The third concert of BCMS Season 41 contains three well-loved masterworks from the chamber music repertory offered in reverse chronological order. The comparison of chamber music playing to conversation based on the close interactions of parts and players is even more evident when there are only two. Beyond interactions within a chamber group are the close encounters with friends, supporters, and with the music of fellow composers, or distant cultures that have also shaped the music we have come to love best.
If I were to name the composer whose works are the most perfect embodiment of the Hungarian spirit, I would answer, Kodály. His work proves his faith in the Hungarian spirit.
Béla Bartók (1928)
Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7 (1914) appeared when Zoltan Kodály was thirty-two years old, a few years into his study of the music of Claude Debussy, and into what would become a life-long goal of restoring to prominence his native Hungarian nation through teaching its folk music to its children. The latter goal involved a massive song collection effort throughout the countryside in the company of a close colleague, Béla Bartók. What Debussy’s study of Indonesian gamelan music and Kodály’s of Hungarian folk music have in common with their times, as so many artists searched for sources of inspiration from far away or long forgotten peoples, was to reconcile the exotic with established Western practices.
Duo for Violin and Cello is not listed among Kodály’s greatest musical achievements despite being one of the two most riveting and widely performed virtuosic works for that combination. Maurice Ravel’s 1922 Sonata for Violin and Cello, the other great duo for violin and cello, may also be inspired by his study of Debussy’s music. In popular culture Kodály is associated with the hand signs used to communicate through musical pitches with alien visitors in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Young listeners will probably not be aware that at the time of Brahms’s death, this Sonata was still very unpopular and was considered indigestible…[T]he unusual rhythm…within ¾ time, the syncopations which give the impression that the third phrase is in 4/4 time …, and the unusual intervals, the ninths contained in the fifth bar, made it difficult to grasp.
Arnold Schoenberg (1933)
Like his first Cello Sonata in E minor, Op. 38 (1862), Cello Sonata in F major, Op. 99 (1886) was first performed by Brahms with Robert Hausman, cellist of the Joachim String Quartet. It was apparently not well received by audiences of his time in part because of its rhythmic ambiguities, close repetitions of motifs over odd intervals that seemed to propel it from one register and key to another—some of the very characteristics for which it is admired today. In 1931, Arnold Schoenberg, whose 150th birth year we will observe later this season and next, remarked (about the opening cello motif): “Nothing is repeated without promoting development.” In that one sentence he described what for him made the opening movement so exciting and “torrent-like”: the unwillingness of Brahms to wait until the end of stating his themes before embarking upon their development. That is the shortest definition of Developing Variation, a technique that Schoenberg was to claim as foundational to his atonal music. Likewise, the tremulous piano accompaniment with which the opening cello motif is introduced is later taken up in the form of oscillating double-stops over two strings by the cello, to continue the conversation analogy. There is at least one other area of closeness that may have puzzled the earliest listeners as much as it delighted the composer who invented composing with Twelve Equal Tones: that the second movement, marked Adagio affettuoso, is written in the key of F-sharp major, one half-step above the home key of the opening movement. This kind of closeness on the musical color wheel is at the same time the farthest one can go away from the home key. This usage is not by accident, nor something he learned only from Beethoven, or from one piece. More than one music commentator has observed that Brahms was more likely to have learned of the power of tonal juxtaposition from someone who exploited it exhaustively within his own time, someone he admired most.
My love for Schubert is a very serious one, probably because it is no fleeting fancy. Where is genius like his, which soars heavenwards so boldly and surely, where we see the few supreme ones enthroned.
Johannes Brahms (1863)
In an audience survey early in its nearly 55-year history, Schubert’s Trout Quintet was voted the ‘most popular’ work in the repertoire at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In our own more than 40-year history its proposed removal from a touring program for economic reasons nearly led to an international incident.
The circumstances under which Schubert’s Trout Quintet in A major was created appear in a letter from 1858 by a childhood friend, Albert Stadler. He reports that Sylvester Paumgartner, an amateur cellist and chamber music aficionado, commissioned the work with the specification that it was to have a movement of variations based on his favorite Schubert song, “Die Forelle,” and with the same instruments that appear in a piano quintet version of a septet by Johann Nepomuck Hummel which also includes double bass. The work is in five movements, four that follow the traditional model of a sonata-form Allegro, Andante, Scherzo, and a Rondo with the added movement of Theme and Variations placed before the Rondo Finale. In fulfilling the terms of the commission, Schubert included the requested double bass and song variations and seemed to absorb and exploit Hummel’s penchant for using third-related keys such as the flat submediant (the key of F major in relation to home key of A major), or the flat mediant (C major in relation to A major). Both those relationships are a half-step below the primary key, i.e., far from home, as is Brahms’s F-sharp from F!
The Trout Quintet came into being following a commission from a devoted fan of chamber music, not unlike some of those who constitute the BCMS Commissioning Club. Later this season, on our February 25th concert in Sanders Theatre, we will premiere Bächlein Helle: Quintet for Violin, Viola, Cello, Double Bass and Piano (2024) by Boston composer Elena Ruehr. We have asked Ruehr to respond to the Schubert as Schubert had been asked to respond to Hummel. We hope you will join us.
Enjoy!
MT
