Maurice Ravel's Piano Trio: Before Everything Changed

Wednesday night, Market Square Concerts celebrates 30 years of bringing chamber music to Harrisburg with a special (non-subscription) concert starting at 7:30 at the Rose Lehrman Center of the Harrisburg Area Community College. The current directors – Peter Sirotin and Ya-Ting Chang – will be among the performers with the music of Brahms and Ravel. And Founding Director Lucy Miller Murray’s words will be featured on the program as well, seven of her poems set to music by three different composers and receiving their world premieres.

Ravel, c.1912

After playing Brahms’ 2nd Violin sonata, Peter and Ya-Ting will be joined by their colleague Fiona Thompson – now constituting the Mendelssohn Piano Trio – in a performance of one of the great piano trios in the repertoire, Maurice Ravel’s Trio in A Minor.

It’s not one that seems to be programmed that often, though, so I thought I’d say a few words about it, by way of introduction.

First of all, it’s not an easy piece to perform from a technical standpoint but that doesn’t imply it’s a difficult piece to listen to.

Here’s a classic recording with three of the greatest musicians from the 20th Century – pianist Arthur Rubinstein, violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. It was recorded in 1950 and so therefore monaural but Peter, who suggested this recording, feels the musicianship outweighs the technical aspects of its recording and, after checking other videos available, I have to agree.

It’s in four movements – the first’s tempo is marked “Moderate” (Modéré), a languidly unfolding, almost traditional sonata form, its main theme based on the rhythms of a Basque dance.

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The second movement is the famous “Pantoum” which sounds like something exotically perfumed, though it is a lively scherzo and full of those harmonic touches that give Ravel’s music its sense of a different world altogether. Actually, a “pantoum” is a Malaysian verse form popularized in France in the mid-19th to early-20th Century: I’ll describe it a little later.

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The third movement, the slow movement, is a Passacaglia which sounds very Baroque – a set of variations over a constantly recurring theme in the bass – but Ravel, being Ravel, treats it his own way: the theme migrates through different registers and creates variety with its textures and harmonies before dying away, the entire work’s “center of gravity.”

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The finale is a lively conclusion with brilliant instrumental, almost orchestral effects and constantly shifting meters – 5/4 and 7/4 rather than the standard ¾ or 4/4 – before ending with a brilliant flourish.

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Every work a composer creates is the product of his mind and heart – or, perhaps, heart and mind (the creative equivalent of the chicken and the egg) – and exists in the environment in which it was created: the composer’s life, the time in which it was composed, even if it seems to have no direct bearing on the music (for instance, Beethoven was writing the 3rd and 4th movements of his 2nd Symphony when he was so distraught by symptoms of deafness, he also wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament at the same time, yet the music reflects nothing of this reality; on the other hand, Brahms 2nd Violin Sonata no doubt captures the ease and tranquility of the summer vacation during which it was written – but then he also started sketching the turbulent 3rd Violin Sonata that same summer).

Whatever happens in and around this time-frame constitutes a creative context for the music whether the impact is positive or negative.

In Ravel’s case, the Trio was composed in the months before the start of World War I. In fact, he rushed the ending knowing, since hostilities had already begun by then, that he would “join up” and he wanted to get it finished before he would leave for the front. Does it reflect the anxiety of the times? No – in fact, there’s little dread in this work (even if one could think of some foreshadowing in the slow movement) and the finale is a joyous romp.

But he composed it in St. Jean-de-Luz, a popular seaside resort in the southwest of France not far from the Spanish border and this does have considerable bearing on the music – not the Spanish aspect of it (as would occur in other pieces he’d write – the Bolero most famously, but also the Rapsodie espagnole and the opera, L’Heure espagnole – but the facts that (a.) he is in the Basque Country (an ethnic minority whose homeland spans the French and Spanish border, here; the Spanish side has long since been agitating for independence, resorting to terrorism to make its point until only recently) and (b.) his mother was Basque.

In fact, he was born only a few miles from St. Jean-de-Luz. This was his home.

He began work on the trio officially in March of 1914, but he had already been at work on a piano concerto of sorts which he called Zazpiak Bat which is Basque for “The Seven Are One,” a reference to the seven Spanish and French provinces that constitute what should be a Basque nation and which was the motto of the Basque nationalists (or “separatists” as they are usually called in the media).

However, work on it was going badly and he decided, as he often did in such cases, to put it aside. He might come back to it, he might start over or, as happened here, he might recycle it into other works. The one remaining fragment of the concerto became the opening of the Trio.

Now, Ravel had been telling friends for years he wanted to write a piano trio. Avoiding the distractions of Paris in 1914, Ravel settled not far from his hometown in the Basque region and absorbed lots of the Basque and Spanish dance music he could hear on the local scene, mostly in the restaurants and taverns.

In fact, in March he wrote to a friend and former student of his, Maurice Delage (who was only four years younger than Ravel) that he’d already finished the Trio – “all I need are the themes.”

Most people would think this an odd statement. He only began putting notes down on paper after he wrote that letter in mid-March and the end-date wasn’t placed into the score until September, the month after World War I had started.

So what did he mean by that?

Ravel & Stravinsky

When Igor Stravinsky – whose Rite of Spring had just set the [old] world on fire the year before – called Ravel “a perfect Swiss watchmaker,” he wasn’t condemning some mechanical lack-of-creativity but referring to his meticulous attention to details, to the intricacy and precision of his music.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who would have ever visited Ravel’s home which was full of clock-work toys. There is the famous anecdote of him holding up one particular toy and saying “listen, I can hear its heart beating!”

Given the child-like wonder of a lot of his music – the Mother Goose Suite is only one example – we should also remember his father was a Swiss-born inventor from the French Savoy region, his creations ranging from an early internal combustion engine to a circus machine called “The Whirlwind of Death,” successful until it caused a fatal accident in 1903 at Barnum & Bailey’s. Joseph Ravel shared his mechanical interests with his son, taking him to museum and science displays (who knows, that 12-year-old going through Whitaker’s Science Center this weekend might grow up to become the 21st Century’s answer to Maurice Ravel) but it was music that Maurice was most interested in. But this sense of wonder, this interest in how things worked remained with him throughout his life.

So when he said he had everything written but the notes, he certainly meant he had already mapped out his Trio – the kind of theme he would use here, how he would contrast it here or vary it there, how the “Pantoum” might be converted into musical form, how the Passacaglia would rise to a climax, then recede.

That also didn’t mean it was just a matter of sitting down and “filling in the blanks.”

Ravel may have been painstaking and precise – a perfectionist, knowing he would never achieve perfection, he said – and this resulted in a slow creative process and a rather small catalogue of completed works during his life.

Though he’d already completed the 1st movement on paper by the end of March, he found himself stuck during the summer and in late-July he wrote to the wife of the pianist who would eventually premiere the piece,

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"…in spite of the fine weather, for the last three weeks the Trio has made no progress, and I'm disgusted with it. Today, however, I have decided that it is not too nauseating . . . and the carburetor is now repaired."
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A few days later, he was writing to his publisher, Durand,

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“I am continuing to work, still rather slowly it is true, but more surely. I am counting on the participation of the weather, which is turning fair again. This morning I resumed my nautical pastimes, which, I hope, will stir up inspiration.”
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But on July 28th, the war started and France mobilized its army on August 1st in preparation for the inevitable invasion from Germany. Ravel was caught up in the idea of enlisting but he was short, underweight and also 39. Still, the music came first – he had to finish the Trio and the sooner, the better.

