Two previous posts covered Beethoven's String Quartet Op.132 which concludes the program and, covering the middle works, Bartok's 1st Quartet and three songs by Eugene Drucker, Of Troubled Times. In this post you can hear
the Emerson Quartet's recording of the quartet Borodin composed in 1881 and find out how a
“Sunday Composer” who took in stray cats won a Tony Award in 1954. I suppose you could call the 2nd movement “Sunday in the Park with Alexander” though I'm not sure
how many of Borodin's “Cats” actually put in an appearance here,
despite their having the run of his Petersburg apartment... Certainly, it's all “Kismet.”
Join us for the concert on Saturday evening at 7:30 at Temple Ohev Sholom, 2345 North Front Street in uptown Harrisburg.
= = = = = = =
Alexander Borodin
In this country, Alexander
Borodin – Dr. Alexander Borodin – is what we would call an
“amateur” in the sense he did not make his living by his art
(“amateur, from the Latin amo/amas/amat, to love”).
Yet anyone familiar with Borodin's music would realize there is
nothing “amateurish” about its quality. Part of the history of Russian Music, however, must be our awareness that, at this time, there were few ways for a young would-be musician to gain any professional training.
Borodin was largely
“un-trained,” another aspect of consideration when bandying about
the word “amateur.” True, when he would've been a student, they
didn't have music schools in Russia – Anton Rubinstein opened the
first official one in St. Petersburg, the Imperial capital, in 1862
and when his brother Nikolai opened one in Moscow four years later,
one of his first students was a former law-student named Tchaikovsky.
Instead, following his
scientific interests, Borodin had entered the Imperial Academy of
Medicine and Surgery in St. Petersburg in 1850 – a prestigious
institution dating back to the days of Peter the Great: one of its
later students named Pavlov might ring a bell – and following
graduation, he spent a year as a surgeon in a military hospital, then
was appointed as a professor of pathology and therapeutics before
receiving his Doctorate in medicine and pursuing some post-doctoral
work first in Heidelberg, Germany, in the late-1850s, then in Pisa in
1862, the year he published a paper describing the first nucleophilic
displacement of chlorine by fluorine in benzoyl chloride. One of his
fellow students in Heidelberg, by the way, was a chemist named
Mendeleyev who would publish his first periodic chart of the elements
seven years later.
While in Heidelberg, Dr. Borodin
met a young Russian woman – Ekaterina Sergeievna Protopopova –
who was an amateur pianist with a preference for Chopin and Schumann.
A woman of weakened health, she had come to Germany for “the cure,”
but returned to St. Petersburg in 1862 – as did Borodin – and not
long after that they were married.
Borodin's interest in music was
awakened, in a sense, by Ekaterina's playing. So is it any
coincidence he composed this piano quintet while traveling in Italy?When they returned to Russia,
Borodin was appointed a professor of chemistry at his alma mater and
he and his new wife set up house-keeping in a spacious and rent-free
apartment in the Academy building where domestic life took on a happy
if often chaotic domesticity.
One other thing happened in
1862: though he had met a civil servant named Modest Mussorgsky,
another would-be composer, a couple of times, it wasn't until he
returned to Russia, his musical interests reactivated, that Borodin
met composer and teacher Mily Balakirev and began taking lessons from
him in his “spare” time.
By then, Borodin had already
completed a small number of chamber works – a couple of piano
trios, a cello sonata (inspired by Bach), two string trios, a string
quintet and a string sextet – before he began his Piano Quintet in
C Minor. So technically, if we examine that “amateur” status
again, as far as the Piano Quintet was concerned, yes, Borodin was as
yet “un-trained.” He finished it before he turned 29. Once he
started working with Balakirev, then, he jumped right into composing his
first symphony.
In
1869, he'd begun two substantial projects: his 2nd
Symphony which he then interrupted in the fall to start work on the
opera, Prince Igor.
With one thing and, mostly, another, it took him around seven years
to complete the new symphony; the opera fared less well and remained
incomplete sixteen years later when he died suddenly in 1885. With
that kind of a schedule, his 1st
String Quartet took about five years to complete; fortunately he
began his 2nd
Quartet in 1881 while staying at a friend's country estate, and
finished it in a very short (for him) time.
It
appears he had intended his new quartet as a 20th
Anniversary gift for his wife and at one time he specifically
referred to the second theme of the scherzo as an attempt to “conjure
up the impression of a light-hearted evening in one of the pleasure
gardens in suburban St. Petersburg.”
Whether
his tunes – and who would deny he had a particular talent for
creating memorable melodies? – are particularly Russian or not does
not bother us today: like that theme from this quartet's third
movement, the famous “Nocturne,” whether you grew up associating
it with the Broadway musical, Kismet,
or not – for which, curiously enough, Borodin won a posthumous Tony
Award in 1954 (also, probably unique among Russian composers, he has
an asteroid named after him).
*
* ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
As life unfolded for Prof. Borodin
– who added to his workload by championing education for women and
later founding the School of Medicine for Women in St. Petersburg –
he found little time for much of anything beyond his profession. Living at
the academy itself made him accessible, day and night, to students
and colleagues. Relatives of his wife's would show up if they needed
a place to stay and at any one time someone might be sleeping on a
couch or in a spare bed or, as happened one time, on
the grand piano, forcing him to abandon plans to get any composing
done for the moment. He called himself “a Sunday composer” who,
during the winter – teaching season – could compose only when he
was home sick. Consequently, his music-friends would greet him not by
saying 'I hope you are well' but by saying 'I hope you are ill.'
In addition to friends and
relatives, the Borodins seemed to collect stray cats. As Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov noted in his autobiography,
= = = = = =
= “Many cats that the Borodins lodged marched back and forth on
the table, thrusting their noses into the plates or leaping on the
backs of the guests. These felines enjoyed the protection of
Catherine Sergeïevna. They all had biographies. One was called
Fisher because he was successful in catching fish through the holes
in the frozen river. Another, known as Lelong, had the habit of
bringing home kittens in his teeth which were added to the household.
More than once, dining there, I have observed a cat walking along the
table. When he reached my plate I drove him away; then Catherine
Sergeïevna would defend him and recount his biography. Another
installed himself on Borodin’s shoulders and berated him
mercilessly. ‘Look here, sir, this is too much!’ cried Borodin,
but the cat never moved.” = = = = = = =
During the 1860s, Borodin became
a member of that legendary circle of composers orbiting around Mily
Balakirev, along with Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky and a fellow
named Cesar Cui whose day-job was being a military engineer and later
a music critic. Advocating a "national Russian voice" in
their music, they became such a powerful presence in Russian music
they were known as “The Mighty Handful,” though the exact words
the critic Vladimir Stasov (sometimes referred to as the 6th member of The Five) used to describe them is better translated as
“Mighty Bunch.” (I have often argued that Cesar Cui, the last to
be mentioned and the most easily forgotten, might well be the “Little
Finger of the Mighty Handful,” but that's another story.) More
often they are referred to simply as “The Five” but this is
something they never used among themselves and which was
rarely used in Russia at all (it was mostly a French thing). Rimsky,
in his autobiography, always referred to themselves as “Balakirev's
Circle.”
(front row) Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Borodin; (in back) Stasov & Cui
They advocated incorporating folk-songs into their general musical styles. In most cases, this came out in colorful orchestral tone-poems full of exotic "scene-painting" or operas based on Russian folk tales or history, like Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov or Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegourochka. One major work in this style, Rimsky-Korsakov's massive Scheherazade, is not technically a Russian folk story, but full of the Orientalism that so many Russians, as their empire expanded into the Middle East, were fascinated by.
One thing they generally tried to avoid were typically Germanic inspirations like abstract symphonies or string quartets. Mussorgsky in particular was opposed to Borodin's wasting so much time on his string quartets and symphonies, when he should be working on Prince Igor. But even Rimsky-Korsakov wrote very "Un-Russian"-sounding chamber music (his 2nd Symphony, Antar, was at least inspired by Slavic legends). Somehow, Cesar Cui's major operatic endeavor was a setting of a Heinrich Heine play set in 17th Century Scotland (!?): how that fared with his colleagues, I've no idea... Even Tchaikovsky, who incorporated authentic Russian folk-songs in his symphonies (even if he used them inauthentically) and who used Russian plots for his operas, was never considered "one of them" regardless of his international reputation.
