Mendelssohn, Ives, Mozart

Felix Mendelssohn (February 3, 1809–November 4, 1847)

As scholar Larry Todd notes, by 1822, the very young Mendelssohn had tried his hand at “nearly all the standard musical genres of the time.” In 1824, his apprenticeship with composer Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832) had come to an end, and by his fifteenth birthday, Mendelssohn was already dancing amongst the compositional pantheon of Bach, Mozart, and Haydn. Although it was withheld for publication (finally published in 1868, well after the composer’s death) the work is an engaging amalgam of youthful rambunctiousness, Classical contrapuntal know-how, and a tip of the hat to a more Romantic consciousness of form and rhetoric.

The Allegro vivace puts Mendelssohn’s contrapuntal aptitude on full display, surprising the listener by transferring a motive to one of the violas, or instead turning it into a murmuring fluid middle voice against a soaring and falling melody in the violin. At least for the first thematic section, the instruments seem to be on equal footing, but then the second theme almost turns the sextet into a concerto, as the pianist takes a solo role against the predominantly homophonic texture in the strings. While the initial entrance is genteel, the piano soon embodies a continuous cadenza-like role, putting the sonata form movement very much at the cusp of the Classical style and more Romantic sensibilities.
The F sharp major Adagio begins with a muted chorale in the strings in a dolce triple meter, and it is the violas that will eventually provide pedal points for the ruminations of the piano. The piano’s melody here is both lyrical and contemplative, almost bordering on the impressionistic at times. The strings then get a turn at self-reflection, as the piano offers repeated notes. The slow triple meter in this moment sets up the tempo and metric contrast for the menuetto, which is in compound duple, almost functioning as a trio-before-the-minuet.

The Menuett, however, has its own trio. The movement begins in D minor, and a pizzicato signal opens the contrasting trio in F major. With the homorhythmic phrases in the strings and the chromatic runs in the piano, Mendelssohn seems to use the trio to revisit the conceit of the second movement, albeit at a fast tempo. Despite the agitato marking for the minuet, it is more graceful than jaunty, with a touch of Eastern European flair.

The restraint is gone in the rambunctious opening of the Allegro vivace. Mendelssohn is at his mostly playful. The strings seem to carry the energy of the piano more immediately than in the first movement, and it includes an impressive solo in the violin. After an implication of silence, the piano is more virtuosic, with offbeat accents from the strings. Notable are the series of strong cadential figures that do not, in fact, cadence. Mendelssohn explores several different key areas, building toward a surprise return of the third movement agitato theme. The final Allegro con fuoco section provides a boisterous coda before ending—with a seemingly endless—cascade of notes from the piano.

Charles Ives (October 20, 1874–May 19, 1954)

Ives’s Piano Trio, best known for its second movement’s quotation of myriad college songs and folk songs, is a testimony to the composer’s creativity in musical borrowing that would become a trademark of his oeuvre, but it also offers insight into his ideas about musical texture and harmony more generally. While scholars such as Lucie Fenner and Peter Burkholder have done an admirable job finding intertextual connections between the myriad references in the second movement, Ives allegedly dismissed the work later in life. Ives graduated from Yale in 1898, and certainly his time there was filled with both behavioral and musical hijinks—he was a prominent member on campus, being both a member of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon, as well as part of the sophomore society He’ Boule, and ultimately the senior secret society Wolf’s Head. But it would be wrong to see the trio as just reminiscences of college life, since it was likely between 1911 and 1914 that he completed the work, even though sketches show beginnings dating back to 1904. It can be seen as an experiment with three different forms and a variety of textures. The first public performance of the work was given in 1948 in Ohio by the Baldwin-Wallace College Faculty Trio.

