Denk Think: Some Thoughts about the Elusive Interpretation of the Transcendent

Jeremy Denk will be playing a recital in Carnegie Hall on Friday. More importantly, for those of us in Central Pennsylvania, he’ll be playing the same program for Market Square Concerts at Whitaker Center on Wednesday at 8pm.

Frankly, I’d go even if he were just live-blogging, but he’s playing a prelude and fugue by Bach, four works by Franz Liszt, the Bartók Piano Sonata (which I haven’t heard live since my grad school days) and Beethoven’s last piano sonata, the C Minor Sonata, Op. 111, which I’d heard Denk play at Gretna Music some summers ago.

He’s also just recorded the Beethoven for Nonesuch, paired with two books of etudes by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti (better known in this country to a certain generation of movie-goers who might recall two of his works used in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey). With any luck, there will be enough CDs for sale in the lobby – from what I’ve heard of it, it’s a keeper, even for the Beethoven alone.

(You can read Ellen Hughes' article about Denk's performance as well as an appearance in Central PA with another giant of the keyboard, Emanuel Ax, here.)

Now, one usually evaluates a performer on their performance – that seems to be what it’s all about – and how they communicate the music to you, the listener. But putting a program (or a recording) together can be a daunting challenge and sometimes it feels like a slap-dash program of this and that that’s thrown together to meet certain expectations can often lead to a slap-dash performance that, individually, might prove very entertaining or even meaningful but often can fall a little short on the whole.

But a thoughtful performer – especially one who wants to get something out of the performance himself – puts a lot of thought into a program and one thing Jeremy Denk is noted for is his intelligent approach to his programming as well as to his performances.

The idea of a performer being labeled “intelligent,” however, may prove off-putting or intimidating to someone who’s out to be entertained – “I could’ve stayed home and watched reruns of Dancing with the Stars instead!” – but there is so much music out there that is beyond its mere entertainment value, it’s good to have someone you can trust it to, a mind that’s willing to get underneath the surface and come to terms with the essence of the music (that indefinable otherness that makes it so difficult to describe and explain why it’s so great). Otherwise, we’d sit there and wait for the big tunes or marvel at how fast the fingers can move.

There are several interviews with Jeremy Denk available on YouTube – this one, a New York City Arts profile, is as good as any:

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Or this one, from a series courtesy of NPR, in which he describes the music he’s playing – how the composer works, how he’s taking it apart before putting it back together for you, rather than just playing the notes on the page: here’s a bit on the Aria that forms the basis of the Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach:

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Most people would listen to the tune in the right hand – after all, that’s what’s most “obvious,” isn’t it? But that isn’t what Bach is doing in the course of this monumental piece: the theme itself is built on an even simpler harmonic bass-line (the lowest notes of the left hand) which, according to standard practice, Bach expands to create in itself a satisfying progression of implied chords which then support the melody we’re enjoying so much.

This is why some people have problems realizing the organic unity of these variations: what’s being varied, the generating material for all this music, is not the most obvious thing we hear but what supplies the foundation that, whether we hear it or not, keeps such a vast piece of music from falling into 30 episodes in the life of a pianist.

While the program had changed from its initial appearance in our brochures – sometimes I understand why the promotion doesn’t include what they’ll be playing because that’ll probably change anyway – the way it stands now (barring any unforeseen tweakings or outright alterations) combines works in a comparative logic and I mean by that the chance to compare, for instance, the last of Bach’s Preludes & Fugues from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier with the last of Beethoven’s sonatas, or works by Liszt, one of the greatest pianists of the 19th Century, inspired by the great Italian poets of the 14th Century in between a prelude inspired by a Bach cantata (Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Sagen – Weeping, Lamenting, Worrying, Fearing) and a transcription capturing one of the most transcendent moments from any of his friend (and son-in-law) Richard Wagner’s operas, what we know as “Isolde’s Liebestod” from the opera Tristan & Isolde.

Missing from the rather daunting set of Liszt pieces is the “virtuosic” Liszt, our typical perception of him as a 19th Century Rock Star, all flash and dash who was all about Entertainment. But this follows a work by Béla Bartók, another Hungarian composer who is better known for his use of folk music, just as Franz Liszt had captured Europe’s imagination with his Hungarian Rhapsodies. Unfortunately, these had nothing to do with folk music but most people assumed they were Hungarian folk music: actually they were inspired by the urban popular music of the Gypsies when people (including Brahms) used to hang out in Vienna’s smokier taverns to listen to their favorite gypsy bands the way people (including Elliott Carter) in more recent times would hang out in clubs to listen to their favorite jazz bands.

But Bartók’s infrequently heard Piano Sonata, while owing much of its musical language to his Hungarian roots, also marks a change in his own under-the-surface language. While he’s not quoting actual folk music as it may seem to a non-Hungarian, he has taken the essence of it to create his own “imaginary folk music” (I’m not sure if the phrase belongs to the composer who was notoriously tight-lipped about his compositional approach, or a well-meaning biographer but the idea is apt enough for our purposes) which looks back in one sense to Liszt’s virtuosity as it looks ahead to what we might hear today in Ligeti’s Etudes. It does make one wonder if there isn’t some national genetic marker in these composers’ musical fingerprints beyond the role of mere influence.

There’s also another aspect of Bartók that might not come to mind easily and that is the role of Bach – not so much his magisterial contrapuntal style but the transformation, perhaps, of the sheer joy one hears in the gigues that end Bach’s keyboard suites which might have toes tapping and heads bopping before one realizes, “hey, this is a fugue!” There’s a contrapuntal sense, a certain left-braininess in Bartók’s finale, aside from all the foot-stomping, drum-pounding clusters in the background, that gives the work its dynamic rhythmic excitement, one that might not be so far removed from Bach’s sense of gaiety, not that I would call it “Bachianas hungarieras.” But the contrast with Bach-inspired Liszt to follow may be less obvious than you’d think.

Of course, the program has to end with Beethoven’s last sonata because where else would you put it on a recital? After that ending – one of the most transcendent in all of music, as far as I’m concerned – no more music is really necessary (damn, I was hoping for an encore).

When Denk played Op. 111 at Gretna, paired with Charles Ives transcendental “Emerson” Sonata, I was doing the pre-concert talk. There is so much to say about Beethoven’s C Minor Sonata but instead I chose to read an excerpt about the work from a famous novel that examines the depths of creativity and genius, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. This was from Chapter 8, when the music teacher Wendell Kretzschmar (who hails, fictionally, from Pennsylvania) is giving a lecture about Beethoven’s Sonata, specifically why there’s no 3rd movement. I can’t quote it all, here – it’s very extensive and there are copyright laws to be broken if I do – but I highly recommend it, especially in John E. Woods recent translation.

It is the moment when the young composer who’s the focus of the story is awakened to the power of music to connect over time and generations, between creator and listener.

(It seems only fair to bring Thomas Mann into the discussion since, Petrarch and Dante aside, as you can see in the video recorded in Denk's apartment, his walls are covered with bookshelves and he can toss off a reference to Proust, not trying to sound pretentious, with the best of them. By the way, if you’ve already discovered Proust, might I recommend Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities?)

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There are, of course, many ways to play these pieces. Someone who is not a trained musician (and too many who are) might think everything is there on the printed page with all the notes and directions the composer gives us. How, then, can one performer play it differently than another if it’s all the same?

