…even artistic creation often goes this roundabout way before it arrives at the real conception. When Karl Kraus calls language the mother of thought, and Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoschka paint pictures the objective theme of which is hardly more than an excuse to improvise in colors and forms and to express themselves as only the musician expressed himself until now, these are symptoms of a gradually expanding knowledge of the true nature of art. And with great joy I read Kandinsky’s book On the Spiritual in Art, in which the road for painting is pointed out and the hope is aroused that those who ask about the text, about the subject-matter, will soon ask no more.
Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, 1950, pg. 5
Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Trio in D major was published as the second of a set of three four-movement works since his earlier response, String Trio in E-flat major, Op. 3, to Mozart’s great Divertimento for String Trio, K. 563. All of these are prior to his sixteen string quartets, beginning at Opus 18 and ending with Op.135. One of the most unusual features of the Trio in D major is that each of its four movements is in the home key of D, instead of using related keys for the middle movements, as had become common after the suites, partitas, and sonatas of the Baroque era.
Scored for oboe, viola, and piano, Peter Child’s Four Movements after Kandinsky was commissioned by BCMS for the same combination of instruments as the iconic Two Rhapsodies by Charles Martin Loeffler (which we performed last month at the new Thomas Tull Concert Hall in the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building at MIT). Like Loeffler, whose inspiration comes from Symbolist poetry, Child’s inspiration comes from four earlier works from an artist who is known to have inspired other composers.
Child writes:
In the summer of 2024, shortly after I had embarked upon my new trio for the Boston Chamber Music Society, I experienced an exhibition of Kandinsky’s early works at the National Museum, Oslo. The effect was electric. The beauty of the works, many of them woodcuts (‘xylographs’), their vividness of color and line, the power of their symbolism, not necessarily obvious but compelling nonetheless, the daring ways in which figurative imagery dissolves into rough-edged compositions of line, mass, and color, anticipating abstraction—these things really took hold of me. Parallels with the musical experiments of Kandinsky’s contemporary and close associate Arnold Schoenberg were impossible to miss. My timely encounter with the early work of Kandinsky shaped the form and ideas in my trio, which came to be called Four Movements after Kandinsky*…
Felix Mendelssohn’s lyrical four-movement Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 49 is one of the best-loved chamber works by a composer whose earlier String Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20, and String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13 might as easily occupy places on a list of all-time favorites. In October of 1842 he wrote to Marc Andre Souchay in response to the meanings of some of his Songs Without Words. He responded:
There is so much talk about music, and yet so little said. For my part, I believe that words do not suffice for such a purpose, and if I found they did suffice, I would finally have nothing more to do with music. People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should be thinking as they hear it is unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the reverse, and not only with regard to an entire speech, but also with individual words. These seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words….
We recall that among many other things, Felix Mendelssohn was also an exceptional water colorist.
Enjoy!
MT
* View the Kandinsky artworks that inspired Child’s new piece (images from the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York):
- Movement 1: Flame
- Movement 2: Two Riders Before Red
- Movement 3: Oboe
- Movement 4: Great Resurrection
