Summermusic 2025: Part Three "Trials & Triumphs," Part Two: Shostakovich's Tribute to a Lost Friend

Dmitri Shostakovich in 1944

The final concert of our Summermusic 2025 series will be performed Saturday night at 7:30 at Harrisburg’s Market Square Presbyterian Church by the Mendelssohn Piano Trio which consists of Market Square Concerts co-directors Peter Sirotin and Ya-Ting Chang, and cellist Fiona Thompson. The program begins with Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67 and concludes with Beethoven’s last piano trio, known as The “Archduke” Trio (you can read about Beethoven’s trio in this previous post).

Each of this summer’s concerts explore what inspired the music on the program. “Love & Loss” explored pieces by Max Bruch, written for his son who was about to start a career as a clarinetist, and Johannes Brahms, whose Horn Trio was written in memory of his mother. “Places & People” introduced us to the friends and locations behind Franz Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet and Antonín Dvořák’s 2nd String Quintet. In Saturday’s final program, we explore more dramatic events, with Shostakovich expressing his grief over the loss of his closest friend during the darkest days of WWII in his Piano Trio No. 2; and Beethoven creating one of his most life-affirming compositions, the “Archduke” Piano Trio, while facing a complete loss of his hearing. 

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In January, 1944, Shostakovich, who had composed his first string quartet in 1938 and then his famous Piano Quintet in 1940, wrote to an interviewer that “chamber music demands from a composer supreme command of technique and profound thought. It would be misleading if I didn’t tell you that very often behind the glamour of orchestral sound the composer conceals his paucity of thought. The rich timbre at the disposal of the modern symphony orchestra is out of reach for small chamber ensembles. I repeat, while it is still possible to listen to thin thoughts concealed behind rich and colorful orchestration, such thoughts would be simply unbearable in a chamber work. From this it would be wrong to conclude that I like chamber music better than symphonies. No, I really enjoy both good symphonies and good chamber music. What I cannot stand is bad music, regardless of whether it has been written for a symphony or a quartet.”

Whatever may have been the genesis of the Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, he was apparently sketching something already in July. He mentioned in October he was working on a piano trio based on Russian folk songs, and, on December 8th, wrote to his friend, the critic Isaac Glikman, “at the moment I am writing a Trio for piano, violin and cello.”

He was in Moscow at the time and almost done with the first movement – which so far included no Russian folk songs – when he received the news that his closest friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, had died at the age of 41. 

Shostakovich & Sollertinsky in 1942 at the time of the Novosibirsk performance of his new 7th Symphony, the "Leningrad" Symphony

Usually described as “a Soviet polymath,” Sollertinsky could speak over 20 languages, specialized in the fields of linguistics, literature, theater, history, and philology, but was best known as a music critic and musicologist.

Years later, Shostakovich recalled meeting his friend in 1927, “at the house of a Leningrad musician... During our conversation it emerged that I didn’t know a single foreign language and Sollertinsky couldn’t play the piano. That’s how it came about that the very next day Sollertinsky gave me my first German lesson and I gave him his first piano lesson. These lessons, incidentally, very soon came to an end. The end was pathetic: I didn’t learn any German and Sollertinsky was unable to play the piano, but since then and up to the last moment of Sollertinsky’s marvellous life we were great friends.”

At the time of the Nazi invasion in 1941, Sollertinsky was evacuated from Leningrad along with the Philharmonic to Novosibirsk (Sollertinsky was then the orchestra’s artistic director). After making plans to leave Novosibirsk in February 1944 and return to Moscow to resume working, Sollertinsky spoke at the orchestra’s February 5th performance in Novosibirsk of Shostakovich’s recently premiered 8th Symphony, then died in his sleep a few nights later.

On February 13th, Shostakovich wrote to Glikman, a mutual friend, “Ivan died on February 11th, 1944. We shall never see him again. There are no words that can express my grief which is eating away at my whole being. May our love for him and our faith in his great talent and phenomenal love for the art, to which he devoted his magnificent life - music - serve to immortalize his memory. Ivan is no more. It is very difficult to come to terms with this. My friend, don’t forget me and write to me. I have a request: wherever you can, get hold of some vodka and on March 11th at 7 p.m. Moscow time let’s drink (you in Tashkent and I in Moscow) a glass and by doing so mark the month that will have passed since Sollertinsky’s death.”

On February 15th, 1944, according to the date on the manuscript, Shostakovich finished the first movement of the Trio but then stopped working on it for some time: illness, on the one hand; the “deep psychological trauma” over the death of his friend, on the other. Returning to the “House of Creativity and Rest” at Ivanovo, a government-run artists’ colony where he’d worked on his 8th Symphony the previous summer, he did not resume work on the trio until late-July. The second movement was dated August 3rd; the entire trio, August 13th, 1944. Almost immediately he began work on his 2nd String Quartet, the piano sketch dated September 2nd. The score of the completed quartet was dated September 20th.

Recently graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, composer Mikhail Meyerovich described his visit to Ivanovo during August and September, 1944. Keep in mind this was during a particularly brutal war – beyond just the Nazi siege of Leningrad – and Meyerovich mentioned how Ivanovo was “very popular [with composers] during the war as it had its own farm and the food was good and plentiful.” Shostakovich, who was about to turn 38 that September, “was not too fond of the other composers of his own age, and he spent most of his time with me and my friend, his former pupil… We were the youngest composers there,” Meyerovich later recalled. Shostakovich would suggest they play four-hand piano duets and take long walks together. “He would play billiards, now he played football. He insisted we join him in a game of football; he played with passion, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the game. Once I inadvertently knocked his glasses off his nose. I was embarrassed, but he said, ‘That’s all right. That’s what the game is about.’”

When he found time to compose was a mystery to them. “He had just finished his famous piano trio and was working on his 2nd String Quartet. I wondered when he did the actual composing. The trio took him a month. The quartet was written in under four weeks before my very eyes. But nobody saw him at the desk or at the piano. ...He would play football and fool around with his friends, then he would suddenly disappear. After forty minutes or so, he would turn up again. ‘How are you doing? Let me kick the ball.’ Then we would have dinner and drink some wine and take a walk, and he would be the life and soul of the party. Every now and then he would disappear for a while and then join us again. Towards the end of my stay, he disappeared altogether. We didn’t see him for a week. Then he turned up, unshaven and looking exhausted. He said to me and [my friend,] ‘Let’s go to an empty cabin with a piano in it.’ He played us his 2nd Quartet. He had only just completed it, as the score had that very day’s date on it. He played somewhat haltingly, as if sight-reading.”

