Origins of Inspiration Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Leoš Janáček

(1854–1928)

String Quartet No. 1 ‘Kreutzer Sonata’

Adagio – Con moto

Con moto

Con moto (Adagio) – Più mosso

It has been said that Janáček’s large-scale instrumental works are really veiled operas. There’s more than a nugget of truth in that. In many of the major orchestral and chamber compositions of his astonishingly fertile last decade, psychological drama and direct expression are central; and in the two string quartets especially, the writing for solo instruments owes as much to Janáček’s painstaking researches into the musical characteristics of everyday speech as to the quasi-realistic writing for voices in his operas. It is music that seems not only to sing, but even to speak. Czech speakers have often claimed that they can hear particular words and phrases in this music, as though they were being addressed personally. But the impact doesn’t depend on nationality: you don’t have to know a word of Czech to get the message.

In the case of the First String Quartet (1923–4) there’s more to this than drama and expression – it could even be argued that the work has a plot. Janáček had been deeply stirred by reading Tolstoy’s harrowing novella The Kreutzer Sonata. It tells of a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage who falls into the arms of an unworthy lover after playing Beethoven’s turbulent, passionate ‘Kreutzer’ Violin Sonata with him, and it goes on to relate how she is killed by her maniacally jealous husband. But Janáček reached a very different ethical conclusion from that of Tolstoy, whose struggles with his own powerful sexual urges pushed him towards a puritanical, misogynist morality. (It is hard to tell where the writer ultimately lays most blame for the sin of adultery: on the woman or on Beethoven’s music.) Janáček however was much more moved by the woman’s plight, just as he had been in his opera Katya Kabanova (1919–21). It is one of the enduring mysteries of art that a composer whose treatment of women in everyday life (his wife very much included) wasn’t always very admirable could be so compassionate and insightful in his work. But there it is, and Janáček’s sense of impassioned indignation on behalf of Tolstoy’s oppressed heroine, and his sympathy for her desperate yearning for happiness, well over and pour out in the music of the First String Quartet.

There was a powerful external, real-life influence here. In 1917, Janáček met Kamila Stösslová, 37 years younger than him, and fell passionately, obsessively in love with her. What she felt about him isn’t easy to gauge, but it’s very unlikely that she returned his feelings. Still, she didn’t discourage him, and his relationship with her – however it may be described – continued to inspire masterpiece after masterpiece right up to Janáček’s death at the age of 74. The character of Katya in Katya Kabanova, the gypsy woman in the song cycle The Diary of One who Disappeared, and even the wily, enchanting fox in the opera The Cunning Little Vixen, are all versions of Kamila – or, more precisely, of what she meant to Janáček. And the tragic female character in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata is also her. Was Kamila, like Katya, or the unnamed woman in Tolstoy’s story, trapped in a loveless marriage? Perhaps not, but it evidently suited Janáček to think so, and he poured out his rage and grief on her behalf in this remarkable string quartet.

The great Adagio sigh that opens the quartet, and which returns tragically transformed at the end, has been compared to the elemental yearning motif that opens Katya Kabanova. The Con moto solo figures that follow could be thwarted attempts to escape confinement – bursts of forward movement halted by the initial ‘sigh’. Janáček’s biographer Jaroslav Vogel compared the strutting viola motif in the second movement to the heroine’s ‘foppish’ lover, while the steadily intensifying sul ponticello tremolo figures that follow could suggest both the thrill and the dread of illicit desire. A much clearer programmatic element appears in the third movement: violin and cello in close imitation intertwine to a version of a theme from the opening movement of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, provoking harsh, angry protests from the other two strings – the husband's increasingly murderous jealousy? The effect of these vivid juxtapositions and confrontations is to generate enormous tension, which is finally, cathartically released in the finale. Slow and plaintive at first, this builds to a frenzied, catastrophic climax, then a short but impassioned coda. Tolstoy had condemned both adulterous womanhood and music; Janáček here pleads eloquently for their vindication.