This aesthetic viewpoint is
important for the development of Russian music (and Russian culture
in general). At this time, there were those who favored the old
Russian traditional identity, called “Slavophiles,” and those who
preferred the idea of being cosmopolitans, becoming part of Europe
both culturally and socially. Yes, technically this division goes
back before the days of Peter the Great – "Peter I" to
Russians who, historically, do not always consider him all that great
– back in the early-1700s when he brought the old Asiatic empire
kicking but mostly screaming into the sphere of Western Europe. (I
could point you in the direction of several fat books that delve into
this topic, if you're interested: Orlando Figes' Natasha's
Dance and Bruce Lincoln's Between
Heaven and Hell; for those aspiring to “Expert
Level,” there's also Richard Taruskin's On Russian Music).
The idea – developments already happening in Western Europe following various
nationalist-inspired revolutions in 1848 and 1849 – was to
incorporate the folk-songs and dance rhythms of the people into the
music rather than rely on the “imported traditions” of especially
German music, then the dominating voice in most of Central and
Eastern Europe. They essentially rejected such things as symphonies
and concertos and especially the abstract world of chamber music.
While his early Piano Quintet
(which you may recall from a 2017 Summermusic performance) sounds more Russian than this
later quartet, I'd asked Peter Sirotin if the quintet quoted actual
tunes Russians would recognize (folk-songs which most Americans would not)
but he said they were original: “they just sound like it: he was
very good at creating faux
folk-tunes.”
Borodin
wrote a surprisingly small amount of music – or should I say,
“completed” a surprisingly small amount of music: he wrote three
symphonies (the 3rd
was left unfinished at his death) and a single tone-poem, In
the Steppes of Central Asia;
one full-length opera (which was also left incomplete), Prince
Igor;
and two string quartets. In addition to several songs, he also wrote
a handful of piano pieces, including several paraphrases on
“Chopsticks.” (Technically, it's not the same “Chopsticks” we
know and probably loathe and he didn't take credit for composing the
theme, whether he knew its original source or not. His daughter was
playing a four-bar version of it called “Tati-Tati” one night for
some friends and it became a party-piece as they started creating
some impromptu variations. Seriously, the tune we
call “Chopsticks” is far more interesting... Not that I would
suggest you listen to all 32 minutes of them, but there it is...)
And
on that note, this is Dick Strawser, signing off.
This is the second in a series of three posts for this Saturday's performance by the Emerson Quartet, a special presentation in honor of Market Square Concerts' 40th Anniversary and the Emerson's decision to retire after a career of 43 seasons as one of the world's leading chamber music ensembles.
Join us Saturday Evening at 7:30 at Temple Ohev Sholom, 2345 North Front Street in uptown Harrisburg.
The program concludes with Beethoven's Quartet in A Minor, Op.132, which you can read about in the previous post here, and opens with Borodin's tuneful Quartet No. 2 in D Major, the subject of the third post which you can read here. This post is about the two works in between: three songs by Eugene Drucker, Of Troubled Times, and Bela Bartók's First String Quartet.
= = = = = = =
Consider the chronological distance separating the four different works on the Emerson Quartet's program:
from the second of Beethoven's Late Quartets, completed in 1825, it was 56 years
till Borodin wrote his 2nd Quartet in 1881. The distance
from Borodin's quartet to Bartók's, however, only 28 years
later, may sound greater: more, stylistically, has changed in between; though
one could argue Beethoven's style was so atypical of his age, it's
not a fair comparison to pit him against Borodin's pleasant if
old-fashioned lyricism and Bartók's striving toward “the new.”
And then, a recent work by Emerson Quartet violinist, Eugene Drucker,
written during the on-going Pandemic as recently as 2020, is actually separated from the Bartók by 111 years, the
broadest span on the program. If the Beethoven is almost 200 years
behind us, and it's over 100 years between the two “modern”
pieces on the program, does that mean anything for a listener trying
to sort out where these composers fit into the Time Line of Music History?
More important, however, would be where these pieces stand in relation to what the composers were
writing in their own lifetimes. But for those who still think Bartók
is “modern” (he finished this in 1909), that would mean – if
Bartók's quartet was being premiered this year, the conservative
listener, longing for the familiar comfort of Borodin's beautiful
tunes and lush harmonies, might be waxing nostalgic over something composed in
1994. Considering what we may have been listening to then, those of older than, say, 30-something, has there
been that significant a change in how musical styles developed over a
few decades?
Enough of that suggestion: in
this post, I'll provide you what the composer wrote about his
lockdown-inspired song cycle and Bartók's answer to the break-up of
a relationship when he was in his late-20s (he was, coincidentally,
born the same year Borodin composed his 2nd Quartet.
* * *** ***** ******** ***** ***
** * *
Eugene Drucker
Eugene Drucker is not just a founding violinist with the Emerson Quartet. In addition to his life as a performer, soloist, and teacher, he has written a novel, The Savior, published in 2007, with another one, Yearning, published late last year. He made his debut as a composer in 2008 with a set of Shakespeare Sonnets for baritone and string quartet, and Madness and the Death of Ophelia, based on scenes from Hamlet, a concert piece for female speaker/singer and string quartet. A setting of five poems by Denise Levertov for soprano and quartet premiered in 2017, and "Series of Twelve" for string quartet premiered the following year.
Here is the premiere performance of the first of five poems making up "Levertov Settings," The Blind Man's House at the Edge of the Cliff with mezzo-soprano Ashley Chui and a quartet with the composer playing 1st Violin:
Of Troubled Times is a
cycle of three songs Drucker wrote for mezzo-soprano, violin,
and cello, setting a poem by Lucy Murray and two more by Denise
Levertov who had been a personal friend of his in the decade before her death in 1997. Here are the program notes for the piece, provided by the
composer:
= = = = = = =
In December 2020,
music annotator, poet and novelist Lucy Murray wrote a brief,
touching poem about the pandemic that had already wrought so much
destruction in the U.S. and the rest of the world. The verse ends
with a wish, perhaps almost a prayer, that “love [may] persist and
sorrow soon be put to rest.” Unfortunately, much more death was
to follow in the next few months, and, as it turned out, December had
not yet “brought the cruelest time.” But there was “hope in
sight,” after all, with the development and rollout of various
vaccines that had been researched, created and manufactured in record
time. I thought that a musical adaptation of this wistful, sensitive
poem could introduce the brief song cycle I had already begun to
compose on several works of Denise Levertov before the pandemic, for
mezzo-soprano, violin and cello. In the first few months of the
lockdown, in the spring of 2020, I continued to work on that group of
settings, and later welcomed the opportunity to add “Of Troubled
Times.” Ms. Murray’s poem addresses the human disaster of a
pandemic. The rest of the poetry in this cycle deals with other sorts
of catastrophes, but I thought that they could be linked musically
(through similar motifs and harmonic language) as well as
thematically, and decided to use Of Troubled Times as the
title for the entire piece. I have rendered the somewhat hopeful note
at the end of the first song with a degree of ambiguity, so that the
final cadence does not provide a comfortable resolution before we
move on to the next setting.
The great activist
poet Denise Levertov (1923-97) often wrote about war, environmental
degradation, the excesses of unbridled capitalism and the spiritual
wasteland that characterizes so much of modern life. The Love of
Morning oscillates between horror and childlike innocence, which
I’ve tried to capture through tone painting and sudden shifts of
texture. Arpeggios across all four strings in both violin and cello
illustrate the feeling of being “swung like laughing infants”
when “we wake to birdsong”; then, abruptly, a series of dull,
plodding chords evokes the struggle of the human spirit on “gray
mornings,” and a few moments later, the cello resumes the arpeggios
to accompany the “summons” that calls us to take some sort of
action to alleviate the world’s “leaden burden of human evil.”
On the Mystery
of the Incarnation asks us to confront “the worst our kind can
do,” and marvels at the fact that God’s Word has been entrusted
to “this creature,” so “vainly sure it and no other is
godlike,” rather than to an innocent life form like a flower or a
dolphin. This gift has been accorded us “as guest, as brother,”
“out of compassion for our ugly failure to evolve.” I could find
no better way to interpret “the Word” in musical terms than to
imitate the harmonic simplicity, voice leading and phrase structure
of a Bach chorale. But I deny the listener/reader a satisfying
resolution, slipping from the warmth and reassurance of an expected
cadence in F Major to an E Minor chord with an added seventh as the
instrumental sound turns to a brittle sul ponticello timbre.
