vienna, that Schuppanzigh’s quartet was rehearsing the new quartet and they were quite enthusiastic about it, the rehearsals going particularly well. The premiere took place on March 14th, in the prestigious hall of the famous Society of the Friends of Music (the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde). 

Again, Schwind wrote to Schober, “Schubert’s quartet has been performed, rather slowly in his opinion, but very purely and tenderly. It is on the whole very smooth but written in such a way that the tune remains in one’s mind, as with all the songs, all feeling and thoroughly expressive. It got much applause, especially the Menuetto which is extraordinarily tender and natural.” Not all reviews were as cordial. A Viennese critic wrote: “New Quartet by Schubert. This composition must be heard several times before it can be adequately judged.” 

A critic from Leipzig wrote it was “not to be despised as first born,” under the assumption this was Schubert’s first quartet – he had composed at least a dozen beforehand, most of them to be played by his family’s quartet for their evening musicales – it was merely the first one to reach a larger, general public. 

In September, he sent it off to his publishers and was paid £4. 

Now that you’ve heard the piece, what was going on in Schubert’s life when he composed it? First of all, Schubert tended to compose almost constantly and “with such concentration,” as one friend reported how Schubert, working on either the Octet or the “Rosamunde” Quartet at the time, “continued writing at his desk, saying only ‘Hallo, how are you? Good!’ without even looking up.” Schubert, who stood all of 5’1’’ tall – his friends called him “Schwammerl” (Little Mushroom) – had just celebrated his 27th birthday at the end of January with a party where he ended up passed out drunk. 

Between early February, 1824, and mid-March, he completed the Octet in F Major, an hour-long work in six movements, and this A Minor String Quartet. Once that was done, he immediately began his next quartet – he was planning three of them – the D Minor Quartet which, however, he apparently put aside and didn’t come back to to finish it in January, 1826 when it was premiered (did he revise a first draft?). The G Major Quartet, the third of the planned set, wasn’t written until the end of June, 1826, but even then it was completed in ten days. 

The previous year had ended with the production of a new play – Rosamunde, the Princess of Cyprus by Helmine von Chézy – for which he’d written an hour’s worth of incidental music he’d begun in late-autumn (some of the ballet music didn’t arrive until four days before the premiere on December 20th). It turned into one of those classic disasters that resulted in the play being pulled after a second performance. At least someone thought enough of the music to keep the instrumental parts in the theater’s library; no one has ever found a copy of von Chézy’s actual play, so you can draw your own conclusions there (speaking of “who’s to blame, the author or the performers?”, this turned out to be a case of “both”). Comments about the music, however, were at least favorable. 

Most biographies of composers focus on what they wrote when: but at this time what was going on in Schubert’s life outside of his composing? 

The first symptoms of syphilis had already appeared by November of 1822. He had just completed… well, let’s say he composed two movements of what was supposed to become a Symphony in B Minor, beginning work on the full score on October 30th. It is of course one of the great mysteries of classical music, “Why is the ‘Unfinished Symphony’ Unfinished?” He did sketch the opening phrase of a scherzo, so the argument that “he thought it was complete with just two movements” is clearly wrong. 

The other thing to consider is, Schubert was now beginning to think, like Beethoven, he wanted to write larger scale works (Beethoven had not yet written his 9th Symphony, and he’d only begun working on the last set of string quartets in November of 1822) – the question was, how do you do that? The scope of this B Minor Symphony is certainly on a grander scale than any symphony Schubert had completed before this (and the B Minor is not, incidentally, his first unfinished symphony). 

Perhaps writing some string quartets would help him get a handle on expanding the traditional forms of each individual movement. 

But then, he became ill. He dealt with various treatments for a disease that he knew was likely going to kill him eventually - it would not be a pleasant life, physical deterioration, possible deafness, likely insanity, a horrible death - along with periods of depression during which, incidentally, he wrote the “Wanderer Fantasy,” a much more dramatic, even demonic-sounding work than we usually associate with the amiable Schubert. 

