November 2015 Program Notes by Steven Ledbetter
GYÖRGY KURTÁG
…quasi una fantasia…, for orchestra
György Kurtág was born in Lugoj, Romania, on February 19, 1926. He composed ...quasi una fantasia... in 1987-88 for Berlin’s Philharmonie Hall. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for an onstage ensemble largely of percussion instruments ( timpani, bongos, snare drum, side drum, bass drum, crotales, vibraphone, marimba) plus cimbalom, celesta, and harp. The remainder of the orchestra is sorted into five groups set up in various places around the hall: Group I: suspended cymbals, cymbals, gongs, tam-tam, triangles; Group II: suspended cymbals, bass gong; Group III: flute (doubling piccolo and recorder), oboe, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabassoon; Group IV: horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba; Group V: two violins, viola, cello, bass. Scattered throughout: harmonicas and hand percussion. Duration is about 9 minutes.
Though he had not produced an orchestral work since his student days (his graduation piece from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest was his Viola Concerto, a work strongly influenced by Bartók), György Kurtág was invited to be composer-in-residence of the Berlin Philharmonic in the early 1990s.
For many years, like other composers who grew up in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, he had been large cut off from new musical ideas in the West. A brief period of exile in Western Europe in the 1950s introduced him to the tiny jewel-like scores of Anton Webern, which played a powerful role in his development.
For much of his career he was been known as the slow and painstaking composer of scores made up of many short—sometimes extremely short—movements grouped into a longer cycle, including seven such works for soprano with small ensembles. Each brief section of these works was a microcomposition, extraordinarily intense and expressive, and often as different as possible from the next one in the set.
After 1985, he began to compose more steadily, and, though he continued to feature solo instruments or small groups, he began to place the performer around the audience far from the main soloist or group, thus beginning to approximate the ensemble of an orchestra. Thus the appointment in Berlin motivated him to create his first full-scale orchestral piece in forty years.
For all its modernistic qualities, Kurtág pays obeisance to the romantic past—first of all in the title, …quasi una fantasia…(the ellipses are part of the title), which will strike most musicians as a reference to Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (that composer’s Opus 27, No. 1), the most famous use of these words, which Beethoven called “sonata rather like a fantasy,” as if to disclaim any hint that it was a sonata at all. Kurtág’s use of the title may be intended to hint to the audience that, for all the forces that are assembled here, resembling a symphony orchestra (however unorthodox the seating), the piece is rather more a “fantasy” than the kind of set form that one might expect.
The first movement is a Largo consisting mostly of slow individual notes, first presented in a falling scale in the solo piano, turned back to a rising scale, with occasional contributions by one or another of the percussion instruments. After a brief pause, the second movement—a wild, even nightmarish explosion of violent percussion and changing colors—breaks out. Kurtág gives this the Schumannesque title Wie ein Traumeswirren (“Like the confusions of a dream”). It moves into a somber funeral march-like passage for heavy brass and percussion. The final section, entitled Aria, is more lyrical, eventually suggesting even the tranquility of a Bach chorale. The score is inscribed with words from a poem by the German romantic Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) on the subject of memory as the work draws to a quiet close with a recollection of the opening descending pitches, on recorders and mouth organs.
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 54
Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony, on June 8, 1810, and died in Endenich, near Bonn, on July 29, 1856. He began work on what became his single piano concerto in mid-May 1841, at which time he composed the first movement (calling it Fantaisie in A minor); the remainder of the work came four years later. He composed the final movement in May 1845 and the middle movement by July 16. Clara Schumann played the work at its first performance in the Leipzig Gewandhaus on New Year’s Day 1846; Ferdinand Hiller conducted. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons in pairs, as also horns and trumpets, plus timpani and strings. Duration is about 31 minutes.
Schumann’s early compositions were almost entirely for the piano. His first departure from that concentration came in 1840, when the joyous prospect of finally being able to marry Clara Wieck (having gone to court to overcome her father’s opposition) motivated an outpouring of songs, among them three of his four principal song cycles, written in feverish energy during May and June. That September Robert and Clara were married in a village church near Leipzig.
By the beginning of 1841, their union was proving fruitful in two ways. Clara was already pregnant with Marie, the first of their eight children, and Robert demonstrated his own fecundity with a new burst of music—only now, with Clara’s encouragement, he wanted to compose in the largest, the most demanding, most highly regarded of musical forms, the symphony.