Regarded as one of the greatest
composers of the 20th Century, Bela Bartók's first published quartet
is in A Minor. That doesn't mean it sounds like it's the A
Minor you might be familiar with from, say, a teenaged Mendelssohn's
A Minor Quartet, much less Beethoven's Op.132
Quartet on the second half of the program or even the famous opening
of Wagner'sTristan
und Isolde(also in A Minor). By 1900, the
idea of what keys you could "move to" within a piece – the home or
central tonality that makes it a 'Something in A Minor' – was very
different from the choices composers had in 1700 or even 1800. All of
this weakened the hold of the "central tonality" as a
structural force in the music. Mozart, in his Symphony No. 40 in G
Minor, written in 1788, moved so quickly through so many keys at one
point in the finale, listeners then must have become dizzy because
they had no idea what “key” they were in, everything whizzing by
so fast. In fact, some writers in the 20th Century pointed to this as
an early example of “atonality” – which basically means "music that has no fixed tonal focus."
It's not that the music's chords
themselves were necessarily becoming more “dissonant”: it's that the
harmonic dissonance, increasing the tension between the
chords, was beginning to fracture the confidence a listener might
have knowing what key-center or tonality the music was in at any
given moment.
While most concertgoers would be
more familiar with Bartók's 3rd, 4th & 5th Quartets, the first
of the six may come as a surprise, but I guess you could say the same
to someone who'd only ever heard Beethoven's Late Quartets and had
never, somehow, managed to hear any of his Op. 18 Quartets. What a
difference twenty years can make!
Bartók
was 27 when he began his first string quartet, writing most of it
in 1908 (he finished it in January the next year). At the same time,
Schoenberg was working on his 2nd Quartet, the one with the soprano
in the final two movements, the last of which is famous for being the
first “atonal” composition, more or less.
Schoenberg's 1st Quartet had
been premiered in 1907 in Vienna, though I doubt Bartók would've had
a chance to hear it by the following year. Even if they don't sound
very much alike, they share a common sense regarding disintegrating
tonality and interestingly also a tie with the past for all their
looking into the future, as if wondering where the tonality of
Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner and Mahler was heading in the first decade
of the 20th Century.
1st Movement: Lento (Very slow)
Bartók's opening movement sounds
little removed from the fugue that begins Beethoven's C-Sharp Minor
Quartet, Op. 131 (begun immediately after he'd completed the Op.132
Quartet), slow and meditative but also timeless (hear theopening
movement of Beethoven's quartet here,
from the Emerson's 1997 Grammy-winning recording). It's also
important to keep in mind Bartók described this opening movement as
“my funeral dirge” – not just “a”
funeral dirge but “my”
funeral dirge: What could possibly have happened to a young man in
his late-20s at the very beginning of his career that would inspire
him to compose that?
(See below.)
Whether he knew anything about
Schoenberg's newest pieces like the 2nd
String Quartet with its first example of “atonal” music (with its text, “I feel air
from a different planet”), he did find out what Debussy had been up
to in Paris. His friend and fellow-composer Zoltan Kodály had just
returned from a trip to France with several scores of Debussy's
works. You can definitely hear the influence of Debussy beginning at 5:59 into
the clip of Bartók's first movement. It's such a sudden change from
the rest of the movement, it almost sounds like Kodály dropped by
with a score of Debussy's Quartet the day Bartók was composing
this passage... Stranger things have been known to happen and strike
a young composer's fancy!
As
I've often told my students, a young composer's job is to be a sponge
and soak up everything you hear, anything that excites you, whatever
you like but wonder “how can I do that my own way?” Eventually, some
influences will go by the wayside and others will come to the fore
and solidify into that elusive thing called “the composer's voice,”
that recognizable style where, if you're lucky, as soon as someone hears it, they know, “Oh
yeah, that's Bartók!”
Bartók & Kodály (1908)
Now, in Budapest at this stage
of his life, Bartók probably didn't know much about what Schoenberg
was writing in Vienna. I suspect he might have known Transfigured Night written in 1899 once the score was published in 1904 (follow the link for a
live performance with the Emerson Quartet and Friends). Perhaps he might've made a
trip to Vienna (rare for Bartók) or an ensemble had brought
something by Schoenberg to Budapest (possible); or a friend like
Kodály had come back from hearing a concert there and told him all
about it. Certainly, as an amateur forensic musicologist, I hear shades
of Schoenberg's influence by 2:24 into the 3rd movement's clip but
curiously more of what I'd associate with serial
Schoenberg which was some 12 years off in the future! It certainly doesn't
strike me as “sounding particularly like Bartók.” But then, by
3:37, we are definitely in more recognizable territory with a
melody whose rhythms are based on Hungarian speech-patterns and more representative of Bartók's mature style. But why does this sound so different from everything else
in the movement?
Bartók in 1903
Well, in 1904, visiting a summer
resort, Bartók heard a teen-aged peasant girl from the nearby rural
area singing folk-songs unlike anything he'd heard before. But it
wasn't until 1908 when Kodály, who had already started studying the
folk music of Hungary, introduced his collection to Bartók. This
then began his systematic study of not only Hungarian folk music but
also a great deal of folk music from across Eastern Europe and
northern Africa. Again, it's almost as if, on the day he was writing
this passage, Kodály stopped by and they were talking about genuine
folk-songs (which Kodály had already begun studying) and Bartók's
creative spirit sparked at the possibilities.
In Europe, Hungarian music
really meant “Gypsy Music.” This was what Franz Liszt, born in
Hungary but cosmopolitan by nature, introduced to the world in his
Hungarian Rhapsodies and what the very German Brahms incorporated
into his Hungarian Dances and the dance-like finales of works like
the 1st Piano Quartet or the Violin Concerto. He'd heard this music
as a young man, accompanying a Hungarian violinist named Eduard
Reményi. Basically, this was the urban pop music of the day and,
like jazz fans in New York City in the Roaring Twenties, people in
Vienna went to smoky taverns to hear gypsy bands play the night away
(the good Dr. Brahms had his favorite haunts with bands he followed
like any jazz fan).
Bartók recording folk songs in 1908
Bartók first incorporated some
of this real folk-song style in the last movement of this 1st String
Quartet, then later writing several piano pieces based on it that
year as well. The photograph of Bartók (above) was taken later in
1908, in fact, as he recorded peasants in rural Slovakia singing
into an Edison recording machine! Later, the common structure of much
of this folk music would inspire him to create a harmonic and melodic
vocabulary unlike standard classical tonality. When he would use this
later in his own original works, he referred to it as his “imaginary
folk-music.”
I
couldn't find anything that wasn't overly arranged (either too New
Agey or just rocking out in a pop-rock style), but here's
an example of a quiet song about unrequited love that may give you an idea. (If
you ever get a chance to hear one of those Nonesuch “Explorer”
recordings, many of them transferred to CD, you're in for a definite
ear-opener!)
Just as Schoenberg was finding his future voice in
his first attempts at writing atonality in 1908 with the last
movement of his 2nd String Quartet (“air from a different
planet” indeed), Bartók was finding his in the realm of
folk-song with the last movement of his 1st String Quartet begun in
the same year.
What I'd be curious about is –
and I've been unable to find any reference to that theme in
particular – is it a genuine folk song, something he'd heard or
Kodály gave him, or did he make it up to sound
like a real folk song? And if it were real, did it have a text that
perhaps had some extra-musical association for him – perhaps
resonating with something else going on in his life?
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
Stefi Geyer
In 1907, Bartók had fallen in
love with a violinist named Stefi Geyer (this photograph of her is
dated 1905: she would have been about 17, then). Apparently it
was mostly a one-sided relationship, whether completely unrequited or
not. Being a composer, naturally Bartók wrote her a violin concerto
but when she broke off the relationship the following year, he
suppressed the work which was not published until after they had both
died. However, after they'd broken up, he did use the first movement
as the first of Two Portraits, re-naming it “Ideal,” even three
years later adding a dissonant, ironic second portrait labeled
“Grotesque.” He uses a sonority of a minor chord with a major 7th
superimposed on it – F#-A-C#-E# which he referred to as his “Stefi
Chord.” (A version of this motive is spelled out in the opening
pitches of the 1st Quartet.)
