Homecoming, Part 2: Two Bs – The Polonsky-Shifrin-Wiley Trio & Old Brahms

As our 40th Season continues, this Wednesday's 7:30 concert marks our Return to Market Square Church, following the long-delayed renovations (another casualty of the Pandemic). You can read the first of two posts about the program here.

While Wednesday's program with the Trio of clarinetist David Shifrin, cellist Peter Wiley, and pianist Anna Polonsky, opens with two sonatas by Johannes Brahms and concludes with Beethoven's Septet on the second half, I wanted to do them in reverse order here on the blog, starting in the previous post with a youthful work by Beethoven at the beginning of his career (though 29 might seem a bit of a late-bloomer by Mozartean standards) and, in this post, going behind the scenes with two works from the last years of Brahms' career (though his “retirement” from composing at the age of 57 may seem premature to us today), the 2nd Cello Sonata of 1886 and the 2nd Clarinet Sonata of 1894.

Brahms in 1890

Some of us might wonder “How old is Brahms” when we look at those photographs with that massive beard and consider his general curmudgeonly reputation. To answer the question, however, in 1890 Brahms was 57. Now, how many of you want to call him “Old Brahms”?  

But age is as much a state of mind and body as it is of chronology, and especially for a creative mind which, after years of hard work, may find the slightest doubts and insecurities catastrophic, the dreaded Writer's Block or a series of failures which undermine the once youthful confidence.

When we hear the Beethoven Septet, we are at the beginning of this spectrum: it is a long and difficult (and often heartbreaking) road between Beethoven's Op. 20 hit and the Late Quartets of only twenty-five years later. 

For Brahms, these two Clarinet Sonatas, written when he was 61, come 41 years after an exuberant young man with his long blonde hair and deep blue eyes, full of confidence and hope, first landed on the Schumanns' doorstep, a folder full of piano sonatas and string quartets under his arm. Schumann would call them "veiled symphonies" and crown him the Heir to Beethoven. Thus his confidence practically evaporated and for the rest of his life he was beset by doubts about ever being good enough to be Beethoven's heir.

In reading about Brahms' life, we don't have to wait long before we run across the word “autumnal” regarding the works of his last years. There's a certain wistfulness if not outright sadness, the sense of genius spent, about much of this music, or at least a movement within a larger work. Those “intermezzos,” which were never really scherzos before, now take on a more nostalgic shade and the emotion of his slow movements or of certain turns of phrase might bring to mind a sense of a looking back or summing up. 

By comparison, some of this "late" music may strike you at times as “less energetic” (but never “less vital”). It's not a weakening of the creative flow – though that is how many of his closest friends viewed some of these pieces (especially the 4th Symphony and the Double Concerto) – but is it the same kind of awareness, given the once vigorous and vibrant young man striding across the finale of his 1st Symphony, of a body now slowing down, more “moseying” than striding, a mind taking stock of itself?

It's difficult to listen to the opening of his Op.111 String Quintet (written in 1890) and think this man is old. Yet, when he sent it off to his publisher, he wrote, “With this letter you can bid farewell to my music, because it is certainly time to leave off...”

One can imagine what the cellist in that first performance must have thought, having to face this wall of sound from the other four string players. His name was Robert Hausmann and this was not his first encounter premiering a piece of Brahms'. As the cellist in Josef Joachim's famed quartet, based in Berlin, he was quite familiar with Brahms' chamber music. And when Joachim and Brahms, friends from their 20s, had finally reconciled after a bitter estrangement, Brahms composed not another violin concerto for his oldest friend, but a new kind of work in 1887, the Double Concerto with Hausmann's cello as equal partner to Joachim's violin.

Even before that, Brahms had been attracted by Hausmann's “sound.” In 1886, he'd written a new cello sonata for the man who was such an outspoken champion of his often neglected E Minor Cello Sonata from the mid-1860s. Not only would he be chosen for the Double Concerto's premiere, he was also involved in other new works from these years, most notably the Op. 111 String Quintet (1890) and the Clarinet Trio and then the Clarinet Quintet, both from 1891.

