The Human Side of the Goldberg Variations

This month begins a new blog. In talking with Ellen Hughes, the new director of Market Square Concerts, I’ve set up a blog for them called, for obvious reasons, “The Market Square Concerts Blog.”

I’ll be posting some of the things there I might usually post here – especially the “up-close and personal” introductions to works that will be performed on up-coming concerts.

So you can now read The Human Side of the Goldberg Variations and also The Road Map to the Goldberg Variations.

Tuesday afternoon, I’ll be presenting a “Market Square Concerts Soundscape” for the students at the Capital Area School for the Arts, preparing them for a pre-concert presentation by pianist Matthew Bengtson and composer Jeremy Gill. The concert itself is Sunday afternoon at 4:00 at Harrisburg’s Whitaker Center.

- Dr. Dick

Music at Market Square for Messiaen's Centennial

In starting to work on a post about the three performances this past weekend I had attended, I got into a riff about how audience distractions can damage, even ruin a performance – mostly just things like people talking (fortunately I didn’t have to deal with ringing cell-phones). Then that reminded me I had not written anything about the Market Square Concerts from November 1st with the ensemble Antares. Now, normally, I don’t care for the idea of being a critic, but I’ll make an exception, here.

The program began with the suite for clarinet, violin and piano that Igor Stravinsky arranged from his theater-piece, L’Histoire du soldat. It’s originally scored without piano but with a very busy percussionist which means the pianist has to make like a bass-drum or trap set in several passages, giving pitch to sounds that originally had no pitch associated with them. An odd idea but an interesting, colorful use of the piano which is, after all, a kind of percussion instrument since its strings are hit by hammers to create the sound. They all played it with the playfulness, sensuality or ferocity it required (it is, after all, a Faust story and there’s a good deal of devilish music incorporated into this suite) but above all with an amazingly clean technical virtuosity.

Ravel’s Piano Trio may have been the closest thing to “standard rep” on the program even though it’s not all that well known. It was given one of the more lucid performances I’ve heard, keeping the structure clear rather than just revel in the beautiful sounds the composer creates over it. At one point when writing it, Ravel was supposed to have remarked to a friend that he had finished written the piece: “now all I need are the notes.” The form of the piece, how it’s put together, is like the human body: the structure is the skeleton which gives it substance. The harmonies are like muscles, since they move the structure forward (and the muscles cannot move without support from the skeleton). Over this, the composer stretches the skin, the surface of the music which is what we hear most easily and which, in many respects, listeners rarely get beyond. If the performers have paid attention to getting the muscles and the skeleton to function properly, the audience doesn’t need to worry about it: it’s understood or, rather, comprehended.

The main work on the program was Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, played in honor of the composer’s 100th birthday anniversary next month. So in addition to Antares, organist Eric Riley, the organist and choir director of Market Square Presbyterian Church, offered his own tribute to a composer who was an exceptional organist and who wrote some of the most amazing organ music of the 20th Century. He played the concluding section of the suite, La Nativité du Seigneur. As the Quartet would show, Messiaen was not just a spiritual composer but a Catholic composer of an uncommon and deeply spiritual, often mystical nature. Much of his music can be long, trance-like meditations based on some passage of scripture or a germ of a spiritual idea that could be the source for a minister’s sermon, though here handled entirely in music. There can also be outbursts of joy and ecstasy that can be “over-the-top” and Dieu parmi nous (God Among Us) is one such joyfully ecstatic over-the-topper. To say Riley nearly brought the house down would also reflect that I was glad not to be sitting directly under the balcony where the organ console is located at Market Square Church, but he did manage to set the walls vibrating to bring it home like a tsunami at the end, cranking the volume up even more. No easy piece, it sounded effortless for all the hands and feet had to do to create this effect: since you couldn’t see him playing, there was no visual element to let you know, “man, this is hard!”

Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is a “signature piece” for Antares, an ensemble that consists of violin, cello, clarinet and piano, which just happens to be the instruments Messiaen had available when this work was given its first performance in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. This is a very long work that moves, as its title implies, within a whole different plane from what many concert-goers may be used to. Still, it can be an intensely riveting work but unfortunately the least distraction can destroy the intense spirituality the composer has put into the piece and all the skill and concentration the performers are applying to bring out what the composer wrote which is always more than just the notes on the page.

Whether it was the performers’ “fault” for not being able to hold everybody’s attention (I have attended performances where the audience was so still you could literally hear a pin drop) or perhaps too big a pre-concert dinner or too much heat in the church, this audience was one of the roochiest I’ve sat in for some time. Some people were leaning forward in rapt attention, hanging onto every note (especially during the long quiet movements) while others were paging through the program or the hymnal or just looking around like they were bored out of their skulls. Others were clearly dozing off (one person was leaning so far forward I was afraid he’d lose his balance and wake up with a snort). Fine – Messiaen can do that to people, I’m afraid: it’s not easy music for some people to listen to, I admit.

But during the quietest section of the piece, the clarinetist’s long monologue, “The Abyss of the Birds,” I was surrounded by the almost constant rumbling of what I thought at first was the New York subway except I knew I wasn't in New York City any more. It was stomachs, the rumbling of several stomachs coming from behind me, from the right, from the front - an uncontrollable physical response that, as Murphy would have it, had to occur during the quietest moments. If that wasn’t bad enough, this set the young couple sitting in front of me into spasms of giggles and much elbow-poking. Yeah, I remember getting caught up in stuff like that a few times when something weird happened, so I can’t claim the high road here, but I don’t think it was ever during something as spiritual as Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. (I can actually recall two incidents right off the bat which might make an amusing post some other time.) Ah, well...

There were two things about Antares’ performance I would note (as a critic). The clarinetist gave one of the best performances I’ve ever heard of this piece – especially in “The Abyss of the Birds” with its long-tones coming out of nowhere and crescendoing into a roar before erupting into a cascade of bird-song, the section most tragically derailed by the audience’s collective gastric distress. I’ve heard many live performances of the Quartet over the years and several of them by very fine musicians, one of them by one of his teachers, David Shifrin. I would rate Garrick Zoeter’s performance very close to the legendary performances from Tashi (I’d heard two of them in NYC in the ‘70s) with Richard Stolzman which has always been, for me, the unattainable bar other musicians have to aspire to.

The pianist, Eric Huebner, had this distracting idea that the on-the-beat accents in the two slow meditations for cello and, to conclude, for violin (accents which Messiaen marks “cet accent louré doit rester dans la nuance piano” – literally, “this accent should remain within the shade piano” in which case piano does not refer to the instrument) should be played not piano (soft) but forte (loud) as if they were REALly ACCents to be PLAYed on the BEAT. And though Messiaen writes this accent over both the right and left hands’ notes of the chord, Huebner chose to accentuate the top note of the right hand only: this in turn created a counter-melody to the violin that Messiaen did not compose. Since the accents were now forte, the gradual climax had to be louder still, so the piano took on this bangy, brittle, acerbic tone-color that shattered the transcendent mood and the growing ecstasy of the finale which in turn finished off what the audience had already damaged.

Music for the End of Time

With Election Day now being counted down in single digits, I’m not writing about the end of an interminable campaign or the fact the 2012 Presidential campaign is already heating up (will it never end...?).

I’m not writing about what many on both sides assume the out-come of that election will be if their candidate doesn’t win.

I’m not writing about all the wars (not just the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan), the scientific evidence of something called “Global Warming,” the crisis on Wall Street or its impact on an already damaged world much less other issues, political and moral, that many call “a sign of the times.”

I’m writing about a simple piece of music.

Not that it’s really all that simple. You can hear it for yourself this weekend here in Central Pennsylvania when the ensemble Antares comes to Harrisburg to perform it on a program at Market Square Church, Saturday evening at 8pm as Market Square Concerts’ season continues. Eric Riley, the organist at the church, will also perform Dieu parmi nous (God Among Us) from La Nativité du Seigneur. Also on the program will be a suite from Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat and the Piano Trio by Maurice Ravel.

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You would think a composer planning a work inspired by an apocalyptic theme – nothing less than the End of the World as we know it – would write it for a vast orchestra with a huge brass section (with at least seven trumpets), probably numerous choruses and several vocal soloists to give proper weight and power to the terrifying words of the last book of the Bible.

At the time of the premiere of this work, Olivier Messiaen (photographed here in 1946) was a prisoner-of-war which had something to do with the fact such a piece of music – complete with a “Dance for the Seven Trumpets” – was composed for only four instrumentalists.

The first people to perform and to hear this amazing music were not sitting in a famous concert hall in Paris but in a Nazi prison-camp on a cold day in January, 1941. Scored only for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, it was called “Quartet for the End of Time.”

December marks the 100th Anniversary of the birth of Olivier Messiaen who, recognized as one of the greatest composers in the world when he died in 1992, was at the forefront of New Music at often as he was an outsider. His style changed as he evolved – as did Stravinsky’s or Beethoven’s – and he introduced concepts from the wider world into his own musical vocabulary – as did Debussy or Bartok – that creates an innately unmistakable voice. At heart, a “Catholic Mystic” who brought a bit of the Medieval Past into the 20th Century Present long before the pop world became fascinated by Gregorian Chant, he also absorbed serial techniques and applied them to aspects of music other than just the notes. He built vast structures out of smaller building blocks borrowed from Indian music. He collected the songs of birds from around the world and quoted them in his music as other composers collected and quoted folk-songs. Time, in many of his works, stands utterly still whether it’s in the static meditations of his opera, St. Francis of Assisi or the ecstatic whoops in some of the wilder moments of his Turangalila Symphony. The Quartet is certainly his most famous single work and probably the most frequently performed: every time it is, it’s an event to experience.

Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” is a long work in eight movements that alternates between despair, terror and hope. With its emotional sweep, this is a work that must be as emotionally draining to play as it is difficult technically to perform. One of the biggest challenges, after all that, is for the clarinetist and the cellist to sit absolutely still during the final movement so as not to distract from the violinist and the pianist!

The clarinet’s solo movement, “The Abyss of the Birds,” covers an enormous dynamic range between the low-register despair of the abyss itself and the contrasting innocent-sounding bird-song which is the element of hope: beginning almost imperceptibly, the sound grows sometimes to a roar, sometimes to a wail, without ever distorting its core. The two serene movements, the meditations on Jesus’ eternity and on His immortality, are almost motionless but with an intensity that underscores the simplicity of the music to bring out its interior ecstasy, supported just with simple steady chords, the pulse behind the music but also the world-force that rises at the climaxes to drive the music into another sphere of awareness.

There are, considering the subject with many of the movements’ titles taken from The Book of Revelation, more violent moments as well – the Dance of Fury for the Seven Trumpets where everyone plays in unison or octaves throughout (no harmony) and the next-to-last movement depicting the angel who announces the End of Time – that in some performances sounded more apocalyptic to me than I thought possible with only four players and more fearsome than I remembered them in the several live performances and recordings I’ve had the chance to experience since I first heard the work when I was a student at Susquehanna University in the early-70s.

This is music Olivier Messiaen composed while being held as a prisoner-of-war in a Nazi prison camp in World War II. The music is inspired by lines from the Revelation of St. John (most of Messiaen’s music in based directly or indirectly on his strong Catholic faith). How do you write a piece like this, with its implication of the end-of-the-world, when you are a prisoner-of-war in a Nazi prison camp? If you’ve ever been distracted from something you really needed to focus on, perhaps by the radio in your co-worker’s cubicle, the every-day sounds of life coming from your neighbors, or the incessant jangling of the telephone, multiply that by the questions and privations of living (if one can call it that) in a prison camp! This was not a concentration camp – Messiaen was in the army and had been captured by the Germans following their invasion of northern France – but it was, still, a prison camp, and the composer, his performers and his audience were all prisoners. I can think of no other great musical work of art that came about under such circumstances.

The story Messiaen tells may be slightly different from the reality of the events themselves. The instruments were certainly not in the best shape: he said the piano was missing some keys and then there is the legendary cello with only three strings which may have been a partial fabrication of the composer’s memory (the cellist apparently chided Messiaen later for this little-white-lie, saying “I had four strings and you know it”). He and the cellist met the clarinetist, Henri Akoka, on the train while the prisoners were being transported to the prison. Akoka had his clarinet with him and the first performance of the solo clarinet movement of the Quartet, “The Abyss of the Birds” (or at least a draft of it), took place in an open field during their move from France to Stalag VIII-A in Silesia (now in Poland).

The idea of the entire work appears to have begun before Messiaen was captured: the “Abyss” may have been composed en route to the prison. What could be more of an abyss than being in a train herded across Europe to an unknown future? It is true that the commandant of the camp cut Messiaen some slack and German guards supplied him with manuscript paper and pencils so he could compose. It is also true, ultimately, that Messiaen, a recognized composer even before his incarceration, was released because of his status as an artist, and the other three musicians of that performance were released with him. Though the clarinetist, a Jew, would survive the war, his father would die in another Nazi prison camp, one that had become a concentration camp instead.

The musical language is Messiaen’s own, using Hindu rhythms to create great palindromic phrases that ebb and flow in units of time outside the standard Western Classical vocabulary, melodies that are built on scales of an equally exotic nature and harmonies that, on one hand, are based on “non-traditional” chords that have their own inner logic and tension but, on the other hand, can often be pure traditional triads, sometimes with added notes that remind one of popular songs from the ‘20s and ‘30s.

At one of those “talk-back” session at a recent performance I heard, one questioner asked about this language and remarked that, for a composer who had won a conservatory prize in counterpoint (the art of creating a harmonically integrated fabric out of recognizably independent musical lines: you might think of a round as its most innocent form, or a fugue as a more intellectual conception), there was almost no counterpoint in this piece.

True, in the more limited 18th Century sense of the word: but in the opening movement, for instance, Messiaen creates a sense of suspended time with each instrument playing an independent and virtually unchanging line without apparent reference to one another, a “temporal” counterpoint not too far removed from the opening of Schubert’s expansive C Major String Quintet, another work that manages to suspend a listener’s sense of time, with its interior line of long sustained chords moving slowly in between the cello in the bass and a bird-like line of the first violin.

This is just one element of the variety of textures Messiaen employs throughout his great musical arc: as it begins with time suspended in the liquid flow of all four instruments, it ends with the simple heart-beat-like pulsations of the piano’s supporting chords for one final meditation rising to the heavens and ultimately beyond the scope of our hearing and our earthly experience.

Alex Ross wrote of this music, in a 2004 article in the New Yorker magazine, “In the end, Messiaen’s apocalypse has little to do with history and catastrophe; instead, it records the rebirth of an ordinary soul in the grip of extraordinary emotion, which is why the Quartet is as overpowering now as it was on that frigid night in 1941.”

It is a long work, as I mentioned, but how long in most performances I’ve been lucky to hear, I couldn’t tell you: if the performers manage to translate Messiaen’s transcendence of time with the proper intensity, it becomes but the flash of a moment, one that may live long in your memory.

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Photo credit: an uncredited photograph posted at Wikipedia and used here under the terms of fair use.

While we celebrate the Messiaen Centennial this year, you can also read about another composer who will be on hand to celebrate his 100th Birthday in December: Elliott Carter.

And, on a lighter note or two, you can also read about another election (of sorts) between two unlikely candidates, including one who has a slightly different approach to the End of the World.

-- Dr. Dick

Like a Patient Etherized upon a Table...

When you play a piece of music, there are many different ways of playing it – not to mention the distinction made between practicing, rehearsing and performing it (and for some lucky players, recording it). While you learn the notes, you come to terms with the technical aspects, beginning simply with getting the right notes, placing them in the right place, phrasing and articulating the notes, then the structure, then the connections and so on. Getting “what’s between the notes” comes with exposure and understanding. Sometimes, you discover “what’s behind the notes” which may give you some insight into what’s on the written page which in turn may give you different kind of interpretation than what you hear other musicians playing.

And meanwhile, you, the player, react to what you’re learning to play and then, once learned, coming to terms with it as a performer. And always listening.

And not every piece requires (expects - demands) the same level of attention: some pieces are harder to play, technically, or more difficult to put together than others. Others present other options to consider: some are fairly straight-forward while others present more questions than answers. One of the things you often hear about “great art” is that it allows you to constantly be discovering new things when you listen to or play a piece – and like people who grow and change with passing time, our listening to a piece of music we’ve heard or played in the past might be invigorated by perspectives that also grow and change as we do.

A pianist could take an “impressionist” approach to, say, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (the first movement’s dreamy night-time reverie sitting in a silver-tinged landscape under a full-moon; the finale’s thunderstorm), a “theatrical one” (the first movement’s contemplation of lost love, the middle movement’s nostalgic memories, the finale’s turbulent heart-break and violent passions) or a literal one (a moderate tempo in the first movement, a kind of song-without-words; a minuet that’s not really a minuet but a more realistic respite between these otherwise atypical outer movements; a finale that is agitato without going overboard, being sure to place the accents where they belong because they’re not always where you expect them or even where a lot of performers seem to put them), all of which still reflects what Beethoven left us, even if we ignore the nickname some critic (not the composer) gave it.

To bring those different kinds of possibilities to, say, the little “Facile” Sonata that Mozart wrote – the one in C Major, K.545, which every budding piano-player has to deal with at some point – is neither possible nor wise, though the structures behind the music might be very similar if not the same (in the Mozart, the trick for more advanced players is to remember the difference between “childish” and “child-like”).

And so Bruce Adolphe decided to approach a Beethoven string quartet from a slightly different perspective, offering another viewpoint that might allow a listener (or a player) to hear a familiar work in a new way.

I wasn’t sure what he was going to “do” with Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95 which the composer himself (not a critic, not the publisher) called “Quartetto serioso.” This is either the last of the “Middle Quartets” or the first of the “Late Quartets” in the progress of Beethoven’s development from a late-18th Century composer who idolized Mozart and whom Haydn tried to control to a composer who, even in his own time, must have sounded like an off-the-wall avant-garde composer writing modern music that went far beyond the boundaries of what his contemporaries considered “proper.” If you listen to Beethoven’s music today, you hear it filtered through all the music you’ve experienced, whether it’s Brahms and Wagner, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Elliott Carter and Philip Glass or Glenn Miller and Kurt Cobain without realizing how much of a shock this must have been to its first-time listeners in 1810, the year after Haydn died.

It’s easy to argue about whether art is cyclical (what goes around, comes around) or linear (the chronological progression from one composer, one era, to the next) and of course there are always exceptions. The people who created this art are perhaps even more complex that the art they created: we just tend to forget the details of the creators when we have, separated by so much time and context, just their art.

When I was teaching at the University of Connecticut, I asked some of my junior-level students to write down the first things that came to mind when they heard the name “Beethoven!” Most answers were easily anticipated – “Great Music” or “Hero” but also “deaf” and (back in the days when a comic named Steve Martin was everywhere) “a wild and crazy guy.”

In one of those moments where you realize why you teach, one of these students had written down the word “pain.” She said she was thinking of his constant suffering and struggling to survive. “Because he was deaf?” I asked as a kind of devil’s advocate. “No, not just that,” she said, going on to mention episodes in his life that can be telegraphed by his relationships – the Immortal Beloved, the Nephew – as well as how difficult his personality was in relation to the society he lived in. She heard this pain in a lot of his music – she mentioned the last movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata – or the “other side” when he was trying to ignore the pain, perhaps, surfacing in the manic energy of the 7th Symphony, what you might call “working through the pain” – one of my students, perhaps her, had once told me the slow movement of the 7th was some of the saddest music she’d ever heard.

