Series Concert III
Sunday, September 14
Franz Joseph Haydn | String Quartet in C Major, Op. 33, No. 3, The Bird
Haydn’s Op. 33 set of six quartets goes by various nicknames: Russian (as they were dedicated to the Grand Duke of Russia), Maiden (due to an image on the title page of a Hummel edition), and Gli Scherzi (because the Menuetto dance movements were newly dubbed Scherzo). This last is one of several features scholars have posited to explain Haydn’s advertising pitch that these quartets were composed in a “new and special way.” Another innovation introduces the Rondo finale, a fast and often jolly genre that would become a Haydn specialty and an emerging standard for the string quartet and symphony.
Compared with the Op. 20 set composed nine years earlier in 1772, the Op. 33 quartets sing with a fresh “lightness”, a warm joie de vivre many trace to the influence of Mozart as well as Haydn’s foray into comic opera. While Op. 20 was learned discourse for the court and connoisseur, Op. 33, packed with popular tunes, fluid textures, and humor, was for “the rest of us”. The publication of Op. 33 coincided with a new, more relaxed contract from Haydn’s Esterhazy employer: Haydn was now free to publish compositions for the general public, and on this occasion, he sought a much broader market. To some, these Op. 33 quartets represent the first true high-water mark of the Viennese Classical Style.
Many of Haydn’s individual string quartets also have nicknames due to their innovative stature and popularity and are “tagged” after some distinctive musical evocation that identifies that particular favorite. Yet another, more subtle aspect of these new and special quartets is how they use themes and motives distributed throughout the quartet texture for a remarkable thematic continuity. Perhaps the most popular of the six, the “Bird” is named after the prominence of birdlike motives that chirp throughout the first and third movements flitting about the texture like a musical genetic marker. Even the finale arguably has an avian aspect.
In the sonata-form first movement, both themes feature bird sounds that saturate much of the texture throughout. These sounds are created from a repeated pair of notes, each with its own leading grace note forming a two-note “chirp.” The bird- like motives in the second-movement twitter in a moment of high relief in one of Haydn’s most innovative scherzi. The scherzo deploys all four strings together in their lowest registers, sotto voce (softly), in a distinctive choral unity where the more characteristically active quartet texture is absent. A lovely musical effect, but highly unusual for a scherzo; a perfect foil for the trio! For the vividly and humorously contrasting trio, the quartet reduces to a duo featuring the treble pair of violins entwined in a most birdlike dialogue.
The third-movement adagio is slow and beautiful without a hint of birdsong. It gracefully traces a simple song form featuring the warm, subdominant key of F Major with standard modulations to its dominant, the quartet’s home key of C Major. The song refrain occurs three times, with the second repetition adorned with decorative filigree from the first violin in variation, followed by a brief “development” that intensifies with a shift to C minor, preparing for the release of tension with the final unadorned refrain.
The Rondo finale, marked presto, is a romp, swift, short, and breathtaking. Characteristic of classical rondo forms, it features a recurring refrain separated by contrasting episodes. The main theme is bright, animated, and arguably birdlike both in sound and motion, a twittering, frolicking foursome. The main contrasting episode shifts to a darker minor mode with perhaps just a hint of “Gypsy” dance that Haydn so often used. The conclusion features some wonderful rhythmic and textural play, again like birds in flight. Curiously, the movement ends simply and suddenly without the slightest hint of cadential fanfare.
© Kai Christiansen, founder of the chamber music exploratorium at earsense.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Jörg Widmann | Es war einmal, Selections
As far back as I can remember, I have always been fascinated with fairy tales: with their archetypal characters and set phrases like ‘Once upon a time ...’ and ‘... they all lived happily ever after’. Fairy tales were however also a source of unrest for me as a seismograph of mankind’s underlying primal fears and desires. So as a performer and composer I have always felt that Robert Schumann’s Märchenerzählungen [Fairy
Tales] (scored for the same instrumentation as my own composition) was a disjointed, complex contemporary work – despite the innocence and naivety of its initial appearance. I therefore do not intend my own Es war einmal ... [Once upon a time ...] to be a mere sentimental, nostalgic flight into the distant past, but as a naive and fantastical alternative concept to our genuine world with all its upheavals.
~ Jörg Widmann, reprinted with permission
Franz Schubert | Piano Trio in E-flat Major, D. 897, Notturno
Schubert’s extraordinary “final year” is a well-promoted fact of his short but immensely fruitful career as a composer with some noted commentaries calling it a great miracle of Western Art Music. Between 1827 and 1828, the apparently herculean Schubert produced a canon of masterworks comprising his final piano sonatas, the two massive piano trios and the ineffable string quintet, among other things. In the chamber music in particular, Schubert expresses a truly grandiose conception of music that oscillates between extreme poles of euphoria and despair, with both modes ennobled by sumptuous lyricism, perfection of ensemble and color laid out in epic proportions to be savored slowly and carefully. One literally thinks of Schubert’s final year as an exalted state of levitation.
