My work in composition means not revolution but evolution, built on the classics which must be the foundation of all musical composition. My compositions are built on classical lines; all real music must be. I believe in the old masters; for Mozart especially I have a great love.
From a 1903 Interview of Richard Strauss by William Armstrong for Etude Magazine to introduce Strauss to an American audience prior to his first visit
For our March BCMS concert, we present three works from various times that shed light on questions about music for which we all at one time or another have sought answers: What does it mean? What is the motivation? From what prior influence does the work spring? Our prior experiences with the great works of Beethoven and with operatic works and tone poems of Strauss offer myriad examples of how big works can evolve from a short motif, rhythmic and melodic signature motives, motivations for how to move physically and spiritually with sound through time. Each work from the most familiar to the newest makes generous use of the practice.
Beethoven’s fifth piano trio opens with a rhythmic signature (motif) that is nearly as forceful and indelible as that of his fifth symphony composed the same year. The trio motif is not as concise as that of the symphony, in part because it repeats upon itself without pause, but is played by all instruments with passion and intensity. It is clearly the source material for everything we hear next. The second movement is said to be the source of the work’s given subtitle “Ghost.” It is in many ways as remote and gradual in its revelation as the first is immediate and impactful. The tonal and rhythmic clarity of the first movement yields to the haze of a constant keyboard tremolando that is one of the earliest deployments of a sonic cloud effect in the history of the Western canon—all in the service of producing a hypnotic calm—in greatest contrast to the certainty of the first, and playfulness of the last movements.
Lavell Blackwell’s Quartet for Oboe, Violin, Viola, and Cello 2023 is our first co-commission shared among nine groups. At the time we signed on we were unaware of its title On the Impulse to Move, which evokes the sense of a treatise on how to inspire, or to motivate. In a short conversation I had with Blackwell, I learned that his motivation was, in fact, to seek calm, or restore inner peace.
The name Richard Strauss (1864-1949) is not immediately associated with chamber music; In recent years many in our region have been blessed with BSO’s performances of Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, The Four Last Songs, among other works that involve large orchestras and great voices in post Wagnerian splendor. Among the earlier works is his Piano Quartet from 1884-5, within two years of the death of Richard Wagner, birth of Arnold Schoenberg, but more importantly at a time when he was in the closest contact with Johannes Brahms through their mutual work with the orchestra at Meinengen, where Brahms was premiering his fourth symphony and the precocious Strauss was soon to assume artistic leadership.
Strauss’s work bears a strong resemblance to the movement titles and keys of Brahms’s piano quartets, which in turn assume the piano quartet model employed by Schumann (1), Mendelssohn (3), Beethoven (1), and Mozart (2), among others. As much as he may have been influenced by contact with Brahms, Piano Quartet in C minor has a greater resemblance to tight motivic deployments of Beethoven and Mendelssohn. The constant use of recognizable motif informs every movement. The soaring melodic sweep we associate with his later operatic writing is there, too, waiting in the wings to inspire as it continually does.
There will be more to say about Richard Strauss next month, when we play a work from near the end of his life, his 1945 Metamorphosen which derives motifs that inform Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, in an arrangement for seven string players.
Enjoy.
