(My sympathies immediately went out to the man’s son…)
While I wasn’t exactly sure how old his son was at the time, I wondered if this father’s disdain for composers “younger than his son” applied to music written by Great Composers he admired?
For instance, Rachmaninoff, one of his favorites. I asked him if he liked Rachmaninoff’s most popular piece, the famous C-sharp Minor Prelude. He looked at me like I must be stupid: of course he liked it!
“You know he was 19 when he wrote that?”
Mark Markham calls his program for this concert “The Roaring Twenties” which immediately brings to mind George Gershwin and flappers dancing the Charleston. However, none of the music you’ll hear actually dates from the 1920s: all the pieces were written by composers who, at the time, were in their 20s, and certainly some of them had come “roaring” onto the New Music Scene of their day.
In all, there are six pieces by composers who might be better known by other works. But in these selections, do we hear a musical style that is the “mature voice” or are we intrigued by what we know of his later pieces and listen for tantalizing clues to what influenced him as a young composer and evolve into what he will eventually become?
For reasons of time, I’m not going to go into my usual great detail about each piece, forensic musicology aside. But it might give you enough to go on to think about not just the music you’ll be listening to, but to the future development of those composers you’re familiar with.
For instance, David Shapiro is a Philadelphia-based composer whose “Through a Child’s Eyes” was commissioned by Mark Markham and written in 1999. The composer writes on his website, “My music explores and integrates diverse musical styles, driven by rhythm. I find music that displays complex interweaving rhythmic layers to be fun and stimulating. Like, for example, the music of Bartok and the Afro-European group Zap Mama. I also enjoy the systematically altering rhythmic patterns in the music of composers such as Steve Reich, Elliott Carter and Conlon Nancarrow. My own work often starts as a scribbled rhythmic sketch in the corner of a book or piece of scrap paper. I then play around with that idea, adapting it to various musical genres and styles that I know and love. Each piece takes on a shape and life from there.”
What do we hear in this piece written 26 years ago? What would we hear in the next piece he will compose?
Something I’ve always told composition students is it’s your job as a student to be a sponge and soak up everything you hear and like, whether you try to imitate it or absorb it (“I like that, let me see if I can do it my way”). Eventually, you’ll find what suits you best and discard the rest of it; also, as we mature, our perspectives change and things that attracted us before we might later wonder why we were so fascinated by that. Plus we discover new things that might act as kindling for a fresh approach, an idea that had never occurred to us before, something that opens up whole new vistas to our creative imaginations.
As a listener, there is another element to keep in mind: if you know, say, Bartók’s string quartets, let's say those written in the 1920s (though not exactly “Roaring Twenties” music unless you’re a Hungarian ethnomusicologist), his earliest works might not show you the way to his later style but if you listen carefully not only might you hear influences of composers he’d recently discovered, a man in his mid-20s who’d primarily been more influenced by Richard Strauss and Brahms looking for a new direction. And there’s a shift in that direction with the short Bagatelles he wrote in 1908 when he was now in his late-20s. What prompted that?
It turns out he’d just discovered Claude Debussy, a composer he’d been unfamiliar with. His friend Zoltan Kodály had just come back from Paris with a bunch of new scores. The year before, these two friends had tramped around the countryside of Hungary, listening to the folk music of the Hungarian people, not the art music heard in Budapest’s concert halls which was usually all German or German-trained composers. The take-away was immediate: there’s a different way of writing music that does not have to be in the standard “tonal” style of German Romanticism, the legacy of Beethoven and Brahms, and so these Bagatelles become, essentially, an experiment in how to get beyond the present.
Bartók, like Brahms or Liszt or Ravel, is what we might call a “closed system.” Unless there really is a parallel universe somewhere where the Great Composers of the Past are still alive and still composing, we can compare these early pieces to everything else they wrote.
The difference with the other two composers – David Shapiro and Zev Malina – is basically that they’re not dead yet (and we wish them both long and productive careers!) so who knows what they might be composing 20 or 50 years from now (or, like Elliott Carter, still composing past their own Centennials)? It would be instructive (to say the least) to come back decades from now and listen to their latest works. But given the limitations of Time Travel into both the past and the future, we’ll have to make do with our (and their) imaginations in the present.