Carl Maria von Weber

(1786–1826)

Clarinet Quintet in B flat major, Op. 34

Allegro

Fantasia: Adagio

Menuetto: Capriccio

Rondo: Allegro giojoso

Amongst instrumentalists, clarinetists seem to have a special power to inspire composers. Hearing, and later befriending the pioneering virtuoso clarinetist Anton Stadler revolutionized Mozart’s understanding of the instrument (still very new in the late 18th century), and spurred him on to create not only the great Clarinet Concerto, Quintet and Trio, but also the gorgeous clarinet solos in his operas and piano concertos. It was the playing of Richard Mühlfeld that charmed Brahms out of retirement and led to the composition of the Clarinet Quintet, Trio and the two Clarinet Sonatas – some of the most acutely personal music he ever created.

Then there was the case of Heinrich Baermann (1784–1847). The clarinet was still developing in Baermann’s time, and he was quick to take advantage of the instrument’s increasing agility (extra keys had been added since Stadler’s day), and of the new tonal potential released by turning the mouthpiece upside down and playing with the reed on the bottom lip. His playing could be scintillatingly brilliant, but it showed enhanced vocal qualities as well; reviewers also noticed Baermann’s impressive dynamic range – something very much associated with clarinet (above the other standard woodwind instruments) nowadays, but clearly a thrilling novelty for many listeners in the early 19th century.

Weber was 25 when he first met Baermann, in Munich in 1811. This was a heady time for the composer, who the previous year had found himself imprisoned for debt, then banished from his home territory of Württemberg. (Weber kept a careful daily record of his income and expenses for the rest of his life.) Baermann’s playing was a revelation: not only was he technically impressive, his playing had a warmth and rich variety of tone that opened Weber’s ears to the clarinet’s soloistic capabilities. A reviewer writing seven years later noted that Baermann’s playing had ‘not the slightest strain or shrillness in it, both of which are so common amongst clarinetists’. Baermann spent time discussing and demonstrating the new instrument with Weber, and it clearly set the young composer’s mind working eagerly. Three fine pieces followed that same year, all written with Baermann very much in mind, all to commissions from the King of Bavaria: the Concertino in E flat, and the Concertos in F minor and E flat major. These have remained central to the clarinet repertoire ever since.

The Clarinet Quintet was also begun in 1811, but it took Weber another four years to bring it to completion. The first ideas for the work came to him as he set off for an extended tour of Switzerland in August. ‘Began composing the quintet for Baer’, he noted in his diary soon after leaving Munich. The use of the abbreviation ‘Baer’ is touching: the German word Baer, or more normally today, Bär, means ‘bear’, which suggests that Weber’s new friend had already acquired an affectionate nickname. Interruptions kept getting in the way, but Weber was able to present Baermann with the first three movements of the Quintet on his birthday, 13 April, 1813. He was evidently delighted with them, and yet it wasn’t until August 1815 that the ever-busy Weber was able to complete the Rondo finale.

The delay had one advantage however: it gave Weber time to develop and enrich his understanding both of his new friend and of his musical qualities. In fact, that feeling that he’d got it right was soon so widespread that the work was nicknamed the ‘Baermann Quintet’. The clarinet’s range, and its ability to move rapidly and smoothly from bright high to dark low notes, are made much of in the first movement. We hear far more of its vocal expressive power in the slow Fantasia, which culminates in a striking cadenza-like climax (two big upward runs, one ‘as loud as possible’, the other pianissimo). The clarinet’s playful side is exploited in the Capriccio minuet, with plenty of teasing dialogue between it and the string quartet, Then the finale balances technical display and lyricism, with the virtuosity increasing towards the end. Weber clearly wanted to win his friend plenty of well-earned applause.