If 1840 had been the “song year,” 1841 was a “symphony year.” Though Schumann had composed most of a symphony in G minor in 1832, and had even heard a performance of the first movement, he had left the work unfinished. But now orchestral music poured out of him. He sketched the whole First Symphony in just four days, from January 23 to 26, completed the orchestration by February 20 and heard a performance under Mendelssohn’s direction on March 28! Much encouraged, Schumann turned to what he called his “symphonette”—the Overture, Scherzo, and Finale in E composed between April 12 and May 8.
It was followed at once by a “Fantaisie in A minor” for piano and orchestra that we now know as the first movement of the Piano Concerto, completed by May 20. Ten days later he began a new symphony in D minor, referred to as his second, though it was finally published—and is known today—as the Fourth. This he completed by September and followed at once with a never-finished symphony in C minor. Thus, in about seven months, Schumann wrote the better part of three symphonies and a good chunk of the piano concerto!
It is a foregone conclusion that Schumann would not compose a piano concerto similar to the majority of the works being created in the late 1830s and through the 1840s and beyond. The classical balance of the concertos of Mozart and Beethoven had been replaced by works intended primarily—even solely—to show off the technical dexterity of the soloist, who was almost always the composer as well. Inspired by the acclaim that had greeted the brilliantly virtuosic violinist Paganini, pianists like Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Thalberg, and Herz churned out pieces that had little to recommend them except the brilliance of empty show. In his role as a critic, Schumann had frequently railed at the shallow exhibitionism of this music and its lack of real feeling. His own concerto calls for a virtuoso player, to be sure, but it never parades the difficulties for the mere astonishment of the audience, but rather for expressive purposes.
When he had finished the first movement (intended, at the time, to be the entire work), Clara was so eager to hear it that she insisted on playing it through—twice!—during a dress rehearsal of the Gewandhaus Orchestra on August 13, 1841—and this despite that fact that she was eight months pregnant. Schumann tried to interest a publisher in the Fantasy, but when no one appeared interested, he put it aside. It was nearly four years before he returned to it and made the Fantasy the first movement of a full-scale three-movement concerto, one of the finest piano concertos to come after Beethoven.
Its completion came in another of those moods of exalted creativity that brought forth astonishing results in an improbably short time—though the creativity this time marked the end of dark months of depression and doubt, inability to work, and concern with Clara’s annual pregnancies, which kept adding new mouths to his burden of support. The existing movement of the Fantasy provided a convenient platform from which to dive into composition anew, without the risk of starting an entirely new piece, because the second and third movements would connect to the thread of the movement already written. So fully did he re-enter the spirit of the earlier movement that one would never guess at a four-year gap during the composition. This time the work was performed and published—becoming an instant success—with other pieces in Prague and Vienna. Ever since, it has been among the most frequently performed and most respected and loved of all of Schumann’s works.
The piano is, of course, the pre-eminent participant in the concerto, but equally wonderful is the variety of chamber music textures that Schumann finds in the orchestra, with orchestral soloists or small groups taking it upon themselves to intertwine with the pianist or to extend or contradict the piano’s musical ideas.
Following the opening outburst of dotted chords tossed off by the fistful, Schumann presents the principal—indeed, almost the only!—thematic idea in the movement, a pensive lyric melody that begins with three descending notes. That melody comes back in many guises—originally in A minor, then in C major as the second theme, in A-flat to start the development with the air of an intimate sonata for clarinet and piano, and finally, after the cadenza, in a speeded up march rhythm for a stirring close.
Schumann called the slow movement an “Intermezzo.” It offers a change of pace, an interlude between the two large outer movements, filled with delicate and pensive touches and is another example of Schumann’s way of creating a new melody (the yearning second subject) out of a tiny figure heard at the climax of the movement’s opening phrase.
As the Intermezzo runs its course, distant recollections of the concerto’s opening theme suddenly explode into an exuberant rondo based on the main theme of the first movement. It is, in part, Schumann’s rhythm that keeps this music perpetually fresh, and the most striking rhythmic passage in the piece (and the trickiest) comes at the second theme of the finale, where rests create the effect of one broad bar of 3/2 time in the place of two bars of 3/4. Schumann’s sense of scale and proportion never deserts him, and the close of the last movement is at once shapely in form and irresistible in its verve.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Opus 68
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna on April 3, 1897. He completed his First Symphony in 1876,though some of the sketches date back to the 1850s. Otto Dessoff conducted the first performance in Karlsruhe on November 4, 1876. The symphony is scored for two flutes, two oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 45 minutes.
