The Doric Quartet and "The Art of the Fugue"

Who: The Doric String Quartet

What: a program called “The Art of the Fugue” with four fugues from Bach’s The Art of Fugue, Haydn’s String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 20 No. 5, and the third of the “Razumovky” Quartets by Beethoven

When: Tuesday, March 17^th, 2026, at 7:30

Where: Temple Ohev Sholom at 2345 N. Front St. (just below Seneca)

The Doric Quartet returns to Harrisburg as they open their American Tour before moving on to seven other locations across the country (including three different programs in three different locations – Boston, Houston, and Durham NC – over a span of three days). When they performed here in 2012, I had the pleasure of “MC-ing” their presentation at the Midtown Scholar, with excerpts from their program. Formed in 1998, the quartet’s undergone some personal changes over the years, so I thought I’d open this post with a 2024 performance at London’s famed Wigmore Hall of a different Haydn quartet than the one on their program this visit, the finale of his Op. 64 No. 3:

They call the program they’ll be performing here this time “The Art of the Fugue” not just because it opens with four selections from a work by Johann Sebastian Bach called “The Art of the Fugue” (or, as the original German is often translated, “The Art of Fugue,” perhaps an article for a different occasion) but because each of the three works explore one of those frequently encountered but rarely understood bits of musical jargon, “the fugue.”

How do Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven, three very different composers, handle the Fugue?

Bach, generally considered the height of the Baroque, composed these fugues in the last decade of his life, the 1740s; Haydn, who along with Mozart is considered the height of the Classical Era, wrote his Op. 20 quartets in 1772; and Beethoven, generally regarded as one of the most influential if not the greatest composer ever, wrote his three quartets dedicated to Count Razumovsky on the cusp of the Romantic Age in 1806.

Three different composers, three different eras, all spanning only about 60 years. (Think, if you’re old enough, what is considered stylish today and what might you remember as having been “cool” in the mid-1960s?)

Well, anyway – what, exactly, is a Fugue??

Simply put – if anything in music could be put simply – a fugue is usually defined as “a composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.”

But music is always a statement of fact followed by enough exceptions to the rule to leave most juries hung up on “reasonable doubt.” The first exception would be “it is not necessarily a composition. It can be a part of a composition.” Case in point, the last movement of Haydn’s quartet on the program is, yes, a fugue; the whole string quartet is not. But while Beethoven writes a lot of “fugal passages” in the finale of his Third Razumovsky Quartet, the idea of a fugue here is treated “semi-rigorously” (a term which always makes me think rigor mortis has not yet set in) where it’s incorporated into the on-going structure of the movement. It may imitate many of the features of a “fugue-by-definition” – the sequencing of a fragment through successive entries in the different instruments at different pitch-levels, to begin – he does what Beethoven does best, developing these ideas in ways that Bach might not have, incorporating them into his structural framework like any other element available to a composer writing a sonata-form movement. Yes, you’re listening to fugue-like passages but they are part of the complete fabric of the piece. And it’s the last of four movements.

Another exception (and a particular peeve of one of my favorite professors of yore) is that “a fugue is not a form: it’s a procedure.” (So too is a root canal.) In fact, an old-time definition of a fugue was “a piece of music where the voices come in one after the other as the audience goes out one after the other.” It was generally regarded as an “intellectual” process by which a composer could show off his technical aptitude: there are many times, when I’m listening to, say, Tchaikovsky’s vast “Manfred” Symphony and that fugue revs up in the finale, it occurs to me even “great” composers sometimes feel the need to impress their critics by proving they can handle the hard stuff, like writing fugues.

While a lecture on “The Fugue” might sound a bit like John Cleese’s famous talk on the workings of The Brain,

trying to explain the many types of fugues can sound just as comprehensible. Keep in mind, the fugue as Bach knew it was already an old, dried-up, out-of-fashion thing, having had its origins in simple “imitative” writing – for instance, a round like the 13th Century’s “Sumer is icumen in” where a folk-song-like melody can be sung with four voices, each overlapping the other by starting at different points, all sung over a repeating bass, in itself a pair of voices overlapping their own pattern, creating a dense texture of six independent voices.

For centuries music’s “standard operating procedure” was a single line, what we know as “Gregorian Chant.” The idea of adding a second independent line was considered revolutionary in the late-12th Century – but thus counterpoint was born. (I always argue that, if students obeyed their horrified teachers who responded “but you can’t do that,” we’d still be singing nothing but Gregorian Chant today…)

“What if” you could take one line and create a second line by manipulating it to come up with a “two-for-one” deal? Of course, for it to work harmonically (“harmoniously”), you had to avoid things that would create nothing worse than passing dissonances… so, let’s see… maybe something like this song from the 1390s by a French harpist about “the melodious harp” advising the listener to “flee from displeasure who causes problems to that which is pleasant to hear.”

