Program Notes 2026
written by Barbara Leish
Live at Deertrees July 14
For flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola cello, double bass
Last November the Cornell University Department of Music presented a two-day symposium “commemorating the 150th anniversary of visionary 19th century composer, pianist, and pedagogue Louise Farrenc.” The symposium aimed to “affirm Farrenc’s place in history” – a richly deserved acknowledgment of a brilliant pianist, composer, and teacher who was admired during her lifetime, then largely forgotten during the century that followed.
Farrenc’s fight for recognition started early. A piano prodigy and a budding composer, at 15 Farrenc entered the Paris Conservatoire – but only as a piano student, because women were not allowed into the composition classes. Berlioz demonstrated the 19th-century’s bias when he declared one of her works “orchestrated with a talent rare among women.” A renowned teacher, she spent 30 years as a full professor at the Conservatoire – a singular achievement, although it took her years to convince the administration that she should be paid the same as her male colleagues (the popular success of the Nonet finally persuaded them.
Farrenc’s early fame came as a touring piano virtuoso, and her first compositions were widely admired works for piano: Her early 30 Etudes in all the major and minor keys became part of the required study for piano students at the Conservatoire. She was twice awarded a major prize from the Academie des Beaux Arts for her contributions to chamber music, lauded for works that “glow with the purist Classical style.”
Paris’s musical elite flocked to the 1850 premiere of the Nonet, a performance that starred the violinist Joseph Joachim. They were treated to a splendid work that showcases Farrenc’s gifts and her appeal. As a short, stately Adagio segues into a genial Allegro, what is immediately striking – in addition to the first movement’s melodic charm and harmonic adventurousness – is the deft interplay among the nine instruments. After a brief, Romantically tinged violin cadenza in the coda, the Nonet moves on to an inventive set of variations, with each variation focusing on a different instrument or set of instruments: oboe in the first, violin in the second, bassoon in the third, horn in the fourth. (You’ll hear Schubert do something similar in his variation movement in the Trout Quintet.) Among the many rich moments are the timbres created when the oboe plays against viola and cello in the first variation, the violin racing up and down in the second, the bassoon striding commandingly over scampering strings in the third, and the horn’s bouncy rhythm in the fourth. Then it’s on to a witty Scherzo that opens with syncopated pizzicatos in the strings, rises to a cheerful hunt-like melody, and is playful and rakish throughout. Farrenc wraps up the Nonet with a final movement that wonderfully plumbs the rich possibilities when instruments of widely varied timbres are placed together in unexpected combinations.
For piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass
Schubert wrote the Trout Quintet during a happy time in his life, before he had begun to suffer from the syphilis that would kill him at the age of 31. In the summer of 1819 the singer Johann Michael Vogl invited Schubert to vacation with him in Steyr, his picturesque hometown in Upper Austria. Schubert was enchanted by the town and the surrounding countryside. In a letter to his brother he wrote, “At the house where I am lodging there are eight girls, nearly all pretty. So you see, one is kept busy.”
During his stay Schubert met the wealthy music patron Sylvester Paumgartner, an enthusiastic amateur cellist who hosted musical evenings in his home. Paumgartner loved Schubert’s popular song “Die Forelle” (The Trout), a charming story of a fish that darts and splashes to escape a cunning angler. Paumgartner asked Schubert to write a piano quintet in which one of the movements would be variations on the song. Schubert agreed, began the quintet in Steyr, and finished it when he returned to Vienna in the fall. Thus was born one of chamber music’s best-loved works. The carefree weeks spent in Steyr, Schubert’s delight in the romantic landscape, the playful song about the nimble fish – all combined to inspire Schubert’s melodious and effervescent Trout Quintet.
