Darkness and Deliverance

The Genius of Mozart is still mourning and weeping over the death of her pupil…with the help of assiduous labour you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.

To Beethoven in album amicorum, from Count Waldstein

For an artist it is not only right to have his roots in the art of some former time, it is a necessity…in our case it is peasant music which contains our roots.

Béla Bartók, The Significance of Folk Music, 1931

Mozart’s music is particularly difficult to perform. His admirable clarity exacts absolute cleanness; the slightest incorrectness in it stands out like black on white…Essentially simple, natural, it demands a simple, natural expression as well…

Gabriel Fauré, from a review, 1909

Beethoven String Trio in C Minor, Op. 9, No. 3 (1797-1798)
Bartók Sonata No.1 for Violin and Piano, Sz. 75 (1921)
Fauré Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 15 (1876-79; 1883)

Our second BCMS concert of calendar 2020 and fifth of season 37 offers three works that show early evidence of greatness to come. Although the last of Ludwig van Beethoven’s five string trios, the C minor is said to be the finest of all his earliest works, displaying the widest emotional range between passion and repose to that point (1797-8). The string trios follow Beethoven’s studies with Haydn and pre-date the works for which he is most revered — seventeen string quartets, nine symphonies, orchestral overtures, scores of sonatas — in which he shows a special affinity for exploring some of his most memorable extremes of darkness and deliverance in that key.

Darkness and Deliverance might also be a subtext of the first of Béla Bartók’s two Sonatas for Violin and Piano. Although nearly twenty years older than was young Beethoven at the time of his trios, Bartók’s first sonata comes at an uncertain time in Music when the exotic, the rustic, the expressionistic, the serial (and the Surreal), were standards by which ‘the new’ in Music was measured. Traditional boundaries in European forms, scales and key centers were thrown open to further expand the expressive range and to search for the source, the real root of all Music. When that search takes us beyond the common Medieval church modes that we call major and minor to a scale used in the third movement called Heptatonia secunda, encountered in various forms in Romanian and Arabic music, we know we have left the boundaries of our small village for the wider world.

Gabriel Fauré’s description of Mozart’s piano music begs the question of Fauré’s familiarity with Mozart’s brilliant writing for piano and three strings in his early examples of the piano quartet (1785 and 1787) or, for that matter, Brahms’s First Piano Quartet (1861). Clarity of writing and simplicity of expression and execution seem like goals to which a young composer and premiere performer of his first piano quartet would aspire.

Faure’s Piano Quartet in C minor Op. 15 appeared at a time when he was searching for a personal style, and when French composers were trying to reclaim a voice distinct from the dominant Germanic tradition that included additional piano quartets by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. As a composer Fauré would make his greatest mark in setting poetry in song, and much of his living as a church musician and influential teacher of composers such as Ravel, Enesco and Boulanger.

The first piano quartets of Mozart and Brahms each begin with unison octave writing in the strings and the piano. In each the delayed deployment of harmony allows forceful opening melodic and rhythmic motivic statements. The opening melody of Faure’s piano quartet, played in unison octaves by the strings over back beat chords in the piano, makes an equally forceful and passionate statement that acknowledges its Classical and Romantic roots while managing to sound uniquely French.

In formal structure and content its four movements fulfill all the requirements and expectations of the time in terms of movement types, placement, structures, and phrase lengths. Where it sounds French, or different from the others mentioned earlier, is in his ability to use familiar harmonies and scales in unexpected ways that enrapture and enchant with their inventiveness. As a result, Faure’s three of four movements in C minor do not sound or feel as tragic as those by Beethoven earlier in the concert. His melodies rise and soar with exaltation rather than triumph. The extended use of blended unison melodic writing, which is present in his later ensemble writing, restores to Music a color more typical of Medieval chant, or congregational singing.

The skipping Scherzo of the second movement is contrasted with a muted trio with the strings harmonized in Faux bourdon (a common parallel voice writing technique in Medieval music). The slow third movement achieves gravitas from the start with the simple slow re-use of the ancient Aeolian form of minor scale that opens the piece.

And finally, to conclude the work with the frenzied dance in three he defies and banishes any thought of associating sadness with a minor key. This finale, a replacement of the original in 1883 now lost to history, leaves us wondering about his original impulse.  

Enjoy,

MT