He wrote to friends,

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"I have never worked with more insane, more heroic intensity."
"Yes, I am working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman."
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And to Stravinsky on September 26th, he wrote, after telling him his brother had already enlisted and that he himself had been turned down repeatedly not only for his height and weight but also his bad heart,

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“The idea that I should be leaving at once made me get through five months' work in five weeks! My Trio is finished…”
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He wanted to make sure the Trio would be of the best quality and his sense of patriotism made him hope it would be considered one of his finest works. He left careful instructions with his publisher in case “the composer was absent,” away fighting at the war.

But earlier, before it was finished, he had written to a close friend,

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“[Before trying to enlist the first time,] I spent one month working from morning till night, without even taking the time to bathe in the sea. I wanted to finish my Trio, which I have treated as a posthumous work. That does not mean that I have lavished genius on it but that the order of my manuscript and of the notes concerning it would allow anybody else to correct the proofs.”
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Perhaps it had occurred to him, after all, he might not come back to see the Trio into print or hear it performed.

Though he started caring for wounded soldiers at a hospital at St. Jean-de-Luz that same month, it wasn’t until March of 1916, after several attempts, that he was finally accepted into the army as a truck-driver for the 13th Artillery Regiment and sent to the front at Verdun. That summer, he came down with dysentery and was sent to hospital and from there, back to Paris to recuperate.

During the course of the war, Ravel's regiment engaged a German unit that included a young man named Adolf Hitler.

As it happened, there were so many mistakes in the printed edition of the Trio, Ravel joked about it being “another trio,” different from the one he had composed. It is apparent he did not get a chance to check the proofs beforehand, judging from the number of errors he later found on each page. The premiere was given in Paris, January 28th, 1915, and completely overlooked by most critics and the public. Ravel was not present at the performance and presumably hadn’t even coached the musicians, focusing all his energies on getting past the army’s medical examinations.

Meanwhile, other works from that summer were, obviously, put aside. The Basque-inspired piano concerto was abandoned, a tone-poem called Wien (Vienna) was put aside along with a suite of piano pieces evoking the old French Baroque style of Couperin. He returned to both of these after the war and completed them. The first eventually became La Valse and the piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin with each movement dedicated to friends of his who had died during the war.

It is said World War I changed the world forever. In that sense, the Piano Trio is then the last work Ravel completed before everything changed.

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The opening theme of the Trio – the one borrowed from the eventually doomed Zazpiak Bat is a lilting dance written in 8, but an 8 that divides not into 4+4 as most European classical music would do before 1914, but 3+2+3. These patterns can be heard throughout the movement. In the last movement’s vitality, the rhythms of other dances are reflected in the shifting 5/8 and 7/8 (as one biographer remarked, “encore le Basque”). It’s amusing to consider that a year earlier Ravel had heard his friend Stravinsky’s latest ballet, The Rite of Spring and what impact this powerful, rhythmic music had on him.

The “Pantoum” is perhaps the most intriguing movement from a structural standpoint, if you're wondering how he took this “Malaysian verse form” and translated it into music, though it still turns out be a perfect “Scherzo-and-Trio” A-B-A form like any other minuet or scherzo from the past 150 years.

Whether he succeeds literally or not, I haven’t examined the exact phrase structure to tell, but a Pantoum is a form based on a rigid pattern of repetition where the 2nd and 4th lines of a quatrain become the 1st and 3rd lines of the next quatrain and so on till the last quatrain which then restates the so far unrepeated 3rd and 1st lines of the opening quatrain.

Though they were popular in late-19th Century France, with some then-famous examples written by the likes of Hugo and Baudelaire, here as an example is a more modern one by the American poet, John Ashbery. (Unfortunately, the 3rd and 4th quatrains are repeated exact which is probably, I would assume, a misprint: you know how things are on the interwebs… from comments elsewhere about subtle shifts in punctuation with these repetitions, I’m also not sure there aren’t other errors as well.)

With a standardized rhyme-scheme of a-b-a-b, the structural outline would look something like this:

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1st Stanza = lines 1… 2… 3… 4…
2nd Stanza = lines 2… 5… 4… 6…
3rd Stanza = lines 5… 7… 6… 8…
And so on to the
Nth Stanza = lines x…3... (x+1)… 1.
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Ravel uses several small fragmentary thematic ideas to represent a “line of text,” creating a near kaleidoscopic energy with the repetition of these fragments fitting in, more or less, to the smaller level of each successive phrase.

Keep in mind, Ravel may have been an innovative composer – much as his father was an inventor – but he was not a revolutionary. Never comfortable being labeled with the term “impressionist” (as much as it could apply to some of his music at a particular time in his career), he was primarily a classicist who loved – no, adored – Mozart and was very conscious of the lessons one learned from the past.

Of all his teachers, Ravel credited André Gedalge, one of the major teachers of the day and usually considered – if not pedantic – a very systematic teacher best known for his strict approach to counterpoint, fugue and what we call “ear-training” today, for giving him "the most valuable elements of my technique."

Is it any surprise, then, considering Ravel wanted this Trio to be his best work, that he dedicated it to Gedalge?

- Dick Strawser

Celebrating 30 Years with Words of a Poet

This season, Market Square Concerts celebrates its 30th Anniversary with a special concert on Wednesday night at the Rose Lehrman Center of Harrisburg Area Community College, beginning at 7:30, which will include performances by the present directors of Market Square Concerts, artistic director and violinist Peter Sirotin and executive director and pianist Ya-Ting Chang playing Brahms' 2nd Violin sonata (then joined by their colleague, cellist Fiona Thompson, to complete the Mendelssohn Trio for a performance of the Piano Trio by Maurice Ravel) as well as the world premiere of songs by three composers setting words by Lucy Miller Murray, the founder of Market Square Concerts who, thirty years ago, thought it would be fun to bring much-needed live performances of chamber music by world-class artists to Harrisburg.

After the Premiere of the Glass Sonata

While there would be so many concerts to mention, one immediately comes to mind – the world premiere of the Violin Sonata by Philip Glass, one of the leading composers in the world today, commissioned by her husband, Martin, as a surprise birthday present for Lucy.

(You can read about the premiere in these earlier posts, here and here.)

Listen to Cary Burkett’s interview with Peter, Ya-Ting and Lucy as well as Ellen Hughes (the previous director of MSC) and composer Jeremy Gill in this installment of WITF’s “The Creative Zone.”

After the last concert, I chatted briefly with Lucy, in addition writer of program notes not only for Market Square Concerts but also of the collection of program notes, Adams to Zemlinsky: A Friendly Guide to Selected Chamber Music and who had been seen turning pages for pianists at many a concert, and joked about her being “the supplier of words” for the Anniversary Concert. She laughed but thought it brought to mind the image of someone shoveling words out onto the stage. Perhaps “Purveyor of Words” would have been more graceful but then I started thinking about a poet standing behind a counter, pouring words out of a bottle… (it should be so easy).

So let’s just say there will be seven of Lucy’s poems set to music by three different composers, all receiving their world premieres:

Jeremy Gill: Three Songs About Words
Jake Heggie: Ode to Image
Paul Moravec: Three Songs of Love

They will be performed by soprano Sarah Wolfson and pianist Renate Rohlfing.

Jake Heggie is perhaps best known for his opera, Dead Man Walking, completed in 2000, and after three more operas, completed Moby Dick in 2010. He’s written over 200 songs in addition to chamber music and instrumental music, and singers who’ve performed his music include Renée Fleming, Frederica von Stade, Audra McDonald, Patti LuPone, Joyce DiDonato and Bryn Terfel, among others. As a pianist, he has accompanied many of these artists in recitals.

Technically, Lucy mentioned the other night, she hadn’t heard any of the songs yet but said how, shortly after he’d completed Moby Dick, Heggie came over to show her his setting of her poem, sat down at the upright, then played and sang through “Ode to Image” for her.

Not always the way every poet gets to hear her words turned into music for the first time!

