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.)
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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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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
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