By projecting his mind into areas of music that would not be totally explored for decades to come, Beethoven foresaw not only solutions (the lines of his projection followed by Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, etc.), but also many problems. Like the later works of several of his eminent predecessors—including Bach, Haydn, Mozart—Beethoven’s final sonatas and quartets tend more and more to a chromatic rather than diatonic texture. That is to say… the older he grew, the more inclined he was to prefer the closer relation, note to note, of chromatic writing [such as in the works of Wagner, Strauss, and Schoenberg] to the more open spaces of diatonic procedures …Certainly Beethoven was conscious of the tyranny of the cadence, and strove mightily…to make it melt, dissolve, or otherwise lose its identity in order that music might flow on and on. Richard Strauss came closer to a solution of the problem in his Metamorphosen of the 1940’s than anyone else, but its lessons are still to be learned
Irving Kolodin, The Continuity of Music,1969, pp 38, 39
Musically speaking, the program we will present for our April 7 BCMS concert at Sanders Theatre contains works that explore issues, problems, and challenges envisioned by Beethoven from composers who chose paths different from those of their historical cohort. We present the first two in arrangements for forces smaller than their originals.
Igor Stravinsky’s Suite is his portable piano trio reduction (and sampler) of L’Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier’s Tale) from1919, originally scored for a septet consisting of violin, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, string bass, and percussion. Loosely based on a variant of the Faust legend in collaboration with writer C.F. Ramuz, The Soldier’s Tale was intended “to be read (Narrator, Soldier, Devil), played, and danced (Princess).” In the Germanic tradition of the tale as told by Goethe, the Faust character is redeemed and spared in the end. In the French tradition, used by Ramuz and Stravinsky, the protagonist is condemned to oblivion. Given the choice of continuing to write music in the French, German, or Russian orchestral and chamber traditions, Stravinsky chooses the nascent development of the Jazz ensemble, “a wholly new sound in my music, and L’Histoire marks my final break with the Russian Orchestral School.”
Commissioned by Paul Sacher, Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen was scored for 23 individual string players. However, in 1990 an earlier, completed short score of the work for string septet was discovered. The Viennese cellist Rudolf Leopold made use of both the short score and the “final” version to bring the arrangement we hear today. Last month before our performance of his prodigious early piano quartet in C minor, we wrote about Strauss’s early exposure to the music of the great masters, notably Beethoven. Followed only by the Four Last Songs in his catalog, Metamorphosen could have been a fitting conclusion to his extraordinary life as a conductor; composer of songs, operas, and tone poems; leading citizen before and during two World Wars; and survivor of the destruction of the society that nurtured his entire artistic world. The work draws upon motifs fashioned from music throughout the Germanic Musical tradition, most notably poised around a single measure from the theme of the second movement (marcia funebre) of Beethoven’s Third Symphony (Eroica) which is quoted in its entirety (In Memoriam) in the lowest instruments at the conclusion.
Looking back on a productive life, the music language he chooses seems to spring from the time of his youth when post Wagner, early Schoenberg, Webern, Mahler, and Korngold were writing in an exuberant chromaticism that ultimately spiraled into atonality, a direction opposite from that chosen by Stravinsky. Filling up the spaces between scale pitches, keys, notes (motifs) may also have begotten the filling up of spaces between phrase endings and sections, as Irving Kolodin suggests above. The result is a work of nostalgia and beauty, lamenting losses and destruction spiritual, material, cultural, and physical, wondering about the future.
Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat major, long a favorite with BCMS audiences, is widely regarded as a significant turning point in the history of chamber music in overall design and in the details of who played what and when. It is one of the first whose composer scored the same musical material for both piano and string quartet at the same time in a manner associated with orchestral doubling rather than the interaction of Individual parts, and one of the first who employed the cyclical technique of returning at the conclusion of the grand Finale to material with which the whole piece began.
Schumann’s Piano Quintet was one of the first works for the medium to be written and performed for an audience beyond the players themselves, or for a salon. It was and remains very popular. Schumann’s bold departures would open new directions for Brahms, Franck, Dvorak, Elgar, Bridge, Taneyev, Shostavokitch, Gubaidulina, and Dohnanyi, whose piano quintets we have played for our audience.
Enjoy!
MT
