At once rustic and quasi-symphonic in timbre, the rub of winds against strings in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Septet bespeaks the composer’s invocation of the serenade tradition, a genre he inherited from Mozart and other 18th-century models of music for outdoor entertainment. That open air setting surely accounts for the work’s overall ebullient nature, which feels far removed from the scowling late Beethoven that posterity emphasizes. Indeed, Beethoven eventually came to resent the tremendous popularity of the Septet for the outsized shadow it cast on what he considered his more serious works.

Still enjoying the early momentum of the Septet’s success and hoping to harness its commercial potential, Beethoven himself pared the work down to a trio version, published in 1805 as the Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano in E-flat Major, Op. 38. The original Septet was innovative for the degree to which it foregrounded the clarinet, elevating it to the same soloistic plane as the violin. Beethoven left the clarinet part mostly intact in his trio arrangement, leaving the cello to field much of the horn and bassoon lines, while transferring the string parts to the piano. Herein lies the most pronounced aesthetic transformation between these two versions: the fiddle-istic grit of the final movement vanishes when its flying triplets are entrusted to the nimble fingers of the pianist. But what the trio version lacks in labored virtuosity it makes up for in newfound class. Beethoven’s naturally pianistic string writing feels at home on the keyboard, and the piano’s glossy tones transport that music of the outdoors to the concert stage.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Completed in 1800, Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 4 quartet represents an early foray into the C minor sound world that would come to be a space of great angst and struggle for Beethoven, one that he would return to often as the backdrop for his most tortured works. Beethoven’s choice of key for this quartet is significant not only as it relates to the rest of his oeuvre — this piece shares its tonal center with the Fifth Symphony, “Pathétique Sonata” and the Third Piano Concerto, among others — but also in the context of his masonic associations. For freemasons, C minor represented a symbol of death, and was reserved by earlier composers for only their very darkest works. Beethoven’s proclivity toward C minor has led some scholars to consider his stormy works in that key the most faithful to his artistic spirit, while others criticize a reflexive levity in choosing that key as a default mode of passion.

In any case, the first movement opens with a worried lament in the violin while the other voices surge restlessly beneath it until slashing chords interrupt the pained lyricism. The eventual major mode does little to quell the apprehension stirred by the opening; instead of the welcome distraction of a contrasting melody, the second theme bears an eerie resemblance to its brooding predecessor, as if to cast a shadow of malaise on the sunny E-flat major.

The unfeeling clockwork that announces the second movement flies in the face of the expected tenderness of a slow movement, which is conspicuously absent from this quartet. What’s more, this alleged Scherzo feels more like a stiff minuet with the veneer of a fugue, while the actual Menuetto third movement, with its blistering tempo and angular odd-beat accents, is hardly danceable.

Virtuosic gypsy fiddling dominates the Finale while the other voices trade vernacular witticisms below. Amid the scorching flames of this devilish Allegro, we might catch a glimmer of C major that passes before we can be sure we heard it — but Beethoven never shows his hand, ending with a wink by including only the notes shared between C major and C minor.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Like Mozart and Schubert before him and Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Nielsen and Poulenc after, Brahms came to the clarinet late in life, having intended to put down his pen after the triumph of the great G major Viola Quintet, Op. 111. It was only upon hearing the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld in Meiningen in 1891 that Brahms was inspired to come out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. It is therefore to Mühlfeld that we owe those crowning masterpieces from Brahms’ twilight years: not just the four sublime clarinet works (the Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Op. 114, the Quintet for clarinet and strings, Op. 115, and the present Sonatas, Op. 120), but the treasured piano music, Chorale Preludes and Four Serious Songs written in those years as well.

An unknown, unpublished, 20-year-old Brahms planted the seeds of lifelong relationships with Robert and Clara Schumann when he met them at their home in 1853 on invitation from the violinist Joseph Joachim to play some of his piano pieces. The Schumanns were profoundly impressed; Clara journaled that Brahms “seemed as if sent straight from God,” while Robert unabashedly hailed him as Beethoven’s long-awaited musical heir (he also recounted Brahms’ genius to the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in an article that reads something like a description of the Second Coming).

The Beethoven prophesy — which others would echo later in Brahms’ career — is interesting for the way it invokes at once tradition and innovation. A lifelong student of music of the past, Brahms obsessively collected, performed and transcribed the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (on one occasion, he jokingly sent his piano transcription for the left hand alone of Bach’s D minor Chaconne to Clara Schumann, who had cut a finger on her right hand); he kept a journal in which he catalogued past composers’ violations of voice leading rules (the brash parallel fifths from Schubert’s “Die böse Farbe” appear here, along with Brahms’ revision of the passage and his annotation, “Schlecht!” [“bad!”]); and his first encounter with Richard Mühlfeld was in a performance of works by Mozart and Weber, which found lasting resonances in Brahms’ music for clarinet (for one, the keys of Brahms’ two Clarinet Sonatas mirror in order those of Weber’s pair of Clarinet Concertos). Indeed, the opening five pitches of Brahms’ F minor Clarinet Sonata reproduce a third lower the beginning of the final chorale from Bach’s immortal St. Matthew Passion. But the way Brahms laces the movement with infinite combinations and permutations of that opening motive creates the kind of motivic latticework that modernist-in-chief Arnold Schoenberg would laud in his essay, “Brahms the Progressive”. In this sense, the F minor Sonata’s Allegro appassionato movement encapsulates Brahms’ straddling of past and future: an undeniably romantic tapestry of sorts mosaicked by a seminal seed of ancient origins, all packaged in the time-honored sonata form.