In the midst of working on the quartet, he wrote to his friend and fellow-composer Vissarion Shebalin, “I am concerned about the lightning speed with which I am composing. It’s no good, I feel sure. One should not compose with this kind of speed. ...I am composing with infernal speed and cannot stop… It is tiring, not very pleasant and when it’s over I have no confidence that the time has been spent usefully. I can’t shake off this bad habit though and I am composing much too fast as before.”

While there are no similar eye-witness accounts about the time he was composing the trio, chances are pretty good, since that was only a month earlier, the “process” was essentially the same.

Shostakovich & members of the Beethoven Quartet playing the world premiere of the Piano Trio No. 2 in 1944

The Piano Trio was premiered on November 14th, 1944, with Shostakovich at the piano, and with two members of the Beethoven Quartet. The 2nd String Quartet was also premiered on that concert with the complete Beethoven Quartet. The “original cast” of the premiere subsequently recorded the trio in 1946; the following year, Shostakovich and David Oistrakh, with Czech cellist Miloš Sádlo, recorded it in Prague. Oistrakh said, “Without meaning to boast, I believe that this recording of the trio is the best of all that I have heard.”

The trio is in four movements. The opening starts with an austere, slow fugue, a simple and rather eerie melody made more eerie by being played on the cello using “artificial harmonics,” the high-pitched, ethereal sound in the instrument’s uppermost register. The violin enters, then, in its lowest register, creating a unique sonority by reversing the roles. Also typical of Shostakovich, the piano part often consists of a single line with wide-octave doublings. When the tempo changes to Moderato, we’re in a kind of neo-classical vein, not without violent contrasts. According to Sollertinsky’s sister, the scherzo, similar to that of the Piano Quintet, was “an amazingly exact portrait” of her brother, whom she said Shostakovich “understood like no one else.”

The slow movement is a mournful passacaglia, a vague sequence of eight chords repeating in the piano, ending with an “unstable” diminished chord. Over this, the strings play dirge-like canons. It’s interesting to realize the 8th Symphony of the previous year also includes a passacaglia as its mournful slow movement. In 1975, the piano trio’s passacaglia would be played at Shostakovich’s public funeral service.

This unresolved diminished chord continues directly into the finale, described as a “Dance of Death,” inspired by the composer having read newspaper accounts of the Red Army’s liberation of Nazi death camps in Poland, particularly Treblinka, and telling a friend he was particularly horrified by reports Nazi guards made their victims dig their own graves, then dance beside them before they were executed.

This movement is the first time Shostakovich used Jewish music as a source-material for his own works. “The distinguishing feature of Jewish music is the ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations," Shostakovich told a friend. "Why does a man strike up a jolly song? Because he feels sad at heart.” This sort of black humor – “laughter through tears” – struck a deep chord in Shostakovich.

The folk-like dance tune begins the finale, whispered, then answered by an impassioned tune full of klezmer-like “intonations.” As the intensity builds, it’s impossible not to imagine, whatever its programmatic implications, this music “must mean something,” and no doubt something horrific.

Like other material from earlier movements, the passacaglia chords then return near the end of the finale: it is only there that that final unstable diminished chord resolves to a quiet – perhaps hopeful? – series of repeated E major chords. If not a triumph over tragedy, perhaps – and again Shostakovich has said nothing specific about this, one way or another – it is at least the awareness we have survived.

While no one could ever complain their performance is “underplayed,” Martha Argerich, Gidon Kremer, and Mischa Maisky recorded Shostakovich’s trio in Tokyo in 1998:

Shostakovich would later use this “dance of death” theme in the shattering climax of his String Quartet No. 8, a clearly autobiographical work full of quotes from several of his earlier works. Written in 1960 shortly after he was forced to (finally) join the Communist Party (the fact that he had not yet become a card-carrying member would surprise many of us), the work is, on the surface, dedicated to the victims of Fascism and War, and written while he’d been working on a film score in Dresden, a city destroyed at the end of World War II by the allied bombings. But it was also a time when Shostakovich was in deep despair, and, as he told a close friend after returning to Moscow, on the verge of suicide. In his usual joking fashion, he introduced the work by telling Glickman, “when I die it’s hardly likely someone will write a quartet dedicated in my memory. So I decided to write it myself.” At the climax of the quartet, he quotes the “dance of death” theme from the trio’s finale but interweaves it with his own “musical signature,” the famous DSCH motive, his “initials” spelled out in German pitches, D–E-flat–C–B-natural. The implication couldn’t be more autobiographical than that...

– Dick Strawser

Summermusic 2025: Part Three, "Trials & Triumphs," Part One, Beethoven and his Archduke

The third and final concert of Summermusic 2025 takes place Saturday evening at 7:30 at the air-conditioned Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg. I mention this air-conditioning for those of you who might be suffering from heat frustration and who thought the weather reports couldn't possibly be more anxiety-laden than the news. Which might mean a program called "Trials and Triumphs" could be just the thing.

The program opens with the 2nd Piano Trio of Dmitri Shostakovich (you can read about it, here) written in the midst of World War II. Given its association with the recent death of a close friend and the news the Nazis had established concentration camps in Poland, the music possesses a cathartic intensity far beyond the scope of just three musicians. But, like other compositions from Shostakovich's career, there is always, however distant they might seem at the time, a sense of survival in the face of the inhumanity of history.  

The “Archduke” Trio is usually considered the greatest of Beethoven’s piano trios, not a medium where one would expect a composer to be writing “heroic” works of the stature of symphonies like 3rd or 5th. It is certainly the grandest of the trios and, given all the details of Beethoven’s life around the time it was written and premiered, definitely a triumph over adversity – and not just his deafness. While we often listen to music “out of context” and even more often without really listening to it (the difference between “hearing” it and listening to it are two separate levels of involvement), what context can we place the piece in that would help a listener appreciate the music even more?

