Bohemian Nostalgia Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Bedřich Smetana

(1824–84)

Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15

Moderato assai

Allegro, ma non agitato – Alternativo I: Andante – Tempo I – Alternativo II: Maestoso – Tempo I

Finale: Presto

In 1855, fate dealt the thirty-one-year-old Bedřich Smetana a shattering blow. His daughter Bedřiška, his first and best-beloved child, caught scarlet fever and died. For both parents, the grief was overwhelming, but before long Smetana began to confront it in the only way he knew – by composing. Soon he was at work on a Piano Trio which, in his private catalogue of his own work, he describes in these words:

‘In memory of my first child Bedřiška [Friederike], who had delighted us with her extraordinary musical talent, but was torn away from us by implacable Death, at the age of four-and-a-half.’

Horrible though the experience was, it provided Smetana with the energy and determination he needed to compose his first masterpiece. The First Piano Trio is one of the great Romantic compositions in this challenging genre – challenging because the concert grand piano can so easily dominate the texture at the expense of the two strings. Even though Smetana’s piano writing clearly owes a great deal to the virtuosic style of Chopin and Liszt, the Piano Trio is beautifully balanced, so that it feels much more like an intimate dialogue between three individuals than a piano display piece with added string instruments. Granted, there are one or two passages, particularly in the first movement, that seem to strain for orchestral power and depth of sound, but on the whole the sense of inner dialogue – the embodiment of Smetana’s own internal struggles – is central. The feeling this music conveys that we are witnessing a private, internal drama was to be strongly influential in Czech music: most notably we hear it again in Smetana’s own autobiographical First String Quartet, ‘From My Life’ (1876), in a different way in Dvořák’s F minor Piano Trio, and then vividly and volcanically in the two string quartets of Leoš Janáček, The Kreutzer Sonata (Quartet No. 1, 1924) and Intimate Letters (No. 2, 1928).

Particularly striking in this respect is the way Smetana uses what’s come to be known as the ‘Fate’ motif – it’s the jagged descending figure presented by the violin alone at the very beginning of the first movement. The resemblance to the ‘Fate’ motif in Bizet’s opera Carmen is pure coincidence (Carmen didn’t appear until 1875), but it’s a telling one. Piano and cello soon join in to create an anguished ensemble, but equally quickly violin and cello deliver what sound like cries of protest against ‘Fate’ on the piano. This kind of intensely theatrical musical argument pervades the whole movement: sometimes the characters quarrel, sometimes reminisce or grieve together, at other times brood alone. A particularly striking example occurs at the beginning of the recapitulation. The tempo drops, and the piano seems to lose itself alone for a moment in dreams of a happier past; but then the violin cuts through with the ‘Fate’ motif, now marked energico, to bring us back to the grim present. In the end it is ‘Fate’ that wins, in a short, furiously accelerating minor-key coda.

After this one might expect an elegiac adagio; instead however there are two more fast movements, both in the dark home key of G minor, in which Smetana seems increasingly determined to dance the pain of grief out of his system. And now we may also sense that Smetana’s intense love for his Bohemian homeland is coming to his rescue. The syncopations in the second movement’s recurring main theme remind us of how much more rhythmically vital and subtle Slavic folk music can be than that of Western Europe, and particularly the German-speaking lands. Folk song also colors the first Alternativo section, but the second is deeply indebted to a German model, the arch-Romantic Robert Schumann. Listeners who know Schumann’s wonderful Dichterliebe (‘A Poet’s Love’) song cycle may hear echoes of that defiant, grief-confronting song Ich grolle nicht (‘I bear no grudge’).

The finale’s indebtedness to Czech folk music is more specific. One particularly exciting Czech dance form, the furiant, brings together rhythmic patterns of two and three, sometimes combining a fast ONE-two-three TWO-two-three against a slower ONE-two TWO-two. That exhilarating rhythmic pattern pervades Smetana’s finale, in which, one could say, the demonic, driven, forward-racing momentum of the finale of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden String Quartet acquires a distinctive Czech-Bohemian accent.

Throughout this movement the nervous, obsessive, minor-key first theme battles it out with an ardent major-key theme (Hope for the Homeland?), and it’s a close-run contest right up to the end, which only just manages to twist to the major key in the very last seconds. Yet there is a sense of triumph here, however qualified. Smetana may have suffered irreparable loss, but at the same time he has found his voice – a voice that has continued to resonate in his homeland right through to the present day.