There are many reasons for the Quintet’s enduring popularity. Like the song itself, the Quintet flows joyfully along, its texture enriched by the unusual instrumental combination. Each of the five movements overflows with melodic invention and harmonic color. An unusual feature of three of the movements – the Allegro vivace, the Andante, and the Finale – is that the second half of each is the same as the first, except in a different key. Among the many highlights of the Quintet are the high-spirited interplay among piano and strings from the very beginning of the opening Allegro vivace; the three wonderful contrasting themes of the songlike Andante; the unusual modulations of the rhythmic Scherzo; and the rambunctious Finale that brings the Quintet to its good-natured close. The heart of the piece, of course, is the delectable fourth movement, with its set of six variations on “The Trout.” Each of the instruments gets a chance to shine, in variations that range from subdued to brilliant to tempestuous to lyrical. Teasingly, Schubert saves for the last variation the leaping arpeggios found in the original song, which paint a picture of the trout darting around in the sparkling water.
Like so much of Schubert’s music, the Trout Quintet disappeared during his lifetime. After his death his brother found the manuscript and in 1829 sold it to a publisher, who declared it a masterpiece. It has remained a popular and beloved work ever since.
Live at Deertrees July 21
It was far from a given that a gifted composer could flourish in Stalin’s Russia. Reinhold Glière was one of those who did. Over his long career he remained relatively untouched by the upheavals that shook the country and traumatized so many of its artists. It helped that he was apolitical, that he was steeped in 19th-century Russian Romanticism, that his music never veered from tonality, and that he sought out and incorporated into many of his compositions the folk melodies of the far-flung republics of the USSR. For many years he was an esteemed professor of composition, first at the Kiev Conservatory and then at the Moscow Conservatory, where he influenced a generation of Russian composers (Prokofiev was one of his students). He was heaped with honors: the Order of Lenin, People’s Artist of the USSR, the Stalin Prize.
Glière’s more than 500 compositions included many large-scale, dramatic, hugely popular works: symphonies (his massive third symphony ran for an hour and a half), commemorations of Soviet anniversaries, a cello concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich, elaborate revolutionary-themed operas and ballets like The Red Poppy, with its famous “Russian Sailors Dance.” At the same time, he showed a more intimate side in songs, piano pieces, and especially works for small combinations of strings – he had been a violin protégé and enjoyed writing for strings in particular. As might be expected from a composer who also was an influential teacher, Glière was a skilled craftsman, whose “chamber compositions show him to have been an absolute master of form, and a virtuoso in his control of the resources of musical composition and expression,” as one of his contemporaries wrote.
You’ll get a taste of this in the five colorful, artfully constructed Duos on today’s program, with their wonderful variety of musical styles. Each of these pieces has its own strong character, beginning with a cheerful Gavotte that looks back to the Baroque, with a more folk-like middle section that features bagpipe-like droning. The mood shifts from Baroque to Romantic in the muted Cradle Song, where the flute’s tender melody floats above the cello’s accompanying arpeggios. Tchaikovsky would have appreciated the harmonically rich Intermezzo, an elegant waltz with lovely long melodic lines. The texture thickens in the more dramatic Impromptu, filled with rich harmonies as first the cello, then the flute plays a soaring melody over a chromatic accompaniment. With the Scherzo Glière moves from elegant to jaunty, in a vivacious movement thick with double-stop chords and marked by bouncy rhythm and harmonic adventurousness. With their combination of Romantic gestures, suggestions of Russian folk melody, and Baroque formality, these atmospheric duos charm.
Beethoven arrived in Vienna in 1792 and took the city by storm. At first he made his reputation as a piano virtuoso, famous for his fiery keyboard improvisations. According to one observer, “His playing tore along like a wildly foaming cataract, and the conjurer constrained his instrument to an utterance so forceful that the stoutest structure was scarcely able to withstand it.” Soon, as he absorbed and mastered the Viennese Classical style, he began to be lionized as a composer as well.
During his early years in Vienna, Beethoven worked his way through genres in which Haydn and Mozart had set the standard: piano sonatas, piano and string trios, string quartets, symphonies. But he also wrote lighter works, designed for popularity. One source of musical entertainment popular during Mozart’s time was the divertimento or serenade, written to commemorate an important person, to sing under a lover’s window, or simply to provide an evening’s amusement. Beethoven’s contribution to this genre was the Serenade for String Trio in D Major. It is a graceful and good-humored work, full of vitality; and while it looks back to the Classical 18th century rather than ahead to the revolutions to come, it is not without some adventurous touches.