That’s just it – it’s not all the same, and even one pianist will admit that, depending on any number of variables – whether or not you’ve had your favorite brand of coffee that morning; how the spring-like weather of Central Pennsylvania might affect you; the fact you’re performing in a place like Carnegie Hall with all its history and historical and professional baggage (practice, baby, practice) – that can create subtle differences from one performance to the next, hitting the notes aside (in itself, enough of a challenge). A “different” piece? Well, not obviously but intrinsically – and how well, in the long run, it reaches and affects the listener, this mysterious communication of the composer’s idea distilled through the performer’s idea to reach the audience’s idea.

The Beethoven is one of those works that an artist or listener can keep coming back to and discovering new and different things in it, for lack of a less specific term. The first movement is a fairly standard “sonata form” by Beethoven’s approach. There’s a slow searching introduction leading to a dynamic, dramatic first theme (or germ of a theme that keeps on spinning) and what seems like a second theme but never really turns into one – it’s a contrast in a major key with a different mood before we’re thrown back into the dramatic struggle of the first theme. There’s a not unexpected development section – with a lot of fugal writing (as Beethoven was fond of in his later works – his last three sonatas were written simultaneously with the massive Missa Solemnis and the Grosse Fuge of Op.133 was not long into the future) – and a not unexpected recapitulation before the drama seems to collapse rather than resolve.

The second movement – much longer – is a complete contrast and, like the Goldberg Variations, is based on a simple theme which Beethoven labels Arietta as opposed to Bach’s Aria. The variations evolve melodically and, as you’d expect, become more complex, bringing in an element of syncopation atypical for Beethoven’s contemporaries. Suddenly, it erupts in what is often referred to as the “ragtime” or “boogie-woogie” variation – generations before such a style existed and which is only an inaccurate after-the-fact descriptor – that, after incredible intensity, turns into a series of expansive meditations, complete with elongated trills, on a short motive which Mann’s Kretzschmar refers to as his “fare-thee-well” motive.

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“After all its ordeals, the motive, this D-G-G, undergoes a gentle transformation. As it takes its farewell and becomes in and of itself a farewell, a call and a wave of goodbye, it experiences a little melodic enhancement. After an initial C, it takes on a C-sharp before the D, so that it now no longer scans as ‘sky of blue’ or ‘meadow-land’ but as ‘O – thou sky of blue,’ ‘greenest meadow-land,’ ‘fare-thee-well for good;’ and this added C-sharp is the most touching, comforting, poignantly forgiving act in the world. It is like a painfully loving caress of the hair, the cheek – a silent, deep gaze into the eyes for one last time. It blesses its object, its dreadful journeys now past, with overwhelming humanization, lays it on the hearer’s heart as a farewell, forever, lays it so gently that tears well. ‘Now for-get the pain!’ it says. ‘God was – great in us.’ ‘All was – but a dream.’ ‘Hold my – memory dear.’ Then it breaks off. Fast, hard triplets scurry toward a convenient final phrase that could easily conclude many another piece.”
(– Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, translated by John E. Woods, Knopf NYC 1997.)
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Here is a performance of the complete Sonata, Op. 111 by Beethoven, with Jeremy Denk recorded live at GreenSpace during a Beethoven marathon:


The discussion “why there is no 3rd movement,” the expected finale after this slow movement’s set of variations, is unnecessary after you hear it. Beethoven essentially combines elements of both slow movement and finale (even a scherzo in those ‘ragtime’ moments) that anything further is pointless. When his friend and secretary Anton Schindler asked why he didn’t write a third movement, Beethoven may have been joking (as he often did) that he had no time to write one; perhaps it was only after he was done, he too realized he’d already said all he needed to say on the matter.

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As if to prove a point that no music is necessary after Beethoven’s Op. 111, I will now add something about the work that opens the program – the Bartók Piano Sonata.

Here are two different performances by entirely different performers of the opening movement of Bartók’s sonata dating from 1926. The first is the ebullient Lang Lang who is clearly enjoying himself and whose performance is guaranteed to bring down the house:
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Now, here is a second performance (also recorded live) with a pianist I first heard when we were both grad students at Eastman and whom I found courtesy of YouTube purely by accident: here is Mark Westcott’s take on the same music:

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Quite a difference, no? The first, of course, is more exciting, focusing on the sheer physicality of performing the music. Most people would stand up and cheer because it is, after all, faster and louder than the second performance. These same people would not even consider this the least bit vulgar because it pushes all the right buttons – if you’re watching American Idol.

For some, Westcott’s performance may seem by comparison “too elegant” if that’s possible but I point out that the composer’s own tempo indication is Allegro moderato – in other words, a moderately lively tempo, not “prestissimo vulgarando.”

And yet the notes are the same. Please explain…

Dick Strawser

Change Is Constant: The Linden Quartet Adds Schubert to the Mix

“Nothing is as unchangeable as change itself.”

I’m not sure who said that first but in one form or another, it’s usually attributed to the Greek philosopher, Heraklitos, who died around 475 BC, so that means the idea’s been around a fairly long time.

This is why everything – from political promises to concert brochures – should come stamped with “subject to change.”

Market Square Concerts has been dealing with changes or the possibility of changes due to any number of reasons since the current season was first established, before the brochure went to press. Artists have reconsidered and, perhaps, refined their programs. And of course, given the variables of reality, artists sometimes are unable to perform. Programming two years in advance, as is often the case, one can never assure one’s health.

So, faced with a family emergency, one of the violinists of the Linden Quartet, playing at Temple Ohev Sholom as part of this weekend’s program with Market Square Concerts, is unable to perform. Finding a substitute to fit in with the established personality of an organism like a string quartet is not always easy, especially considering the repertoire.

Playing the Mozart Quintet at Cumberland Valley High School on Friday

Fortunately, the Linden Quartet was able to bring in a violinist from another quartet but unfortunately she’s not familiar with the two new composers’ music on the scheduled program and there was not enough time for her to learn them.

So the two short pieces by John Corigliano and Kelly-Marie Murphy’s “Dark Energy,” a quite recent work from 2007, have landed on the cutting-room floor. This is too bad – I know I was not the only person in town looking forward to hearing them.

Fortunately, the Mozart Clarinet Quintet (which you can read about here) and the Mendelssohn A Minor Quartet are still on the program, but the concert will now open with another early quartet by another young composer, one that Franz Schubert wrote for his family’s quartet to play during their after-dinner relaxations, something that lots of people did in the days before television, creating their own entertainment.

Schubert at 17

It was written in November of 1813 when Schubert was 16. His father, a school-teacher, was an amateur cellist and his older brother Ferdinand was a talented violinist. Another older brother, Ignaz, also played the violin, so Franz, who played the piano as well as the violin, ended up playing viola in these family gatherings.

During the previous summer, in addition to writing a couple of string quartets, some vocal trios for male voices, an Octet for winds (not to be confused with the masterpiece of his maturity) and numerous exercises for his composition teacher, Antonio Salieri – yes, the same Salieri traditionally maligned with having poisoned Mozart (great theater but totally lacking in proof) – Schubert was unhappy with the way things were going at his school. Some friends of his had gotten in trouble of a political nature (during the era of Napoleonic wars, any form of critical comment against the state was picked up by the secret police). His grades were not good – he was sub-standard in Latin and he'd failed Math which meant he might lose his scholarship.

Schubert was convinced he should quit school and abandon any further school education so he could avoid wasting his time, as he saw it, on subjects that had no relevance to his musical development. Plus, he was easily the most talented musician at the school and had few challenges there, compared to those that could be offered among the circle of Salieri’s other pupils.