Many of us in Central Pennsylvania have been listening to Zev Malina grow up. Mid-May will bring the premiere of a new work tentatively called “New Work” as it’s listed on the Harrisburg Symphony’s website. The composer’s father will not only conduct it, Stuart Malina will then play George Gershwin’s quintessential Roaring 20s piece, Rhapsody in Blue. The work on this weekend’s Market Square Concerts’ program is a tribute to another Roaring 20s composer, Zez Confrey, called “Schemin’.” There’s no point in going through “structural and technical details” because that would be pedantic (something I have a great talent for). Let me say that while being a sponge and turning something you like into a piece of your own music is not just “imitating” it. There’s a difference between listeners thinking, if they don’t know what exactly they’re listening to, “that sounds like Zez Confrey” (even if all they know is his “Kitten on the Keys” and a few other novelty pieces he was famous for) and listeners thinking “that’s by Zez Confrey, isn’t it?” It’s like a painter copying a famous artist’s style – brushstrokes as much as subject matter – and doing it so well, even the experts might not realize it’s not an original (“forgery” is a matter of legality and morality: an hommage is not a forgery but a well-meaning tribute fully attributed.) The fact I can listen to Zev’s “Schemin’” and feel he’s really captured Zez’s spirit is not just a matter of “imitation.”
Here is Zev Malina playing “Schemin’” as a young artists’ “warm-up” presentation to a Market Square Concerts program in April, 2021, a month before his 20th birthday.
Oh, and no slouch as a pianist, either!
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The care and feeding, much less “training” (or perhaps a better word would be “guiding”) of child prodigies depends on many things, not just the level of prodigyhood (I think Jascha Heifetz coined the term). A prodigy – someone who expresses a high level of talent at an early age (for anything, be it music or playing chess) – is more susceptible to the surrounding environment than the trickiest kind of hot-house plant (to use a bad metaphor frequently abused). Consider some famous prodigies of the past – let’s stick to music – like Mozart (writing his first pieces by the time he was 6), Mendelssohn (anyone who could write that String Octet would’ve been a great composer, but to write it when he was 16 is more than mind-boggling for us mere mortals), or Shostakovich (his 1st Symphony, written at 19, on the cusp of adulthood, became an instant international sensation not just because he was a teenager).
The transition to adulthood, challenging enough under normal circumstances, is especially dangerous for the prodigy: gone are the days when people will be delighted with anything you’d compose because now, putting aside your childhood things (with or without 1 Corinthians 13:11), you’re going to be regarded and judged as an adult, and the pressure can be… well, dangerous, for one, too much pressure. Creativity is a very fragile thing, even in those who would seem to us to be so secure and self-confident. Even the Great Beethoven struggled with it almost constantly and if we need proof of that struggle, we have several of his surviving sketch books to prove it.
I’ve talked to many composers who, when young, likened the creative process to listening to a kind of inner radio that was always playing and many times it was a scramble to write all this constantly flowing music down. (Schubert, not that I’ve ever talked to him, would tell friends he wrote music as effortlessly as a tree produced fruit.) But at some point, this “radio” connection slows down or stops: the question now becomes “now what do I do?!” Suddenly, it becomes work, you have to consider what to do with these ideas you’ve come up with. This is why so many newly emerging composers begin this new, uncertain world by writing short pieces: if an etude is a “study” in some technical skill for the performer to focus on, these short pieces become studies in creativity, not just in dealing with the technical aspects of composition – harmonic language, structural considerations – but in evolving an individual creative voice and establishing a confidence that makes the process less fearsome. It’s not just “training.” You can’t teach someone to be a genius.
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As listeners sitting in the audience, we might not be aware the earliest pieces by Beethoven we usually hear at a concert were written around the time he was pushing 30. We also might not think about, had Beethoven lived only as long as Schubert (who died at 31), all of the great music that turned Beethoven into the colossus who dominated the rest of the 19th Century would never have been written.