The Serenade has six movements – seven, if you count the opening March and Adagio as two. It begins with a sprightly march that announces that the entertainment is about to begin. The violin takes the lead in the lyrical section that follows, a gentle and untroubled Adagio, charmingly melodious. Next comes the first of the dances, a Menuetto with a Trio. This movement has some humorous surprises: brusque chords introduce it, and a playful pizzicato coda ends it. Beethoven’s sense of humor emerges in the next movement too. The expressive but melancholy Adagio that begins the movement is interrupted by a short, mercurial scherzo, amusingly scored for the three instruments. This happens twice in the movement, so that by the time the Adagio makes its final reappearance, it’s hard to take it entirely seriously. Any lingering gloom is banished by the fourth-movement polonaise, an infectious dance that in Beethoven’s hand radiates good cheer. Next he turns to a form for which he already was well known, a theme with variations. All of the variations are gracious elaborations on a lovely melody, with each instrument getting its turn to take the lead. Finally Beethoven repeats the opening March to bring his entertainment to its genial conclusion.
Despite Beethoven’s reputation for being moody and pugnacious, he also could be “merry, mischievous, full of witticisms and jokes,” as Czerny once described him. The lighthearted Serenade is a delightful reminder of that Beethoven.
The melody that opens the Horn Trio came to Brahms during a leisurely early-morning walk in the Black Forest, near Baden-Baden, in the summer of 1865. For years it was Brahms’s habit to spend the spring and summer months combining vacation with work, buoyed by pleasant company and the beauties of nature. This particular spring, however, his pleasure was tempered by sadness over the recent death of his mother.
Not surprisingly, the Trio is a memorial for his mother. Beyond that, one of the instruments Brahms chose—the valveless Waldhorn, or natural horn—had strong childhood associations. His musician father had played it, and as a child Brahms had learned to play it too. Although horn players were turning to the new, valved French horn, Brahms was much fonder of the darker, more muted sounds of the natural horn and preferred that it be used in performances of the Trio. “I would be apprehensive about hearing it with the valve horn,” Brahms wrote to a friend. “All poetry is lost, and the timbre is crude and dreadful right from the start.” The key in which Brahms wrote the Trio, E-flat, is the Waldhorn’s natural key.
The Horn Trio is a marvelous blend of elegy, nostalgia, and high spirits. Brahms was as usual breaking musical ground. The very combination of instruments was a striking departure from the expected violin-cello-piano scoring. It was the first and only time, too, that Brahms wrote a chamber piece whose first movement is not in sonata form. Rather, it is an andante that, with its ABABA pattern, moves leisurely away from and back to the gentle, somewhat melancholic theme that opens the work. The second movement is a robust Scherzo, with typically Brahmsian rhythmic inventiveness and darker hints in the minor-key trio section. The full weight of Brahms’s mourning for his mother arrives with the elegiac third movement, whose mood Brahms makes explicit in his tempo marking: Adagio mesto (“sad adagio”). But it is a gentle sadness, in keeping with the spirit of the early movements. In another nod to the past, Brahms links this movement to the next with a German folk tune that his mother had sung to him. The tune appears at the end of the Adagio and then, speeded up, becomes the theme of the exuberant Finale. The clouds lift in this irresistible closing movement, as the three instruments merrily let loose and the Waldhorn indulges in cheerful hunting calls.
Brahms was the pianist for the Trio’s premiere in December 1865, and in the following years he performed it many more times. But despite his wishes, the obsolescent natural horn rarely became the horn of choice for performers.
Live at Deertrees July 28
Widely admired as a composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist, Carl Maria von Weber played a significant role in the launch of 19th-century musical Romanticism. Along with Schubert, he pointed the way to the ascendance of melody. And with his groundbreaking opera Der Freischütz he launched German Romantic opera. Set in a German forest and based on German legend, Der Freischütz pointed in a new nationalist direction that led in a straight line to Wagner. Chopin admired Weber’s piano compositions. Berlioz studied his inventive orchestration. Wagner lauded his approach to opera. After he died, he was interred to funeral music that Wagner arranged from one of Weber’s operas.
