Series Concert II
Thursday, September 11
Eugène Ysaÿe | Sonata for Two Violins in A minor
The great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) created an immense body of works. His name is not often encountered on typical concert programs, being reserved primarily for recitals that focus on solo violin repertoire. Ysaÿe was born among the generation of towering late 19th-century virtuosi: violinists like Kreisler and Sarasate, pianists like Busoni and Godowski. He also received the dedications of works by contemporaneous composers, including Chausson and Debussy. Franck’s famous Violin Sonata in A Major was written as a wedding present for Ysaÿe in 1866. Eugène first studied with his father, who was himself an accomplished musician. The talented youth began formal training at the conservatory in Liège, though Eugène’s progress faltered due to extensive performance demands made upon him by several local orchestras. Fortunately, he received guidance from two of the most important violinists at that time, Henri Vieuxtemps and his assistant, Henryk Wieniawski. One of Ysaÿe’s first posts following graduation was with a beer-hall orchestra, which in time became the mighty Berlin Philharmonic. He then appeared at a prominent music series in Paris, and his career as a concert artist took off.
Compositions proceeded in step with his concertizing, and many of Ysaÿe’s best-known works are flamboyant, difficult sonatas he wrote for his own needs. The Sonata in A Minor for Two Violins, composed in 1915 and published posthumously, stands alone in Ysaÿe’s output in terms of scoring. More popular are his solo sonatas, which show a great indebtedness to Bach’s sonatas and partitas for violin. Echoes of Bach resound in the two-violin sonata, which starts with a powerful, chromatic slow introduction prior to the main Allegro theme. That theme quotes the fugue from Bach’s Unaccompanied Sonata in C major, though much of the time Ysaÿe focuses on only four notes as inspiration for wonderful flights of fancy. Not surprisingly, he inserts his own fugue toward the middle, surrounded by passages of wicked double stops and harmonic effects. But what speaks through this work is not merely virtuosity; it articulates a touching reverence for string writing from ages past.
~ Jason Stell
Lili Boulanger | D’un soir triste and D’un matin de printemps
Deux pièces en trio (1917-18)
I. D’un matin de printemps
II. D’un soir triste
Lili Boulanger came from a multi-generational family of extraordinary musicians: her grandfather, a prize-winning cellist; her father, a winner of the Prix de Rome for composition; and her older sister, Nadia, a prodigy, who became, arguably, the most important and prolific 20th-century teacher of composition. After winning second place in the Prix de Rome on her fourth attempt, Nadia would give up composing completely in deference to her younger sister Lili, whom she deemed the greater talent. Lili, beset with illness and an increasingly frail constitution, would die an untimely death in 1918 at the tragically tender age of 24. But during her short life of prodigious achievement, Lili became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome, leaving a small but precious cache of brilliant compositions reflecting both her historical/aesthetic context and her beguiling originality.
Among the very last works she composed in her own hand during her final years in 1917-1918 are a thematically connected, inseparable diptych of pieces titled D’un matin de printemps (Of a spring morning) and D’un soir triste (Of a sad evening). She scored them for a variety of ensembles: flute (or cello) and piano, orchestra, as well as for piano trio, published as Deux pièces en trio featured on the program. The pieces are based on a short, common theme that is transformed rhythmically and harmonically into vastly contrasting works that showcase Lili’s musical prowess and surely a reflection of her inner selves, Lili “light” and “dark”. D’un matin de printemps sports a lively tempo, percussive rhythm, and supple theme evoking the modern French milieu of Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, each intimately connected to Lili within a community of friends, colleagues, and mentors. The harmonies, piano figurations, and languid melodies shared among the strings in the middle section of its ternary form particularly suggest Debussy. In a noteworthy historical marker,
both Boulanger and Debussy died within the same week in March, 1918, poignantly
marking the end of an era.
The second piece, D’un soir triste, is indeed “sad” but ultimately quite dark, complex, and deeply profound. More than twice as long as its daytime companion, it recasts the shared theme into a slow, stately, and elegiac promenade with its melody darkly stained by the cello’s soulful timbre. The significantly more complex dramatic narrative explores shadow, crisis, death, ascension, and then a final elegy solemnized as a particularly poignant string duo. The final bars feature a gentle softening into a hopeful halo of light, but ultimately end in enigma. In reality, Lili’s world was saturated with sadness and tragedy around this time: her beloved father’s death, the ravages of WWI, and her own rapidly declining health as she strained to compose in a race against her fate; she composed from her bed until she could no longer hold a pen, leaving Nadia to finish the orchestrations. It has been said that the ray of hope towards the end of the “sad evening” was Lili’s undying Catholic faith. The Deux pièces combined leave an extraordinary masterwork reflecting time and place, as well as the artistry and soul of the supremely gifted Lili Boulanger, utterly devoted to music until her last breath.