Of course, the issue of intention on Brahms’ part eludes resolution when it comes to the ostensible Bach quote; we know that Brahms was intimately familiar with Bach’s music and that he owned a copy of the St. Matthew Passion score, but cannot say for sure whether he consciously referenced the final chorale in the F minor Sonata. It is nevertheless tempting to read the text of that chorale in the sentimental context of the waning light of Brahms’ own life: “When I must depart one day, do not part from me then.”

Written as they were in the twilight of his life, Brahms’ clarinet works have a reflective quality — highly emotional, but experienced from the remove of memory. Following the tumult of the pained Allegro appassionato, the pathos of the F minor Sonata’s heartbreakingly understated second movement seems to lie in what is left unsaid, rather than what is present. The clarinet croons what is hardly a melody at all — basically a decorated, falling scale — accompanied by the naked, heartbeat metronome of the piano, and the movement circles itself in poetic simplicity. The tender E-flat Sonata, one of Brahms’ very last pieces of chamber music, also takes up this kind of summative quality. Like fading embers, it glows with an introspective, generous — if melancholic — spirit, which is perhaps best captured in the weeping coda that ends the Allegro amabile. That the clarinet provides the bass note that supports the movement’s final chord seems a poignant metaphor for the weight of a long life.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Lloyd Van’t Hoff’s album, Johannes Brahms: Music for Clarinet and Piano

Like Mozart and Schubert before him and Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Poulenc and Nielsen after, Brahms came to the clarinet late in life, having intended to put down his pen after the triumph of the great G major Viola Quintet, Op. 111. It was only upon hearing the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld — in a performance of works by Mozart and Weber — that Brahms was inspired to come out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. It is therefore to Mühlfeld that we owe those crowning masterpieces from Brahms’ twilight years, the glowing embers of his mature genius: not just the four sublime clarinet works (the present Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Op. 114, the Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115, and two Sonatas, Op. 120), but the treasured piano music, Chorale Preludes and Four Serious Songs written in those years as well.

Written in 1891 (exactly a century after Mozart’s peerless Clarinet Concerto and premature death weeks thereafter), the Clarinet Trio in A minor was the first fruit born of Brahms’ late love affair with the clarinet, but its tender cello writing betrays Brahms’ deep affection for that instrument as well, lover as he was of dark timbres. In the Clarinet Trio’s outer movements, Brahms entrusted all of the initial statements of the main themes to the cello at the hands of Robert Hausmann (a member of the Joachim Quartet and the dedicatee of Brahms’ F major Cello Sonata), who premiered the work alongside Mühlfeld and the composer at the piano. For its part, Brahms’ beloved “Fräulein Klarinette” shimmers in its singing clarion register, while other times crooning in the smoky chalumeau. It is perhaps this vocal manipulation of register and texture as the instruments sing to each other that prompted one contemporary scholar to note, “It is as though the instruments were in love with each other.”

The Trio is remarkably concise compared to the expansive scale of the Clarinet Quintet with which it shared the program for their premiere in December 1891, but no less expressive. There is, however, something about the reserved treatment of voices that seems to reflect the work’s tight proportions; whereas the Quintet often rises to symphonic tutti sonorities, the Trio’s instruments retain their individual identities through their inherent acoustical differences and their presentation in canon or in frequent solo passages. The piece opens with one such solo, a rising, searching theme that begins in the cello alone before the clarinet’s echo. As the music seems to try a couple of times to begin its course, the meditative introduction studies half-step relationships that forecast the movement’s conclusion in a sunlit A major. First, however, there is the brooding pith of the movement, driven by the motivic saturation of the cello’s pained opening and punctuated by fleeting oases of calm in between. The heartfelt lyricism of the Adagio movement best captures the reflective quality that permeates Brahms’ late masterpieces: it is generous and loving, but not without a tinge of melancholy. The curious ländler that follows feels endearingly out of place; one might expect a fleet-footed scherzo at this point in the form, but instead Brahms gifts us an unhurried Andante grazioso built on a long-breathed clarinet theme. Moreover, the graceful melody and its hint of Viennese lilt seem to aspire to a waltz, but the strummed cello and absent dance accompaniment suggest the outdoors, not a ballroom. Later on, the music shirks its guise of grace and commits whole-heartedly to the stamping, provincial spirit that had been there all along. A swashbuckling finale reinstates the stormy A minor of the first movement and drives the piece to a thundering conclusion.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for The Graduate Center, CUNY

Johannes Brahms had retired from composing by the time he heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, but was so inspired by his playing that he came out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. The resulting chamber music includes the Clarinet Trio, two Clarinet Sonatas, and the poignant Quintet for Clarinet, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello in B minor, Op. 115, all some of his final, most mature works. Written as they were in the twilight of Brahms’ life, these works have a reflective quality, highly emotional, but experienced from the remove of memory.

