Musically Speaking

The second concert of our twenty-seventh season offers music that in at least three different ways brings the outside, or the outsider, in.

Chamber music began as one of the domestic, interior arts within the family, the church, or the court. The best known of the evening’s three works, Johannes Brahms’ Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano (1865), brings into the home the most evocative sound of the great outdoors, both hill and dale. Krystof Penderecki’s Sextet for String Trio, Clarinet, Horn and Piano (2000) assembles an even larger ‘broken consort’, i.e., instruments of different sound producing families, to create an ensemble that rides the tonal boundary between orchestral and chamber, between outer and inner. Piano Quartet No. 2 in F minor (1823) by fourteen-year old Felix Mendelssohn was one of several works written for a series of house concerts that showcased his prodigious talents and enabled this scion of a successful family with a few recent Protestant converts to assimilate into and cultivate an audience from the Prussian society.  

Goethe (1749-1832), the poet and philosopher whose life spanned those of Mozart and Mendelssohn, knew personally both Mozart and Mendelssohn when they first appeared as young prodigies. He was more impressed by Mendelssohn’s upbringing and talents. The grandson of a philosopher and son of a banker whose grandmother gave him a manuscript of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (at an age when most kids today are denied the keys to the family car) proved in time to be as talented a visual artist and conductor as he was composer and performer on the violin and piano.  And yet, many later commentators have suggested that Mendelssohn’s music lacks the ability to evoke the struggle, irony and ambiguity of the human condition that many listeners find in Mozart’s music.

Mendelssohn may well have anticipated the need for shadow in his music by selecting the infrequently used key of F minor for the second of his three piano quartets and a sonata for violin and piano that followed. So rare is this key choice that each of three earlier works that readily come to mind have subtitles or programs connoting tragedy. (Beethoven Piano Sonata “Appassionata,” String Quartet Op. 95 “Serioso,” Overture to Egmont.) Later in life Mendelssohn’s last string quartet, Op. 80, also in F minor, introduces an ominous tone unheard in any of the earlier five.

The upbeat tempo and gestures of the first and last movements of Piano Quartet No. 2 suggest a real effort to bring light and grace to the subject. But the choice of key tells a different story.

Clip: Mendelssohn Piano Quartet in F minor, Movement 1, opening

Clip: Mendelssohn Piano Quartet in F minor, Movement 4, opening

There are at least two instances in which Mendelssohn clearly had the dramatic and sober moments of earlier works in mind. The first from Beethoven’s “Apassionata” Sonata is echoed in a piano riff, and the second from the close of the slow movement of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet.

Clip: Beethoven “Apassionata” Sonata, Movement 1, opening

Clip: Beethoven ”Apassionate” Sonata, Movement 3, opening

Clip: Mendelssohn Piano Quartet in F minor, Movement 4

 Clip: Schubert “Trout” Quintet, Movement 2, Measure 95 to end.

Clip: Mendelssohn Piano Quartet in F minor, Movement 2, ending

In his book ‘The Romantic Generation,’ the ever-enlightening Charles Rosen says:

“Schubert’s and Beethoven’s horn calls give us an exceptional example of nineteenth-century musical iconography as opposed to simple tone painting of bells, babbling streams, and cuckoos… its bare fifths softly played seem to come from far away, and the sense of distance stands as a natural metaphor for absence. How much of its effect is due to its individual sonority and how much to its associations with the poetry of the time we can only speculate (and its frequent appearance in verse must have been due to the sonority of the hunting horns as well as the experience of hearing them in the forest). In Romantic music these horn calls come from landscape; they appear in Schubert and Beethoven with a novel aura of the sublime and the melancholy derived from the new ambitions of landscape painters and poets. In the extraordinary triumph of landscape, we can see both painter and poet using elements of Nature –foliage, rocks, mountains, and above all the unifying poser of light –the way a musician uses harmonies and motifs.”

Brahms learned the horn from his father and was proficient on the violin in addition to being a master pianist.  For this first-of-a-kind use of horn with more familiar chamber instruments Brahms specified the use of the natural, valve-less horn rather that the increasingly popular valve horn in part because its natural outdoor qualities were more easily tamed and muted by placing the right hand inside the bell.  The occasional muting serves both practical and creative purposes by maintaining a proper balance among the three dissimilar instruments, creating the sound of distance and absence, and along with the dark key of E-flat minor providing a veil for the Adagio mesto (mournful Adagio) through which Brahms is said to have memorialized his recently departed mother.

Clip: Brahms Horn Trio, Movement 3, opening

When this part of the opening material appears again later it is followed by several barely perceptible changes that lead an unsuspecting listener from mourning to morning without really knowing how. By slipping seamlessly from (E-flat) minor to (G-flat) major, and quoting in major the outline of a familiar German folksong normally heard in minor, we are somehow prepared for the Finale without really knowing why.

Clip: Brahms Horn Trio, Movement 3, Measures 53 to 66

Clip: Dort in den Weiden steht ein Haus 
(There in the willows a house stands)

 Clip: Brahms Horn Trio in E-flat, Movement 4, opening

The Finale reminds us that the hunting horn is heard in the morning, at the start of a new day.

Since its premiere in 2000 Krystof Penderecki’s Sextet in two movements has been hailed as one of the most compelling chamber works of our time.  Although its language and materials are far from the common practices of the Romantic era (by which it is surrounded on this program) the musical iconography of earlier times, representing outdoor sounds with winds, remains. The piece opens with a palpable thumping heart-beat in the piano joined by the stopped horn on a low pedal note interrupted by a shrill bird call in the clarinet and imitated by the violin.

Clip: Penderecki Sextet, Movement 1, opening

Twenty minutes later, as the piece draws to a close and after various virtuosic ascents and descents, collaborations and clashes, the players are instructed to play funebre, signifying loss and the end of an experience.

Clip: Penderecki Sextet, Movement 2, ending

Given what we know about how the horn has been used by Brahms and others, we should not be surprised when we encounter a marking in the score that says da lontano (from far away), by which Penderecki instructs the horn player to leave the stage and play from the wings. He is similarly instructed to re-join the ensemble and return to his seat (and play as if far away) before the conclusion of the piece.

While each of these pieces trades in momentary sadness and loss, of identity or of a loved one, each also contains the promise of reconciliation, reconnection, transformation, and  better things to follow.

Enjoy the concert!

Marcus