On this last program of Summermusic 2024 – Sunday afternoon at 4:00 in the air-conditioned Market Square Church – our microcosm of “Modern Music” (however we choose to describe music that can now be over a hundred years old) samples only a fraction of this diverse century. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet – another work in G Minor, though so different from Mozart’s Piano Quartet or the Chopin Cello Sonata in the same key – was the subject of the previous post which you can read here.
This post is about the first two pieces on the program: the Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola by Bohuslav Martinů and the Piano Trio in A Minor by Joaquin Turina.
The 20th Century, now that we’re in a position to look back on it (at least those of us who grew up in it), turned out to be a fractured array of differing and often conflicting styles with no set “-ism” to create a common language like we have in 19th Century Romanticism or 18th Century Classicism. What we tend to overlook is that, to someone who grew up in those centuries, there were also several different styles that ranged the gamut of audience reactions. Just ask King Frederick the Great, more like Frederick the So-So when it came to his being a composer, what he thought Haydn was doing to “good music”; or how a pro-Wagnerian music critic accused Brahms of being so dry his music sounded like “musical trigonometry” (that would be the String Sextet in B-flat, by the way).
In the 20th Century there was Arnold Schoenberg writing atonal and serial music (there’s a difference between the two); Igor Stravinsky, after crashing down the curtain on the 19th Century with his Rite of Spring, turning to what became known as “Neo-Classicism” before eventually embracing his rival Schoenberg’s serialism; and then, while composers like Samuel Barber or Benjamin Britten wrote in a more Romantic style, there was also the “chance music” of John Cage or Iannis Xenakis with its seemingly anarchic reliance on improvisation; when along came Minimalism (which was also tonal and “classical”) with Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams.
We call it an “eclectic century,” composers picking and choosing whatever appealed to them. There seemed to be no clear guidance on what would become a single stylistic focal point like, say, the 19th Century. But while it all sounds so different to us, now, imagine if, at some future point, whoever’s left still being performed in another hundred years, all this will sound “pretty much the same” as most of the 19th Century does to the average 21st Century music-lover today, even though, if you really get “into” it, there’s a whole world between, say, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms on one hand and Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner on the other.
In case you missed the reference in the “Chopin Post” paraphrasing Plato’s theory of the two horses harnessed together – one horse tame, the other “wild” – that depending on which horse was more in control would determine whether that person was more logical (“tame”) or more emotional (“wild”), terms we later adapted to be viewed as “classical” (more clarity of structure and texture) or “romantic” (more reliant on an emotional response to the surface elements, where the structure, especially the harmony, and the textures were more unclear). Talking about this in any art is, of course, purely subjective and for several generations it was considered that a “logical” artist was dominated by Apollo (viewed basically as the god of logic) or Dionysus (generally, the god of wine who led to drunkenness and a wildness that was antithetical to logic, going more by inspiration than by rules) – and of course various levels in between (imagine being classified as 4 parts Apollo & 6 parts Dionysus?)… For a while, it was considered the left brain controlled our rational impulses, going by the evidence, and the right brain controlled our irrational ones, prone more to going with our gut or taking our cues from inspiration. I’m also reminded of the classic (to use another meaning of the word) expression where the Native-American sage explains how each of us is made up of two wolves who are fighting each other: “which one wins?” the young man asks; the grandfather answers, “the one you feed.”
Martinů in NYC, 1946
After exploring the
amazingly ear-opening world he experienced in Paris after growing up
in a Czech village, Bohuslav Martinů clearly fell into the
“Neo-Classical” camp (oh, sorry, poor choice of word, there –
I’ll get to that in a moment). He would write a series of short
pieces he called “madrigals,” though they have nothing to do with
the “fa-la-la-la-la” kind that word brings to mind. In 1947,
inspired by the brother-and-sister duo of Joseph and Lillian Fuchs of
a Mozart Duo for Violin and Viola – and by their commission from
them to write something similar for them – Martinů composed a set
of three such madrigals, delightful explorations full of good humor
and virtuosic interaction.
