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| Karl Goldmark |
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| Antonín Dvořák |
Let's begin with the Hungarian-born Karl Goldmark.
Since the only videos that surfaced on YouTube for the String Quintet in A Minor, Op.9, here are individual clips of each movement:
1st Movement, Allegro molto
2nd Movement, Andante con moto
3rd Movement, Scherzo, Allegro molto
4th Movement, Finale: Andante sostenuto; Allegro
Though he may be relatively obscure to American audiences, Karl (or Carl – or, in Hungarian, Károly) Goldmark was regarded as a leading Viennese composer in the late-19th Century. But like many "leading composers," his star faded and his reputation became lost in the shadows of time (or perhaps the larger shadow of his friend Brahms' more lasting reputation). Another leading German composer in his day, the Leipzig-based Carl Reinecke published 288 opus numbers, Brahms 120, but Goldmark only 54. Reinecke today is remembered chiefly for a flute sonata, so prolificness is no guarantee of lasting fame.
Keep in mind geography and ethnic heritage in the 19th Century can be two (or three) different things, since borders were frequently being shifted with the politics of the time. The dominance of the Germanic Austrians, spreading across their ethnically diverse empire, does not guarantee someone born in Hungary is automatically an ethnic Hungarian (just as Bartók, born in a town in Transylvania, then part of Hungary but now in Romania, does not make him a Romanian). While the use of Hungarian folk motives in his music would not make him a Hungarian either – in that case, Brahms would be more Hungarian than either of his closest Hungarian-born friends, Goldmark and Joseph Joachim – Goldmark's music seems singularly lacking in overt “Hungarian influences.”
If anything, he is a solidly conservative Germanic composer, influenced primarily by Schumann who, at the end of his life, was a major factor in the development of Johannes Brahms, even beyond all that “Heir to Beethoven” stuff. Even in Goldmark's even less known 2nd Symphony of 1884, the third movement in particular still has strong thumbprints of Felix Mendelssohn's (though he died in 1847), but also a goodly smattering of phrases or harmonies that could easily be at home in works by his friend, Brahms.
Born in Hungary in 1830 in the town of Keszthely on the shores of Lake Balaton, Karl Goldmark was raised in a large Jewish family. His father, Ruben, was a cantor (or chazan) in the local temple and the family would eventually encompass over twenty children (he'd remarried after the death of his first wife). In 1834, the family moved to Ödenburg (in Hungarian, Sopron) on what is now the modern border of Hungary and Austria, and it was there in 1841 young Karl received his first “primitive” violin lessons from one of the local choir singers. His initial experience was entirely in the world of “village dance music,” much as Dvořák's would be in his native Bohemia.
(Here's an intriguing "what if...?" – about 14 miles north of downtown Sopron (today, just across the border in Austria) is the palace of Prince Esterházy where Haydn had been the "music director" or kapellmeister. Now, of course, that had been fifty years earlier, but how might young Karl's life have changed if his first music lessons had come from a member of the Esterházy orchestra, if, in fact, since even princes fall on hard times, there had been one in 1841?)
Eventually, Karl went to study in Vienna (not far away) where, eventually, he entered the Conservatory where he studied with Joseph Böhm who'd worked with Beethoven and Schubert in the 1820s. Two other students of Böhm's were Joseph Joachim and Eduard Hoffman, who, like their teacher, were also Hungarian-born and Jewish.
However, during the political unrest of the 1848 Revolution, the school was temporarily closed, and so Goldmark returned home to play in the local theater orchestra. His older brother Joseph, having taken an active part in the uprisings, fled to America. Eduard Hoffman, changing his name to Reményi, fled to Hamburg where he would meet Brahms, then still a teenager, and later introduce him to Joachim and, eventually, pave the way for him to meet Robert and Clara Schumann.
