Saturday, February 14, 2009

Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 127
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Composed in 1824-1825. Premiered on March 6, 1825 in Vienna, played by the Schuppanzigh Quartet.

“I sit pondering and pondering. I have long known what I want to do, but I can’t get it down on paper. I feel I am on the threshold of great things.” These words of Beethoven, written in 1822, were prophetic. At the time, he was still involved in the five years of Herculean labor that finally yielded up the Missa Solemnis in 1823, a task that demanded all his concentration lest it be crowded from his thoughts by a head (and sketchbook) full of yet unconnected ideas for a new symphony, into which, he was convinced, he needed to somehow take the unprecedented step of integrating a chorus. The string quartet, a genre for which he had not written in a dozen years, was also on his mind, as evidenced by his letter of June 5, 1822 to the Leipzig publisher Carl Friedrich Peters urging him to consider issuing a new quartet that would be ready “very soon.” Burdened by poor health, financial difficulties (Rossini was appalled at the squalor of Beethoven’s small, dank apartment when he visited him that year), the emotional drain of being guardian to a worthless nephew, and the obsession with finishing the Missa and the Ninth Symphony, it was, however, to be some time before he was able to take up a new quartet in earnest.

On November 9, 1822, Prince Nikolas Galitzin, a devotee of Beethoven’s music and an amateur cellist, wrote from St. Petersburg asking Beethoven for “one, two or three quartets, for which labor I will be glad to pay you whatever amount you think proper.” Beethoven was elated by the commission, and he immediately accepted it and set the fee of 50 ducats for each quartet, a high price, but one readily accepted by Galitzin. The music, however, took somewhat longer. The Ninth Symphony was completed in February 1823, but Beethoven, exhausted, was unable to begin Galitzin’s quartets until May. “I am really impatient to have a new quartet of yours,” badgered Galitzin. “Nevertheless, I beg you not to mind and to be guided in this only by your inspiration and the disposition of your mind.” The first of the quartets for Galitzin (E-flat major, Op. 127) was not completed until February 1825; the second (A minor, Op. 132) was finished five months later; and the third (B-flat major, Op. 130) was written between July and November, during one of the few periods of relatively good health that Beethoven enjoyed in his last decade. (Beethoven completed the Op. 131 and Op. 135 Quartets the following year to round out this stupendous ultimate series of his compositions.) Galitzin received his three new scores in fine copies by the middle of 1826, and promised payment “in a day or two.” The Prince, for all his good intentions and evident sympathy for Beethoven’s creative process, however, found himself, as he put it, “awkwardly placed” at the time, and the bill remained unpaid. (During the preceding year, one of Galitzin’s children died, his wife fell gravely ill, and his indirect involvement in a revolutionary movement brought him to the edge of bankruptcy.) Beethoven sued for his money without success, and the account was not finally settled until 1852 (!) between Galitzin’s son and Beethoven’s heirs.

The premiere of the E-flat Quartet (Op. 127) was given in Vienna on March 6, 1825 by the ensemble of Ignaz Schuppanzigh, a champion of Beethoven’s works in earlier years and the first musician in Austria to undertake public quartet concerts. Schuppanzigh had been in Russia for some time and only returned to Vienna at the end of April 1823, when he resumed his series of concerts, which once again became major events in the city’s musical life. He convinced Beethoven to allow his group to give the Quartet’s first performance, but the score was finished later than expected, and the parts for this work, in an extraordinary new and difficult chamber music style, reached the performers only two weeks before the scheduled concert on March 6, 1825. Beethoven made each of the quartet members sign a pledge that he would give his best in presenting the work, and they worked hard, indeed, to prepare the piece. Still, reported Sir Julius Benedict, “Schuppanzigh and his companions were scarcely equal to this occasion; as they did not seem to understand the music themselves, they failed entirely to impart its meaning to the audience. The general impression was most unsatisfactory.” Beethoven, who was not at the concert, learned of the debacle from his brother Johann, and offered the next performance to Josef Böhm and his quartet. They were coached by the composer, now stone deaf (he was guided by their fingers and bow movements), and the presentation was so successful at Böhm’s March 26th performance that it had to be repeated nine times during the following weeks.

“In these last works,” wrote Melvin Berger in his Guide to Chamber Music, “Beethoven leaves the realm of personal self-expression and enters the domain of the universal — plumbing the full depths of the human soul and psyche.... In a sense, it is music that transcends music, that even transcends human feelings and thoughts, to achieve a spiritual level above all worldly concerns.” The series of the five late quartets and the Grosse Fuge were Beethoven’s final musical thoughts, and they were the only important works that occupied him during his last four years. They are the ultimate distillation of his art. The conventions of traditional musical expression are swept away by a concentration on the most fundamental, the most absolutely essential elements of the creation of tonal art. Contrast, lyricism, texture, motivic growth — every facet of composition is not just brought under magisterial technical control, but heightened to a level that nearly defies traditional analysis and description. This music, like the deepest, most powerful emotions, passes beyond mere words to touch the noblest threads of our feelings and humanity.