On October 4th, he and his brothers performed a little cantata he’d written for their father’s Name Day. Later that month, he received news that he had been awarded a scholarship (not as generous as some of his other friends received) on the condition he improve his grades, work harder and behave well. He was also told in this letter that “singing and music are but a subsidiary matter… good morals and diligence in study are of prime importance and an indispensable duty for all those who wish to enjoy the advantages” of this scholarship.

Since young Franz disagreed with this attitude, he told his father he was going to leave the school but Ferdinand, no doubt aware of the argument this would create, suggested that – especially to avoid being drafted into the army (would he, given his height – or lack of it – as well as his bad eyesight, have been found acceptable?) and as some insurance against financial insecurity in the future – Franz should attend the Imperial Teacher’s Training College to prepare for life as a school teacher like his father, an uncle, and his two older brothers.

On October 28th, then, Franz Schubert completed his first symphony. Two days later, he began work on a new opera which he would work on with Maestro Salieri – a full, three-act singspiel called The Devil’s Pleasure-Palace – followed by two more string quartets, including the E-flat Quartet, D.87.

Here's a classic performance by the Amadeus Quartet recorded in 1955. By the way, ignore the rather high-looking opus number you often find with this piece - Op.125! The Deutsch Catalog is a better indicator of its actual chronology in the composer's life.

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At this time, Beethoven, a major figure in Vienna’s musical world, had been having a difficult patch, following the summer of 1812 when he ostensibly met The Immortal Belovéd at a spa in Bohemia (and presumably, not long afterward, broke up with her). We know little of his daily life after his return to Vienna that fall but we know he composed little – and was apparently not in good health much of the time, either – until he produced what became a popular success, Wellington’s Victory following the arrival in June of 1813 of news heralding the first break in Napoleon’s control of Europe, though it was not performed until December of that year at the same concert that saw the premiere of his 7th Symphony. This was a month after Schubert composed this little quartet of his. The 8th Symphony, also completed before the end of 1812, wasn’t heard in public until 1814. Likewise, he had completed the Op. 95 String Quartet three years earlier but it wasn't premiered until 1814, either.

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Mendelssohn at 20

Fast forward fourteen years to Berlin, where Felix Mendelssohn is 18. News had been received earlier that year that the great Ludwig van Beethoven had died.

By the time Felix Mendelssohn composed his String Quartet in A Minor, he had already written a few other pieces you might be familiar with: his Overture to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Octet for Strings, both masterpieces for someone of any age, much less a boy in his mid-teens.

Opus numbers only confuse the issue, here: the Octet Op. 20 was written two years before the String Quartet Op. 13, and the famous Overture, his Op. 21, was written the year before the quartet. To make matters worse, the second string quartet he published was actually written two years later than the first but published as Op. 12 so it is therefore always called the String Quartet No. 1.

Just another music-illogical observation…

Anyway, keep this in mind as you listen to Mendelssohn’s quartet.

Here's a performance with the Melos Quartet complete with score (yes, it says "in A Major" but after the introduction, most of the quartet is centered around A Minor).

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Yes, there's a motive similar to Beethoven’s “Muss es sein/Must it be?” motive from the Master’s last quartet, Op.135 - Mendelssohn introduces his motive in the 3rd measure of the second system in the score above. But rather than the presumably philosophical implications of Beethoven’s motive, Mendelssohn’s motive, setting the words “Ist es wahr/Is it true?” in a song he composed a few months earlier (and which, by the way, is published as Op. 9, No. 1), asks if it’s true the girl he’s in love with will be waiting for him at the tree-lined walk. After all, how philosophical is an 18-year-old likely to be?

More importantly, it was composed a year after Beethoven’s Op.135 was completed (and not yet premiered or published), so it was still hot-off-the-press contemporary music – in fact, not even off the press, if it hadn’t been published yet: how did Mendelssohn find out about it before the days of photocopying or on-line self-publishing?

One assumes musicians from Vienna who knew of Beethoven's music and may have been familiar with what he'd been writing at the end of his life, had traveled to Berlin and visited the Mendelssohns who, on Sunday afternoons, gave locally famous musicales which often included many musicians, artists and philosophers who lived in or were visiting the Prussian capital.

So, undoubtedly, this quartet was definitely inspired by the memory of this most famous contemporary composer of the day, at least to anyone interested in New Music. Mendelssohn's father, a wealthy Berlin banker, may not have shared his son’s enthusiasm for it and in fact Beethoven’s Late Quartets continued to leave future generations of listeners in a cloud of uncertainty. It surprises me that a young man of such conservative tastes as Felix Mendelssohn would have taken such an interest in such “avant-garde” music, but that's the case.

Technically, there’s more Late Beethoven referenced in Mendelssohn’s A Minor Quartet than just the similarity of the opening motive and its being posited as a question. At points, Mendelssohn shows he is familiar with Beethoven’s Op.95 (published in 1816) as well as Op. 132, especially the operatic-style recitatives for the first violin in the last movement. This quartet had been premiered in late-1825, not long after its completion. How soon did it reach Berlin?

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So here we have two youthful quartets by teen-aged composers not yet at the level of greatness we ordinarily associate with them (keep in mind, Schubert’s reputation was largely posthumous).

And of course, there’s that “what if” aspect, considering Schubert died at 31 and Mendelssohn at 38 – or for that matter, Mozart, given the “lateness” of his Clarinet Quintet, at 35.

Schubert’s was written to entertain his family and whatever friends might have dropped by to hear them play some evening. Mendelssohn’s was composed to honor a great composer who had been a significant inspiration to him and was now lost to him.

Who knew where the future would take either of them?

- Dick Strawser

Mozart & the Clarinet: A Quintet for February

Despite Valentine's Day, the Lunar New Year, Mardi Gras and the beginning of Lent in addition to Groundhog Day and Presidents' Day all in February, the weather still often leaves us wishing for something to warm us up, inside and out.

The Linden String Quartet

Well, this weekend, the Linden Quartet arrives in Harrisburg for a performance with clarinetist Christopher Grymes in a program that could do just that, featuring a string quartet by a teen-aged Felix Mendelssohn and some short works by two living composers: “Dark Energy” by Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy and two miniatures by John Corigliano entitled “Snapshot: Circa 1909” (inspired by a photograph of his father as a child playing the violin) and something that sounds much more delightful than its title may imply, “A Black November Turkey.”

And – as one would expect from the fifth player on the program – one of the great clarinet quintets in the repertoire.

Not that there are many to choose from: Mozart or Brahms would be the most likely suspects and the one by Carl Maria von Weber has been making more appearances in recent years than previously.

In this case – on Saturday evening at 8pm at Temple Ohev Sholom in uptown Harrisburg, Market Square Concerts presents a performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet – usually regarded as one of the great works in the chamber music repertoire, period.

Here is a performance recorded live in Vienna with Sabine Meyer joining the Hagen Quartet: it begins at 1:10 into this clip and continues to 33:19.
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(As a bonus, this clip also includes the Clarinet Concerto in a performance with Michael Collins and the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra in a not very good video that's probably pirated, anyway...)

I suppose it would be easy to point out that the great piano quintets were for the most part written by pianists: Schumann, even though by then he could no longer play, wrote it for his wife Clara, one of the greatest pianists of the century); Brahms and Shostakovich were fine concert pianists. Other than John Adams, I can't think of any major composer who was a clarinetist. Instead, Mozart, Weber, Brahms (and more recently, Elliott Carter) found their inspiration in the playing of great clarinetists.