Emotionally, he was strongly
affected by this rejection and his friends worried about the state of
his health. After he'd begun work on a new string quartet, he wrote
to her that it opened with what he called “my funeral dirge.” If
this event signaled the end of one aspect of his life – before the
year was out, he married one of his piano students, apparently on the
rebound: it was not to be a happy relationship – the quartet ends
with another sound that would become his future voice, its
inspiration found in the folk songs of his ethnic heritage, something
only recently discovered within him, resonating in his innermost
soul, and which would form the foundation of his mature musical
voice. He would later describe the whole quartet as “a return to
life” (keep in mind, in the midst of his “Prayer of
Thanksgiving,” in the Op.132 Quartet, Beethoven marked the
contrasting motive “finding new strength”!)
In 1984, Hungarian conductor
Zoltan Rosznyai was the guest conductor for a Harrisburg Symphony
concert that featured concertmaster Julie Rosenfeld of the Colorado
Quartet, then in residence with the orchestra, playing the Two
Portraits. I remember Rosznyai explaining to the orchestra how he'd
known the Geyer family and had met Stefi Geyer late in her life at a
sanatorium in Switzerland where she'd spent most of her life.
As I recall Rosznyai's
explanation, Bartók was just too unpredictable for her and
presumably not regarded as a good match by her father. She was also
only 19 at the time; and Bartók, remember, recently appointed a junior teacher at
the Budapest Conservatory, was 27. Not long afterward, she married a
Viennese lawyer, presumably a more stable personality and a more
securely established professional. After he died during the Flu
Epidemic of 1918, she married composer Walter Schulthess and moved to
Zurich where she taught and performed. She died there in 1956.
The violin concerto Bartók had
composed for her wasn't discovered until after she died, and first
heard in 1958. The famous and rather large-scale concerto Bartók
wrote in 1937 now had to be re-christened the Violin Concerto No.
2 to make room for this slighter, less mature early work inspired
by unrequited love. Its aftermath became the starting point for the
first of his six string quartets, starting a
collection regarded as monumental to the 20th Century as Beethoven's
had been to the 19th.
In appreciation of the Harrisburg community’s loyal support over four
decades, Market Square Concerts presents a special concert featuring the
eminent Emerson Quartet.
Who: The Emerson Quartet (with mezzo-soprano, Susannah Woodruff)
What: Borodin's 2nd String Quartet; Bartok's 1st String Quartet; "Of Troubled Times," Three Songs by Emerson Quartet violinist Eugene Drucker; Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor, Op.132
Mask wearing is optional to attend this concert and
proof of vaccination will not be requested.
There are many aphorisms like “all good things
must come to an end” which could begin this post. Suffice it to
say, the Emerson Quartet has decided, after the 2022-2023
Season, to retire following a career spanning 47 years. And so we are
glad that, given the number of times their tours have brought them
through Harrisburg during Market Square Concerts' 40 seasons, they
give us one last chance to hear them and celebrate their legacy.
Back in the mid-1970s, while walking down Broadway
from the 72nd Street subway station on one of my many
infusions of New York City's concert-life, I ran into a
violist I'd met a few years earlier when he was a freshman at the
Eastman School of Music and I was a teaching assistant. I didn't know
him well, but he occasionally sat in on my 9:00 theory class when he
overslept his 8:00 class. I knew he had transferred to Juilliard at
some point, so I asked him how things were going.
“Great,” he said. “Some friends and I just
formed a quartet,” very enthusiastic about their prospects in what
is admittedly a difficult world to break into, much less survive in.
Knowing how many quartets there are and how few of
them survive to make it to the top (if that's not too much to aspire
to), I wished him well and hoped things would turn out for the best.
Also knowing that, after finding a few friends to make a compatible
group, one of the more challenging Rites of Passage for new quartets
was to establish their “brand,” I asked him, “Have you decided
on a name yet?”
“We have – we're going to call ourselves the
Emerson Quartet.”
“After Ralph Waldo? Well, that's something
to live up to...” I wished him well and the best of luck.
And with that, Larry Dutton continued on his way,
and I, on mine.
So here, almost 46 years, 9 Grammys and countless
other awards and accolades from around the globe, recognized as
one of the finest quartets in the world today, Larry and his
friends in the Emerson Quartet are getting ready to retire!
The quartet is unusual in there is no set “first violinist”
or “second violinist” but rather two violinists who share the
responsibilities. So you may see Eugene Drucker playing First on one
piece, but on the next piece, Philip Setzer may be sitting in the
First chair. (In addition to his responsibilities as a performer,
Eugene Drucker is also represented on this program as a composer, but
I'll get to that in a second, subsequent post.) In addition to
Lawrence Dutton, the violist, there's cellist Paul Watkins who joined the Emerson
Quartet at the end of the 2012-2013 Season, replacing long-time
cellist David Finckel. If you're wondering what that does to an
established ensemble, it means after 34 years, in addition to just
getting used to somebody new in their midst, they would have to go
through and “re-learn” everything in their repertoire with “the
new guy,” bringing him up-to-speed but also reworking how the four
of them now interact with the music itself.
Here's a brief video prepared by the Chamber Music Society of
Lincoln Center for their “Spotlight” series, posted in 2014:
For a “virtual concert” recorded during the Pandemic in the
Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University (NY), the
Emerson Quartet prefaces their performance of Beethoven's Op.132
(preceded by Britten's arrangement of Purcell's “Chaconny”) with
a pre-concert Zoom interview, ranging from “what was this past year
like, dealing with Covid” to giving their various insights about Beethoven
– which you can view here. While you can continue viewing the link beyond the
talk's conclusion at 32:03, I've included the complete and continuous
Beethoven performance, recorded enmasked in an empty hall, as an
embedded video following the individual movements from their 1997
recording of the Complete Beethoven Quartets (which won the Grammy
for Best Chamber Music Performance that year).
The program opens with Alexander Borodin's String Quartet No. 2 in D Major (the source of several of his best-loved tunes, by the way), and Bela Bartók's 1st String Quartet. In addition, mezzo-soprano Susannah Woodruff joins two members of the quartet for a performance of three songs composed by violinist Eugene Drucker. But I will discuss these works in a subsequent post. This post is concerned solely with one of the towering masterpieces of the repertoire, one of Beethoven's "Late Quartets" - which, incidentally, we owe to a violist who suggested, when a music-loving Russian prince was thinking of commissioning some new works, he should contact Beethoven...
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor, Op.132, is in five
movements – not the usual four – creating sort of an arch form
around the central slow movement which is generally regarded as this
quartet's “crown jewel.” This is surrounded by two faster
movements – first, there's the seemingly old-fashioned dance of the
2nd Movement, and then it's followed by the march-like 4th Movement
which hardly seems to have gotten started when a recitative-like solo
in the 1st violin turns into the finale, a dramatic mirror to the
opening movement – hence, the arch, with its famous Heilige Dankgesang as the keystone:
Drama – Dance –
Prayer – March – Resolution of the Drama. Nowhere in this
quartet is Beethoven's signature “scherzo” (the earthy, jocular
replacement of the old-fashioned minuet). In fact, compared to the
previous two opus numbers, it seems almost a return to near-normal.
After all, you say, Op. 130 is in six movements and Op. 131 is in
seven – so what's new and unusual about Op.132 being in five?
Beethoven's original MS, opening of Op.132
Just from the opening introduction, follow the
constant half-step motion of the G#-to-A (or its reverse, A-to-G#) as
it appears in different voices. It's hard to imagine this is the
“kernel” that generated this whole quartet and provided,
apparently, some fertile soil for the Grosse
Fuge – but that's
Op.130, so didn't that come first? More (as usual) on that in a
bit...
Assai sostenuto –
Allegro (Very sustained; Lively) –
The opening movement would not be
familiar territory to the careful listener of 1825 – it seems to be
in Sonata Form but rather than repeat the exposition (as one normally
would) he writes it out in the wrong key – so was that bit of
transition the development section and this is... uhm... wait, it's
over? Nowhere are those clear-cut boundaries one was used to in
Haydn's day which told us plainly where we were: Exposition,
Development, or Recapitulation with its final return to the home key.
And what to make of those occasional operatic-like flourishes in the
first violin that sound a bit like old-fashioned recitatives? Hmmm...
Allegro ma non tanto
(Not too lively) – The second movement
starts off like a minuet but then that G#-A movement on the downbeat
makes it awkward to dance to (where's the beat?). And as it unfolds,
it really not a minuet, more of a lilting ländler, the folksy
precursor of the more elegant waltz. The middle section, the "trio," is a gentle country dance with
its drones (the open A-string affording a hurdy-gurdy-like
accompaniment to a simple tune in the 1st violin) – beginning at 4:27 – one of the sweeter
moments after all the unsettled turbulence implied in the first
movement. Not without its own interruptions from reality, harking back to that half-step motive of the first movement's introduction (a premonition of the Grosse Fuge yet to come), it then relaxes to a gentle conclusion.