A Flemish composer of the late-15th Century, Johannes Ockeghem, had also devised ways to create “puzzle canons” which, by offering often hidden and sometimes obtuse instructions, could be solved to create complex textures all based on a single line. He incorporated many of these different kinds of “puzzles” into his numerous masses and motets.

By the Renaissance, this had branched out to writing pieces with various lines in “imitative” style – not necessarily exact repetitions but recognizably similar. Someone came up with the idea of starting to sing (or play) them starting at different pitch-levels. The term applied to this technique was “fugue” even though it’s not quite The Fugue we know today. It was just a more advanced form of “imitative counterpoint” – one more degree of technical hocus-pocus.

Composers of the generations before Bach wrote elaborate works they also called fugues, the most famous being Sweelinck and Buxtehude. Bach wrote numerous “puzzle canons” and incorporated the idea into such works as The Musical Offering and… The Art of Fugue. As I mentioned, these were already considered old-fashioned by Bach’s day and, as often happened with Bach, he spent a good part of his life codifying the past in often encylopedic works like The Art of Fugue. The primary focus of this collection “was an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject.” In this sense, he took a single melody – although not a very melodious one by our 19th Century standards – and took it through its paces: how could he realize this line’s potential by writing as many different types of fugues as he could? In all, there are 14 fugues and 4 canons; the last fugue is incomplete and, true or not, there is a note added to the MS by Bach’s son, Carl Philip Emanuel, that “Upon this fugue, where the name BACH [for which the English notation would be B♭–A–C–B♮] was placed in the countersubject, the author died.” While there is proof much of the manuscript was composed (or compiled) between 1740 and 1746, there’s enough difference between the last fugue and the rest of the MS that, perhaps, it was written later, quite possibly at the time of Bach’s final illness. Whether or not he actually died at that very moment is a nice story: “he wrote it before he died” (“well, obviously…”). In this case, it could be argued “he wrote it before his blindness prevented him from writing it down.”

Bach’s collection of fugues, here, unlike the famous Well-Tempered Clavier, does not seem to be intended for any specific instrument. It is written in “open score,” meaning it could be played one unspecified instrument to a part or on an organ where multiple manuals and the pedal could cover the notes as needed. While it could be a keyboard work – any organist worth his salt would’ve been able to play from it; presumably as well a harpsichordist – it’s also notable that no instruments of Bach’s day had the range to play many passages throughout the work. It is probably an attempt how best to notate it for the clarity of the fugue’s procedures. Curiously, the final unfinished fugue (which a friend of mine insisted on calling “The ‘Death’ Fugue”…) is written with all four lines on two staves just like a piano piece.

Here’s the first fugue (or, as they were subsequently labeled, “contrapunctus”). Note the sheet music used here with all four different “voices” color-coded. Notice also how these lines overlap each other.

As the remaining fugues progress, they become more complex: Bach adds different kinds of “accompanimental” lines, or uses The Theme in diminution or augmentation (shortening or lengthening the note-values). Rather than sequencing the entrance of the lines at the interval of a fifth, he might increase that to a tenth (an octave-and-a-third) or a twelfth (and octave-and-a-fifth); in others, the lines may move in contrary motion or be inverted or mirrored. One of the canons moves roversio, that is, the line is reversed, moving “in retrograde” from end to beginning.

Here is the 9th Fugue, a double fugue (two subjects each treated fugally): yes, the first subject is different but The Main Theme (sorry, subject) enters in m.35 – see 0:54 into the video – playing simultaneously as counterpoint to the first subject; then both continue to interweave with each other. Notice how the harmonic tension increases with the interaction of the two subjects.

The Main Theme is in D Minor. Each of the fugues and canons is in D Minor. The entire collection is not intended to be performed straight through – there is very little tonal variety (despite a great deal of rather intense chromaticism) and unless you’re prepared for it, it could become a very mind-numbing experience. On the other hand, the variety that Bach gets out of his material and the incredible ways he creates his technical variety is amazing. Of course, a composer who had struggled through counterpoint class trying to write fugues as an assignment will find more to be amazed by than a music-lover who might prefer the good ol’ Pachelbel Canon.

Speaking of an academic approach to fugue writing, for many students and composers writing a fugue can be like creating a crossword puzzle: you have a set of challenges you try to solve. The unfortunate thing is, most people don’t want to listen to your homework assignments, for better or (most likely) worse, in a concert. You learn by doing and each time you take away some slightly different solution to a problem that, with any luck, will help you in the future, whether you’re writing a fugue per se or an involved contrapuntal passage you can make more interesting. If you listen to the last movement of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, you will most likely have no idea you’re listening to one of the most complex pieces of music ever composed! That’s what “talent” is all about: making the difficult sound easy.