Now, it’s always difficult to psychoanalyze the music or the composer because in many ways you can counter any argument by saying “all composers are different” just as “all listeners are different” – just as for every Democratic response to the economic issues we face politically and socially today can be countered by an equal and usually opposite Republican reaction to the same issue – and vice-versa (even if the response is no more grounded than just saying “it won’t work”). What every performer must do and what every listener should do is something every composer has to do before putting notes down on paper: make an honest committment to the moment. It doesn’t matter if it’s two- or three-hundred years old or brand new. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve heard the piece before or if you’re hearing it the first time. If you’ve heard it fifty times in your life – concerts, on the radio, listening to CDs – there’s someone nearby who may be hearing it for the first time.

Bruce Adolphe’s presentations tend to use humor seriously – like his turning the first movement of Mozart’s G Minor Piano Quartet into a murder trial at a Market Square Concert a few seasons ago – so when it was announced he was going to describe Beethoven’s “Serioso” as an example of “Tourette Syndrome in Music,” I was wondering if people might show up to picket the performance. True, you can look over a list of symptoms and find musical examples that might correspond to them – certainly, his sharp unexpected accents and swift changes of mood come to mind. And it’s not that everything has to be “humorous” even in a piece called “Serioso.” In fact, in addition perhaps to being a little better prepared with the examples he wanted the quartet to play and running back and forth from the raised platform down to the otherwise unused piano, the presentation might have benefited from a little less humor or maybe it was just, in the apparent lack of preparation with the players, the humor hit the wrong notes but “rightly played” could have been the kind of contrast between light and dark Beethoven himself could give you in his music.

The idea was not, it turned out, to “have fun” at the expense of people who suffer with this disease: he made that very clear at the beginning. The idea was not to imply that Beethoven suffered from this along with any other number of things that at the time were unnamed and just passed off as aspects of his personality. The idea was, in essence, to describe the piece – actually, to “diagnose” the piece – as if it itself suffered from something and it was up to the doctor to treat it as he would any other patient.

Part of this involved a little bit of surgery, removing something that a listener in 1810 would have thought a mistake on the second violinist’s part (minor cosmetic surgery) or an unpleasant transition from one point to another. By exploding a chord at one point, Beethoven veers off into unexpected harmonic territory only to resolve it to some expected place after all by means of a harmonic trick. To explain this, Adolphe had the quartet play the passage under the microscope as it’s written, then asked them to cut out a few measures. Unfortunately the resolution still sounded abrupt because it was now without any transition at all: a second-year theory student should be able to write a couple of chords as a “transplant” replacing the “cancerous cells” that would make a more pleasant modulation, and it might have helped make the point to hear how somebody less than Beethoven might have handled it.

But still, the point was clear: the question is, why was Beethoven doing this? Or, if you’re examining the piece of music like a patient, what was happening here to make this simple structure not function the way such structures were intended? Beyond identifying the symptoms and naming them, what could be done to help the patient?

Adolphe began by describing an incident that happened to him recently in a New York train station, a story that anyone who’s lived in New York City could have experienced, how this guy came up to him on the platform and just started cursing at him and gesticulating wildly – just as the quartet began to play the opening music, with its wild turning pattern and sharply articulated leaps. Then the man calmed down and started to walk away (the music calms down) but then suddenly he turned and came back at him again (as does the music, now, with equal suddenness and building of tension). He would go on to explain how intervals in this opening pattern found their way into other passages – most notably the odd-sounding cello solo that opens the slow movement. He also identified a “trigger point” which seems to set the music off into these unexpected tangents – a simple stepping up from F to F-sharp (or G-flat – on the piano, they’re the same note) sometimes with barely any preparation at all, sometimes even more suddenly by just picking up and dropping down into the new key of F-sharp (“whoa, what was that?!”) – which might cause the music to react the same way a friend of mine might react if you just mentioned the word “Hillary”...

The curious thing about this “trigger,” technically speaking, it’s simply another way of treating a harmonic progression, the movement of one chord to another. Several of my teachers over the years described this by writing three Roman numerals on the board:

I – V – I

This the musical shorthand for a tonic chord moving to a dominant chord moving back to the tonic chord again. In the white-rat garden-variety key of C major, a C chord to a G chord back to a C chord. This is the simplest progression – away from and back to the same sonority – and really nothing more than an automatic expectation.

Then they put another symbol in between the first two chords:

I – X – V – I

This “X” now represents a new chord that could become something to prolong the digression from the C chord before we get to the G chord, whether it’s one chord or a bunch of them. But sticking to the basic cadential formula, it could become

I – IV – V – I

or a C chord to an F chord to a G chord before ending satisfactorily on a C chord. There are different ways you can expand this – you can fool a listener who is expecting that final C chord by replacing it with an A Minor chord – which has two of the same pitches in it, but it sounds completely UN-final and therefore needs to resolve further in order to reach that expected C major chord:

I – IV – V – vi

If you want to really throw the listener for a loop, once the “deceptive resolution” to A minor sounds “so last year,” you switch it to an A-FLAT major chord which then allows you a ton of other expectations:

I – IV – V – ♭VI

Like any tangent, this now requires a little more work before you – aaaah! – finally get to where you expected to go in the first place – that last C Major chord.

You could also substitute another “almost-identical” chord for the IV, the original “X” chord. Instead of an F Major chord (built on the pitches F-A-C), you could insert a D Minor chord (D-F-A built on the 2nd degree of the C Major scale and therefore Roman-numeralized as a “ii”) but in its first inversion, putting the third note of the chord – the F – in the bass so it’s now an F-A-D chord (same chord, just a different ‘voicing’):

I – ii6 – V – I

Composers often played with the expectations a listener might have between major and minor chords – or by extension their tonalities – “inflecting” something from the minor world into the major one. This goes back to the uncomfortable generalization that “minor is sad” and “major is happy” kind of thing – one is dark, the other light – but like a shadow passing over the surface, hearing an A-flat in an otherwise C Major passage would be something to notice: it’s not expected.

Substituting an F MINOR chord for the IV – thus making it a “iv” chord (upper-case = major chord, lower-case = minor chord) – can bring out a new and different emotional response with this inflection of the A-flat from the parallel world of C Minor:

I – iv – V – I

If you go back to that “ii-chord” substitution and now work with the two common notes of F and A-flat, and switch the D to a D-flat, you have not only a minor “inflection” but also a note that does not belong to the scale of C Major OR C Minor. This is usually handled as a first-inversion chord, again, with the expected F in the bass – F - A-flat - D-flat – which then resolves to a G Major chord et cetera...

I – ♭II6 – V – I

Whether this “sound” was invented in Naples, Italy, or not, it’s become known as a “Neapolitan Chord,” one of a variety of geographically identified chords that have certain intrinsic structures and expectations of their own.

Beethoven is, however, often using the emotional response for this chord more directly, more “in-your-face” by NOT playing with the “oh, I’m just masquerading as a IV chord” kind of chord. And in his aggressive rhythmic and melodic patterns, it becomes startling – in 1810, possibly even frightening. It’s not what the listener expected and it’s playing with these expectations that opened up whole new worlds of sound and harmonic technique that may lead directly or indirectly to further confusions of expectations in Schubert or Wagner or Schoenberg.

As my teachers would explain it, “I-V-I is just a raw element of music, a cliche.” (In pop music today, perhaps it’s I-♭VII-I but the analogy is still there.) Pointing to the X in the “I-X-V-I” pattern on the board, he’d say, underscoring the X, “THAT’s composition.”

Looking for humor in Beethoven’s agitated “Serious” Quartet might have brought up the possibility of placing Op. 95 on prozac. By calming down the opening’s abrupt motive to become more acceptable, more of what listeners then expected, would it turn into just another faceless quartet in the crowd? Hoffmeister, perhaps? It wouldn’t take much to rewrite a few measure here and there to show what we would have lost if Beethoven were on medication...

As Adolphe concluded, whether we think it’s the pain that Beethoven experienced that he put into the music or the piece of music itself that bears the pain – after all, he said, “Beethoven is dead” (unless of course you believe in a weird kind of parallel universe, whether or not they continue to live through their music) – we have the piece and we can hear its pain. And the pain becomes ours.

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While I’m not in the mind-set to write reviews of performances I hear, though some people expect it – let me repeat, I am not a music critic despite whatever opinions I may have or whatever other people think of them – it’s impossible not to comment on the performance of the Beethoven “Serioso” Quartet given by the Daedalus Quartet at Saturday night’s opening performance with Market Square Concerts.

This is a group I’d heard a little over three years ago playing Sibelius’ underrated String Quartet with a more enigmatic nickname, “Intimate Voices,” a work that figures on their first CD release from the Bridge label. For one reason or another, I hadn’t listened to this disc: even without listening to it when we got it at the station, I automatically ordered a copy for myself. It was odd, driving in to hear them play at Market Square Church and listening to their performance of the Sibelius on the ride in and the ride back. Of course, the listening conditions in my car were not as good as hearing a live-performance anywhere, one reason why sitting in a concert hall in quasi-religious confinement listening to music is better for the experience (unless you’re just looking for pretty wall-paper). By concentrating your focus on the music, you absorb more of what the composer wrote and how the musicians interpreted it. Some of it, also, is just the “communal experience” of sharing this concentration with the rest of the audience as well as communing with the music. Granted, I should’ve listened to it in my living room, if the Kittens of Mass Distraction would allow the ability to focus (of course, there, if the phone rings, I feel more obligated to answer it than to hurl silent curses to the idiot with the cell phone two rows down...).