The Clarinet Quintet seems to straddle two opposing sides of a coin. The conspicuous lack of tonic in the violins’ opening gesture creates a momentary ambiguity between B minor and D major, an early herald of the duality that will outline the work’s affective trajectory (and for Donald Tovey, a "tragic" elevation of the same tonal ambiguity that initiates Haydn's B minor Quartet, Op. 31, No. 1) . The three-note motive that the clarinet sings in the Adagio is the same that forms the pillars of the movement’s rhapsodic middle section. The third movement is similarly constructed on two contrasting sections — a melancholic scherzo in B minor between the pastoral spaciousness of the D major Andantino areas — both mosaicked with the same two motives. Even the fourth movement sources its opening material from the Andantino, but this time the turbulent B minor casts a shadow of malaise on the sunny repose that ended the third movement. The final variation’s collision with reprised music from the first movement signifies a sort of communion, a coming full circle that seems to acknowledge this material as the bookends of a unified story. The realization of this goal allows the piece to finally come to rest, but not before the final upset of the forte penultimate chord: Brahms’ harrowing last gasp right as the curtain falls.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

A distance of 21 years separates Johannes Brahms' Two Songs for Viola, Voice and Piano, Op. 91, written separately in 1863 and 1884 and published in the opposite order of their composition, but the songs are tied together by their shared theme of wind in the trees, by Brahms’ penchant for dark sonorities, and by their intended recipients. Brahms wrote both songs for his close friends Joseph Joachim and Amalie Schneeweiss, first for the occasion of their wedding, and later in a futile attempt to mend their damaged relationship.

“Gestillte Sehnsucht” (Assuaged longing) opens the set with a wistful text by Friedrich Rückert that surely appealed to Brahms’ love for nature and Romantic sensibilities. Each stanza sounds a refrain of whispering wind and birds, each time delivering a different message and ultimately confessing that the speaker’s longing will only end when life itself ends. Brahms paints the twilight yearning of the poetry in his characteristic dusky timbres, with murmuring arpeggios deep in the piano while the viola croons in velvet tones. Atop this carpet of viola and piano, the low female voice glows like the opening lines it pronounces: “Bathed in golden evening glow, / How solemnly the forests stand!”

“Geistliches Wiegenlied” (Sacred lullaby) establishes a rocking lilt as the viola simply sets out the tune of “Joseph, lieber Joseph mein”, a well-known medieval Christmas carol in which Mary asks Joseph to help rock the Baby Jesus. Brahms even provided the words of the song beneath the viola line in the score, perhaps to prod Joachim by his given name, as the new couple was expecting a baby (they would go on to name it Johannes, after Brahms).

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Essential to understanding Austro-German music is the notion of a lineage, a legacy of Germanic composers that has its roots in the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, those framers of the classical style dubbed the First Viennese School. This very palpable musical heritage, often referred to begrudgingly as the “German musical hegemony,” persisted well into the 20th century, but was cast in sharp relief in fin-de-siècle Vienna by the divisive music critic Eduard Hanslick. Writing for the Neue Freie Presse, Hanslick championed the music of Johannes Brahms and other composers of “absolute” music — that is, without programmatic imagery — who he saw as defenders of the great Viennese musical tradition. Conversely, Hanslick published scathing indictments of the aesthetic school of Richard Wagner, poster boy of the supposed “Music of the Future,” which Hanslick disparaged for its dramatic elements and extra-musical associations. Through his crusade against program music, Hanslick effectively created a divide between what was perceived as “old” and “new” music in his conservative Vienna, a rift whose aftershocks would plague progressive composers for years to come, and indeed, are still evident today.

​Wagner’s death in 1883, like Beethoven’s a half-century earlier, was a watershed moment for European artistic and intellectual worlds. For contemporary composers, it raised questions of legacy: of where exactly Wagner fits into the Germanic musical tradition (as a successor or an aggressor?), and of where to go from here (were his larger-than-life, chromatically-soaked Gesamtkunstwerks the turning point or terminus for German romanticism?). Anton Bruckner, Wagner’s friend and admirer, was at work on his Seventh Symphony when he learned of his passing, and later confessed about the symphony’s funereal second movement, “I really did write the Adagio about the Great One’s [Wagner’s] death. Partly in anticipation, partly as Trauermusik for the actual catastrophe.” Bruckner’s nods to Wagner don’t stop there; the symphony quotes several Wagnerian leitmotifs, and some veiled structural connections to Beethoven’s Eroica and Liszt’s Faust Symphony could even suggest a program for the symphony as a whole depicting the hero death of Wagner, the Faustian innovator of harmony.