When Mozart wrote his quintet, the clarinet was only a recent addition to the orchestra. Before that, it was primarily found in “dance bands” and hadn't yet evolved into what we know as the clarinet today. There was an early 17th Century Baroque instrument called the “chalumeau” which had basically just the lower register of a modern clarinet. By expanding its middle and upper registers around 1700, and the sound was so bright, it was called “the little trumpet,” the word 'Clarino' the Italian word for trumpet. Even though the instrument makers soon tamed this hybrid into the mellower sound we're familiar with, it still kept its trumpet-like name.

Though it was used in the opera pit, the clarinet was not standard in the orchestra until around 1790. Mozart used it occasionally in his last piano concertos and symphonies. In fact, because Vienna had such fine wind players, the wind writing in these concertos was a remarkable addition to the Mozart Sound. One of those wonderful wind players was a clarinetist named Anton Stadler, one of Mozart's Masonic brothers and a close friend who had arrived in the Imperial capital of Vienna around the same time Mozart did.

In the mid-1780s, Mozart was writing music to be played in the home of one of his more affluent friends, the botanist Nicholas Joseph von Jacquin, several pieces involving clarinet and the alto-member of the family, the basset-horn (which is neither a horn nor a dog with big brown eyes). In 1786, not long after he completed “The Marriage of Figaro,” he composed the so-called “Kegelstatt Trio” for clarinet, viola and piano – written to be played at the Jacquins. The piano was played by daughter Frantziska Jacquin (one of Mozart's piano students). Mozart played the viola and Anton Stadler, the clarinet.

A few months later, in January of 1787, the Mozarts went to Prague for the triumphant performances there of “The Marriage of Figaro,” traveling with an entourage that included Anton Stadler.

The next year, after a fairly fallow six-month period that involved an extended trip to Berlin in the hopes of finding work – or at least some remunerative performances and commissions – Mozart completed the Clarinet Quintet with Stadler in mind, entering it into his thematic catalogue on September 19th, 1789. Earlier that summer, for no reason whatsoever, apparently, he composed his last three symphonies in the space of about six weeks. And soon he would begin a new opera, “Cosi fan tutte.”

It was during these last years of his life that Mozart, dealing with frequent money problems – he was a genius as a composer, but like many, had issues with reality – was borrowing from his masonic brothers, especially the banker Puchberg. But when he had a little money himself, he would help out his friends, if possible, and we know he loaned money to Stadler around the time he was writing the Clarinet Concerto for him in 1791. Stadler, a struggling musician, had borrowed money from Puchberg before and the banker had to sue him for repayment in the mid-1780s.

In 1791, there was another trip to Prague, this time for the coronation opera, “La Clemenza di Tito.” Stadler went along as a kind of musical secretary but primarily as a ringer for the orchestra, playing the difficult clarinet part Mozart had envisaged for the opera. The main reason he chose not to stay in Prague professionally had to deal with the lack of a high level of talent there: Prague was, after all, a provincial capital without the international resources and fine players that were available in Vienna. Besides, most of the aristocracy who'd support the arts in Prague spent much of their year living in Vienna, anyway.

And so, when Mozart returned from the not quite so satisfying experience with “La Clemenza di Tito” (which the new empress called a “porchería tedesca” or “German swinery”), Mozart composed his Clarinet Concerto for Stadler who then premiered it in Prague on October 16th to great acclaim.

Seven weeks later, after the premiere of “The Magic Flute,” Mozart was dead.

But Stadler favored his own hybrid version of the not-yet-standardized clarinet, extending the lower end of the range, something now called a Basset-Clarinet. The problem is, this instrument never caught on and when the concerto was eventually published after Mozart's death, someone arranged the part so the lowest notes could be played on the now-standard instrument. Ever the free-lance musician dealing with financial concerns, Stadler eventually pawned the manuscript score he owned, and so without Mozart's original copy, reconstructing it has always been conjecture.

But even in the Quintet, listen to how Mozart uses this lower range of the instrument. Stadler was actually the second clarinetist in the imperial court orchestra – his brother Johann played first clarinet – so his position gave him more opportunity to work on the lower register. Was Johann Stadler a better musician because he played 'first'?

A contemporary critic wrote of Anton Stadler's playing: “I would not have thought that a clarinet could imitate the human voice so deceptively as you imitate it. Your instrument is so soft, so delicate in tone that no-one who has a heart can resist it."

And since it was Anton who became good friends with Mozart, it was probably the friendship that had a great deal to do with the music he composed for him – not just “who's the best player around.”

We can listen to this music as a work of art to inspire us with its beauty or as something to simply entertain us – but it's also interesting to think of the music as the product of a life, the result of friendships and the relationships that develop between real people, not just notes on a page.

It's the performers' responsibility to bring these notes “to life” – and it's ours to receive them and make them part of ours.

- Dick Strawser

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Photo credit: The Linden String Quartet - by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

The Schumann Trio Plays Some Brahms, Too

We often wonder what inspired a composer to write a particular piece. We know a stormy passage across the Baltic Sea on a rickety ship prompted Wagner’s equally stormy overture to the opera, “The Flying Dutchman,” an opera about a ghostly ship and its strange crew and captain. Did Beethoven really write the “Moonlight Sonata” because he was in love with the woman he dedicated it to? Was Mozart’s “Kegelstatt” Trio – for clarinet, viola and piano – really written while he was playing a kind of lawn-bowling game?

And, for that matter, what prompted Johannes Brahms, who’d announced his retirement from composing, to make a come-back with a number of works for clarinet – like the A Minor Trio we’re going to hear the Schumann Trio play on Tuesday night’s concert with Market Square Concerts at 8pm at Whitaker Center?

(You can read about some other works on the program in earlier posts: here, for Schumann's "Fairy Tales" and here for a work by Rebecca Clarke.)

As I’d said before, chamber music is often music played by friends for friends. It can also be written for friends.

While the bowling game (“skittles” or “kegelstatt”) might’ve been behind Mozart’s little trio, the whole occasion of the piece concerned a dinner party which ended up with some music-making: Anton Stadler, a leading clarinetist in Vienna (though not as famous as his brother, Johann), was a guest, as was Mozart who loved to play the viola in chamber music ensembles, and the host’s daughter was one of Mozart’s more able piano students. Not only does the whole work exude this relaxed, “un-buttoned” atmosphere of friends enjoying each other’s company after dinner, it wasn’t long until Mozart – who wrote great woodwind parts in his piano concertos and operas because of the great players in Vienna (as opposed to more provincial Salzburg) – wrote Stadler two more works: the Clarinet Quintet K.581 and the Clarinet Concerto, K.622, both masterpieces and both major works for any clarinetist’s repertoire.

Just as Mozart’s cousin Carl Maria von Weber wrote his two concertos and a clarinet quintet for clarinetist Heinrich Bärmann (you can read more of the story behind these works, here), and Ludwig Spohr, one of the most famous violinists and a very popular composer in his day, wrote four clarinet concertos for Johann Simon Hermstedt, it was a clarinetist whom Johannes Brahms heard playing these works that brought him out of retirement.

With his great beard and fussily grumpy personality, we think of Brahms as an old man though at the time he told his publisher in 1890, after his Op.111 String Quintet, that he was going to stop composing, now, he was only 57 years old. This G Major String Quintet hardly sounds like a farewell piece by an old man with its exuberant opening and youthful energy, the finale one of the liveliest of the gypsy finales Brahms ever composed. When a close friend heard the piece in a read-through, he cried out “Brahms in the Prater!”, thinking of the famous amusement park in Vienna where Brahms liked to hang out with his friends. Brahms shouted back “You’ve got it! And all the pretty girls there, too, eh?”

