Talking with Shulamit Ran before a World Premiere

It was a last minute thing, finding out Shulamit Ran would be here for the concert Saturday night when Concertante would give the world premiere of the work they’d commissioned as part of their “1 + 5 Project.” So after talking to Zvi Plesser, the “1” in the “1 + 5” combination for this piece, Friday afternoon, I called the composer on Saturday and invited her to drop in on the pre-concert talk I was giving if she had the time. As it turned out, she was delighted to do so. I warned her that there might not be many people there – once there was over 40 but another time there was 7 – but she said “Oh, I know how that goes.”

They were rehearsing the piece when I got there – and I was concerned they might not be done in time for the talk – so I stuck my head in the door and listened a bit. My reaction was “wow!”

Shulamit Ran is a busy composer with pieces being commissioned and performed far and wide. But as often happens with contemporary composers, it’s not always easy to hear their music. This was not the first piece of hers I was hearing but the first one I was going to hear live. There’s a big difference between listening to it unfold before you in a live concert and listening to a recording of it by yourself. Being one of the first people to hear it anywhere in the world is also very exciting: you never know what you’re going to get – it’s as close to gambling as a music lover can get.

So what I heard in those few minutes as they worked over a couple of sections – an added fermata here someone didn’t have written into the part, watching the dynamics there to balance better with the cellist – was exciting to hear knowing (a) it was the first time I was hearing anything from this piece but also (b) I was hearing a bit of it even before the audience would hear it in its official first performance.

And I knew from that sampling I would like this piece. As a composer myself, I was thinking “okay, we’re on the same wave-length, here,” stylistically speaking. Even though I can enjoy music written in many different styles, this was music that spoke to me more closely. I was, as they say, “psyched.”

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As I was ready to start my talk – I had spent a few hours putting a script together about Mozart and Mendelssohn in case she was unable to make it – she walked in the door ready to go. In a few minutes, then, I began by telling the audience, even though Mozart and Mendelssohn were unable to be here tonight, Shulamit Ran is – and that we had a rare opportunity of not only hearing a brand new piece by an internationally acclaimed composer right here in our own musical back yard, but also hearing about it from the composer herself.

This was the second world premiere by an internationally acclaimed composer to be heard in Harrisburg in two weeks – Philip Glass’s Violin Sonata was performed at Market Square Concerts on February 28th – and several people in the audience here had heard that performance, too. It makes you begin to think that maybe we’re not such a provincial small-town state capitol, after all.

We began with the last stage of the creative process – what is the title and where did it come from? The program book was printed up before the season actually began and so her work is listed as “Commissioned Work” since at press time it hadn’t been finished yet much less given a name.

She explained as she was working on it, she didn’t know what she was going to call it. As she was nearing its completion, one title came to mind – not even a “working title” – but she didn’t want to mention what it was. Finally, the title “Lyre of Orpheus” appeared out of nowhere, even though the music had nothing to do with the ancient Greek myth – how Orpheus goes into the Underworld to bring Eurydice back to life only to lose her again; or, as the legend concludes, with Orpheus, playing his lyre and taming the savage beasts of the forests, is torn apart by Maenads, the wild women under the influence of Bacchus, his body parts floating down the river but his lyre still playing.

Looking back over what she had just composed, she could see the emotional points that might correspond, here and there, maybe not in chronological order but enough to give a sense of this timeless story of love lost, found and lost again. One of the reasons these stories survive in modern culture is because they are timeless and can be appreciated in any number of ways because of their universality.

Even though the story was not in her mind when she composed the piece, a listener might still be able to hear details of it reflected in the music. For a couple of generations growing up on the likes of Walt Disney’s Fantasia or more recent MTV music videos where music was represented in a visual medium meant to enhance (or “explain”) the aural one, I joked it would be interesting to poll the audience afterward to discover what they thought the story was, where it fit the music – what the music was “about.” We could get several different interpretations!

If coming up with the title was the last step of the creative process and the first step was receiving the commission, I asked her what the second step was, getting it started.

She was given a deadline of February 1st to deliver the finished score and parts for a performance six weeks later. She completed writing it in December of 2008, but then the work has to be copied. So within this time-frame, she set to work.

Rather than just being given a blanket commission to write anything at all, she said, she was given certain parameters or limitations to work in – it was for six players and the idea was to feature one of those - why they call it “1 + 5.” She was supposed to highlight the playing of cellist Zvi Plesser. How she was going to do that was up to her.

The “easy way out” might be to write a mini-concerto – put him up front like a soloist with the rest of the group forming a small orchestra. But it’s a chamber music group, not a chamber orchestra, so she wanted to be more mindful of the interplay between equals that makes chamber music what it is – the give-and-take, collaboration and state-of-mind that makes it different from just being music for a small number of players. In that sense, she knew she wanted to have the cellist play in certain parts like a soloist but at other times as part of the group, also giving other players prominence at certain times (even in the few minutes I heard in rehearsal, in addition to the cello’s lyrical lines there were solos for the first viola and the first violin).

One of the things an audience-member may feel before a premiere is “dread of the unfamiliar.” Not knowing what style the composer is writing in may cause some uncertainty – that’s part of the gamble. So we talked a bit about her style.

She explained that while she’s trying to write in a 21st Century way, the music combines elements of a certain intellectual approach to its structure but always with the sense that music is an emotional experience - we respond to it emotionally.

I mentioned Harold Shapey, an important Chicago-based composer who was a mentor of hers and, like many important composers, one not all that well known to the general American public. He had been described as a “radical traditionalist,” meaning that he used traditional means to express his musical ideas in a “radical” way. I asked her to explain what that was and if it applied to her own music (which I felt it did).

“If someone wants to call me a ‘radical traditionalist,’ I would gladly accept that,” she said. Essentially, it means there are chords that move in certain expected ways – “everything is about ‘tension and release,’” the whole concept behind dissonance in 19th Century music – but the chords will sound different by themselves than chords from Beethoven or Brahms might sound.

Music – or at least music involved with harmonic motion – moves from one point to another and draws you along with it. Dissonance is like spice and helps propel a chord toward its resolution. While there may be a lot of difference between the sound of Vivaldi and the sound of Brahms, if you get beneath the “surface language,” you’ll discover that in most ways they’re very similar, maybe even the same, no matter how simple or complex the style.

Hearing Mozart before Lyre of Orpheus may make them sound like different worlds, I said, but in reality they are just two different ways of doing the same thing: creating a musical world to which you can respond on different levels, both intellectually and emotionally. There are phrases in Mozart that move from here to there – there will be phrases in Ms. Ran’s piece that will do the same thing, essentially, not the way Mozart would do them but comparable (after all, they were written 230 years apart).

(Interestingly, in the context of the concert, I found Mozart’s sense of dissonance and release much closer to Ms. Ran’s style, especially in that incredible slow movement, more than Mendelssohn’s style which was written only 183 years ago!)

During the course of this conversation the composer and I were having, I saw the cellist sneak in on the side. Zvi Plesser said he wanted to hear what we were talking about but I decided later to put him to work.