Paul Moravec, described as a “New-Tonalist” (“neither embarrassed nor paralyzed by tradition”), received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his “Tempest Fantasy” which Trio Solisti and clarinetist David Krakauer played in Harrisburg around that time. Sort of a break-through piece for him, it more or less officially put him on the map, though he’d written a great deal of music before and since.

Jeremy Gill, a Harrisburg native now based in Philadelphia where he is now focusing on composing and conducting, is well-known to Harrisburg audiences through performances of works on Market Square Concerts including a work composed for the Parker Quartet to celebrate MSC’s 25th Anniversary, and by the Harrisburg Symphony (most recently, his Symphony No. 1). A recent CD on the Albany label includes his “Book of Hours” with pianist Peter Orth (another name familiar to Market Square Concerts regulars – he played on the very first concert in 1982) and a powerful song cycle “Helian” which Jeremy and baritone Jonathan Hays (another Harrisburg-area native) performed just this past Friday at Pine Street Presbyterian Church.

After identifying the composers she wanted to include in this commissioning project, Lucy selected 15 of her poems, spanning the years but which have always been kept “in dusty drawers,” and sent them out to composers, asking them to choose which ones they’d like to set.

For instance, as he explained to Cary Burkett, Jeremy Gill chose three poems “reflective in some way on the act of writing or on the personality or the philosophy of the writer.” He described the middle song, “On Hearing a Very Famous Man Speak Profoundly” as a young student (presumably Lucy) sitting in a lecture hall listening to this man droning on and on and she’s not the least bit interested in what he has to say – more interested, actually, in the bird outside the window. If the first song is nervous, a young poet concerned about being heard, about finding her voice, the third is a plea by a poet to take her words and turn them into songs.

So in addition to having been the founding Director of Market Square Concerts, writer of program notes, frequently page turner and occasionally stage hand, Lucy Miller Murray now helps celebrate the organization she so innocently started in 1982 by taking on the role of Poet.

Which, now that I think of it, she has always been – as someone choosing the artists and suggesting the repertoire, bringing performances to life (as much an act of creation as anything), eloquently advocating for the arts, even filling out grants, not to forget everything else that goes unseen behind the curtain – except now, finally, it’s official.

- Dick Strawser

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In the 2nd photo, taken following the world premiere of the Violin Sonata by Philip Glass: L-R with pianist Jon Klibonoff, Ed Harsh from Meet the Composer who was instrumental in arranging the commission, Martin Murray and Lucy Miller Murray (holding the score of the sonata), and violinist Maria Bachmann.

The Cypress Quartet: Another Return to Central PA

When I first heard the Cypress String Quartet, they had joined Awadagin Pratt for the first of the Next Generation Festival concerts which Ellen Hughes organized through WITF back in the '90s. In addition to the Brahms Piano Quintet which closed the program held at the Harrisburg Area Community College's Rose Lehrman Center, the Cypress played Beethoven's Quartet in A Minor, Op.132, the one with the famous (and, for many, infamously long) slow movement subtitled "Heilige Dankgesang" (The Holy Song of Thanksgiving) written after the composer had recuperated from an illness. What amazed me about their performance was how well they made it work - by that, I mean as the engaging, thoroughly compelling masterpiece we know it's supposed to be but, alas, often isn't. I had heard many performances and recordings of the piece over the years and even a well-established quartet can make Op. 132 sound boring. But that night, listening to the Cypress Quartet play it, it was easily one of the best performances of it I've ever heard and probably hasn't been bettered since.

The most amazing thing was realizing they hadn't even finished a full year playing together. This is something rare in any ensemble and usually associated with familiarity and longevity.

The good news is they've now been recording the Late Beethoven Quartets as the start of their eventually complete cycle. Considering most groups would begin with the "easier" Early Quartets before getting to the Mt. Everest of the Repertoire, it didn't strike me as odd after recalling that first performance of theirs I'd heard, that they would begin at the end.

The better news is, now celebrating 15 years together, they're coming back to Harrisburg (again) - from further Next Generation Festivals to residencies with Lebanon Valley College or the Pennsylvania Academy of Music and Market Square Concerts - to play another deeply moving, spiritual work that is also a challenge to interpret, especially in the first two lengthy movements. They'll be joined by cellist Gary Hoffman (with whom they've frequently performed the work) for Franz Schubert's String Quintet in C Major this weekend at Market Square Concerts' Whitaker Center program - Saturday at 8:00.

You can read my post about the background of this amazing work in the context of Schubert's life in this post, "And Schubert at the Close."

Here are several YouTube Clips to listen to if you're unfamiliar with the piece. It may be quite long - Robert Schumann referred to Schubert's "heavenly lengths," especially regarding another great work in C Major, his final completed symphony - so I apologize for all the breaks within movements (the old YouTube policy of 10-minute limits is not Schubert-friendly).

Here is the Harlem Quartet with cellist Carter Brey recorded at a concert held at the Library of Congress in 2008 where the quartet is playing on the house collection of Stradivarius instruments.

1st Movement (Part 1) 1st Movement (Part 2) 2nd Movement (Part 1) 2nd Movement (Part 2) 3rd Movement 4th Movement = = = = = = = =
 - Dick Strawser

And Schubert at the Close: The C Major String Quintet

This weekend, the Cypress Quartet, joined by cellist Gary Hoffman, will perform what I think is one of the Greatest Works in the Chamber Music Repertoire (and one of the Great Works, period), the String Quintet in C Major which Franz Schubert wrote at the end of his brief life. The program is this weekend, Saturday April 28th at 8pm in Whitaker Center.

You can hear various clips of the complete work on this post.

Here's a post about the quintet which I'd written for another performance back in 2008 which looks into some of the historical background of the piece and the other music Schubert composed in his final year before his death at the age of 31.

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There are so many things that continue to amaze me no matter how many times I hear Schubert’s Quintet.

For some, there’s just the question, “why two cellos?” It was more standard to add a viola to a string quartet: that’s what Mozart did, though that may have had as much to do with his preferring to play the viola and listening to the music from his “inside-out” position, between the melody in the violins and the harmonic bass in the cello. He also like to pair off the 1st violin against the 1st viola in conversational sonorities. Along the same lines, Boccherini, a virtuoso cellist, wrote string quintets with two cellos, where the pivotal melodic roles are shared by the 1st violin and the 1st cello (in some cases, they sound more like cello concertos with the accompaniment of a string quartet, but when you write the piece, you write the rules). Even afterwards, the standard string quintet was still two violas and one cello: not even Brahms and Dvořák felt the need to change it.

Schubert usually played the viola in the family string quartet. Judging from his treatment of the cello in his late chamber music – like the two piano trios and especially the last string quartet – it’s not difficult to hear how he was drawn to this deeper, fuller sonority and richer texture. Almost as much of a mystery as “why two cellos” is why he wrote it at all – there was no performance in the near future and there were no other quartets with a second cellist going around likely to be looking for such a piece. Like many of the works Schubert composed, he wrote it because he wanted to. Or perhaps, needed to.

People have said there must have been a rush to complete as much music as he could before he died, not that anyone would know how much time they have left in one’s life, especially when you’re in your early-30s like Franz Schubert in the 21 months following the death of Beethoven. But that’s the way Schubert was most of his life, writing as much music as he could possible get down on paper: how else do you end up with nearly a thousand pieces in your catalogue in just 18 years?