But I was still wondering why this piece isn’t heard more often. I don’t recall it being programmed locally before, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t play it more than three times the whole 18 years I was working at the radio station, once to promote the Daedalus’ performance with the Next Generation Festival that year.

Beethoven’s Op. 95 is in a different category. Listeners have the opportunity not only to hear this one work frequently, it’s not unusual to hear it on an all-Beethoven program with two other quartets – or even in the context of a Complete Quartet Cycle.

Whether or not the Daedalus Quartet was influenced by the image of the music being laid out on an examining table – reminding me of that cadaverous exhibit going around called “Our Bodies” – they certainly gave it a very visceral performance. By pushing what would have sounded unexpected in 1810 (or whenever it was first performed: Beethoven didn’t publish it for another six years), they made it sound fresh and frightening today, not belabored by what most audiences expect after two more centuries down the road. For some listeners who like their music clean, this may have been an over-the-top performance, pushing the tempo to a risk-taking breaking-point. Regardless, it was a clean performance, note-wise at least, even if at times the emotions got a little messy.

The Haydn that opened the program, the second of the Opus 20 set known as the “Sun Quartets,” was appropriately all light and sunshine, not to sound too perky about it. I love this quartet, mostly because the cello actually has something to do beyond just kicking out the bass-line. This was a clean performance in all respects. The second movement is a curious “slow” movement called a Capriccio which one could argue, in terms of diagnosing the Beethoven, suffers a bit from ADD: before you know it, what sounds like it could be another episode turns out to be the next movement. Papa Haydn and his jokes, always playing with your expectations! And the last movement was so well controlled, starting off hushed before ending with a bang, it didn’t dawn on me (no pun intended) it could be called the “Crescendo” Quartet.

It might have been beneficial to hear the Beethoven immediately after this very nice work by his teacher, written only 38 years earlier (If the Beethoven were new today, that means the Haydn would've been written in 1970 - how old is that?). Keeping in line with the prognosis on the second half (given a concert-series sponsored in part by a health insurance company), the slot usually reserved for the less familiar, more challenging and generally new piece was a work written in 1992 by Bruce Adolphe. Being there to set up the Beethoven, he said a few words about his own piece – better than reading the program notes, if you did: it wasn’t quite like having somebody doing a power-point presentation and then reading everything to you as if you can’t understand it, yourself – that helped put the music in a more subjective context.

While he was working on the idea for a new quartet, a relative was diagnosed with a serious illness. Since music cannot tell a story, it can till imply one but it can also imply any number of similar stories or different details, often none of which the composer had in mind – even in words, reading Moby Dick is one thing, figuring out what it means is something else.

After describing how the first movement describes the personality changes between shock at hearing the news and the attempts (with humor) at trying to keep your mind off it; how in the second movement there is a slow tick-like motive in the 2nd violin and viola with the 1st violin cast as the patient and the cello, as the disease; how in the final movement, a double canon, we feel trapped in this kind of never-ending texture - after all this, he says someone remarked to him that it could just as well be a story about gazelles being stalked by a hunter. True, he thought, there’s no way to control the listener to think specifically of this relative, that disease and those thoughts – but in hindsight, it’s still the same story where the gazelles (at times playful) are the patient, the hunter (ever persistent) is the disease. One assumes from the open-endedness of the last movement (no real finale in the wrapping-up sense), the cousin may have survived to hear the work since the music is more about ones thoughts on mortality rather than on death, dying and mourning.

That being said, there were a lot of things to listen for in this piece – and grateful for the composer’s insight to have many of them pointed out, whether one would hear them without it or not. There were gentle passages like a minimalist cushion for whatever may have been happening on the surface – the ticking motive that came from the title given the work, “Whispers of Mortality” (as opposed to T.S. Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality”) or a kind of rhythmic rising-and-falling (breathing?) that reminded me of something I heard by Scott Pender back in the mid-1980s, a touch of Steve Reich as one of many dialects absorbed into a composer’s own language.

Whether they have performed this piece before or learned it for this concert, paired with the composer for his Beethoven presentation, it’s hard to tell. Their individual playing was impressive as well – the cellist, so pristine-sounding in the Haydn now taking on the role of villain; the 1st violinist’s virtuosic outbursts that recur (often repeatedly) throughout the piece – but still blending into a cohesive unit as a single quartet of different but equal components.

On first hearing, there’s nothing I could fault the quartet or the composer for except for feeling the ending something of a let-down, proportionally, not that it needed a more dramatic turn or even a last minute reprieve like the buck-and-wing that ends Beethoven’s Op. 95. This ending – if it can be called that – came primarily as a surprise when it stopped, begging for a second hearing to make more sense out of it. After all, how much great art can you truly absorb in one encounter?

There was one curious thing that happened during Bruce Adolphe's quartet, “Whispers of Mortality” - it was as if an off-stage conversation (more of a growing argument) were taking place somewhere else in the building with doors slamming and occasional laughter. At first, I thought I was imagining things but eventually, especially during the short last movement, I noticed other people looking around uncomfortably, too. It almost seemed part of the piece (Quartet for Strings and Off-Stage Theatricals? More Whispers than You Bargained For? The Grim Reaper Coming to Take You Away?) . In the end, I was reminded of another T.S. Eliot reference:

“ In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.”

...and I had this odd hankering for a peach...

Become a DaedHaed

Another one of those award-winning young string quartets is coming to town – and there are many out there, these days, all worth checking out. Who knows which ones will survive the free-market arts economy to become one of that elite group of Great American Quartets that unfortunately then become a little too expensive for many chamber music presenters around the country.

In that sense, this is a good season for Market Square Concerts whose series will wrap up in April with an appearance by the legendary Guarneri Quartet in what is one of the very last concerts they’ll give on their final tour.

It’s also a great weekend, right now, because the Guarneri Quartet will be playing Friday night at the new home of the Pennsylvania Academy of Music in Lancaster, playing the Dvořák “American” Quartet on their program.

And then Saturday night, Market Square Concerts’ new season opens with a group that last year won the Guarneri Quartet Award from Chamber Music America, the Daedalus Quartet. Their program will include Haydn’s C Major Quartet, Op. 20 No. 2 (one of the set called the “Sun” Quartets), the 4th Quartet by Bruce Adolphe, written in 1992 with the evocative title “Whispers of Mortality,” and then Beethoven’s F Minor Quartet, Op. 95, nicknamed the “Serioso” which will be prefaced by another of Bruce Adolphe’s insightful and humorous presentations.

A few seasons ago, Adolphe (who is the companion of one of the most famous parrots in classical music, Polly Rhythm) did a similar presentation with the first movement of Mozart’s dramatic G Minor Piano Quartet which he ingeniously translated phrase-by-phrase into a murder trial. The opening theme became the prosecutor’s “You... are... a murderer!” followed by the damsel’s distressed disavowal. At one point in the proceedings a cell-phone in the audience went off, playing out its ring-tone of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” If I’d been quick enough, I would’ve shouted out from the balcony “Beethoven Objects!” to the opening notes of his 5th Symphony...

So now it’s Beethoven’s turn. What Adolphe has in store for Beethoven’s “Serioso” Quartet, I have no idea – he calls it a “diagnosis” of Tourette Syndrome in Music – hey! – and the season is appropriately sponsored by Capital Blue Cross.

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The Daedalus Quartet formed in the year 2000. Violinists Kyu-Young and Min-Young Kim, brother and sister, grew up on Long Island with cellist Raman Ramakrishnan and met violist Jessica Thompson at the Marlboro Music Festival and decided to form a quartet. The next year, they won one of the most coveted prizes in the Chamber Music World, the Banff International String Quartet Competition. Beginning in the fall of 2005, they spent two seasons as the resident quartet for Chamber Music Society II, which led to numerous performances at Lincoln Center. Their first CD was released in 2006 by the Bridge label which includes the quartets by Sibelius and Ravel and Stravinsky’s 3 Pieces for String Quartet. Last year, they won the Guarneri Quartet Award from Chamber Music America.

In and among all these events, I had a chance to hear them at the 2005 Next Generation Festival where they appeared on the second week of the series organized by Awadagin Pratt for a program held at Susquehanna University’s Stretansky Hall. I’ll just quote from the review I’d posted at the time on my other blog.

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Awadagin Pratt always manages to bring with him some incredible performers, usually including a new string quartet. I had never heard of the Deadalus Quartet before which is the sort of thing that makes you think, “well, this could be one of several things, couldn’t it?” There are so many young quartets out there and so few opportunities to hear them, it’s easy to be dismissive. I’ve heard a few groups that impress as likely to become this generations answer to great ensembles of the past, like the Juilliard, the Guarneri, the Cleveland and the Emerson Quartets. I’ve been especially impressed by the Ying, the St. Lawrence and the Pacifica Quartets all of which have performed live in the area on several occasions courtesy of Market Square Concerts and Gretna Music. Add to that list, now, the Daedalus Quartet.

First of all, Sibelius’ lone string quartet alternates between the spare style of what would become his 4th Symphony and the more traditional style of his recently finished 3rd. The only way I’ve ever heard it was through the Juilliard Quartet’s recording. With nothing to compare it to, I just figured the pieces wasn’t all that interesting [to me] and I even wondered why this younger group had programmed it. I know Awadagin loves Sibelius, and so do I – his symphonies and tone poems, the violin concerto are all wonderful works – so I figured this going to be the discovery-of-the-evening. As it turned out, on several levels.