Zvi talked about the process – choosing the composer (the first of these six commissions was performed two seasons ago, so this has been an on-going process in addition to being a long wait), then out of nothing, receiving the completed work in the mail and holding the score in his hands, then playing through his part to hear what it sounded like and then, after everybody’s had a chance to practice their individual parts, getting them together to read through it so he could get an idea how it all worked together, hearing the piece take shape finally as they work out the details. In a sense, it’s just like they might do with something by Brahms but only here there are no recordings or other performances to guide them. It was a very elastic process, figuring everything out on your own. Then a few days ago they had their first rehearsal with the composer present and their last rehearsal just a few minutes ago. In all, they’d been working on the piece for about a week.

But the process wasn’t finished yet: though the commission may have been announced over two years ago, it wasn’t finalized until the audience has heard it. That, Ms. Ran said, is the continuum, going from what she had in her mind, getting it down on paper, then having the performers interpret what she’d written to lift it (as she extends her hands forward to the audience) off the page so the listener can hear it. Only then is it “complete.”

Twenty minutes later, the concert began and after the Mozart, Shulamit Ran’s Lyre of Orpheus was complete.

And we in Harrisburg PA were the first to hear it.

I'll post about the performance itself a little later.

- Dr. Dick

Concertante: Arranging Mozart

Concertante's program last night began with a work by Mozart - or at least an arrangement of it. These are some of my notes intended for my pre-concert talk, along with those about Mendelssohn's youthful Quintet in A Major which you can read here.

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In the days before there were copyright laws, the idea of arranging someone else’s music – what today would be called “copyright infringement” – was pretty normal. In one letter, Mozart apologized that he’d had no time to write because, in addition to the composing and performing he was involved in, he also had to arrange some highlights from his latest opera because if he didn’t do it, somebody else would – and beat him to the money that could be made with the amateur music market.

In the early 19th Century, long before there were TV sets or CD-players, people made their own music. It was part of a woman’s education, particularly, that she should be able to play the piano or sing pleasantly enough to entertain her husband and their guests after they’ve finished the dinner she’d cooked and put the kids to bed.

It wasn’t uncommon for cultured young men to be proficient on one or more instruments. Even a generation later, the household that Franz Schubert grew up in had a family string quartet – the father, a school-teacher, played the cello; the oldest son played 1st violin, another brother played 2nd violin and Franz, who also played the violin, usually played the viola.

As I’d been told in my student days, the Moravians – even after they set up their communities in Pennsylvania - might have a set of stringed instruments hanging on the wall of, say, the barber shop so that the men could take them down and make music together while waiting their turn – rather than reading magazines or watching TV, or playing with their iPods and iPhones.

And some of these amateurs must have obviously been of a very high quality. Most of Franz Schubert’s piano music, for instance (except for the last three piano sonatas) were written not for the concert hall but for the amateur, home-music-making audience – not just the reams of dances he turned out but also the impromptus and Moments Musicaux, the sonatas and, of course, one of the favorite forms of musical social interaction in those days, lots of piano duets.

Even late in the 19th Century, gentlemen would get together to play string quartets like these serious-looking men in 1889 (see left). Dvořák, for instance, played quartets with some of his neighbors. One summer, when I was living in Connecticut (more recently), I heard some wonderful sounding Brahms coming from the living room of a friend’s house: she explained it was her husband, a well-known doctor, getting together with some of the university’s medical students to play quartets!

In Mozart’s day, this “middle-class” market was just beginning to open up. Before then, it might have been the aristocratic court musicians – whether it was a small-time nobleman who might have a piano trio in his employment or a big-time nobleman like Prince Esterhazy who had a whole orchestra and an opera theater in his employ (with a fellow named Haydn to run it). Perhaps it was the change in the economy during (but especially after) a generation of Napoleonic Wars – probably that more than the French Revolution and the down-sizing of aristocrats across the continent – but by Schubert’s day, in the 1820s, there was an Esterhazy cousin, a Count, who hired Franz Schubert for a couple of summers to be their one-man music staff. Rather than conduct symphonies and write operas for his employer, he was expected to teach his two daughters to play the piano, to play for their evening’s after-dinner entertainment as well as compose works they could all perform, whether it was piano duets for the daughters, or part songs when they would gather ‘round the piano to sing songs written with 3 or 4 voice parts, especially pleasant when friends dropped by for visits. If a friend with a particularly pleasant voice was visiting for a week, Schubert was expected to produce a number of songs that would impress the guest and leave him feeling pleased enough to tell his friends how wonderful his experience was, visiting the Esterhazies. In fact, it was one of these visitors, a Baron Schönstein (with a fine baritone voice), who received the dedication of something Schubert composed that year, a set of 20 songs known as Die Schöne Müllerin.

So Schubert was a kind of status symbol – like having the best stereo speakers on an expensive sound system or the latest technology on your latest gadget. For Schubert, it was a kind of networking: hopefully the visitor would also spread his own name far and wide among his friends so they might go and buy his music to perform it for themselves. “Buying” was the operative word, here – the amateur market accounted for the largest part of Schubert’s meager income, and in fact many composers of his generation.

What does all this stuff about Schubert’s employment record have to do with Mozart?

Schubert was employed by the Esterhazies in the 1820s but Anton Steiner’s arrangement billed as Mozart “Grand Sestetto concertante” was published around 1808 - 17 years after Mozart’s death. A few years earlier, someone made a piano trio arrangement, as well. If no one was concerned about ripping him off when he was alive, who was going to bother with copyright infringement after he was dead?

And so while you’re listening to the members of Concertante playing this music tonight, imagine that 200 years ago, you might have been playing it yourself if technology hadn’t ruined the social interaction of friends making their own music!

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Mozart composed his Symphonie Concertante for two soloists - violin and viola – with an orchestra. The idea of a symphonie concertante was a particularly French one – a combination Symphony-Concerto featuring two or more soloists. It was one of the most frequently composed “forms” in Paris in the 1770s and into the early 1800s. Even Johann Christian Bach wrote several symphonies concertantes for his London audiences, they were so popular. But really, it was nothing more than the old Baroque concerto grosso – exemplified by J.C. Bach’s father, Johann Sebastian Bach’s six “Brandenburg Concertos” – dressed up now in Classical Period clothes.

(Incidentally, the term symphonie concertante was used by the French to describe what they regarded as their creation. Across the rest of Europe – and in most modern-day writings, you’ll see it listed in the Italian as sinfonia concertante. It’s also that sense of “concerto-like” playing in an ensemble that gives the ensemble you’re going to hear play it its name.)

Presumably, Mozart wrote two of these symphonies concertantes while he was in Paris trying to find a job. There’s an interesting mystery behind the one he wrote for four winds which, even today, cannot be fully authenticated as Mozart’s but who else could have written it? It’s even available in two different versions but there is no copy of it in Mozart’s handwriting that’s survived.

Anyway, he wasn’t very successful with his job hunt – but then he wasn’t fully engaged in the search either since, free of his father’s ever-watchful eye for a change, Wolfgang, now in his early 20s (when his middle name might well have been changed to Randy), was more interested in finding a wife. Stopping in Mannheim on the way, Wolfgang fell in love with one of the opera singers there, Aloysia Weber. When his father got wind of this, he sent an urgent letter to his wife who had gone along as the official chaperone, to get their son off to Paris quickly before anything serious happened.