Weber composed prolifically. While opera was his first love – he wrote 10 operas – he also wrote many orchestral works, including two symphonies, a number of compositions featuring the clarinet, many virtuoso pieces for piano (most famous among them “Invitation to the Dance”), and several chamber works, including this convivial, melodically rich Trio for Flute, Cello, and Piano in G Minor.
The G Minor Trio is a whirl of virtuosity and striking contrasts. The sonata-form Allegro Moderato that opens the Trio, with its contrasting themes and dramatic outbursts, sets the tone for the whole work. The darker minor-key opening theme, with the cello and the flute playing long melodic lines over a rumbling piano accompaniment, soon gives way to a sunny second theme that dominates much of the movement. At the end of the exposition all three instruments join in staccato octaves, a dramatic device that propels the development section. Like the good dramatist that he is, Weber ends the movement with a surprise, when the opening theme returns and whispers to a close.
The Scherzo also is a movement of contrasts, with a stern, rhythmically offbeat martial theme alternating with a frothy waltz. Weber departs from standard scherzo form by not including a trio. For the third movement, “Shäfers Klage” (Shepherd’s Lament), Weber turned to a Goethe poem that several others composers, including Schubert, also set to music. Weber charmingly portrays the lovelorn shepherd in the field, playing his lonely tune. The Lament serves as a calm bridge to a high-spirited Finale, with Weber spinning off a profusion of melodies while giving all three instruments a chance to shine. As the music critic John Warrack wrote, “Even within a classical framework, Weber’s Romantic imagination is running high.”
A hard-to-resist vitality, originality, and joie de vivre – those are among the qualities that animate the prolific Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s music. He was a Czech patriot who lived away from his native land much of his adult life. But Czechoslovakia left its mark on his distinctive musical personality, as did many of the other places where he lived.
Martinů’s father was a church bell ringer, and Bohuslav spent his childhood in a room atop the church tower. He later would say that the expansive view shaped his outlook on the world: “It was this space that I had constantly before me, and that I am forever seeking in my compositions.” In Prague, where he earned a living as an orchestra violinist, he first heard the music of Debussy, whose works greatly influenced his own style. In 1923 he moved to Paris, where he assimilated French modernism, jazz, and Stravinsky’s neo-classicism. It was in Paris too that he rediscovered his Czech roots. The rhythms of Czech song and dance played an increasingly important role in his compositions.
Martinů fled Paris when the Nazis invaded in 1940, eventually making his way to the United States. Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony and a Martinů enthusiast, commissioned Martinů’s First Symphony and got him a teaching position at Tanglewood. America loved his music, and Martinů continued to compose prolifically. His friends the violist Lilian Fuchs and her brother the violinist Joseph Fuchs had recorded Mozart’s Duos K. 423 and 424 for violin and viola. Inspired, Martinů composed his own Duo No. 1, Three Madrigals, and dedicated the work to the Fuchs siblings.
Martinů had long loved English madrigals. In Three Madrigals he combines the rhythmic spirit and the polyphony of Renaissance music with the melodiousness of Czech folk music. The perpetual-motion first madrigal begins with energetic double-stop chords, one of the devices Martinů uses to give two instruments the heft of a much larger group. Throughout the movement, vigorous chords alternate with playful nonstop repartee between violin and viola as the two instruments trade long-lined melodies and swooping runs. While the first madrigal has nonstop energy, the second is languid. The mood is set by the murmuring trills and tremolandos, played with muted strings, that open the madrigal. What is particularly striking about this movement are its unusual textures and sonorities, as Martinů paints a distinctive color world. Then it’s back to the vigor and playfulness of the first, with an opening that sounds like a hoedown. The rhythms continue to be sprightly and free-floating, the harmonies rich, the folk suggestion strong. There is a melodious central section, and there is humor throughout, right up to the race to the end.
