“It has become the custom to treat this most sublime of all tonal masters as a “rococo artist,” to represent his work as the epitome of the ornamental and the playful. Though it is correct to say that he was one who solved all “problems” before they were even posed, that in him passion is divested of everything earthly and seems to be viewed from a bird’s-eye perspective, it is equally true that his work contains—even when transfigured, spiritualized and liberated from reality—all phases of human experience.“
— Richard Strauss, Zurich, 1944
For our third celebratory concert of BCMS Season 40 we return to First Church, Cambridge in Harvard Square, where we present the first of two concerts this season framed by the sublime music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Between his two towering works from the eighteenth century, Duo in G major for Violin and Viola, and Quintet in G minor for two violins, two violas, and cello, we have placed three from more modern times that achieved the sublime through ornament, playfulness, passion, and color even as tonality and form were ‘transfigured, spiritualized and liberated’ on the way to becoming the music of our time.
With the encouragement of his publisher Durand, Claude Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp was envisioned to be one of six for different instrumental combinations. Debussy completed only three before dying of cancer near the close of World War I. The work is in three movements in which he explores the common ground for instruments that initiate sounds with bow, breath and pluck. Of its mood Debussy once wrote, “I can’t say whether one should laugh, or cry. Perhaps both at the same time.”
At the heart of our program is Frank Bridge’s Lament for Two Violas, a rare and welcome pairing outside a larger group. The title speaks for itself as well as for the losses among our ranks in recent months.
Belgian composer Joseph Jongen’s Two Pieces for Trio offer contrasting views of the atmospheric Impressionism, rustic dance and scene painting to which French composers turned in response to ever popular theatricality of Wagner and the Primitivism of Stravinsky that swept through Paris at the turn of the twentieth century.
“Mozart’s melodies, his G minor String Quintet, Beethoven’s Symphonies, sonatas, quartets…Schubert’s songs…are symbols that reveal the most exalted truths of the soul, which are not invented,” but are “lent in a dream” to those favored with them. Whence they come, nobody knows, not even their creator, the unconscious instrument of the world spirit…(My father always said: ‘What Mozart did, that is, composed up to his thirty-sixth year, the best copyist of today could not write down in the same amount of time.’)“
— Richard Strauss, 1940
Enjoy!
