cond movement opens with a rare solo for the second vio- lin, which is soon .... began taking piano lessons with the not
About the Program by Jason S. Heilman, Ph.D., © 2017
Joseph Haydn Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Austria Died May 31, 1809, in Vienna
String Quartet in C Major, Op. 50, No. 2, Hob.III:45 Composed in 1787; duration: 21 minutes Throughout the 1780s, Joseph Haydn was engaged as Kapellmeister to the powerful Esterházy family. While this job kept him busy composing for and conducting the numerous musical soirees that took place at their winter palace near Eisenstadt, he frequently managed to get away to Vienna, where he was widely respected as the father of both the symphony and the string quartet. His 1772 Opus 20 quartets and, even more importantly, his 1781 Opus 33 set were pivotal in establishing the string quartet as the premier chamber ensemble in Vienna and beyond. These works had a powerful influence on the next generation of composers – including the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who wrote his own celebrated quartet responses to both sets. By the 1785 premiere of Mozart’s most recent “Haydn” quartets, the two composers had become occasional chamber music partners and even Masonic lodge brothers. It was at that occasion that Haydn returned Mozart’s compliment, famously declaring to Mozart’s father Leopold, “Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.” It is likely that, when he made this remark, Haydn had already started working on yet another set of string quartets. These six quartets, which Haydn would publish in 1787 as his Opus 50, could be considered his response to Mozart: while they still sound like Haydn, they show Mozart’s influence in their expanded length, greater differentiation in contrasting themes, and more harmonic chromaticism than Haydn’s previous quartets. In another parallel to Mozart, Haydn dedicated these six Opus 50 quartets to King Frederick William II of Prussia, the cello-playing monarch who would later be the dedicatee of Mozart’s final three quartets. But while Mozart’s dedication was famously a last-ditch effort to secure better employment, Haydn’s dedication seems to have been a simple business decision on the part of his publisher to gain higher visibility. As such, Haydn’s Opus 50 quartets utilize the cello only slightly more than usual. The second of the Opus 50 quartets, in the key of C major, was likely composed well before the Prussian dedication was proposed. The quartet opens with a gentle vivace first movement in the expected sonata form, with a chromatically tinged first theme contrasted by a staccato second. The real twist comes at the beginning of the development section, which remarkably begins with a kind of fugue on the movement’s opening theme and continues with dramatic, Bach-inspired counterpoint. The recapitulation calms things down, but this is cleverly broken up by
another interpolated fugue-like passage before the second theme and coda. The equally novel adagio cantabile second movement opens with a rare solo for the second violin, which is soon passed on to the first. A remarkably virtuosic cello countermelody leads into the final statement of the theme. This is followed by a jaunty allegretto minuet movement with a busy central trio section, which indulges in some of Haydn’s trademark fits and stops before the minuet theme returns. The vivace assai finale is an almost Mozartian wonder, with the individual quartet instruments finishing each other’s phrases before launching into dizzying melodies of their own. This lighthearted movement takes a dramatic turn at its midpoint before racing to its humorously abrupt conclusion.
Karol Szymanowski Born October 6, 1882, in Tymoszówka, Russian Empire Died March 29, 1937, in Lausanne, Switzerland
String Quartet No. 2, Op. 56 Composed in 1927; duration: 19 minutes With the end of the First World War in 1918, Poland was finally reunited and restored to sovereignty after 123 years of divided Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian rule. During this time, many Polish artists who had emigrated to freedom elsewhere in Europe began to return home to rebuild their culture. This wave of returnees included Karol Szymanowski, who had been a part of the Young Poland artistic movement in Warsaw during the early 1900s, but who had spent the war years on his aristocratic family’s estate near the Ukrainian town of Tymoszówka. This had been a happy and productive refuge until 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized the family estate, forcing Szymanowski to flee. In 1919, he returned to Warsaw, where he took up the idea of creating a national music for the new Polish nation in earnest. The music Szymanowski had written during the war, including his Third Symphony, First Violin Concerto, and First String Quartet, was decidedly cosmopolitan, with influences ranging from Richard Wagner and Max Reger to Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. In the early 1920s, after completing his modernist opera King Roger (a Polish-language treatment of the life of the twelfthcentury king of Sicily, Roger II), Szymanowski began taking a greater interest in Polish folk music, which he sought to integrate into his own style. The best exemplar of this was his 1931 ballet Harnasie, which incorporated folk songs authentic to the story’s setting in the southern Tatra mountain region. Szymanowski even took a villa in the southern Polish town of Zakopane to immerse himself in the distinctive music of the area. In 1926, Szymanowski became director of the Warsaw State Conservatory, successor to the Institute of Music he had attended a quarter century earlier. The four years he
spent in that position were marred by bureaucratic struggles and bouts with tuberculosis, which left Szymanowski little time to compose. Sensing this possibility, at the outset of his administrative tenure, Szymanowski decided to enter an American composition contest sponsored by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia. He saw this as his best opportunity not only to complete the string quartet he had been composing on and off for years, but also to raise his international profile by winning a competition sure to attract the brightest lights in the musical world. Unfortunately, Szymanowski did not take the prize – the competition was won by Béla Bartók for his Third String Quartet – but his resulting Second String Quartet has proved to be a milestone in twentieth-century Polish music. It is appropriate for Szymanowski’s quartet to have lost out to one of Bartók’s, as Szymanowski was consciously adapting Bartók’s folk-inspired modernism to his own Polish milieu. Unlike the truncated First, Szymanowski’s Second String Quartet was intentionally cast in three movements. It opens mysteriously with a moderato, dolce e tranquillo melody played in octaves by the violin and cello; this delicate tension is eventually offset by a vigorous contrasting melody, and the two moods alternate until the movement’s quiet conclusion. The vivace scherzando second movement shatters this calm with a boisterous folk dance, complete with such Bartókian string effects as sliding portamentos and aggressive pizzicatos. This rhythmically aggressive music is only occasionally restrained by quieter, meandering melodies. The finale begins as a lento fugue based on a somber Tatra folk song, which eventually becomes the melodic basis for the movement as it builds, wanes, then builds again to an intense climax.