As 1823 began, things apparently improved, but a few weeks after he’d returned from a summer’s holiday, these symptoms became serious enough he needed to enter a hospital. By this time, he had begun composing some of the twenty songs for his song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin, even writing several of them while in the hospital. 

How long he was being treated there is unknown, but as soon as he finished the songs, he began work on music Mme. von Chézy urgently needed for her new play, barely completing the last of it in time for the premiere. 

But with the New Year, he had a relapse shortly after his birthday which required another round of treatment which involved a diet alternating between schnitzel and panada (a cooked flavored meal of bread and water) along with copious amounts of tea and frequent baths. Still, Schubert was focused on composing: the Octet first, then immediately on to the A Minor Quartet. 

Moving ahead to a couple of weeks later, having started work on the next quartet, the D Minor (perhaps even finishing a first draft of it), Schubert wrote to his friend, Leopold Kupelwieser, who’d recently left Vienna to study painting in Rome. “Of songs I have not written many new ones, but I have tried my hand at several instrumental works, for I wrote two Quartets for violins, viola and violoncello and an Octet, and I want to write another quartet, in fact I intend to pave my way towards [a] grand symphony in that manner…” 

That is the news about his new works, but he also added “In a word, I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair over this ever makes things worse and worse, instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have come to nothing, to whom the joy of love an friendship have nothing to offer him but pain, at best, whose enthusiasm… for all things beautiful threatens to vanish…” He then quotes the opening lines from Goethe's poem which he set to music in one of his earliest songs, Gretchen am Spinnrade – “‘My peace is gone, my heart is sore. I shall never find it, never again.’ I may well sing every day now, for each night, I go to bed hoping never to wake again, and each morning only tells me of yesterday’s grief.” 

Keep in mind this was written only a couple of weeks after completing the A Minor Quartet. 

It’s not that these depressing realities were weighing him down as he wrote, as far as we know: some people can create works of art as a refuge from reality, in spite of their reality, where for a period of time, their creativity can take them outside of the reality around them. 

Listeners are often surprised to discover Beethoven, dealing with the first signs of serious deafness and the implications for a composer who lives in a world of sound, wrote his heart-rending “Heiligenstadt Testament” which almost reads like a suicide note at the time he was composing the finale of his 2nd Symphony. I mean, Beethoven knew what he wanted – needed – at this point in his new symphony, and it wasn’t part of the plan to suddenly write a dramatic, indeed tragic conclusion full of emotional outbursts, what other composers might turn into knee-deep self-pity. He would handle Fate Knocking at the Door in his 5th Symphony.

But was Schubert, like Beethoven, able to compartmentalize life from art? It would seem so. 

The quartet’s nickname, “Rosamunde,” comes from the music Schubert used for the second movement, one of the entr’acts salvaged from the ill-fated play. Did Schubert choose it because it was, apparently, a nice bit of music that would otherwise remain unknown (given the play’s demise), or was there some significance to the music that appealed to Schubert’s state-of-mind? 

An “entr’act” is basically a prelude or interlude between scenes meant to fill in the time necessary for a change of the stage setting: what happens in the up-coming scene? Apparently not much: it’s a pastoral scene (Rosamunde is, at this time, a shepherdess, before it’s discovered she’s the rightful princess of Cyprus) which includes rustic choruses for shepherds, then huntsmen. Probably no significant “hidden meaning,” here. 

What is generally overlooked is how often Schubert has quoted some of his own music in new works: not so much that he does this (getting a little extra mileage out of an old piece) but why choose this piece? Is there some significance (for him, at least) behind the selection. Take the famous “Fantasy in C Major,” known as the “Wanderer” Fantasy because a motive permeating the work is taken from a song written six years earlier, “The Wanderer” (D.489). But that’s a song in which this “stranger, an outsider, seeks happiness but cannot find it anywhere: where will he find happiness?” The answer? “There, where you are not, is your happiness.” Remember, at this time, Schubert was dealing with his first diagnosis of syphilis. 