Brahms was only too aware that he was treading in the footsteps of giants. He knew the music of his great predecessors—Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann and others—better than almost anyone living at his time (or any other time, for that matter), and he did not welcome direct comparison to their achievements. Beethoven in particular was an overwhelming gray shadow behind him, because by the middle 1850s, when Brahms’s career as a composer got going in earnest, Beethoven was rapidly approaching the position he has never since left, that of being the one composer to whom all others must bow in homage. Brahms keenly felt the power of Beethoven’s example. His fear of direct comparison and his own high standards made it difficult for him to create works in any medium that Beethoven had made uniquely his own. Thus Brahms was fully mature before he created a string quartet that he was willing to allow out into the world, and even older before he began a symphony. It was not for want of trying! He had started symphonies time and again for nearly two decades, but he ended up turning all of that music into some other kind of piece (such as his First Piano Concerto or his Requiem), or he simply destroyed it.
Finally, at the age of forty‑three, in 1876, Brahms completed a symphony that met his standards and let it out into the world. But he had been working on it at least since 1868, when he wrote to Clara Schumann quoting the horn theme of the finale. It was a tough nut for first listeners to crack. Brahms himself admitted that it was “not exactly amiable.” The work traces a lengthy progress from the dark tension of its opening C minor to a glorious and sunny conclusion in C major. In this respect it follows a plan similar to that of two of Beethoven’s most famous symphonies, the Fifth (in its choice of key) and the Ninth (in achieving its bright conclusion with the aid of a theme of such direct and simple melodic appeal that it lingers forever in the ear).
The symphony opens with a tense and dramatic introduction that provides the
principal musical germs of the first movement (it is hard to believe that this slow introduction is an afterthought, so closely knit is it to what follows, but that is in fact the case). This introduction—pounding timpani strokes and rising chromatic line—seems to begin in the midst of some titanic struggle. Yet this lengthy moderato opening prepares the main argument of the movement; the Allegro takes up the idea of the timpani strokes (abstracted into the other instruments of the orchestra) and the rising chromatic line. It is prevailingly somber, its darkness only slightly relieved by the horn and wind colors in the secondary theme.
As the work continues, Brahms’s concern for unity reveals itself through the reworking of musical ideas from one movement to another: there are frequent references in later movements to the passing chromatic notes of the first movement’s introduction—an oboe theme in the slow movement seems to predict a clarinet theme in the next movement; and so on. These inner movements are essentially lyrical, expanding on the character of the dolce (sweet) and espressivo (expressive) markings that appear occasionally in the opening movement. The oboe theme in the second movement is wonderfully calm and expansive, though the middle section threatens its stability.
The third movement is entirely grazioso (graceful), far removed in mood from the struggles of the first and last movements. It is also harmonically far afield from the home key. Indeed, Brahms has planned a symmetrical architecture in which each movement appears in a key a major third higher than the previous one. After beginning in C minor, the second movement appears in E major. Its middle section (in G-sharp minor) anticipates the key of the third movement, A-flat major (A-flat and G-sharp are the same note, differently written). Finally, following the barely-resolved conclusion of the third movement, one more rise of a major third brings us back to C, closing the circle.
Like the opening movement, the finale begins with a lengthy introduction which plays an important part in the character of the whole movement. It starts out in the minor mode (as the whole symphony had done), but there is a constant sense of struggle, of reaching for a new goal, and this is finally achieved with the arrival in C major and the appearance of the magnificent horn theme that Brahms had sent to Clara in 1868. (This long-breathed theme offers a trompe-l’oeil to the audience: it sounds like a solo melody, but Brahms has divided it between the first and second horns to allow it to seem virtually unending.) The trombones enter, for the first time in the entire symphony, with a chorale melody, building up to the first statement of the main theme—a hymnlike C-major melody first hinted at (though in the minor) in the opening bar of the movement. Brahms was short-tempered with those who pointed out that it sounded like a rerun of Beethoven’s Ninth: “Any ass can see that!” he retorted. It marks the onset of the final struggle to establish C major, which is finally achieved with a climax for the entire orchestra on the trombone chorale melody and a powerful affirmation of C-major, achieved through a carefully crafted battle plan that conquers all in the end. The shade of Beethoven would have been pleased with his pupil.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)