According to Harmony Ives (Charles’s wife), the first movement recalled “a rather short but serious talk, to those on the Yale fence, by an old professor of philosophy.” Sitting on the Yale fence was a tradition that began in 1833, when a picket fence was replaced with a rail fence that offered a place to perch and chat, a privilege afforded only to sophomore, juniors, and seniors. The original Yale Fence was extended in the 1880s then demolished to make room for a classroom building in 1888, but the tradition remained even with the replacement fence.

The first movement does not use borrowings, and demonstrates Ives’ interest in what Peter Burkholder identifies as additive form (A B A+B). Built of three sections, the movement opens with a quietly intense duet between the piano and cello. The piano offers glimmers of a descending melody in the right hand before the cello presents strikingly angular fanfares as the piano chromatically wanders in and out of C major. The two instruments seem to be more in consort as the repeated pattern in the cello becomes a chromatic ascent against a transition of four notes in the piano to the second section Moderato. Here the duet is between the piano and violin, the latter instrument offering a disjunct melody closely aligned to the original cello melody and in a quasi-canonical relationship with the piano, which also plays material that shares intervallic identity with its music in the first section. A dotted skipping rhythm signals a new melodic idea in the cello against chromatic sustained chord progressions in the piano. Double stops draw the section toward the same four note transitional figure (now in the violin) that leads into the final section. Now all three instruments play together in a “blended reprise” with the cello and piano returning to their opening material (the cello, almost verbatim, and the piano now using its material from the second section in the left hand), and the violin reprising its melodies from the second section.

The second movement, TSIAJ (This Scherzo is a Joke), may have been just that, but Ives hearkens back to the quodlibets of the Baroque era, albeit with a much more modern expression of counterpoint and harmony. While the movement offers a fascinating mélange of over twenty college tunes, frat songs, and hymns, only a few shall be indicated here given their relative audibility. From the sketches, Ives likely started the second movement as early as 1904, during the sexennial reunion of Yale’s Class of 1898. After a rambunctious introduction, the strings open with a reference to the fraternity song, “Band of Brothers in the DKE (Delta Kappa Epsilon)” appropriately in march time (“We march along tonight, Two by two with arms locked form and tight…”)—albeit with a noticeable drunken syncopation in the melody. Before one gets too settled in to this melody, the violin briefly quotes “Marching through Georgia,” a Civil War song that Ives would use in other compositions such as “The Saint-Gaudens in Boston Common” in Three Places in New England. In the Trio movement, the tune has less intertextual significance, but also offers a glimpse of what Ives called his “piano-drum” writing:

“When I was a boy, I played in my father’s brass band, usually one of the drums. Except when counting rests, the practising was done on a rubber-top cheese box or on the piano. The snare and bass drum parts were written on the same staff, and there were plenty of dittos. In practising the drum parts on the piano (not on the drum—neighbours’ requests), I remember getting tired of using the tonic and dominant and subdominant triads, and Doh and So etc. in the bass. So [I] got to trying out sets of notes to go with or take-off the drums—for the snare drum, right-hand notes usually closer together—and for the bass drum, wider chords. They had little to do with the harmony of the piece, and were used only as sound-combinations as such.” (Charles Ives, Memos, 42)