In the 19th Century, one of the most famous teachers of the day was a composer named Simon Sechter who included among his students Franz Schubert (okay, he only took one lesson and died shortly afterward, but hey…) and Anton Bruckner, a longer-lived composer who wrote many fugues and contrapuntal passages in the course of his masses and symphonies. As for Sechter, he tried to write one fugue a day and, in the end, left behind about 5,000 fugues! The quality of this output might be explained by the fact you’ve probably never heard a single one of them even if you know who Sechter is. (I wonder if, like people who attend the gym regularly and have, say, a dedicated “leg day,” was Sechter’s Wednesday a “Fugue with Inversion” Day?) But what if he were inspired to write a fugue beyond just his daily exercise? Here, if you’re curious, you can spend a few minutes with Herr Prof. Sechter’s fugue “In Memory of the Prematurely Deceased Franz Schubert.”

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The Haydn quartet on the program is more than just the fugue in the finale. There are so many things to point out about its historical significance or the technological advances Haydn made in the three sets of quartets he’d written in the few years leading up to these works – he was 40 by the time he finished the Op. 20 quartets in 1772, the so-called “Sun” Quartets – a quick summary is in order. First of all, in the Classical Period, minor keys were considered darker, more dramatic, and were usually passed over in favor of brighter major keys. The music was after all intended to entertain and the audiences to be entertained were usually not fellow musicians but aristocrats gathered in the local nobleman’s music room for some after-dinner delectation. So the key of F Minor – considered a particularly dark key – was there because Haydn wanted to explore more intense emotions than a lighter mood might allow. This was near the start of what was called the “Sturm und Drang” period of the late-1760s to the early-1780s: “Storm & Stress.” In many ways, it explored what would become major features of 19th Century Romanticism, and it came about as an antidote to the rationalism of the Enlightenment that gave the “Classical” Style its general characteristics. The opening movement of Haydn’s quartet is turbulent (certainly for what the audience might’ve been used to in 1770) and not everyone was on board with it (Frederick the Great, the Prussian King, considered the style “noise”). A play in this style might focus more on greed and revenge than uplifting principals, or pitting two aristocratic brothers against each other over their love for the same woman; hopeless love and suicide are main themes in Goethe’s famous Sorrows of Young Werther published in 1774.

By comparison, the second movement, a more austere minuet (still in F Minor), has a folk-like middle section or trio. The slow movement, a stark contrast to the first movement and the finale to come, has the feel of a gentle sicilienne in F Major that for all its simplicity brings to mind Schubert fifty years later (though no one could ever imagine anyone other than Haydn actually composing it).

The finale returns to the storminess of the opening yet it is a fugue through-and-through, which, if already old-fashioned long before Bach died in 1750 (only 22 years earlier, btw), must have startled Haydn’s listeners who would’ve expected a lively romp with a happy ending instead of something this intellectual and archaic (and yet, curiously, in this avant-garde “Sturm und Drang” style!).

Not only is it a fugue, it is a double fugue with two subjects (the “theme” of a fugue is always called a subject, just to be academic about it), heard simultaneously at the outset. The character of each subject is distinct: the more prominent one strongly resembles Bach’s “Theme” used throughout The Art of Fugue, angular with wide intervallic leaps, clearly defined rhythms; the one that sounds like an accompaniment is actually a contrast in quicker rhythmic figures and smaller fragments, yet perfectly identifiable as “not the main theme.” As the fugue expands, we’re never far away from one of those subject’s motives, identifiable but often passing kaleidoscopically from one instrument to the other. Later, the viola introduces the second subject al rovescio (in reverse), followed a bit later, after an interrupting pause, by a subtle cascade of both subjects spilling over each other, not waiting for the first statement to finish before the second one butts in (this is called stretto, an overlapping of ideas that creates a kind of “stress”) followed by the main subject now coming in only a half-measure after the other voice, moving “in canon” before it seems like its losing steam, only to end with a forceful statement of both subjects simultaneously, treble and bass, with its final punctuation.

You may not be aware of the intricacy of it and I know people have heard it and wondered “what fugue?” Yet it’s an amazing tour-de-force worthy of the contrapuntal genius of Bach or, at least later, chronologically, the Mozart-yet-to-come. Two things to mention, here: Mozart was so impressed by this set of six quartets and then by the Op. 33 set in 1781, the year he moved to Vienna, he set about writing a new set of his own quartets, exploring many of the innovations Haydn had opened up for him, especially in terms of incorporating more contrapuntal writing into his textures. Beethoven, when he arrived in Vienna to study with Haydn, hand-copied one of the Op. 20 Quartets (I would imagine either the F Minor or the G Major, both with fugal finales), a typical way for a young student to learn the details of his teacher’s craft.