The opening movement of the Op. 127 Quartet erects a distinctive sonata structure upon two sharply differentiated thematic elements: a series of bold, proclamatory chords and a sunny, flowing melody of vernal freshness. The bold chords return both for expressive contrast and as a formal marker to indicate the arrival at the development and the recapitulation (Beethoven had much earlier tried a similar experiment in the famous “Pathétique” Sonata, Op. 13 of 1799), with the intervening sections devoted to a lithe working-out, almost a fantasia, of the flowing motive. Beethoven’s mastery of variation technique, one of the touchstones of his fullest creative maturity, is seen nowhere better than in the Quartet’s Adagio, a sublime movement built upon a spacious, arching theme, which progresses from a state of hymnal introspection through its animated central paragraphs to a close of rapt transcendence. The third movement achieves a remarkable balance of playfulness and rigorous thematic development, with a sleek, spectral central trio providing the perfect foil. The finale is a compact sonata structure built from a naively melodious main theme and a marching second subject. The Quartet culminates in a luminous transformation of the finale’s principal theme.

Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Composed in 1825. Premiered on September 9, 1825 in Vienna, played by the Schuppanzigh Quartet.

The A minor Quartet was the product of Beethoven’s difficult time during the first months of 1825. He had begun sketching the piece by the end of the previous year, but before he could progress very far with it, he was stricken with a serious intestinal inflammation, a frequent bane of his later years. “I am not feeling well,” he complained to Dr. Anton Braunhofer on April 18th. “I hope that you will not refuse to come to my help, for I am in great pain.” Braunhofer was alarmed by the composer’s condition, and gave him strict advice: “No wine; no coffee; no spices of any kind.... I’ll wager that if you take a drink of spirits, you’ll be lying weak and exhausted on your back in a few hours.” The physician also recommended a recuperation in the country to allow for the plentiful imbibing of “fresh air” and “natural milk.” Beethoven had recovered sufficiently by May 7th to repair to the distant Viennese suburb of Baden, and remained there — with occasional visits to the city — until mid-October. It was at Baden that the A minor Quartet was largely written. Beethoven’s illness and recovery touch directly on the music of the Quartet, which takes as its centerpiece a magnificent Adagio titled “A Sacred Song of Thanks from One Made Well, to the Divine; in the Lydian Mode.” Though not specifically programmatic, the Quartet, whose overall structure follows the minor-to-major, dark-to-light progression familiar from the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, evidences what Joseph de Marliave called “the habitual state of mind of the composer: the fight against destiny, the triumph of joy over pain.” Maynard Solomon observed that “music here appears to become an implicit agency of healing, a talisman against death.”

Ignaz Schuppanzigh and his quartet gave the first performance of the Op. 132 Quartet on September 9, 1825 at the Hotel Der Wilden Mann in Vienna to an audience of about fourteen persons. Beethoven had enticed the publisher Maurice Schlesinger to come from Paris to hear the new work, and he was so impressed with the piece that he agreed immediately to issue the score. Schuppanzigh’s quartet played the work again privately two days later, and gave its public premiere in Vienna on November 6th. The reaction to all of these performances was uniformly laudatory.

Basil Lam summarized the structural logic of the A minor Quartet: “No other composition in all Beethoven’s works shows the unintegrated contrasts of this Quartet. Once he had become possessed by the unique vision of the Heiliger Dankgesang [‘Holy Song of Thanks’], no solution of the formal problem was available other than to surround it with sound images united only by their total diversity.” The Adagio, then, is not only the central element in the five-movement structure of the Quartet, but is also its expressive heart. The movement’s form alternates varied versions of a hymnal theme of otherworldly stillness based on the ancient church modes with a more rhythmically dynamic strain marked “feeling new strength,” a technique also used in the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. The Heiliger Dankgesang is one of the most stunningly rapturous creations in 19th-century music.
To support a slow movement of such magnitude requires surrounding music of considerable breadth and emotional weight, and Beethoven chose to precede it with a large sonata form and a fully developed scherzo and trio. The opening movement, craggy and sometimes even belligerently willful in its progress, is based on several terse ideas presented in the exposition: a slow-moving motive in melodic half-steps; a melancholy violin line with dotted rhythms; a playful little imitative episode that serves as the formal second theme; and a more lyrical strain presented by the violins above a galloping triplet accompaniment. There is a brief development section, mostly based on the half-step motive and the melancholy melody, before the apparent recapitulation of the themes begins. Though the themes are presented in proper order and balance, they are not adjusted as to key, and another full recapitulation, suitably transposed, is required before the movement can end. The long scherzo, in A major, developed almost entirely from the violin motive heard in the fifth measure, is paired with a central trio whose flowing themes are often rhythmically displaced.