Robert Hausmann, Brahms, & Marie Fellinger (c.1889)

Marie Fellinger was a close friend of Brahms and an avid fan of photography. Among Frau Fellinger's photographs are some taken in the family music room with Brahms and the cellist Robert Hausmann. It was here they "tried out" the new 2nd Cello Sonata for some friends and quite likely where they read through Antonín Dvořák's recently completed Cello Concerto shortly after the composer returned from New York City in 1895. While the photograph is quite dark – the heavy draperies, the wallpaper, Frau Fellinger's dress, the ebony Streicher piano, even Hausmann's cello – you can make out the portrait on the prominently-placed easel. It was common to represent someone who couldn't be present or who had "recently departed" by placing their portrait within the frame. In this case, the absent friend is Clara Schumann, her portrait based on a London photograph taken in March, 1887.

Here is Brahms' pre-retirement Cello Sonata No. 2 in F Major, Op.99, in an exuberant performance with Jacqueline du Pre and Daniel Barenboim (as much as I would've loved to include the live performance video, the sound quality was poor, so in this case, we at least have the score...)

After the first run-through of the Double Concerto with the composer at the piano, playing it with Joachim and Hausmann for Clara Schumann, Brahms remarked “Now I know what has been missing from my life these past few years: the sound of Joachim's violin.”

With that sound back in his ear, Brahms began sketching a new violin concerto, but the public reaction to both the 4th Symphony and now the Double Concerto stifled him and so he destroyed it, along with sketches for not one but TWO additional symphonies, even a second Double Concerto – all consigned to the flames because of his insecurities. (The Op.111 Quintet, incidentally, is assumed to be created out of the ashes of one of those Fifth Symphonies.)

Even Clara Schumann, Brahms most loyal critic, didn't think the Double Concerto had much of a future. His good friend of thirty years, Theodor Billroth, a famous surgeon, had called it “sterile.” Brahms, feeling terribly old-fashioned, was beginning to think perhaps he'd written himself out.

After he had decided to retire from composing at the age of 57, Brahms was coaxed back to writing again by the sound of another musician who had captured his imagination: clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld for whom he wrote a trio and a quintet, both in 1891, and a few years later, created two clarinet sonatas for him as well.

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So, how did Brahms meet Mühlfeld?

In 1894, front row: Brahms (2nd from right) & Mühlfeld (far right); Hausmann (behind Brahms)

In March of 1891, Brahms was a few months shy of 58, and he'd gone to Meinigen in Germany where the local count had maintained a fine orchestra, one Brahms often used for “trying out” his new symphonies before taking them to the Viennese public. It was meant to be a good time, a holiday – honorary dinners with Brahms decked out in formal attire wearing all his medals and listening to the orchestra play his recent 4th Symphony, played so well, he asked them to play it again.

He also heard their principal clarinetist, a fellow named Richard Mühlfeld who arrived in Meinigen almost 20 years earlier as a violinist and for some reason, learned to play the clarinet, succeeding in three years’ time to become the orchestra’s principal clarinetist in addition to being the orchestra’s assistant conductor. In the 1880s, he also became the principal clarinetist at Wagner’s opera house in Bayreuth but remained for the duration of his playing career in Meinigen.

Now, Brahms listened to him play the quintet by Mozart and concertos by Weber and Spohr. They quickly became friends and Brahms sat around listening to him play for hours at a time. This wasn’t just a sense of discovering a talented musician – something that had drawn him to his life-long friend and collaborator Joachim or, more recently, to Hausmann. With Mühlfeld, it was the epiphany of also discovering an instrument.

He had not seriously considered the clarinet before, outside of its role in the orchestra. Suddenly hearing how Mühlfeld handled the instrument’s three different layers of sound, the registers that can sometimes be problematic in less proficient hands, he delighted in the nuances of sound Mühlfeld made, showing Brahms the clarinet could sing like a fine mezzo (and Brahms always enjoyed a fine singer’s voice) or how it could be shaded like an exceptionally played viola. He dubbed Mühlfeld “Fräulein Klarinette” for having seduced him with this mellifluous voice (as there had been so many fräuleins in Brahms' life before). 