It was her one brief moment in the spotlight of her son’s biography – and she became ill and died while they were in Paris. Without a job, with no substantial income from the trip and with his mother’s body left behind in an unmarked grave, two months later Wolfgang returned to Salzburg to face his father’s wrath since it was clear – at least in Leopold’s mind – that his wife died through his son’s negligence. Wolfgang had been away from home for 18 months.

There is a question whether he wrote this Symphonie Concertante in Paris or on his return trip, having stopped in Mannheim where he had stopped to visit before, a court that had one of the finest orchestras in Europe where every player was capable of being a soloist, it was said. Certainly, he began composing a symphonie concertante for piano and violin there, but dropped it after 120 measures and left it incomplete. (By the way, his opera singer girl-friend had cooled considerably toward him by this return trip – ironically, Wolfgang would later marry her younger sister, Constanze.)

It’s also possible he may have written this work after he returned to Salzburg but that seems unlikely since by now he had been demoted – due to his long absence – from the court’s concertmaster to the chapel organist where his job was now to supply the brief “Church Sonatas” and short masses for the Archbishop’s service. He would have had little need for a concert vehicle for himself, especially where things in the French Fashion would have had little or no vogue.

His treatment of the two soloists – never really a solo “group” but a true “double concerto” with them each playing solos, answering each other’s lines – is however not typical of the French love of simplicity and more light-hearted entertainment. Certainly, the slow movement of this piece goes way beyond the emotional limits the French would have found acceptable. On the academic side, it can find its roots in the old-fashioned opera seria style of the day. In its heart-wrenching sadness, we might assume Mozart was thinking of his mother, but we’ll never know. To paraphrase Lucy Miller Murray’s notes, the irony in this piece is that we can listen to this work and know that while he couldn’t find a job, rejected by the successful composers of the day, his music survives today, regarded more highly than any work written by those who turned him down.

- Dr. Dick

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The third photograph above, by the way, is a print made from a famous family portrait of the Mozarts, painted the year after the disastrous trip to Paris when the mother, Maria Anna Pertl Mozart, died. Wolfgang shares the bench with his sister Nannerl, playing a duet (notice the hands crossing) while their father Leopold, a violinist, stands behind the piano. On the wall between them is their mother's portrait painted a few years earlier: no longer with them, she could at least be included in spirit.

Mendelssohn at Concertante: A Bicentennial Salute

Usually, giving a pre-concert talk, I don’t get the chance to have the composer there to talk to about the music on that program. In the case of Concertante’s performance last night, aside from the fact Mendelssohn and Mozart had been long dead, it was unexpected that Shulamit Ran, the composer who’d been commissioned for the most recent work in their “1 + 5" Project, would be attending the concert, much less be able to drop in at the pre-concert talk (and my assistant, Otto deLoup, only found out about this the day before, anyway). I’ll post separately about the World Premiere of her Lyre of Orpheus, but I wanted to include my notes on the two works by Mendelssohn and Mozart – especially since I didn’t get to deliver them at the talk: when you have a living composer to talk to, the dead ones can speak more for themselves.

One of the hallmarks of Concertante’s programming is to present something familiar along with a less familiar work by a well-known composer and then something that might be a discovery for most of the audience. Mendelssohn and Mozart are certainly well known names and though Mozart’s “Grand Sestetto” that opens the program may be not-so-well known, the music is probably quite familiar – it’s an arrangement of his Symphonie Concertante for Violin & Viola. Mendelssohn may be one of the most popular composers around but his Quintet isn’t as well-known as it ought to be – and nothing can any more unfamiliar and a discovery to an audience than a piece that no one else has ever heard before – and tonight, Harrisburg gets its second World Premiere in two weeks.

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2009 is the Bicentennial of the birth of Felix Mendelssohn - born on February 3rd, 1809 - one of the more popular and best-loved composers from the 19th Century – best known for his Violin Concerto, the Italian and Scottish Symphonies, the music he composed for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (think Wedding March), the Octet for Strings and a little tune beloved of cartoons that’s always used to herald the arrival of Spring, one of his Songs without Words called “Spring Song.”

One of the works we’ll hear tonight, his String Quintet in A Major, Op. 18, isn’t as well known as any of these, especially considering a work he’d written in October the year before, the much more famous and more extroverted Octet in E-flat Major, or another work he composed in the summer of the same year he wrote the Quintet, an overture he sketched while sitting in the family garden reading Shakespeare.

It’s amazing to consider that by the time Felix Mendelssohn wrote this string quintet, he had already composed a violin concerto, a piano concerto, a concerto for violin and piano, two concertos for two pianos, three piano sonatas, two violin sonatas, a viola sonata, a clarinet sonata, three piano quartets, six comic operas and a dozen string symphonies, not to mention the Octet for Strings – all between the ages of 11 and 17, the year he wrote this String Quintet and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

It’s also amazing to consider how works written at the same time in his life could go on to become generally regarded as masterpieces, while another pieces written at almost the same time never quite caught on with the public. Every time I hear this quintet, it ends up getting compared to the Octet, as in “if he'd never written the Octet, this would be a really good piece.” By itself, it is a very good one - especially for a 17-year-old - and one that deserves to be heard more often.

Felix Mendelssohn was growing up in the quiet city of Berlin in Northern Germany, the capital of Prussia, in what was a cultural backwater at the time, compared to Vienna, the Austrian Capital far to the south. In the year Mendelssohn composed his String Quintet, Beethoven was working on his last string quartet – he would die in March of the following year – and Schubert, little known beyond a handful of friends and lovers of songs, was writing his last string quartet as well (he would die about 20 months after Beethoven).

His grandfather was a famous philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, and his father, Abraham, a successful banker, first in Hamburg, then, after they fled the Napoleonic Wars and the French Occupation’s “reign of terror,” in Berlin – Felix was 2 years old then and his sister Fanny was 6. Both children would later show extraordinary musical talent: while visiting Paris on business, Abraham found a piano teacher for Felix, now 7 years old, a woman who had been highly esteemed by both Haydn and Beethoven.

That was also the year that Abraham Mendelssohn had his children baptized, primarily because of the anti-Semitic regulations in Prussia but also because it was a kind of “Enlightenment” thing-to-do, reconciling Jewish and Christian beliefs with the ruling philosophy of the day. In honor of the children’s sponsor (Abraham himself waited another six years to convert), they added the name “Bartholdy” so sometimes you will find him with a hyphenated name, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. These days, it’s usually dropped.

The Mendelssohns turned their spacious home - with its garden and rather substantial music room – into a salon that saw guests like the writer ETA Hoffman, the philosopher Hegel, the poet Heine, one of the Brothers Grimm (collectors of the fairy tales, then something new and startling) as well as musicians like Carl Maria von Weber, Ludwig Spohr and the most powerful composer in Berlin at the time, Gasparo Spontini. They secured music teachers for both children and hired musicians to form an orchestra that played occasionally on their Sunday afternoon musicales. Fanny played the piano, Felix both the piano and the violin – and both children conducted, Felix (today he'd be called a tween-ager) having to stand on a chair to be seen by the players. His composition teacher, Friedrich Zelter, loved Bach – which fit in with Abraham’s preferences (he didn’t care much for the avant-garde music of Beethoven) – and Zelter introduced the boy to his friend, Goethe who was one of the greatest German poets of his or any other generation. When Goethe was a child, he had heard the still younger Mozart play and was very impressed – but in his old age, he was much more profoundly moved by the 12 year-old Mendelssohn’s talents.

