We will not cease from exploration
from Little Gidding, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
Franz Schubert Sonata in A minor, D.821 “Arpeggione” (1824)
Anton Arensky String Quartet in A minor, Op. 35 (1894)
Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50 (1882)
Our fourth concert of BCMS Season 37 and first of the New Year 2020 offers three works that have more in common than being unique in the repertoire, and beginning their journeys in the key of A minor. The Schubert Sonata and Arensky String Quartet travel and eventually end in A major. The Tchaikovsky Piano Trio, however, returns and ends in the original key. Each work also shows elements of cyclical conception, and is based on songwriting or actual songs spun into variations—virtuosic and sublime—that anchor and challenge the listener while creating an arc of tones in time. We can truly say by the end of our concert that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Franz Schubert’s Sonata (1824) in three movements, written for the now extinct arpeggione, is performed more often these days on the viola or cello. The arpeggione had six strings, was fretted and tuned like a guitar, and played seated with a bow like the cello. As the name might suggest, arpeggios, or broken chords, were apparently characteristic of how the instrument was to be played. In this sonata the leading melodic material throughout the piece is shaped largely around arpeggios. That decision to favor using broken chords over scale motion in the melodic writing by the composer of more than six-hundred songs seems a conscious nod to its unusual tuning and hybrid origins. Further evidence may be heard in places where the arpeggione plucks arpeggios in accompaniment to themes played by the piano in the first and third movements, and the use of bariolage (a virtuosic rapid string crossing bowing technique) to announce a return to the minor mode in the last movement.
Anton Arensky’s String Quartet (1894), comprised of two cellos, one violin and one viola, is itself a variation on the standard string quartet that uses two violins, viola, and one cello. Using two cellos makes the overall texture darker in tone than the Mozart String Quintet in C major that opened our season—standard string quartet with an extra violist. The darker tonal palate is typical of choral music from the Russian Orthodox Church that features low male voices. Its number and types of movements are also a departure from the string quartet norm. Instead of four movements there are three. The first is based on a liturgical chant. The second is a set of seven variations of a children’s song by Tchaikovsky. The movement concludes with a quiet restatement of the chant heard at the opening of the first movement. The finale opens with a slow chant from the Requiem Mass as an introduction to the triumphant Russian Coronation Hymn that Beethoven quotes in the trio of the third movement (Allegretto) of his second “Razumovsky” String Quartet, Op. 59, No. 2. The quartet was dedicated to Tchaikovsky’s memory.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio (1882) sends us on the most epic journey of the afternoon, taking nearly one hour to perform in its entirety. The trio is said to appear at a time when the difficulties of his personal life and failed marriage had raised a barrier between him and his deepest musical expression. It took the death in 1881 of Nikolay Rubinstein, pianist and composer, to spark the level of grief, remembrance and speed needed to create a timely and appropriate offering to honor their musical friendship. The score is inscribed ‘to the memory of a great artist.’
The first movement, entitled Pezzo elegiac, is intended to be an elegiac statement. Rather than taking on the character of a lament, it is celebratory in invention and virtuosity. Its themes and settings display Tchaikovsky’s greatest strength—writing beautifully formed melody.
The second movement is divided into two large parts, A and B in the score. Part A has eleven variations on an innocent theme first exposed by the piano. The variations proceed like a series of character pieces or stage set changes, portraying scenes and music styles from every day life while highlighting the theme in one instrument with embellishment in another.
Part B, entitled Variazione finale e coda, is, in fact, a twelfth variation that enlarges the space (beyond the original twenty-bar framework) in which Tchaikovsky elaborates on the theme in a manner that confirms his own description of the work as symphonic music for piano trio. The trio is brought to an exalted conclusion with a return of the opening theme from the first movement played triumphantly an octave above the original version in the original key of A minor, and then repeated in a more down-to-earth fragmented version in a lower register, before once more—quietly—started by the cello, where it was first heard, in a version now marked ‘weeping’ (piangendo), evoking the image of a funeral cortege slowly departing.
We have now arrived again at a place and time where once we started; but transformed, and renewed.
Wishing you all the best in the New Year!
MT