 

Beethoven composing around 1811, a painting by Carl Schloesser

Since writing about Beethoven’s music can reveal an infinite number of rabbit holes, I thought I would begin with something I’d found a few months ago and jotted down (alas without referencing its source: a biography, I assume, either the one by Maynard Solomon or a more recent one by Jan Swafford, both of which I recommend for more avid rabbit-hunters):

“During the Congress of Vienna which was busy reshaping Europe following the Napoleonic Wars, Beethoven's cantata "The Glorious Moment," "Wellington's Victory" and the 7th Symphony were performed on November 29th, 1814, to great acclaim. But on Nov. 30th, the head of the Secret Police wrote in his report "The recital given yesterday did not serve to increase enthusiasm for the talent of this composer who has his partisans and his adversaries. In opposition to his admirers... is formed an overwhelming majority of connoisseurs who refuse absolutely to listen to his works hereafter."

Since we normally consider Beethoven one of the Greatest Composers of All Time, possibly The Greatest, this might put “The Master” in a more realistic context, especially regarding the work that concludes this year’s Summermusic Series, the Piano Trio No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 97, better known as “The Archduke Trio,” which was given its first public performance on April 11th, 1814, just seven months before the concert mentioned in the Secret Police’s report.

Before digging deeper, here is a performance of Beethoven’s last piano trio – with score – played by pianist Daniel Barenboim, violinist Michael Barenboim (yes, Daniel Barenboim’s son), and the Austrian-Iranian cellist Kian Soltani. Both string players had long played in Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, comprised of young Jewish and Islamic musicians formed in 1999.

Whatever prompted Beethoven to write the trio – does the noble and expansive opening represent a musical portrait of the Archduke as some writers suggest? – we know he began “sketching” it during the summer of 1810 at the same time he began work on the next string quartet which would become the Quartetto Serioso (one of the few works he would give a title). It was Beethoven’s habit to compose works in contrasting pairs, sometimes concurrently – in the course of the sketches, the “Pastoral” Symphony almost became No. 5 and the C Minor Symphony, No. 6 – and this would continue until the end. Having completed the 9th Symphony, Beethoven began sketching a 10th and the pages found in his desk after his death suggest it too would be, by comparison, a more lyrical, expansive work than the incredible 9th (if you’ve ever wondered “how could he possibly follow that…?”).

Personal history and health issues aside, what were the purely “academic” considerations Beethoven would address in writing a piece contrasting to the “Serioso”? Obviously, it should not be “so serious,” and that becomes fairly obvious when you listen to the scherzo and to the finale of the trio. Honestly, reading some descriptions of the music, you would almost think you were about to hear a slap-stick comedy (I suspect at least one annotator had heard a bad performance which colored his approach to the music itself). But, given the times – 1811 was still in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars and Vienna was still reeling from the French Occupation of 1809 – and given the memory of “Papa” Haydn (who coincidentally died during that occupation) who had his own unexpected twists that brought smiles of delight to his listeners, Beethoven was doing nothing new, though perhaps, for some, doing it “more new” than they’d expected.

Case in point – the opening “theme” of the scherzo is a simple scale in the cello with rhythmic punctuation. “That’s it?!” you could imagine Standard Music Lover No. 10 sitting there in the audience’s third row wondering if Beethoven weren’t in fact pulling their collective leg. But if the main theme of the first movement is generated by triads – not unlike the building blocks used in his 3rd and 5th Symphonies’ opening themes – why not, if you’re looking for contrast, built the next movement’s theme on a scale?

The finale is also rather light-hearted and is generally taken as a comfortable country-dance. (Curiously, Beethoven had remarked, in rehearsal, that his fellow musicians shouldn’t be so gentle with it, playing instead with “much energy and force.”) But there are also unexpected turns – Beethoven had established the disruption of the forward flow by extending a note’s duration in the opening theme, extending a four-bar phrase into five bars; and that trait shows up in delayed resolutions of up-beat chords in the finale. First of all, it starts right on top of the slow movement’s final chord, without a break and only a single chord preparation: bam! Between the sudden changes in dynamics, the almost snickering motive going back-and-forth between the strings and piano, and Beethoven’s favorite off-beat accents (hardly something a genteel courtly dancer would do), you already have something that amounts to a second scherzo (not so serious, now). And then when you get to the coda with its sudden change of tempo (fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride), here you are in the key of A Major. Okay, so it’s only a half-step away from B-flat, but in the universe of traditional 18th and early-19th Century tonality, it’s light-years away from the expected tonic. And then, once back home in B-flat Major, it’s over.

Compared to the taut structure that creates the tension in the Serioso Quartet (the Emerson Quartet’s performance clocks in at 23 minutes), the Archduke Trio is expansive, taking about 40 minutes. Compare the openings: the quartet’s is like a corkscrew, drilling into you in 3 seconds; the trio’s unfolds in a leisurely 8 measures (maybe 20-some seconds). The first movement alone takes about ten minutes compared to the Serioso’s less than half that. The quartet is relentless in its rhythmic and harmonic tension; the trio is, by comparison, a pleasant day’s walk in the park.

It’s also odd that in 1816 Beethoven would write in to Sir George Smart, the man who had introduced Beethoven to the English public that would lead to the commission for his 9th Symphony the following year, he thought "the Quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public." Most would agree Beethoven didn’t mean that as a literal injunction (concerts in those days were different than they are today, anyway; music was still most likely to be heard, especially chamber music, in the “music rooms” of aristocrats like Prince Lobkowitz). Basically, it was the composer’s way of saying “this work is not recommended for popular consumption,” merely for entertainment. Perhaps, given his love of contrasts, he was specifically writing the Piano Trio to be exactly that: meant to appeal to popular taste and suitable for all ages.