The Octet, written when Mendelssohn was 16, was written for his violin teacher’s birthday. The teacher, Eduard Rietz, played the 1st violin part and Felix played one of the other violin parts. The next year, he wrote a string quintet – with two violas in the standard fashion of the day. This was also written for he and his teacher to play – and Mendelssohn also played the viola, by the way. For some reason, this work did not have a slow movement... but when Mendelssohn was in Paris six years later, he found out (on his 23rd Birthday) that his violin teacher had just died at the age of 31, and so he composed a memorial tribute to Rietz, adding the Andante movement to this Quintet. So in a rather odd way, we’ll hear music Mendelssohn composed when he was 17 with the inserted 2nd movement written when he was 23.

And then I’ll leave you to figure out, after you listen to it, why this work never quite caught on with the public like the Octet written before it or the Midsummer Nights’ Dream Overture written after it...

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Watching the performance (rather than just listening to it), I had a rather unexpected epiphany about this piece - not its critical worth or its place in the canon, but rather something going back to that first performance when Mendlessohn and his teacher first played the piece for his family and their Sunday afternoon guests. You can read about it here (once I get it posted).

You can read about the Mozart here - and about the world premiere of Shulamit Ran's Lyre of Orpheus here (likewise).

- Dr. Dick

Concertante: Another World Premiere in Harrisburg This Weekend

It’s the second world premiere by an internationally acclaimed composer to take place in Harrisburg PA in the past two weeks.

On February 28th, Market Square Concerts presented Maria Bachmann and Jon Klibonoff in the first performance of the new Violin Sonata by Philip Glass (you can read posts about it here, from the Market Square Concerts Blog).

Tomorrow at 8pm – and my apologies for the late notice – listeners in Central Pennsylvania will have the chance to be the first to hear a new work by Shulamit Ran (photo at right), an Israeli-born composer now living in New York and teaching in Chicago where she has been a composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony and the Chicago Lyric Opera. Her Symphony won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. She was the soloist in the premiere of her “Concert Piece for Piano & Orchestra” with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic in 1971. Since then, she has received numerous commissions, premieres and performances across the United States and around the world.

Philip Glass, unfortunately, was busy performing concerts of his music in California when his Violin Sonata was being performed here for the first time.

But Shulamit Ran will be joining Concertante for all three of their performances this weekend – the world premiere in Harrisburg on Saturday, in Baltimore on Sunday and New York City’s Merkin Recital Hall on Monday. With any luck, she’ll be able to meet the audience at my pre-concert talk if her schedule is open (composers are often very busy with things like this, so I make no promises). Regardless, you'll be able to meet the composer after the performance.

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THIS JUST IN: Shulamit Ran will be my guest tonight at the Pre-Concert Talk at 7:15 before the world premiere of her Lyre of Orpheus. - (posted Saturday 4:45pm...)
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She is one of six composers commissioned by Concertante in their “1 + 5" Series, creating new repertoire for the sextet of string players with each member of the ensemble commissioning a composer to write a work that will feature them in relation to their colleagues.

I just spoke with Zvi Plesser (photo at left), the cellist who’ll be the featured artist in this new work Concertante is premiering tomorrow night at the Rose Lehrman Center of Harrisburg Area Community College. Oh, and wouldn’t you know, I forgot to ask him what the actual title is! The program (printed at the start of the season) refers to it only as “Commissioned Work” since it hadn’t been finished yet. Well, I’ll get back to you on that detail...

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Update: According to the listing in the Patriot-News on-line (if you've scrolled through to page 5 of the Events Listings to find it) it's called Lyre of Orpheus. I should also mention, the Patriot-News listing has it for 4pm but it's really 8:00. You might be early but at least you'll get a good seat...

In her program notes, which Zvi forwarded to me, Ms. Ran said she finished the work late in 2008 but the title, Lyre of Orpheus, actually came about after the fact, so the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the ageless tale of love lost, love found and then lost again, was not actually in her mind when she composed the music. Still, she felt the title was appropriate to the cellist’s role of protagonist in the music’s dramatic give-and-take. She also mentions the sextet’s 2nd cellist tunes the lowest string down a minor third to obtain some additional lower notes than usual.

About writing the piece, the composer says,
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“This particular commission was made with the goal of giving center-stage to the ensemble’s first cello, a choice I was especially grateful for, not only because it features Zvi Plesser, the outstanding Israeli cellist, but also because it gave me an opportunity to highlight an instrument for which, from a very early stage in my life, I have felt a special affinity. The cello’s “soul”, so naturally combining passion and lyricism, has always touched me in a special way.”

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Zvi said the whole process of the group choosing their composers involved lots of discussion and listening to lots of CDs and performances. One of the deciding factors for him was hearing the Violin Concerto she had written which Ittai Shapira, one of his colleagues in Concertante, had premiered with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 2003. He knew her work but didn’t know her, personally, but liked her musical style to take the plunge and choose her as his composer.

So what’s it like going from asking a composer to write something to performing it?

As Zvi explained it, you go from nothing – before the music even exists – to getting the manuscript in the mail and holding the score in your hands. He immediately started playing through his part to hear what it sounded like and fell in love with it.

After their own rehearsals, they worked with the composer for the first time last night in New York. He commented about how well she communicated what it was she wanted from them at certain points and that she had the piece very much in her mind (it may seem obvious, but composers can often be very vague about their own music after it’s finished, especially when it comes to smaller details). So it was a very exciting experience bringing it to THAT point – and now, to place it before a live audience and experience an actual performance of it.

Since there are many solutions to the idea of “1 + 5,” I asked Zvi if it was more of a “mini-concerto” in which he’d be the soloist while the others form the equivalent of the orchestra, or more like a piece of chamber music where all the players are integrated on a more equal level except, in this case, he’d be a little more equal than the others.

He described it as a combination of the two: at times, he’s part of the ensemble and at other times, his prominent role may verge on something like a concerto, complete with some solo cadenzas.

I’ve had the chance to hear about a dozen of Shulamit Ran’s pieces over the years, and those I have heard (or scores that I’ve looked at) show a style that combines what some might call “intellectual design” with an expressive sense that aims directly for the heart as well as the mind.

Zvi agreed, telling me it’s exciting to be able to express himself through this music he helped bring into being.

Also on the program are works by Mozart and Mendelssohn who, however, are unable to attend the concert. Mozart’s Symphonie Concertante for Violin and Viola may be well known but in the days when amateur musicians made their own music at home before there were stereos and TV-sets, it was arranged for various combinations, including this one for string sextet. Last month marked the start of the Mendelssohn Bicentennial Year and on this program you can hear his String Quintet in A Major, Op. 18, which he composed the year after the more famous (and more extroverted) Octet – that would make the composer 17 when he wrote it.

The concert is at 8:00 at the Rose Lehrman Arts Center of Harrisburg Area Community College. My pre-concert talk starts at 7:15 back in the “Black Box” (take the hall off the left from the front entrance).

– Dr. Dick

November & Concertante

This was the view in my back-yard today.