Beethoven followed the transcendent Heiliger Dankgesang with one of his most glaring formal incongruities — a little march of four-square structure whose emotional blandness provides an almost shocking descent from the exalted realms of the Adagio. This movement lasts only a short time, however, and it is linked to the finale by an instrumental recitative, as Beethoven had done in the Ninth Symphony. The last movement, in fact, is based on a theme that he had originally intended for that Symphony, but which here becomes the subject for a vast sonata-rondo that gains the hard-won, victorious luminosity of A major in its closing pages.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas and Cello in G Major, Op. 111
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Composed in 1890. Premiered on November 11, 1890 in Vienna.

For many years, Brahms followed the sensible Viennese custom of taking to the countryside when the summer heat made life in the city unpleasant. In 1880 he first visited the resort of Bad Ischl in the lovely Salzkammergut region east of Salzburg, an area of mountains and lakes widely famed for its enchanting scenery (and in more recent years the site of the filming of The Sound of Music). There he composed the Academic Festival and Tragic Overtures and the Piano Trio, Op. 87, cantankerously telling his friends that he was encouraged to such productivity because the miserable weather confined him constantly to his villa. Two years later, however, he again chanced Ischl, again found the weather poor, and again composed; the String Quintet, Op. 88 dates from the summer of 1882. Brahms then stayed away from Bad Ischl until 1889, but thereafter it became his annual country retreat until his last summer seven years later. In his biography of the composer, Walter Niemann explained the town’s attraction for the composer: “Half of Vienna and the whole circle of Brahms’ friends and acquaintances would gather here round the master as years went by, and so at rainy Ischl he felt quite secluded, and yet with much to stimulate him. He was particularly fond of making an excursion from Ischl to the lovelier, but even rainier, Gmunden, where he would visit his faithful friend Viktor von Miller zu Aichholz and his wife, Olga, in their splendid villa, surrounded by a great park. Here he would meet [the composer Karl] Goldmark, [the critic] Eduard Hanslick, and other friends and colleagues from Vienna, or would bury himself in the great library with black coffee and his well-known enormous cigars, and he was treated by the Millers as one of the family.” It was at Ischl during the summer of 1890 that Brahms composed what Niemann called “the most passionate, the freshest, and the most deeply inspired by nature” of all his works — the String Quintet in G major, Op. 111.

Brahms was 57 years old in 1890. By that time he had acquired the great hedgerow of beard that is so familiar from the photographs of him in later life, a pronounced corpulence and a feeling that he had “worked enough; now let the young people take over.” When he submitted the score of the new Quintet to his publisher, Fritz Simrock, in December 1890, a month after it had been premiered in Vienna by the Rosé Quartet, he attached a note to the manuscript: “With this letter you can bid farewell to my music — because it is certainly time to leave off.” His dear friend and faithful correspondent Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, reminding him that his health was excellent and that he was at the peak of his popularity, wrote to him, “He who can invent all this [i.e., the G major Quintet] must be in a happy frame of mind! It is the work of a man of thirty.” Still, Brahms was not to be swayed, and he announced his retirement as a composer. When he heard the celebrated clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld at Meiningen the following spring, however, his resolve was broken, and he again took up the pen to produce the resplendent valedictories of his last years: the Trio (Op. 114), Quintet (Op. 115) and Sonatas (Op. 120) for Clarinet; the Fantasies and Intermezzi for Piano (Op. 116-119); the Four Serious Songs (Op. 121); and the Chorale Preludes for Organ (Op. 122).