The slow movement, placed between the scherzo and the finale for better contrast, continues this generally idyllic quality of the first movement. It is the only movement not in B-flat Major and is in the not very typical key of D Major (one would expect F Major or even E-flat; or, for a more serious tone, G Minor, the relative minor of B-flat Major, all sanctioned by the Classical Era’s text-book concept of tonality). But D Major has a brighter tone, due to the overtones of the open strings of the violin and cello, and it gives a different aura (so to speak) to a set of variations marked with an usual tempo indication: Andante cantabile ma però con moto. Thinking però could mean something distinctive, qualifying the singing character of cantabile – perhaps something like “whistfully”? – I looked it up and realized ma però con moto only means “but however with motion.” (Sigh...) By contrast to the scherzo (and the up-coming finale), the long-flowing singing melody, like a hymn, is accompanied by sustained harmonies that, as Beethoven’s lyrical imagination combines with his sense of the profound – think of the 9th Symphony’s slow movement – to create poetry that transcends its heart-felt simplicity.

from Beethoven's sketches for the 3rd & 4th movements of the Archduke Trio (if you're wondering about his handwriting, I refer you to the painting, fanciful or not, above...)

When Beethoven’s new trio was premiered – a private musical evening at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz – Beethoven was the pianist. The Archduke was not only present, he also performed as a pianist in another composition on the program.

About that premiere – for one thing, it didn’t take place until three years after the trio was completed which is odd in itself, considering most of the piece was composed over a short period of three weeks. Beethoven had been plagued by symptoms of his increasing deafness for more than a decade, now, and by the time it was performed, he was almost completely deaf. Ludwig (or Louis) Spohr, a famous violinist and highly regarded composer of the time – enough that Beethoven knew who he was when they met and subsequently became good friends – “witnessed” a rehearsal for the premiere and wrote this in his Autobiography:

“On account of his deafness there was scarcely anything left of the virtuosity of the artist which had formerly been so greatly admired. In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys until the strings jangled, and in piano he played so softly that whole groups of notes were omitted, so that the music was unintelligible unless one could look into the pianoforte part. I was deeply saddened at so hard a fate.”

Ignaz Moscheles, another leading pianist and composer of the day, wrote about the premiere: “in the case of how many compositions is the word 'new' misapplied! But never in Beethoven's, and least of all in this [piano trio], which again is full of originality. His playing, aside from its intellectual element, satisfied me less, being wanting in clarity and precision; but I observed many traces of the grand style of playing which I had long recognized in his compositions.”

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Another rabbit hole opened up when, googling information about the trio and asking the seemingly innocent question, sans Siri, “What did Beethoven compose in 1810,” the year he had begun sketching the Archduke Trio. And up came, “April 26th, 1810, Beethoven writes Fur Elise,” which of course makes it seem like (a.) we actually know when Beethoven wrote this ubiquitous little piano piece (scholars’ best guesses usually fall between 1808 and 1810, but sure, this is the internet we’re talking about), and (b.) this is the Greatest Piece of Music Beethoven Ever Wrote. But it is certainly one of the pieces most people, lovers of classical music or not, would recognize (and probably reach for their phones when they hear it). Without digging any deeper, it does present part of the problem when trying to place both composer and composition into some kind of context: we know he began sketching the piano trio in the summer of 1810 and saying he was “sketching” it is different from his actually writing it, which occurred during the month of March – one reference says “between March 3rd and March 26th” of the following year, 1811. If you want to consider what events were going on in Beethoven’s life at the time the work was conceived and written, you must consider he wrote very little around this time – why? – and what was going on in his personal life that might influence this.

Perhaps the biggest rabbit hole of all, then, is the whole warrenful of rabbit holes that opens up in 1812, all focused directly or indirectly around “The Immortal Beloved.” And while that seems to involve a period of time after the Archduke Trio, it is, naturally, not that simple. But I will do my best to refrain from taking you on a tour of the usual suspects regarding her mysterious identity. Just like no one seems to know who, exactly, Elise was, regarding that little, otherwise seemingly insignificant piano piece of a few years earlier…

More to the point, of course, is “Who Was the Archduke of Beethoven’s Title?” Unlike the Emperor in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto – that title refers to no specific person and the nickname was possibly supplied by Beethoven’s English publisher who’d called it “an emperor among concertos” (or perhaps some French officer who’d heard the premiere in 1811 and thought it was about the French Emperor, Napoleon, which was, given Beethoven’s politics and the fact Napoleon’s Army had occupied Vienna, making everybody’s life miserable for all of 1809, highly unlikely. The concerto is, however, dedicated to the Archduke Rudolf who happened to be the youngest brother of the Austrian Emperor, Franz I.

Rudolf was born in 1788, the youngest son of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and brother of the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II (he of Amadeus fame who actually did say there were too many notes in Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio). But when Joseph died without an heir, Rudolf’s father became Emperor Leopold II and when he died less than two years later, his eldest son inherited the throne as Francis II of the Holy Roman Empire. Since that nation ceased to exist in 1806, thanks to Napoleon, he then became just Francis I of the Austrian Empire. Now, barring some cataclysmic dynastic extinction, Rudolf never had a chance at becoming an emperor. Besides, he ended up dying four years before his older brother, anyway.

So, his chances of being anything remotely imperial beyond being the youngest son of a Grand Duke (or Archduke), Rudolf was allowed to pursue his primary interest: music. He was a talented pianist and exhibited an early talent in composition, so in 1803 or so, when Emperor Franz (or Francis, as he’s usually called in English) was looking around for a possible music teacher for his little brother, they landed on Beethoven as a possibility. Ironically, as far as we Americans are concerned, Emperor Franz is not one of those historical personalities to gain much of a gleam of recognition; but because he’d studied with Beethoven, and Beethoven dedicated several works to him, including both the 4th and 5th Piano Concertos, three piano sonatas (Les Adieux, the Hammerklavier, and Op.111), as well as the last of his piano trios, the “Archduke” Trio. Beethoven also wrote his Triple Concerto for the Archduke to play, writing it around the time the 16-year-old Archduke started to study with him.

Since the boy suffered from epilepsy and a military career was out of the question, a life of music and scholarship was deemed more satisfactory; subsequently, he pursued a career in the church, and was appointed Archbishop of Olmütz (now Olomouc in the Czech Republic) when he was 31 (curiously, he was named a cardinal a few months later, ordained a priest a few months after that, and less than a month after that, consecrated a bishop). Sorry about that particular rabbit hole, but his student’s sudden elevation in the ecclesiastical world inspired Beethoven to compose a mass for his investiture which took place in March, 1820. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be), Beethoven’s inspiration turned his mass into a massive project which became his Missa Solemnis which, unfortunately, was not completed until 1824… The fact he also wrote his 9th Symphony at the same time, between 1822 and 1824, didn’t help with the deadline.