Schumann’s Piano Quintet was the first great chamber-music work that paired the piano with a string quartet. In the year Schumann wrote it, he was on a typical-for-Schumann emotional roller coaster. Married less than two years, he hated it when his wife Clara was on tour, but he also hated traveling with her and being in her shadow. At home and miserable while Clara was away early in 1842, he passed the time studying counterpoint and the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But he was depressed, drinking too much, and unable to compose. Robert blamed Clara. In their household book he wrote, “You deprive me of all my ideas right now. I can’t even put a single song together.” He quickly revived after she returned home. By the end of the year he had written three string quartets, a piano trio, a piano quartet, and the glorious Piano Quintet, his most famous chamber work.
It took Schumann less than three weeks to finish the Quintet, which he wrote for and dedicated to Clara. Not surprisingly, given Clara’s brilliance as a pianist and his own love of the instrument, the piano is front and center for much of the Quintet. But the work is also very much a lush exploration of the sonorities produced when piano and strings work together.
From the outset the Quintet is marked by what Ronald Taylor describes as “verve, enthusiasm, serenity, charm, and above all a sense of utter conviction, the feeling … that Schumann saw its entire course from the very moment of its joyful opening bars.” Schumann launches the work with a bold unison opening that will reappear in several guises later on. In one of Schumann’s magical transformations, this opening motif melts almost immediately into an expressive song. Next the cello and the viola present an equally disarming second theme. Virtuosic piano runs in the development section and a satisfyingly big sound at the end are among the highlights of a movement marked by Schumann’s melodic gifts and his sense of high drama.
Each of the movements that follow is brilliant in its own way. The solemn second movement has the air of a funeral march, although both a lyrical second subject played over a restless piano and an agitated middle section affect the opening mood. The instruments chase one another up and down the scale in the acrobatic Scherzo, which features two trios, the first a lyrical inversion of the first movement’s opening theme, the second a whirl of motion. The Quintet ends with an exultant Allegro that sweeps to a stunning coda: a fugue whose subjects are the first theme of the opening movement and the main theme of the finale. In terms of musical thrills, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Live at Deertrees August 4
The E-flat Major Trio probably got its nickname through a mix-up. Purportedly Mozart composed it while enjoying a game of skittles, an early form of bowling. (“Kegelstatt” means “skittle alley.”) In fact Mozart did compose a work while bowling with friends – it just wasn’t this one. A week earlier he had composed a set of duets for horns, and on that manuscript he had written, “Vienna 27 July 1786 while playing skittles.” Somehow “Kegelstatt” got appended to this Clarinet Trio. Accurate or not, the nickname does suggest one of the Trio’s many endearing qualities: It is, as Alfred Einstein notes, “a work of intimate friendship and love,” written to be enjoyed by friends playing together at home.
Mozart had a rich social life. His closest friend was Gottfried von Jacquin, the son of the famous botanist Nikolaus von Jacquin and the brother of Franziska, Mozart’s talented young piano pupil. Mozart was part of a group that gathered weekly at the Jacquin house for talk, games, and music-making. Another good friend was Anton Stadler, a fellow Mason, a rogue, and, most important, a brilliant clarinetist. Mozart loved the sound of Stadler’s clarinet and wrote the Clarinet Quintet and the Clarinet Concerto for him. He also loved the deep, rich sound of the viola, his instrument of choice when he played chamber music. All of these elements came together in the E-flat Major Trio. Mozart wrote it for Franziska Jacquin to play at one of the family’s informal gatherings, and he scored it for a unique combination of his favorite instruments. Most likely the Trio was first performed at the Jacquin home with Franziska playing the piano, Mozart the viola, and Stadler the clarinet.