© Kai Christiansen, founder of the chamber music exploratorium at earsense.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Franz Schubert | Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (Shepherd on the Rock), D. 965
When one thinks of Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) final months – slipping toward an early grave, brought down by syphilis – one doesn’t imagine him composing virtuoso showpieces full of frills and bravura. And yet one of his most ostentatious pieces, The Shepherd on the Rock (Der Hirt auf dem Felsen), was the penultimate song he ever composed. Written in early autumn 1828, Der Hirt betrays nothing of Schubert’s miserable state of health. Though he would live just six weeks more, Schubert rose above the situation to create a musical work brimming with joy and exhilaration. Der Hirt is structured like a small concerto: three sections in fast-slow-fast arrangement, the outer ones in major and the middle section in the relative minor key. Part of the explanation for the virtuosity of Der Hirt comes from its having been written specifically for a well-known soprano, Anna Milder-Hauptmann, with whom Schubert had corresponded in 1825. She had been moved by some of Schubert’s more introspective songs, but regretted that “all this endless beauty” would be unappreciated by her audiences. They preferred, as Milder-Hauptmann put it, “somewhat brilliant music for the voice” with frequent changes of mood. Schubert’s attempts to please her help explain the cheerful brilliance of much of Der Hirt. Those features also make the composition succeed in today’s arrangement featuring solo violin instead of voice.
The piece opens with a piano prologue, tinged with drama and suggesting a minor key. Schubert seems to be quoting (consciously or not) his own earlier song, “Auf dem Flusse” from Winterreise (1827), which begins with nearly the same progression and stark tone. That mood is soon cast aside as the clarinet leads off the first main theme. At times Schubert uses wide melodic skips to highlight crucial moments in the poem. For instance, the musical mention of singe (sing) gets an upward leap of a ninth, and an even larger downward leap paints the word Klüfte (chasm).
As one might expect, the character of section B differs quite dramatically from the optimism of section A. Where the text speaks of the distant beloved and how happiness resides only where she is, Schubert darkens the musical setting. The texture becomes spare, mirroring the protagonist’s feelings of isolation. Clear quotations from Schubert’s own famous ballad “Ständchen” may be heard in the rocking broken-chord accompaniment and G-minor tonality. A simple shift to the major mode helps alleviate the expressive darkness at exactly the moment the poem turns to invocations of Heaven. The movement closes with a mini cadenza, strengthening the entire piece’s connection with the classical concerto form.
The joyous spirit of the opening section now returns for the finale. This cyclic return of a brighter mood corresponds to the poem’s renewed hope; with spring comes rebirth. Schubert invests in a coloratura vocal style the way a typical Mozartian aria might. There is also a hint of popular folk song. Rising figures predominate, and the overriding impression – one of sheer agility and jubilation – becomes only more pronounced in the coda, where Schubert accelerates the tempo. No evidence survives to show whether it was performed by Milder-Hauptmann or how it was received. Today its lyricism and distinctive scoring make it a recital favorite.
~ Jason Stell
Johannes Brahms | Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25
During the European classical and romantic eras prior to Kodály and Bartók. Stylized “Gypsy” music lent an exotic, rustic and presumably Hungarian folk element to the music of numerous composers from Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Hummel and Weber to Liszt, Brahms and Ravel. Among the most obvious and cherished examples, Haydn wrote a piano trio nicknamed “The Gypsy Rondo” while Liszt (who was Hungarian) wrote his virtuosic Hungarian Rhapsodies and Brahms, his own Hungarian Dances. Like Haydn’s trio, the finale of Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 in g minor is also a “Gypsy Rondo”, but it is instructive to compare the two composers’ actual titles. Where Brahms wrote “Rondo alla Zingarese” (“in the Gypsy style”), Haydn wrote “Rondo all’Ongarese” (“in the Hungarian Style”). Both the words and the elements of musical style are subject to confusion here. As Kodály and Bartók eventually revealed, the labels “Hungarian” and “Gypsy” are by no means
synonymous.