But it is the symphony’s Finale that offers the most concrete and compelling evidence for insight into Bruckner’s tribute to Wagner, as well as Bruckner’s estimation of his own place in the Germanic musical lineage. The exposition of this disfigured sonata-form movement presents three themes in three distinct key areas: a snappy, impish figure in E major modeled after the opening theme of the first movement; a poised but sensitive chorale in A-flat major; and a monstrous bastardization of the lighthearted opening motive, this time set to A minor in fortissimo. Most interesting about Bruckner’s elusive form in this movement is his treatment of the recapitulation, where he brings the themes back in reverse order and in the “wrong” keys: B minor for the third group, followed by the second group in C major, and finally the triumph of E major with the return of the first group.

Bruckner did not pioneer this peculiar form; rather, his use of this reverse recapitulation structure puts him in the company of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms and other masters of the venerated Germanic musical legacy who also deployed the same form. Scholars have since termed this formal device the “tragic” reverse recapitulation, and some evocative titles from the repertoire of pieces organized in that fashion lend support for that interpretation (Haydn’s Symphony No. 44 in E minor, “Trauer-Sinfonie”; Brahms’ Tragic Overture; Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, “Tragische”, among others). To suggest Bruckner expressly sought to build tragedy into his symphony by reversing the recap of the finale would be presumptuous, but the existence of these works and Bruckner’s documented knowledge of some of them at least provides a rhetorical precedent for the formal affect he seems to have channelled to express the tragedy of Wagner’s death.

In the context of the classical education system that produced composers of this era, “tragedy” as a rhetorical concept doesn’t just mean doom and gloom; it stems from Greek dramatic theory and the Aristotelian idea of peripety, the tragedy inherent in the subversion or reversal of expectations, be they narrative or tonal-formal. In Mozart’s opera Idomeneo, for example, Idomeneo rashly promises Neptune to sacrifice the first living creature he sees in exchange for safe passage home from the Trojan War. When that fateful first encounter turns out to be his own son, the tragedy lies not just in the prospect of infanticide, but in the tragic reversal of expectations. For composers conditioned by the time-honored, Germanic tradition of sonata form, a violation of a normative structure represented a tragic deformation. Sure enough, the famous quartet from Act III depicting the height of the characters’ suffering follows the same tragic reverse recapitulation structure.

This distinction between overtly tragic expressive content and inherent tragedy of structure is important because the exultant E major coda of Bruckner’s Finale may seem mismatched with a form that has traditionally been used to express despair. Indeed, Bruckner’s ending is unique in this regard, but this seeming contradiction actually serves his tribute to Wagner. When, in the final bars of the symphony, the Finale’s first theme returns atop echoes of its first movement ancestor, it is easy to imagine this coda as a musical representation of Wagner’s legacy resonating for eternity after his death. In this reading, Bruckner’s Finale projects a dichotomous program: a tragic lament of Wagner’s death coupled with a triumphant eulogy celebrating his arrival in heaven and the longevity of his legacy on earth. Ascribing extra-musical meaning when it is not explicitly stated can be misguided and misleading, but in the context of the Germanic musical heritage, the tonal-formal interactions in Bruckner’s Finale surely belie a certain programmatic rhetoric even without imposing a whole narrative.

The slim 1921 chamber arrangement supervised by Arnold Schoenberg for his Society for Private Musical Performances and completed by his students, Hanns Eisler, Erwin Stein and Karl Rankl, may seem counterintuitive. Scored for only string quintet, clarinet, horn, piano four-hands, harmonium and timpani, it is a far cry from the robust, Wagnerian orchestration Bruckner originally had in mind. But for what it lacks in grandeur and decibels, the chamber version offers a certain neoclassical transparency that seems to clarify the music’s intricate tonal-formal relationships. Surely this was by design; the cerebral Schoenberg, with his newly-minted twelve-tone compositional system, must have been attracted to Bruckner’s calculated approach to composing and his music’s highly-organized architecture below the surface. In fact, Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony even reveals some early forerunners of the kind of interval manipulation that would become a hallmark of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic style. Not only do the themes appear in reverse order in the last movement’s recapitulation, but the intervalic relationships between the tonal areas of the exposition are literally retrograded in the recapitulation (E—A-flat—A minor in the exposition, transformed to B minor—C major—E major in the recapitulation). The Finale also features passages in which inversions of the movement’s first two themes are superimposed. For a composer so often reductively compartmentalized as “late-Romantic,” it is striking to unearth these seeds of modernism in Bruckner’s music. Moreover, it is no wonder that Schoenberg seemed to perceive a kinship between himself and Bruckner, both victims of the suffering of the avant-garde at the hands of the conservative Viennese press.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale in New York series at Carnegie Hall