Robert Schumann Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau, Germany Died July 29, 1856, near Bonn
String Quartet No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 41, No. 1 Composed in 1842; duration: 27 minutes Robert Schumann was one of those rare talents equally fluent with words as well as with music. His contributions as both a composer and a critic had a defining influence on the course of music in the nineteenth century. Born into a literary family in the southeastern German town of Zwickau, Schumann received a well-rounded education steeped in Romantic literature. In 1828, he went off to the University of Leipzig to study law, but quickly found that music had an even greater hold on his imagination. Two years later, Schumann had abandoned his law studies and began taking piano lessons with the noted pianist Friedrich Wieck. He had also met Wieck’s young daughter, Clara, who, over her father’s strenuous objections, became Schumann’s wife some ten years later. Unfortunately, Schumann’s dreams of becoming a concert pianist were dashed when, just a few months into his studies, he permanently injured the muscles in his left
hand. Rather than giving up on music altogether, he decided to compose and began taking lessons in music theory at the Leipzig Conservatory. During his first decade as a composer, Schumann tended to focus his energies on one genre at a time. He composed almost exclusively for the piano up until 1839. Then, after marrying Clara Wieck in 1840, he branched out into Lieder, composing some 138 songs for voice and piano. Schumann devoted 1841 to orchestral music, and that year saw the genesis of his First Symphony as well as an early version of his Fourth. 1842 was his chamber music year, in which he composed his Piano Quintet and Piano Quartet, as well as his Fantasiestücke for piano trio and his only three string quartets. By the 1840s, the string quartet was a relatively neglected genre, as few composers were willing to follow in the footsteps of Beethoven. One notable exception was Schumann’s friend Felix Mendelssohn, and it was Mendelssohn’s quartets that ultimately inspired Schumann to write his own. Schumann composed his three string quartets virtually simultaneously over seven weeks in the summer of 1842, publishing them soon thereafter as his Opus 41. Interestingly, while Beethoven had abandoned the traditional multi-quartet opus in the 1820s, choosing instead to publish his late quartets as standalone works, Schumann looked back to Haydn and Mozart by casting his Opus 41 as a cohesive trilogy – one that progresses through related keys from a brooding opening in the First to a jubilant finale in the Third. Schumann opened his Opus 41 trilogy with the only minor-key quartet of the three, giving the set a striking darkness-to-light progression. This transition is heightened by the A-minor quartet’s extended andante espressivo introduction, which opens with the four instruments imitating one another’s serpentine lines. After a dramatic transition, the first movement begins in earnest with a gentle yet cheerful allegro theme in the unexpected key of F major. A short snippet of counterpoint among the four instruments leads the transition to the movement’s lively second theme; this alternation of tender lyricism and learned counterpoint continues through the movement’s compact development section before the main themes recapitulate. Schumann returns to the key of A minor for the scherzo second movement; its presto opening theme, bristling with restrained energy, is contrasted by a lyrical central intermezzo before returning. The adagio third movement, back again in F major, unfolds like an operatic love duet between the first violin and cello over an undulating accompaniment. This charming scene is broken by a more dramatic interlude at the midpoint before reasserting itself. The presto finale, at last in the key of A minor, takes the form of a vigorous round dance, with a perpetual-motion melody passed among the instruments over what at times sounds like a rustic bagpipe accompaniment. Just as the movement is about to reach its relentless climax, Schumann slows down for a moderato restatement of the movement’s melodies. This is only a temporary respite, however, as the presto theme returns
one final time to close the quartet.