Why Brahms felt the need to “retire” is another matter, but the fact that he even thought that – much less made an official announcement that this would be his last piece – is striking.

So how did Brahms handle his retirement?

In March the next year – 1891, Brahms a few months shy of 58 – the composer went to Meinigen, a small city-state that was now part of the German Empire, where the local count had maintained a fine orchestra, one Brahms often used to “try out” his new symphonies before taking them to Vienna. It was meant to be a good time, a holiday – honorary dinners with Brahms decked out in formal attire wearing all his medals and listening to the orchestra play his recent 4th Symphony, played so well, he asked them to play it again.

Critic Eduard Hanslick, Johannes Brahms & Richard Mühlfeld

He also heard their principal clarinetist, a fellow named Richard Mühlfeld who arrived in Meinigen almost 20 years earlier as a violinist and for some reason, learned to play the clarinet, succeeding in three years’ time to become the orchestra’s principal clarinetist in addition to being the orchestra’s assistant conductor. In the 1880s, he also became the principal clarinetist at Wagner’s opera house in Bayreuth but remained for the duration of his playing career in Meinigen.

Now, Brahms listened to him play the quintet by Mozart and concertos by Weber and Spohr. They quickly became friends and Brahms sat around listening to him play for hours at a time. This wasn’t just a sense of discovering a talented musician – something that had drawn him to his life-long friend and collaborator Joseph Joachim (for whom he wrote the Violin Concerto) or Robert Haussmann, the cellist in Joachim’s quartet, for whom he wrote the 2nd Cello Sonata but also the Double Concerto with Joachim (not until after he’d heard Dvořák’s Cello Concerto did he consider maybe writing a cello concerto of his own for Haussmann, but by then, it was too late, he felt). With Mühlfeld, it was the epiphany of also discovering an instrument.

He had not seriously considered the clarinet before, outside of its role in the orchestra. Suddenly hearing how Mühlfeld handled the instrument’s three different layers of sound, the registers that can sometimes be problematic in less proficient hands, he delighted in the nuances of sound Mühlfeld made, showing Brahms the clarinet could sing like a fine mezzo (and Brahms always enjoyed a fine singer’s voice) or how it could be shaded like an exceptionally played viola. He dubbed Mühlfeld “Fräulein Klarinette” for having seduced him with this mellifluous voice (as there had been so many fräuleins in Brahms' life before).

The net result of this initial flirtation was the Trio in A Minor, written that summer for clarinet, cello and piano while Brahms was vacationing at Bad Ischl, a fashionable spa-town east of Salzburg popular with the Austrian Imperial Court. In 1880, he spent a not very pleasant summer there between the weather and an ear infection that worried him he might be going deaf, despite writing two new piano trios: the C Major and one in E-flat that never made it to the publisher and was no doubt subsequently burned on the altar of his ever-present insecurities. During 1889’s visit, he revised his Op. 8 Piano Trio to the version we usually hear today.

Some react to this new trio which, by comparison to the Op.111 Quintet, sounds like a more austere affair, as a cello sonata with clarinet obbligato: perhaps, since he was just trying his fling with Fräulein Klarinette, he was still more aware of Herr Hausmann’s cello. This changed, however, with the work he immediately wrote next, finishing up this fruitful summer of his so-called retirement with the Quintet in B Minor for Clarinet and Strings which is all about the clarinet and makes one wish he had gone on to write a concerto for the instrument as well as, eventually, two sonatas.

Brahms described the quintet as “a far greater folly” than the recently completed trio, though it would become one of his chamber music masterpieces. The trio, for some reason, has not caught on nearly as much and, frankly, I see it less on clarinetists’ programs than you’d think, given the choice of repertoire.

It's interesting, considering the nature of this program with the Schumann Trio, that the two works scheduled to open and close the evening are both late works by two composers who lives are inextricably intertwined: Robert Schumann, unaware the end was near, writing a work only a couple of weeks after he and his wife met Brahms, then just 20 years old; and a work by his protegee, written thirty-eight years later, having come back from a self-imposed retirement.

Brahms wrote to his old friend Clara Schumann, Robert's widow, racked with pain and barely able, at times, to walk, inviting her to come to Berlin to hear the first public performances of both the Trio and the Quintet:

"To listen to the clarinet player would mark a red-letter day in your life. ...You would revel, and I hope that my music would not interfere with your pleasure."

Unfortunately, Clara was unable to make the performance, but it would seem to have been a suitable rounding-out any artist interested in the on-going breath of one's artistic existence would have basked in, nostalgic for the past but pleasant in the presence of friends.

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This time, with the Schumann Trio which consists of a clarinetist, a violist and a pianist, we’ll hear the Trio in a slightly different format than originally intended.

Because there were not that many clarinetists out there – whether they could play such music, or not – Brahms’ publishers, no doubt delighted he was writing again at all, balked at the idea of so much time and effort spent on a piece that may not sell that well. In those days, much of a composer’s income (and certainly a publisher’s) came from the amateur market, people who would snap up the latest pieces of chamber music to play them at home with their friends. So Brahms agreed to making “viola versions” of these works, despite the importance of the clarinet’s very sound behind their inception.

So, the A Minor Trio is available for Viola, Cello and Piano, the B Minor Quintet as a string quartet with a prominent added viola part, and the two sonatas have gone on to become major works in any serious-minded viola player’s repertoire.

And the viola, incidentally, tunes its strings like a cello only an octave higher, so presumably it can play a cello part but in a different octave. Violists, habitually lacking in repertoire and not shy about purloining anything suitable (I once heard a friend play a recital which included a set of songs by Fauré, set in a mezzo’s range, which sounded wonderful as “songs without words”), could consider adapting this particular trio for their given combination. There is something lost in the compression of the registers, the viola’s being so similar to the clarinet, but there is also something poignant in their being two sides of not quite similar coins.

Again, finding reasonably good performances on You-Tube can amount to a carp-shoot (seizing the day), but here is the original version with cello, to give you an idea of the piece with which Brahms came out of retirement, even if only briefly.

Clarinetist Paul Meyer, cellist Jing Zhao and pianist Eric LeSage in this performance recorded in a museum in Denmark:

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- Dick Strawser

A Quorum of the Schumann Trio Plays Something by Rebecca Clarke

Rebecca Clarke in 1919

The Schumann Trio’s performance at Whitaker on Tuesday at 8pm includes a rarely heard composer by the name of Rebecca Clarke – her “Prelude, Allegro and Pastorale,” a.k.a. Three Pieces for Clarinet and Viola. Also scheduled for this program are two late-works by two closely related composers, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms as well as a few pieces by Max Bruch of “Scottish Fantasy” fame. You can read more about the ensemble and the Schumann “Fairy Tales” in this earlier post and about Brahms and his post-retirement Trio in this subsequent post.

Rebecca Clarke is one of those composers who could’ve been, to turn a familiar movie phrase less often associated with artists, “a contender.”

She grew up at the end of the Victorian Era with its societal repression of women’s roles and was dominated by her equally repressive father, an American living in England and married to his German wife. The idea of a woman becoming a musician was unthinkable for a respectable lady and that she wanted to study composition seemed ridiculous, apparently, even to many fellow musicians. She was allowed to study the violin at the Royal Academy of Music – after all, she could still play for musicales at home – but two years later, when her violin teacher “proposed to her,” her father pulled her out of school (not, as usually thought, because he disagreed with her course of study - well, yes, that too, no doubt).