But it wasn’t just Beethoven cozying up to a member of the Imperial Family: Rudolf was well known as a patron of the arts and in particular of Beethoven, having arranged in 1809 for him and two of his aristocratic friends to present Beethoven with a “guaranteed annual salary of 4000 florins” to convince the composer not to leave Vienna. Yes, there had been almost immediate problems: the French occupied Vienna (again) in 1809, when much of the city’s nobility, including the Imperial Family, evacuated the city, leaving behind social and financial chaos. In 1811, the Austrian currency was devalued “fivefold,” placing an undue burden on the aristocrats’ contributions to Beethoven’s pension. When Prince Kinsky was thrown from his horse and died in 1812 and Prince Lobkowitz went bankrupt the following year, Rudolf alone maintained Beethoven’s pension.

So there you have, more than less, all you need to know about Beethoven and his Archduke.

Oh, and one more thing… Rudolf studied piano as well as composition with Beethoven, and Beethoven rarely taught anyone composition. The Archduke composed several piano pieces and chamber works (including a septet for winds and strings and a clarinet sonata) but due to his royal status, these had to be published anonymously; nor could he appear on the stage as a performer as a professional musician – it just wasn’t done. 

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Among several questions I haven’t mentioned, one that bothers me is “If Beethoven finished the work in March of 1811 – especially if it only took him three weeks to finalize the piece – why did he wait until April, 1814, three years later, to premiere it? And then two more years before he’d publish it?” He did the same thing with the Serioso Quartet, completed presumably in October 1810, which wasn’t premiered until May of 1814, or published until 1816. These are two major works – “serious” works, I was going to say – so why the delay? Could he have had reservations about them? He was publishing other things at the time, so why not these two?

In the post about the Dvořák String Quintet, I mentioned how careful one had to be about using the publisher’s Opus Number when trying to sort out when a work was composed. In this case, Beethoven completed his previous string quartet, known as “The Harp”, in 1809 and published it as Op. 74 in 1810 and dedicated it to Prince Lobkowitz who held a musical evening at his palace after the French withdrew from Vienna in December of 1809. This soiree included the quartet’s first performance. The “Emperor” Concerto, also completed in 1809, was published as Op. 73 in 1810 (and premiered in Leipzig in November, 1811).

Beethoven was frequently tardy with his publications: the oratorio, Christ on the Mount of Olives, for instance, was composed in 1803 and premiered the following year. But he was “quite critical” of the piece and the performance, only revising it in 1811 for publication as Op. 85. This was a time when apparently Beethoven dumped a lot of earlier works on his publisher, for whatever reason, including a trio for oboes and English horn which became Op. 87 despite being written in 1795 (if you want another rabbit-hole to explore, this piece along with other arrangements of it for string trio, has also appeared as Op. 29, Op. 55, and Op.55bis.) By comparison, the “Eroica,” completed in 1803 was published in 1806 after several private performances as Op. 53.

Given how composers’ styles often change within the span of a few years – Beethoven’s especially – it can be challenging to place a particular work in its stylistic context if the opus numbers are so skewed they “misrepresent” when they were composed. And there’s also the problem that many listeners (and program annotators) mention a work was written in such-and-such a year when, in fact, that was the year it was published. Normally it wouldn’t make much difference, if it would matter at all to the average listener, but there are those who would complain mightily if I mentioned the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series in 1959 – no, they didn’t, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1957!

I rest my case…

– Dick Strawser

Summermusic Part Two: Schubert & Dvořák with "Places & People"

Wednesday's concert, the second of three programs in this year's Summermusic series, takes place at Market Square Presbyterian Church at 7:30 and includes one of the most popular of all pieces of chamber music in the repertoire, the famous "Trout Quintet" by Franz Schubert, and a lesser known, if not more accurately little-known, work by another popular composer, Antonin Dvořák, his early String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op.77. (The third program, subtitled "Trials and Triumphs," features Shostakovich's 2nd Piano Trio and Beethoven's "Archduke" Trio, Saturday at the church, also at 7:30.)

(You can read the post for Sunday afternoon's first program, "Love and Loss," with trios by Bruch and Brahms, here.)

(Schubert had many friends like the artist Leopold Kupelwieser who drew this portrait of the young composer, then 24, in the summer of 1821. As a typical example of Schubert's "social music," since he loved to play for dancing at friends' parties, he improvised a quiet waltz in G-flat Major at Kupelwieser's wedding in 1826. Though never written down, much less published, it was handed down "by ear" through generations of the family until one of them played it for Richard Strauss in 1943 who wrote it out; it still wasn't published until 1970. How close this is to Schubert's original is anyone's guess.)

This concert is dubbed "Places and People," and what nicer place to imagine on a steamy summer night than a small city in the Austrian countryside in the early-1820s when Franz Schubert accompanied his friend, the singer Johann Michael Vogl, on a trip across Austria.

Here is a performance of Schubert's "Trout" Quintet with a Hungarian ensemble that, for lack of space, could be called "Zoltan Koscis and Friends" recorded in 1982.

Because the strings include a double bass rather than a second violin to make it an actual string quartet with the piano, officially it can't be called by definition a "Piano Quintet." It's in five movements, the fourth of which is a set of variations on one of Schubert's most popular songs, Die Forelle or "The Trout," hence the popular nickname, "The Trout Quintet"! 

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It was written following a delightful summer vacation in an old Austrian city located between two idyllic rivers in eastern Austria. It has nothing to do with the joy of trout fishing and no one plays an instrument called "the trout" (though there is an instrument called "the serpent" which is not used here, either.) Let me explain...

In 1815, Schubert, then 18, met Vogl, a baritone who sang major roles at one of Vienna's leading opera houses: the year before, he had created the role of the villain Pizzaro in Beethoven's latest revision of Fidelio. Reluctantly agreeing to meet the young composer, he sang through a pile of songs, his reactions going from “not bad” to “you have something special in you, but as yet you are too little of the actor and showman; you have fine ideas but should make more of them.”

Vogl was a tall and imposing man. Schubert was about 5'1”. One of Schubert's friends drew a wicked caricature of the two, reflecting Vogl's stature in the arts community and Schubert's relative insignificance.