Every time I hear this movement, I think back to
the Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802 when Beethoven, then not yet 32
years old and near-suicidal over the possibility – no, the
inevitability of
his deafness – wrote...
= = = = = “...what a
humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the
distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing
and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of
despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life -
only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave
the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to
produce, and so I endured this wretched existence...” = = = =
=
He kept that document in his desk (quite likely having shown it
to no one), however many times he moved over the years, where it wasn't discovered until after his death. Six years
before he began writing these Late Quartets, Beethoven was reduced to
using the "Conversation Books" where friends would write
down questions for him, thus recording for posterity one
side of what
conversations Beethoven had but leaving us ignorant of his responses.
Still, to communicate with the world this way...?
Molto adagio – Andante (Very slow; a walking tempo)
The third
movement – the famous “Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a
Convalescent to the Deity (in the Lydian Mode)” – is a hymn that
seems simple enough (the fact it is in the Lydian Mode – F Major
with a B-natural instead of a B-flat – doesn't make it sound as
“ancient” to our ears as it must have done to someone in the
1820s) with its “white notes” (in this case, open half-notes)
even evoke the look
of Palestrina's 16th-Century polyphony.
The hymn itself (those slow-moving notes in simple block harmonies) alternates with different approaches to the opening prayer-like motive (sometimes inverted, sometimes overlapping itself). These alternate with
more lively passages he marks “feeling new strength.” There is little more transcendent, indeed consoling music in
the whole realm of classical music to become one of the most universal moments in all of
Beethoven.
Alla marcia, assai vivace
(Like a march, very fast) The brief fourth
movement will come as something of a shock after the spirituality of
this slowly unfolding hymn – a simple march-like passage that barely gets going
before it is interrupted by one of those operatic flourishes
(remember, in the first movement?) which leads directly – again, no
boundary to cross, no pausing to turn the page – into the finale.
5th Movement, Allegro appassionato
(Lively, very emotional) This is
basically a rondo, not unexpected as finales go – incidentally,
paging through the sketch-books if you could read them, the main idea
of this movement was originally intended for a fully instrumental
finale to the 9th Symphony, before he decided on adding a chorus and
setting Schiller's Ode to
Joy (imagine, you're
listening to one of Beethoven's rejects, here!) – and here, the
lyrical element which never got to take the lead in the first
movement finally comes to the fore yet not without its own bits of
turbulence along the way.
As we near the end – how many times
do we think we're “nearing the end” in Beethoven's finales only
to find “wait, there's more!”? – this lyricism takes on new
heights (literally) and it almost seems as if everything is going to
ascend into the air. A happy A Major ending, finally, as the music
transcends the drama, the expectations, the implications of the past,
to achieve humanity. But even when it arrives (after some nifty
side-steps), it still seems a bit peremptory.
Here is the Emerson Quartet performing the complete quartet in one continuous video, from a "virtual concert" recorded at the Staller Center of Stony Brook University in April, 2021.
* * ** ***
***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
Beethoven in 1823
The earliest sketches
for Op.132 appear in late-1824 during the final push to complete the
first of these quartets, the E-flat Major, Op.127, a more “standard”
quartet in four movements, which he completed in February of 1825,
moving immediately into the new A Minor Quartet which became Op.
132.
So, what happened to Op. 130 and Op. 131? They were actually
composed later: the B-flat Quartet with its original Grosse
Fuge finale was begun in
August of 1825, immediately after he finished the A Minor. This makes
more sense when you realize the opening slow introduction of Op.132
is actually an integral part of the Grosse
Fuge from Op.130 (the
Fugue was later surgically removed and published separately as
Op.133, but that's another story). Then, having completed this “Great
Fugue,” he began another quartet which opens with a great fugal
movement – if minuets were old-fashioned by the 1820s, fugues were
like “ancient, scholarly stuff” – the C-sharp Minor Quartet
(eventually Op.131) which he “finished” in May of 1826, as he
told his publisher, though he apparently kept working on it until he
submitted the score that August. Again, he then immediately began
work on Op.135, the F Major Quartet, which he completed in October,
1826.
Keep in mind, in the same sketchbook, there are ideas
intended for a String Quartet in C Major.
Wait – there
could have been a sixth
Late Beethoven Quartet?
Beethoven died in March, 1827. He was 56.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
While
all five of his “Late Quartets” are considered the Mount Everest
of Chamber Music, both for performers as well as listeners, it's
amazing to consider the personal world of Beethoven when he was
writing them.
Unfortunately for Prince Nikolai Galitsin's legacy
- he commissioned Beethoven to write “a few quartets” for him -
“The Late Quartets” never became known as “The Galitsin
Quartets” as we generally know those three Middle Quartets
dedicated to Count Razumovsky. Many people – at least, Classical
Music Lovers – know Razumovsky's name (even if they have no idea
what a Razumovsky is) only through his association with Beethoven's
quartets.
N. Galitsin (1820s)
First of all, Prince Nikolai Galitsin (Голицын
in Russian: it can spelled different ways phonetically in different
Western European languages) had to wait so long for them, asking
Beethoven in 1822, offering to pay him “whatever amount you deem
adequate.” Beethoven thought 50 ducats seemed adequate, though I've
never found any way of comparing an 1822 Ducat to a 2022
pre-inflation Dollar.
Galitsin had lived in Vienna for a while
and was familiar with the latest German music. An amateur cellist who
played in his own house quartet (as Count Razumovsky played 2nd
violin in his), he arranged several of Beethoven's piano pieces for
his ensemble. At one point, he decided he would commission some
quartets from the latest rage in German music, Carl Maria von Weber,
but the violist advised he should contact Beethoven
instead.
Considering Beethoven had not written a string quartet
since he finished the Op. 95, the one he called the “Serioso,” in
1810, it is unlikely Beethoven would simply have decided “oh, okay,
now that the Missa
Solemnis is done and the
9th Symphony has been premiered, let me write these five string
quartets for no reason whatsoever.”
So we have a violist to
thank for bringing them about! (Think on
that, ye collectors of
viola jokes!)
To help his cause, Galitsin arranged what turned
out to be the world premiere of the Missa
Solemnis in St.
Petersburg, the Russian Imperial capital in 1824. For his troubles,
Galitsin also received the dedication to Beethoven's new overture,
The Consecration of the
House, written for the
opening of a new theater in Vienna.
Once he was ready to start
work on the quartets, it was 1824, two years after Galitsin's request,
and while the legal issues dealing with his nephew's custody were
behind him, the composer still had to deal with a rebellious
17-year-old who clearly had no interest in living with his rough,
demanding, and not to mention stone-deaf uncle, regardless of his
being The Great Beethoven.
While working on the Op.127 quartet,
the constant yelling between uncle and nephew, not to mention the
deaf composer's pounding at the piano when he composed, proved too
much for the landlord who threw them both out and Beethoven was
forced to find new lodgings!
There were problems with the boy's
occasionally running off to his mother (the infamous sister-in-law
Beethoven referred to as “The Queen of the Night”) and there were
always problems at the boarding school the boy'd been sent to. Later,
while Beethoven was in the midst of composing the Op.135 Quartet, the
boy, just before he turned 20, tried to commit suicide.
Listening
to these quartets, it is amazing to imagine a composer being able to
concentrate on writing anything, much less works of this profundity.
Perhaps the drama surrounding Beethoven's final years had as much to
do with shaping the inner world where these quartets came from as did
the isolation from his deafness.
* * ** *** ***** ********
***** *** ** * *
There is a habit among commentators (and
performers) who often explain these works as a kind of “summing up”
in Beethoven's career – as if the term “Late Beethoven” refers
to “the late Beethoven,” recently deceased. Beethoven had no idea
he was going to die in March of 1827. If you didn't know that the
Op.135 Quartet was his last completed work, neither did he.
After
his death, people found in his sketchbooks and in his desk, among
other things (like that letter to the Immortal Belovéd as well as
the Heiligenstadt Testament), sketches for a 10th Symphony's first
movement, a C Major String Quartet, a string quintet – hardly the
stuff of someone who was dying. Granted, between October of 1826 and
his death, he completed only that alternate happy-go-lucky
replacement finale for the Op.130 Quartet, for those who argued the
Fugue was impossible to play and made the quartet too long for mere
mortal attention spans. Yes, he was ill and yes he'd been sick
before, perhaps even worse, but thoughts he was on the verge of dying
never occurred to him before he completed the quartets, much less
began contemplating them three years earlier.