The English word “Gypsy” derives from a misnomer that inaccurately associates the Romani people with “Egypt”. They actually originated in India, migrating sometime before the year 1000 into Eastern Europe, North Africa and up into Spain and France. As nomadic master musicians, they typically absorbed and mimicked the local culture, likely introducing their own elements of style and performance creating a hybrid that was neither strictly “Gypsy” nor, in the case of Hungary, strictly “Hungarian”. Kodály and Bartók discovered older strata of pentatonic Hungarian folk music not related to the Gypsy-performed verbunkos dances (themselves not of Gypsy origin) just as other countries found Romani “Gypsies” making music of distinctly non-Hungarian cast, for example, Spanish Flamenco. Of course, despite a muddling of labels, styles or ethnic attributions and the significant contrast between the sounds of the classical “Gypsy” rondos on one hand, and the field recordings of Kodály and Bartók on the other, the music of Haydn, Liszt and Brahms is still marvelous music of a distinctive style with authentic origins in Hungary and easily heard within the Austro-Hungarian empire, around the Esterházy estates, or in the streets of Vienna.
A twenty-eight-year-old Brahms wrote his ambitious Piano Quartet No. 1 in g minor in 1861. The third composition in what would become an oeuvre of some twenty-six chamber music masterworks, the quartet enjoys a fine reputation in no small part because of the vigorously effective Gypsy Rondo itself. No less than Arnold Schoenberg found the quartet worthy of his own orchestral transcription. The finale is indeed a tour-de-force of rhythmic and melodic bravado where the sectional form of the rondo serves as a brilliant vehicle for dynamic contrast of the very sort found in traditional Hungarian dances and Bartók’s rhapsodies. In the main refrain, Brahms employs a characteristic 2/4 meter, swift with a stomping dactyl accent on the first beat, a mirror of the Hungarian language that tends to accent the first syllable of each word (as in the words “Kodály” and “Bartók”). In subsequent episodes, Brahms creates fleet and ringing piano textures as if to intentionally evoke the sound of the cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer commonly found in Hungary and Romania, particularly among the Gypsies. Brahms leverages a rather subtle and intricate rondo structure for a calculated drama delivering the wild escalation and unbridled release of our most thrilling conception of the “Gypsy Style.” Needless to say that Brahms precedes the Gypsy rondo with three marvelous and expansive movements provoking additional commentary for which there is no more space available. As it has done for nearly over one hundred and fifty years, the quartet is left to speak eloquently for itself.
© Kai Christiansen, founder of the chamber music exploratorium at earsense.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) created an immense body of works. His name is not often encountered on typical concert programs, being reserved primarily for recitals that focus on solo violin repertoire. Ysaÿe was born among the generation of towering late 19th-century virtuosi: violinists like Kreisler and Sarasate, pianists like Busoni and Godowski. He also received the dedications of works by contemporaneous composers, including Chausson and Debussy. Franck’s famous Violin Sonata in A Major was written as a wedding present for Ysaÿe in 1866. Eugène first studied with his father, who was himself an accomplished musician. The talented youth began formal training at the conservatory in Liège, though Eugène’s progress faltered due to extensive performance demands made upon him by several local orchestras. Fortunately, he received guidance from two of the most important violinists at that time, Henri Vieuxtemps and his assistant, Henryk Wieniawski. One of Ysaÿe’s first posts following graduation was with a beer-hall orchestra, which in time became the mighty Berlin Philharmonic. He then appeared at a prominent music series in Paris, and his career as a concert artist took off.
Compositions proceeded in step with his concertizing, and many of Ysaÿe’s best-known works are flamboyant, difficult sonatas he wrote for his own needs. The Sonata in A Minor for Two Violins, composed in 1915 and published posthumously, stands alone in Ysaÿe’s output in terms of scoring. More popular are his solo sonatas, which show a great indebtedness to Bach’s sonatas and partitas for violin. Echoes of Bach resound in the two-violin sonata, which starts with a powerful, chromatic slow introduction prior to the main Allegro theme. That theme quotes the fugue from Bach’s Unaccompanied Sonata in C major, though much of the time Ysaÿe focuses on only four notes as inspiration for wonderful flights of fancy. Not surprisingly, he inserts his own fugue toward the middle, surrounded by passages of wicked double stops and harmonic effects. But what speaks through this work is not merely virtuosity; it articulates a touching reverence for string writing from ages past.