By the second measure of the Daedalus’ performance, I knew I was going to be rethinking this piece. Within a minute I was thinking “okay, you’ve sold me on this piece, I’m going to love it!” But I kept thinking, “why didn’t the Juilliard impress me the same way?” You’d think it’s the same piece of music, but in the hands of the Daedalus it hit me squarely as something completely different. Maybe the Juilliard approach caters more to the asutere side while the Daedalus play it with a mix of fire and guts and, when needed, a certain aloofness (but never dispassionate), the same kind of involvement that distinguishes a good performance from a great one. Not that the Juilliard were “phoning it in,” but their view of it didn’t hit me – in fact, it missed me by a mile. The Daedalus hit me between the ears and stayed there the entire performance.

There are passages where Sibelius’ trade-mark string-noodling, rolling by like quiet but often troubled waves, serve as a bed for a melodic fragment that ought to buuild. These noodlings are fine when played by a whole string sections where they create a texture, but my jaw dropped when I heard the violist begin one of these segments, where you could cleanly hear every note, only to have the others one by one join in, all playing in perfect tune and rhythm (no fudging) as you ride to the crest of the wave and then are thrown over the top into its resolution. The middle movement, however, is the miracle: this is a mixture of harmonic writing and meditation that gives the quartet its nickname: Sibelius scribbled over three hushed repeated chords the Latin phrase “voces intimae” but what Intimate Voices means remains an enigma. Did something happen to him at the moment he was writing those austere chords? Had he just received some bad news? Was there a sudden but maybe unmusical epiphany when, in the middle of something else, these chords, sounding so unexpected, came to him out of nowhere? There were so many details unheard before, I wouldn’t have minded if they’d played this movement again or, for that matter, the whole piece.

By the end, the audience in Stretansky Hall burst into applause like they were hearing a great performance of a beloved masterpiece... [The quartet has] been chosen to work with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for the next two seasons, I can now understand why: it would be worth a trip to New York just to hear them again. Consider me a DaedHaed!

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Well, this time you don’t have to drive to New York to hear them. They’ll be playing this Saturday night at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg at 8:00. I’m sure you’ll be able to pick up their recording of the Sibelius at the concert (probably not any boot-leg concert tapes, though) – most people would probably get it for the Ravel – but I’m also sure hearing their Beethoven “Serioso” will be an ear-opener as well.

By the way, I’d recently written about a chance to hear another quartet I first heard at the very first Next Generation Festival, before the Cypress Quartet was even a year old. That was almost 12 years ago and the performance I just heard of the Debussy Quartet which I blogged about here was another revelation, turning a work I never cared for into something riveting to listen to. I would also add them, now, to the list of young quartets I hope to hear a lot more from in the future. In fact, Ellen Hughes, the new director of Market Square Concerts and a long-time friend of Cypress, told me the quartet will be appearing during the NEXT season, perhaps in January of 2010 as they work out the dates, probably playing a work by Jennifer Higdon.

SummerMusic: A Super Sunday at the Mill

The weather turned out to be about as good as you’re likely to get for late-July, warm but not unbearably humid rather than the usual pre-Dog Days heat wave, and the threat of thunderstorms, at least over our little corner of the world, evaporated in the sunlight glinting off the babbling brook of the Yellow Breeches, doing its best to stand in for the second movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

I had taken my camera along but couldn’t find an angle that didn’t have a little too much sunlight in it; nor did I want to disrupt the performance, even during the bows, with a flash going off. It seemed odd to get a picture of the empty stage other than to prove that, yes, they did get a real grand piano into the mill. By the time I was able to find a reasonably good shot of the quartet, after the performance standing in front of the mill, we were already in the car and on the road home. It wouldn’t have mattered much, I suppose, to stop for a quick drive-by photo-shooting. When I got home, I discovered that somehow the cover on my old-fashioned digital camera had pushed back so that the batteries were long gone. Fortunately, the performance went much better than that.

July in the Harrisburg classical music scene has come to mean SummerMusic [Insert Year Here] which Market Square Concerts has been presenting for several years now with a Wednesday night concert at Market Square Church and then two more concerts on the weekend at the Glen Allen Mill along the Yellow Breeches. It started with the Ying Quartet for a few years and then, when they could no longer return, the Fry Street String Quartet started spending some time with us – if I’m not mistaken, this is their 3rd or 4th year (maybe, like Super Bowl Games, they should start listing them as SummerMusic IX or whatever, now that it seems to be a fixed tradition).

There have been some sweltering weekends at the Mill in those years and others that were downright pleasant, but this year the mill is marketed as “air-conditioned.” In this case, window units in several key windows work diligently before the concert, people are kept out until the last minute so they can keep the door closed and the cool air inside. And it actually works. Of course, you have to turn them off during the performance so you can hear the music but still, it’s pretty successful: while programs usually get pressed into service doubling as fans, there were fewer people on Sunday waving them.

After the opening concert Wednesday night, the weekend programs included four Beethoven quartets along with a Haydn Piano Trio and a Mozart Violin Sonata, joined by pianist Stuart Malina. It was surprising they were able to get - much less fit - a piano in the mill, a low-ceilinged space that certainly was not designed for anything close to chamber music concerts. Moving it in and then out of that space might make an amusing video to post on-line - or perhaps not, depending on how squeamish you get about things like that (I can never watch Laurel & Hardy as the piano movers without breaking into an anxious sweat).

The program opened with one of the great violin sonatas Mozart composed during the height of his fame in Vienna, the one in B-flat Major, K.454. It must have been a fairly happy time for him, creatively, since a month earlier he had just composed something he considered one the best things he ever wrote – the Quintet for Piano & Winds.

This violin sonata, though, creates a problem for the “historically informed” period instrument performer – at least for the piano-player. Since this is the sonata made famous in the anecdote about Mozart not having had time to finish it before the performance (before the Emperor, no less) and he just wrote out the violin part and left the piano part blank, playing it from “memory,” should a pianist today do the same thing? Later, Mozart filled it in, which we can tell since it’s a different colored ink in the manuscript and some passages are squeezed in to fit the already existing violin part, but still, yeah...

Since they’re officially “Sonatas for Piano & Violin” as they were styled in Mozart’s and Beethoven’s days, Stuart was joined by the rather tall first violinist of the Fry Street Quartet, William Fedkenheuer – I was afraid when they bounded up on stage, the violinist would knock himself out on one of the rafters if he hadn’t ducked in time – for a performance that, once you acclimated to the sound in the room, was stylish and compelling, especially in the beautiful slow movement. Clean strings of parallel 3rds in the pianist’s right hand and a shared clarity of texture and phrasing were highlights of the first movement. Balance in Mozart is always tricky, especially during those passages where the violin plays more pianistic arpeggiated patterns and is actually accompanying the melody in the piano, but the give-and-take between them was usually so keen, there was never any sense anyone was not an equal partner here.

After the piano lid was closed and the chairs and music stands put in place by the gracious stage crew, the Fry Street Quartet came out to play the first of the Beethoven quartets, at least as it’s numbered – it’s actually the second one completed but Beethoven chose it to open the set because it just makes such an incredible statement. The whole point of writing these quartets – on the heels of his teacher Haydn’s success in the medium – was to announce to the world, “Here I am,” so Beethoven took his time and spent two years working on all six of them before they were ready to be performed. One thing Beethoven was not was the fast-food equivalent of art.

Nor was the Fry Street’s performance. Though I missed Saturday night’s performance of Op. 18/6 and Op. 132, their grasp of these works should be a very positive indication for their future. Every quartet, as I mentioned, has to come to grips with Beethoven, one way or another, if you’re going to play the standard repertoire. The great thing about great art, of course, is that the first time you learn it is does not mean you will play it that way every time. There are always new things to discover and explore, just as Beethoven did with each quartet he composed. Each one approaches the idea of what a string quartet can be from a different perspective which in turn affects how you might approach the others: in Op. 18, one is symphonic, one is a mini-concerto, another is lyrical, still another is the dramatic one; after the chaos of Op. 130, the B-flat with its immense fugal ending, comes the tautly controlled Op. 131 which is in turn followed by a return to an almost classical scope in Op. 135 (just as Wagner pushed tonality to the extreme in Tristan, he pulled back afterwards to write the much less adventuresome Meistersinger). That the Fry Street Quartet has grown in their approach to these works honestly helps them bring us a little closer to Beethoven’s private universe.

It was interesting to compare these two specific works back-to-back, written 25 years apart. The C-sharp minor Quartet on the second half of the program is essentially his last major work and, in order of composition, the next-to-last quartet, essentially the apex and summation of his career just as the first quartet heralded its start.

Beethoven was primarily an “organic” composer, usually building a piece out of musical cells or building blocks rather than themes: think the opening of the 5th Symphony which builds on that famous four-note motive and how that rhythm – da-da-da daaaah – permeates the whole movement, even the whole symphony (since it appears in the 3rd and 4th movements as well).

The first quartet (Op. 18/1) opens with a short cell that basically consists of a turn around the first note – this is imbedded throughout the movement 104 times (down from 130 times in an earlier draft). In the Op. 131 quartet, it’s not so much the opening’s cell as its shape and its bare essentials that subtly permeates other movements, especially the relentless finale, unifying the whole piece.

The form of Op. 131 always fascinates me, too: a lot is made of its being in seven movements (as in, “wow, seven movements, imagine that!”), even though they’re not quite in the right places to be an “Arch Form” in the 20th Century way, each movement corresponding around a central “keystone” movement. Still, the elements are there and it flows from beginning to end in much the same way, a hundred years before Bartok is given credit for introducing it. Two of these are quite brief and really only serve as introductions (or structural up-beats) to the movements that follow them.