In those days, singers didn't give “song recitals.” Composers – even Mozart and Beethoven – wrote songs primarily for the domestic market, meaning for amateurs who'd perform them at home, back in the days before the invention of stereos, radios and TVs when people made their own entertainment rather than watched or listened to it. If you read any novels of the time – like Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, written in 1813 – there will likely be references to the young unmarried daughters of the house who would play the piano and sing for their friends and family: a girl's talent was considered a marriageable trait.

These, then, were the performers Schubert's contemporaries had in mind except Schubert often wrote songs setting “deeper” poems with more difficult piano accompaniments and requiring a higher level of vocal technique. Vogl appreciated this and took Schubert and his songs around to his friends and sang this music for them. Without being published, Schubert would build a reputation as a composer known for his songs. It was, however, not a very rewarding kind of reputation: opera was “where it was at.”

And that's probably why Schubert's friends arranged for Herr Vogl to meet their young friend in the first place. Money was to be made not in writing songs for pretty daughters to warble after dinner but in getting operas performed. That was the mark of a professional composer. In 1820, Vogl would sing the parts of twin brothers in Schubert's opera Die Zwillingsbrüder, written just for him. One of the few operas Schubert would complete or even see on the stage, it was a failure. One of music's great mysteries is that Schubert, an expert dramatist in the miniatures he wrote – Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel, for instance, written when he was 16 – seemed incapable of finding the dramatic moment in extended scenes on the operatic stage.

Perhaps Schubert's most popular song is Die Forelle, “The Trout.” He wrote this during the spring of 1817. There's a famous story that, in the midst of drinking a good deal of wine on a Saturday night, Schubert sat down and (while everybody else was talking) wrote Die Forelle on the back of a napkin. The manuscript certainly looks like it, but the truth is, he was visiting a friend whose younger brother very much liked Schubert's songs, and so Schubert sat down and from memory wrote out a copy of this one for him – it was the third time he'd copied out this same song, but keep in mind it was also in the days before there were photocopiers.

Here is a video (with nice pictures) of Schubert's song complete with lyrics, sung by the incomparable Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with his equally incomparable collaborator, Gerald Moore:
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In 1819, Vogl was going on an extended vacation to his hometown of Steyr, an industrial town about 2/3s of the way between Vienna and Salzburg (it would celebrate its 1,000th Anniversary in 1980) and he decided to take his young friend Schubert with him. Schubert stayed at the home of a “cultured lawyer” who had three sons and eight daughters and whose nephew, Anton Stadler, an old school friend of Schubert's, also lived there. He would meet Vogl for meals at the home of Josef Koller, an iron merchant whose daughter was a talented pianist named Josephine. It was there Schubert, Vogl, Josephine and Stadler performed Der Erlkönig as a trio (Schubert sang the part of the father). That month, Schubert also wrote a piano sonata just for Josephine – the Sonata in A Major, K.664. Another piece of music associated with that vacation was a little cantata written for Vogl's 51st birthday – Schubert was again one of the singers – and performed at the Kollers' house.

More public music making took place at the home of a wealthy mining official, Sylvester Paumgartner, a bachelor who was a local patron of the arts and an amateur wind player and cellist. The best musicales in Steyr took place either in the music room or the larger 2nd floor salon of his home on the city's town square (see photo). Vogl, sort of a local hero having gone off to a great career in the Big City, was the center of attention and being a bit of a prima donna would not always feel like singing: on occasion Paumgartner had to get down on his knees and beg him to sing. Schubert was very much in the “back seat,” sitting at the piano, but still, people admired his songs, though they more openly enjoyed Vogl's singing of them. One of the favorites was Die Forelle. 

Paumgartner owned a copy of Johann Nepomuck Hummel's Septet in an arrangement for the unusual combination of piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass (the first 'real' and enduring piano quintet, consisting of the now standard string quartet plus piano, wasn't written until Schumann wrote his in 1842). In order to have something else for this group to play, he asked Schubert to write a little something for him and, if he wouldn't mind, include a set of variations on the song Die Forelle as one of the movements. And so that's how Schubert came to write this Quintet in A Major for Piano & Strings (friends call it “The Trout Quintet”).

Since the original manuscript is lost and no one (not even his school friend Stadler) ever mentioned the performance in a letter or subsequent memoirs, it's hard to say when it was written or premiered. The going story is that he wrote it then and there and in a matter of days everybody played it and loved it.

Unfortunately, that's probably not true. There were two other visits to Steyr – 1823 and 1825 – but because of the style of the piece compared to its contemporaries, it's more likely it was written after this first visit when Schubert was 22.

What actually happened was that the request was made before Vogl and Schubert left Steyr, the piece was composed that autumn in Vienna, Stadler copied the parts and sent them back to Paumgartner. Unfortunately, Schubert overestimated Paumgartner's abilities as a cellist: apparently, the work was played through (perhaps not even performed), then put away on the shelf. Regardless, it wasn't published until 1829, a year after Schubert died at the age of 31. Today, it is probably one of the most popular pieces in the chamber music repertoire.

So, ironically, Schubert's friends' attempts to accelerate his career as an opera composer, introducing him to one of the leading singers in Vienna at the time, didn't work out, at least in the sense of any operatic success (of course, what might have happened had Schubert lived to be in his 60s, one can only imagine). But it did produce a great champion of Schubert's music, especially his songs, and someone who managed to introduce this music to an audience that might not otherwise have heard it.

Oh, and there was one instrumental work we can thank this friendship for: without Vogl's introduction to an amateur cellist from his home town, we would never have had the "Trout" Quintet.

