Music and Memory

Schubert Fantasie for Violin and Piano in C major, D. 934 (1827)
Dutilleux Les Citations for Oboe, Bass, Harpsichord and Percussion (2010)
Elgar Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 (1918)

Purchase tickets

Isn’t music constantly concerned with memory?

— Henri Dutilleux (in an interview)

Our third BCMS concert in Season 37 falls in the latter part of the week during which we remember each year the service, sacrifice, and loss of our war veterans. The three works comprising our program ordinarily stand apart from such reference, but together conduct the listener through a virtual hall of sound mirrors by referencing texts, music, times, and heroic deeds that allow us to remember.

Franz Schubert’s Fantasie for Violin and Piano, D. 934 is regarded by all who play and hear it as one of the pinnacle achievements of Western musical expression. Like his revered String Quintet (1828) in the same key, it arises from silence to present us with C major before veering off into myriad kaleidoscopic colors and emotions based on variations on one of his more than 600 songs, “Sei mir gegrüsst” (1822). Its title and first stanza in translation read:

I greet you
You who were torn from me and my kisses.
I greet you!
I kiss you!
You, whom only my yearning greeting can reach.
I greet you!
I kiss you!

By the time of his death in 2013 at age ninety-seven, Henri Dutilleux was regarded as one of the preeminent composers of the 20^th and early 21^st centuries, although not as widely known as Olivier Messiaen or Pierre Boulez. Les Citations (The Quotations) was conceived as a virtuosic work that explored extended techniques on the oboe, harpsichord, bass, and percussion. Unlike most composers of any era, Dutilleux was known to withdraw, revise, re-write, or expand works. The creation and evolution of Les Citations is an example of this process leading to the final 2010 version. Written at first to be played at Benjamin Britten’s festival to honor the 75^th birthday of tenor Peter Pears and known initially as For Aldeburgh 85, the piece was withdrawn in order to add a second movement called “From Janequin to Jehan Alain,” quoting two French composers who lived four hundred years apart: the first wrote for voices; the second for his own instrument, the pipe organ. Their work and lives offer examples of what musical artists can make of war. Janequin wrote many popular chansons (vocal chamber works) that depict in alliterative texts sounds of nature and battle. About Jehan Alain and Clément Janequin, Dutilleux writes,

While I was working on this second movement in June 1990 I was haunted by the memory of Jehan Alain…Exactly fifty years earlier, on 20 June 1940, he had died a hero’s death going on a voluntary reconnaissance mission during the defense of Saumur. So I put together this second movement a quotation from a ‘theme and variations’ by Alain, together with a phrase attributed to Janequin which Alain used in one of his organ works.

Much of Dutilleux’s music derives from memories and free associations, premonitions and perceptions of time, similar to the processes of more familiar music whose forms and durations we are more accustomed to. He asks, “Isn’t all music constantly concerned with memory?”

Our program concludes with the mighty and mysterious Piano Quintet in A minor of Sir Edward Elgar, who has been called the English Brahms. His association with Brahms may be due as much to the richly textured orchestral and choral writing in his largest works as to his ability to capture the spirit of his times and location. Most commentators on the piano quintet start with the spurious legend associating dead trees with apostate monks in a grove supposedly near where the work was composed. They go on to associate the timeless, transcendent character of the middle of its three movements with Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and the final movement with the appearance of an occasional ‘galumphing,’ i.e., strutting rhythm.

This commentator, however, hears and experiences the entire work as an evocation and celebration in rhythm, character, tone and tune of all that is at risk, and about to be lost, both high and low, as result of the disastrous ‘war to end all wars’ raging elsewhere while it was being composed in the quiet English countryside. The irrevocable losses are unspeakable and unbearable to the national self-image and character—of dominance, empire, security of place, and the fun of just being in charge. In all the pieces we’ve played, this is the only one in which the ‘musical’ directions such as con dignità, nobilmente, and grandioso appear to offer guidance on how to add pomp and circumstance to patriotic-sounding themes. Those directions were not just for the uncertainties to come in Elgar’s time. They’re for ours, too!  

Enjoy.

MT