November is not a favorite month of mine though it’s not on the bottom of the pile, either. Cold rainy days in November, though, generally leave me, well... cold, usually from the inside out. It’s the kind of day I would like to snuggle up in a comfy chair with a good book and some cats (if the cats would allow me to read: usually the book is in the way of where they want to nestle) if I had the time for that. Oddly enough, now that I do have the time for that, finding myself one of the highest influx of unemployed Americans in the past seven years, I don’t have the time for that today.

Tonight there’s a performance by Concertante at the Rose Lehrman Arts Center at Harrisburg Area Community College that begins at 8:00. They’re playing two movements of the String Quintet in D Minor by Alexander von Zemlinsky, the Piano Quartet of Robert Schumann and Ernő Dohnányi’s first published work, his Piano Quintet in C Minor, one of the few “other” piano quintets available beyond the standard handful of Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák, Shostakovich, maybe Fauré and Franck... who’m I leaving out? Those are the basic ones you might hear (often enough) when a pianist joins a string quartet for an evening of chamber music.

I’ll be doing the pre-concert talk beginning at 7:15, gathering in the “Black Box” theater down the hall to the left of the auditorium’s entrance.

My starting point for the talk is one thing they all have in common: they’re all, at one time or another, better known for their relationship to someone else. And I discovered, thinking more about it, another common denominator, a composer not on the program (at least on this one) but whom I’ve already mentioned.

Schumann, in his day, was better known as a writer about music than a writer OF music. And his wife happened to be one of the greatest concert pianists of the age, Clara Schumann. In fact, though she would perform his music on her concerts, he often felt like a lap dog trotting after her when he went on tour, a consort who was treated by the press and the public like Mr. Clara Schumann.

Zemlinsky, almost forgotten today, is best known as the mentor of Arnold Schoenberg and, as it turned out, his brother-in-law. Zemlinsky also worked with Gustav Mahler in the early years of the 20th Century, championing new music (some of it his own, some of it by his brother-in-law) as well as conducting and teaching. One of his students, by the way, was a woman named Alma Schindler who would shortly become Mrs. Gustav Mahler.

Ernő Dohnányi – or to use his more frequently seen German-form, Ernst von Dohnanyi – is the third of three major Hungarian composers anyone talks about in the founding of the 20th Century Hungarian Style, with Bartók, Kodály and... uhm... oh yeah, Dohnányi. He’s the one most people haven’t heard anything by, or if they have, it’s that treacly cute set of variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” for piano and orchestra, written in various and sundry styles, a delightful pastiche that has little to do with his real worth. These days, since even that has faded from the concert halls and probably the air-waves, he’s remembered more as the grandfather of the former conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohnányi.

Interestingly enough, the music we’ll hear by Zemlinsky was composed the year he formed an amateur orchestra of which the sole cellist was a young man who also wanted to write music, named Arnold Schoenberg. Dohnányi’s quintet was composed a decade before Bartók had begun collecting the Hungarian folk songs that became the foundation of the modern Hungarian “school.”

The other “common denominator” is Johannes Brahms who was a protege of Schumann’s and a mentor of sorts to both Zemlinsky and Dohnányi! Zemlinsky had joined one of the major music organizations in Vienna in 1893 when Brahms, who turned 60 that year, was the leading figure in the city’s musical universe. Several of Zemlinsky’s early chamber works were performed in their concerts and he got some very complimentary comments from Brahms whose endorsement certainly helped his career. Zemlinsky had turned young Schoenberg on to Brahms’ music which would be a major influence on the development of his style, even beyond tonality, but it was Wagner that would become the biggest immediate factor in pushing Schoenberg into the 20th Century.

Brahms had heard about the young Hungarian pianist and composer Dohnányi and decided to arrange to have his Piano Quintet premiered in Vienna, an endorsement that also led to its publication. As Dvořák's music was full of the sound of Bohemian folk music, Dohnányi's music brought to cosmopolitan Vienna the unexpected sounds of actual Hungarian folk music, not the urban popular music of the Gypsies that everybody always associated with Hungarian music, most notably in those popular dances that made Brahms’ fortune.

Just as Schumann’s passing the mantle on to Brahms had far reaching consequences, Brahms own mentorship may have been more profound on someone like Dvořák, though time, temperament and perhaps talent may be more at fault for the failure of Zemlinsky and Dohnányi to benefit comparably. As styles changed around 1900 and Schoenberg went off in one direction, Zemlinsky was not comfortable in following this infusion of air from another planet (to quote a line from the poem Schoenberg set in his 2nd String Quartet, one of the first “official” atonal pieces). Zemlinsky’s career was further hampered by both world wars as was Dohnányi’s: both composers, like Bartok, found themselves ex-patriots living and dying in the United States.

Dohnányi spent much of his time rebuilding the musical life of Hungary during its independence following World War I and the collapse of the Austrian Empire (or, as it was mollifyingly known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Kingdom of Hungary still ruled by the Emperor of Austria), and before the government was taken over by Nazi Germany before World War II. Much of his creative energy was sapped by the government administrative posts, the concertizing and above all the teaching. He was often taken to task by his more ethnically-minded colleagues Bartók and Kodály for being too conservative in his musical style.

But it is easy to forget that, when he attended the Conservatory in Budapest, he was the first ethnic Hungarian student to graduate from there as a “star.” It is also important to note that Vienna, for all its Imperial cosmopolitan-ness was still xenophobic enough to consider a composer like Dvořák from the province of Bohemia and the Hungarian Dohnányi were, essentially, “hicks,” inferior to the good Germanic culture that was Viennese Art, even though the most famous Viennese composers (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms and now Mahler) were all transplants (from Salzburg, from rural Austria, from Bonn, from Hamburg; and Mahler was a Jew from Bohemia). In fact, three composers who were actually born and raised in Vienna – Schubert, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg – received barely any recognition from their home town! So much for prophets in their own land...

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Meanwhile, I’m hard at work – though today, hardly working – on the November Novel Challenge that is NaNoWriMo (November is National Writing Month). The goal is not so much to hurry up and write a novel during the month of November, the goal is to push yourself to write 50,000 words whether or not the novel is completed in time, so you have something to go back and edit, pare down or add to or even finish at a later date. Without goading yourself toward this goal, you might never sit down and actually write 50,000 words. I can vouch for that: twice I’ve tried getting this novel started and twice it got put aside for other things (called “reality”). So far, just about half-way through the month, I am half-way toward that goal with 25,012 words under my belt as of yesterday afternoon.

So here, on this drizzly dreary November afternoon, rather than curl up in a chair with the cats and read a book, I am trying to hunker down at my desk and write a book, though the cats are still trying to claim their share of the turf: everybody needs a muse or a proof-reader or an editor, right? (see Freddy, Charlie and Max, my support group, right).

And now, back to work.

Dr. Dick

The Times of Their Lives: Concertante with Mozart, Britten & Brahms

Concertante opened their new season with a concert at the Rose Lehrman Center at the Harrisburg Area Community College Wildwood Campus Saturday night. The program opened with the Oboe Quartet by Mozart, then followed with another staple of the oboist’s repertoire but not one that well known, the Phantasy Quartet by Benjamin Britten. After intermission, we heard a rousing rendition of Brahms’ 2nd String Quintet, the G Major Op. 111.