Several writers have commented on the similarity between the opening of this string quartet and Schubert’s famous song Gretchen am Spinnrade, not an exact quote necessarily but playing with the pitches in such a way, they’re obviously similar (there are, of course, only so many notes to go around). 

But remember that line in his letter to Kupelweiser written a few weeks later? “My peace is gone, my heart is sore. I shall never find [peace], never again.” That’s the opening line from Goethe’s poem which Schubert set when he was 16. Does Gretchen’s inner turmoil, spinning along like her spinning wheel reflected in the piano’s accompaniment, have any significance for the composer now, a little over ten years later? 

But fragments of another song supply material for another movement in this quartet, what seems to be a very pleasant minuet. Die Götter Griechenlandes (“The Gods of Greece”), composed in 1819, is a fragment itself from a longer poem by Schiller which described his conception of life and nature in antiquity, to the poet a happy and harmonious age in contrast to the present-day Christian age which he sees as a stage of loss, joylessness, alienation and divisiveness (keep in mind, the poem dates from 1788). 

For Schubert, the point was a longing for the peace of this old world: “only in the fairy tale land of song / That any trace of your magnificence lives on. / ...Oh, that image, so warm with life, / Only a shadow of it now remains.” 

It might be more cumbersome to refer to the Quartet in A Minor, D.804, as the “Götter Griechenlandes” Quartet (or even the “Gods in Greece” Quartet), but perhaps it better reflects what was going on in Schubert’s mind than a pleasant pastoral scene about a Cypriot princess cheated out of her rightful inheritance. 

Or does this, in hindsight, turn Rosamunde into the “outsider” like the stranger in the “Wanderer” Fantasy and her bucolic countryside into the absent and lamented “fairy tale land” mourned with the passing of the gods of antiquity? Didn't Schubert admit to feeling like an outsider himself among Viennese society, suffering from syphilis?

Of course, I’m probably overthinking this, as usual. But then… 

– Dick Strawser

Summermusic 2026, Part 3: Jantelagen - Songs with Tenor Curtis Bannister & Pianist Mark Markham

At 4:00 this Sunday, July 19th, the air-conditioned Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg will be the setting for the final program of Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic 2026, a program of songs with tenor Curtis Bannister and pianist Mark Markham setting texts that illuminate the Swedish cultural concept of JANTELAGEN which can be defined as “a focus on collective unity and humility over praise of the individual.”

Curt Bannister & Mark Markham

The recipient of the Actors Equity Foundation Roger Sturtevant Award and a Drama League Award nominee, tenor Curtis Bannister has been praised by the Broadway World as a "commanding performer." He has performed with the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Atlant Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Cincinnati Symphony.  

Pianist Mark Markham was a recital partner of the legendary late soprano Jessye Norman for over twenty years and is familiar to our audience from his appearances as a piano soloist with the Harrisburg Symphony as well as his performances as a pianist prented by Market Square Concerts including a memorable recital with the late tenor Limmie Pulliam back in 2023.  

This concert will take place on Sunday, July 19th, at 4pm at the Market Suqrae Presbyterian Church. Free parking is available at the garage adjacent to the church at the corner of Second and Chestnut Streets. You will need to provide the license plate number to a staff person when you enter the church through the atrium in order to activate your validation.

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To explain Jantelagen, I can do no better than quote verbatim the program notes supplied by Curtis Bannister:

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Jantelagen (the Law of Jante) is a Scandinavian social norm that discourages bragging, individualism, and standing out from the crowd for attention. Instead it favors the praising of the collective and all its achievements. Such a practice or mindset can be seen as disingenuous, particularly in the U.S. The need to achieve and be seen as a success is a constructive trait, but many in our American society have found a way – as we often do with many norms from other cultures – to put an emphasis on the need to be singularly successful and elevated. This mindset is the practice of placing self-importance above the ideals that shaped and save the America we love and enjoy today.