The Trio is a splendid example of chamber music as a perfectly balanced conversation among equals. Unusually, Mozart begins with a first movement Andante rather than an Allegro. Unusually, too, while the movement is in sonata form, Mozart develops just one theme. To achieve unity he relies on subtle elaborations and instrumental interplay, and on the gruppetto (ornamental turn) that recurs throughout the movement. Like the Andante, the cheerful Menuetto is distinguished by Mozart’s blending of the genial galant style with complex polyphony. The movement’s minor-key trio – with its dynamic contrasts and the viola’s energetic triplets – adds bite; and the reappearance of the trio’s theme at the end of the movement is a delectable touch. Mozart concludes with a rondo that “sings from beginning to end,” in Einstein’s words. It features colorful contrasts, virtuosic turns, melodic and contrapuntal delights, a minor-key episode that briefly turns the movement darker, and a joyful ending that brings the work to a perfect close.
If Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio is a cheerful work of friendship and love, Alfred Schnittke’s Piano Quintet is something else altogether: a musical expression of great grief from a son mourning his mother’s death. The Quintet is a cry from the heart, and a powerful illustration of the ability of music to convey deep emotions.
Schnittke was one of the most important and admired composers in post-Soviet Russia. Like Shostakovich, who was a major influence, he was a prolific craftsman whose output ranged from symphonies (he wrote nine) to music for films (some sixty-six scores). Schnittke received his early musical education in Vienna, where he absorbed the Western European traditions that factored significantly into his musical outlook. In the years that followed, he mastered the abstract musical styles of the 20th century. By the time he wrote the Piano Quintet, he had developed the distinctive technique that he named polystylism – an eclectic mashing together of wildly contrasting ideas, from the traditional harmonies and forms of the Baroque and Classical eras to the microtones of the avant garde. In Schnittke’s hands, established musical boundaries crumbled away. As he once described his method, “I set down a beautiful chord on paper – and suddenly it rusts.”
The Piano Quintet is a vivid example of Schnittke’s distinctive approach. It’s also a work so steeped in anguish that it took him four years to finish it. After he wrote the first movement, he later said, “I was unable to continue because I had to take what I wrote from imaginary spaces defined in terms of sound and put it into psychological space as defined by life, where excruciating pain seems almost unserious, and one must fight for the right to use dissonance, consonance, and assonance.”
In the opening movement, Schnittke pits the piano’s slow, repeated five-note motif against edgy dissonances from the strings. Halfway through the movement he adds a note that tolls measure after measure, like a death knell. These elements – the repeated motif, the dense tone clusters, the relentless tolling – recur in various combinations throughout the Quintet. In the harrowing second movement, a traditional waltz deteriorates into a sardonic oom-pah-pah as the strings trill and buzz claustrophobically. Schnittke described the next two movements as “real experiences of grief.” There’s a bone-chilling moment in the Andante when the strings, high-pitched, shriek in anger. There’s a fierce stridency throughout the Lento. And finally, there’s a reprieve. Schnittke called the last movement a pastorale, and the mood does become gentler here, thanks to the calming, expansive fourteen-note theme that the piano repeats throughout the movement. It’s an offer of solace that closes this haunting, deeply personal work.
Schnittke later reworked the Quintet into an orchestral piece that he titled “In Memoriam.”
Something out of the ordinary happened in the Czech-speaking town of Spillville, Iowa, during several weeks in the summer of 1893. There, vacationing in a community that reminded him of his native Bohemia, Dvorák put the finishing touches to his iconic “New World” Symphony, Op. 95, and composed two “American” works for strings: The F Major Quartet, Op. 96, and the joyful work on today’s program, the E-flat Major String Quintet, Op. 97. All three were inspired by the same impetus: Dvorák’s desire to create a distinctively American musical voice.
The year before, Dvorák, the muse of Czech musical nationalism, had come to New York to be director of the National Conservatory of Music, a school focused on creating an American style of composition. Among the students at the school was Harry Burleigh, a Black baritone whom Dvorák heard singing spirituals. Dvorák was entranced. In the rhythmic vitality and simple lines of Burleigh’s songs he heard the indigenous American sound that he was looking for. And in Spillville he heard other sounds that delighted him, especially when a group of travelling Native American Indians, arriving in town to sell herbal medicines, performed traditional music and dance accompanied by drumming – performances that Dvorák enthusiastically attended. Their music infuses the Quintet.