From November, 1827, to his death a year later, Schubert wrote (if not completed) 36 works, according to Otto Deutsch’s catalogue, including
- Piano Trio in E-flat (D.929, published as Op.100) - November ‘27 (the more famous B-flat Trio had been written the month before)
- Fantasy in C for Violin & Piano (D.934) based on the song “Sei mir gegrüsst”) - December ‘27
- Four Impromptus for Piano (D.935, published as Op.142) - December ‘27
- Fantasy in F Minor for Piano Duet (D.940) - January-April ‘28
- “Auf dem Strom” (D.943), song for tenor, horn & piano - March ‘28
- Symphony in C Major “The Great” (D.944) – though it was probably composed two years earlier, there had been evidence it was begun (or more likely, revised) in March ‘28
- Three Impromptus for piano (D.946) often called more generically “Drei Klavierstücke” - May ‘28
- Mass in E-flat (D.950) - begun June ‘28
- Quintet in C for Strings (D.956) - sometime in August-September ‘28
- Fourteen Songs known as “Schwanengesang” (D.957) - finished between August & October ‘28
- Piano Sonata in C Minor (D.958) – September ‘28
- Piano Sonata in A Major (D.959) – September ‘28
- Piano Sonata in B-flat Major (D.960) – last page dated 26th September ‘28
- Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (“Shepherd on the Rock”) (D.965) October ‘28

Whether you’d consider them all “masterpieces” or not, this list of fourteen works (really 27, since you should count the songs of Schwanengesang individually as it’s not really a single work per se) does not include nine other songs (two or three written earlier that could’ve fit into the set of “Swan-Songs”), eleven part songs and short choral works (including a setting of Psalm 92 in Hebrew, written for a specific temple’s Sabbath service), four other “miscellaneous” works for piano solo or duet and - oh yes – two large-scale unfinished works, a symphony in D Major (D.936a) and an opera, The Count of Gleichen, listed as D.918 because it was begun the previous summer. And one should also include some “homework assignment” for his counterpoint lessons, which I’ll get to, later.

Look at those works written in September 1828, the three last piano sonatas, the C Major Quintet and probably several of the Swan-Songs (only the first and last are actually dated). While there are sketches that exist for material that ended up in the piano sonatas from earlier that summer, most of the work was done in a matter of three weeks.

But the original manuscript of the quintet has vanished and with it any preliminary sketches, though Schubert rarely “sketched,” his inspiration traditionally described as being “at white-heat” that even if he dropped a page on the floor (so the wives’-tale goes) he would prefer to start over on a new page rather than waste the time to pick it up. Was the quintet a product of “white-heat?” Was it really composed, as several biographers seem to conclude, in two weeks’ time? In addition to the sonatas he was either composing or copying over in final form to send off to publishers, that is one very intense month!

And in less than eight weeks, he died ten weeks shy of his 32nd birthday.

It’s not that he knew he was dying. His health had not been good, off and on, especially after 1822 when, at the age of 25, he began showing the first symptoms of syphilis, presumably in November, not long after he finished... or rather, left unfinished the B Minor Symphony (“The Unfinished Symphony”), the score dated October 30th, 1822, and the virtuosic Fantasy in C, a piano solo known as “The Wanderer Fantasy,” also one of his most dramatic, violent and, at times, pessimistic pieces. Signs of illness may not explain the despair of the fantasy or even why he never completed the rest of the symphony (he had started the third movement but stopped after nine measures), since we normally think of works of art being unhampered by reality, but the chronology is difficult to ignore.

It was at the end of August, 1828, that Schubert, on the advice of his doctor, moved out of his friend Schober’s house in downtown Vienna to take a room in his brother’s new suburban home just outside the city, since the air – and no doubt the quieter life – would be better for his health. And then in the next few weeks he wrote the string quintet and three sonatas. Could there be some correlation between his health and his inspiration? Certainly, the quintet is one of the loftiest works anyone has ever written under any circumstances.

Today, a composer could brag he (or she) doesn’t write anything unless it’s commissioned or would at least have a performance of it already lined up. We’ve lost that romantic notion of the struggling artist writing for the sheer pleasure of creating art, the product of pure inspiration.

To say Schubert was famous may not be entirely accurate but statements about his being unknown are not exactly truthful, either. His music did not bring him a great deal of money, though his short dance pieces for piano were popular and his songs were well-known, probably circulating more in manuscript copies, the early-19th Century answer to ipods and illegal downloads. By a small group of music lovers, he was certainly respected, but he had difficulties getting his works performed, mostly because he was writing things that were not practical for Vienna in the 1820s: keep in mind, things had gotten tough enough, economically, that even Beethoven threatened to leave for new financial possibilities in Paris or London.

Ironically, the first public, largely professional concert of Schubert’s music was also his last. It took place on March 26th, 1828, the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death as it turned out, and included the E-flat Piano Trio, several songs and part-songs including “Auf dem Strom,” after opening with a movement of (presumably) the G Major String Quartet. The attendance was good, the response, since it was mostly of Schubert’s many friends and acquaintances, enthusiastic, but there was no critical mention of it in the press because all of Vienna (in fact, all of Germany, apparently) was taken up with the five concerts being given by the then-all-the-rage violinist Nicolo Paganini, performances which brought in about 5600 florins per concert. While I have no idea what a florin in 1828 might be worth today, it’s enough to mention that Schubert’s concert brought in 320 florins total, less than 6% of Paganini’s box-office take. For him, he thought he’d done fairly well – not enough as he’d’ve liked, but he was feeling flush enough to plan a couple of summer vacations. Unfortunately, these never came about.

Schubert was convinced that the path to monetary success and artistic recognition was through the operatic stage. For a composer who could write such intensely dramatic songs and telling psychological miniature portraits in his songs (you only need to point out Gretchen am Spinnrad, written when he was 17, to prove that), he couldn’t write a theatrically successful opera if, not to press the analogy, his life depended on it, but he persisted. Even at the end of his life, he continued working on The Count of Gleichen with its lame, cliché-ridden plot and badly written libretto by one of his closest friends. He filled 36 large pages and 52 smaller-sized sheets with sketches and completed sections but it didn’t seem to matter the censors had already rejected the story – shockingly, it included a benign view of a bigamous hero – so even if he might manage to finish it, it wasn’t going to be taken up by any theater in Vienna.

The unfinished D Major Symphony, usually numbered the tenth – there’s no room here for the story of why there had been no 7th Symphony for so long and why the “Great C Major” appears with various numberings – apparently was begun in October ‘28, fragments of three large-scale movements sketched in a “short score” format (like a reduction playable at the piano, but with occasional orchestrational cues written in). The 2nd movement was the “most complete” section but the 3rd movement, labeled a “scherzo” which would imply there would be a 4th movement finale, seems to have morphed into a combination scherzo-and-finale with several large patches of fugal writing, very unusual for Schubert.

Which brings me back to those “counterpoint lessons” Schubert had set up just before he died. When he was working on the Mass in E-flat earlier that year, he had been studying Handel oratorios: Messiah, he’d said, was one of his favorite works. A few months before his death, Schubert told friends about these Handel scores, realizing “Now for the first time, I see what I lack.” He arranged to take lessons with organist Simon Sechter to “make good the omission.”

What was it that Schubert, at the age of 31 and who’d been composing since he was 13, lacked?

Counterpoint.

Usually, this is assumed to mean “the writing of fugues,” something that by 1828 was pretty old-fashioned already. Composers might insert “a fugal section” to show that they know how to do something academic, that they’ve learned their craft. It might not always sound natural, given the flow of things: Beethoven aside (who at least admitted he approached it “with some license”), I often feel like we should do The Wave whenever a 19th Century composer breaks into a “learnéd” fugue midstream (there’s one in Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony of 1885 that usually reduces me to a puddle of giggles).