Opening concerts are a bit like a home-coming, if not for the musicians playing them, then for the musicians and the audience gathering together for a whole new season. An oboist from Israel, Dudu Carmel, was to join them for the Mozart and Britten but unfortunately it was discovered too late he had not applied in time for his visa and so he was unable to join them. I’m not sure if “scrambling” was the word, but when you’re trying to find a “sub” a couple of weeks before the concert, hoping you don’t have to change the repertoire – fortunately the Mozart and the Britten are likely to be in any free-lance oboist’s play-book – it doesn’t make life easier getting things organized for the very first concert.

Fortunately, they found Robert Ingliss. In addition to playing with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and being the Acting Principal Oboist for the New Jersey Symphony, he also plays in the New York-based ensemble An die Musik (where I’d first heard Gerard Reuter back in the ‘70s and have more recently heard him with the Fry Street Quartet at Market Square Concerts’ Summermusics (in fact, at one of those concerts, playing the Britten Phantasy Quartet). He teaches at Columbia University among other universities in New York City and vicinity. He recently gave the world premiere of a new work by Charles Wuorinen at Carnegie Hall and has also premiered works by Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt and a French composer whose Violin Concerto I’ve found fascinating, Michel Dalbavie.

Two examples of the expression attributed to Henry James, “There are not enough people to go around in the world” –

(1) Ingliss is also a member of the Cygnus Ensemble which has a Harrisburg connection in its guitarist, William Anderson, whose parents, Dotty & Bill, are very active in the local arts scene.

(2) Ingliss attended the University of Connecticut, his last year at UConn being my first year there as a teacher of theory and composition (I mean, how many oboists in the country could be named Robert Ingliss, right? I had to ask...).

The Mozart Oboe Quartet – always too short – is always a delight to hear. The outer movements are some of Mozart’s most joyful, classical decorum (that powdered-wig stereotype we often associate with 18th Century music) held in abeyance for fifteen minutes you wish you could hang on to forever. The slow movement’s sorrowful aria gives way to what would, in the next generation, become emotional Romanticism. It’s the last movement that stays with me the longest, though, despite its brevity. This is music without a care in the world and it was clear the players were having a fun time playing it.

The quartet is really a mini-concerto for the oboist and it was great to hear Ingliss navigate its long lyrical lines as well as its more virtuosic flourishes. Only at the end of the slow movement was there a slight shadow: would his reed hold out for that last long sustained high note? Fortunately, yes.

Though the Britten is darker and the Mozart just sounds like a good concert opener, I’m not sure it would be better to have a chance to “warm up” on the Britten or get the hard work of the Mozart out of the way. Toss up.

Britten’s “Phantasy Quartet” is more of an integrated ensemble for the four players. For a while, I was trying to remember if the oboist plays at all in the more lyrical middle section. Where the string trio was primarily an accompanist in the Mozart, Britten uses his instruments independently and gave each player separate lines and often independent layers which everybody handled to make a convincing whole of the piece.

It’s hard to believe that Brahms considered himself “written out” when he composed this glorious romp of a quintet at what he thought would be the end of his career. The biggest challenge, once you’ve got all those notes down, is to maintain the volume level he requires: it’s a very loud piece! And just as you think it can’t get any louder or faster, he turns the dial up another notch. Clara Schumann called the ending “magnificent confusion” but there was no confusion in Concertante’s handling of the entire piece, from the wall of sound the cellist has to cut through at the opening, to the melting adagio, to the autumnal intermezzo before the mad dash of the gypsy band in the finale.

The opening is a famous example of stubborn composer versus practical musician: violinist Joseph Joachim told Brahms it would take three cellists to be heard against the other players all sawing away on these sixteenth notes that look clearly like they should be “behind” the theme, not covering it. But Brahms stuck to his guns and joked that he would leave it to the performers to work out. Everyone is marked to play at the same dynamic level – forte – though it struck me (literally as well as figuratively) more like fortissimo which leaves not much room to expand by the time they reach the fortissimo at the very end. Perhaps it’s a trick of the acoustic in the hall, what might sound okay to the players on the stage coming across louder to the audience. Perhaps they should’ve cut back a tad on the opening and not have to work so hard for the first 25 measures, that’s one thing, but if Brahms was honest about his inspiration for the piece – a friend said it reminded him of a night at the Prater, Vienna’s famous amusement park and Brahms told him he’d guessed right – maybe his intent was trying to depict overhearing someone talking in the hubbub of a crowd out on the town?

As for the title of this post, whether the members of Concertante had “the times of their lives” or not, I can’t say – they certainly had a good time – but for this program, my pre-concert talk – attended by about 20 people which I thought was pretty good, considering we didn’t have a lot of publicity about the talk beforehand – was entitled from the viewpoint of the composers, “The Times of Their Lives.”

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Britten had been playing the piano since the time he could walk and improvising almost immediately, trying to write things down before he even learned the rudiments of notation, becoming more sophisticated by the time he was 9. He often played the piano to his mother's singing and attended rehearsals of the choirs she sang in – she had a fine mezzo voice that one friend of the composer’s later described as being surprisingly close to the tone color of tenor Peter Pears’ voice (Pears would later become Britten’s life-partner). He also studied viola with a family friend who played in a string quartet in a nearby town.

At 11, he heard his first live orchestra concert which included “The Sea” by Frank Bridge which, in Britten’s own words, “knocked me sideways.” In the year before he turned 14 and started studying with Bridge, the boy composed two overtures, five Poemes, the Suite fantastique for piano and orchestra, a Symphony in D Minor for an orchestra that included eight horns (according to David Matthews’ 2003 biography, apparently Britten wrote 117 pages of full score in five weeks during school term plus two of the Poemes), and a large scale symphonic poem, Chaos and Cosmos!

A fan of the music of Beethoven and Brahms, much of which he could play from memory, he also discovered Ravel’s String Quartet. On his 16th Birthday, his parents gave him a score of Beethoven’s Fidelio and he referred to this as a “red-letter day in my life.” It was at that time, also, he discovered the music of Arnold Schoenberg, hearing a radio concert that included Pierrot Lunaire and shortly afterward he composed a piece for him and his friends to play that was atonal in several places. He went to London to be interviewed for the Royal College of Music a few months later, and the panel (which included the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams) thought it wasn’t ‘decent’ for a schoolboy to be writing such music. Still, they offered him a scholarship. He chose a score for Pierrot Lunaire as one of his prizes at school graduation and then wrote what Matthews calls the “ne plus ultra of his modernist pieces,” which Britten, leaving it untitled, referred to as a “not-too-nice piece for viola solo.”

During his first year at the Royal College of Music, Britten wrote a String Quartet in D Major (which he revised and published near the end of his life) – there had been several smaller quartets and quartet-movements before – and a Sinfonietta which would become his Opus 1. His Op. 2 was the “Phantasy Quartet” for Oboe and Strings which, at least in part, sounds more like the mature Britten, not that there weren’t recognizable fingerprints in many of these earlier works. Though his fondness for Beethoven was waning – Brahms, soon, became “solid & dull” – it seems Mozart was becoming more of an influence, at least in the sense of his linear clarity and sense of formal control. Britten tired of the “turbulent” music he had been writing, full of “gestures” and this shift of style was obvious in these recent works.