He had written
three quartets for Galitsin but then immediately produced two more –
in Haydn's day, it was typical that quartets were produced in sets of
six or maybe three: even Beethoven produced six quartets for his
first set, Op. 18, and three for Razumovsky in Op. 59 in 1806.
Perhaps, now, he decided he would go for six again, another complete
set.
There are “whiffs of mortality” about these works
because we find them there, and if Beethoven put them there, it's
probably because most of his music from 1803 on also contained
elements exploring the human condition – in the opera, Fidelio,
but certainly the dramatic moments of the Eroica
and the 5th Symphony. Could anything sound more “mortal” than the
great Funeral March of his 3rd Symphony or even the slow movement of
the 7th, even though one could argue these are essentially
conventions Beethoven imbued with super-mortal inspirations?
* * ** *** *****
******** ***** *** ** * *
If you want to understand the quartets better, listen to them in the order
they were composed. Usually they are played in “opus order,” but
to hear the A Minor Quartet as a response to the E-flat Op.127
quartet helps pave the way for the increasing complexities of the
next two – the B-flat whose original finale is so carefully tied
into the opening of the A Minor; the C-sharp Minor whose fugal
writing is an outgrowth of the complex fugue that ended its
predecessor – and the seeming reaction in the shorter, seemingly
less daring in not quite so innovative F Major that was the last one
he completed.
But, tell me, who could imagine, given that
trajectory over three years' time, what a sixth quartet in C Major
might have been like?
And now for some reality: Beethoven had
requested a fee of 50 ducats per quartet before he'd started work on
them. Prince Galitsin paid Beethoven a down-payment of 25 ducats for
the first quartet, Op.127, but due to financial difficulties, he was
unable to pay the debt he acknowledged in a subsequent letter. By the
time Beethoven died, perhaps Galitsin figured it no longer mattered
and Beethoven's heirs – acting on behalf of Karl van Beethoven, the
nephew, who, despite everything, turned out to be a pretty decent
fellow after all, once the soldiering life straightened him out –
had to pursue the Prince through the courts until it was finally paid
in 1852 – twenty-five years after the composer died! It's a good
thing this hadn't come out before he had completed the 2nd of
these “Galitsin Quartets,” or Beethoven could have easily said,
“the hell with you and your quartets – I'll write something
else!”
But then, nobody commissioned Op.131 and Op.135 or the
C Major Quartet left abandoned in the sketchbooks.
Who: “Stuart &
Friends” with pianists Stuart Malina & Ya-Ting Chang, plus
soprano Rebecca Meyers, mezzo-soprano Dianna Grabowski, tenor
Christyan Seay, baritone Jonathan Hays
What: Brahms'
Liebeslieder Waltzes, Op.52 &
Op.65; Schumann's Pictures from the East
(Op. 66); and Rachmaninoff's Six Pieces for Piano Duet, Op. 11
When: Thursday, 7:30,
April 21st
Where: Market Square
Church, downtown Harrisburg
Please note: Masks are now optional and proof of vaccination is no longer required to attend our April and May concerts.
“House-Music” certainly
means something different today than it did in the 19th
Century. Now, it's a style of electronic dance music originating in
the 1980s, but to composers like Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and
Rachmaninoff, it referred to music composed specifically to be
performed in people's homes, not concert halls or the music rooms of
aristocratic palaces. It was geared to be played by amateur
musicians, not professionals, and though not designed for virtuosos
of the concert stage, the more intimate setting of someone's living
room or parlor made for a more intimate musical style as well, both
in the composition and its performance.
This post is mostly about the
combination of piano duet and songs on the first half of the program, music for a gathering of friends to make
“social music” for their own entertainment and for the family and
friends making up the chamber-sized audience (imagine, if you will, you are seated in someone's living room). Brahms'
Liebeslieder Waltzes are both
a series of dance pieces for piano four-hands and a collection of
songs written for various combinations of a mixed quartet of singers.
They can be performed by the pianists alone (one pair of pianists
referred to it as “the karaoke version”) but the songs can also
be sung by a small choir and, in this format, they are much-loved by
amateur choral groups around the world. There's even an orchestral
version for larger choirs which, IMHO, is a bit heavy-handed for the
music, but it only attests to the music's popularity.
On
the second half, Stuart Malina and Ya-Ting Chang will play works by
Robert Schumann, his “Pictured from the East,” and Rachmaninoff's
youthful collection of Six Pieces, Op. 11. In this post, you can read about them
and listen to videos of them after the Brahms.
*
* ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
In several past posts, I've described the “piano duet” (more
amicably called “piano four-hands”) as the do-it-yourself home
entertainment system of the 19th Century, before there
were recordings and stereo systems, even radios, that turned music into a passive experience. We read accounts of
Mozart or Haydn playing before aristocratic audiences in their
palaces, but once the new century's economy created a middle class
who wanted their own musical entertainment but were unable to hire
performers or have a musical staff on hand like Prince Esterházy,
not only did “free-lance” musicians find new employment as music teachers for the children (especially
the young ladies) of bourgeois families, they also discovered composing new works especially designed for the
burgeoning “amateur market” so these families could make their
own music.
Wiling away an evening before there was television, a family
(with friends, perhaps, invited over) would gather 'round the parlor
piano (or, if wealthy enough, a grand piano in the music room) and
listen to members of the family run through their favorite
selections: a scene comes to mind from George Eliot's Middlemarch where young
Fred Vincy plays the flute to his sister Rosamond's accompaniment.
Piano duets, with two people sharing a bench (and staking out
their turf on the keyboard), were a favorite way of “making social
music.” In addition, others would raise their voices in song: many
of Schubert's songs, and a great many collections of dances and
various piano duets, were written for “the amateur, home market,”
and where there was one singer, there were probably others.
The phenomenon of the “Part Song” is (pun intended) part of
this same social music-making legacy. Schubert supplied this aspect
of the Amateur Market with numerous “vocal quartets” for various
combinations, sometimes mixed voices or perhaps four men or four
women as the text required. The important thing, here – despite the
definition perpetrated by Wikipedia – is, this is not originally
intended as “choral music” unless Wikipedia's idea of a choir
consists of 2 or more singers... And it's true many of them will work
well with more than one singer on a part but, at least as the
composer intended, very few households might have a chorus of 50 on
hand for an evening's music-making.
(A typically dour Victorian photograph of a family in the midst of an evening of social music-making: one hopes they're not singing the Liebeslieder Waltzes here...)
Brahms' two sets of “Love
Songs” (which, except for the conclusion of the 2nd set, also happen to be waltzes)
is the result of this legacy of domestic music-making, combining the
piano duet – not two
pianos – with four singers often grouped (for variety's sake, if
nothing else) in various combinations of solos, duets, and quartets.
Yes, they are frequently heard performed by choral groups and the
piano part has been arranged for orchestra, but the way we'll hear
them in this concert is as the composer intended them – except for the fact we're sitting in a
church rather than, say, Clara Schumann's living room surrounded by family and friends. A very real definition of chamber music in this setting would be "music made by friends for friends," and in this case, composed by a friend as well.
The Big Question, once you get
past the sheer entertainment value of the music, is, okay, if they're
love songs, is there someone to whom they're directed? Are they just random songs about love written by a composer in his mid-30s, love being a favorite topic for things artistic (witness the most popular novels of the day, and the reams of poetry written during an age that wasn't called "Romantic" for nothing)? Most people
will say they're the result of the composer's unrequited love for
Clara Schumann, who, aside from being one of the finest pianists of
the day, was the widow of the composer Robert Schumann. And Brahms
had met them both in the fall of 1853 when Brahms,
just 20 years old, showed up on their doorstep with a pile of
manuscripts under his arm, including piano sonatas (Schumann called
them “veiled symphonies”), string quartets, and songs. For
Brahms, it was a life-changing encounter.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
Rather than give you a detailed “analysis” of the individual
songs in the collection, I'm going to offer you a bit of insight
“behind the scenes” with what was going on in the composer's life
at the time the music you'll be hearing was written. Unfortunately,
it's a long story since, as with many composers and many of their
compositions, a work doesn't always spring up isolated without some sort
of biographical context. And in this case, there is so much
back-story, it reads like a sub-plot for, say, a George Eliot novel
(if Brahms and the Schumanns had been Victorians instead of good
middle-class Germans). And I chose the reference to Middlemarch
because the novel was written between the years Brahms produced his
two sets of Liebeslieder
Waltzes, and was set shortly after Schubert had died in
what might be considered, with its ubiquitous “Schubertiads,” a
Golden Age for Domestic Music.