The first not-quite-a-real-movement consists of a few gestures, typical operatic patterns you might hear in any recitative as if all four instruments are conversing about what comes next (in an opera, next would come an aria or an ensemble of some kind but something grand, no doubt, and lyrical), going directly into the core of the quartet, a long set of variations which turns out not to be the expected slow movement. With all its changes of mood and tempo, rather than being one long string of variations on a theme, it seems more like a collection of sub-movements, six variations in all complete with a restatement of the recitative-like “introduction” before an incomplete seventh variation (and how many movements in the quartet?) is interrupted by a scherzo (though he doesn’t call it that). Here, there is a lot of quick back-and-forth between the instruments, fragments of gestures, pizzicato (plucked) notes ricocheting over the music stands, colors changing suddenly to the glassy sound of sul ponticello (playing near the bridge). As fractious as the 2nd movement was gentle, following the slow sad fugue that began the quartet, this 5th movement is essentially parallel and at the same time the opposite to the 2nd movement. Then an impassioned interruption that sounds like it might actually become a slow movement suddenly erupts violently as the stormy finale takes off, driving everything to the conclusion.

Then an odd thing happens, after it climbs and climbs to a peak: Beethoven suddenly cuts back and brings everything to a near-grinding halt with a wistful look back on the opening motive (again, traded almost recitative-like between the instruments) before a somewhat peremptory final cadence, especially considering everything that had been building up over the past 40 minutes or so.

The first violinist, the group’s spokesman, took us on a tour of Op. 131 before they began playing it, explaining some details here, playing excerpts there, sign-posts to listen for, background information and a raft of quotable quotes to keep in mind. His lightness also helped keep things from becoming too serious (trust me, it is very easy to get too reverential about The Late Quartets), but I loved his mock-serious comments about the role of the first violinist in the piece, especially when he said how the theme of the variations movement is NOT in the first violin part “where it belongs” but shared with the second violin “as if there were actually other players to be considered.”

This of course makes fun of the old traditional approach to the quartet in Beethoven’s day: a violin “accompanied” by three other players. Ludwig Spohr, one of the great violinists then and an even more popular composer at the time, wrote in his autobiography about how his group was attempting to perform one of Beethoven’s late quartets. During the rehearsals, he noticed “my accompanists were having great difficulties making sense of their parts” (or something to that effect) so instead he substituted one of his own quartets which proved to be much more successful all around. It would be too easy to ask, by comparison, how many of you have ever heard a Spohr quartet played live...?

Watching the interplay of the performers during Op. 131, it reminded me, rather than the traditional allotment of the parts – melody in the first violin, bass line in the cello, and the harmonies filled out by the second violin and viola – how independent and equal all four voices are, like people sitting around having a conversation, arguing a point or agreeing on another, making side comments and perhaps changing the topic. This isn’t very different from Elliott Carter’s approach to his string quartets where (borrowing from Charles Ives’ 2nd Quartet) each instrument takes on specific identities as they interact with each other.

This in turn reminded me of the comment some critic made back in the '70s, describing some work by Carter or Babbitt, I’ve forgotten who, by saying “This must be what Late Beethoven Quartets sound like to a dog.”

When I was teaching in Connecticut, I got a postcard from a fellow composer who was attending the contemporary music festival at Tanglewood that summer. On the front was a photograph of a stately collie sitting upright on the grass with a pipe in his mouth. On the back he’d written,

“Listening to Late Beethoven Quartets.”

SummerMusic with Beethoven & Schumann

Sitting there, waiting for the first program in Market Square Concerts’ SummerMusic to begin, I was paging through May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, something I like to pick up to read, even just a few entries, when the “main book” I’m working on is too much to concentrate on for a short spurt of reading-time (currently, that would be Tolstoy’s War & Peace which at four pounds is just too cumbersome and pompous-looking to drag around in public). And I read this quote-within-a-quote: she’s sitting in an airport waiting for her flight and reading Robert Coles’ New Yorker article about Erik Erikson, a developmental psychologist perhaps best known for creating the term “identity crisis.” I re-quote from her November 17th entry this passage quoted from Erikson’s 1958 book, Young Man Luther, and her reaction to it.

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‘Millions of boys face these problems and solve them in some way or another – they live, as Captain Ahab says, with half of their heart and only one of their lungs, and the world is the worst for it. Now and again, however, an individual is called upon (called by whom, only theologians claim to know, and by what, only bad psychologists) to lift his individual patienthood to the level of a universal one and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone.’ The key word for me, of course, is ‘patienthood,’ for this is exactly what is involved for the poet or artist of either sex. Coles himself says elsewhere in the piece, ‘Not everyone can or will do that – give his specific fears and desires a chance to be of universal significance.’ To do this takes a curious combination of humility, excruciating honesty, and (there’s the rub) a sense of destiny or of identity. One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent.

— May Sarton: Journal of a Solitude. 1973. W.W. Norton & Company NY (p.59-60)
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As a composer, I found it striking in ways similar to Sarton the poet and novelist. And it seemed entirely appropriate for a pre-concert rumination, thinking back on it after the concert, in any number of ways.

First of all, after 26 seasons, Lucy Miller Murray, founder and patron saint of Market Square Concerts, is turning over its directorship to my friend (and ex-colleague) Ellen Hughes. One has been through all of those doubts and struggles before – from her own fears and desires to bring an organization like this into being in order to give the fears and desires of other talented artists a platform of expression – and the other, having already been there on so many different levels of consideration in past life-encounters, will now be facing them from a new perspective.

When you consider how many music schools there are in the world and how many musicians they release into the world annually compared to the number of orchestras and string quartets and opera companies and choirs and music schools that will be able to employ them or the number of recording companies and labels and audiences that will likely bother to listen to them and support them, it must be daunting for a group of young musicians to decide to band together and make a career in the arts.

How many “up-and-coming young string quartets” are there out there who will try to fit into that small handful of slots made available by the likes of Market Square Concerts around the country? How few of them will become the legendary ensembles of their generation like the on-going Juilliard and the Guarneri Quartets have been of theirs?

They can’t, of course, dwell on that but they can’t escape it, either. It takes lots of time and hard work to realize whatever potential they may have felt at the beginning: will they have the right chemistry to make it work? Will things fall into place for them at the right time?

That’s something the audience is usually unaware of: how many hours are spent practicing, even before rehearsing together, learning a new piece, going over an old one, perhaps rethinking it, perhaps rethinking everything each time the play it. And how many years they may be doing that kind of working and growing before they actually get that much-needed break.

So it’s gratifying, over the past several years of SummerMusics Past, to see the Fry Street String Quartet, another of these young quartets, moving through those development stages, gaining assurance and making strides. And above all, taking risks: you don’t move forward if you don’t take risks. Sometimes they pay off but not always: I’ve never seen statistics on the mortality rate of young string quartets, but it’s probably not pretty.

And it’s not that they’re exactly new: they formed in 1997, so the sense of commitment must be very deep to keep at it. They have to believe not only in their individual talent but in their collective talent which is not the same as just adding four talents together, stir and simmer.

And while everybody these days plays Beethoven quartets, you still have to have the courage to take all of them on, something that everybody can compare you to, that cultural legacy from all the great quartets you’ve ever heard perform or record Beethoven’s quartets throughout your lifetime. But some day a quartet will have to play them – unless you’re the Kronos Quartet who lives on the other side of just about everything – and if you’re going to learn them, you might as well learn all of them because only then do you really understand each of them.

Several years ago, driving home late at night, the “overnight” network program at the radio station where I used to work was playing a string quartet I did not recognize. In fact, I couldn’t even identify the composer. I caught, as so often happens, just part of it - the end of the last movement, as it turned out. It sounded vaguely familiar, like so many things do when you’ve been in the radio business and music goes in one ear and out the other so much of the time. As I was pulling up my garage, it ended. “That,” the announcer said matter-of-factly, “was Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 59, No. 2.”

I was floored.

Okay, granted, except for the third movement, of all the Beethoven cycle it’s probably the least familiar to me, and I primarily know that one movement only because of his use of the Russian folk-song “Slava” which every 19th Century Russian composer probably used at one time or another (and since I’d taught a course in Russian Music, I was obligated to play Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov’s settings of it and then, as a chuckle, Beethoven’s Germanically straight-jacketed version). But why didn’t I recognize what I heard at least as something by Beethoven? I was thinking some otherwise faceless early-19th Century also-ran, somebody imitating Beethoven – and not very well.

The problem was, it just didn’t sound like Beethoven. It was too nice, too well-rounded around the edges, not driving enough and certainly not compelling. I thought perhaps the announcer had played the wrong piece (hey, it can happen: cue up the wrong cuts, the wrong CD was in the jacket or something). The performance had just been so clueless and now I was annoyed I couldn’t even remember the performers' name because I sure as hell wanted to avoid ever getting any of their recordings, at least of Beethoven.

Wednesday night’s performance of the “2nd Razumovsky Quartet” by the Fry Street String Quartet was the first time I’d had a chance to hear it live since that awful drive-way moment years ago. And I kept thinking “why is this one I’ve never really gotten to know?” Okay, there are, what, 16 string quartets by Beethoven and while they can’t all be “the best,” there certainly aren’t any anyone would seriously consider “bad.” Even the least of them would be better than many another composer’s best, however you care to evaluate something so subjective. So I tried listening to it as if it were the first time, again.

More importantly, I was able to react to their performance by the way they connected with me, how they made their case for the universal – not by comparing it to the Juilliard’s recordings or Cleveland’s or Guarneri’s, details I’d forgotten over the years and usually don’t pay a lot of attention to. Yes, there were a few intonation issues here and there, nothing serious (see comment above, about taking risks) but what connected was their sense of one-ness and their faith in their own talent and interpretation.

Because they’re willing to let go, to jump out into this complex world Beethoven creates for them, and to do it with confidence. And to do it as one: taking four talented string players does not usually make for a talented quartet since playing as a single group (rather than the sum of its components) is its own talent and one not easily found. It is a process of maturity: few quartets find the spark at the very beginning though some spark must exist, you’d think, for a group to stay together long enough to nurture it. The career, then, is another issue.