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| Brahms in 1853 (age 20) |
On September 30th, 1853, the famous story goes, a young composer shows up unannounced on the doorstep of Robert and Clara Schumann. Robert Schumann was not only one of the Greatest Living Composers of the Day, he was one of the most famous critics and writers about music as well. His wife Clara Schumann was also one of the greatest pianists of the day, second only to Franz Liszt. This composer – also a pianist – was an unknown, only 20 years old. His name was Johannes Brahms.
Unfortunately, as the Schumanns’ daughter Marie told the visitor, her parents were out but he could return the next morning, maybe at 11:00. This time, Schumann was at home, answered the door in dressing gown and slippers, and found the tongue-tied young man a bit of a challenge at first, but he invited him in. Their mutual friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, had mentioned this shy young man with the long blonde hair and blue eyes, so Schumann, himself an introvert, decided perhaps, if words were not working, it would be better if the young man played some of his music.
“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius” is how Schumann was supposed to have introduced the young man to his reading public, but, alas, the story is not quite accurate. That was Schumann’s reaction to another young composer/pianist named Frederic Chopin way back in 1831 when both he and Chopin were barely “out of their teens.” But Schumann, now in his early-40s, did hail Brahms as “the heir to Beethoven.” As if a young composer stepping out for his first appearance on the musical stage needed pressure like that!
The whole idea of Brahms forever being a “slow” (say “painstaking”) composer was the result of that review. It’s why his 1st Symphony took over 20 years to complete (along with his 1st String Quartet and what became his 3rd Piano Quartet), decades spent on the back burner because Brahms (even in his mid-40s) was not so secure with himself to feel these works were worthy to be compared to Beethoven. As he put it, “You have no idea what it’s like to hear the footsteps of a giant like that behind you.”
All that, of course, is in the future on that autumnal day in Düsseldorf when Brahms started to play some of his piano pieces – he had come prepared with a backpack full of his compositions – when Schumann interrupted him. “I must call my wife,” he said, and told her, as she settled down beside the piano, “here you shall hear music such as you have never heard before. Begin your sonata again, young man.”
That sonata was a vast piano sonata in C Major – it would become his Op. 1 but it was the second of three sonatas he had written during the past year – and it contained shadows of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier and Waldstein Sonatas (and that was just in the opening bars). Most young composers would be producing shorter (if not short) pieces because the understanding of craft, especially the ability to control something so long with such cohesion, was something many composers never quite learned even in their maturity (it was one of Schumann’s own shortcomings, no pun intended).
After listening to the complete C Major Sonata (which lasts just under a half-hour), the Schumanns invited him back the next day for lunch but he was so nervous, he failed to show up at the right time, so Clara went out to find him and drag him back to the house. Here, he played more of the music he’d brought with him, including a Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor (actually, the first one he’d composed, but he thought the C Major was more impressive), the brief Scherzo in E-flat Minor and the third sonata, the one in F Minor, which he was still working on. Schumann would later refer to them as “veiled symphonies,” so far did they push the bounds of a normal piano in a household parlor.
Clara wrote in her journal “a great future lies before him for when he comes to the point of writing for orchestra, then he will have found the true medium for his imagination.” In other words, real symphonies.
Schumann wrote a more laconic entry in his journal: “Visit from Brahms (a genius).”
The Schumanns talked him into extending his visit – Brahms had planned on only spending a day in Düsseldorf. In the meantime, music-making aside, Brahms joined some friends of his who lived in town who, along with the Schumanns and their children, played parlor games – Schumann was a big fan of seances – and reading from the works of Schumann’s favorite author, E.T.A. Hoffman. Soon, this new circle of friends, including the newly arrived Joachim, began calling young Brahms “Kreisler,” after Hoffman’s alter ego, his fictional kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler. Presumably, for so young a man, they felt the connection was more than just the first name: Kreisler – no relation to the famous 20th Century violinist, Fritz Kreisler – was a “moody, asocial composer, a musical genius whose creativity is stymied by an excessive sensibility.”