The net result of this initial flirtation was the Trio in A Minor, written that summer for clarinet, cello and piano while Brahms was vacationing at Bad Ischl, a fashionable spa-town east of Salzburg popular with the Austrian Imperial Court.

Some reacted to this new trio which, by comparison to the Op.111 Quintet, sounds like a more austere affair, calling it a cello sonata with clarinet obbligato: perhaps, since he was just trying his fling with Fräulein Klarinette, he was still more aware of Herr Hausmann’s cello. This changed, however, with the work he immediately wrote next, finishing up this fruitful summer of his so-called retirement with the Quintet in B Minor for Clarinet and Strings which is all about the clarinet and makes one wish he had gone on to write a concerto for the instrument.

Brahms wrote to his old friend Clara Schumann, racked with pain and at times barely able to walk, inviting her to come to Berlin to hear the first public performances of both the Trio and the Quintet:

"To listen to the clarinet player would mark a red-letter day in your life. ...You would revel, and I hope that my music would not interfere with your pleasure."

Unfortunately, Clara was unable to make the performance, but it would seem to have been a suitable rounding-out any artist interested in the on-going breath of one's artistic existence would have basked in, nostalgic for the past but pleasant in the presence of friends.

The sonatas, then, were both composed in 1894, premiered in Vienna the following January by Mühlfeld and Brahms, and then published in June.

The opening of this second of the clarinet sonatas may certainly sound “autumnal,” but perhaps, given the circumstances, it's more of an Indian Summer? And what can be more wistful than this final set of variations (one of Brahms' most beloved forms) with which to say, again, farewell? At least, right up to the very end with its final, joyful, valedictory wave? There would be only two more pieces – the Four Serious Songs (Op.121) and a set of chorale preludes for the organ (Op.122) but these, yes, would be his last works.

In this performance, it's Karl Leister and David Levine.

As with Beethoven's Septet and the Trio arrangement, Brahms arranged these clarinet sonatas for viola and piano because, simply put, there weren't that many clarinetists out there to buy the scores, so violists everywhere have been eternally grateful to have something dropped in their laps out of an economic necessity. While they happen to sound as natural for the viola as they do for the clarinet, people can surmise they were originally for the viola, but that's historically not the case (nice try, though).

If you want to hear our guests performing Brahms' Clarinet Trio in A Minor from this collection of masterpieces inspired by Mühlfeld's sound, here they are in a performance recorded in 2019.

Brahms in 1897

One more image of Brahms, taken from a private read-through of these sonatas at the home of Clara Schumann before the premiere in 1895.

Clara's teenaged grandson Ferdinand was in awe of finally meeting the famous family friend. He thought Brahms was shorter and stouter than his photos – Brahms had just sent one to Clara taken with Johann Strauss the previous September, Strauss looking youthful and chipper beside Brahms looking considerably older though he was actually eight years younger than the Waltz King. Ferdinand was also fascinated by Brahms' mustache, gray on one side “and fiery red on the other.” 

Daughter Eugenie was astonished how “full of life the house seemed as soon as Brahms set foot in it,” no doubt recalling the Old Days when the 20-something Brahms had been a daily part of their family life. He regaled them with jokes and stories about an operation that Billroth had described to him, or telling them about Dvořák's new pieces, or how Joachim, who'd sleep like a log when they were touring together, was a terrible card player. They read through the clarinet sonatas with Mühlfeld, Clara turning pages, smiling. 

But one day, during this visit, he angrily complained “I have no friends! If anyone tells you he is my friend, don't believe him!” “But,” Eugenie countered, “friends are the best gift in the world. Why should you resent them?” 

He only stared back at her “with wide haunted eyes and said nothing.”