Here is the Quatour Mosaïque in this video of the complete Op. 20 No. 5 Quartet with the score:

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This concert is part of a series of seasons with the Doric Quartet focusing on Beethoven culminating next year in the 200th Anniversary of Beethoven’s Death on March 26th, 1827. Not that the 199th Anniversary warrants such a celebration, but there is much in Beethoven’s legacy to examine, not just his own impact on subsequent composers – few figures loom as large over future generations as Beethoven – but on those whose music helped to form him.

Of the other two composers on this program, Haydn was not only Beethoven’s teacher but also someone who could be regarded as the Most Famous Living Composer of the Day (and in Beethoven’s own estimation that was only because Mozart had died before he’d had a chance to study with him). The other is Bach, and though this was long before he’d come to be regarded as one of “The Three Bs,” the influence of his collection of keyboard pieces called The Well-Tempered Clavier was also very powerful among the handful of composers familiar with it.

Over the years, I’ve written about Beethoven’s 3rd “Razumovsky” Quartet, so if you’re interested in the historical or biographical information about the piece, the composer, and the dedicatee, check out this earlier post from 2016.

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The expansive opening movement, following a very enigmatic introduction – harking back, most likely, to Mozart's “Dissonant” Quartet, also in C Major – is more compact than the other quartets' but on the whole more approachable, too, as if he's letting listeners baffled by the first two off the hook with this one (or so it might seem).

As one of the early reviews said, "Three new, very long and difficult Beethoven string quartets, dedicated to the Russian ambassador Count Razumovsky, are also attracting the attention of all connoisseurs. The conception is profound and the construction excellent, but they are not easily comprehended." Perhaps the comparative tunefulness of the Third's opening brought a sigh of relief? 

The second movement, however, could have something Slavic about it – again, more likely Beethoven's impression of something Slavic – in the mood of the theme though its most memorable feature is the cello's steady pizzicato, almost like a tolling bell – and Russians did love their bells. That hasn't kept other writers from hearing something Spanish or even more exotic in it.

The third movement, rather than being a typical scherzo, is more of a throwback to the graceful days of Mozart and Haydn, the previous generation, a minuet marked “grazioso.” [Keep in mind Mozart, an idol of the teen-aged Beethoven, had died in 1791, fifteen years before this quartet; and Haydn, old and ill, would die three years after it.] But this sets up the finale more perfectly than a typical Beethoven scherzo possibly could.

And yet, this [finale] was even more of a throw-back, this time to the highly contrapuntal days of Bach and Handel of the 1740s or so when Fugue was king. (In Beethoven's day, Bach was little known, at least to the general public; Beethoven admitted more than once Handel was one of his favorite composers). The finale starts off with a vigorous (!) fugue and this dense and busy texture – a perpetual motion, at that – dominates the movement to the point it no longer sounds like an academic and old-fashioned dry-as-dust fugue, the kind of thing all students once learned to compose but then probably shouldn't. While it's very different from the Great Fugue that originally ended the Op. 130 Quartet, it's still a marvelous show-case of compositional craft combined with musical ingenuity.

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Here is the Emerson Quartet (another frequent visitor to Market Square Concerts in seasons past) with the Quartet in C Major, Op. 59 No. 3 by Ludwig van Beethoven, complete with score:

(P.S. The video and the poster’s commentary date the quartet as 1808 but that is when it was published. The C Major Quartet was composed in 1806, and all three were premiered in February, 1807.)

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I could spend another 5,000 words writing about how Beethoven did or did not quite follow the rules of “How to Write a Fugue.” But then Beethoven was never one to follow anybody’s rules, something that often frustrated his teacher, Franz Josef Haydn, and most of his friends and fans. Counterpoint, which can become a fairly rigorous academic subject, is not something Haydn was particularly interested in teaching, and it was Baron von Sweiten, a prominent bureaucrat, librarian, and music-lover in Vienna’s court, friend and supporter of Mozart and a fan of young Beethoven’s, suggested Beethoven, then pushing 25, to study with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger who proved to be a much better (or at least better-attuned) teacher for someone of Beethoven’s intellectual feistiness.

Counterpoint, of course, is not just “writing fugues” – it is the development of those skills both melodic and harmonic which help create a greater sense of texture and variety beyond a simple melody with a simple harmonic accompaniment. Yes, there are lots of rules – as a former theory teacher, I can say there are too many rules perhaps, but learning the rules is important because then you understand what you need to do to break them, which is so much more productive than merely writing whatever the hell you want to. Beethoven knew this, even if purists (frequently known as pedants) bickered about his ability to follow the rules. You learn the rules, understand why they exist, and then, keeping in mind what you should do, you find a way to bend – then break – them to get what you want.

And that’s what Beethoven did here, a composer by then in his mid-30s, who horrified the pedants by not following their rules. As one violinist responded to the Razumovsky Quartets, “Surely you do not consider this music!” To which Beethoven famously replied, “Not for you, but for a later age,” not because he was arrogant – well, yes, he was, but that’s not what he meant, here: there would come a time when the present generation would not only have forgotten the Old Rules but would have accepted the fact there are other ways of writing music.