There was a fellow named William Wilson Cobbett who championed the idea of composers writing “Phantasies” – distinguished from the more traditional “Fantasies,” however one distinguished them in pronunciation – because he felt it harkened back to the glorious days of Elizabethan England and free-form works written then for what were called “consorts of viols.” Vaughan Williams had written one – either commissioned by or at least requested by Cobbett – in 1912. Britten wrote two Phantasies when he was 18, the first one a quintet for strings alone which won him the annual “Cobbett Prize,” one assumes for works with the word “Phantasy” in the title. Adding an oboe would not be “hoyle” according to Elizabethan standards as that would be called a “broken consort” (a mixed ensemble of strings and winds): it was performed at the school – badly, according to the composer, though he expected worse – but did not win a prize. It was also publically performed on a concert series founded by an all-women’s quartet and the composer Elizabeth Lutyens to showcase the latest English composers (rather than the staid “pastoralists” like Vaughan Williams).

Interestingly, I found reference to a 1975 publication by psychologist Melanie Klein which described Phantasy as a state-of-mind of an infant stemming “from genetic needs, drives and instincts. They appear in symbolic form in dreams, play and neuroses. They are constructed from internal and external reality, modified by feelings, and emotions, and then projected into both real and imaginary objects. Phantasies are the means by which infants make sense of the external world and hence relate to it through projection and introjection.” This is somehow different from the adult Fantasy which is more of a day-dream, an imagined un-reality in which we may try to imagine a future reality.

Usually in music, a “fantasy” means merely something that is free-formed and perhaps dreamy in nature (Mozart’s almost nightmarish Fantasy in C Minor, K.475) , or built on impressions of someone else’s music (as in a “Fantasy on Themes from Bizet’s Carmen”) more loosely than, say, a set of variations.

Britten’s Phantasy, regardless of its psychological or historical implications, is the first piece he wrote with a processional and recessional, figuratively if not literally. The opening section is a rather shadowy march that begins quietly with the cello, then adding the other parts in layers, each with different material. At the end, this process is reversed until the cello repeats its little march-like rhythm, alternating on two notes, each time shortened until it evaporates. This section sounds the most like “mature” Britten, full of ideas and sonorities that would become hallmarks heard in his most familiar works. He would use this processional / recessional in works like the Church Parables of the 1960s, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn & Strings (where the solo horn opens with a kind of fanfare that, at the end, is then played off-stage) and most famously in The Ceremony of Carols.

The middle part is something Britten did not return to, stylistically. It is more lyrical and harmonically more Beethoven-ish compared to the sparer March. Whatever his reasons were for not pursuing this style – just one of many a young composer might explore – I have no idea, but it struck me listening to this Saturday night (and I’ve heard the Phantasy live three times in the past two years or so, now) how much it reminded me of Michael Tippett, fellow British composer who, after Walton, would become regarded internationally as the major English composers of their generation. Tippett, I knew, grappled with Beethoven’s influence directly (as in his 3rd Symphony, quoting whole passages from Beethoven’s 9th) or indirectly (in all of his five string quartets) so it was interesting, the next day, to listen to Tippett’s 1st String Quartet (the earliest work of his I know) which he began about two years after Britten wrote this Phantasy: it’s not likely Britten could have influenced him because it’s unlikely Tippett would have heard much of his music. His recollections confused a concert in 1934 where he saw Britten for the first time when a work of his was on the program, with a concert a year later that was the premiere of his own 1st Quartet. Even though Tippett left the Royal College four years before Britten arrived but continued studying privately with one of its major teachers for the next few years, it’s more likely this aural similarity in styles stems from their admiration of Beethoven rather than an imitation of each other: these same fingerprints can be heard in music Britten wrote years earlier before their paths could have possibly crossed. Perhaps it was just something in the air at the time...

Anyway, the year after writing the Phantasy Quartet (when this photograph was taken), Britten won a travel scholarship from the RCM which he wanted to apply to going to Vienna so he could study with Alban Berg. It’s interesting that, having put Beethoven and Brahms behind him, he should find himself more attuned to the emotional music of Berg rather than the more intellectualized, classically-lined style of Schoenberg – he had heard Schoenberg conduct his Variations for Orchestra and found them lacking, mentioning in his diary that he’d met Schoenberg then but said nothing more about it, one way or another. He found Pierrot fascinating (perhaps it’s that dream-like state the work concocts, Phantasy or Fantasy) but “could not make head or tail of” the nightmarish world of Erwartung.

Now, serialism, still relatively new, was frowned upon in England where the attitude even to someone as “contemporary” as Mahler was extremely negative. (Keep in mind, England meant Elgar to the wider world: composers like Holst and Vaughan Williams were still very insular products – Richard Strauss, perhaps reacting to this lack of international acclaim for British composers, had referred to England as “the country without music”...) Britten’s hopes to study with the composer of Wozzeck foundered on the school’s concern that Berg would not be “a good influence.” His parents interpreted this not as musical influence but as a moral influence – after all, this is the man who wrote Wozzeck: what would they have thought of Lulu? – and so the plan was dropped.

Ironically, not long afterward, Britten and his mother, traveling on the Continent, went to Vienna which Britten loved, but unfortunately Berg was out of town then and they never met. Not much later, on Christmas Eve, 1935, Berg died unexpectedly at the age of 50 (from blood-poisoning following an insect-bite). Four months later, Britten went to a contemporary music festival in Spain to hear the premiere of Berg’s last completed work, his Violin Concerto, which he found to be “shattering.”

The possibilities in this influence – had Britten actually gone to Vienna to study with Berg – are just another of those great “What If?”s – how different would Britten’s style have become? What kind of works would he have written if he had not composed the ones he did, or how different would they have sounded?

A few years ago, I was at a “composers’ workshop” performance at Susquehanna University where a work of mine (as Class of ‘71) was being performed along with a work by a more recent graduate, David T. Little, a very fine composer. The students on the program were asking us questions like “When did you find your own voice?” I said, then in my mid-50s, I was still looking for it, having not composed for 16 years and facing my piece on the program written in 1979. David, then in his early-20s, said he hadn’t found what he thought might be his voice yet, either. We both agreed that it’s not something a young composer should be worried about: a student’s job is to write lots and lots of music, explore lots and lots of whatever catches his or her fancy (or perhaps “phancy”) and let the voice, consciously or unconsciously discarding these bits or absorbing those bits, eventually present itself over time.

That is what Britten was doing around the time he wrote his Op. 2 – some of it he kept, and some of it he rejected; influences came and went but he learned a little something from each of them and absorbed them into what we then recognize as Benjamin Britten.

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By the time Mozart wrote his Oboe Quartet, he was 25 and had been composing for about 19 years. While many of his earliest works would show the influence of his contemporaries (except for J.C. Bach, mostly unknown to us, today), he very early found a voice that not only defines Mozart for us today but the whole Classical Era (roughly 1750-1800). Mozart turned 25 in Munich where he’d been “on leave” from his post with the Archbishop of Salzburg. His primary job in Munich was to compose and produce the opera Idomeneo which, however successful it became, was not enough to land him the court composer’s position he was hoping for.