~ Jason Stell
Lili Boulanger | D’un soir triste and D’un matin de printemps
Deux pièces en trio (1917-18)
I. D’un matin de printemps
II. D’un soir triste
Lili Boulanger came from a multi-generational family of extraordinary musicians: her grandfather, a prize-winning cellist; her father, a winner of the Prix de Rome for composition; and her older sister, Nadia, a prodigy, who became, arguably, the most important and prolific 20th-century teacher of composition. After winning second place in the Prix de Rome on her fourth attempt, Nadia would give up composing completely in deference to her younger sister Lili, whom she deemed the greater talent. Lili, beset with illness and an increasingly frail constitution, would die an untimely death in 1918 at the tragically tender age of 24. But during her short life of prodigious achievement, Lili became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome, leaving a small but precious cache of brilliant compositions reflecting both her historical/aesthetic context and her beguiling originality.
Among the very last works she composed in her own hand during her final years in 1917-1918 are a thematically connected, inseparable diptych of pieces titled D’un matin de printemps (Of a spring morning) and D’un soir triste (Of a sad evening). She scored them for a variety of ensembles: flute (or cello) and piano, orchestra, as well as for piano trio, published as Deux pièces en trio featured on the program. The pieces are based on a short, common theme that is transformed rhythmically and harmonically into vastly contrasting works that showcase Lili’s musical prowess and surely a reflection of her inner selves, Lili “light” and “dark”. D’un matin de printemps sports a lively tempo, percussive rhythm, and supple theme evoking the modern French milieu of Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, each intimately connected to Lili within a community of friends, colleagues, and mentors. The harmonies, piano figurations, and languid melodies shared among the strings in the middle section of its ternary form particularly suggest Debussy. In a noteworthy historical marker,
both Boulanger and Debussy died within the same week in March, 1918, poignantly
marking the end of an era.
The second piece, D’un soir triste, is indeed “sad” but ultimately quite dark, complex, and deeply profound. More than twice as long as its daytime companion, it recasts the shared theme into a slow, stately, and elegiac promenade with its melody darkly stained by the cello’s soulful timbre. The significantly more complex dramatic narrative explores shadow, crisis, death, ascension, and then a final elegy solemnized as a particularly poignant string duo. The final bars feature a gentle softening into a hopeful halo of light, but ultimately end in enigma. In reality, Lili’s world was saturated with sadness and tragedy around this time: her beloved father’s death, the ravages of WWI, and her own rapidly declining health as she strained to compose in a race against her fate; she composed from her bed until she could no longer hold a pen, leaving Nadia to finish the orchestrations. It has been said that the ray of hope towards the end of the “sad evening” was Lili’s undying Catholic faith. The Deux pièces combined leave an extraordinary masterwork reflecting time and place, as well as the artistry and soul of the supremely gifted Lili Boulanger, utterly devoted to music until her last breath.
© Kai Christiansen, founder of the chamber music exploratorium at earsense.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Franz Schubert | Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (Shepherd on the Rock), D. 965
When one thinks of Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) final months – slipping toward an early grave, brought down by syphilis – one doesn’t imagine him composing virtuoso showpieces full of frills and bravura. And yet one of his most ostentatious pieces, The Shepherd on the Rock (Der Hirt auf dem Felsen), was the penultimate song he ever composed. Written in early autumn 1828, Der Hirt betrays nothing of Schubert’s miserable state of health. Though he would live just six weeks more, Schubert rose above the situation to create a musical work brimming with joy and exhilaration. Der Hirt is structured like a small concerto: three sections in fast-slow-fast arrangement, the outer ones in major and the middle section in the relative minor key. Part of the explanation for the virtuosity of Der Hirt comes from its having been written specifically for a well-known soprano, Anna Milder-Hauptmann, with whom Schubert had corresponded in 1825. She had been moved by some of Schubert’s more introspective songs, but regretted that “all this endless beauty” would be unappreciated by her audiences. They preferred, as Milder-Hauptmann put it, “somewhat brilliant music for the voice” with frequent changes of mood. Schubert’s attempts to please her help explain the cheerful brilliance of much of Der Hirt. Those features also make the composition succeed in today’s arrangement featuring solo violin instead of voice.
The piece opens with a piano prologue, tinged with drama and suggesting a minor key. Schubert seems to be quoting (consciously or not) his own earlier song, “Auf dem Flusse” from Winterreise (1827), which begins with nearly the same progression and stark tone. That mood is soon cast aside as the clarinet leads off the first main theme. At times Schubert uses wide melodic skips to highlight crucial moments in the poem. For instance, the musical mention of singe (sing) gets an upward leap of a ninth, and an even larger downward leap paints the word Klüfte (chasm).