Like Hindemith, composer-violist Rebecca Clarke also traded the violin for the viola; her teacher, the famed British composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, believed the middle-voice instrument would be more instructive in the areas of harmony and orchestration, “because then you are right in the middle of the sound, and can tell how it’s all done.” Bolstered by a supportive network of other successful female musicians, Clarke found remarkable success as a performer (this was not the case in her parallel work as a composer, where her gender and dual career both handicapped her professional standing). Her travel resumé is especially impressive given the contemporary professional obstacles for women; in 1922 alone, Clarke gave concerts in Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, India, China, Japan, the United States, England and Hawaii. It was under gloomier circumstances, however, that she found herself living in the United States in 1916: Clarke transplanted across the Atlantic after her abusive father disowned her following her confrontation about his infidelity. It was in America that Clarke befriended Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, an important patron of the arts and a friend and champion of Clarke for the next three decades. Coolidge personally encouraged Clarke to enter a composition competition she was sponsoring in 1919, and Clarke’s Viola Sonata tied for first place out of 72 entries with a piece by Ernest Bloch (the judges ultimately declared Bloch the winner, in part so as to avoid arousing suspicions of favoritism; meanwhile, reporters speculated that “Rebecca Clarke” must have been a pseudonym of Bloch himself, unable to imagine a woman penning such compelling music).

At the top of the Viola Sonata’s score, Clarke left a short verse from Alfred de Musset’s 1835 poem La Nuit de mai: “Poet, take up your lute; the wine of youth / this night is fermenting in the veins of God.” The incipit bespeaks a French connection that echoes throughout Clarke’s oeuvre, and this Sonata in particular. The proud, pentatonic fanfare that opens the work is quick to suggest a kinship with Debussy’s Cello Sonata from just four years prior, which begins in a similar vein and also proceeds with a cadenza-like passage for the string instrument atop still piano accompaniment. Aside from Clarke’s documented admiration for Debussy, congruencies in their harmonic language could be traced back to each composer’s attendance at the Paris World’s Fair (Debussy in 1889, Clarke in 1900) and their subsequent interest in “Oriental” music. After their exposure to such expositions as a Javanese gamelan and Vietnamese dance music, both composers adopted “exotic” scales into their styles, including pentatonic, octatonic and whole tone, all of which are on display in Clarke’s Viola Sonata.

The first movement, Impetuoso, achieves its namesake in no small part via another Debussian technique: a dynamic process of quick crescendos followed by sudden drops to piano, yielding a breathless, surging quality. The piano introduces the second theme, a slinking chromatic subject shadowed by glassy eighth notes above. Here again, the shape of the theme, Clarke’s interest in half-step relationships, and the smoky rolled-chords that bloom beneath the melody point unmistakably to Debussy. In the second movement’s light-footed Vivace scherzo, Clarke seems under the influence of Ravel, the other leading French Impressionist composer; the movement’s effervescent character, sparkling sonorities and flitting melodies call to mind Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin and the Pantoum movement of his Piano Trio as possible models. The pensive Adagio finale derives much of its reflective nature from its modal harmonies, which are decidedly less directed than those of traditional tonality. Clarke’s choice of modes puts her in the company of her countryman Ralph Vaughn Williams, who had himself studied with Ravel, and whose English pastoral style is finds a natural home in Clarke’s French-inflected Sonata.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Piano on Park

Horrified by the carnage of World War One and losing his own battle with cancer, a world-weary Debussy began work on a set of six sonatas for various instruments, though he would only finish three of these before his death cut short his plans in 1918. Ironically, the Cello Sonata from 1915, the first of the set, brims with life and energy from its first declamatory fanfare to its percussive finishing blows.

Debussy’s longtime avoidance of the traditionally German symphonic and sonata genres points to his emphasis on the storied French musical legacy as a viable alternative to its “hegemonic” German counterpart, and he maintained this priority even after his late adoption of the sonata genre. The proud poise of the piano’s D minor opening in the Cello Sonata’s Prologue is distinguished by a harmonic clarity rare for Debussy, but redolent of the music of the 18th-century French composers Rameau and Couperin. Similarly, the sighing cello theme that emerges from the ashes of the florid ornamentation in the bars before recalls the character of a Baroque operatic lament.

The second movement Sérénade upends the textural status quo, trading the plodding sustain of the first movement for pointillistic, walking pizzicato and vanishing wisps of bowed phrases. In the frenetic Animé, the cello, marked “light and nervous,” lurches back and forth between Debussy’s 17 tempo changes, which add to the manic character of the movement.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

The first piece from Book One of Debussy’s Images, “Reflets dans l’eau,” returns to a favorite subject of his for his impressionistic musical paintings: water. Rising and falling pianissimo sixteenth notes trace gentle arcs across the opening Andantino, their circular motion perhaps suggesting the rhythmic lapping of tidewater against a bank. A pebble shatters the water’s unstained surface, and Debussy paints the ensuing ripples in a shimmering, quasi cadenza cascade of 32nd notes. The increasingly more agitated swells that follow spill over into a mighty fortissimo climax, a wave that crashes just as quickly as it rose, and subsides in a sinking, faraway coda, marked Lent.

In his austere second movement sarabande, “Hommage à Rameau,” Debussy pays tribute to that French master composer and harpsichordist of the 18th century. Along with Ravel’s later “Le tombeau de Couperin” and Debussy’s longtime avoidance of the traditionally German symphonic and sonata genres, this movement points to Debussy’s emphasis on the storied French musical legacy as a formidable alternative to its “hegemonic” Germanic counterpart.