When I listen to Schubert’s quintet, it amazes me that he felt so insecure that he had to go study counterpoint. I’m not familiar with his masses – at least the last two “mature” ones – and I’ve heard the Unfinished D Major Symphony (No. 10, D.936a) once or twice on the radio, enough to remember there’s a lot of fugal writing going on in that last movement (though how much of it is what Schubert sketched and how much is part of Brian Newbould’s realization of it, I couldn’t say), but fugues aside, the art of writing melodically and rhythmically independent lines that are interdependent harmonically – a broader definition of counterpoint – is not something Schubert was lacking!

All you have to do is listen to the opening of the second movement.

Long slow notes in two- and three-part harmony in the inner voices (as they’d be called, regardless of the fact they’re instruments), with rhythmic filagree-like patterns in the 1st violin that remind me of birdsong, and one cello plucking along on what sounds like the downbeat with the harmonic underpinning. These are three fully defined layers of easily identifiable ‘sound’ – the long slow notes actually turn out to be the melodic layer – that becomes clearer the second time around, about 2½ minutes later, when the “bird-calls” of the 1st violin are replaced by plucked chords answering the cello’s bass line. Then, having taken about 5 minutes to run twice through this theme – speaking of expansive – there’s a sudden change of mood: the violins now have the decidedly more dramatic theme, here, the cellos’ bass-line now more insistent, turning back over on itself, and the middle voices now playing an agitated pattern, filling in the harmony but completely separate, rhythmically, from the outer parts, a far cry from the relaxed contemplation of the first theme.

Why would anybody who could create passages like that feel that insecure about needing to study counterpoint?

Unfortunately, we’ll never know what impact those lessons with Simon Sechter would have on Schubert’s later music. He only took one lesson – on November 4th, 1828. He had already complained of feeling sick the week before but managed to walk the four or five miles to the church where his brother Ferdinand’s Requiem was being performed, not counting a three-hour walk they and the choirmaster took afterwards before walking home (no public transportation to the suburbs in those days). Complaining of feeling tired, understandably, Schubert still felt well enough to walk the mile-or-so to and from his teacher’s house for the counterpoint lesson the next day. That weekend, Schubert attended a friend’s dinner party where much wine was drunk and everybody thought he was feeling pretty good (in any number of ways). By Tuesday of that week, then, he “took to his bed,” did not make it to the next lesson - in fact, never left the house again.

Another friend showed up with a copy of his setting of Psalm 23 which needed some corrections. There was no real anxiety – he had been ill before and had recovered before – and Schubert himself complained only of feeling tired, not of any pain. A few days later, he sat up in bed to make corrections on the publisher’s proofs for the second half of the Winterreise songs – keeping in mind the final song, “Der Leiermann” (“The Hurdy-Gurdy Man”), one of the most desolate songs in the repertoire. He wrote to his friend Schober, asking if he could borrow any books by American author James Fennimore Cooper which he hadn’t read yet.

Two days later there was, as they say, “a turn for the worse,” presumably after friends came and played Beethoven’s C-sharp Minor Quartet, Op.131, for him at his request. By the end of the performance, he had become so excited and his condition had deteriorated so rapidly, they put him back in bed. His friend the librettist of The Count of Gleichen came by to visit the next day or so: Schubert had continued to work on it up until that week, and they even talked about another collaboration once he finished this one. Apparently, in these first two weeks of November, he also worked on the sketch for the slow movement of the D Major Symphony, before things got so bad, he was unable to work at all. A few more days passed: on the 18th, Ferdinand wrote later, Schubert began hallucinating, then died the following day. As his friend, the poet Grillparzer wrote for the epitaph, “The art of music here entombed a rich possession, but far fairer hopes.”

So it is impossible – for me, at least – to listen to this quintet and not dwell on things deeper than the acquisition of contrapuntal skills or on the expansion of harmonic and structural techniques to create a work that lasts between 50 and 60 minutes. Schumann, who didn’t know the quintet existed then, wrote about the “heavenly lengths” of the Great C Major Symphony which Ferdinand showed to him during a visit in 1839. The Quintet, equally heavenly, somehow didn’t surface until 1850. Like the symphony, it was just too long – for the audience but also for the players – and both were first performed in heavily cut, shortened versions.

Igor Stravinsky was never one to mince words about other composers (of Benjamin Britten, he said, “He’s an excellent accompanist”), but when someone asked him if he weren’t “sent to sleep by the prolixities of Schubert,” he replied, “What does it matter if, when I awake, it seems to me that I am in paradise?”

- Dick Strawser

Zuill Bailey & Awadagin Pratt, Together Again (Part 2)

Awadagin Pratt

This weekend, two good friends with ties to Central Pennsylvania – cellist Zuill Bailey and pianist Awadagin Pratt – come back for a performance with Market Square Concerts at Whitaker Center, Sunday at 4pm EDT.

As personnel manager for the Harrisburg Symphony back in the mid-1980s, I’d hired Awadagin Pratt, then a student at Peabody in Baltimore, as a substitute in the orchestra’s 1st Violin section for a concert. (Yes, that’s right – the violin section.) During a break between rehearsals, he wanted to know if there was a piano around he could practice on – “juries” were coming up, performance exams for conservatory students – and I figured, well, I knew several violinists who’d be lucky to find Middle C on a keyboard. The only piano available that time was the old clunker grand (in much need of repair) kept in a cluttered storage room backstage at the Forum: it didn’t even have a bench. So I left him there and went to discuss business with the conductor in the Green Room next door. Suddenly, we heard the opening of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto and Larry Newland, the conductor then, asked me “who’s playing that?” I remember saying something stupid like “I dunno, I left Awadagin in there a few minutes ago…”

We went over and peeked in the door. Yes, there was Awadagin, playing away, dreadlocks swaying, and sitting on an upturned five-gallon bucket, a cluttered dusty storage room turned momentarily into Carnegie Hall.

The next concert I hired him for he said would be the last one he could play. After the juried exam, his piano teacher told him if he wanted to pursue the piano as his career, he would need to cut back on other things, like the time he spent playing the violin. Yeah, well… I could understand that…

In 1992, he won the prestigious Naumberg International Piano Competition and two years later, an Avery Fisher Career Grant. So it was great to see him come back to play some recitals in the area and then play the Grieg Piano Concerto as a soloist with the orchestra, not as a member of the 1st Violin section.

Then Ellen Hughes started the Next Generation Festival through WITF in 1996 and invited Awadagin Pratt to be its music director. He brought in friends of his among other rising young musicians worth taking note of and introduced Central PA to some incredible performers and some amazing music making. For instance, there was the Cypress String Quartet, then a new group, and they’ve also been returning frequently to the region for concerts ranging from the Pennsylvania Academy’s summer music festival to residency concerts with Lebanon Valley College and, of course, Market Square Concerts. In fact, they’ll be returning for a concert with MSC next month at Whitaker Center.

Zuill Bailey

Another one of those brilliant musicians Awadagin brought to play for us was a cellist named Zuill Bailey. If the music making was of a very high level with these concerts, the electricity between Awadagin and Zuill was even more exciting. I was hoping their careers would take off for them – they certainly deserved it.

Awadagin soon had a recording contract with EMI and started teaching at the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. And in 2009, he played at the White House.

The last time Zuill was in town, he had a “CD Party” to celebrate the release of his Telarc recording of the Bach solo cello suites, and he’s been busy as a performer and also director of chamber music festivals in El Paso TX and in Alaska. Both of their professional accomplishments make my head spin to read them. Amazing!

Recently, Zuill and Awadagin collaborated on a recording for Telarc that includes both of Brahms’ cello sonatas as well as other works arranged for cello and piano. They’ll be playing the first of those sonatas on their program here, along with a work chosen for sentimental reasons: the first piece they played together at their first Next Generation Festival collaboration was Beethoven’s A Major Cello Sonata.

Ellen Hughes had a chance to catch up with both of them for her interview in the Patriot-News.

