Songs of Solace Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Dmitri Shostakovich

(1906–1975)

String Quartet No. 4 in D major, Op. 83

Allegretto

Andantino

Allegretto –

Allegretto

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Fourth Quartet during one of the most catastrophic low points in his tumultuous career. Elevated to the status of national hero after the triumph of the wartime ‘Leningrad’ Symphony (No. 7, 1941), and still feted even after the much darker Eighth appeared two years later, he had then disgraced himself spectacularly with his Ninth Symphony in 1945. Comments attributed to Shostakovich in the Soviet press had led everyone to expect a colossal, heroic, choral ‘Ninth’ to compare with Beethoven’s mighty choral Ninth – a celebration of the crushing Soviet victory over the Nazi aggressor, and a hymn to the USSR’s self-proclaimed ‘leader and teacher’, Joseph Stalin.

In the event, the ‘Soviet Ninth’ turned out to be a more like a bizarre satire than a thunderous hymn of victory. Not only was it disappointingly modest in scale, it exploded with irreverent, sometimes barbed, ultimately manic humor. ‘At the end the listeners parted, feeling very uncomfortable,’ reported the composer Marian Koval, ‘as if embarrassed by the musical mischief Shostakovich had committed and displayed.’ Koval’s account was brandished aloft in 1948, the year Shostakovich was viciously denounced at the First Congress of the Union of Composers, dismissed from his teaching posts, and forced to make a humiliating public statement of repentance. Stalin, it seems, had not forgotten that act of ‘musical mischief’.

Although Shostakovich was able to rehabilitate himself to some extent with his grandiose cantata Song of the Forests(1948), a celebration of the ‘Great Stalinist Plan for remaking nature’, he seems to have come to the realization that there was now a limit to what he could express safely in public. Initially he had hopes for his song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, based on Russian-Jewish texts and incorporating elements of Jewish folk music. But anti-Semitism was on the rise in the Soviet Union, fuelled partly by Stalin’s own paranoia, and the cycle was withdrawn. Yet despite this, Shostakovich continued to draw on characteristic elements of Russian-Jewish folk music in his next major work, the Fourth String Quartet (1949). Did he not realize the danger in which he was putting himself? If so, he was soon put right by the Committee of Artistic Affairs who, having heard the Fourth Quartet at a private play-through, advised him strongly to withdraw it. Wisely, as it turned out, Shostakovich complied.

Even so, it’s hard to believe listening to this Quartet, and especially to its remarkable finale, that Shostakovich didn’t realize, at least instinctively, the trouble it might cause for him. At first, its bright, dancing, folkish energy might seem exactly the kind of thing to win the authorities round. But pure joy is very rare in Shostakovich: there are ominous undertones, which increase as the music begins to wind down, and long shadows have begun to fall well before the first movement’s morendo (dying away) ending. Then comes a slow movement which initially resembles a heartfelt aria for the first violin; but this being a string quartet the other instruments are soon playing their part too, especially as the music builds to an anguished climax – something intensely personal seems to be revealed here. As the initial ‘aria’ returns all the instruments are muted, adding somber coloring to music that increasingly recalls the closing shadows of the first movement.

The four strings remain muted throughout the ghostly third movement: not so much a classical scherzo as an uneasy moto perpetuo (perpetual motion), dominated by pattering, scampering repeated rhythms, full of ambiguities, and rarely rising much above piano. This leads without a break into the finale, in which Jewish folk song and dance elements now take centre stage, as in the Second Piano Trio of 1944. Also, as in the Trio, the mood is uneasy to start with, and grows increasingly nightmarish towards the climax. In the Trio, Shostakovich was partly inspired by rumors reaching Russia of the horrors of the Nazi death-camps; was he now worried that something similar might happen in his own homeland? Yet there is possibly a sense of something positive here too – a sense that Shostakovich was learning a language in which to express his own predicament. Solomon Volkov, editor of Shostakovich’s alleged ‘memoirs’ Testimony, quotes the composer as saying that there ‘should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express their despair in dance music.’ And from now on, the string quartet became the medium in which Shostakovich was able to express some of his most private thoughts and feelings – the authorities, it seems, were much more interested in big ‘public’ works like cantatas, concertos and symphonies. Shostakovich had found his musical ‘safe space’, and within it he was able to body forth some of the most magnificent and moving music written in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Stephen Johnson

(b.1955)

Angel’s Arc, for clarinet and string quartet

Lento moderato – Con moto, scherzando – Lento moderato

As a teenager, I developed an intense love for the West Pennine Moors, near my home in Lancashire in the north of England. Their desolate, lonely beauty, contrasting starkly with the rich woodland around the encircling Victorian reservoirs, seemed to mirror my own moods as I walked and cycled amongst them. The wildest expanse of moorland bore the striking name Angelzarke, and I remember someone telling me that this derived from the Flemish words ‘Angel’s Arc’, or ‘Ark’, a name allegedly given to these lands centuries earlier by Protestant refugees fleeing persecution in the Spanish Netherlands. It turns out that this was almost certainly a mistake: the real derivation was probably much more prosaic, most likely from the Norse for ‘Anlaf’s Hill-Pasture’. But the image stuck in my mind. I loved the idea of a displaced people finding refuge in those hills and expressing gratitude to them in the name they gave them. I thought I found evidence of them in the ruined hill-farms scattered about the moorlands – wrongly, of course, and yet so many useful poetic ideas have their origins in mistakes. The famous opening line from the Biblical Psalm 121 – ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help’ – which I often recited to myself then, turns out to have been a mistranslation; but at that time I could hardly have cared less. The poetic truth was far more relevant.