Aptly titled “Mouvement,” the final piece is an effervescent, scurrying tapestry of unrelenting triplets. This moto perpetuo could also evoke images of water, but this time of a rolling boil character, far from the glassy stillness of the first movement’s scene.​

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music​

Claude Debussy's 1894 tone poem Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun has been reimagined from its lush, orchestral origins several times, notably by fellow Impressionist Maurice Ravel, for piano four hands, and again under the supervision of Arnold Schoenberg, for a hodgepodge band of thirteen players. My arrangement responds to both composers, taking its orchestrational inspiration from Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro (for the present forces minus the bass), and diverging from the Schoenberg school version by restoring the harp of the original score and trimming other instruments. Moreover, by taking up the more personal vessel of chamber music, my arrangement seeks to reconnect Debussy’s Faun with the intimacy of the poetry that inspired it.

Indeed, Mallarmé’s poem is tethered to the individual experience by its single narrator, the faun, as he daydreams of erotic encounters with a pair of nymphs. But even this most baseline narrative is full of ambiguity and dizzying imagery; the faun isn’t sure — and we’re not sure — if he’s recalling actual experiences of just fantasy: “Did I love a dream,” he wonders. But by packaging his bewildering verse in strict hexameter with Alexandrine rhymed couplets, Mallarmé contains his attacks on poetic meaning within classical forms. Debussy’s mirrors this to a tee in his Prelude. Pierre Boulez called the piece the beginning of modern music, but while Debussy’s tritones, whole tone scales and misbehaving harmonies tear at tonality from the inside, his major cadences confirm E major amid subtle looks backward to Wagner. But whereas German music strives and battles, Debussy’s music takes a more passive approach by relishing this fundamental, Freudian division of the self. Instead of trying to reconcile its tonal and chromatic poles, it basks in them, like a faun in the afternoon. Half-asleep, half-man–half-goat, half charging into the 20th century and half hanging onto the glitter of yesteryear, it balances precariously but deliciously at the dawn of a new era.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

As part of his role as conseil supérieur of the Paris Conservatory, Debussy was charged with writing two new pieces for the school’s annual Concours in 1910; the result was the whimsical miniature Petit Pièce for the sight-reading round and the otherworldly Première Rhapsodie for the prepared round. Initially, Debussy was less than enthusiastic about hearing the clarinet students all attempt his demanding new works, but in the end was especially pleased by the way the Rhapsodie turned out and how it was received by his fellow judges. He returned to the piece the following summer when he fashioned the piano part into a lush, vividly colorful orchestration, and ultimately declared the work “one of the most pleasing [he had] ever written.”

Debussy marks the Rhapsodie “rêveusement lent” (dreamily slow), and so the piano paints the opening dreamscape with three sparse droplets of octave F’s and a triplet that drips into the clarinet’s entrance. The clarinet murmurs under its breath three evaporative notes of its own, simple and directionless, politely vanishing in time for the piano to repeat itself. Then, the same: drops of F, the clarinet whispers, but isn’t finished. With a flurry of notes and a crescendo it spills over into a splash of color — sunburst. The clarinet’s faux-improvisatory soliloquy that follows recycles its opening three notes, then raises them by a step before finally yielding to the piano, and the piece seems to begin anew. The piano lays a carpet of luxuriant harmony and gently lapping syncopations so that when the clarinet croons its faraway melody (starting with its seminal three-note motive in reverse order), it emanates from deep within the wash of piano, “soft and penetrating.”

Despite its serene opening, the mercurial Rhapsodie will soon spring to life, and the striking shifts between animated outbursts and time-stopping moments of suspended reality highlight Debussy’s masterful manipulation of texture and mood. It is a testament to Debussy’s imaginative musical language that this piece still sounds as fresh as ever today, 100 years after his death.

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

During the winter of 1887, the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák shared his lodgings with a chemistry student and amateur violinist, Josef Kruis. A violist himself, Dvořák would sometimes play with his flatmate and his violin teacher, and in January of that year he spent a few days writing the Terzetto for Two Violins and Viola in C Major, Op. 74 for the threesome to play. Dvořák overestimated the violin student’s technical prowess, and eventually drew up the simpler Miniatures when the Terzetto proved too difficult for Kruis. Nonetheless, the Terzetto remains a valuable addition to the chamber music repertoire, one whose unconventional structure befits its unusual combination of instruments.

Dvořák marks the first movement Introduzione, and while expressive, it does carry the reservedness of a prelude, a sense that the work’s meatier moments are still on the horizon. While he never allows the movement to spill over into a fully-fledged emotional climax, Dvořák does achieve a formidably lush texture for his slim instrumental paintbrush as he pits the spaciousness of the main theme against scampering sixteenth notes in various voices. He slips seamlessly from this introduction into the second movement, a Larghetto that sways gently until the abrupt intrusion of sprightly dotted rhythms in the middle section shakes us out of our reverie. The hemiolic Scherzo proper dances in and out of the written triple meter with Bohemian angularity, but shirks its duple obstinance in the slower, more graceful Trio. Here, the augmentation of the original Scherzo figure to better suit the meter feels like a sleepier recasting of the same character, rather than a contrasting theme as is traditional.