– Dick Strawser

 

Homecoming, Part 1: Two Bs – The Polonsky-Shifrin-Wiley Trio & Young Beethoven

The Polonsky-Shifrin-Wiley Trio

Another milestone for our 40th Anniversary Season: we're back home at Market Square Church (for newcomers, that's the big red-brick Presbyterian Church on Market Square in downtown Harrisburg) where the much-awaited and Covid-delayed renovation, another victim of the Pandemic, has been completed. Get ready to check out new pews, new floors, a lot of new stuff you won't immediately see, and the acoustics which you'll certainly be able to hear.

It's a program with music by Young Beethoven and Old Brahms – starting with two sonatas from the Twilight Years of Johannes Brahms, but ending with Beethoven's breakout hit, his youthful Septet (slightly reimagined). This post will give you some insights behind the Beethoven; behind Brahms and music inspired by two specific performers, read Part Two.

Our performers call themselves the Polonsky-Shifrin-Wiley Trio, bringing together David Shifrin, one of our most acclaimed clarinetists and a former director of the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center, Peter Wiley, a former cellist of the Beaux Arts Trio and the Guarneri Quartet, and pianist Anna Polonsky who has performed with major orchestras and ensembles around the world.

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With Beethoven's 251st Birthday still – officially – 30 days after our November concert, we can still claim this program with Beethoven's first Big Hit as part of a Beethoven 250th Anniversary Celebration.

Ludwig van Beethoven, arguably the best-known if not the greatest composer of classical music, was born – or at least baptized – on Dec. 16th, 1770, but somehow most of the world planned on celebrating that anniversary starting in January of 2020, just weeks after his 249th birthday (so much for being a purist...) until the Pandemic came along and pretty much changed everybody's plans, regardless of timing, about everything.

(For people who like to plan Big Anniversary Festivals, take heart: the 200th Anniversary of Beethoven's Death is only seven years away! And while “deathdays” don't seem as happy an occasion for celebration as a birthday, they offer us as much an opportunity for retrospective as a birthday anniversary. My suggestion has been, rather than performing even more Beethoven than usual (he is already the most performed composer in the world's entire repertoire), to include commissioning lots of new works by living composers, both aspiring and established, to celebrate the influence and inspiration of Beethoven and his legacy to move that celebration from retrospective into the future, but I digress...)

Last month, we heard the Arianna Quartet play Beethoven's very first completed string quartet which became the third of the set of six completed in 1800 as Op.18. He would turn 30 that next birthday (he was still 29 for most of that year!)

This concert, then, the Polonsky-Shifrin-Wiley Trio performs his Septet in E-flat, Op.20, a work published in 1802 but written between 1799 and 1800, and given its first performance in April of 1800.

So, astute reader, you're probably wondering how three people perform a work written for seven – and why?

Most of it has to do with economics and marketing – not that our performers didn't feel like hiring an addition five players and leaving Ms. Polonsky sitting in the wings (there's no piano part in the original Septet). And those economics and marketing are not ours but Beethoven's.

Scored originally for violin, viola, cello, and bass, plus horn, clarinet and bassoon, the work consists of six movements rather than the usual four we're used to with symphonies, string quartets, and most sonatas. In that sense, it's more of an old-fashioned Serenade. And it's a lot of music, some forty-plus minutes' worth of music, in all. The first movement, with its slow introduction (still standard in the very-late-1700s), is a substantial opening sonata-allegro movement, followed by a beautiful and equally substantial adagio. Then along comes this slight little minuet – and so far, isn't it really like a symphony's first three movements, and about twenty-one minutes or so. In the 1790s, Haydn's half-hour-long symphonies for London were considered rather long for the audience's attention-span, so the idea of a dance and then a lively finale helped offset the longer, more complex opening two movements.

So here, all Beethoven would have to do is add a finale, and there you'd have something symphony-like – a multi-movement, large scale work for a “chamber orchestra of strings and winds” (basically, given the mindset toward what was then considered “orchestral” music before these gigantic orchestras filling these gigantic concert halls with 75-100 musicians we're used to today).