Two years later, now 21, she resumed her studies at the Royal College of Music, studying composition with one of the leading composers and teachers in England of that generation, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, who suggested she play the viola rather than the violin. It seems, in addition to Mozart’s preference – because you’re sitting in the middle of the action and get to appreciate everything going on around you (particularly good from a composer’s viewpoint) – the viola was also beginning to become a respectable solo instrument and there weren’t as many people who played it well. Very quickly, she became one the best viola players around and so she found herself getting more “gigs” rather than competing with all those violinists hanging about.

She also began studying composition more seriously and was the first of Stanford’s “female composer” students. She also worked with Ralph Vaughan Williams, a youngish composer despite pushing 40 (let’s say, he was a late-bloomer) on the verge of premiering his choral first symphony, “A Sea Symphony.”

However, when she criticized her father for his extra-marital affairs, he tossed her out of the house and cut off his financial support (stuffy old twit, he was: concerned about her being a lady and then pushing her out onto the streets because he was acting like a pig, but hey…). So, she left school once more, this time to find necessary employment, becoming the first female member of a major London orchestra when the legendary Sir Henry Wood hired her for the Queen’s Hall Orchestra.

Once the First World War began, she went to the United States to set up a career here, performing several pieces of her own on a program in New York City, one of them posted under the pseudonym “Anthony Trent.” Critics liked the Trent piece but ignored her other works, not even dismissing them.

A similar thing happened with the Viola Sonata she composed in 1919 when she submitted it to a competition sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (who also happened to be a friend and neighbor of hers). Out of over 70 entries, her sonata tied for first place with a work by Ernest Bloch. The assumption by the judges was that “Rebecca Clarke” must have been a pseudonym for Bloch himself, so the story goes, entering two pieces, because, certainly, no woman could’ve written such a good piece as that. The assumption is, the judges didn’t realize the second composer’s true identity until after the decision had been made. A woman composer! They were shocked, no doubt – shocked!

A Piano Trio had a similar fate in a subsequent competition, placing well but winning no prize. At least she did receive Mrs. Coolidge’s financial patronage as a result.

But this, alas, ended up being the peak of her career which was, by most retrospective glances, just beginning. Instead, she returned to England and focused primarily on performing, organizing concerts and making recordings. Visiting her brothers in America, she was stranded here at the start of World War II and, to support herself, became a governess for a family in Connecticut. Meanwhile, she composed some more – in 1941, one her better-known later pieces, the “Passacaglia on an Old English Theme” for viola and piano, using an old-fashioned modal tune attributed to Tallis. Presumably the work is dedicated to Benjamin Britten, a young ex-patriot English composer then staying in America (and hanging around Tanglewood) who would, five years later, write his own passacaglia on a theme by Purcell, better known as "The Young-Person's Guide to the Orchestra."

Rebecca Clarke

Next, she composed her “Prelude, Allegro and Pastorale” for viola and clarinet which appears on our program as “Three Pieces for Clarinet and Viola,” apparently for her brother and his wife. While the Allegro may be her “20th Century Voice,” the Pastorale reminds us of her English roots – in fact, both this and the earlier Passacaglia are clearly reminders of home – considering the typical concept of the “cow-looking-over-the-fence” pastoral school of composing which was so frequently aimed at Vaughan Williams and his colleagues.

Her music was largely overlooked – most people would say “forgotten,” but to be “forgotten” you first have to be known, and she never really was “known” as a fine composer. In fact, from her childhood on into her maturity, this lack of support and encouragement resulted in a chronic form of depression now called “dysthymia” which often prompted her to not compose.

Ironically, in the mid-1940s, she ran into an old school friend in New York City and they, now both in their 50s, decided to get married. James Frisken was a composer and pianist and on the faculty of the newly formed Juilliard School of Music and, even though he was supportive of his wife’s composing, she essentially stopped completely. A radio broadcast of some of her music on the occasion of her 90th Birthday revived interest in her existence, but she died in 1979 at the age of 93.

One wonders what she might have written had things been easier not just for her but for other women who wanted to become composers. Few had the indomitable butchness of Ethel Smyth to overcome the idiocy that held them back, and even then, who pays much attention to Dame Ethel’s music, these days?

While I can’t find any respectable presentation on You-Tube of the piece on this program, here’s a reasonable presentation of the first movement of her wonderful Viola Sonata. Molly Carr is the violist with Yi-fang Huang, the pianist.
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- Dick Strawser

The Schumann Trio Plays (Naturally Enough) Some Schumann

Now that we’ve survived the Old Year (in so many ways) and are headed into the New 2013, it’s time for January’s program with Market Square Concerts. This first concert of the year features an unusual trio which includes three musicians you might be familiar with.

They call themselves the Schumann Trio but they’re not, as you might think, a piano trio in the technical sense. In this case, it’s with clarinet, viola and piano. There’s not a lot written for that combination, but they’re scheduled to open the program with a work by the trio’s namesake, Robert Schumann, his Märchenerzälungen or “Fairy Tales,” and include along the way three pieces for clarinet and piano by English composer Rebecca Clarke, along with a few of the pieces written for the trio by Max Bruch.

And, repertoire being scarce, it should come as no surprise that they dip into another rare combination for clarinet, cello and piano by Johannes Brahms, for one of his valedictory works, his Clarinet Trio in A Minor – the viola can play the cello part an octave higher. (You can read about how this work came about, here.)

You can hear them Tuesday evening at Whitaker Center beginning at 8pm.

Incidentally, you’ll also be able to hear a young performer as a “warm-up act” for this concert. Pianist Daniel Glessner, currently studying at Penn State, will perform one of the Transcendental Etudes by Franz Liszt. It’s an opportunity for us to hear some of the many fine young musicians in the area: hearing great performers is one thing but it’s always nice to know the future of classical music is in good hands.


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Of our Schumann Trio, Violist Michael Tree has been best known as one-fourth of the legendary Guarneri Quartet who, during their long and illustrious career as one of the finest string quartets in the world, made frequent and welcome stops in Harrisburg with Market Square Concerts Past – most recently, in 2009, one of their very last concerts together. You may remember an additional and unexpected bit of excitement about that performance when concert-time had arrived but the quartet’s second violinist hadn’t, yet, being stuck somewhere in traffic – and so the program began with a series of anecdotes told by those players present (perhaps a quorum in the political sense but not good for Haydn, Dohnanyi or Ravel). You can read about that aspect of the performance, here.

Clarinetist Anthony McGill will be familiar, if not by name, as one of four performers, along with violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Gabriela Montero, freezing their combined assets off during the outdoor swearing-in ceremony at Barak Obama’s 1st Inauguration, playing a work by John Williams based on the Shaker Hymn, “Simple Gifts.” (I would imagine any of them no longer complain about playing outdoor concerts on hot humid summer days…)

Pianist Anna Polonsky, pursuing her own career as a soloist and chamber musician, has appeared in the region in past summers – speaking of outdoor concerts – with Gretna Music, among her appearances in Vienna, Amsterdam or New York City, appearing here as both solo recitalist and combining with string players for some little-heard music by Ernest Chausson. She has also joined the Guarneri Quartet, among others, for chamber music, playing at major chamber music festivals around the country. Incidentally, as a child, she attended the same music school in Moscow which MSC’s Artistic Director Peter Sirotin had also attended, even though he first heard her at a concert at Bard College – music can be a small world.