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In the midst of this domestic environment, Brahms continued working on his F Minor Sonata. Schumann, meanwhile, wrote and published an article he called “New Paths” in which he made his fateful prediction about Brahms being Beethoven’s Heir with enough Christian symbolism to imply even weightier (and potentially destructive) implications. Of course, without having even heard the young man’s music, a musician like Hans van Bülow, a famous conductor and champion of Wagner, wrote to his friend, Franz Liszt, that he did not expect much from Schumann’s new protege: fifteen years earlier, Schumann had written the same thing about a young Englishman studying with Mendelssohn, William Sterndale Bennet (Bülow spelled it ‘Benêt,’ a pun on ‘blockhead’) who had turned out to be a flash-in-the-pan. Wagner and his circle began referring to Brahms – remember, he was still 20 and still untested – as “St. Johannes.”
Three weeks after the article appeared in print, Brahms, back in Hanover, wrote to Schumann to thank him for his praise. He also informs him, “Further, I wish to tell you I have copied out my F Minor Sonata” – meaning the work was not only complete, it was now ready to be sent to a publisher – “and made considerable alterations in the finale.”
He decided he would publish the C Major first, followed by the first one he completed, the F-sharp Minor as No. 2, then some songs (Op. 3), the Scherzo as Op. 4, and then the new sonata, No. 3 in F Minor, a grand sonata in five movements. (When asked by a friend why he hadn’t led off with the shorter Scherzo, which she thought “flashier,” Brahms replied, “When one first shows oneself, it is to the head and not the heels that one wants to draw attention.”)
Wherever Brahms’ future career would take him, I imagine anyone – certainly Schumann – would’ve been surprised to find out these three sonatas would be the only piano sonatas Brahms would ever compose. He would go on eventually to write three violin sonatas, two cello sonatas, even a pair of clarinet sonatas (also available in viola…) as well as a sonata for two pianos which eventually was turned into his Piano Quintet. But considering the significance of the piano in his repertoire and all the short piano pieces he would produce throughout his life, there would not be another large-scale work for solo piano.
The work is basically a standard four-movement sonata except Brahms interpolated an “extra” movement between the scherzo and the finale. Whether that was part of his original plan or something he inserted for greater contrast between the two “regular” movements, I don’t know. The other option would’ve been to reverse the slow movement and the lively scherzo (Beethoven had done that), but that may not have been the optimal contrast he was looking for. This way, he creates a longer arch form – Fast / Slow / Faster / Slow / Fast – and the fact this Intermezzo harks back to the slow movement also gives it more cohesion than just being “another slow movement.”
Here is a recording (with score) by Yevgenny Kissin of Brahms’ Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Minor, Op. 5:
00:00 – 1st Movement, Allegro maestoso – There are two opening gestures: a grand flourish (tonic leading to dominant on a C Major chord) then switching to C Minor, over a left-hand drum beat reminiscent of the “Fate Motive” from Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Note the similarity between the second fragment's "melodic shape" and the flourish's second beat. The real “2nd Theme” arrives at 1:30 in a contrasting key and in a completely different mood. The standard “development section” begins at 4:48, tears around through these different motives (not really “themes”), and eventually builds up to the expected “recapitulation” at 7:24, complete with the “2nd Theme” at 8:15 as expected in the original tonic major key, before ending in F Major rather than the darker key of F Minor. There’s a great deal of variety in the course of this varied movement, but there’s also a great deal of cohesive unity – motives, thematic outlines, harmonic progressions – that we tend to feel it all belongs together whether we’re aware of it or not.
09:58 – 2nd Movement, Andante espressivo – This is one of the great slow movements and every time I hear this – it really is a love song-without-words – I am amazed it was composed by somebody only 20 years old. Again, there will be melodic shapes and rhythms that we’ll recognize and we’ll hear them again in other movements as well. Brahms prefaces the score with a few lines from a poem by Sternau: “The evening dims, / The moonlight shines. / There are two hearts / That join in love / And embrace in rapture.” Beginning in A-flat Major (F Minor’s relative major), the final segment, beginning at 18:38, is one of those “to-die-for” moments that appears unexpectedly in D-flat Major, then builds to a heart-throbbing climax. “Genius,” indeed...