When Schubert died, he left reams of unpublished and unfinished music; most it took decades to emerge. One such sublime treasure is the so-called “Nocturne” in E-Flat, a single movement for piano trio that Schubert simply titled “adagio” but to which a later publisher attached the more Romantic, trendy sobriquet. Compared with the wide-ranging drama featured in the major works from his final year, this lone slow movement is more single minded, more happily confined to the bright side of Schubert’s spectrum, and with its pervasive gentle serenity, it easily suggests the dreamy notion of a nocturne. But Schubert effectively wields contrast (and tension) between two sub-moods of the brighter side: elegant repose and raging triumph, first Mozartian, then Beethovenian, but so vividly in Schubert’s own voice and style. Unique to Schubert is the slow, mesmeric quality of his shining themes, the perfectly placed surprising harmony, the subtle shift of texture and color for variation within repetition, and the miracle of such a nuanced beauty from ostensibly simple means. It is a supreme meditation. The music strongly reflects the incandescent voice of Schubert’s last year and it is now thought that this slow movement was the first candidate for the Piano Trio in B-Flat Major, ultimately rejected by Schubert in favor of the more famous replacement we have come to cherish. This nocturne is intimately part of the same world, a small jewel whose facets clearly reflect the larger picture.
© Kai Christiansen, founder of the chamber music exploratorium at earsense.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Johannes Brahms | String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111
In the summer of 1890, Brahms planned to retire from his composing career, intending his String Quintet, Op. 111 in G Major to be his swan song. When he signed off on the final publisher’s proof of his second viola quintet, Brahms added a note stating, “With this letter you can bid farewell to my music, because it is certainly time to leave off . . ..” As with many of his compositions, the piece was originally conceived for a different ensemble, in this case as sketches for a fifth symphony. And though it ended as a string quintet with two violas, a grand symphonic sonority still graces the outer movements. It is an extraordinary work, one of the finest in Brahms’s oeuvre and therefore all of chamber music: exuberant, elegant, subtle, original and unmistakably Brahms in nearly every bar. It makes advances on the first viola quintet written eight years earlier and would have made a perfect final composition for Brahms had it ultimately turned out that way. But a lingering “Indian summer” of 1891 found Brahms writing once more to produce his ineffable chamber works featuring the clarinet after which he would truly call it quits.
A big orchestral texture launches the first movement with a lush shimmering of the four upper instruments as the cello sings the lively theme soaring merrily into its upper registers in one of the longest melodies Brahms ever used in the sonata form context. A gentle sway in 9/8 meter animates the exposition through two more themes, each lyrical and charming, softening the athleticism of the first and creating a radiant, beneficent mood betraying nothing of Brahms’s leave taking. The development sweetens the shimmering into a kind of celestial hovering before bounding into a muscular development working motives, counterpoint and the ever-rocking figurations into a froth that breaks with the recapitulation like the sun bursting through clouds. It ends with a glorious coda making this opening movement one of Brahms’s most sublime.
The two central movements turn inward with more subdued sonorities, a melancholy darkened by minor keys and the reedy tone of the violas in the middle range of the ensemble. First, the slow movement adagio walks a slow, stately march introduced by a viola duet over a pizzicato base line in the cello. The single dominant theme recurs five times, each time with a fresh scoring and an ever-changing harmonization. The music rises in a surge as the theme ripens into a yearning major tonality, then tumbles into a stormy density of tremolo, fading into a lonely cadenza for solo viola and a final statement of the wistful march. The third movement is equally pensive, tentative and reserved. The duple-meter march becomes a triple-meter waltz, a kind of “waltz misterioso” in a scherzo and trio form where the outer sections in G minor give way to a sweeter interior in G major, a brightly gentle relief that recurs, slightly transformed, like a memory in the coda, a wan smile after an extended frown.
The finale restores the vivacious grandeur of the first movement like robust, sunlit mountains enclosing the shaded valleys between them. Characterized by many writers as a jovial dance, it begins with a touch of angst as a worried five-note motif in the “wrong” key before bursting into the proper tonic with a leaping, accented dance evoking the same youthful robustness as the shimmering start. A second theme like a country jig in rolling triplets intensifies the vital groove. The form suggests a sonata movement, but the music is more lively and organic than any schematic with the five-note motive and the leaping accents blending into an indistinguishable synergy constantly evolving with Brahms’s signature thematic variation. An infectious driving builds into a moto perpetuo rush toward the end, erupting into another Brahms signature: an inexhaustible Hungarian dance. Accents, trills, the dashing motif and a gigantic chord of 13 notes conspire to conclude this stunning quintet, a brilliant end for Brahms before his special clarinet encore.