But first of all, the music:
there are two sets of songs, 18 in the first and 15 in the second.
The first set is the one most involved in the back-story I'm about to
tell; the second was a sequel inspired by the financial success of
the first set, composed to fulfill the demands of the amateur market. It is, however, not without its own context (read on...).
Here is a recording, one of the
best I've heard of the original version, with an unlikely quartet of
singers as you'd find in your average bourgeois household, with one
of the pianists being a famous conductor familiar to fans of the
Philadelphia Orchestra. Here are soprano Edith Mathis, alto Brigitte
Fassbänder,
tenor Peter Schreier, baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and pianists
Karl Engel and Wolfgang Sawallisch. The recording was made in 1981.
Beneath each video-clip is a link to a collection of the poems Brahms
set.
(The final song, setting Goethe's
Zum Schluss, begins at 16:07)
The poems, inspired by folk
poetry or actual folk songs from Central and Eastern Europe, are by
one of Brahms' favorite poets, G. F. Daumer, best known for his love-songs,
but who also wrote more “serious” poems inspired by his early
theological studies and directed “at the hypocrisy he associated
with Orthodox Christianity.” (An interesting story: Brahms, not
long after the success of his 2nd Set of Liebeslieder
Waltzes, went to visit Daumer, living in retirement in
northern Bavaria, imagining, as he described it to a poet-friend, “a
touching moment, a heartfelt exchange between colleagues, a new
insight into the poems,” but instead, meeting “a little dried-up
old man!” “I soon perceived he knew nothing either of me or my
compositions, or anything at all of music. And when I pointed to his
ardent passionate verses, he gestured with a tender wave of the hand
to a little old mother almost more withered than himself, saying,
'Ah, I have only loved the one, my wife'!” So much for meeting our
idols...)
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
The Schumanns (1847)
In
order to appreciate the story behind these songs, you need to go back
to that fateful February day, just months after Brahms met the
Schumanns in Düsseldorf when Robert, tormented by increasing bouts
of an illness once described as “manic-depression” and attacks of
tinnitus which “unhinged his reason,” threw himself into the
Rhine in an attempt to commit suicide. (You can read my post, “And Schumann At the Close,” here.)
Having
become close to both the Schumanns – Robert was definitely his
mentor in the brief time he knew him, but Clara would become a
life-long inspiration – Brahms changed his plans and came to help
Clara deal with the reality of a husband who, having survived the
attempt, was immediately sent to what was then called an asylum in
Bonn (in the remaining years of his life, she would never see her
husband again) and a large family to raise. In fact, at the time of
Robert's attempted suicide, she was pregnant with their 8th
child, born two months later (a son, Felix, named after their
late-friend, Mendelssohn).
As
Clara returned to concertizing – she needed to, she defended
herself, not just because she needed the music: she needed the money!
– Brahms would come and stay with the family as a kind of baby-sitter. Marie, the oldest,
was only 13 at the time. Another daughter, Julie, was all of 9. The
younger children called him “Uncle Johannes,” if you can imagine
the Brahms we know (with the most famous beard in Classical Music)
compared to the 20-something Brahms crawling around on the floor giving them piggy-back rides!
The photo above was taken around 1860 and includes five of the Schumann children: Felix (the youngest), Elise, Julie (standing, center), Marie (the oldest), and Eugenie.
Fast
forward to 1868. Brahms, who was often something of a jerk, had
managed to insult his friend Clara (frequently) but this time their relationship had come to a
standstill. Always a self-critical composer, Brahms often would
“submit” a new work to Clara for her approval as much as for her
suggestions; occasionally, a work that did not pass muster might be
completely revised (the Piano Quintet of the early-1860s began as a
sonata for two pianos, was converted into a string quintet before
finally gaining the seal of Clara's approval in 1864 as the Piano
Quintet we know today); more often, the work was consigned to the
wastebasket or the fireplace (Brahms' most characteristic advice to
young composers was to buy a wastebasket).
There
is, of course, the old story Brahms was in love with Clara
Schumann, but, being modern and prone to active imaginations, we
imagine “being in love with” and “becoming lovers” as a logical progression. Certainly, arm-chair psychologists have had
numerous field-days hypothesizing about their relationship, whether
it was “platonic” or something that had been realized or merely
“unrequited love.” Certainly, being 14 years older than Brahms,
there might have been a motherly instinct (a woman who'd had 8
children by the time she was 35) towards the young composer who,
let's face it, lacked considerable finesse in his own personality.
But
there's another woman behind the love-songs Brahms, now 35 himself,
was writing in 1868: and that would be Clara's younger daughter,
Julie, who was now 23. You can argue it as a case of “transference,”
but Brahms did have relationships, mostly, it seemed, platonic and
unrequited, with a few young women in the intervening years, some of
them more serious than others: infatuations
might be a more accurate term.
While
we're aware of the 20-some years it took Brahms to complete a first
symphony (not necessarily his 1st
Symphony), there was also a piano quartet, originally in C-sharp
Minor, he had begun around the same time, not long after Robert's
suicide attempt but before Robert died in the Bonn asylum. In the
mid-1860s, he picked this up again, rewrote it in C Minor (the same
key the 1st
Symphony would be in), and, sending it off to his publisher with a
note referencing Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther
– a novel about a young man in love with another man's wife who
then goes off and, having been rebuffed by his would-be love, shoots himself with a borrowed pistol – which of course has given all
manner of fuel to the argument about his relationship with Clara.
It
seems, however, there was another woman he longed for, now. He didn't
exactly keep it a secret but he never told the object of his ardor
much less her mother. During 1868, he composed a number of love-songs
to poems by Daumer (published between Op.46-49) which he mentioned to
more than one friend being inspired by a certain someone...
Another
song he wrote at this time was the Wiegenlied
of the Op.49 set, written to one of his “old girlfriends,” Bertha
Faber (neé
Porubzsky) now happily married, to celebrate the birth of her first
child, a Cradle Song which the world would eventually know as
“Brahms' Lullaby.” A simple folk-like text with a simple
folk-like melody, it is accompanied by a reminiscence of an earlier
song he had composed for Bertha which she would be familiar with: so
while she is singing her infant son to sleep, Brahms explained, “a love-song is being
sung to her.” I mention this, chronological context aside, merely
to show “this is how Brahms' creative mind worked.”
As
their latest tiff dragged on and Brahms missed his association with
Clara and by extension her family (he was still very much a part of
this family), he sent her a postcard from a holiday in Switzerland on
which he jotted down a long slow alp-horn melody, under which he
wrote the words, “High on the mountains, deep in the valley, I
greet you a thousandfold.” A few years later, he would take up this
theme and turn it into that famous moment when, out of the murky
introduction of his C Minor Symphony's finale – which had, as
usual, so far stymied him – this horn-theme soars out over the
orchestra. Whether anyone else would know or not was immaterial:
Clara could not help but recognize the significance of that tune – "I greet you a thousandfold."
Whether
it was the result of this September postcard or not, Brahms met Clara and the
family in October while they were all traveling and staying in Oldenburg. He
had, as usual, a bunch of new pieces with him, finished and unfinished, to play for her as they resumed their old familiarity: among them, his latest four-hand duet, the waltzes of Op.39. At a
party, they read through a few of his new Hungarian Dances
(yet to be published). There were also some part-songs he dubbed
Hausmusik – music to
be played in the home – as biographer Jan Swafford described them,
“confectionery tunes with a large helping of Viennese Schlagobers
(whipped cream) for four-hand piano and vocal quartet.” They may
have paid tribute to his love of Schubert's dance music – he had
just edited a volume of his Ländler,
the folksy precursor of the Waltz – and we know Brahms was a big
fan of one of the most popular “pop musicians” in Vienna, Johann
Strauss Jr., “The Waltz King.” Brahms' waltzes, however, are “the
Viennese Waltz á la
Brahms.”
Julie Schumann in 1868
Whether
he showed them to her in Oldenburg or not, we don't know, but the
next May, they all gathered in Baden-Baden where Brahms and Clara
would try out these new “Love-Song Waltzes” as the rest of the
family and several friends gathered around to join in singing or just
sat to listen. Then, on May 11th,
Clara excitedly told Brahms the news: Julie was to become engaged to
an Italian count! You can almost here her “Isn't that wonderful?”
as Brahms “choked out a response and ran from the house.”
