Love and Loss: Brahms & Mendelssohn Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Johannes Brahms

(1833–97)

String Quartet in C minor, Op. 51 No. 1

Allegro

Romanze: Poco adagio

Allegretto molto moderato e comodo – Un poco più animato

Allegro

However robust, even caustic he may have seemed in public, privately Brahms was acutely sensitive and consumed by self-doubt. Evidence suggests that this Quartet, Brahms’s official ‘First’, was partly written by 1865. Two years later Brahms was talking of rehearsing two quartets he’d already completed, cautiously hoping that he might be able to ‘make one or the other passable’. If, as seems very likely, these were the two Op. 51 Quartets in some early, provisional form, then we should be grateful they didn’t share the fate of the ‘twenty’ other quartets Brahms claimed to have destroyed before sanctioning the publication of Op. 51. After another two years, in 1869, Brahms was writing to his publisher that, just as Mozart had taken ‘particular trouble’ over his magnificent six ‘Haydn’ Quartets, so Brahms intended to do his ‘very best to turn out one or two passably decent ones’. It wasn’t until the summer of 1873, during a physically and mentally refreshing holiday beside Lake Starnberg, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, that Brahms was at last able to finish both Op. 51 quartets; even then, he insisted on a secret performance before finally allowing them out into the world.

As with his roughly contemporary First Symphony, part of the problem for Brahms was the colossal figure of Beethoven, who’d cast such a long shadow in both symphonic and quartet form that Brahms understandably feared to follow in his footsteps. Eventually, however, he grasped the nettle, choosing Beethoven’s ‘Promethean’ key, C minor, as his First Quartet’s home tonality. There were, however, other emotional challenges. In 1865, as the First Quartet was still taking form, Brahms’s mother died; her relationship with her son had been intense, but complicated. Alongside this lingered another source of pain and grief, one with which Brahms may never entirely have come to terms. His profoundly meditative, elegiac German Requiem, which he also began in 1865, features prominently a theme he had written down a decade earlier, in 1854–5, now set to the Biblical words ‘For all flesh is as grass’. It was in 1854 that Brahms’s mentor Robert Schumann suffered his catastrophic final breakdown, leaving Brahms with powerful but nightmarishly complicated feelings for Schumann’s soon-to-be widow Clara. The turbulent first movement of the C minor Quartet almost certainly has its roots deep in that still-unresolved trauma too. Here Brahms transforms heroic Beethovenian drama into something more inward-looking and finally, in the hushed, resigned major-key ending, more enigmatic.

The Romanze that follows is song-like, but it is also subtle, sometimes shadowy and hesitant. Here the solo voices really come into their own. That’s even truer of the wistful, twilit third movement, which mostly seems to speak in whispers – for most of its length the markings never rise above piano (softly). The finale, however, brings an energetic re-engagement with the troubled mood of the first movement: in fact its opening motif echoes the rising and falling figure that set the first in motion. Where the finale of the C minor First Symphony powers through to a blazingly optimistic major-key conclusion, this one remains wedded to the minor to the end, and the last thing we hear is an undisguised memory of the Quartet’s opening theme. Grief, it seems, is still unappeased.

Felix Mendelssohn

(1809–47)

String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80

Allegro vivace assai

Allegro assai

Adagio

Allegro molto

‘What gives me most joy and most pleasure is making music with a few friends. Best of all is a quartet with like-minded musicians – I don’t need anything more just now.’ So wrote Felix Mendelssohn in 1847, the last year of his shockingly short life. The pleasure of playing with kindred souls, and of incorporating that intimate, affectionate dialogue into the very texture of the music, can be felt in several of his chamber works, especially the set of three string quartets, Op. 44, which he wrote during 1837–8. But the Quartet that he composed in 1847, Op. 80, tells of a very different, far more distressing emotional process.

In May 1847, Mendelssohn experienced a terrible blow, perhaps the hardest of his adult life. His beloved sister Fanny, a close confidante and a remarkable composer in her own right, died suddenly at just 41 of complications following a stroke, brought on (which must have made her brother’s pain all the sharper) while rehearsing one of Felix’s choral works. For a couple of months he was so stunned that he couldn’t compose; but then, during a summer holiday with his family, ideas began to pour out of him: as he wrote to his brother Paul, ‘I have begun to write music very diligently.’ ‘Diligently’ reads like an understatement: not only was the new piece, the Op. 80 Quartet, composed at tremendous speed, it is the most impassioned, darkly driven score he ever produced. The nickname ‘Requiem for Fanny’ seems entirely apt – except that requiems normally begin and end with a prayer for rest. There is very little sense of rest in Mendelssohn’s F minor Quartet.

The need to come to terms with devastating loss concentrated the composer’s mind as never before. So much is compressed into Op. 80’s relatively brief span that it seems to last far longer than its relatively modest twenty-five minutes. Things happen at lightning speed: changes of mood and texture fly by, and themes tend to be short and sharply distinctive – the long, airborne melodies of so many of Mendelssohn’s best-loved works are striking in their absence. The first movement surges into being with a chilling tremolando crescendo, bursting into cries of anguish at its height. The range of moods is remarkable – as though Mendelssohn were keeping a ‘grief diary’ in music. At the end the screw tightens further as the tempo notches up to Presto for a furious conclusion. Still more astonishing is the second movement, which swings rapidly backwards and forwards between terrifyingly driven Beethovenian scherzo and weirdly dissociated minuet.

Even the heartrending Adagio third movement is lyrically short-breathed, as though it wanted to sing but was unable to escape the heart-stopping pain of loss. We couldn’t be much further from the well-mannered drawing-room Romanticism of Mendelssohn’s famous Songs without Words. The finale (the third movement to be marked ‘very fast’) offers no respite. Jagged syncopations and more agitated tremolandos dominate the sound picture until the emotion brims over into a kind of crazed tarantella near the end. Without doubt this was music that had to be written, and it would be good to be able to suggest that composing it helped Mendelssohn with his own grieving process. Alas, the reverse seems to be the case. Two months after finishing it, the composer himself was dead, like Fanny, from a stroke. He was thirty-eight.

LOVE AND LOSS: BRAHMS & MENDELSSOHN

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