I first performed this recital just outside of Washington DC on November 5th, 2024 – the day after the 2024 election. I chose these songs as a collective to express the possibilities of what was to come no matter the electoral results. Once the results were known, this program became a rallying cry for unity, principles, and the need to remember who we are as Americans, where we came from, and the importance of listening before a response or reaction. We as a collective community that make up the United States do not and should not always agree but we should always stand on principle, debate, morality, and the right to agree to disagree. This program is my interpretation of being one among an incredible many to create and achieve greatness. No one achieved greatness alone.

Be the best. Be seen as the best. Be known for being the best even if we are not: in our current social climate, to dismiss humility and replace it with hyper ego can be perceived as a superpower – as a strength before all else while lacking self-awareness. Without self-awareness we feed the dangerous elements of ego. Ego is needed to survive, but when it consumes all, it can be more detrimental than being ignorant; it can cause harm to another for self-benefit and advancement without care or apology. Modesty is seen as a negative vulnerability and conformity as a weakness because it’s not “all about us/me”. Somehow sentiments that exude open-mindedness, community and cooperation are seen as negative in a culture that thrives off of hyperbole and the feat of being irrelevant. But historically, progress (not to be confused with political progressiveness) an clarity of understanding is achieved by community.

America and The American Experiment has made the remarkable feat of reaching 250 years. That’s 250 years of trial and error, victories, embarrassment, maturity and absolution. We did not become the “beacon on the hill” by playing it safe, being selfish and irresponsible, and watching out for self. America was born from the collective agreement and dream of like-minded individuals who believed in peace, freedom, liberation, and the pursuit of happiness away from the “big brother” eye and hand of a singular opinion or rule. Jantelagen is an extension of this ideal in tangible practice. As individuals we are all special, smart, humorous, compassionate and powerful. When such individuals, as we all are, realize and put to action what we can achieve together, while using our common sense and humanity, we will have the honor and right to celebrate another 250 years – as “us,” not as “I.”

– Curtis Bannister

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When it comes to writing about various works on these concerts, if you follow the blog with any regularity, you know that I essentially delve into what I call the music’s biographical background as well as (at least for this particular creative moment) the composer’s. Sometimes, programs are constructed with some sense of order – a theme, a thread that permeates the selection of the music – or perhaps there’s a historical juxtaposition (for instance, writing about Dvořák’s “American” String Quintet and Arthur Foote’sPiano Quintet on last Wednesday’s program, written just a few years apart and very much to the heart of the question, then very contemporary, of “What Is American Music?”), but in this case, none of my usual options make much sense. I will offer some recordings to familiarize listeners with some of the music, but that won’t be necessary for all of them. Still, the biographical context of the Strauss songs, I think, may enhance the listener’s appreciation; whereas, with some of them, it hardly matters. I mean, I can go on and on about, say, Bernstein’s West Side Story, but for a “curtain raiser” to the topic of the program – “Something’s Coming” – is all that that important? Going from Bernstein to Barber may not seem so much of a stretch but keep in mind that Bernstein was a curious figure in American Music, an artist with… how to put this… many feet in many different fields: conductor, pianist, lecturer, but even as a composer, a composer of music that straddled various definitions, both “popular” and “serious” (terms Bernstein would’ve hated). As I’ve often mentioned the definition of “popular” versus “classical music” a high school music teacher I knew back in 1970 gave her class, “Classical Music was the music nobody liked” (she also told them “John Philip Sousa was the greatest American composer”) but I digress.

Both Bernstein and Barber struggled with acceptance (as did most composers: think Beethoven and Brahms, for that matter). Bernstein wanted to write “serious” music that was appreciated by the “serious” composers he championed at the New York Philharmonic but which, in many cases, often came up short in the approval of both his desired audience and the audience-at-large. What was wrong with being the composer of West Side Story or The Chichester Psalms? Samuel Barber, who was treated like an anachronism in a musical universe largely populated by serialists and the avant-garde, was often dismissed, like Bernstein, for writing tonal music when tonality as such was “soooo last century.” Of course, now, the shoe has moved completely over to the other foot, but that’s another story...