22:26 – 3rd Movement, Scherzo – A straight-forward contrast to the previous two movements, this is a rollicking if somewhat driven dance back to the home key (as expected) of F Minor with a contrasting middle section (the “trio”) in a hymn-like D-flat Major – yet note the Beethoven 5th Motive in the bass. The opening then is restated as you’d expect, all in the old classical format.
27:00 – 4th Movement, Intermezzo – Called an Intermezzo and subtitled Rückblick (“Reminiscence” or, literally, “Look-back”), it’s in B-flat Minor (the relative minor of D-flat Major) and with its opening chain of thirds – a frequent musical fingerprint of Brahms’ melodic style, all the way through to his 4th Symphony and the late piano pieces of his old age – it’s a ghostly, almost grief-stricken reflection of the sonata’s slow movement (given the poem prefacing the Andante, a reflection on lost love?). But notice the bass, again, with its persistent rhythm, the motive from Beethoven’s 5th but here bringing to mind the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica. But what to make of that oddly undulating chord at 28:26? It’s basically a G-flat minor 9th chord, a most unusual chord for 1853 but would be perfectly at home in a piano piece by Maurice Ravel! (Oh, and look what Mark Markham has programmed next – a short piece by Ravel from 1905!) Hardly a “look back,” that. Another thing that always strikes me, hearing these last measures: imagine if the next music could be from the first movement of Mahler’s Fifth...! (That, by the way, was written in 1902 and of course has absolutely nothing to do with Brahms, but it’s just the way my imagination works. Clearly, I need to get out more.)
30:53 – 5th Movement, Finale – In the Standard Sonata Form Textbook (if there were such a thing), you’d read the last movement of a long-form work like a symphony or sonata was usually a light-hearted Rondo – a main theme with contrasting “interstitial” elements in different keys while the original main theme recurred before the next one. It’s usually diagrammed A-B-A-C-A or, given the sonata-like recurrence of the B-Theme, A-B-A-C-A-B-A, which helped “elongate” the structure. It’s the recurrence of the A-Theme that makes it a Rondo but with a bit of the Sonata-Form lurking in the foreground. But once Beethoven decided to ignore the handbook, composers had trouble figuring how to solve the Finale Problem. Even here, Brahms, still working on the sonata when he visited the Schumanns, didn’t finish it until almost two months later. I’m still not convinced it’s the best solution, but it is interesting to think toward the end of his life, Brahms thought about revising this early work of his – he did revise the Op. 8 Piano Trio around the time he was writing what would become his 3rd Violin Sonata, Op. 108 – but for some reason never got around to it.
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Schumann was not the only famous composer young Brahms met in 1853. This sonata was being written “on the road” while he was touring with the great Joseph Joachim (acclaimed, yes; the “great” still lies in his future). As a result of their tour, they were in Leipzig where Joachim took his young pianist-friend to meet Franz Liszt who had already gathered around him a coterie of other like-minded composers including the great French composer, Hector Berlioz, composer of the Symphonie fantastique who was, by then, nearing the end of a difficult and unfulfilling career. For them, young Brahms played some of his recent works, including the Op. 4 Scherzo and the Andante from his “new work,” the Piano Sonata in F Minor.
Berlioz later wrote to Joachim, “Brams [sic] has had a great success here… I am grateful to you for having let me make the acquaintance of this diffident, audacious young man who has taken it into his head to make a new music. He will suffer greatly.”
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| Liszt playing for some friends, including Berlioz, in 1853 |
Liszt, long acclaimed as a great pianist and futuristic composer, thought Young Brahms might be a good addition to his and Wagner’s circle. Whether the newly-arrived Brahms fell asleep because of whatever you’d call jet-lag in the days of traveling by horse-and-carriage or because he was bored to tears during Liszt’s playing his vast B Minor Piano Sonata one afternoon, things did not go well. Brahms found both the man and his music repellent and they soon parted ways. A few months later, after Schumann declared Brahms the future of German music, the heir to Beethoven, the rift was complete and for the rest of their lives and well into their posthumous careers, there were two irreconcilable polarities in German music: Wagner and Liszt on one side, Brahms on the other.