The theme of the variations set that closes the work evokes an operatic overture in its huge range of expression and its orchestral organization: unison rhythms, fortissimo tutti declarations separating hushed, tiptoeing passages. Dvořák acknowledges this operatic connection in the Moderato variation, where he indulges the first violin in a wordless recitative atop quivering orchestral tremolos in the other voices. Afterward, the final two variations rush frenetically to a virtuosic finish.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

It is curious that Franck would turn to the symphony as one of his last works. While a smattering of symphonies did emerge from such 19th century French voices as Saint-Saëns and Lalo, the genre was still decidedly a fixture of Germanic music. Moreover, Franck’s abstract brand of form may have been better described by the looser “symphonic poem” designation; his treatment of the first movement structure seems at once to acknowledge the procedure of sonata form while ignoring some of its core tenets. Franck’s unorthodox double alternation in this movement of the Lento introductory material with the Allegro recasting of that motive offended contemporary critics for its strain on the pace of the movement, in contrast to the structural economy of sonata form. It is ironic, then, that the musicologist Donald Tovey should liken this same device to the B-flat major Quartet, Op. 130 of Beethoven, the master symphonist himself.

Beethoven’s influence infects other areas of this rogue symphony as well. Franck’s resurrection in his finale of themes from earlier movements and his layering them atop a tireless bass ostinato undeniably recalls the ubiquitous Ninth Symphony, also in D minor. But Franck’s musical language in his symphony, with its tertian key relationships and heavy chromaticism, its lush textures and web of recurring motives, points unabashedly to Wagner.

Perhaps it is the symphony’s peculiar positionality in the context of the symphonic tradition of the 19th century that provoked such mixed reactions in its early performances. It occupies an awkward, neither-here-nor-there space between Beethoven and Wagner, two titans of artistic influence who loomed large in the venerable Germanic musical legacy that ostensibly did not include Franck. The symphony’s premiere in February of 1889 was met with with cold condemnation, the purists offended by Franck’s departure from the harmonic and formal processes of Haydn and Beethoven, and other critics bemoaning a dogmatic German style present in the work. This delicate paradox seems to be the symphony’s handicap and its lifeblood. It was only a few years later, when public opinion turned overwhelmingly in the symphony’s favor, that Vincent D’Indy declared Franck, the French proprietor of this contorted symphony, the first worthy heir to Beethoven’s symphonic legacy.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music

Just as John Harbison imagines the unlikely pair of horn and violin “meeting best under cover of dusk,” Twilight Music cloaks its abstract architecture beneath the warmer veneer of lyric chromaticism. Rather than forcing an unhappy marriage, Harbison’s approach to the incongruities between horn and violin is to juxtapose and celebrate their distinct identities, using that friction as a dramatic impetus of the piece. And in the Antiphon, the piece’s third section and the source of much of its generative material, Harbison drapes his sophisticated intervallic processes in an exterior that he finds “simplest and most familiar, where the piece seems to make no effort.” This represents one of the composer’s most stalwart efforts in the American musical landscape: to revive a fledgling American musical identity that had been cut short by the postwar, university-sponsored avant-garde, whose relationship with lay audiences verged on antagonistic. Harbison achieved a rare synthesis by which he crafted a more palatable surface than his mid-century contemporaries Babbitt and Boulez, but without diluting the intellectual integrity of his works’ construction. Twilight Music needs no explanation of its secret organizing forces, although they are there; its evocative, smoky sonorities and dynamic part-writing speak for themselves.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

​Haydn wrote his G major “Gypsy” Piano Trio during the second of his two highly productive visits to London in the early 1790s, which together bore his 12 “London” symphonies (Nos. 93-104) and six of his piano trios (No. 35-40). Haydn’s time in London also kindled a romantic relationship with Rebecca Schroeter, a wealthy amateur musician and the dedicatee of this work. Perhaps Haydn’s most popular contribution to the genre, the G major Trio represents one of the earliest examples of a classical composer parroting the Hungarian folk idiom, and prefigured the 19th-century fascination with gypsy music seen in the works of Brahms and Liszt. Having lived and worked at the Esterhazá palace in rural Hungary since the 1760s, Haydn would surely have been exposed to Hungarian vernacular styles by itinerant gypsy bands who played there. In the G major Trio, Haydn reserved the gypsy style for the last movement Rondo all’Ongerese, which features at each of its minore sections authentic verbunkos (recruiting dance) themes, probably quoted from memory by the composer. In retrospect, we realize the breakneck finale also fulfills the anticipated excitement promised by the more reserved movements that precede it: an unhurried, untroubled Andante variations set, and a swaying lullaby as the middle movement.