And you can read more about this Sunday’s program in Part 1 of this post which includes the video about making their Brahms recording as well as videos and background for Robert Schumann’s Fantasiestücke and the Beethoven sonata.

Here are Jacqueline Du Pré and Daniel Barenboim recorded in 1968 playing the complete E Minor Cello Sonata of Johannes Brahms in four clips (the poster apologizes for having to break the 1st movement into two bits):
1st Mvmt Part 1
1st Mvmt Part 2

2nd Mvmt

3rd Mvmt


The summer of 1862 must have been an especially good one for Johannes Brahms – he had just turned 29 and was spending time with good friends. He was staying with fellow composer and Schumann protégé, Albert Dietrich, best remembered if largely unheard as the composer who wrote the first movement of the committee-written F.A.E. Sonata for Joseph Joachim, sharing a house somewhere under the Ebernburg Castle (not in a camper: see photo, below). Not far away, taking the cure at Bad Münster-am-Stein, was Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann’s widow and one of the greatest pianists of the day.

Ebernburg Castle

Following the Lower Rhine Music Festival that June, Brahms and Dietrich spent two weeks there, busily composing, taking walks through the countryside, and spending the evenings making music with Clara.

As Brahms wrote to Joachim, unable to join them, “Now I am sitting in a tavern under the Ebernburg. Dietrich is in the next room belaboring his bride. The bride in question being a ballade for choir and orchestra.”

Dietrich, for his part, wrote to his wife how his friendship with Brahms increased the more time they spent together. “His nature is equally lovable, cheerful and deep,” adding however that Johannes had an impish side, teasing the women which was often misinterpreted, at least by Clara who missed the joke and reacted with indignation, though Brahms had a twinkle in his blue eyes.

For her part, Clara wrote to Joachim, “he made life with him almost unbearable.”

At the end of the two weeks, Brahms and Dietrich took an extensive walking tour visiting friends in Landau and Karlsruhe, then stopping in Baden-Baden where they saw Anton Rubinstein, the Russian composer who was another great pianist of the day. By the end of August, he was back home in Hamburg.

Before leaving Ebernburg, Brahms gave Clara a pile of manuscripts to look at – he always valued her opinion and frequently sent her his latest efforts, something he did through much of his career. Included in the box was the first movement of a symphony in C Minor – minus its introduction, what would eventually become the opening of the 1st Symphony he didn’t feel satisfied with until 14 years later.

This, of course, overshadowed everything else: Brahms was writing a symphony! Even when she had first met Brahms, a 20-year-old who showed up on their doorstep in Düsseldorf, his piano sonatas and string quartets struck her husband as “veiled symphonies.” She had been urging him ever since to compose a symphony: that was the path to success and acceptance. The earliest sketches for this symphony dated back to the mid-1850s, not long after Robert had attempted suicide, that February, by jumping into the Rhine.

But also there was a string quintet in F Minor (with two cellos) and three movements of a cello sonata in E Minor, minus its finale.

Three summers later, in 1865, Brahms rented a couple of quiet rooms (“unbelievably cheap,” he wrote to his father) on the top floor of a quaint house on a hillside near Baden-Baden, consisting of a small but comfortable bedroom and the “Blue Salon,” as he called it, with its blue-and-gold wallpaper. From the window, he could see the mountainside and the road to Baden. He enjoyed these rooms and this area and returned here for several summers.

His schedule was simple: he would wake up at dawn, make strong coffee, take a long walk to mull over what he was working on that day, then before lunch spend four hours composing. After having lunch at a nearby inn he would join Clara Schumann and her children who were staying nearby, walking with them before having more coffee at 4:00, then back to their place for dinner before returning to the Blue Salon.

That first summer, Brahms completed the last movement of his G Major String Sextet and the fugal finale to his E Minor Cello Sonata, deciding eventually to discard its original slow movement which may or may not have ended up in the F Major Cello Sonata composed over twenty years later.

Something that engaged his mind that summer was a keening theme, strongly reminding him of Schumann’s musical sentiments: sitting among the fir trees near the house where he was staying, Brahms began what became the Horn Trio. His mother had become increasingly ill that previous winter, Brahms arriving a few days too late in early February to see her before she died of a stroke. After the funeral, he returned to Vienna where a friend, a singing teacher and amateur cellist named Joseph Gänsbacher, found Brahms playing through Bach’s Goldberg Variations for solace. In tears, Brahms told his friend about the death of his mother, but never stopped playing.

By April, he had composed three movements of his German Requiem, the second of them (the “All flesh is as grass” movement) containing ideas he had sketched shortly after Robert Schumann had attempted suicide 11 years before.

After finishing the sextet and the cello sonata, he sent them to his publisher, Simrock, who declined them. Next, Breitkopf and Härtel likewise rejected them. Leipzig had never been fond of Brahms’ music and Carl Reinecke, a successor to Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus, considered the sextet “vile,” the kind of music that should be suppressed.

The brighter, more out-going F Major Sonata of 1886, a great deal of it written for the instruments upper register, was written for the cellist of Joachim’s quartet for whom he would also write the cello part of the “Double” Concerto. The darker, internal E Minor Sonata, dwelling more in the lower register of the instrument, was dedicated to an amateur cellist friend, Joseph Gänsbacher, the same friend who had stopped by to visit the composer after his mother’s death. The famous story about the sonata’s first performance, almost too good to be true, makes one wonder if Brahms had misgivings about that decision.

Now, one of the most difficult things about writing for cello and piano is maintaining the balance between the two since the cello, especially in the lower register, can easily be swamped. Considering Brahms’ typically dense textures, it was no wonder Gänsbacher was struggling to be heard, especially in the fugal last movement. At one point, he presumably said to the Maestro that he could barely hear himself at all.

To which Brahms presumably replied, “Lucky for you!”

- Dick Strawser

Zuill Bailey & Awadagin Pratt, Together Again (Part 1)

This Sunday, cellist Zuill Bailey returns to Harrisburg and Market Square Concerts for a performance at Whitaker Center with friend and frequent collaborator, pianist Awadagin Pratt in a program featuring sonatas by Beethoven and Brahms and the three Fantasy Pieces of Robert Schumann as well as some of Brahms’ songs transcribed for the cello.

This performance is Sunday afternoon at 4pm EDT – and I stress the “EDT,” there, because Sunday, March 11th is also the first day of Daylight Saving Time! So if you forgot to “spring forward” not only will your entire Sunday be off, you’ll be showing up an hour late for the concert. So… consider yourself reminded!

Both performers are well known to Central Pennsylvania audiences: Awadagin Pratt played the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Harrisburg Symphony back in the ‘90s and, having appeared in recitals throughout the region, returned in 1996 as the Music Director of the “Next Generation Festival” which Ellen Hughes had founded through WITF. With musicians from Awadagin’s wide-ranging circle of friends and colleagues, “Next Gen” gave us a chance to hear the Cypress Quartet a few times when they’re were still a “new group” – they’ll be returning to Market Square Concerts again for a performance next month on April 28th – as well as Zuill Bailey.

Zuill’s last appearance at Market Square Concerts was in November of 2009 – you can read about it here – when he and Robert Koenig played Brahms' 2nd Cello Sonata.

Since then, he and Awadagin have recorded the “complete” Brahms cello music and then some (including the Scherzo from the F.A.E. Sonata originally for violin, one of Brahms’ earliest surviving works, and seven song transcriptions ranging from the gorgeous “Wie Melodien zieht es mir” to the universally beloved “Lullaby” or “Cradle Song” which you can hear in this unfortunately bad sounding live recording (possibly pirated) with Christa Ludwig and Leonard Bernstein at the piano).  

