Ludwig van Beethoven / Trio for Clarinet, Violoncello and Piano in B flat major, Op.11 (1798)
Johannes Brahms / Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor Op. 101 (1887)
Arnold Schoenberg / Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899)
“What in 1883 seemed an impassable gulf was in 1897 no longer a problem. The greatest musicians of that time, Mahler, Strauss, Reger, and many others had grown up under the influence of both these masters. They all reflected the spiritual, emotional, stylistic and technical achievements of the preceding period. What then had been an object of dispute had been reduced into the difference between two personalities, between two styles of expression, not contradictory enough to prevent the inclusion of qualities of both in one work.”
—Schoenberg, “Brahms the Progressive” from Style and Idea, 1950, p. 53.
Our February program of Season 42 offers three BCMS audience favorites, two of which are based on previously existing work, all from within a period of 100 years. The Finale of Beethoven’s three-movement Clarinet Trio is a set of nine variations on a theme from the final trio of a popular two-act comic opera by Weigl, The Corsair, produced in Vienna in 1797. The inclusion or referencing of a popular work was considered key to public acceptance of a new work.
“This Trio is by no means easy in parts , but it runs more flowingly than much of the composer’s other work…If the composer with his usual grasp of harmony, his love of graver movements, would aim at natural rather than strained and recherche composition, he would set good work before the public, such as would throw into the shade the stale, hurdy-gurdy tunes of many a more talked of musician.”
—Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, 1799
Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht is based on a poem of the same name from 1896 by German poet Richard Dehmel. Scored originally for two violins, two violas, and two cellos, the musical work took its shape in five sections from the poem, and was later arranged by the composer himself for string orchestra. Our performance, part of our observance of the Schoenberg Anniversary year, will be a slightly different arrangement, using bass instead of a second cello.
Both Dehmel’s poetry and Schoenberg’s music sparked severe public criticism at the time of their earliest performances: Dehmel for depicting the discussion of an out of wedlock conception without judgement, and Schoenberg for using harmonic practices not yet recognized by teachers of the time. One commenter, referring to its colorful harmonic language, noted that the sextet sounded as though someone had smeared the ink on the first page of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde.
Were anyone to criticize Schoenberg for finally siding with the forward-looking Wagner (d. 1883) and Liszt (d.1886) over the more academic and traditional Brahms (d.1896) in the public controversies that raged for decades prior to their deaths, they might be intrigued to learn from Schoenberg’s later thoughts, and about how much he had learned from Brahms, the Progressive. He was not the first to notice:
“Your last chamber music pieces proved a positively royal gift…They are constructed in the plainest possible way from ideas at once striking and simple, fresh and young in their emotional qualities, ripe and wise in their incredible compactness….
We had a foretaste in the ‘cello sonata [Op.99], and now the violin sonata [Op.100] and the trio [Op.101] seem to us the perfect development of this new drift. No one, not even yourself, can say what it will lead to, let us hope it will clear the field and leave the giants in possession. Smaller men will hardly trust themselves to proceed laconically without forfeiting some of what they want to say.
—Johannes Brahms: The Herzogenberg Correspondence. Edited by Max Kalbeck. Translated by Hanna Bryant. New York: Dutton, 1909, p. 302-3.
Enjoy,
MT