The tail end of the “piano-drum” section offers a tidbit of “The Hearse Song” (better known in modern times as “The worms crawl in, The worms crawl out”), against the violin, before the piano brings in the romanticized ethos of “My Old Kentucky Home” (against harmonically unrelated undulations in the violin). The tune is set against “That Old Cabin Home Upon the Hill” in the cello, and this juxtaposition is an earmark of Ives’s sense of a “medley.” A sudden tremolando stops the collage and an Adagio evocation of “In the Sweet By and By” enters in the piano. Ives uses this chordal language in several works, including some of his songs, as a sort of nostalgic transition between sections, a device he uses twice in this movement. Here it dissolves into an Allegro moderato featuring an off-kilter quotation of “Sailor’s Hornpipe (also called “College Hornpipe”) in the violin before more piano-drum writing enters, sounding not unlike passages from Stravinksy’s L’histoire du soldat (composed several years later). The cello enters with a noticeably legato melody, yet to be identified, but that bears some resemblance to the incipit of “Marching through Georgia”. The violin marks the next section with a fairly clear quotation of the 1833 English ballad “Long Long Ago” by Thomas Haynes Bayly, morphing into several less obvious borrowings. The cello and violin’s brief nod to vaudeville’s “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” is illuminated momentarily as the music rushes along, seemingly at a breakneck pace made more so by the dissonance and overlapping quotations. “Gods of Egypt” sounds majestically in the piano, providing a tuneful respite from the textural cacophony (although the strings keep up their helter-skelter momentum). Another nostalgic Adagio passage stops the mayhem, connecting to the coda. Ives marks the piano part “as a cadenza (freely)” against tremolando strings, before the final measures precociously glimpse “The Hearse Song” once again in F major juxtaposed against E major. Ives’s final joke is the little two note tail that follows after the fermata.

The Moderato con moto opens with sonorous gestures outlining a ninth, followed by a descending and sorrowful melody in the violin. The three instruments come together and an ascending chromatic bassline moves against the slow maestoso descending melodies in the strings, offering an illusory sense of G major in the violin. Half-step sonorities sound between the piano and violin, creating a lyrical tension. The elegiac melodies give way to a 6/4 con moto section of chordal gestures in the piano whose intervals (but not pitches) are echoed in the strings. An offbeat syncopation is established in the piano’s left hand under the melodic phrases in the piano’s right hand and the strings, and the music remains so systematically askew that it establishes its own sensibility. A ritardando signals again a noticeable descending line from the cello, as a chromatic ascent in the violin returns. The piano begins a more flowing section, marked Andante con moto, and the cello and violin play a melody built of half-step dissonances between the two instruments. The cello and piano have a momentary duet that meanders harmonically, but seems to carry on with the pathos of the entire movement, until a gestural (and yes, dissonant) fanfare begins in the strings morphing seamlessly into a canon in the strings on Ives’s tune “The All-Enduring”, which he composed for the Yale Glee Club, but was rejected. The now-habituated lyricism is interjected with quick staccato licks in the violin and cello, becoming more emphatically marcato as fanfare fifths once again assert themselves. The music builds toward a reprise of the material beginning six measures into the movement. The reprise is straightforward except that the Andante con moto section is played at Adagio. The coda features Thomas Hastings “Rock of Ages” in the cello first, then taken up by the violin, and a final sounding of the tune in the cello that seems to fade into the ether of the piano’s final pianissimo notes.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (January 27, 1756–December 5, 1791)

When it comes to arrangements and transcriptions, one might wonder if Shakespeare’s “rose by any other name” does indeed smell as sweet. Mozart’s original 1779 composition, scored for violin and viola soloists with an orchestra of 2 oboes, 2 horns, and strings, is well known for occupying a no-man’s land between a symphony and a concerto. However, as Barry Brook opines, “It is clear that the symphonie concertante must be examined as a genre in its own right and not looked upon as a bastard created out of mésalliance of other forms.” So what then, should we make of an early nineteenth-century anonymous arrangement of the work for string sextet that distributes the solo parts fairly equally among the violins, viola, and first cello? Christoph Wolff notes that the anonymous arranger “must be credited with an ingenious solution of a compositional task well before the string sextet became a well-established genre….” So, it would seem, that a transmogrification might have taken place for an orchestral work that is neither symphony nor concerto, and is now a chamber work (and further, for our performance, a septet by adding a contrabass). There is not uniform agreement as to how this sextet should exist either. Joshua Dieringer, in his arrangement for the American Viola Society, re-envisions the instrumentation as violin and viola solo with string ensemble (violin, viola, and two cellos) so that the work might be “performed as a true soloistic piece while accommodating both the difficulty of arranging a full orchestra accompaniment and the shortcomings of piano reductions that necessarily miss important melodic and harmonic material.” On the other hand, Gunther Schuller, in the edition for this performance, took special care to return to the sextet some of the original’s dynamic nuances (note the opening bars of the first movement), octave doublings, and other aspects of the original while also striving to “preserve scrupulously the essence and special early nineteenth century ‘point of view’ of this remarkable arrangement.” It seems a tall order to be in dialogue with two pieces (the original and the 1808 sextet) while also honoring different performance traditions that gave rise to both pieces. But Christoph Wolff is unequivocal when he writes that the sextet “can be considered a real string sextet in every sense of the term” and certainly if one is unaware of the “redistribution” of “solo material” it becomes an entirely independent listening experience. So perhaps we can embrace both a youthfully defiant Mozart, under the influence of his travels in Mannheim and Paris and ready to vacate the courtly and churchly expectations of Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg, as well as a robust aristocratic tradition of chamber transcriptions of symphonic works in the early nineteenth century.