On that note, I cannot resist ending with a fugue composed by Glenn Gould, the great pianist and interpreter of Bach, whose little vocal quartet accompanied by strings was written for a 1963 CBC broadcast called “The Anatomy of Fugue.” I give you Glenn Gould’s So You Want to Write a Fugue which includes, in the midst of some very busy counterpoint, wise advice: “Just forget the rules and write one.”

– Dick Strawser

Stuart & Friends: Music for Piano & Winds

Who: Stuart Malina, pianist, with flutist David DiGiacobbe, oboist Andreas Oeste, clarinetist Eric Just, bassoonist Joseph Grimmer, and hornist Jonathan Clark 

What: Music by Stephen Sondheim, Sergei Prokofiev, Avram Dorman, and Francis Poulenc 

When: 8:00 on Wednesday, February 18th, 2026 – note: due to a scheduling conflict, the usual 7:30 start-time has been moved back to 8pm! 

Where: Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg. 

Stuart Malina at the piano (photo by Dan Gleiter)

“Chamber Music” in its typical definition “is a form of classical music composed for a small group of instruments.” While academics might quibble over the use of form – a sonata is a form, as if musical terminology isn’t confusing enough – let’s just say it’s music to be performed by a small group of instruments (except, since a work for full orchestra can be arranged for only a few instruments, if it wasn’t composed for that small group, does that mean…? – Oh , wait, it probably means I’ve been watching too many legal shows on TV where lawyers and politicians dole out bowlfuls of quibble to obfuscate and bamboozle the opposition…).

The great writer Goethe once wrote in a letter to a friend of his (who also happened to be the teacher of a boy named Felix Mendelssohn) that chamber music was “four rational people conversing.” To him – and certainly to many music lovers out there – chamber music meant “string quartets.” While a solo pianist is readily accepted by the audience in general, a single violinist might raise an eyebrow (“will there be enough variety to hold my interest?”) – how did you react to hearing Kerson Leong last month?

The “chamber” in chamber music originated in the room where it was to be performed, camera being Italian for “room” (before it was applied to certain photographic devices) or kammer in German going as far back as medieval days and the Renaissance. Instruments playing in a room played what was called a sonata da camera as opposed to music played in a church where it would instead be called a sonata da chiesa (a “church” sonata). So here we are, listening to a performance of “chamber” music in a church… Normally, this should not be confusing… (Remember, btw, it takes four people to play a Trio Sonata.)

We're about to listen to “chamber music” performed by… well, different combinations of musicians: two works for two instrumentalists, another for five, and the grand finale combining six (count ‘em, six). And not a string quartet in sight. This time, it's piano and winds. There’s a set of waltzes for oboe and piano by Stephen Sondheim, a sonata for flute and piano by Prokofiev, a relatively new work for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, and piano by Avner Dorman, and a work for piano and wind quintet (add a flute to the last batch) by Francis Poulenc. Certainly a variety of sounds, textures, and timbres as well as styles, all composed over a span of 75 years.

The concert itself is part of an on-going series of chamber music concerts with the music director and conductor of the Harrisburg Symphony, Stuart Malina, now in his 26th year with the orchestra, performing as a pianist as he often does with members of the orchestra. In this case, he’ll be joined by principal flutist David DiGiacobbe, principal oboist Andreas Oeste, principal clarinetist Eric Just, principal bassoonist Joseph Grimmer, and Jonathan Clark, a member of the orchestra’s horn section.

Back in the 1970s, there was such a proliferation of “____ & Friends” programs in New York City including several with concertmasters of the New York Philharmonic, that critics began wondering if the idea of “and Friends” hadn’t outworn its welcome. Then along came the Phil’s new concertmaster, Rodney Friend, so, of course, now we had programs performed by “Rodney Friend & Friends”... New York wasn't the kind of town where people would automatically understand "Rodney & Friends."

One of my favorite definitions of “chamber music” describes it as “music played by friends for friends.” It also goes to say, here in Harrisburg, we don’t need a last name to tell us whose programs these are.

Welcome to Stuart & Friends 2026!

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When I mentioned that definition of “chamber music” as music “written for a small number of instruments,” the academic pedant could argue the first music on the program, despite being performed by two musicians, was written for the pit orchestra of a Broadway theater. Stephen Sondheim had, by the time he’d composed the originals, become one of the leading composers of “Broadway Musicals” – let’s say, “American musical theater” since Sondheim’s works have found a long and prosperous life well beyond the Great White Way – and would go one to create several more to ensure his place as one of the all-time greatest composers in the field. 

 

Stephen Sondheim

While he’s well known for his tunes – who hasn’t heard “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music? – his music as well as his lyrics have an unmistakably recognizable quality both rhythmic and structural with technical demands for the singers as well as the orchestra that go beyond the traditional aspects of the typical musical.