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The program opens with the three Fantasy Pieces originally for clarinet but which Schumann also adapted for violin or cello (the publisher’s assumption was there weren’t as many clarinetists around, but more string players would mean more sales). He originally called them “Night Pieces” written in just two days during February of 1849.

The term “Fantasiestücke” or “Fantasy Pieces” was something he’d used before – specifically a set of piano pieces from 1837, published as Op.12 – a generic approach to those short character pieces which offer, in a brief amount of time, a musical “image” sometimes with poetic or literary titles (think “Scenes from Childhood” and its famous Träumerei) or something merely suggestive of a mood without benefit of a guiding title. The earlier pieces each bore titles – Aufschwung (Soaring) or Traumes Wirren (Dream’s Confusion) – but these, only tempo marks that are more like emotional descriptors: Tender, with expression; Lively, light; Quick, with fire.

Here’s a young Armenian-born cellist, Narek Hakhnazaryan, recorded at a Ravinia Festival Master Class when he was 19 or 20, playing the three Fantasiestücke on Zuill and Awadagin’s program:

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Beethoven wrote five cello sonatas. There are 32 piano sonatas written throughout his career but all but one of the 10 violin sonatas were written before he completed his Eroica Symphony. The first two cello sonatas (Op.5) are early works and the last two (Op.102) were composed in an otherwise dry spell in 1815 just as the period of his “Late” Sonatas was taking shape. The middle one – a single work – was composed mostly in 1808, shortly after he completed a pair of symphonies (No. 5 and No. 6) and while he was working on a pair of piano trios (Op. 70) including the well-known “Ghost” Trio.

Zuill discusses recording Beethoven’s works for cello and piano with the pianist on this project, Simone Dinnerstein:

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This recording of the A Major Sonata by the legendary Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim was recorded in 1970 and even though it is accompanied by a still photograph, I want to share this live performance with you:
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Narek Hakhnazaryan is back again for the final movement (with its slow movement/introduction) accompanied by pianist Michael Mizrahi, also from Ravinia.
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Considering it’s such a sublimely noble-sounding work with such a joyful conclusion, Beethoven inscribed the dedication copy of the A Major Cello Sonata Inter lacrymas et luctus (“amid tears and sorrow”) when he presented it to his friend, the amateur cellist Baron Ignaz von Gleichenstein in 1809. One of the closest of Beethoven’s friends at the time, Gleichenstein had helped him negotiate the settlement of his annuity a few days earlier, one which guaranteed him an annual income of 4,000 florins contributed by three of his principle patrons, Princes Lobkowitz and Kinsky and the Archduke Rudolph.

Much of the past year had been taken up with thoughts about the reality of his financial security in Vienna, not having any official position but relying, to turn a phrase, on the kindness of aristocrats.

In the fall of 1807, around the time he presumably began work on the cello sonata, he petitioned the Imperial Royal Court Theater (whose board included several of his biggest aristocratic fans) to offer him an “employment contract” with a fixed annual income of 2,400 florins in return for his writing a new opera every year in addition to other works! In the absence of a favorable response, he rather heavily hinted that he would have to consider leaving Vienna to find better conditions – perhaps Paris .

By the end of the year, the minutes of that Board meeting read “Beethoven is not to be engaged.”

Original Manuscript for the A Major Cello Sonata

While working on the Pastoral Symphony and the cello sonata – finishing both during a summer spent in Heiligenstadt, a place that had proven so traumatic a few years earlier – Beethoven considered several possible operatic topics, including a setting of Macbeth (music sketched for the Scene with the Witches eventually found its way into the “Ghost” Trio). The possibility of the subject The Founding of Pennsylvania may more likely come from 1820 or later, but Beethoven knew, despite the failure of the public to appreciate Fidelio, this was where composers made their fortunes – in the opera houses.

Perhaps it was a consolation that they offered the theater to him for his benefit concert of December, 1808, a marathon program lasting four hours which saw the premiere of his two latest symphonies, the 4th Piano Concerto and movements from the recently completed C Major Mass, among others.

Perhaps the “tears and sorrow” Beethoven alluded to in his dedication had less to do with the time the sonata was written than the time of the official dedication in early 1809? In February, his doctor, Johann Schmidt, who’d been treating him since 1800 – he was the doctor mentioned in the Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802 – and Beethoven was deeply affected by this loss as much as he was concerned about the prospect of finding a new doctor, one could help him find a cure for his deafness. It was Gleichenstein who suggested Dr. Johann Baptist Malfatti.

There are also unproven rumors that, between 1806 and 1810, Beethoven was “secretly engaged” to Teresa von Brunswick (for more if not too much more information on Beethoven relationships with women, read an earlier post, here). It appears he may also have been having an affair with Countess Anna-Marie Erdödy in 1809 – he had been renting rooms in her palace in Vienna (as earlier, he had lived in the palace of Prince Lobkowitz as a lodger) – and he dedicated the two Op. 70 piano trios to her: they were first performed at a concert in her house. Whatever details of the affair’s ending may be, involving an unpleasant scene with one of her servants, they did not become friends again until 1815, at which point Beethoven dedicated his two new cello sonatas (Op. 102) to her.

At any rate, in March 1809, shortly after handing his friend Gleichenstein his dedicatee’s copy of the A Major Cello Sonata, no doubt in thanks for helping him arrange his annuity, Beethoven wrote to him that he had another task for him: having helped him find a doctor, now he asked his help in finding him a wife – preferably one “who would now and then grant a sigh to my harmonies.”

Some of the sources I have refer to his newest love interest then as the daughter of and others as the niece of Dr. Malfatti – Theresa Malfatti. The next year, Beethoven was riding in a coach with her one afternoon and apparently blurted out without any other overt form of courtship that he would like to marry her. He was refused.

Ironically, Gleichenstein married her older sister, Anna, in 1811.

I’ll continue with a separate post about the Brahms Cello Sonata that concludes this Sunday’s program.

- Dick Strawser

All-American with the Lark Quartet & Stephen Salters

The Lark Quartet

This Saturday, Market Square Concerts returns to Market Square Presbyterian Church for a program that includes five American composers and works for voice and string quartet. Joining the Lark Quartet - who then style themselves the Lark Quarte+ when adding someone to their programs - will be baritone Stephen Salters.

The program opens with rags by William Bolcom and closes with songs by George Gershwin: in between are three works about identity: the east coast premiere of Bolcom's Billy in the Darbies, as a young man sentenced to death contemplates his life; a work describing an outer-space alien's attempts to figure out what an American is in Theodore Wiprud's American Journal; and a love-story told in music by Elena Ruehr in the best boy-meets-girl/boy-loves-girl/boy-loses-girl tradition except in this case the girl is a silkie, a legendary seal-woman who comes ashore and sheds her seal-skin to fall in love with a man only to return to the sea.

Composer Theodore Wiprud will be attending the concert and speaking to the audience before the performance of his work.

I'll be doing a pre-concert talk beginning at 7:15.Here are my program notes for this concert:

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For those of you who enjoy pondering Unanswerable Questions, this program offers you four composers writing in the United States between 1970 and 2010—plus some Gershwin from the ‘20s and ‘30s—that may spark a discussion about “What is an American Composer?”

Is it being born in America, or does it mean writing in an American style – and if so, what does that mean?

Antonin Dvořák, when he taught in New York City, advised students to look to their folk music to find their “natural” voice. But what did that mean, for a nation made up of many cultures? What influences composers in today’s world? How do they make it their own?

Here are a few examples:

Born in Seattle in 1938, William Bolcom began studying composition when he was 11, then with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. While studying and working in France and Germany during the 1950s, he composed in the standard serial style du jour influenced by Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio. After returning to the United States in 1962, he found little sympathy for the latest avant-garde techniques from Europe. Eventually, he started exploring a more eclectic approach, developing a love for popular styles that he then sought to integrate into his “serious” music. He has said his main goal was “to erase the boundaries between popular and art music.”