1853 was also the year after Franz Liszt had published a set of twelve Transcendental Etudes (simply calling them Etudes was not enough). Whenever he may have composed (or re-composed) the individual etudes before the time they were published, these were reworkings, revisions, or re-imaginings of a set of twelve Grand Etudes (again, simply Etudes was not enough) published in 1837 which were, in turn, elaborations of a set of twelve etudes written between 1825 and 1826 called simply “Etudes in 12 Exercises.” That means Liszt was 14 when he wrote the first draft; 26 when he produced the Grand Etudes; and 41 when he published the final version, the famous Transcendental Etudes. It also means the work itself was, in effect, 27 years old… The 7th of the 1837 Grand Etudes formed the basis of the 11th of the Transcendental Etudes, given the picturesque title, Harmonies du soir (which sounds so much more Romantic than “Evening Harmonies”).
Here is another video-with-score of the 11th of Franz Liszt's Twelve Transcendental Etudes (the 1852 version) recorded by Yevgenny Kissin:
Considering how straight-forward (say, “old-fashioned”) Brahms was about his style, both in terms of standard structure and his use of tonal harmony, listening to this could have been either a revelation toward music’s “New Path to the Future” or it could’ve made his skin crawl. Nominally in D-flat Major (the first minute is basically a prolonged dominant chord), it proved to be so chromatic – note all the accidentals in the score – someone in the 1850s would certainly be excused if they felt themselves completely at sea. The term “atonal” would not become a thing until much later – Liszt himself would write some very strange short pieces late in his life, like the “Bagatelle Without Tonality.”
One of the standard expectations of classical music, so far as Western Europe was concerned, was this gravitation toward a tonal center – say, C Major – so that any divergence from this, wherever the harmonic progressions took you, was a way of increasing the dramatic tension. True, Liszt does return to chords closely related to the key of D-flat Major, and firmly in D-flat Major by the end, but in between, he pulls you away from it in such a way, you might never feel quite sure where you are. That also fits in with the whole programmatic idea of “Night” and man’s fear of the darkness, of the unknown: it can be beautiful, it can be fearsome. In one sense, the awareness of its psychological implications (in hindsight) is at the root of what we call Romanticism. It’s about our emotional responses – not, like Brahms’ implications of the poetry he quoted at the start of his F Minor Sonata’s Andante, just about being in love.
Liszt declared he was writing “Music of the Future.” Haydn, certainly, never cared about posterity in his day – few artists did, then – but Liszt felt if listeners today could not appreciate what he was writing, they would understand what he was doing in time.
I admit I’m not familiar with Liszt’s 1837 set of Etudes to know what exactly changed in the fifteen years in between – I would imagine Liszt-in-1852 was more extreme in his harmony even if much of the structural and melodic ideas are similar – but it’s interesting to note that in 1852, Wagner, considered one of Liszt’s leading acolytes, was just beginning work on what would become Das Rheingold, a few years after completing Lohengrin. He would begin composing the music for his more harmonically extreme Tristan und Isolde in 1857 and, once premiered in 1865, its impact on the Future of Music was decidedly strong. As Beethoven had been the giant standing behind (if not over) most composers of the 19th Century, Wagner was the dominating figure over most of the composers for the rest of it, long into the 20th Century. If you didn’t follow Wagner’s Path, you reacted against him and took the other one, and that would’ve been Brahms’. Curiously, the 20th Century composer usually blamed for the Death of Tonality, Arnold Schoenberg, eventually found more influence in the skeletal workings beneath the surface of Brahms’ music even as he broke away completely from all sense of a tonal center which we usually attribute to Wagner’s influence.
And yet, if you listen carefully, many of those core values of Brahms' maturity – the use of underlying motives to unify often completely contrasting passages, the fact that everything seemed to stem from something else in an organic manner, not just a succession of pleasant themes and pretty harmonies – are already present when, a young man of 20, he made his first appearance on the musical stage.
– Dick Strawser