The critic and champion of Brahms’ music Eduard Hanslick praised the G major String Quintet for “the beautiful warm-hearted solidity of the subject matter, the continuity of the sentiment, and the admirable conciseness of the form. More and more Brahms seems to concentrate himself; more and more consciously does he find his strength in the expression of healthy, proportionately simple feelings. A full emotional life works in them without strain, without exaggeration. There is nothing of that self-conscious rending to pieces, that mysterious tone-painting and ‘dramatic’ representation with which ambitious semi-geniuses of the present day furnish us even in the domain of pure instrumental music.”
The opening Allegro is one of Brahms’ typically masterful sonata forms, broad in scale and gesture yet enormously subtle and integrated in detail. The cello is entrusted with the task of announcing the main theme through a glowing but dense curtain of accompanimental rustlings from the upper strings. The complementary melody, almost Schubertian in its warm lyricism, is presented in duet by the violas. The development incorporates much of the thematic material from the exposition, but keeps returning, almost like a refrain, to the rustling figurations of the movement’s opening. The earlier themes are recapitulated in heightened settings to round out the movement. When Max Kalbeck, the composer’s friend and eventual biographer, said that this music reminded him of the Prater, Vienna’s amusement park, Brahms replied, “You’ve guessed it! And the delightful girls there.”

The Adagio is a set of three free variations based on a touching theme whose most characteristic gesture is the ornamental turn in its opening phrase. The following Allegretto serves as the Quintet’s scherzo, though in spirit it is indebted to the popular waltzes of his adopted Vienna that Brahms so loved. The finale combines elements of sonata and rondo, a formal procedure, perhaps borrowed from Haydn, which Brahms employed in several other of his important works.

Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet in B Minor, Op. 115
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Composed in 1891. Premiered on November 24, 1891 in Meiningen, by Richard Mühlfeld and the Joachim Quartet.

As an unrepentant, life-long bachelor (he once vowed that he would “never undertake either a marriage or an opera”), Johannes Brahms depended heavily on his circle of friends for support, encouragement and advice. By word and example, Robert Schumann set him on the path of serious composition as a young man; Schumann’s wife, Clara, was Brahms’ chief critic and confidante throughout his life. The violinist Joseph Joachim was an indefatigable champion of Brahms’ chamber music, and provided him expert technical information during the composition of the Violin Concerto. Hans von Bülow, a musician of gargantuan talent celebrated as both pianist and conductor, played Brahms’ music widely, and made it a mainstay in the repertory of the superb court orchestra at Meiningen during his tenure there as music director from 1880 to 1885. Soon after arriving, Bülow invited Brahms to Meiningen to be received by the music-loving Duke Georg and his consort, Baroness von Heldburg, and Brahms was provided with a fine apartment and encouraged to visit the court whenever he wished. (The only obligation upon the comfort-loving composer was to don the much-despised full dress for dinner.) Brahms returned frequently and happily to Meiningen to hear his works played by the orchestra and to take part in chamber ensembles. At a concert in March 1891, he heard a performance of Weber’s F minor Clarinet Concerto by the orchestra’s principal player of that instrument, Richard Mühlfeld, and was overwhelmed. “It is impossible to play the clarinet better than Herr Mühlfeld does here,” he wrote to Clara. “He is absolutely the best I know.” So fluid and sweet was Mühlfeld’s playing that Brahms dubbed him “Fräulein Nightingale,” and flatly proclaimed him to be the best wind instrument player that he had ever heard. Indeed, so strong was the impact of the experience that Brahms was shaken out of a year-long creative lethargy — the Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano (Op. 114) and the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (Op. 115) were composed for Mühlfeld without difficulty between May and July 1891 at the Austrian resort town of Bad Ischl, near Salzburg. Three years later Brahms was inspired again to write for Mühlfeld, and produced the two Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano (Op. 120). Both the Trio and the Quintet were first heard at a private recital at Meiningen on November 24, 1891 presented by Brahms (as pianist), Mühlfeld and the members of the Joachim Quartet. The same forces gave the public premieres of both works in Berlin on December 12th.

The Clarinet Quintet’s mood is expressive and autumnal, with many a hint of bittersweet nostalgia, a quality to which the darkly limpid sonority of the clarinet is perfectly suited. The opening movement follows traditional sonata form, with the closely woven thematic development characteristic of all Brahms’ large instrumental works. The main theme, given by the violins in mellow thirds, contains the motivic seeds from which the entire movement grows. Even the swaying second theme, initiated by the clarinet, derives from this opening melody. The Adagio is built in three large paragraphs. The first is based on a tender melody of touching simplicity uttered by the clarinet. The central section is an impetuous strain in sweeping figurations seemingly derived from the fiery improvisations of an inspired Gypsy clarinetist. The Adagio melody returns to round out the movement. Brahms performed an interesting formal experiment in the third movement. Beginning with a sedate Andantino, the music soon changes mood and meter to become an ingenious combination of scherzo and rondo which is closed by a fleeting reminiscence of the movement’s first melody. The finale is a theme with five variations, the last of which recalls the opening melody of the first movement to draw together the principal thematic strands of this masterful Quintet.

©2008 Dr. Richard E. Rodda