As
Swafford continues (paraphrasing lines from p.349 in his biography),
=
= = = =
So
that was it. Suddenly everything became clear to her: the reason not
only for his flight but for his moods going back years, his rudeness,
his awkward kindness toward Julie, her confused withdrawal, his
restiveness in the Schumann house. Surely somewhere in his mind he
had known that sooner or later, for a reason hopeful or tragic, the
moment of losing his fantasy was inevitable. But when it came, the
moment was no less terrible for that.
Now
he suddenly went limp. “Johannes is quite altered,” Clara wrote
in her journal; “he seldom comes to the house, and speaks only in
monosyllables when he does come. And he treats even Julie the same
way, though he always used to be so specially nice to her. Did he
really love her? But he has never thought of marrying, and Julie has
never had any inclination towards him.” [Conductor]
Hermann Levi confirmed it to Clara: Brahms had spilled his feelings
to Levi and probably to others. Likely, there had been late-night
session with Brahms anguishing, entreating friends to tell him what
to do about her, what to do. Rumors that Clara never heard had been
going around. That spring in a Hamburg ship, somebody innocently to
Elise Brahms [Johannes' older sister]
that a Viennese gentleman with her name was engaged to Clara
Schumann's daughter.
...The
magnificent side of Clara Schumann came forward when Johannes'
helpless infatuation revealed itself. If she had no great insight
into human nature, Clara seems to have understood the irrational
impetus of love and respected it. She had broken with her father for
sake of a passion she regarded as holy [her love for Robert
Schumann] and maybe she saw all
love as no less holy, even if hopeless. She could have taken
Johannes' love for Julie as a betrayal of herself. Instead, she saw
it for the sad spectacle it was, between two people whom she loved.
The chances are that she and Johannes never spoke directly about it
at all. But for a long time, Clara would be very gentle with him.
=
= = = =
This
change in his life might also explain the change in mood for the
second set of waltzes, which he continued working on but didn't
complete for publication until 1874 as Op.65. No longer
“confectionery tunes and whipped cream,” we hear of darker
moments when the lover is compared to a rose that “will bleed its
leaves when it dies,” or when “a poisoned arrow infects the
target of my heart,” or, with a touch of humor, “I won't hear
another word about love: you'll only let me down.” (I've joked about how Brahms could've called this 2nd set the Liebesleider or "Love-Sorrows" Waltzes.)
To conclude this
set, Brahms chose a poem by Goethe and though it is not technically a
waltz (despite being in triple time): “Now, you Muses, enough! / In vain you strive to describe / how misery
and happiness / move in a loving breast. / You cannot heal the wounds
/ that Amor inflicts, / but solace comes / you Kind Ones, only from
you.”
*
* ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
Allgeyer, Brahms, & Levi
The
day before Julie's wedding to her count, in September of 1869,
shortly after Brahms published the first set of Liebeslieder
Waltzes, several friends gathered at Clara's, and she wrote in her
journal, “there was music and laughter... and [the lovers] cooed
over their presents.” Swafford continues, “Brahms' personal gift
to Julie was a daguerreotype of his mother. He, [Hermann] Levi and [Julius] Allgeyer together gave the couple an embossed brass platter,
and had a photo taken of themselves contemplating the gift” [see
left]. Allgeyer, who towered
over Brahms, “indulgently leans over so as not to dwarf Brahms”
who was very self-conscious about his being short. Levi, for the same
reason, is seated...” It's an almost comical pose, the three
friends, such seriousness as if examining some ancient artifact
hoping to unlock some historical secret (perhaps, in a way, Brahms
was). You'll notice Brahms is still clean-shaven, even at 36 (the
beard came after the
1st
Symphony was completed).
Brahms
also wrote a “bridal song” for Julie which he sent to Clara after
the wedding, known rather blandly as “The Alto Rhapsody,” a
work for solo alto voice, men's chorus, and orchestra, setting lines
from Goethe's “Winter Journey in the Harz Mountains,” one of
Brahms' bleakest and darkest works. In one section, the soloist
addresses a nearly invisible figure, a young man who recedes into the
thickets and “the barren waste” of the winter landscape “swallows
him up.”
“Ah,
who can heal the pains / Of one for whom balm has become poison, /
And who sucked hatred of mankind from the abundance of love?”
In
the concluding hymn, the men's chorus sings “If... there is a tone
/ his ear can discern, / Refresh his heart! / Open to his clouded
gaze / the thousand springs / Alongside him as he thirsts / in the
wilderness.”
Goethe's
poem was written “at a turning point in his life, away from his
youth and toward a more mature vision of his life and work.”
Clearly, Brahms was aware of the same, having come under the spell of
Young Goethe's passionate Werther with the C Minor Piano Quartet and
now with the “solitary misanthrope” of Goethe's desolate poem.
So,
with the Rhapsody, then, which begins in C Minor and ends with a
benediction in a soothing C Major, Brahms bade farewell to Julie –
alas, always frail in health, she would die in childbirth only a few
years later. Then he turned to something else that had been haunting
his path, with or without the footsteps of Beethoven trudging behind
him, something he'd first started sketching not long after Robert
Schumann's suicide attempt 20 years earlier. In another seven years,
after figuring out what to do with that symphonic finale that
continued to elude him, he took the Alp-Horn Tune he'd sent to Clara
and turned it into that glorious transition from darkness into light;
with its subsequent hymn, a tribute to Beethoven's “Ode to Joy.”
It was a symphony not unlike Beethoven's 5th
in plan, beginning in a fateful C Minor and ending in a blast of C Major
triumph! Whether he succeeded in exorcising either ghost, Beethoven's
or Clara's, is unclear, but at least, once done, he continued.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
The
second half of the program consists of two piano-duets, the Bilder
aus Osten or “Pictures from
the East” that Robert Schumann composed in 1848. These six "impromptus" were inspired by a translation of a
medieval Arabic poet popularly known as Hariri who was born in what
is now Basra, Iraq, in the mid-11th
Century. Schumann, however, never set Hariri's actual poems but used
the “ideas” behind the poems to create Character Pieces similar
to what he'd done in Kreisleriana
which Stephen Hough played for MSC in February: you aren't really
being told a story,
but he creates an atmosphere (with generic mood-indicating markings
rather than titles) in which you, the listener, place yourself and
imagine your own story. Schumann compares Abu Seid, the hero of
Hariri's poems, to the German trickster, Till Eulenspiegel. Imagine
what you will.
Rachmaninoff in 1892
With Rachmaninoff's set of six pieces, Op.11, we find a transition from household music for amateurs to something geared more for concert repertoire, written for two young pianists who were budding concert artists (besides, I doubt many
Victorian spinets would survive its last movement). They were written in 1894
when Rachmaninoff was 21, a graduate of the Moscow
Conservatory with a “Free Artist” Diploma he'd received two years earlier, and well on his way as a pianist and a composer. Stunned by the death of his idol
Tchaikovsky in November of 1893, his 2nd
Piano Trio, composed in Tchaikovsky's memory, was premiered at the first concert of
Rachmaninoff's music in Moscow the following January.
Rachmaninoff
often spent holidays and summers with his aristocratic cousins on
their country estate near Tambov, where he enjoyed playing piano duets
with various members of the family. As a teenager, he wrote two
pieces for piano six-hands
for the three Skalon sisters, frequent guests of the family. His
first cousin, Natalia Satina, three years his junior, was also a
budding young pianist, so there was a great deal of music-making
during these visits and, surrounded by this care-free and isolated
environment, Rachmaninoff composed a great deal of music
here. One of these works, his Op. 1 Piano Concerto, was written for another first
cousin, Alexander Siloti, a native of Kharkiv, Ukraine, who had
studied with Tchaikovsky and had given many performances of Tchaikovsky's
1st
Piano Concerto to the composer's acclaim.
Eventually, Rachmaninoff, in the years after the disastrous
premiere of his 1st
Symphony in 1897, would marry Natalia Satina after
receiving special dispensation since first cousins were not allowed
to marry. After two years of depression over the symphony's failure and the seemingly unrelenting delays in being able to marry Natalia, he then wrote his 2nd
Piano Concerto in 1900, but this time the composer was the soloist and Siloti conducted. The rest, as they say, is history.
- - - - - “Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” – Stella Adler - - - - -
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