Now, with “Flu Season” in full swing – and we hope all of you are well and don’t want anyone to miss this performance – it’s perhaps a good time to mention that there’s always a possibility that expression “program subject to change” may be invoked. Executive Director Ya-Ting Chang has been deluged with a blizzard of last minute program changes for each of the remaining concerts of the season, a concert presenter’s nightmare. At least they came in before the program for these concerts went to press. Should there be any changes to this program, let’s say Clara Schumann knew all about these issues…

Which brings me to the Trio’s namesake and the first piece on the program which is by Robert Schumann, who spent much of his life as a writer about music and a composer trying to make his way in the world while married to one of the greatest pianists of the day and was, subsequently, often regarded as Mr. Clara Schumann. (As one of Clara Schumann’s admirers once asked the husband, standing idly by at a post-concert reception, “Are you a musician, too?”)

I often define chamber music as “music played by friends for friends.” Before the advent of smaller concert halls especially for the presentation of chamber music, chamber music concerts usually took place in people’s homes which could have been a specifically designated music room whether it was in Count Razumovsky’s palace in Beethoven’s day or the rather substantial house in Berlin where Felix Mendelssohn grew up and frequently performed (and composed for) Sunday afternoon musicales, or, for that matter, in the parlors (or living rooms) of professional or amateur musicians across Europe, whether your name was Robert Schumann or Johann Nepomuck Publik.

For instance, the summer that Schumann so industriously poured forth with his three string quartets, the piano quintet and the piano quartet (among other pieces), the unofficial world premiere of Schumann’s famous Piano Quintet took place in their living room, his wife Clara joined by friends of theirs for the occasion. There was a second performance planned (prior to its first public performance) in which Clara Schumann, pregnant with her second child, Elise, was to perform but illness prevented this and, at the last minute, Felix Mendelssohn stepped in and sight-read the part. (Therein, by the way, lies a hint…)

Most of Schumann’s well-known chamber music was written that busy year of 1842, overshadowing much of his later music. Another thing overshadowing his later music is his health and our attitudes about it. Throughout his life, Schumann was plagued with what had been called “manic depression” or, more recently, “bi-polar disorder.” Frequent bouts of creativity – such as the summer of 1842 – were balanced by its aftermath when, drained of energy, Schumann was unable to create and sank into periods of depression.

In the last years of his life, stuck in the provincial world of Düsseldorf as the town music director, his lack of skills as a conductor eventually made things worse: the orchestra refused to play under him as had the chorus. His bouts of illness, beginning with a “rheumatic attack” in the spring of 1852, should not imply a period of constant sickness: again, there were ups and downs and he was still quite prolific as a composer. And it was not an entirely unhappy time, either. It wasn’t until the fall of 1853 that the Schumanns met a young visitor by the name of Johannes Brahms, a 20-year-old friend of the violinist Joseph Joachim (for whom Schumann had written a Fantasie with orchestra as well as a violin concerto).

During this time, he wrote a number of “make-work” pieces, “mechanical” things like arrangements of earlier orchestral works for piano (for amateur study and performance) or writing piano accompaniments for some of Bach’s works for solo violin or solo cello, primarily to keep himself creatively active. But he also wrote a “Festive Overture” with chorus on the Rheinweinlied which was a popular success at its premiere along with his recently revised and now completed 4th Symphony (a work written initially in 1841 but set aside as unsatisfactory).

Not long after Brahms arrived on his doorstep, Schumann composed four short pieces for clarinet, viola and piano he called Märchenerzälungen or “Fairy Tales,” a nondescript image he had used for other, similar short pieces in the past (there's also a set of Märchenbilder or "Fairy Pictures" though often also translated as "Fairy Tales," written only two years earlier). They were written between October 9th and 11th. The following week, he wrote some short piano pieces (similar to many of his more famous earlier miniatures) which he called Gesänge der Frühe or “Songs of the Early Morning” which, as Schumann wrote to his publisher, “depict the emotions on the approach and advance of morning, but more an expression of feeling rather than painting.” Then he went back to writing accompaniments for, among other works, Paganini’s famous 24th Caprice.

By the end of the month, there was a little music-making in the Schumann parlor when several friends joined to honor Joseph Joachim (it is often described as a birthday celebration, though he was born in June and had just turned 22). There was a collaborative violin sonata which made use of Joachim’s favorite expression, “Frei aber einsam” (free but lonely) converted into the pitches F, A and E. Schumann wrote two movements, Brahms wrote the scherzo and another Schumann pupil, Albert Dietrich, wrote the first movement. Joachim and Clara played through them, and the violinist was to guess who composed them.

Unfortunately, the following year he was exhibiting “painful aural symptoms” (in the manner of hallucinations) and eventually, momentarily left unguarded while the family gathered for dinner, a distraught Schumann ran out of the house and jumped off the bridge into the Rhine. (You can read more about this in a post on my other blog, here.) Saved from drowning, Schumann was nonetheless sent off immediately to an asylum where he died two-and-a-half years later, shortly after his 46th birthday.

These “Fairy Tale” Pieces are typical of Schumann’s miniatures which often implied a story rather than depicted one in music. Growing up in a family where his father was a book-seller, Schumann developed an early love for “spinning tales” and, inspired by E.T.A. Hoffman (himself a writer as well as a composer), he was torn between wanting to become a writer and wanting to become a musician. Many of his early piano pieces tell or imply stories: Carnaval, Kreisleriana, Kinderszenen or even Waldscenen with pieces entitled Prophet Bird.

Again, these particular tales – identified only by descriptive tempo markings, more “with tender expression” rather than story-titles like “The Princess and the Pea” or whatever – create more the mood of a tale or set an appropriate tale-telling ambience than suggesting much less setting any specific story.

There are four of these in this set:
Lebhaft, nicht zu schnell (Light but not too fast);
Lebhaft und sehr markirt (Light and very marked [in rhythm]);  
Ruhiges Tempo, mit zartem Ausdruck (Quiet Tempo with sweet expression) and
Lebhaft, sehr markirt (Light, very marked, with a middle section in a Somewhat Quieter Tempo before the opening section returns).

Though this would not be my ideal preference for a performance, it gives you an idea of what to expect with Schumann’s very comfortable tale-spinning. Imagine yourself in a warm domestic atmosphere surrounded by friends listening to some delightful music. (And you get to follow along with the score - without having to turn pages.)
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- Dick Strawser

Beethoven & His Late Quartets: Part 1

Q&A with the Doric Quartet

Last night, at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore, the Doric Quartet gave us a preview of tonight's concert with excerpts from each work on the program, ending with the conclusion of  Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op.131. The program also includes quartets by Robert Schumann and Ernest Chausson – and will open with excerpts from Britten's Suite No. 1 for Solo Cello played by Julia Rosenbaum whom some of you may have heard play with the Harrisburg Symphony last weekend (she’s the 16-year-old winner of the latest “Rising Star” Concerto Competition held at Messiah College).

You can read more about the concert here in this earlier post (which includes directions to Temple Ohev Sholom at 2345 N. Front Street in Harrisburg). The concert begins at 8:00.

This post is about Beethoven’s Late Quartets, more or less in general. Part 2 of this post, Beethoven, the Late Quartets & His Audience, continues at my other blog which will also give you more background on these works, often described as the Himalayas of the String Quartet Repertoire.

It’s difficult to find the best performances or recordings on YouTube, even when there are so many good ones available. I’ve chosen this clip for two reasons: it’s complete in one “video” and it’s the Juilliard Quartet, recorded in 1960. However, the sound, transferred from vinyl, is not the best. But it is the Juilliard Quartet.

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The work is ostensibly in seven movements, though a few of them are little more than expanded introductions. The main difference between these movements and those in other works Beethoven composed, they’re played without interruption. It’s also interesting to realize how the composer balances the difficult movements (the opening fugue, for example) with a contrasting movement (at 6:47), a scherzo built on simpler phrase structures and dancelike rhythms that are more easily assimilated.