But no, Beethoven adds another slow-ish movement, a set of variations in a “walking” tempo (andante), a second dance-movement (a scherzo, livelier than a minuet), and then, after another slow-ish introduction (marked alla marcia or “march-like”) with a Mozart-infused Presto complete with a violin cadenza (like a concerto). And, voilá, you have a forty-some minute piece.

Its performance was well received – Beethoven, quite pleased, proudly exclaimed, according to a friend who was there, “that is my own creation,” as if he couldn't believe he'd written it (or he'd written that much music, or that it was that well received). During his lifetime, it would become his most frequently performed piece. But there was one movement that caught the popular fantasy even more keenly. If you've never heard the entire Septet before or even heard of it, you'd probably smile in recognition when you hear this:

Perhaps not as famous as Beethoven's immortal, belovéd Minuet in G that would haunt him the rest of his life, but still so prevalent as to be annoying when, after all, he did write other things...

So, as you listen to this voluminous work, remember you're listening to Beethoven, recently a student of the great Franz Josef Haydn, always a fan of the late Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (who was really his primary model), and not yet the great titan of his 5th and 9th Symphonies, or the esoteric tortured soul who produced those Late Quartets never equaled by anyone since.

When the Young Beethoven was working on this, a piece geared for popular appeal, he was also writing his first String Quartets (Op.18) and a few piano sonatas (the famous Pathetique was written the year before and the more famous Moonlight, the year after).

And remember what I'd said about audience attention spans and Haydn symphonies?

The premiere of the Septet on April 2^nd, 1800, was part of that first major concert Beethoven, recently acclaimed as a major piano virtuoso, gave in Vienna to prove himself now as a composer and the program, not terribly specific by modern standards, included, along with a “grand symphony by the late Kapellmeister Mozart,” some arias from Haydn's recently premiered oratorio, The Creation, one of Beethoven's first two piano concertos (probably the C Major) and, before his “new Grand Symphony” (that would be No. 1 in C Major) fresh off the rack, Beethoven improvised at the piano (in those days, pianists who could successfully improvise were considered greater than a pianist who merely performed a printed work).

If that wasn't long enough already, in the middle of all this was this new Septet of his – a forty-minute work in between two symphonies and a piano concerto, not to mention an improvisation which could easily have gone on for quite some time itself. Attention spans may have been one thing but it gives rise to the thought perhaps “Binge-Watching” TV shows is not a recent phenomenon.

Alas, the one printed review spent more time talking about (as they still do today) the performance (not the best) than the music (the symphony made too much use of the winds) with only passing praise for the concerto and the septet. However, the audience response was very keen and the Septet went on to become Beethoven's most frequently performed work during his lifetime. In fact, the Minuet became so popular, Beethoven later regarded the Septet with annoyance: like many young composers, as Jan Swafford points out in his epic biography from 2014, Beethoven – Anguish and Triumph, Beethoven had to suffer when compared to great masters like Haydn and Mozart; in his later years, his newest, more mature and far more challenging works “had to endure unfavorable comparisons to his younger self.”

The Septet was not meant to challenge. Geared to be readily accessible to both audiences and performers alike, particularly accessible to talented amateurs which were a composer's bread-and-butter, the sale of scores-and-parts to be used in household performances. Circulating by hand-copied manuscripts before it was published, once available to the public en masse there were numerous arrangements for other combinations so that other amateurs, those who perhaps could not muster the seven required, might enjoy themselves with this delightful, often toe-tapping music. Before the days of copyright, others made arrangements of the piece (or of movements, especially the Minuet) for piano (both two- and four-hands), for string quartet (many households could support a quartet: even Schubert's family had it's own quartet, where his father played the cello, his two brothers played the violins and he, by default, the viola), even for guitar duet – and especially for those aristocrats who kept a “wind band” (think those arrangements of Mozart's opera tunes for wind octet) so such a long piece of music became more palatable when accompanying a lavish dinner to entertain the guests with something popular, pretty, and practical!