© Kai Christiansen, founder of the chamber music exploratorium at earsense.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Haydn’s Op. 33 set of six quartets goes by various nicknames: Russian (as they were dedicated to the Grand Duke of Russia), Maiden (due to an image on the title page of a Hummel edition), and Gli Scherzi (because the Menuetto dance movements were newly dubbed Scherzo). This last is one of several features scholars have posited to explain Haydn’s advertising pitch that these quartets were composed in a “new and special way.” Another innovation introduces the Rondo finale, a fast and often jolly genre that would become a Haydn specialty and an emerging standard for the string quartet and symphony.
Compared with the Op. 20 set composed nine years earlier in 1772, the Op. 33 quartets sing with a fresh “lightness”, a warm joie de vivre many trace to the influence of Mozart as well as Haydn’s foray into comic opera. While Op. 20 was learned discourse for the court and connoisseur, Op. 33, packed with popular tunes, fluid textures, and humor, was for “the rest of us”. The publication of Op. 33 coincided with a new, more relaxed contract from Haydn’s Esterhazy employer: Haydn was now free to publish compositions for the general public, and on this occasion, he sought a much broader market. To some, these Op. 33 quartets represent the first true high-water mark of the Viennese Classical Style.
Many of Haydn’s individual string quartets also have nicknames due to their innovative stature and popularity and are “tagged” after some distinctive musical evocation that identifies that particular favorite. Yet another, more subtle aspect of these new and special quartets is how they use themes and motives distributed throughout the quartet texture for a remarkable thematic continuity. Perhaps the most popular of the six, the “Bird” is named after the prominence of birdlike motives that chirp throughout the first and third movements flitting about the texture like a musical genetic marker. Even the finale arguably has an avian aspect.
In the sonata-form first movement, both themes feature bird sounds that saturate much of the texture throughout. These sounds are created from a repeated pair of notes, each with its own leading grace note forming a two-note “chirp.” The bird- like motives in the second-movement twitter in a moment of high relief in one of Haydn’s most innovative scherzi. The scherzo deploys all four strings together in their lowest registers, sotto voce (softly), in a distinctive choral unity where the more characteristically active quartet texture is absent. A lovely musical effect, but highly unusual for a scherzo; a perfect foil for the trio! For the vividly and humorously contrasting trio, the quartet reduces to a duo featuring the treble pair of violins entwined in a most birdlike dialogue.
The third-movement adagio is slow and beautiful without a hint of birdsong. It gracefully traces a simple song form featuring the warm, subdominant key of F Major with standard modulations to its dominant, the quartet’s home key of C Major. The song refrain occurs three times, with the second repetition adorned with decorative filigree from the first violin in variation, followed by a brief “development” that intensifies with a shift to C minor, preparing for the release of tension with the final unadorned refrain.
The Rondo finale, marked presto, is a romp, swift, short, and breathtaking. Characteristic of classical rondo forms, it features a recurring refrain separated by contrasting episodes. The main theme is bright, animated, and arguably birdlike both in sound and motion, a twittering, frolicking foursome. The main contrasting episode shifts to a darker minor mode with perhaps just a hint of “Gypsy” dance that Haydn so often used. The conclusion features some wonderful rhythmic and textural play, again like birds in flight. Curiously, the movement ends simply and suddenly without the slightest hint of cadential fanfare.
© Kai Christiansen, founder of the chamber music exploratorium at earsense.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Jörg Widmann | Es war einmal, Selections
As far back as I can remember, I have always been fascinated with fairy tales: with their archetypal characters and set phrases like ‘Once upon a time ...’ and ‘... they all lived happily ever after’. Fairy tales were however also a source of unrest for me as a seismograph of mankind’s underlying primal fears and desires. So as a performer and composer I have always felt that Robert Schumann’s Märchenerzählungen [Fairy
Tales] (scored for the same instrumentation as my own composition) was a disjointed, complex contemporary work – despite the innocence and naivety of its initial appearance. I therefore do not intend my own Es war einmal ... [Once upon a time ...] to be a mere sentimental, nostalgic flight into the distant past, but as a naive and fantastical alternative concept to our genuine world with all its upheavals.
~ Jörg Widmann, reprinted with permission
Franz Schubert | Piano Trio in E-flat Major, D. 897, Notturno
Schubert’s extraordinary “final year” is a well-promoted fact of his short but immensely fruitful career as a composer with some noted commentaries calling it a great miracle of Western Art Music. Between 1827 and 1828, the apparently herculean Schubert produced a canon of masterworks comprising his final piano sonatas, the two massive piano trios and the ineffable string quintet, among other things. In the chamber music in particular, Schubert expresses a truly grandiose conception of music that oscillates between extreme poles of euphoria and despair, with both modes ennobled by sumptuous lyricism, perfection of ensemble and color laid out in epic proportions to be savored slowly and carefully. One literally thinks of Schubert’s final year as an exalted state of levitation.