 Bolcom’s catalogue ranges from operas like McTeague and A View from the Bridge to cabaret gems like “Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise,” and includes eight symphonies, eleven string quartets and numerous stage works and song cycles. He won the Pulitzer Prize for a set of Twelve New Etudes for piano in 1988. Until he retired in 2008, he taught at the University of Michigan.

In the late-1960s, someone told Bolcom about Scott Joplin’s little-known ragtime music (beyond the “Maple Leaf Rag”), particularly mentioning the unfinished opera, Treemonisha. This whetted his appetite as he began tracking down what music he could find, contacting several friends who, likewise enthusiastic, began recording it. The Joplin Revival was in full “swing.” From the “ragged” rhythmic style of its right-hand melody over a steady stride bass, ragtime originated as a basically honky-tonk keyboard style, a synthesis of African syncopation and American dance-hall tunes descended from European popular music. It influenced several European composers like Eric Satie, Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky and was considered by some the American equivalent of Chopin’s mazurkas or Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, stylized evocations of folk or urban popular music.

Bolcom immediately started writing his own rags, looking at them originally as “my mazurkas.” Later, he arranged some of them for various combinations. The first of this set, Poltergeist, contains several unexpected twists, turns and ghoulish special effects – some (we assume) made by the performers. “It was written in a converted garage next to a graveyard in Newburgh, NY,” says the composer Graceful Ghost is one of Bolcom’s best known works, an elegantly melancholy tune full of wistful harmonies, dedicated to his father’s memory.

pianist Paul Jacobs plays William Bolcom's Graceful Ghost
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While the first two are from the 1970 set called “Ghost Rags,” the third one written in 1967, less well-known independently, could serve as a peppy theme song for the City of Harrisburg’s economic revival. It’s called Incineratorag.

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While the traditional route for a composer had been to teach in a university music department, Theodore Wiprud, born in Washington DC in 1958, bases himself in New York where he is a composer as well as “concert presenter, educator and musical executive,” working with the New York Philharmonic as Director of Education and bringing music to classrooms and community venues across the city. Following a degree in biochemistry from Harvard even though his lifelong dreams involved music, he had a lucky encounter with composer David del Tredici which led to a Master’s degree in composition in 1983. With several works inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, much of his music deals with spiritual experience whether in vocal or instrumental works. His Violin Concerto “Katrina,” premiered last October, was written for Ittai Shapira, familiar to Harrisburg audiences as a member of Concertante.

Robert Hayden (1913-1980), raised in the Detroit ghetto, became our first African-American poet laureate in the late-70s. His American Journal first appeared in 1978. In 2000, Wiprud began collaborating with baritone André Solomon-Glover, the first part ready for performance the following year. But after Solomon-Glover suffered a stroke, the project was put on hold. “I continued writing scenes in between other projects,” Wiprud says, “and finally completed the entire work in the summer of 2007 for a 2008 premiere on Victoria Bond's Cutting Edge Concerts. During these seven years, I have seen the relevance of the poem grow with every day's headlines. What, indeed, is an American?”

Hayden's “American Journal is a remarkable piece of social commentary,” the composer writes, “the alleged journal entries of an extraterrestrial visitor studying America undercover. Full of both wit and a tragic view, the poem raises questions without answering them. The alien’s awkwardness as he tries to fit into American society in various guises suggests a host of interpretations. Where one might find an allegory of race in America, or a Cold War commentary, I also read a reflection on the position of the intellectual. The alien writes, ‘much here is beautiful,’ and ‘i am attracted to the vigorous americans,’ but he is at the same time repelled and frightened, and certainly not accepted. He cannot figure these Americans out, but comes to identify more with them than with the purely rational ‘Counselors.’”

At this performance, we’ll hear a new, compact version utilizing three of the original scenes plus parts of the prologue and epilogue.

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Words have been an important part of William Bolcom’s output. He set 45 poems from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence & Experience,” a vast work for soloists, choruses and orchestra (a recording of the complete cycle won three Grammys in 2006). In addition to the cabaret texts that may be more familiar, he has also set texts by WaltWhitman and turned works by Frank Norris and Arthur Miller into operas.

Stephen Salters, baritone

In one of his most recent works, Bolcom turns to Herman Melville’s unfinished novella, Billy Budd, setting the poem known universally as “Billy in the Darbies,” the starting point for Melville writing the story and then becoming the final chapter of the manuscript.

Billy is an innocent, pressed into service by a British ship during the Napoleonic Wars in 1797, who, though revered by his shipmates, lashes out at the ship’s Master at Arms, John Claggart, and accidentally kills him. Circumstances notwithstanding, Billy is condemned to hang from the yard-arm. The poem, told as a sentimentalized ballad after the fact, describes Billy’s meditations in his cell (“Darbies” is a slang term for handcuffs) before his execution the next morning.

Written for the Lark Quartet and Steven Salters, it received its world premiere at Stanford University on February 12th, 2012.

This performance will be its second performance, the East Coast premiere.

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Elena Ruehr, born in 1963 and raised on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, later studied at the University of Michigan with William Bolcom, then at Juilliard with Vincent Persichetti . She now lives in Boston, teaching at MIT since 1991. Enriching her classical background, she has also played in a gamelan orchestra and studied West African drumming. Opera News described her as “a composer to watch,” her music written “with heart and a forceful sense of character and expression” (The Washington Post). Gramophone magazine called her music “unspeakably gorgeous.” She has written six string quartets, three of them commissioned by the Cypress Quartet who will be performing her 5th Quartet, “Bel Canto,” inspired by Ann Patchett’s novel, when they perform with Market Square Concerts two months from now.

The Song of the Silkie, setting a text by playwright Laura Harrington, was commissioned by the Rockport Chamber Music Festival and premiered in 2000. Ruehr was asked to write a piece about the sea and chose a story that stems from the same branch of folk legends that have given us water sprites like Undine and Melusina or Anderson’s Little Mermaid. In Celtic versions of this story, a “silkie” is a female seal who comes ashore and sheds her skin to become a woman in order to mate with a human male. After she resumes her sealness, she returns to the sea and the bereft man is left to hunt the seas to find his wife. The poem is a dialogue between the man James and the silkie, named Sula—the baritone sings both parts, taking the role of the silkie into a higher, falsetto range.

As blogger Tom Schnauber of the Boston Musical Intelligencer described it, “Darkly shimmering, watery textures alternate with jig- and reel-like rhythms turned inside out to create a half-moonlit-shanty effect that the Quartet vividly brought to life. These textures support the daring vocal part that serves as the expressive core of the piece.”

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George Gershwin, an iconic American voice, is often considered the quintessential cross-over composer, beginning in the realm of popular music in the age of Tin Pan Alley and almost by accident discovering the world of classical concert music when Paul Whiteman asked him to write something for piano and jazz band that became Rhapsody in Blue. It is unfortunate he did not live long enough to write more than a few pieces for the concert stage and the opera, Porgy & Bess.

From over a dozen musicals written for Broadway, many of them collaborations with his older brother, Ira, came numerous popular songs which can be found in numerous adaptations. “Strike Up the Band” was part of the 1927 musical in which a war-loving USA declares war on Switzerland. The show failed but the song eventually became a hit on its own. “Embraceable You” was written for an unpublished operetta, East Is West, in 1928, then incorporated into Girl Crazy in 1930 where it became a dance number for Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. “It Ain’t Necessarily So” is the drug dealer Sportin’ Life’s cynical biblical summary told at the church picnic in the 1935 opera, Porgy & Bess. 

I should mention the title of this last song could also be a response to any answer to that initial question, “What Is an American composer?”

- Dick Strawser