Spanish composer Joaquin Turina’s Piano Quartet is a mix of two-parts classical structure, underlined by a strong hint of German influence, with surface flavors from two-parts native Spanishness and one-part Frenchness from his student days in Paris before the War (in this case, World War I), surrounded by the new-fangled Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel and the old-fashioned academic worlds of Gabriel Fauré and Vincent D’Indy.
To break it down into our “Two Horse Theory,” then, given what each composer absorbed early in their careers to find their “own voices” as mature artists, we might say, as simplistic as it sounds, Martinů is the classicist, the “tame” horse ascendant, and that Turina is… well, lets say there’s more of the “wild” horse in evidence, certainly more than we’d hear in Martinů’s music, but the “tame” horse is not to be ignored. Curiously with Shostakovich, we can hear the “tame” horse inspired by Bach and the old-fashioned rule-conscious writing of fugues in the opening two movements, when the “wild” horse makes his presence felt in the scherzo. What about the Intermezzo? More mild than wild, a bit of both, some combination? And what about that enigmatic ending? Are both horses wearing masks to keep you (either as performer or listener – or, probably, more importantly, the Soviet critic) guessing?
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Here’s the first work on Sunday’s program, Martinů’s Three Madrigals which Joseph and Lillian Fuchs premiered in 1947 (not sure when this recording was made, though).
Here is the Piano Quartet by Joaquin Turina, with pianist Marianna Shirinyan, violinist Benjamin Bowman, violist Michel Camille, and cellist Richard Lester, at the Esbjerg International Chamber Music Festival in Denmark, 2011. It’s in three movements: (I.) Lento – Andante mosso; (II.) Vivo; (III.) Andante – Allegretto
While many eyes are on Paris in the coming days, Paris would also influence Martinů – in his case, this was Paris of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Roaring aside, Martinů sampled a wide variety of styles, adding to experiences he’d had with the folk music of his native Bohemia – he was born in a 193-step walk-up of a bell-tower in a village on the Bohemian-Moravian border that was then part of Austria – and then his student-days at the Prague Conservatory where he was dismissed for “incorrigible negligence” (more for lack of practicing and frequent cutting of classes than for any lack of talent).
But once in Paris after the War (again, World War I), he sampled a bit of jazz, some of Les Six’s Neo-Classicism, even a dash of surrealism (no doubt supplied by Cocteau and Friends), whatever was trending on the musical horizon. Neo-Classicism won out but as World War II was brewing beyond that horizon, Martinů found himself blacklisted by the Nazis now occupying his homeland. As the war came to Paris, Martinů fled first to southern France, then to Spain, and eventually, with financial support from various musical patrons, he and his wife went to America. Unfortunately, they spoke little English, found living in Manhattan sheer chaos until he found a place in a suburban neighborhood in Queens where it was so quiet he liked to walk at night, going over his newest projects in his head until he would become so lost, he had to call a friend to help him get home.
While in Queens, he wrote to Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony, in 1942 who’d thought highly of some of his earlier music and then commissioned what became his 1st Symphony. It was also thanks to Koussevitsky that Martinů was invited to teach at the Berkshire Music Center, part of Tanglewood. Later on, Martinů, who’d been dismissed from the Prague Conservatory for “incorrigible negligence” in 1910, would teach at Princeton University and the Mannes School of Music where among his students were such diverse composers as Alan Hovhannes and Burt Bacharach.
Remember also how Martinů used to “zone out” while concentrating on a new piece he would work out in his mind while walking? On July 17th, 1946, not long after completing his 5th Symphony, Martinů was taking his usual evening walk – this time on the terrace of his apartment at Tanglewood – and fell from a place where there was no railing, hitting the pavement below. He was hospitalized with a concussion and a fractured skull which would leave him with a serious hearing defect, dizziness, and headaches for the rest of his life. According to composer David Diamond who knew Martinů a few years later, when his wife returned from visiting Paris that summer, she found him “a different man: gaunt, irritable, crippled and in pain from the accident. It required a few years before he was able to return to his former state as a solid composer."
Yet, in October 1946, barely three months later, he completed his “Toccata a due canzone” for small orchestra (he’d begun the work in May, but completed it in early-October) – you can listen to the second Canzona here – then his 6th String Quartet by Christmas Day, and, by mid-March of 1947, the Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola!