Antonín Dvořák

(1841–1904)

Piano Trio in F minor, Op. 65

Allegro ma non troppo

Allegretto grazioso – Meno mosso

Poco Adagio

Finale: Allegro con brio

Antonín Dvořák’s F minor Piano Trio dates from 1883, a time when he was beginning to engage with a compositional challenge that was almost the reverse of that faced by his older compatriot Smetana. Smetana’s lineage may have been authentically Bohemian, but culturally and linguistically his upbringing was Austro-German. He had to learn Czech, and he had to immerse himself in the folk music of his homeland before he could begin to draw on it authentically in his own compositions. Dvořák came from a much less prosperous, less cosmopolitan, Czech-speaking home, and folk music was in the very air he breathed – there was no need for him to ‘discover’ it. By 1883, he had shown that he could create marvels for the international concert hall from his native folk music (most notably in his hugely successful first set of Slavonic Dances); now, with the encouragement of his friend and mentor Johannes Brahms, he was attempting to tame his generously tuneful muse and bring his thinking more into line with the great Viennese tradition of symphonic thinking – music very much about a developing journey from A to B – as exemplified by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and of course Brahms himself. The F minor Trio was the work in which Dvořák demonstrated for the first time that he really could bring off this East-West European fusion in music. It was soon to be followed by another, similar triumph, the Seventh Symphony.

Such a feat wasn’t achieved without a struggle though, as is particularly keenly shown by the compositional history of the F minor Piano Trio. Dvořák often composed quickly, but the Trio had to go through several significant reworkings before it arrived at the present form – most notably the order of the middle two movements was changed. Given all that, it’s remarkable how successful the familiar final version is. Dvořák has adopted something of the Brahmsian manner without at any point disguising or compromising his own voice. The somber opening theme, for instance, recalls the beginning of Brahms’s magnificent Piano Quintet, also in F minor. Brahms, rather than Chopin or Liszt, is clearly the model for some of the piano writing too. Yet the fluid, spontaneous-sounding evolution of that first theme is more typical of the impulsive Dvořák than of the structurally self-conscious Brahms, and the beautiful long cello theme that emerges later couldn’t really be by anyone else. The struggle has given a sharper dramatic focus to Dvořák’s thinking, however: the ending of the movement is not simply powerful in itself; emotionally and musically it feels like the logical outcome of all that has gone before.

The gentle, intermezzo-like character of the Allegretto grazioso echoes the kind of movement Brahms preferred to the energetically dancing scherzos so typical of his idol Beethoven; yet the theme itself has a distinctively Czech accent. Like Smetana in the finale of his Piano Trio, Dvořák replicates the rhythmic complexity of the Czech furiant: a fast ONE-two-three TWO-two-three on strings against a more leisurely ONE-two – ONE – ONE – ONE-two on piano. Soon the roles swap, and rhythmic contrast becomes an important part of the instrumental dialogue. Then dance yields to wistful lyrical outpouring in the slower, major-key central section.

Up to this point, the passion and ardor of the music have had a certain ‘objective’ quality: while clearly deeply felt, the work doesn’t on the whole invite us to look for autobiographical elements to make sense of it and be moved by it. Listeners may feel however that this changes in the Poco Adagio third movement, where the expression does seem to have a more personal urgency and poignancy. Perhaps, as in the case of Smetana’s Trio, the explanation is to be found in grief. Dvořák’s mother died just two months before he began work on this Trio, which could be an added motivation in his struggle for Brahmsian objectivity in the first movement. Now, however, discipline can be relaxed, and instrumental song can carry the process of emotional release. There is certainly an element of tender leave-taking in the lovely coda.

Dvořák turns to back to folk-dance music in the Finale: not this time to a specific dance, but to the energetic sprung rhythms and melancholy exultation so often found in the popular music of the Slavic peoples. This Allegro con brio is in three-time, but it definitely isn’t a waltz. Near the end, the tragically inflected theme from the very opening of the Trio returns, marked grandioso, but then comes a wonderful moment of pure, sweet, melodic nostalgia. The melody’s final affectionate falling figures, in echoing violin-cello dialogue, may lead us for a moment to expect a soft, consoling conclusion. But then the dance theme sweeps back in to bring about a resolute, firmly major-key ending.

BOHEMIAN NOSTALGIA

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