True, the characteristics that appealed to Dvorák in the music he heard in America –including pentatonic scales and syncopated rhythmic patterns – are familiar from the folk melodies he had long incorporated into his music. In fact, the pentatonic scale is a staple of folk music from around the world. Still, there is something distinctively American about this vibrant Quintet. The melodic lines are presented simply, without an emphasis on harmonic complexity, while underlying ostinatos strongly suggest Native American drumming. It’s all laid out in the sonata-form opening movement, from the viola’s pentatonic opening melody, through the second theme’s drumming-like dotted rhythms, to the energetic coda with all four instruments playing in unison.
The second movement is a bouncy scherzo featuring a drum-beat pattern and a long-lined, spacious central trio that perhaps, it has been suggested, was inspired by the wide-open spaces of Iowa. The third-movement Larghetto, a lovely theme and four variations, opens with a two-part theme. There’s an interesting story associated with the second part of the theme. While he was in New York Dvorák had decided that it was wrong for the country’s then-national anthem, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” to be set to the British tune “God Save the Queen.” He had written his own tune as a substitute, and although it was never adopted, this is the melody that appears as the major-key half of the Larghetto theme. The Quintet ends with a rambunctious Finale, a rondo whose fortissimo ending brings Dvorák’s gift to America to a rollicking close.
Live at Deertrees August 11
For many years, no composer or pianist was more revered in France than Camille Saint-Saëns. The public adored him, and Berlioz and Liszt were among the many forward-looking musicians who admired him (Liszt described him as “the greatest organist in the world”). His vast output included works that remain staples of today’s classical concerts, including his Symphony No. 3 (“Organ”), the symphonic poem Dance macabre, the opera Samson et Delila, and of course Carnival of the Animals (which he wrote as a joke and, worried that it would hurt his reputation, refused to have it performed during his lifetime). His interests were wide-ranging. He was one of the first pianists to experiment with recordings, and he was the first famous composer to write music for the cinema, a 1908 film called The Assassination of the Duke of Guise. During his lifetime he was heaped with awards, and statues were erected to honor him.
Yet although he was once considered an innovator, Saint-Saëns stubbornly resisted Modernism, and as he got older his influence and reputation began to wane. His music was criticized for being elegant and beautifully written but lacking depth and emotion. In addition, his conservative, Romantic style put him at odds with France’s musical revolutionaries, especially Debussy. But he never stopped writing well-crafted, often inspired, harmonically and contrapuntally masterful music, and throughout his long life, audiences – especially in England and America – continued to revere him. Late works like the lyrical Fantasie for Violin and Harp help to explain his enduring appeal.
Saint-Saëns wrote the single-movement Fantasie for two sisters, the violinist Marianne Eisler and the harpist Clara Eisler. Like Debussy, he was interested in the possibilities when two instruments of very different timbres are paired. In this inventive, atmospheric work – which is filled with flowing melodies and bravura turns for both instrumentalists – the violin and the harp engage each other in an ever-changing pas de deux. At first, in the opening Poco allegretto, they take the roles expected of them, with the violin rising melodiously over the harp’s rippling arpeggios. From this gentlest of openings, as the music progresses through its five sections, the interactions grow in complexity. In the middle section, Vivo e grazioso, which begins with the violin skittering playfully over harp chords, the two relate more as equal partners. In the wonderfully paced Andante con moto, the harp keeps up an obsessive ostinato over which the violin weaves increasingly elaborate flourishes and the music grows in intensity. Throughout, there’s a silky smoothness to Saint-Saëns’s touch as he leads his duo from calm, through playfulness, whimsy, and passion, back to calm with a return to the balance and clarity of the opening.
Depressed by World War I and eager to contribute to the French war effort, Debussy turned to the only thing he had to offer: his music. “I want to work not so much for myself, but to give proof, however small it may be, that not even 30 million ‘boches’ can destroy French thought,” he said. In the sonatas that turned out to be his last compositions, Debussy sought to capture what he saw as the spirit of French tradition. As he told Stravinsky, his intent was to return to “pure music.” He planned to write six sonatas for different combinations of instruments: cello and piano; flute, viola, and harp; violin and piano; oboe, horn, and harpsichord; clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, and piano; and as a grand finale, a sixth sonata that would be scored for all those instruments plus a double bass. As it turned out, he wrote only the first three before succumbing to colon cancer.