Around that time, he wrote the oboe quartet for the orchestra’s principal oboist, Friedrich Ramm, but finding himself with no reason to stay longer in Munich, he was forced to obey the Archbishop’s summons to join his court in Vienna. He arrived in the Imperial capital on March 16th and immediately began complaining about what he could be doing there if it weren’t for his meager responsibilities with the Archbishop. Now, he couldn’t just quit because it was a more feudal set-up than that: he had to have the Archbishop’s written release – otherwise, if he just ‘ran away,’ the Archbishop could send the police after him: he quite literally “owned” Mozart as a servant. But the Archbishop saw no reason to release Mozart. Months of negotiations led to nothing until finally, apparently in exasperation, the Archbishop’s chamberlain (not the Archbishop himself) gave Mozart “the boot” – also quite literally, giving him a swift kick in the butt on his way out the door.

Mozart was now free and on his own: he would pursue a livelihood as a pianist and teacher - and composer, the first major free-lance musician in an age when most successful musicians were either employed or wanted to be employed by some aristocrat. A month later, he received the libretto for an opera to be written for the Emperor’s court, The Abduction from the Seraglio, the one the Emperor thought had “too many notes.”

(By the way, this whole concept of employment vs free-lancing is an interesting topic: Beethoven, in Vienna during the decades following Mozart’s death, was also a free-lancer but survived on considerable financial support from various aristocrats, not the least of which was the Emperor’s younger brother. The distinction was, he was not “in servitude” to them. Today, we might call this patronage “underwriting.”)

But who knew that Mozart would only have ten more years to live? If the Oboe Quartet is K.370 and the Requiem left unfinished at his death about 7 weeks before his 36th Birthday is K.626, that means he wrote about 255 more works after the Oboe Quartet, among them most of his piano concertos, his greatest operas, the best of his chamber music and the last six symphonies. If he had written another 255 works in the next ten years, what else might we be listening to today?

Speaking of “What if?”, Haydn, who was 24 years older than Mozart, had gone off to London when he was almost 60: the assumption was, as he felt, he could die in England and never see his friend Mozart again. Who would have expected Haydn would return to Vienna to find Mozart had died at the age of 35? If Mozart had even outlived Haydn by one more year, he would’ve been only 54, but would have heard Beethoven’s first six symphonies and all of his concertos.

If he had lived to be as old as Haydn, dying instead in his mid-70s five years after Beethoven died, what might Mozart’s reaction have been to hearing Beethoven’s Late Quartets or his 9th Symphony... or for that matter, Schubert’s C Major String Quintet (if it had been played in public then) or, perhaps, Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique which was composed in 1830? If Mozart died at the same age as Haydn, he would have died the same year Brahms was born.

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If Brahms had died before his 36th birthday, he would not have completed his 1st Symphony or written any of the string quartets. That means he would have died a year after the German Requiem and a year before the Liebeslieder Waltzes.

Blessed with a few more years than Mozart, Brahms wrote his 2nd String Quintet when he was 57, the age Beethoven had been when he died. Brahms, he figured, had his whole life behind him, it seemed. It had taken him some 20-25 years to finish a first symphony but only a year or two to write each of his next two. The 1st did not have an easy success, especially in pleasure loving Vienna (too dramatic, too intellectual). When the 2nd Symphony, a more immediate success in Vienna, was first performed in Leipzig, it was criticized for being too “pretty” which might have been okay for Vienna, the critics wrote, but the good Germans of Leipzig preferred something with a little more to chew on than just pleasant tunes.

While his 3rd Symphony had been well received everywhere, he knew the new symphony he’d finished when he was 52 was going to be a challenge, maybe even a disaster. It was even too cerebral for his intellectual friends, the Herzogenbergs. Having passed 50, Brahms was now concerned perhaps he was “written out.” The reaction to his 4th Symphony was cool at best, even cooler for his next orchestral work, the Double Concerto (which, incidentally, the Harrisburg Symphony will play on its first concert of the new season, October 4th & 5th, with Kurt Nikkanen and Daniel Gaisford). So it was with some trepidation he began his summer holiday in 1890: he decided that perhaps this would be his last work – he would retire from composing.

He had found it difficult to get anything started in those years after the Double Concerto. Jan Swafford, in his biography of Brahms, says that Brahms had sketched TWO symphonies, one of which was apparently advanced enough to be played as a piano duet for his friends – the standard Brahmsian try-out. TWO symphonies – imagine what it might be like to have SIX symphonies, not four, by Johannes Brahms? But he was a very strict composer who never let anything go he wasn’t sure of: he said one of the most important things a composer could own was a wastebasket.

Brahms was a summer composer and he preferred to write in vacation spots away from the distractions of Vienna. In 1890, at Bad Ischl, he “tormented” himself by trying to write chamber music and a symphony. He came back to Vienna with the G Major String Quintet, Op. 111. Before he left Ischl, he wrote to his publisher and said he had thrown reams of paper into the river – usually he consigned his sketches and rejected works to the flames – and mentioned this quintet would be the last work he would compose.

It’s difficult to listen to this music and think he felt himself “dried up.” When a friend thought the opening reminded him of the Prater, the great amusement park in Vienna and a favorite haunt of Brahms’, the composer replied “You guessed it! And the beautiful girls are there!”

It’s possible the opening cello theme (all but lost under all those sawing 16th notes in the violins and violas) was intended for the symphony that otherwise never took shape. How much of the other ideas were originally intended for the symphony, who would know, after Brahms destroyed all the sketches. But it’s still tantalizing to hear this joyous work and wonder what those two symphonies or the other pieces that never came to fruition might have been like?

Here is Brahms, looking back on his career - but fortunately, he met a clarinetist whose sound he found inspiring and so he came out of retirement the following year to write a trio, a quintet and eventually two sonatas for the clarinet. And, by the way, three more sets of piano pieces, some choruses, the Four Serious Songs and a set of chorale preludes for organ.

I’ll leave you with these images.

This famous photograph was taken the summer of 1894, the summer of those Clarinet Sonatas, with Brahms standing on a porch beside Johann Strauss Jr, the “Waltz King” (of whom Brahms was a big fan – in Strauss’ daughter’s autograph book, he wrote out the theme from “The Beautiful Blue Danube” and underneath it, “alas, not by Johannes Brahms”). Strauss is slim and elegant, his curly black hair and mustache very dashing beside the rumpled Brahms, short and overweight with his long gray hair and beard. Strauss was eight years older than Brahms.

But earlier that year, at his 61st birthday celebration, as Swafford describes it, he and his friends went to a restaurant at the Prater to hear the gypsy musicians play – many of his finales were inspired by the gypsy style, not just all the Hungarian Dances: most famously, there’s the G Minor Piano Quartet, the Violin Concerto and the Op. 111 Quintet. They in turn gave Brahms a rousing chorus of Hoch soll er leben (the German equivalent of Happy Birthday). Then after dinner, Brahms and his friends went off to the amusement park, ending before midnight “at the slide and the haunted house.”

Now there’s an image to ponder as you listen to the Quintet Op. 111 – not the autumnal Brahms we associate with his “late music,” but the Brahms who could wrap up his birthday party by going down a playground slide...