The Fry Street had already brought this same sense to the more universally appealing if less universal Piano Quintet by Robert Schumann on the first half of the program. They were matched in their collective enthusiasm by Stuart Malina, best known as the conductor of the Harrisburg Symphony, and a pianist who is – as he admits himself – “lucky enough to be able to sit down and sight-read” things that other pianists may have to struggle to learn. It is easy to think such facility (abetting such enthusiasm) would turn into a facile performance and the Schumann is something that’s often subjected to that.

The work itself was apparently created by spontaneous combustion – sketched in five days, completed from start to finish in a mere nineteen days – yet given Schumann’s inexperience with larger forms and the finer details of composition, the work manages to survive its own facility. Schumann’s experience was writing miniatures (or creating larger-formed pieces that are really collections of miniatures), mostly piano pieces and then a sudden burst of art songs. He had finally given in to the pressure of writing a symphony (there were actually four that he worked on that one year, but only one was published at the time) at a point in his career it would have been better to lead up to it, first: for many composers, that’s what chamber music is for. But he creates such tunes, such memorable gestures (like the opening with its rising intervals) and such moods and images (the touch of the Romantic poet as opposed to the Classical craftsman), you’re willing to forgive the mileage-filling sequential repetitions, the lapses into required counterpoint (something many composers did to show off the fact they had learned how to write old-fashioned fugal passagework), the fact that, even though he’s trying to develop his material (a necessary requirement for a work of even moderate length), he doesn’t always give himself material that lends itself to being developed (even in other sonata-form movements where a development section is part of the plan, he’ll drop it for a new theme to create – surprise – an unexpected miniature within). But because Schumann’s talent – as insecure as he was with it – was so good at other creative aspects, the Quintet is one of those pieces that succeeds in spite of its flaws. Any performance that is willing to emphasize the positive will reach its audience. The sheer joy of playing it is enough the take it directly to the heart.

Thinking back on my quote from Sarton’s journal, it’s interesting to think of Schumann in light of Beethoven who came before and Brahms who came after (with no small help from Schumann himself). Schumann did not have the strength of personal conviction to approach his art as Beethoven did. In fact, few other composers could, either. Brahms, perhaps because of Schumann's advocacy, felt it necessary to be cautious in his own development, famously taking almost 25 years before he felt both his first symphony and the first piano quartet he completed were ready to be published.

There is that sense of genius that makes Beethoven at his best a composer who reaches far more universal answers to questions he could not solve for himself. And yet the man who wrote those symphonies and string quartets could also churn out schmalz like Wellington’s Victory or scads of arrangements of British folk songs (which earned him money to live on). In this quartet, the slow second movement (according to Beethoven’s biographer Thayer) was inspired by his contemplation of starry skies which made him think of the music of the spheres, very universal concepts indeed. But in the next movement, he felt compelled to use a Russian folk-song – when he rarely even quoted German ones – in order to, what? earn a wink of recognition from the Russian ambassador Razumovsky for whom he wrote these three “Razumovsky” quartets? Not only does he take a go-nowhere tune that can only be repeated (the structural issue any Russian composer discovered when trying to treat their folk music with German standards), he turns it into that most erudite Germanic process, a fugue (or, more accurately, fugal filler), even overlapping it on itself (ah, the learned student would say, “and now, a stretto fugue”) before it collapses into a pile of repeated dominant-tonic chords to fill out the requisite number of measures almost as if he’s giggling at its ineptness, regardless of how poorly the notes in the melody match the harmony. Kerman describes it as if “Count Razumovsky had been tactless enough to hand Beethoven the tune, and Beethoven is pile-driving it into the ground by way of revenge.”

But this is the scherzo, after all, the “joke” movement, and though we think of Beethoven, deaf genius who had little regard for social niceties much less fashion and good hair, striding the heavens to transcend mere mortal expectations. There’s a good deal of humor in this movement – like the almost Laurel & Hardy-like approach to a few notes the instruments keep tossing back and forth to each other (“no, you” - “no please, I insist, you first”) before the phrase finally gets underway. These are things the Fry Street Quartet latched on to rather than passed over, but I kept thinking they might have had a little more fun with it without turning it into outright slapstick.

Is that akin to “dumbing down,” cheapening its universality to create a moment of personal connection? And yet (he says slyly) that is what I remember most about the piece and what brings most people in the audience to communal smiling and foot-tapping. You can’t stay at the summit all the time: sometimes, you just need to catch your breath and, after a little contrast, drive it home to the end.

Which is how the Fry Street brought the concert to a conclusion – not just an end. And in the end they impressed a lot of people in the audience, judging from comments I heard, with how far they’ve grown over the past few years.

Now all they need is that Big Break.

Again, with the aid of hindsight and this quote from Sarton’s journal vibrating in my head, I went to, perhaps unfairly, reassess the concert’s opening which started the evening “small,” a nice place to begin before growing “big.”

The original plan had been to bring back oboist Gerard Reuter who’s also appeared at several past SummerMusics – and with no complaints from me: he’s a fine musician and possesses one of the smoothest sounds of any oboist I’ve heard (and I’ve been listening to him with pleasure since the late-70s when I first heard him free-lancing in New York City). But due to changes in the series’ dates, he wasn’t able to be here this week. I think they tried recruiting a clarinetist before Stuart contacted soprano Ilana Davidson who was available. So perhaps a collection of “art songs from the Baroque to the Present” was something of an afterthought to a series marketed as “Beethoven Before and After” (whatever that means).

Aside from a slim collection by Mozart and Haydn, there are few art songs to chose from before Beethoven – the Handel selection for the “Baroque” part of the formula was an opera aria, anyway – and I was thinking, given the Beethoven Fulcrum of these concerts, perhaps other composers of the 19th Century who reacted one way or another to Beethoven’s genius like Schubert and Brahms, or even some of the miniatures of Beethoven and Schumann themselves. So while Fauré and Strauss didn’t match my pre-concert expectations, they were delightful to hear, especially Strauss’s story of the “sly child, Cupid” which Ms. Davidson navigated with the kind of panache that left me wondering if she had the stratospheric range and the undaunted stamina to bring off another of Strauss’ slyer creations, Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos. When I heard her sing Mozart’s Requiem with the Harrisburg Symphony in 2006, I knew I would love to hear her do Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro (and I’m sorry I missed her in the Gilbert & Sullivan performances on the Pops series). Aside from a little stiffness with the non-pianistic accompaniment for the aria from Handel’s Acis & Galatea, it was a delicious way to begin a program.

It’s always good to hear a conductor who’s able to step down off the podium to play chamber music so convincingly. He says it gives him a different perspective on the music he conducts and it certainly makes it easier for him to connect with the players in the orchestra, taking those intangible elements you experience in communicating with a few players and allowing everybody to feel connected rather than just “following the baton.”

Earlier this week, Stuart was joking about the rehearsal schedule and three performances in five days, since he’s not used to performing as a pianist that much, how at the end of the week his hands may hurt, but how he’ll enjoy the experience getting there. Fortunately, they’re not doing, say, the Brahms Piano Quintet on Saturday night and the Dvořák on Sunday afternoon – if you wanted to do a killer immersion festival – but it bodes well for one of the livelier piano trios by Haydn (the one known as the “Gypsy” because of its Hungarian rondo) and a great Mozart violin sonata with William Fedkenheuer, the quartet’s first violinist – enough work to keep you busy for a few days!

And the Quartet is playing not two but four more Beethoven Quartets – an immersion of its own, regardless of the summer humidity – with two of the early quartets (Op. 18 #6 on Saturday and Op. 18 #1 on Sunday) and two of the late quartets (Op. 132, the A Minor, with its “Holy Song of Thanksgiving,” speaking of “universal patienthood,” on Saturday and the C-sharp Minor, Op. 131, on Sunday).

People often cringe at the idea of sitting through Beethoven’s Late Quartets – which many music lovers will speak of in hushed tones full of awe and reverence. Yes, they’re very long for attention spans geared to thinking 30 minutes is just fine, thank you, and they’re very intense, as challenging to listen to as they are to play (technically and interpretively). Perhaps there is no other music before Mahler’s gargantuan symphonies that tax the performers and the listeners on such an expansive scale as these quartets from Beethoven’s last years (he was, after all, only in his mid-50s). But unlike other works that are just long, there is so much more to walk away with - and also to come back to on repeated hearings.

Yet one of my fondest concert memories, people-watching during a performance, was when the Cypress Quartet played Beethoven’s Op. 132 at the very first of the Next Generation Festivals – something Ellen Hughes organized through WITF with pianist Awadagin Pratt. There were a number of young people in the audience who perhaps chose to come to these concerts to see what it was that made a black man in dreadlocks want to play classical music, with its reputation for Dead White Man stuffiness. Whether he had ever heard classical music before or not, I have no idea, but one boy – he might have been 9 or 10 years old – sat in the front row, his elbows on his knees, his chin planted firmly on his hands, staring up at the stage with an almost ferocious intensity and curiosity: he never moved during the entire slow movement, the famous “Holy Song of Thanksgiving” which for many seems to move at an almost glacial pace for 15 minutes. At the end, he sat back in his seat, turned to his mother and said with his eyes, “Wow!”

That’s when you know the music – regardless of all the mumbo-jumbo musicians and music-lovers use to describe what a composer wrote, how he wrote it, how performers interpret it and how they played it – connects on some universal plane far beyond the individual.