When Schubert died, he left reams of unpublished and unfinished music; most it took decades to emerge. One such sublime treasure is the so-called “Nocturne” in E-Flat, a single movement for piano trio that Schubert simply titled “adagio” but to which a later publisher attached the more Romantic, trendy sobriquet. Compared with the wide-ranging drama featured in the major works from his final year, this lone slow movement is more single minded, more happily confined to the bright side of Schubert’s spectrum, and with its pervasive gentle serenity, it easily suggests the dreamy notion of a nocturne. But Schubert effectively wields contrast (and tension) between two sub-moods of the brighter side: elegant repose and raging triumph, first Mozartian, then Beethovenian, but so vividly in Schubert’s own voice and style. Unique to Schubert is the slow, mesmeric quality of his shining themes, the perfectly placed surprising harmony, the subtle shift of texture and color for variation within repetition, and the miracle of such a nuanced beauty from ostensibly simple means. It is a supreme meditation. The music strongly reflects the incandescent voice of Schubert’s last year and it is now thought that this slow movement was the first candidate for the Piano Trio in B-Flat Major, ultimately rejected by Schubert in favor of the more famous replacement we have come to cherish. This nocturne is intimately part of the same world, a small jewel whose facets clearly reflect the larger picture.
© Kai Christiansen, founder of the chamber music exploratorium at earsense.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Johannes Brahms | String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111
In the summer of 1890, Brahms planned to retire from his composing career, intending his String Quintet, Op. 111 in G Major to be his swan song. When he signed off on the final publisher’s proof of his second viola quintet, Brahms added a note stating, “With this letter you can bid farewell to my music, because it is certainly time to leave off . . ..” As with many of his compositions, the piece was originally conceived for a different ensemble, in this case as sketches for a fifth symphony. And though it ended as a string quintet with two violas, a grand symphonic sonority still graces the outer movements. It is an extraordinary work, one of the finest in Brahms’s oeuvre and therefore all of chamber music: exuberant, elegant, subtle, original and unmistakably Brahms in nearly every bar. It makes advances on the first viola quintet written eight years earlier and would have made a perfect final composition for Brahms had it ultimately turned out that way. But a lingering “Indian summer” of 1891 found Brahms writing once more to produce his ineffable chamber works featuring the clarinet after which he would truly call it quits.
A big orchestral texture launches the first movement with a lush shimmering of the four upper instruments as the cello sings the lively theme soaring merrily into its upper registers in one of the longest melodies Brahms ever used in the sonata form context. A gentle sway in 9/8 meter animates the exposition through two more themes, each lyrical and charming, softening the athleticism of the first and creating a radiant, beneficent mood betraying nothing of Brahms’s leave taking. The development sweetens the shimmering into a kind of celestial hovering before bounding into a muscular development working motives, counterpoint and the ever-rocking figurations into a froth that breaks with the recapitulation like the sun bursting through clouds. It ends with a glorious coda making this opening movement one of Brahms’s most sublime.
The two central movements turn inward with more subdued sonorities, a melancholy darkened by minor keys and the reedy tone of the violas in the middle range of the ensemble. First, the slow movement adagio walks a slow, stately march introduced by a viola duet over a pizzicato base line in the cello. The single dominant theme recurs five times, each time with a fresh scoring and an ever-changing harmonization. The music rises in a surge as the theme ripens into a yearning major tonality, then tumbles into a stormy density of tremolo, fading into a lonely cadenza for solo viola and a final statement of the wistful march. The third movement is equally pensive, tentative and reserved. The duple-meter march becomes a triple-meter waltz, a kind of “waltz misterioso” in a scherzo and trio form where the outer sections in G minor give way to a sweeter interior in G major, a brightly gentle relief that recurs, slightly transformed, like a memory in the coda, a wan smile after an extended frown.
The finale restores the vivacious grandeur of the first movement like robust, sunlit mountains enclosing the shaded valleys between them. Characterized by many writers as a jovial dance, it begins with a touch of angst as a worried five-note motif in the “wrong” key before bursting into the proper tonic with a leaping, accented dance evoking the same youthful robustness as the shimmering start. A second theme like a country jig in rolling triplets intensifies the vital groove. The form suggests a sonata movement, but the music is more lively and organic than any schematic with the five-note motive and the leaping accents blending into an indistinguishable synergy constantly evolving with Brahms’s signature thematic variation. An infectious driving builds into a moto perpetuo rush toward the end, erupting into another Brahms signature: an inexhaustible Hungarian dance. Accents, trills, the dashing motif and a gigantic chord of 13 notes conspire to conclude this stunning quintet, a brilliant end for Brahms before his special clarinet encore.
© Kai Christiansen, founder of the chamber music exploratorium at earsense.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.