Our thirty-fifth anniversary season at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre opens with three significant works, from very different places and times, written by masters in their prime. Each is the second and final musical statement in its format within the composer’s corpus, less often heard, and not as popular as the ‘firsts.’ Each shows the same confidence and brilliance of the earlier works, and adds something new to the way a composer begins a piece.
Mozart’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat major, K. 493 was to have been the second of three contracted by Hoffmeister, his publisher, and a fellow composer. But the first was not received as expected and the parties mutually agreed to cancel the contract for the remaining two. The reasons may have been stylistic—the first was too virtuosic, or too deep for the intended audience; or economic—that it did not sell well at a time when the publisher needed a sure winner. The E-flat piano quartet had already been completed before the cancellation. Its creation would not be subject to public taste or market pressure. Mozart readily found another publisher. If anything, Hoffmeister’s reputation as composer, publisher and colleague has suffered for not recognizing, supporting or promoting the qualities that make both quartets popular to this day. It opens with a sustained E-flat chord above a driving bass of repeated octaves in the piano bass. Could this be the origin of rock and roll?
Mozart and Mendelssohn were each introduced to the world as the greatest musical genius of his time. They also share the distinction of meeting Goethe as children nearly sixty years apart. As Goethe tells it, Mendelssohn bore “the same relation to the little Mozart that the perfect speech of a grown man does to the prattle of a child.” Current opinion, based on their entire opus and the test time, recognizes Mozart’s primacy and Mendelssohn’s debt to him. Mozart’s six Quintets for string quartet and extra viola dating from 1773 to 1791 served as a formidable model for the transparency of Mendelssohn’s first viola quintet, Op. 18 in A major (1826-32). His String Quintet No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 87, started nearly twenty years later in 1845, employs a robust, orchestral tremolando accompaniment texture to open the first movement. When this stormy accompaniment appears again at the start of his final chamber work String Quartet in F minor, Op. 81 (1849), it is seen as a significant new direction in his writing.
Faure’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in G minor, Op. 45 (1885-6) closes our program coincidentally in the same dark key as Mozart’s first piano quartet. Like the preceding works on the program, it begins with a strong chordal opening in which the components of the chord are repeated or broken. (In the Mozart it is with octaves in the bass; in Mendelssohn the tremolando of the lower strings.) In the Faure the piano part is a bariolage, i.e., rapid alternation among all the notes of the accompanying chords, a technique associated more with string music of Bach or Vivaldi, as is an Alberti figuration with keyboard. In each case the effect is to create a cloud of harmony through which the principal theme emerges from the lowest registers of the strings, well within the spacing of the hands of pianist’s hands in the quartets, as though fighting for melodic independence from the established harmony. The coming independence and interaction of equals is well worth the wait.
I’ll have seconds, please!!
Enjoy.
Marcus