Beethoven (in 1803)

In 1802, there was an exchange about such arrangements between Beethoven, his younger brother Caspar Carl (father of the ill-fated nephew who would also haunt Beethoven's later years) who was at the time acting as the composer's agent with various publishers. Carl had offered one publisher the possibility Beethoven would arrange the entire septet for piano solo which the publisher declined. When Ludwig got wind of this, he wrote to the publisher agreeing with his decision: he complained of this “unnatural rage” for transplanting piano pieces to strings, “instruments so utterly opposite each other,” which “should come to an end,” something that only a Mozart or a Haydn could do with their own music.

Fast forward (slightly) to the following year, and Beethoven published his own arrangement of his own Septet for piano trio, allowing for the option of either a violin or a clarinet to play the “top” part. It was dedicated to his new doctor, Johann Adam Schmidt – by this time, Beethoven was already seeking treatment for his incipient deafness (oh yeah, while the Septet dates from 1800, the heart-rending Heiligenstadt Testament in which he admits to fears he will soon become totally deaf and wonders what will become of a composer, only 31 years old, who cannot hear: that was dated October 6th, 1802!). Dr. Schmidt was also an avid amateur violinist with an amateur pianist for a daughter. What the personal inclusion of the clarinet was here, I'm not sure, except – again, think of Mozart's works for the clarinet written for his friend Anton Stadler, around 1790, the Kegelstatt Trio, the famous quintet, and the great Clarinet Concerto of his last year, 1791 – there were good amateur clarinetists around looking for things to play but not enough to warrant the kind of sales would-be violinists would offer.

Besides, one of the charms of this septet is the way Beethoven plays the clarinet off the violin as an equal. But he didn't just write out the clarinet and cello parts and adapt everything else to the freshly added piano: it's a transcription of the music to suit the instruments involved, which you can tell by comparing two of the videos below complete with scores.

Curiously, later on Beethoven's student, the long-suffering Ferdinand Ries, admitted some of his duties (no doubt proffered as a learning experience) involved arranging some of Beethoven's works for other combinations under the composer's supervision. Beethoven would make revisions as needed, but then these works would be offered to various publishers by Brother Carl as “arrangements by Beethoven.” Perhaps this trio version of the septet was one such project.

Regardless, it was Beethoven's music, he “approved” the transplant, and he profited from its sales. It was often not a creative decision by a musical genius feeling “you know, I think this would make a wonderful piano trio!”, but an economic decision and a way of paying his doctor a compliment.

Whatever its origins, however, what fun to listen to – and no doubt to play! 

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I know listening to three videos of the full Septet is a bit much to expect, so pick which ever you want to view – the trio version, since that's the one you'll be hearing Wednesday night; or a bit of each score version to compare the two; or just the original Septet version in a live performance (with something people who can't read music might find a better experience) and imagine what Beethoven (or Student Ries) could have done with this delightful music to turn it into Music for Three when you attend the concert.

This performance of the original Septet was recorded at a Dutch music festival in 2011 with violinist Janine Jansons and one of the most acclaimed clarinetists in Europe today, Martin Fröst:

This next performance, from 1977 with the Vienna Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble, includes the score:  (remember, if you want to read this in a larger screen, there's a “full screen” icon, the little square box, in the video's lower right corner)

Here is the complete Trio (with Clarinet) Version, with score, keeping in mind the top two lines are one part, one for the violin, the second one for the clarinet: The performers are clarinetist Ronald van Spaendonck, cellist Marie Hallynck, and pianist Muhiddin Dürrüoglu.

If you would like to hear our performers for this up-coming concert – and who wouldn't? – play the other Beethoven Clarinet Trio (originally for Clarinet but also available in Violin if you'd prefer), here they are with the earlier Trio, Op.11 from 1798. Several sources indicate this work has “nothing substantial to recommend it” compared to the more technically and intellectually challenging Piano Trios, Op.1, published in 1795. But aside from also being fun to play and listen to, doesn't the fact he wrote it a year before he included a clarinet so prominently in his Septet count for something? If nothing else, here is the future superhero, Beethoven the Titan, practicing his popular appeal, a very important skill for a young composer going up against the likes of the already famous Mozart and Haydn hoping to find some recognition.

And now, on to Brahms!

– Dick Strawser