In 1992, English composer Richard Rodney Bennett arranged these three waltzes from two of Sondheim’s more popular musicals (call them “shows,” if you must) which opened on Broadway in the early-1970s. While the original plot for these waltzes (two of them, originally vocal numbers) may be unnecessary to enjoy Sondheim’s melodic writing, both musicals deal with ordinary people and their frustrated and failing relationships. This causes not only tension in the plot but also in the nostalgia and hopelessness reflected in their music.

Company, opening in 1970 and winning 6 of the 14 Tonys it was nominated for, was one of the first musicals to deal with (then) contemporary aspects of dating, marriage, and divorce as the central character, a bachelor named Bobby, faces his 35th birthday. After what he assumes will be a one-night-stand with April (or is it June…?), his date is ready to leave for Barcelona (Bobby: “Oh?) but after he gives up trying to convince her to stay, she decides she will after all (Bobby: “Oh God…”). Here’s a link to the 2011 live performance recorded at Avery Fisher Hall with Neil Patrick Harris as Bobby and Christina Hendricks as April. 

Almost all the music of A Little Night Music (which takes its name from Mozart’s famous serenade, Eine kleine Nachtmusik) is written in 3/4-time; as critic Clive Barnes put it, “an orgy of plaintively memorable waltzes, all talking of past loves and lost worlds.” A series of “night waltzes” recurs throughout the score, mostly instrumental. Here’s Richard Rodney Bennett’s arrangement as played by saxophonist John Harle with Bennett at the piano. 

After what passes for an overture, the main characters enter dancing to this Night Waltz, “each uncomfortable with their partner.” One of these characters will be the middle-aged Frederick with his “trophy wife.” He goes to see a former lover, a fading flower of an actress named Desiree (she who gets to sing “Send in the Clowns”). After she tells him about the young married dragoon she’s currently having an affair with, Frederick tries to “one-up” her by telling her about his young wife, fending off Desiree's interjecting quips and eventually revealing his sexual frustration in “You Must Meet My Wife.” Here is a link to the Original Cast Album with Len Cariou as Frederick and Glynnis Johns as Desiree. 

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I was in my 20s when I saw the great (and then fairly new) flutist James Galway’s newly released RCA recording (with no less than pianist Martha Argerich) of a flute sonata by Sergei Prokofiev which, as I listened, turned out to be the 2nd Violin Sonata I’d been familiar with since I was in high school. Considering Galway paired it with the Franck Flute Sonata which clearly was a transcription of Franck’s famous Violin Sonata, I thought he was just raping the repertoire to find other things he could program. Yes, unfortunately, many great composers have never written great works for the flute (or for that matter most wind instruments) – so many instrumentalists will find something they like and appropriate for their own. 

And why not? It’s certainly nothing new – Mozart himself did it, transcribing a woodwind serenade when he was behind on a deadline with his publisher for a set of string quintets. 

Prokofiev, composing at the piano

So what's the story here?

It was deep in the midst of the horrors of World War II when the Soviet Union had been invaded and much of it occupied by Nazi Germany. Like Shostakovich and numerous other artists, Prokofiev found himself “evacuated” to various remote locations deep in the heart of Russia, first to Tbilisi in the Caucasus, then to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, then Perm in the Ural Mountains, that north-south line of mountains serving as a convenient dividing point between Europe and Asia. He may have been far removed physically from the ravages of the war then raging with the horrendous siege of Leningrad (which Shostakovich commemorated in his epic 7th Symphony) and the devastation then wasting Ukraine, and as you listen to this music, you would have no idea what current events may (or may not) have been affecting his life.

Historically, artists often deal with the challenges of creating art “in the midst of traumatic events.” Think of Beethoven writing his A Major Cello Sonata in the midst of Napoleon’s bombardment of Vienna in 1809, or Robert Schumann composing short piano pieces for his Album for the Young with the sound of gunfire audible quite literally just down the street as revolution came to Dresden in 1849.

A famous example would be how many artists responded after the events of September 11th 2001. The impact of such physical and emotional upheaval varies from artist to artist, culture to culture, or time to time, and in Prokofiev’s case he was working on several large-scale works during this time, most notably the opera based on Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace, about the impact of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 (curiously, he had been thinking about it even before Hitler’s invasion was announced in the news in June of 1941).  

While under evacuation in Alma Ata, he composed the filmscore for Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (music overshadowed by the score for Alexander Nevsky) but also worked on the ballet Cinderella, one of his most melodious scores, which occupied him throughout these four years. And, almost as an afterthought amidst these large-scale works, this Flute Sonata in D Major. He wrote to a friend describing his new work as a “sonata in a gentle, flowing classical style.” 