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While Dvořák was teaching in New York City in the mid-1890s, he would lead his students through readings of some of Franz Schubert’s early symphonies, works that were, at the time, completely unknown in America, and hardly performed at all in Vienna. He published an article about Schubert and his music in 1894 in which he wrote, among other things, about Schubert’s chamber music, “especially his string quartets and his trios for pianoforte, violin, and violoncello, [which] must be ranked among the very best of their kind in all musical literature. Of the quartets, the one in D minor is, in my opinion, the most original and important, the one in A minor the most fascinating. Schubert does not try to give his chamber music an orchestral character, yet he attains a marvelous variety of beautiful tonal effects. Here, as elsewhere, his flow of melody is spontaneous, incessant, and irrepressible, leading often to excessive diffuseness… 

"Like Chopin and Rossini, Schubert has frequently shown how a melody may be created which can wonderfully charm us even apart from the harmonic accompaniment which naturally goes with and enriches it. But he was accused by his contemporaries of neglecting polyphony, or the art of interweaving several melodious parts [voices] into a contrapuntal web. This charge, combined with a late study of Handel's scores, induced him shortly before his death to plan a course in counterpoint with Sechter. No doubt his education in counterpoint had been neglected. It is not likely, however, that such study would have materially altered his style. That was too individual from the beginning to undergo much change, for Schubert did not outgrow his early style so noticeably as did Beethoven and Wagner, for example. Besides, Schubert had no real need of contrapuntal study. In his chamber music, as in his symphonies, we often find beautiful specimens of polyphonic writing – see, for instance, the andantes of the C-major quintet and of the D-minor quartet – and though his polyphony be different from Bach's or Beethoven's, it is none-the-less admirable. Mendelssohn is undoubtedly a greater master of polyphony than Schubert, yet I prefer Schubert's chamber music to Mendelssohn's.”

Every time I listen to a piece by Franz Schubert – any piece, but especially anything from the last years of his life – I do the usual “what-if-he-could’ve-lived-longer?” thing. I mean, there are almost 1,000 pieces in his catalogue as it is, and he died at 31: imagine the “what-if” possibilities had he lived to be, say, 62? Which, coincidentally, is how old Antonin Dvořák was when he died in 1904, and (not to number-shame him) he’d published some 200 works, over 400 (give or take) if you count completed works he did not publish. In fact, had Dvořák died at 31 like Schubert, he had not yet written a single work that survives in the Standard Repertoire: today, no one would know an obscure Czech composer who had a modest reputation that had not yet reached beyond Prague, and nothing he’d yet composed would be being played today. And this, the composer of “The New World Symphony” or the world’s most frequently played cello concerto!

Case in point, the String Quintet that follows Schubert’s beloved “Trout” Quintet on the second of MSC’s Summermusic programs. In G Major and published as Op. 77, this quintet was written in the early months of 1875 – he would turn 34 in September – and a couple of months later, he would write his famous Serenade for Strings in E Major, Op. 22, in 11 days. If you noticed the opus numbers – numbers assigned at publication rather than when the work was composed – there’s a longer story, there, which I’ll save for later. But basically, the Serenade is the first of Dvořák’s works to gain immortality. Fame beyond Prague was also on the immediate horizon.

Schubert’s father was a schoolteacher in Vienna and an amateur cellist who trained his sons to play the violin (eventually Franz switched to viola) so the family could play string quartets for their own amusement, especially those Franz would compose for them.

Dvořák’s father was a butcher in a rural town about 11 miles north of Prague where he was also an innkeeper and played the zither for the town’s band. Perhaps inspired by the dance music this band played, young Antonín was given violin lessons and, once he turned 16, his father allowed him to “become a musician” if he pursued a career as a church organist, and so off he went to the Prague Organ School. When he graduated, he found work not as an organist (he kept getting turned down) but as a violinist in various orchestras and dance bands that played in Prague’s restaurants. At 21, he was hired as a violist for the city’s new Provisional Theater Orchestra (the theater was supposed to be a temporary location for the National Theater but it took over two decades for them to raise the money and build it), The following year, Dvořák played in a program of Wagner’s music with the composer conducting, an experience that helped ignite the young man’s desire to take his composing more seriously (I mean, if you’re only making the equivalent of $7.50 a month, why not branch out to pursue a career where you’ll make even less?). To save money, Dvořák joined five musician-friends in renting a room (one of them had a spinet piano they could share), plus he began giving piano lessons. One of his students was Josephina Čermáková with whom he fell in love, even wrote some songs inspired by what turned out to be his unrequited love for her. She eventually married someone else (a count, no less!). Dvořák eventually married her younger sister, Anna, in 1873.

Then, having had a few works performed in Prague to decent reviews, Dvořák sent off a massive collection of 15 pieces for the annual Austrian State Prize (or Stipendium) which included his recently premiered third and fourth symphonies, both of them conducted by Bedřich Smetana who’d recently taken over the Provisional Theater Orchestra. In a moment of what could be considered Divine Intervention, Johannes Brahms – internationally famous but who incidentally had not yet completed his own 1st Symphony – was added to the jury after the judging had begun. It was his enthusiastic support which decided the outcome, announced in February, 1875, that Antonín Dvořák should be this year’s winner.

(This photograph of the newly successful composer was taken around 1877 or 1878.)

So, let’s check those dates, again: February, 1875, he wins the Stipendium; March, 1875, he completes his String Quintet No. 2 in G Major which he’d been working on since January; then in May, he writes the String Serenade in E Major in less than two weeks. Perhaps even more important than the money he’d won – presumably now he could buy his own piano – was Brahms’ introducing him to his own publisher, Simrock, who immediately commissioned him to write some dance pieces in the style of Brahms’ famous (and lucrative) Hungarian Dances, resulting in Dvořák’s “Slavonic Dances” which soon became best sellers. Small wonder Dvořák now had the self-confidence to pursue his composing just a little more seriously. His father may have been disappointed he’d not gotten a good gig as a church organist but I think he would’ve soon become very proud of his son, the composer.

Incidentally, many of Dvořák’s works may have received opus numbers – his Op. 1, for instance, was the String Quintet No. 1 in A Minor, composed in 1861 or so, though it wasn’t performed publicly until 1921 – but while those two symphonies of his may have been performed (at least, the scherzo of the 4th was), neither were published until years after the composer’s death, the Third in 1911 and the Fourth a year later. Which is still odd, considering Dvořák revised both of them in the late-1880s and conducted the Fourth himself in Prague in 1892, months before he left for America and a new teaching job in New York City.

Dvořák’s 2nd String Quintet is a four-movement work scored for a string quartet plus a bass. Mozart and Brahms added a second viola for their string quintets (as Dvořák had done in his own Op.1 String Quintet); Schubert, famously, added a second cello for his. Adding a viola fills out the inner voices, the middle texture of the overall sound; a second cello would strengthen the lower register of the ensemble but would also free up the first cello part to play more in its “tenor” register. By using a bass (or double bass), Dvořák risked creating a bottom-heavy texture, since it primarily doubles the cello part an octave lower, so, like Schubert’s “Trout,” it presents special problems with balance to keep the sound from becoming too muddy.