It was some time after I began work on a work for clarinet and string quartet in 2017 that I realized that memories of those hills were flooding into my mind as I wrote, and so I decided to take that once-treasured name ‘Angel’s Arc’ as the title for my own piece. At the same time there were echoes of music associated with people who had been important to me, and whom I had lost: my aunt, Elizabeth Johnson, who sent me much-valued scores and recordings during my troubled teens, and my father-in-law, the Revd. Canon Harold Jones. Harold’s favorite line from the Anglican Communion Service, ‘Lift up your hearts’, along with the response, ‘We lift them up to the Lord’, morphed in my mind with the idea of looking up towards the hills. There is also a memory of a little piece I wrote at the age of twelve or thirteen, itself naively indebted to the slow movement of William Walton’s First Symphony. These ideas emerge during the elegiac first section. After this comes a nocturnal scherzo, whose sweet-sour alternations recall the moods (and some of the colors) of Mahler’s haunted symphonic scherzos, with which I also fell in love around that time. Finally there comes a transformed recapitulation of the opening slow section, in which the clarinet softly quotes the Walton, moments before the cello intones the chant-phrase ‘Lift up your hearts’. Elegiac as this music is, I hope there can also be heard a note of reconciliation, of gratitude, and finally release.

On the subject of gratitude, I must express my thanks first of all to Irina Knaster, director of Aspect Foundation, for her support and understanding, and for making this performance possible. My thanks too to Andrew Jamieson of IMG for initiating and encouraging the project, and to Fiona Costa and Peggy Czyzak-Dannenbaum for their generous sponsorship. I hope they too can hear an expression of profound thanks in this music.

Johannes Brahms

(1833–1897)

Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115

Allegro

Adagio – Più lento

Andantino – Presto non assai, ma con sentimento

Con moto

In 1890, the fifty-seven-year-old Johannes Brahms surprised many in the musical world by announcing his retirement. The newly completed Second String Quintet, Op. 111 was, he said, to be his last work. But Brahms was much inclined to melancholy and loneliness, and without the distraction and creative focus of composition he seems to have found dark thoughts harder to fend off, especially after the deaths of several of his closest friends and colleagues. Fortunately, rescue was at hand. In March the following year he heard the playing of Richard Mühlfeld, principal clarinet of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, whose director, Hans von Bülow, had been a staunch advocate of Brahms’s music. Brahms was enraptured by Mühlfeld’s artistry. The ever-susceptible bachelor was particularly moved by what he saw as the ‘feminine’ vocal qualities of his playing – so much so that he dubbed his new friend ‘Fräulein Klarinette’ and, in a remarkably short time, had composed two major works for him: the Clarinet Trio, and this Clarinet Quintet.

The clarinet was beautifully suited to Brahms’s artistic and emotional needs: although it can soar high, its dark, chocolatey lower register is one of its most appealing features, and it adds to this music an autumnal, sometimes shadowy character – in any case Brahms was always particularly drawn to contralto voices. At the same time, the strong contrast in tone and expressive nature between the clarinet and the four strings means that they can interact, engage in ‘dialogue’ with one another, without losing any sense of distinct character. This is made particularly clear by the arrangement Brahms made of the Quintet for string quintet: without that vital contrast in tone, something essential is lost. Introspective though much of this music may be, there is also great tenderness in the writing, at times with an almost erotic warmth and sumptuousness. As Brahms’s friend the musicologist Eusebius Mandyczewski put it, ‘It is as though the instruments were in love with each other.’ Perhaps Mandyczewski had heard more than he realized. Is it possible that the ‘feminine’ clarinet also reminded Brahms of the great unfulfilled romantic attachment of his life? Clara Schumann, widow of his youthful champion Robert Schumann, was clearly an object of intense, adult-life-long devotion, which she evidently reciprocated – but for whatever emotionally complicated reasons this never seems to have blossomed into what we today would call a ‘relationship’. It is possible that the Clarinet Quintet provided Brahms with a kind of sanctuary, a creative vehicle through which he was able to mourn what might have been.

Mozart’s glorious Clarinet Quintet cast a very long shadow here, and despite the effectiveness and rich potential of its combination of clarinet and string quartet, few composers have dared to follow in its footsteps, and almost none with comparable success. Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet is the towering exception. He composed both the Quintet and the Clarinet Trio (for clarinet, cello and piano) while staying at the Alpine spa town of Bad Ischl. Where the Trio is inward-looking and occasionally gruff, the Quintet feels much more of a ‘confessional’ work: intimate, as true chamber music should be, but lyrically far more expansive. This, one may sense, is Brahms with his habitual defences down. Aching nostalgia, a painful sense of love lost, and finally a kind of sad serenity emerge in this music with a directness that can occasionally be surprising (especially in the second movement’s wild, quasi-improvisatory climax), but which never sacrifices subtlety. There’s even a kind of delicate, Haydnesque joke in the opening, which pretends for a moment to be in a bright D major before twisting deftly into the more somber home key of B minor – the musical equivalent, perhaps, of a hopeful smile slowly fading. The contrast between those two emotional states can also be felt in the breezy third movement and in the folk-inflected variation finale, but the heart of the work is the wonderful Adagio which, like the slow movement of Mozart’s Quintet, exploits the pathos of the major mode to the full. This is the mood the English composer Edward Elgar (a huge admirer of Brahms) characterized beautifully as ‘smiling with a sigh’. In this work the clarinet, in dialogue with the strings, distills the essence of that complex mood to something like perfection.

SONGS OF SOLACE

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR MAILING LIST