I can find no specific references to why he chose to a write a sonata for flute – he’d begun a violin sonata in F Minor in 1938 but put it aside as events developed, left uncompleted until 1946, after the war. By that time, his Flute Sonata had received its premiere in Moscow in 1943 with flutist Nikolai Kharkovsky and pianist Sviatoslav Richter.

When that violin sonata was finished and premiered by violinist David Oistrakh and pianist Lev Oborin in 1946, the flute sonata had already been published as Op. 94. Somehow, the newer 1st Violin Sonata in F Minor became Op. 80, perhaps because Prokofiev was thinking more about having started it years earlier in 1938, two years after he returned to his native Russia – now the Soviet Union – to stay. 

There’s a story, told by a student of the pianist, that at one point Oborin “played a certain passage, marked forte, too gently for Prokofiev's liking, who insisted it should be more aggressive. Oborin replied that he was afraid of drowning out the violin, but Prokofiev said ‘It should sound in such a way that people should jump in their seat, and people will say 'Is he out of his mind?’”

Later, Oistrakh remarked to the composer that Flute Sonata, you know, would make a very good violin sonata – and so Prokofiev made a few adjustments to cover the difference between how the violin would play a passage compared to the flute (the piano part remained untouched) and published it as the Violin Sonata No. 2, Op.94b.

It’s in the standard four movements of a classical sonata: a luxuriantly unfolding andantino (not slow but not fast, either) followed by a bustling (if not scurrying) scherzo, a tender, Mozartean slow movement, and then a positive and positively enthusiastic finale. Here’s that recording by Galway and Argerich I’d mentioned, released in 1975:

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At Market Square Concerts’ 40th Anniversary concert in March, 2022, one of the works on the program was the Guitar Quintet by Avner Dorman, a composer with academic ties to the Midstate, with Grammy-winning guitarist Jason Vieux – here’s an excerpt from the version for guitar and string orchestra.

Avner Dorman at his desk (photo by Wendy Halperin)

For this concert, Stuart Malina will be joined by four wind-players for another quintet by Dorman, one written earlier in 2007. While the Guitar Quintet (from 2016) had been inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and peace activist from Vietnam, where each movement took its title from one of the six mantras outlined at the end of his book, “How to Love,” the quintet for piano and winds is entitled Jerusalem Mix and also has a story of sorts behind it, which the composer explains:

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Jerusalem Mix takes its title from a popular Israeli dish made of an eclectic assortment of fried meats. The dish, much like the city of its origin, is a melting pot of flavors and characters - each preserving some of its unique characteristics while contributing to the whole.

When I was first approached to write a woodwind and piano quintet for the 10th anniversary of the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival I knew I wanted to write a piece that would reflect the spirit of the festival and of the city of Jerusalem.

As I started writing the piece, I discovered that the piano and woodwind quintet is a tricky ensemble as it embodies members of four different instrument families: the bassoon and oboe are both double-reed instruments; the clarinet is a single-reed instrument; the French horn is a brass instrument; and the piano is of the percussion family. I decided to use the diversity of this ensemble to mirror the diversity of Jerusalem. With this in mind I set out to write this piece as a collage of short scenes, each portraying one or more aspects of the city:

I. Jerusalem Mix – portraying the busyness of the modern city. Musically, this movement is based on Armenian and Turkish folk dance-styles in which the length of the beats constantly varies. In the middle part of this movement a prayer-like melody is introduced in the Oboe emulating its Middle-Eastern origins such as the Zurna or the Duduk.

II. The Wailing Wall – emulates the sound of a praying crowd. This movement is based on the characteristic sigh of the Jewish prayer and pays homage to the opening movement of Mordecai Seter’s oratorio “Tikun Hatzot.”

III. Wedding March – a humorous movement that is first inspired by Hassidic Music but gradually incorporates wedding music from Middle-Eastern Jewish traditions. As the wedding party reaches higher levels of ecstasy (and the guests are increasingly drunk) these different styles collide and collapse into one another.

IV. Blast.

V. Adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) – by hitting the strings of the piano with drumsticks the pianist emulates the sound of a Kanun and the prayers of the opening movement and of the “wailing wall” movement become the call to prayer of the Muezzin.

VI. Jerusalem Mix. All the movements are based on two simple melodic cells – one chromatic and the other made of a whole step. For me, the fact that these simple motives can lend themselves to the music traditions of Christianity (Armenian dance), Islam, and Judaism, express that on a deep cultural, musical, and humane level, our cultures are closer than we realize.

(from program notes, ©Avner Dorman)

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Here is the complete work, performed at the Piano Salon Cristofori, Berlin, on January 6th, 2017.

Born in Israel, Dorman was 25 when he received the Prime Minister’s Prize for his Ellef Symphony, the youngest composer to have won the award. He studied composition with John Corigliano at Juilliard where he earned his doctorate. With numerous works commissioned and performed around the world – you can check his website for more details – he is currently Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College right here in Central PA.