Friends who knew him realized how organized he was about whatever he was composing. He was intensely prolific and wrote rapidly, creating a diverse catalog of over 380 pieces by the time he died of stomach cancer at the age of 68, completing 14 works since he’d been diagnosed and completed a work for children’s choir called “Greeting” six weeks before his death.
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Meanwhile, in Spain… Joaquin Turina was born in Seville, capital of the southern region of Andalusia, eight years Martinů’s senior. He began exhibiting musical talent at the age of 4, playing the accordion, and, some might say wisely, switched to the piano, taking theory lessons by the time he was 12 and almost immediately began composing. After working with some local teachers, he went to Madrid to take up more serious studies and, like many young Spanish musicians, went to Paris in 1905 where he studied with Vincent D’Indy, one of the leading composers and teachers of the day. Through D’Indy, Turina was able to absorb the legacy of Cesar Franck as well as Gabriel Fauré, still teaching at the Conservatoire. Turina also met many of the leading Parisian composers like Ravel and Debussy, then the leaders of a new school considered by many to be “avant-garde” (in 1902, Debussy’s new opera, Pelleas et Melisande, was the big scandal: many conservatory professors forbid their students to go see it; Ravel, studying with Fauré, never missed a performance).
Most of the music Turina composed in this period was heavily influenced by the French Impressionists. Among his friends were fellow students like Manuel de Falla and also Isaac Albeniz, a generation older, then working on his Iberia. It was a remark by Albeniz that prompted both Turina and Falla to focus more on the popular songs and cultures of their native Spain. When Albeniz died in 1909, his advice apparently inspired Turina, then in his late-20s, to write a string quartet he dedicated to Albeniz. It opened with a pizzicato flourish earning it the nickname, “de la Guitarre.” Most themes show a distinctly more Spanish profile, especially the scherzo, a wild Spanish dance called a zorezico, in 5/4. Well-received in Paris, this was the turning point for Turina’s discovering his “true voice.” In 1914, with the advent of World War I, both Turina and Falla returned to Spain where Turina, now a member of the Madrid Symphony, was involved in the premiere of the orchestral version of his friend’s ballet, El amor brujo in 1916, the same year Turina composed a zarzuela, a popular-music-inspired operetta, of his own.
There are another fifty or so compositions written in the fifteen years between 1916 and 1931 when he composed his Piano Quartet in A Minor. 1931 was also the year Turina was appointed Professor of Composition at the Madrid Royal Conservatory. Most of the ten pieces of chamber music he composed since 1926, curiously, have only abstract titles – his first Violin Sonata, two piano trios, the Piano Quartet – and only two bear Spanish titles like the Violin Sonata #2, Sonata española, or one of his last works, the Homenaje a Navarra, sobre diseños de Sarasate, Ciclo plateresco III of 1945 which unfortunately, with my lack of familiarity with Spanish, I can only translate as “Homage to Navarra on Designs by Sarasate, Plateresque Cycle No. 3” (plateresco refers to a typically ornate architectural style originally from the Gothic Spain).
Joaquin Turina, 1930 (without his familiar mustache)
Perhaps it was a sense of
needing to seem “academic,” now that he was a professor, that
inclined Turina to reign in the “wild horse” of his Andalusian
roots? There are many flashbacks to earlier influences, sounds
reminiscent of the Impressionists alongside unmistakably Spanish
themes and rhythms, even the sound of castanets. Some writers point
out it’s “only” in three movements, beginning with a nocturnal
slow movement “evocative of nights in Seville” though one could
also point out Beethoven did much the same thing in his famous
“Moonlight” Sonata, a four movement sonata without an opening
movement, and a slow movement that inspired one critic to say it
evoked “moonlight on a lake.” The “cyclic” use of material
from the earlier movements in the finale was something much used by
Franck and D’Indy, though in this context, one could mention
Bruckner also made use of this as a unifying device.
Now that Turina is pushing 50, the past, here, is neither gone nor forgotten, but blended in with what was no longer new. He has found his mature voice and he’s comfortable using whatever he feels he needs to make a statement, however his inner horses are aesthetically harnessed.
– Dick Strawser
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