After things calmed down, Karl returned to Vienna in the mid-1850s, playing in theater and opera orchestras, teaching himself the piano, but after his first concert's failure, he tried his luck in Budapest where, in the midst of giving piano lessons, he studied textbooks on theory and composition, including one by Sechter who could count among his students Schubert (even if only for one lesson), Bruckner, and Eduard Marxsen who, if he accomplished nothing else, was Johannes Brahms' only significant teacher of composition and counterpoint.
Deciding to settle in Vienna permanently in 1860, Goldmark made his name with his String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 8, which “made him famous overnight” (according to Grove's) and the String Quintet in A Minor, Op. 9, which he wrote in 1862 and which solidified his reputation as a composer-to-take-note-of. He won a state prize (I'm not sure which one) that same year and made a living as a music journalist in addition to giving piano lessons.
Considering Brahms, unknown as of yet in Vienna, had just completed the two piano quartets heard on the earlier concert in this series in 1861 – the A Major Quartet (No. 2) was the one Brahms played in his first Viennese concerts in 1863 – it might be argued how much Brahms or his music might have influenced Goldmark's own style in either of these early works of his, especially the String Quintet. As expected, there's the clear imprint of Robert Schumann's influence, stylistically, as well as Felix Mendelssohn's, though I'm thinking more of Mendelssohn-as-he-influenced-Schumann, particularly in Goldmark's scherzo: Schumann tried to emulate Mendelssohn's “fleet-fingered” scherzo-magic in his own Piano Quartet of 1842.
However, I have to admit the “forensic musicologist” in me hears a hint of Alexander Borodin in the opening of that same scherzo – Borodin, when not influenced by his Russian friends or his own culture, found inspiration in Schumann and Mendelssohn as well – yet what it reminds me of is Borodin's second symphony which was premiered in – wait a minute, 1876...? How can that be? – which reminds me once again, there are only 12 notes to go around...
By the mid-1870s, Goldmark would become quite an established figure in Vienna, with the huge success of his “exotic” opera, The Queen of Sheba, Op.27 (listen to this brief but captivating aria, “Magische Töne” with the incomparable Nicolai Gedda, or this excerpt from the Act II ballet, especially its exotic turns-of-phrase beginning at 4:00); his Rustic Wedding Symphony, Op.26 (hear the 1st movement's “Wedding March & Variations” here, conducted by Leonard Bernstein); and his Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op.28 which bears more the stamp of Schumann and Spohr, to be honest. All three of these works were premiered between 1875 and 1877. Just for the perspective, Brahms' Violin Concerto was written the following year and premiered by Joachim on New Year's Day, 1879.
What did Brahms have to say about his friend's new symphony following its premiere in 1876, around the time he had finished (finally) his own Symphony No. 1? Now, the “Rustic Wedding Symphony” is more a five-movement suite than a traditional symphony – not that five movements would've bothered Brahms: both Beethoven's Pastoral and Schumann's Rhenish have an additional movement to the usual four (as did Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique, whether Brahms would've disapproved of it on other grounds or not). Korngold's opens with a long set of self-contained variations (a form Brahms himself was fond of) rather than a traditional sonata movement which here is left to the finale, deceptively labeled “Dance,” which also opens with a fugue. So you'd think Brahms, the leader of the Conservative Party of the Romantic Era, in opposition to the Liberals led by Wagner and Liszt, would have had a few criticisms to make about Goldmark playing fast and loose with the Classical Traditions of Mozart and Beethoven?
Brahms told his friend, “That is the best thing you have done; clear-cut and faultless, it sprang into being a finished thing, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter.”
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| Karl Goldmark in later years |
(There is a wonderful and likely apocryphal story that, while traveling in the days when many composers still held posts at aristocratic courts like those of, say, the Duke of Meiningen (where Brahms occasionally tried out his own new symphonies) or the King of Bavaria (where Wagner hoped to produce his as yet unfinished Ring of the Nibelungs), Goldmark was asked by a woman-of-a-certain-age who he was and so he introduced himself with some pride as “the composer of The Queen of Sheba.” The woman thought this was quite interesting and asked if the post paid well.)