The quintet, suitably for a composer not yet secure with his own talent, follows a fairly standard routine: the first movement is a regular sonata form with two themes as would be expected (and a lot of repetition similar to but not nearly as well-handled as Beethoven did in his first published string quartet, something called “motivic saturation”). The second movement, a scherzo, has the expected contrasting middle section or “trio” before the first section returns. Its main theme has the sharp rhythmical accents and other harmonic fingerprints anticipating Dvořák’s so-called Slavic period, a stylistic trait which has nothing to do with the influence of Wagner. The slow third movement is a typical example of his natural lyricism, something he shared with Schubert, full of “profound sentiment, instilled in the broadly arching melodies which become more animated for a moment during a restless passage in the middle section.” The finale is a rondo but it uses only two contrasting themes with the episodes unfolding as variations to create the kind of variety you’d expect, rather than making it sound like a medley of pleasant tunes which can so easily happen in less experienced hands. Originally, there were five movements; he later removed the “Nocturne” which itself had been partly based on material from an earlier string quartet, and published it separately.

This performance is with musicians of the Allegra Festival & Academy, recorded in July, 2022, in Sofia, Bulgaria.

When Dvořák completed the work in 1875, he called it “Op. 18,” which meant it was presumably published by Stary, a small-time local company that didn't have the budget for promotion and marketing beyond Prague. Regardless of that, when he later revised it in the late-1880s, along with a good deal of other “juvenalia” (including his third and fourth symphonies), Simrock (now his publisher since 1875) assigned it the number “Op. 77” which is confusing: though technically an early work, the slightly revised quintet was now given a current number like any work he would’ve just completed which annoyed Dvořák, concerned people would hear the work and be misled by the fact it was not a mature work. If you listened to this in the context of, say, the 7th Symphony, Op. 70, completed in 1884 and one of his first international successes, and the famous Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81, written in 1887, there’s a world of difference between the them and the comparably weaker string quintet.

That was not the only point of contention between composer and publisher.

For generations, Vienna, the Imperial capital with all of the empire’s ethnic minorities represented in its population, was a hotbed of prejudice against both “people who were not Austrian” and Jews in particular. Viennese musicians were suspicious of a composer who was a Bohemian (or Czech) and when the orchestra refused to perform one of Dvořák’s symphonies, Brahms stepped in and berated them, forcing them to accept it. A similar case was Simrock’s insistence Dvořák’s Czech titles be given only in German and that his first name be spelled “Anton.” When Dvořák chose to compromise with the abbreviation “Ant.” which could be either Anton or Antonín, Simrock’s uncomprehending response provoked the composer to write,

“Your last letter, in which you launched forth into national-political explanations, amused me greatly, but I am sorry you are so badly informed. All our enemies speak like that, or rather, some individual journalists are obliged to write like that in accordance with the policy and tendencies of this or that political newspaper. But what have we two to do with politics; let us be glad we can dedicate our services solely to the beautiful art! And let us hope that nations who represent and posses art will never perish, even though they may be small. Forgive me for this, but I just wanted to tell you that an artist too has a fatherland in which he must also have a firm faith and which he must love.”

While they say “it takes a village to raise a child,” it takes more than that to raise a composer. If you’d follow Dvořák’s path from a would-be butcher, destined to join the family business, to one of the most popular composers of the 19th Century, there are lots of people who supported him along the way, beginning with his father František (perhaps that caveat about studying to become a church organist was to protect his young son from the snares of the world), and not necessarily ending with Johannes Brahms who gave him the confidence to walk through that door he’d opened for him which could lead to wider fame beyond just some local recognition.

And Brahms would no doubt understand the importance of such support, given Schumann's generously referred to him, a young man of only 20, as the heir to Beethoven. Realizing what a double-edged sword that had been, Brahms, never very tactful himself, at least new better than to go “all Schumann” on this young man from the provinces.

Another important person in this Young Composer Support Group must’ve been Bedřich Smetana, the composer most famous for his tone-poem, The Moldau (or as it should be known by the Czech name, Vltava). Seventeen years Dvořák’s senior, Smetana was at the forefront of the Czech Revival in this corner of the Austrian Empire where the native language and culture had been suppressed by the German-speaking Austrian government in Vienna for centuries (Bohemia, as it was known, had been an Austrian province since 1526), particularly after the defeat of the nationalists in the 1848 Revolution. In 1860, Emperor Franz Josef (who remained the emperor until 1916!) abolished Austria’s traditional Absolutist policies which then allowed, among other things, for the foundation of a National Theater which could present plays and operas in Czech, not just German. Ironically, there being no reasonable Czech opera to produce, Opening Night at the Opera presented Cherubini’s Les deux journées (The Water Carrier) – in French. After a bit of a power struggle in 1866, the Provisional’s founding conductor was dismissed by the theater’s board and his rival, Bedřich Smetana, whose opera The Brandenburgers in Bohemia had been rejected previously, now became the chief conductor. His most famous opera, The Bartered Bride, received its premiere there later that year.

Another thing Smetana was involved in at this time was the founding of an organization called Umělecká beseda, which sounds so much classier than “Artists’ Club.” The purpose of the organization was to promote specifically Czech art and artists – music as well as literature, painting, poetry and folklore – all reflecting their motto, “For My Nation.” One of the things Smetana championed was setting up a competition for new music. Perhaps with Smetana’s backing or at least his suggestion – after all, Dvořák had been a member of the theater’s orchestra until 1871 and Smetana had performed his Third Symphony, the scherzo of his Fourth, and the overture to an opera, The King and the Charcoal Burner, which had otherwise been rejected by the theater as being “unperformable.”

Then, in the midst of working on a string quintet he intended to enter into that year’s competition, Dvořák received the news he’d won the Austrian Stipendium thanks to the support of Brahms! Pleasantly, Dvořák now won the Artists’ Club’s prize as well for his brand-new Quintet. He placed the group’s motto at the head of the score by way of dedication: “For My Nation.”

– Dick Strawser