While the rhythmic design might give the whole work a more seamless flow, the frequent changes in tempo and mood might give it more discontinuity – rather than being closely organized around the tonal center of C-sharp Minor, there are six distinct “main” keys and thirty-one changes of tempo (ten more than in the longer Op.132 Quartet).

At 9:40, a brief recitative-like dialogue sets up the heart of the quartet, a long, largely slow set of variations (beginning at 10:34) with its own sense of unity and contrast.

This easier-to-follow movement is followed by a wild scherzo (at 25:56) ending with the glassy sound of the strings being played near the bridge, before rising up to a dramatic conclusion (31:03) that sets up a slow, tragic passage that leads us into the dramatic and intensely rhythmic finale (at 33:22).

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Beethoven in 1823

It’s possible these five late string quartets of Beethoven’s might never have been composed.

In 1822, Beethoven had been sketching at a new quartet while he was working on the Missa Solemnis and had offered both works (the nearly completed Mass and the as yet unfinished if unbegun quartet) to one of his publishers, C.F. Peters, who accepted the Mass but turned down the quartet, saying they were more interested in, say, piano trios or piano quartets. Besides, they had enough “beautiful quartets” by Ludwig Spohr, Bernhard Romberg and Pierre Rodé (how many of you have heard any quartets by either of these composer recently? Anyone? Bueller?)

So Beethoven put the quartet aside and resumed work on the Mass (he had finished the first draft).

Then, in late November, 1822, a Russian prince from St. Petersburg who had lived in Vienna and was quite familiar with Beethoven’s music, sent him a letter hoping to commission from him one, two or three string quartets. Beethoven immediately sent off a letter to a student of his then in London to look around and see if there was the possibility of “selling quartets” there which, it turned out, was answered in the affirmative. He also pursued other arrangements with another publisher, meaning he could write something for Prince Galitsin who would pay for its being composed, and then make additional money from publishers in England, Germany and Vienna.

They argued about fees, the publishers feeling Beethoven’s asking price too steep, though the Prince was willing to pay whatever Beethoven wanted. The only problem was, in early 1823, Beethoven had other projects still in the fire that needed to be completed first: the Mass, the 9th Symphony, the Diabelli Variations – all vast works – and that only after the May 1824 concert which saw the symphony’s premiere would he be able to turn his attention to the new quartets.

This request from Galitsin almost didn’t come about.

Having heard Carl Maria von Weber’s new opera, Der Freischütz, he thought perhaps he would contact Weber for his newest commissioning project. Galitsin was then 27 years old, a talented amateur cellist married to a talented amateur pianist. He employed his own string quartet (of which he was the cellist). But when he announced he thought about commissioning Weber, the violist in his quartet, himself a composer, advised against it and said he should contact Beethoven instead.

Now, Beethoven may have already had a quartet on a back burner – he always had new works on numerous back burners but didn’t always complete them (an opera based on Macbeth at least provided some ideas for his “Ghost” Trio, for instance). Without a possible performance outlet, would Beethoven have spent the time and effort on a quartet for the sake of writing another quartet? And would he have written, as it turned out, five of them?

He picked up his discarded quartet sketches again before he completed the 9th Symphony, put them away again. He had initially proposed completing the first quartet by March of 1823 but then put Galitsin off with more delays and excuses that the prince probably feared he would never see his quartets.

Then, in May of 1825, after the premiere of the 9th, Beethoven settled down to work on the quartets. Originally there were going to be three for Galitsin. But he kept on writing them, perhaps keeping an eye to the other publishers and the lucrative deal he had made with them for those three. At one point, while working on the third of these quartets, he wrote to a publisher in Berlin that, ultimately, he planned on writing a total of six quartets – imagine, another Late Beethoven Quartet!

Beethoven’s friend, the violinist Karl Holz (recently, the new 2nd Violinist of Ignaz Schuppanzig’s quartet) had joked there was enough music in the Op.130 Quartet for two works – and then the decision to separate the difficult finale known as the Grosse Fuge resulted in at least an additional fee.

By February of 1825, over two years since Galitsin first wrote to him, Beethoven completed the first of these quartets, the E-flat Major, Op.127. Then in July, he had completed the A Minor which would be published as Op.132. Come November, the B-flat Major, Op.130, was finished.

But he just kept going.

In May of 1826, Beethoven informed his publisher Schott that a new quartet was ready – this was the C-sharp Minor, op.131 – though he didn’t send them the manuscript until mid-August. It was announced by the publisher in February of 1827 but didn’t go into print until June. By that time, Beethoven had died.

Immediately after sending off Op.131, then, Beethoven started work on the F Major, Op.135, which he finished in October.

Sometime during this span of months, there’s a fragment of a sketch for a Quartet in C Major, what might have become the sixth quartet from this set.

Between October and November, then, while visiting his brother in Gneixendorf, along with his nephew in what turned out to be a most unfortunate visit, Beethoven composed the new finale for the Op.130 quartet, replacing its original Grosse Fuge ending.

This would turn out to be Beethoven’s last completed composition. He and his nephew returned to Vienna. Beethoven’s health took a decided turn for the worse and he died on March 26th, 1827.

In April, 1825, while composing the A Minor Quartet, Op.132, Beethoven had suffered another relapse, this time with intestinal complications and spitting blood. A letter to his doctor ended “Doctor, close the door to Death! Music will also help in my hour of need.” In late May, he began to feel better: he composed the famous slow movement of the quartet, the Heiliger Dankgesang with its prayer of Thanksgiving to God on his convalescence with a sense of renewed strength in the contrasting sections.

A few days later, his nephew wrote to him “God is my witness that my sole dream is to get away completely from you.” Karl was 18 at the time.

There followed a precarious truce. But it was a time filled with tension and several letters back and forth between Beethoven and Karl’s teacher who was not supposed to allow Karl out of the house at night under any circumstances.

Then, on July 31st, 1826, Karl attempted to commit suicide, shooting himself in the head with a pistol but succeeding only in wounding himself (apparently, a week later, they had not yet removed the bullet). Among other things, this caused the need to cover it up since attempting suicide was a state crime. Something had to be done to get Karl out of this state of mind – perhaps a military career would give him the necessary discipline and, also, get him out from under the obsessive watch of his Uncle Ludwig.

Beethoven was still working on the final version of Op.131 in July of 1826, only sending the score off a couple of weeks after his nephew’s attempted suicide. Originally, the score was to be dedicated to Johann Nepomuk Wolfmayer, a devoted friend of Beethoven’s, but instead he gave the dedication to General Baron von Stutterheim who had secured a place for Karl in his regiment: Karl joined the regiment in January of 1827 and never saw his uncle again. Wolfmayer, instead, received the dedication of the next quartet, Op.135. A wealthy textile merchant, Wolfmayer had advanced Beethoven a large sum for a Requiem that Beethoven promised he would write but never did. (Imagine the irony of both Mozart and Beethoven writing requiems at the times of their deaths?)

Alternating between depression and defiance, Karl’s life was not an easy one, kept in almost virtual imprisonment at his school and forbidden to see his mother. Whatever tensions led to Karl’s attempt to take his own life must not have been easy for the composer to bear, either.

For lack of space and time, we’ll have to leave the biographical details at that, but it’s enough of a headline to give you an idea Beethoven was not working on this quartet in an idyllic setting.

Click here for Part 2: Beethoven, the Late Quartets & His Audience.

Dick Strawser