Incidentally, one of Goldmark's students in 1890-1891 was a violinist from Finland whose primary dream had been to become a concert soloist but was thinking more, now, of studying composition. Rejected as a potential student by both Brahms and Bruckner, he studied privately with Robert Fuchs, a friend of Brahms who taught at the Conservatory, who allowed him to play in the school's student orchestra. Goldmark, over a few months of casual lessons, advised him to focus a little more on the shaping of his themes, studying the Classics a little more and the music of Berlioz and Wagner a little less. The young man left for home and in the fall of 1891 gave a concert in Helsinki that left people wondering what, exactly, to make of Jean Sibelius.
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One of the things that surprises me, though, in listening to these works of Goldmark's, is how little influence of Wagner there seems to be in this music. And why would that be a surprise, especially if he was a Friend of Brahms, the dialectical opposite of Wagner's then-avant-garde style?
Because Goldmark was an advocate of Wagner's music both as a music critic (or, more generally, a music journalist) in the late-1850s and early-'60s, even to the point, in 1872, of calling for the creation of the Vienna Wagner Society (of which a young student from Bohemia named Gustav Mahler would later become a member). He'd only met Wagner once in person “in the early 1860s” but it wasn't until considerably later he would distance himself from Wagner the Man for his crude antisemitism. I remember reading somewhere (but cannot find it again) he had held some administrative function in the society but was later asked to leave because he was Jewish.
I have trouble hearing what might be “imitations” (or even “intimations”) of Wagner in what little music of Goldmark's I've heard, but the operas (which I have not heard beyond a few excerpts of The Queen of Sheba) are supposed to have more chromatic harmonies than his instrumental music. As Grove's Dictionary describes it, the operas have “strongly chromatic Wagnerian harmony” but then says his style “falls between Meyerbeerian grand opera [a style largely unfamiliar to modern American audiences] and Wagnerian music drama” which implies that it's not quite an absorption of Wagner's operatic approach (which would be more than just his chromatic harmony: think Tristan, first performed a decade earlier than Sheba). However, we'll leave details like that for the theorists to peruse.
Certainly, if Bruckner were absorbing Wagner's dramatic style into his abstract symphonies, Goldmark sounds nothing like Bruckner (who, in 1874, had just written his 4th Symphony, the one called the “Romantic” though, after much revising – Bruckner was probably one of the most insecure of composers – it wasn't premiered until 1879). Brahms, for all that, sounds far more “chromatic” in general than Goldmark, and no one would ever accuse Brahms of being “a Wagnerian.”
Speaking of influences, it would be interesting to hear Goldmark's late Piano Quintet, the one in C-sharp Minor, Op.54, his last work, written in 1914, the year before his death. Coming as it does after the advent of so many new musical styles Brahms already found horrifying in the 1890s – the tone poems of Richard Strauss, the first symphony of Mahler – not to mention the just-around-the-corner hyper-chromatic world of Schoenberg's early works (Verklärte Nacht the year after Brahms died; his first atonal pieces coming in 1908/1909) but also of Debussy's impressionism in Paris (his Prelude to the “Afternoon of a Faun” had already been heard in 1894), shades of which can be heard, Grove's tells us, in Goldmark's quintet. One wonders what Old Brahms might've made of that?
Incidentally, here's a recording by the Mendelssohn Piano Trio (Ya-Ting Chang, Peter Sirotin, and Fiona Thompson) of Goldmark's Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor Op.33, composed in 1879 and published the following year, written at the height of his friendship with Brahms. This was the year after Brahms managed to drag him and another close friend, his physician Dr. Theodor Billroth, off to an Italian holiday. Though Goldmark would leave them in Naples, Brahms and Billroth went on to Rome where Brahms started making some sketches that would find their way into his Second Piano Concerto. Perhaps this piano trio is also a reflection, if not of the delights of Italian sun and wine, at least of the conviviality shared by friends?
I'll save Dvořák and his American Quintet, the product of an idyllic summer vacation, for the next post.
- Dick Strawser
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