Bernstein wrote West Side Story, a Broadway musical (and one of the most enduring ones in the repertoire) in the mid-1950s. Barber wrote his song cycle The Hermit Songs in 1953, but the one on our program today – usually described as an “art song” to distinguish it from a “pop song” – Sure on This Shining Night was composed in 1934 around the time he graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music and four years before he wrote what would become the Adagio for Strings. One of his most frequently performed songs, it is a fine example of his lyrical romanticism yet combines a keen sense of classical structure, “carefully crafted interplay between the voice and piano that emphasizes canonic imitation” (which sounds dreadfully academic, but is an example of a composer who can be both “romantic and classical” at the same time: again, think Beethoven and Brahms). Given the multiverse that is Modern Music today with all the different styles available to the listener, there has become a more open, shall we say “diverse” awareness of the “different kinds of musics” whether we pigeon-hole it or not, and that today we think of “Wagner and Brahms” as just two more Romantic Composers from the 19th Century, regardless of the intense animosity between them and their adherents in their day, simply based on the difference of their musical styles.

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Two of the three Strauss songs on the program set texts by the Scottish-German poet, novelist, and anarchist John Henry Mackay whose father, a Scottish insurance broker, had died when the boy was two years old, so his German-born mother returned to her home in Hamburg, where Mackay grew up. While his novels explored various political and social themes (he also wrote “sports novels”), his poetry attracted composers like Strauss and Schoenberg. Since some of his poems, because of their “socialist content,” attracted the attention of the German censors, he had many of his poems published in Switzerland instead.

Both are from the Op. 27 set, written when Strauss was not yet 30. Heimliche Aufforderung ("The Secret Invitation") was composed on May 22, 1894, and given to his wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna, as a wedding present. During their American tour in 1904, she sang it to conclude her Carnegie Hall debut recital. This particular song describes a man among party-goers wooing a woman he then invites to join him for a later tryst.

Here is soprano Jessye Norman, in this case with pianist Geoffrey Parsons:

The more famous Morgen! (“Tomorrow!”), composed the day before Heimliche Aufforderung, concludes Strauss’ original set. Mackay’s poem describes how “the sun will shine tomorrow, uniting us as we descend to the beach, looking into each other’s eyes: upon us will sink the mute silence of happiness.”

While most of the recordings that surface on YouTube use an orchestration, here is a video (with score) of mezzo-soprano Janet Baker and pianist Gerald Moore: 

The “Jantelagen” program concludes with a third song by Strauss, Zueignung (“Dedication”), written shortly after his 21st birthday, and the first of his songs to be published. Written for tenor voice, this caused a rift in the Strauss family because the composer’s father wanted these first songs to be dedicated to Aunt Johanna as thanks for all her support in the boy’s musical development. Instead, the songs were dedicated to the heldentenor Heinrich Vogl who’d sung, among various Wagnerian roles, Loge at the first complete Ring of the Nibelungen at Bayreuth in 1876.

The poem is by the Austrian poet Hermann von Gilm whose day-job had been being a lawyer in Vienna; he had died the same year Strauss was born, 1864. Gilm’s original title was Habe Dank (“Have thanks”), the poem’s refrain, but Strauss changed it to “Zueignung.” The lover is tormented by their being parted, but after he’d drunk “the blessed draught” (how very Tristan-like) he finds the evil spirits banished and, comforted, “sinks into your embrace – have thanks!”

Here is tenor Jonas Kauffman with pianist Helmut Deutsch

(Incidentally, here is a 1921 recording with baritone Heinrich Schlusnus and the composer at the piano!)