As one might expect, the character of section B differs quite dramatically from the optimism of section A. Where the text speaks of the distant beloved and how happiness resides only where she is, Schubert darkens the musical setting. The texture becomes spare, mirroring the protagonist’s feelings of isolation. Clear quotations from Schubert’s own famous ballad “Ständchen” may be heard in the rocking broken-chord accompaniment and G-minor tonality. A simple shift to the major mode helps alleviate the expressive darkness at exactly the moment the poem turns to invocations of Heaven. The movement closes with a mini cadenza, strengthening the entire piece’s connection with the classical concerto form.
The joyous spirit of the opening section now returns for the finale. This cyclic return of a brighter mood corresponds to the poem’s renewed hope; with spring comes rebirth. Schubert invests in a coloratura vocal style the way a typical Mozartian aria might. There is also a hint of popular folk song. Rising figures predominate, and the overriding impression – one of sheer agility and jubilation – becomes only more pronounced in the coda, where Schubert accelerates the tempo. No evidence survives to show whether it was performed by Milder-Hauptmann or how it was received. Today its lyricism and distinctive scoring make it a recital favorite.
~ Jason Stell
Johannes Brahms | Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25
During the European classical and romantic eras prior to Kodály and Bartók. Stylized “Gypsy” music lent an exotic, rustic and presumably Hungarian folk element to the music of numerous composers from Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Hummel and Weber to Liszt, Brahms and Ravel. Among the most obvious and cherished examples, Haydn wrote a piano trio nicknamed “The Gypsy Rondo” while Liszt (who was Hungarian) wrote his virtuosic Hungarian Rhapsodies and Brahms, his own Hungarian Dances. Like Haydn’s trio, the finale of Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 in g minor is also a “Gypsy Rondo”, but it is instructive to compare the two composers’ actual titles. Where Brahms wrote “Rondo alla Zingarese” (“in the Gypsy style”), Haydn wrote “Rondo all’Ongarese” (“in the Hungarian Style”). Both the words and the elements of musical style are subject to confusion here. As Kodály and Bartók eventually revealed, the labels “Hungarian” and “Gypsy” are by no means
synonymous.
The English word “Gypsy” derives from a misnomer that inaccurately associates the Romani people with “Egypt”. They actually originated in India, migrating sometime before the year 1000 into Eastern Europe, North Africa and up into Spain and France. As nomadic master musicians, they typically absorbed and mimicked the local culture, likely introducing their own elements of style and performance creating a hybrid that was neither strictly “Gypsy” nor, in the case of Hungary, strictly “Hungarian”. Kodály and Bartók discovered older strata of pentatonic Hungarian folk music not related to the Gypsy-performed verbunkos dances (themselves not of Gypsy origin) just as other countries found Romani “Gypsies” making music of distinctly non-Hungarian cast, for example, Spanish Flamenco. Of course, despite a muddling of labels, styles or ethnic attributions and the significant contrast between the sounds of the classical “Gypsy” rondos on one hand, and the field recordings of Kodály and Bartók on the other, the music of Haydn, Liszt and Brahms is still marvelous music of a distinctive style with authentic origins in Hungary and easily heard within the Austro-Hungarian empire, around the Esterházy estates, or in the streets of Vienna.
A twenty-eight-year-old Brahms wrote his ambitious Piano Quartet No. 1 in g minor in 1861. The third composition in what would become an oeuvre of some twenty-six chamber music masterworks, the quartet enjoys a fine reputation in no small part because of the vigorously effective Gypsy Rondo itself. No less than Arnold Schoenberg found the quartet worthy of his own orchestral transcription. The finale is indeed a tour-de-force of rhythmic and melodic bravado where the sectional form of the rondo serves as a brilliant vehicle for dynamic contrast of the very sort found in traditional Hungarian dances and Bartók’s rhapsodies. In the main refrain, Brahms employs a characteristic 2/4 meter, swift with a stomping dactyl accent on the first beat, a mirror of the Hungarian language that tends to accent the first syllable of each word (as in the words “Kodály” and “Bartók”). In subsequent episodes, Brahms creates fleet and ringing piano textures as if to intentionally evoke the sound of the cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer commonly found in Hungary and Romania, particularly among the Gypsies. Brahms leverages a rather subtle and intricate rondo structure for a calculated drama delivering the wild escalation and unbridled release of our most thrilling conception of the “Gypsy Style.” Needless to say that Brahms precedes the Gypsy rondo with three marvelous and expansive movements provoking additional commentary for which there is no more space available. As it has done for nearly over one hundred and fifty years, the quartet is left to speak eloquently for itself.
© Kai Christiansen, founder of the chamber music exploratorium at earsense.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.