Robert Schumann

(1810–1856)

String Quartet in A minor, Op. 41 No. 1

Introduzione: Andante espressivo – Allegro

Scherzo: Presto

Adagio

Presto

Schumann’s development as a composer followed a strange, obsessive course of its own. During his twenties he wrote virtually nothing but solo piano music. 1840, the year of his long-thwarted, fervently awaited marriage to the virtuoso pianist and composer Clara Wieck, saw an astonishing outpouring of songs and song cycles. The following year was designated the ‘year of the symphony’, during which he composed the ‘Spring’ Symphony (No. 1), the symphony eventually published as No. 4, the orchestral Overture, Scherzo and Finale and the first movement of what later became the Piano Concerto. Then, in 1842, Schumann turned his attention to chamber music. A flood of fine works followed, most notably the Piano Quintet and Piano Quartet and a set of three highly original string quartets. 1843 was devoted to choral music, then in 1844 – unsurprisingly, perhaps, after all this manic work – a terrifying nervous collapse was followed by an extended period of complete creative sterility. The pathological causes that led to Schumann’s final breakdown and insanity in 1854 are complicated, and there is still some controversy, but he almost certainly suffered from some form of what we would now call bipolar disorder. The repeated cycles of intense activity followed by paralyzing depression would certainly fit that diagnosis.

The first four years of Schumann’s marriage, however, were probably the happiest he ever experienced. Domestic life with Clara brought him a sense of stability, at least at first, and he was beginning to enjoy success as a composer – though Clara’s far greater success as a virtuoso pianist and his own deepening self-doubt seem to have been among the factors that precipitated his breakdown in 1844. (Schumann is said to have been particularly stung when a member of the audience at one of Clara’s concerts asked him, ‘Are you musical too, Herr Schumann?’) The couple had made their home in Leipzig, the central musical hotspot in the German world. At the heart of its rich and exciting musical life was the composer, pianist, and conductor Felix Mendelssohn, very much at the height of his reputation in the 1840s – until his shockingly early death in 1847. Schumann admired Mendelssohn hugely – according to Clara he placed him above all other musicians – and for a time the two men were close friends. But Schumann’s attitude to his friend and ally was typically complicated: envy certainly clouded his affection for the man, as did, increasingly, a form of nationalistically-inclined anti-Semitism which he shared with Clara.

Yet the dedication of Schumann’s three string quartets to ‘His friend Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in heartfelt admiration’ was evidently sincere. Schumann’s great god when it came to this medium was Beethoven, who had transformed the witty, sometimes dramatic conversational style pioneered in Haydn’s string quartets into a kind of intense, rarefied inner dialogue. Mendelssohn had then given the quartet a Romantic warmth and fantasy which also appealed directly to Schumann. The first of the three Op. 41 quartets opens with a direct tribute to Mendelssohn, who almost single-handedly had brought about the revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in 1829, an event of epochal significance in the development of Germany’s sense of national selfhood. The Quartet’s opening Introduzione is exquisitely melancholic, but it is also a finely wrought demonstration of imitative counterpoint (the voices echo and interweave with each other) in a neo-Bachian style. Then, suddenly, Schumann seems to say, ‘Enough of this!’ and a dancing soaring Allegro begins in the slightly surprising key of F major. Mendelssohn loved to surprise audiences with unusual major-minor changes, and Schumann takes it a degree further here. The result could be heard as a vivid illustration of a bipolar ‘mood swing’ – or it could simply be appreciated as a refreshingly original take on Classical first-movement form.

Mendelssohn’s nocturnal ‘elfin’ music was clearly a model for Schumann’s nervous, fleeting Scherzo, with its spectral galloping rhythm heard at the start. Yet, as so often with Schumann in this kind of vein, there’s a hint of something demonic here too. Mendelssohn was also the creator of the ‘song without words’ – that exquisitely domesticated form of music displayed on pianos in middle-class homes all over Europe. Schumann, one of the greatest of Lieder composers, gives us his own take in the Adagio: tender, confidential, yet at times disquieting – the Scherzo’s demonic elements make their presence felt here too. The finale is a robust minor-key dance, which eventually wins its way through to a bright A major, via, near the end, a moment of enigmatic hush. The ending seems bracingly confident but, as in the other movements, there are troubling elements: ambiguities where one might expect confidence, and moments where the music seems to veer temporarily off-kilter. Perhaps something of Schumann’s complicated attitude to Mendelssohn can be heard in this; or perhaps it’s more simply a reflection of his own ever-enigmatic, painfully unstable nature. It reminds this writer of a remark by one of Schumann’s contemporaries, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: ‘From earliest childhood, a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it remains, I am ironic; but if it is taken out, I will die.’

Origins of inspiration

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