The addition of contrabass gives the work symphonic heft in a chamber context, but also highlights the different roles of the two cellos. The Allegro maestoso features clearly delineated themes that are varied in texture, occasionally with charming pizzicato accompaniment, or sequential trills in the violins. The striking opening gesture reflects Mozart’s experiences at Mannheim. Even with the more homogenous timbral setting of the septet, the textural contrast between gesture and melody is riveting, and the homophony in the instruments that signals the secondary theme area is highly effective. The thorough distribution of soloistic material from the original is readily apparent and makes for a delightfully engaging chamber piece. The “maestoso” is a mainstay throughout the movement, but Mozart is sure to blend in moments of pathos and thematic contrast. For example, when the cello takes the theme formerly heard in the violin, the impact is pronounced in the context of the chamber work. The “shared” cadenza is the ultimate joy of translating the Sinfonia Concertante to a chamber piece, as the violin’s efforts are echoed and supported in most of the instruments. The soulful and brief Adagio between the cello and the violin provides a transition to the final bars of the movement.

The triple meter C minor Andante is more restrained in its distribution of melodic material, at least in terms of frequency, opening with the two violins carrying the theme over sustained harmony with counterpoint in the low strings. The first cello then takes up the theme, filling out the melody and then it is the first viola’s turn. The texture seems to expand as scalar lines, and oscillating sixteenth and thirty-second notes seem to weave their way through the ensemble, with a momentary trio between violin, viola, and cello. The other instruments subtly enter back in and the violin still gets the privilege of carrying a theme. When the other instruments fill in the texture however, it provides an enriched sense of depth and inward grief. The descending passages cascade through the ensemble like tears, and it is difficult not to ascribe biographical significance as the work was written shortly after the death of Mozart’s mother (1778). The final measures with layered trills signal a gentle return to the original tempo, but the mournful cast remains until the final measure in C minor.

The sprightly vivacity of the Presto rondo finale in 2/4 does not disguise the characteristic symmetry and tidiness of Mozart’s themes. The rondo theme, notably initially served up by the first violist, provides not only thematic cohesion, but a constant return to a more symphonic guise. In the original work, the Presto opens with the full complement of strings, and the principal violinist is supported by the first violin in generating the rondo theme’s first appearance. The energy is almost relentless, even in the more dolce B theme, carried by the violin, then echoed in the first cello. This call-and-response gambit gives the septet a sense of pseudo-antiphony, depending on the seating arrangement of the ensemble. When the rondo theme returns (in both violas now, echoed by the violins), the playfulness of the repartee increases. The second violist gets a moment to shine with the secondary return of the dolce theme before the first violinist runs with it. The episode that follows feels almost developmental due to Mozart’s manipulation of the thematic material and the harmonic modulations. The rondo theme returns, and everyone has a part to play in the party, with nowhere to hide in the profound showcase of virtuosity.

© 2024 Rebecca G. Marchand