Maurice Ravel may be better known for his orchestral and solo piano works but he wrote a number of songs throughout his career, including two sets of songs in 1914 based on “traditional melodies” (usually implying folk songs), one pair of Hebraic Songs (Deux mélodies hébraïques or “Two Hebrew Songs”), the other “Five Popular Greek Songs.” The first of two Hebrew songs is a setting in Aramaic of the Kaddish with its central theme of the magnification and sanctification of God’s name and often associated with mourning, a prayer that is one of the central elements of the Jewish liturgy. It hardly sounds like Ravel, the composer of… well, what else was he writing around 1914? The Piano Trio, for one, and he also began work on what would become Le Tombeau de Couperin; and two years earlier he’d written the ballet Daphnis et Chloe (Bolero, his most famous, if not infamous, piece would be written in 1929). In Ravel’s uncharacteristic setting, the accompaniment is almost minimalist, the whole focus on the singer and the words of the prayer. By not setting it in French, perhaps Ravel was thinking the audience would need to follow the translation in the program – did they do that in 1914? – so they would be forced to face the words of the prayer, thus, Believers or not, they were made part of the community.

In this recording, cantor Azi Schwartz sings Ravel’s setting of the Kaddish text with pianist Fadi Deeb, recorded at the Jerusalem Music Center in 2010.

Part of that side of American Music that encompasses everything from Rodgers & Hammerstein to Bernstein to Sondheim and many more (and many different styles) in between, community is certainly a part of the other songs in this set: Adam Guettel, born a hundred years after Richard Strauss, “is known for his rich, operatic style and for writing major Broadway musicals such as Floyd Collins, The Light in the Piazza, and Days of Wine and Roses. His work often blends storytelling with lush, dramatic music, and “Build a Bridge” fits this tradition – combining emotional depth with melodic beauty.”

Here, Audra Macdonald sings “Build a Bridge,” part of Guettel’s Myths & Hymns collection, a series of concert pieces drawing on themes and melodies from his stage works. It’s “a lyrical, reflective piece that uses the metaphor of building a bridge to convey emotional and spiritual connection,” expressing “longing and determination to overcome obstacles (‘the water’s wide,’ ‘battle the tide’) to reach someone or something important. The repeated call to ‘build a bridge’ symbolizes creating a connection across distance, time, or difference. It’s both a personal plea and a universal metaphor for hope, perseverance, and unity.”

Stepping outside the program’s continuity (since I already blew that as a concept with the Strauss songs, anyway), the second half of the program opens with another Guettel song, “Awaiting You,” from the album “Myths and Hymns” released in 1999.

"In his song cycle, Myths & Hymns,” Concord Theatricals writes, “Guettel paints an emotional landscape of faith and yearning that embraces a boundless spectrum of ideology and spirituality. ...The musical vocabulary sweeps from romantic art song and rock to Latin, gospel and R&B. Myths & Hymns elucidates our fantastic desire to transcend earthly bounds, our intrinsic need to connect with something or someone greater in our restless search for enlightenment.” Here is “Awaiting You” with Billy Porter:

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Alas, between the heat, the oppressive air quality as I try to finish this, and the joint cantankerousness of my back and my computer, I’m going to have to cut this short if it’s to be posted before the concert… Well, I’d said I wasn’t planning on covering every song: some of them may be more familiar than others and their context within the program’s theme, Scandinavian or not, fairly obvious – if we’re talking about building bridges to connect to a greater community, of course you’re going to include Sondheim’s “No one is alone” from Into the Woods (sung here by Bernadette Peters) or a true Broadway classic from 1945, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel (“When you walk through a storm, keep your chin up high – and don’t be afraid of the dark… Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart, and you’ll never walk alone…” You only need to see the words and you’ll be able to sing along!).

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If we’re talking about what makes America in these past 250 years, we would be remiss if we completely overlooked the Black Experience and the role of the Negro Spiritual and the influence they’ve had on American Music (and society in general) both popular and “serious.” The song “Strange Fruit” may be familiar thanks to Billie Holiday’s performances, both music and lyrics written by Abel Meeropol in 1934. It portrays “lynched African Americans as ‘strange fruit’ hanging from Southern trees, using stark imagery to contrast the natural beauty of the landscape with the horror of racial violence.”

Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” was to be the first movement of his instrumental suite, Black, Brown, and Beige, blending jazz, gospel, and spirituals in an attempt to tell the African American story through music, a work he premiered at Carnegie Hall in January of 1943. The lyrics “express a heartfelt prayer for divine guidance and protection, particularly reflecting the African American experience. Repeated appeals to "Lord, dear Lord above" ask God to "look down and see my people through," combining personal faith with collective hope. Biblical imagery and folk wisdom are woven throughout, with references to celestial permanence and moral guidance, such as the Golden Rule.”

In this recording, Duke Ellington performs with Mahalia Jackson.

There are books about the history, the meaning, and the significance of the African American or Negro Spiritual, musical expression that gave hope to a life in slavery, religious or social (the two intertwined). Their melodies have become familiar to audiences of all races, their lyrics sometimes less so, and the comprehension of them perhaps even less: tragedy as entertainment is always difficult, and sometimes the unbearable sadness and incomprehensible hopefulness may be uncomfortable (but then, Art is supposed to challenge us, to open us to experiences beyond ourselves).

Only one example is a song called simply “O Freedom.” “Oh freedom over me! And before I’d be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.” In this performance of one of many arrangements is the American tenor, George Shirley, raised in Detroit, who was the first African American tenor to sing a lead role at the Metropolitan Opera, singing Ferrando in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte in 1961. He would sing major roles for the next 11 seasons. (Point of note: the first African American singer in any major role at the Met was contralto Marian Anderson with her belated debut as Ulrica in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera in 1955. Time, moving slowly, has continued to move slowly in too many areas of equality in this nation of ours.)

With Dvořák’s quintet on the second program of Summermusic 2026, I mentioned briefly the Bohemian composer’s influence as a teacher in New York City in the 1890s where his advice to his American students was to look to American folk music for inspiration, just as he, a Bohemian (or Czech) composer looked to his own ethnic roots for inspiration. The problem was, none of his students really could say what “American folk music” was since they all came from Europe with English or German or Italian folk music in their blood – and one, at least, Henry T. Burleigh, had the Negro Spiritual in his heritage. In fact, he introduced his teacher to these songs. The story goes that Burleigh, a native of Erie, PA, putting himself through school while working as the Conservatory’s janitor, was singing in the hallways one night as he cleaned, and Dvořák, the school’s director, happened to hear him and asked him to sing more of these for him. Burleigh later wrote “I sang our Negro songs for him very often, and before he wrote his own themes, he filled himself with the spirit of the old Spirituals.” Dvořák himself said, speaking about musical styles, “in the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”

While there is much that can be argued for and against Dvořák’s “Americanisms” in the works he wrote will in the United States, the famous “Largo” Theme in his “New World” Symphony may or may not be inspired by any specific Negro Spiritual (or capturing the essence of them in general), but in 1922, another Dvořák student, William Arms Fisher, added Spiritual-like words to Dvořák’s English horn melody to create the song “Goin’ Home,” speaking of the Chicken-or-the-Egg Conundrum.

But we forget Burleigh also studied composition with Dvořák: he didn’t just empty his waste baskets and sing for him. In all, Burleigh, well-known as a singer, also wrote between 300-400 songs of his own, some of them arrangements of spirituals, but most of them original, “serious” – there’s that word again – compositions. One of them is a setting of Langston Hughes’ “Lovely, dark and lonely one.” Hughes, one of the most famous African American poets and leader of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote the poem, originally titled simply "Song," in 1925; Burleigh published his setting of it ten years later. Here, it’s performed by tenor Roderick George and pianist Katie Franklin.

And while the program concludes with Strauss’ Zueignung which I discussed above, we’ll close this blog post for now and look forward to seeing you Sunday afternoon at the concert!

– Dick Strawser