Having studied musicology (as well as physics) as a student in Israel, his music is not only influenced by the culture and history of the country and the wider region of the world, but as a third-generation Holocaust Survivor, of his family’s German heritage (he describes how the household he grew up in was full of German music and literature). Whether it’s the musical DNA that brings out the soul of this heritage or his meditative or hypnotic approach to contemporary minimalism, he has created music with a direct emotional impact that goes well beyond the surface so many composers have failed to penetrate.

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The oldest piece on the program is by that “witty Vulgarian” intent on tweaking the various noses of the Parisian establishment, a member of a group known as Les Six (an obvious and singularly unimaginative nickname for a group of six composers) and a follower of what was called Neo-Classicism, taking its influences more from the distant past of Mozart rather than the recent trajectory of the Late Romanticism of Wagner and Liszt into the 20th Century with Schoenberg’s atonality and Stravinsky’s early ballets.

When I was growing up in the ‘60s, I remember people still thinking the music of Francis Poulenc was “contemporary.” After all, most of it was written only 30 or 40 years ago and the man had died as recently as 1963. Perhaps no longer shocking, it is certainly sincere and smile-worthy.

One critic had described him as “half bad boy, half monk” – which reminds me of a photo that once inspired the composer as he was writing a distinctly religious work – his Gloria, a late work from 1959 – still infused with some of his trademark cheekiness: a bunch of Benedictine monks in their robes playing soccer.

As Lucy Murray points out in her program notes, “Filled with comic gestures and dissonances that suddenly turn lyrical, the work continuously pulls the listener back and forth between pathos and humor. One senses, in Poulenc, one foot in the café and one in the grave.”

The Sextet opens like “a Paris traffic jam,” as Lucy puts it, with a contrasting slower, lyrical section ushered in by the solo bassoon building to a passionate climax before – okay, enough of this sadness – back to the comedy of the opening. The second movement opens in full classical clarity, evocative of a Mozart andante before everyone spontaneously decides it’s time to stop in at the dance hall but then (oh yeah) this is supposed to be a tender slow movement. The finale combines bits of jazziness (remember, this is only a few years after the Roaring ‘20s) with lyrical contrasts and then some Stravinskian rhythms (a bit of Les Noces perhaps? Poulenc had played one of the four pianos at its London premiere in 1926) before – another surprise – rather than the boisterous romp we’d expect to the finish line, it becomes this slow-motion reflection on themes from the previous movements (again, perhaps an inspiration from that magical conclusion to Les Noces), a solemn ending, by comparison, to what started off like a galop from Offenbach.

This performance is from a fairly new music festival in 2023, held in the port city of Pohang, South Korea:

It’s assumed Poulenc began work on the sextet in 1931, finishing it in 1933, the year after the Concerto for Two Pianos. Poulenc played the piano at the premiere with some of the best known wind players in Paris. It was, however, regardless what we might think of it today, not well-received by traditionalists: composer and critic Florent Schmitt criticized it as “wandering and vulgar.” A more positive review wrote that "with Poulenc, all of France comes out of the windows he opens." 

Poulenc extensively revised the composition in August 1939 because he was dissatisfied with the original, telling Nadia Boulanger, "There were some good ideas in it but the whole thing was badly put together. With the proportions altered, better balanced, it comes over very clearly."

Poulenc & Friend (1930s)

Self-taught because his parents intended him for a career in the family’s pharmaceutical company, Poulenc, after coming under the influence of that great Parisian iconoclast Erik Satie, was convinced music was his life. He described himself as a “Vulgarian” who wrote in his trademark light-hearted style to his final years in the early-1960s, long after such a style had gone out of fashion. However, in the summer of 1936, after an unexpected religious awakening following the death of a close friend and fellow composer in a violent car accident and his visit to a famous religious shrine shortly afterward, he began composing with a new-found and often religious seriousness, writing dramatic choral works during the Nazi occupation setting words of Resistance poets, which culminated in his intensely dramatic opera, The Dialogue of the Carmelites of 1957.

Even though his contemporaries might disparage his style, he himself was more open-minded than we might think. In 1921, he traveled to Vienna where he met Arnold Schoenberg and “talked shop” with him and his pupils (Schoenberg at the time was developing what soon became his “Method of Composing with 12-Tones”). A fan of Pierre Boulez, playing recordings of his Marteau sans maître for some friends, Poulenc wrote to him in 1961 how he was sorry to have to miss a performance of Boulez' recent Pli selon pli “because I am sure it is well worth hearing” (Boulez did not return the sentiment).

In 1942 he wrote to a friend, “I know perfectly well I am not one of those composers who made harmonic innovations like Igor [Stravinsky], Debussy or Ravel but I think there is room for new music which doesn't mind using other people's chords. Wasn't that the case with Mozart-Schubert?"

– Dick Strawser