In the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, Debussy wraps an 18th century French sensibility – elegant and uncluttered – in 20th century tonality. Debussy described this Sonata as “in the ancient, flexible mold with none of the grandiloquence of modern sonatas.” What is immediately striking is the way in which, from the ethereal opening measures, Debussy exploits the distinct and contrasting timbres of his unusual combination of instruments. Striking too is the unconventional structure. Beginning with the flute’s melancholy opening strain, the episodic Pastorale is made up of six brief motifs. After a lively middle section that is driven by dotted rhythms, these motifs recur without variation but in a different order. Throughout this sensuous movement and the two that follow, there are striking shifts in tempo and mood. And even with Debussy’s new aesthetic, you’ll hear a beguiling range of colors and textures that recall his earlier Impressionistic works, and suggestions of the Eastern influences so prominent in his compositions.
Debussy continues his homage to the past in the Interlude. Marked “Tempo de Minuetto,” the movement with its carefree melody captures the spirit of the graceful, sunny Baroque dance. Vigorous rhythms propel the energetic Finale, with the viola’s pizzicatos and the flute’s arpeggios among the movement’s driving forces. William Austin called the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp “the last word in the vein of Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun and Syrinx, with both the voluptuousness of the former and the austerity of the latter.” Debussy’s own assessment of the Sonata is intriguing. Looking back with seeming regret, he wrote to a friend that it was “the music of a Debussy whom I no longer know. It is frightfully melancholy and I don’t know whether one should laugh or cry – perhaps both?”
In 1861, Brahms moved out of his family’s cramped house in Hamburg and into his own sunny rooms in the suburb of Hamm. Happy in his new quarters, he poured out compositions. The first of his important Hamm works were a pair of piano quartets, Op. 25 in G Minor and Op. 26 in A Major. With these two quartets, Brahms entered a significant new stage in his development. Yet the G Minor Quartet did not entirely please his friends Clara Schumann and Josef Joachim, who had problems with the first movement. Clara complained about Brahms’s choice of keys (“Too little in G minor and too much in D major”) and especially about the looseness with which he dealt with sonata form. As Jan Swafford summed up their reaction, “They were not yet accustomed to the dialectic Johannes had begun with tradition.” Brahms knew that Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven had not been bound by rigid principles. As Clara wrote in her journal a few months later, “An interesting conversation with Johannes about form. How the old masters had the freest form, while modern compositions move within the stiffest and most narrow limits, He himself emulates the older generation.”
Clara’s uneasiness, shared by many listeners, derived largely from the way in which Brahms blurs the expected transitions from section to section in the first movement. Instead of the traditional, expected repeat of the exposition, he writes a short restatement of the first bars of the movement before moving directly into an intense, extended development section. Brahms also blurs the start of the recapitulation. Along with this characteristically unorthodox treatment of form, though, there is an equally characteristic melodic expressiveness that gives a Brahmsian lushness to this powerful movement.
Brahms originally called the second movement a Scherzo – it is in scherzo form, complete with a trio — but Clara apparently suggested that the title Intermezzo would be more appropriate, given the movement’s slower tempos and tuneful grace. In the romantically expressive third movement Brahms combines two very different ideas, as a melodious theme flanks a dotted-rhythm march. While the first movement may have puzzled listeners, the last – a breathless Gypsy-style rondo – “was obviously intended to bring the house down, and it did,” as Brahms’s biographer Ivor Keys noted. Clara, who premiered the Quartet in Hamburg in 1861, wrote in her diary, “The last movement took the audience by storm.” Joachim, who had dedicated his own “Hungarian” Violin Concerto to Brahms, wrote to his friend, “You have beaten me on my own turf.” A year later, the musicians who performed the Quartet with Brahms in Vienna added their own accolade: At the end of a rehearsal, the first violinist leapt up and proclaimed, “This is Beethoven’s heir!”
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