That’s why it was gratifying to see over a dozen young listeners in the audience Wednesday night, students from a local Suzuki Chamber Music Camp. I’m not sure how they ended up there but you rarely see people under 40 at these kinds of concerts. Occasionally, I was able to glance over at them during the performance, too, and see rapt faces totally absorbed. Yes, one seemed to sleep through the Schumann and even through the applause, but several of them had leaned forward, one with his elbows on the pew in front of him, focused solely on the performance. Short attention spans because of pop music, video games and movies with violent specifal effects and moronic TV aimed at the lowest common denominator? Maybe not. Perhaps an experience like this will allow some of them to live with more than half a heart and one lung, to be able to take the risk and have the courage to lift themselves up beyond the individual level to a universal one, “to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone.”

More, please?

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Photo credit: publicity photo of the Fry Street Quartet from their website.

Schumann's Piano Quintet: Up Close & Personal

Tonight, you have a chance to hear one of the most popular works in the chamber music repertoire when Market Square Concerts begins its SummerMusic 2008 series at 8:00 in Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg. Pianist Stuart Malina will be joining the Fry Street String Quartet for this performance (let’s hope everybody stays away from sharp implements while preparing dinner). The program also includes the 2nd of the three “Razumovsky” Quartets by Beethoven and an array of songs from the Baroque to the Present with soprano Ilana Davidson accompanied by Stuart Malina (incidentally, the beard stays). I thought I’d take you “up close and personal” with the Schumann Quintet.

You could probably say Robert Schumann was the first blogger - at least about classical music. The magazine he started in 1834, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, literally the New Journal for Music, was mostly a new music journal dealing with issues of the day, published twice weekly with four two-column pages per issue. Rather than focusing on writing reviews (at least in the traditional sense), he wrote about issues and concerns in the music world, countering the Philistine influence of the day’s stuffier critics. He and his writers, otherwise lacking the internet since Al Gore hadn’t been invented yet, offered a great deal of commentary and opinion. Schumann even supplied a few short stories now and then, often satirical, like the thinly disguised attack on his then ex-girlfriend Clara Wieck and her new boyfriend, Carl Banck.

Among the 300 articles he wrote over a period of ten years were discussions on musical and literary aesthetics by his alter-egos, Florestan and Eusebius. It was here he published his famous articles announcing the arrival of such new talents as Chopin and Brahms. Considering what the role of criticism has been in the traditional world of newspapers (and at least those today that still have music critics on staff), that’s more the sort of thing you’d find in the blogosphere, isn’t it? Sort of.

Schumann may never really have intended to be a composer any more than most pianists in those days wrote music for themselves to play. He only seriously began focusing on composing after he had injured his hand with one of Friedrich Wieck’s mechanical contraptions designed to strengthen the weak 4th finger during hours spent practicing. If he couldn’t keep him from marrying his daughter, Wieck at least managed to, however inadvertently, ruin Schumann’s career as a performer, so in a perverse way we owe thanks to him for knowing Schumann today as a composer.

All the music Schumann published in the years before his marriage were for solo piano, much of it intended for Wieck’s best pupil, Clara. There were also things like the little piece based on the letters ASCH, transformed into a musical theme (S is the German equivalent of E-flat, and H is B-natural), which was the home town of another piano student, Ernestine von Fricken, to whom he became secretly engaged while on the outs with Clara. This became a section of the suite Carnaval. A rather morose march by her father became the basis of the Symphonic Etudes which are really a set of variations (and even though Symphonic Etudes may be a slightly misleading title, it beats being known as the Fricken Variations). By the way, the engagement was broken off when Schumann and Clara got back together and when Schumann realized Ernestine was officially illegitimate (not that he was making much headway with this girl’s father, either).

After he and Clara were able to overcome the various legal hurdles her father put in their way, they were married in 1840, the day before her 21st birthday. So it’s rather surprising that he suddenly started composing other things than just piano music but all in concentrated bouts of feverish creativity – 1840 was a year of songs, followed by one of symphonies. And the next year, chamber music.

In his day, Schumann was probably better known as a writer about music than a composer of music. Actually, he was probably better known as Mr. Clara Schumann, trailing along on her fame to appear at her performances when she’d play some of his music. It was after one such tour resulted in a rather severe bout of depression that he composed his Piano Quintet. And also three string quartets and a piano quartet, all in about six months’ time.

They had gone off together for a tour across northern Germany when it really hit him, this being in the shadow of his wife, so after a month he returned to Leipzig and his journal while Clara went on to Copenhagen without him. During her month-long absence, he studied fugue and counterpoint (again) and examined quartets by Mozart and Haydn, then later those by Beethoven. And he also drank a lot, slipping into a period of depression during which Old Wieck managed to spread the rumor that they’d separated and were heading for a divorce. Thoughts of a tour of America were shelved when Clara returned in April.

By June 2nd, he was sketching “quartet essays” and two days later began the 1st String Quartet. On the 11th, he began the 2nd Quartet even before the first one was finished. In between the 2nd and the 3rd Quartet, not begun until July 8th, he wrote a scathing article about Clara’s ex-boyfriend Carl Banck and his new composition (it was so nasty, Schumann did not include it later when he re-published most of his articles) and also ended up in a libel case which netted him a 6-day jail sentence which was commuted to “a five thaler fine” (I don’t know what the equivalent of the standard German unit of currency would’ve been, but an 1841 thaler recently sold on E-bay for $270). The 3rd Quartet was finished on July 22nd, seven weeks after he’d begun work on the first.

During August, there was a bit of a summer vacation - I should mention, without getting too personal, the Schumann’s second child was born nine months later - then back to Leipzig for rehearsals of the three quartets in early September. On the 23rd, then, he began work on the Piano Quintet which, after sketching it out in just five days, he completed on October 12th, 19 days after he started. Twelve days after that, he began the Piano Quartet which he finished in a month. In the next month, he also composed a piano trio which he later recast as the Phantasiestücke (Op. 88) and a work for two pianos, two cellos and horn that later became a set of variations for two pianos (Op. 46).

All of that in seven months! (It’s easy to be envious of such creativity, considering I’ve been working on a short new piece for violin and piano since late April and in three months haven’t yet gotten beyond the 8th measure, but I digress...)

One of the curious things that most people forget today is that, before Schumann’s, there were no famous Piano Quintets. To Schumann’s, we would add those by Brahms and Dvořák, both famous (and equally over-played) but both later, as would be the less-well-known one by Cesar Franck and the most famous 20th Century one by Shostakovich. But when I mean “over-played,” it’s only because – how many masterpieces can a pianist and a string quartet, combining for a performance, play? There are no Piano Quintets by Mozart or Beethoven, though they wrote piano quartets, much less by their also-rans. Except for one by Prince Louis Ferdinand, who published one in 1803.

Also-ran he may be, but this prince, a nephew of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia (a great general and talented if not so great composer himself), played the piano “not like a prince but like a real pianist,” according to Beethoven (who dedicated his C Minor Piano Concerto to him). The Grove Dictionary entry for “piano quintet” indicates he was a student of Beethoven’s, but the dictionary’s biographical entry on the prince does not mention that fact.

He was also considered a brilliant soldier, dying on a Napoleonic battlefield in 1806 about a month before his 34th birthday, killed by a French soldier after he refused to surrender. He wrote thirteen published works, his Piano Quintet in C Minor being his Opus 1, his only work published in his lifetime. There are three piano trios and two piano quartets, as well.

I suppose you could ask, since Schumann knew Prince Louis’ quintet and one could imagine him thinking “here’s a good idea that’s never caught on – take a string quartet and add a pianist,” what prompted Prince Louis to write one?

There are, basically, other works for keyboard and four string players – those by Padre Antonio Soler were intended for the organ, and those by J.C. Bach included the fortepiano or harpsichord more in its role of continuo, the traditional baroque duty of supplying the “harmonic filler” between the melody line and the bass line.

It was also the tradition, in the days before radios, television and stereos when people provided their own entertainment at home, that publishers made piano concertos available to the amateur public. Rather than deal with an orchestra (even the much smaller sized ones in Mozart’s day than the one we think of today), the orchestral part was either arranged or written for three or four string players. The piano here is purely a soloist and not, in the standard sense of chamber music, an equal partner to the strings.

Yes, while Mozart wrote two piano quartets with strings, he did write a quintet for piano and winds (not surprising, since he was delighted with the great wind players he found in Vienna), a work which Beethoven thought so highly of, he imitated it in one, himself. But Beethoven’s publisher also realized there were few opportunities for performances, given the number of wind players as opposed to the number of string players around, so he suggested Beethoven also arrange the work for strings and get more mileage out of it. But curiously, rather than arrange it for four strings, one to each wind part, he reworked it into the more standard format of piano quartet. Perhaps if he had decided on a string quintet, he might have written the first Piano Quintet and decided it was really a good medium and written an original one or two. And others may have come along and done the same. But, alas... another chapter in the great game of “What If...”

By the way, a “Piano Quintet” really means a piano with four other players, though it’s usually defined as a piano plus a string quartet (two violins, viola and cello) – or if you’re a string player, a string quartet plus a piano (since it’s more likely you’ll find a pianist being added to a string quartet program than vice-versa). To distinguish them, the two works with winds I mentioned by Mozart and Beethoven are called “Quintets for Piano & Winds.” And since the Trout Quintet by Franz Schubert uses one violin, viola and cello, then adds a double bass, it’s technically not a “piano quintet.” Fortunately, it can just be called the Trout Quintet on the fly rather than the official “Quintet in A Major for Piano & Strings.” But that’s another topic...

If I (and you) had time for another 1900 words, I’d write about Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartet on the program, too. The SummerMusic series continues this weekend at the Glen Allen Mill (see my previous post for more information about these concerts), Since the Sunday performance includes my favorite (if it’s possible to have a favorite) Beethoven quartet, the C-sharp Minor Quartet, Op.131, maybe I’ll post something about that, later.