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Haydn’s landmark Opus 20 quartets represent a laboratory of sorts in which coalesced the techniques and relationships that would govern string quartet writing for centuries to come. The scholar Ron Drummond asserts, “This cannot be overstated: the six string quartets of Opus 20 are as important in the history of music, and had as radically a transforming effect on the very field of musical possibility itself, as Beethoven's Third Symphony would 33 years later.” And Sir Donald Tovey concurs: "Every page of the six quartets of op. 20 is of historic and aesthetic importance... there is perhaps no single or sextuple opus in the history of instrumental music which has achieved so much.”

But for all his innovation in this set, Haydn is not immune to influence himself. His use in the opening bars of the C major Quartet of the cello as a bearer of melodic material suggests the influence of Boccerini’s contemporary cello-heavy quartets. With its slow harmonic motion and delayed first violin entrance, this opening Moderato sees a leisurely pace of musical development that lends a pastoral spaciousness, one that is enhanced by the movement’s central “bird call” motive. The second movement’s striking preponderance of unisons and octaves creates a hollow sonority that vaguely evokes music of yesteryear — chant, maybe, or Greek dramatic chorus, or most probably, a recitative style of early opera. Sure enough, Haydn creates operatic character development through the contrasting textures of the cello theme muddied by sixteenth notes versus the lone violin aria without cover from the rest of the ensemble. The musette style of the Menuetto channels a folksy bagpipe, made more so by the clumsiness of obscured bar lines. The intricate four-subject fugue that follows snowballs elegantly until the voices erupt into sixteenth notes and chase each other to the end.

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Joseph Haydn dedicated his Opus 50 string quartets to King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, as would Mozart with his own “Prussian Quartets.” The two composers often converged in the string quartet genre; they played quartets together, and Mozart dedicated an earlier set of quartets to the older composer. Upon first hearing these “Haydn Quartets,” Haydn lauded Mozart as “the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.” Such an enthusiastic reaction makes it no surprise that the creative influence would flow both ways, and indeed, Haydn’s quartets bear conspicuous traces of Mozart’s compositional footprint.

Haydn’s String Quartet in B-flat major, Hob. III:44, Op. 50, No. 1 opens curiously with unflinching, repeated B-flats in the cello before Haydn sprinkles terse melodic fragments from the higher strings on top: a measure-long, fleeting breath of lyricism in conversation with nimble triplet figures. The rest of the spirited first movement unfolds like an exercise in compositional virtuosity as Hadyn deftly threads together these meager slivers of melody into a cohesive whole. Along the way, Haydn’s impish chromaticism and breathless deceptive cadences bespeak an unmistakable dialogue with the younger composer’s style.

The second movement is a courtly variation set fit for its regal dedicatee. The trio section of the graceful Menuetto rejects the notion of melody once more, like an impudent parody of the fragmentary first movement, favoring instead choppy arpeggios that would be almost banal if not for Haydn’s dry wit. This humor reaches its height in the multiple false endings of the Vivace Finale, as Haydn tries to goad the audience into premature applause.

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Haydn’s string quartets found enthusiastic favor with London audiences during the composer’s first visit there in 1791. Back in Vienna, Haydn fashioned his Opus 71 quartets specifically for public performance in preparation for his return to London, likely explaining the jolting chords of the D major quartet’s slow introduction and the brilliant passagework for all four players that follows. That slow introduction itself, while brief, is unique to Haydn’s mature quartets, and its octave drops in the first violin portend the falling octaves that will cascade across all four parts in the first theme of the Allegro. After the octave leaps invert upwards and rise to the end of the effervescent first movement, a meditative, heartfelt Adagio unfolds in its wake. The terse, self-assured minuet that follows fills in the gaping octave leaps from the first movement, while its curious, practically themeless trio seems anything but filled-in. The finale begins in a jovial, sometimes rowdy Allegretto, but accelerates through scampering sixteenth notes to a brilliant finish.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

While serving in the German army during World War I, Paul Hindemith was charged by his commanding officer — himself a great music-lover and admirer of French art — to assemble a string quartet of fellow soldiers as a way of providing respite from the miseries of war. During a March 1918 performance of Debussy’s sensuous String Quartet, Hindemith and his group had just finished the slow movement when the signals officer burst in and announced the news of Debussy’s death. The performance did not continue. Hindemith recalled:

"It was as if the spirit had been removed from our playing. But now we felt for the first time how much more music is than just style, technique and an expression of personal feeling. Here music transcended all political barriers, national hatred and the horrors of war. I have never understood so clearly as then what direction music must take."

Debussy’s untimely death interrupted his projected cycle of Six sonatas for various instruments, of which he only completed half. Interestingly, Hindemith also made plans for a series of six sonatas during his military service, but he, too, would never finish the set. The Viola Sonata in F major, fourth in the would-be series of six, and the first of his five viola sonatas, marked Hindemith’s decision to pivot from playing the violin to its alto-voice cousin instead. Completed in June 1919, the year Hindemith returned from the service, the Sonata’s international style seems to reflect the composer’s wartime epiphany: Brahmsian warmth mixes with quasi-Dvořákian folksong, all occasionally refracted through the iridescence of Debussy’s harmonic language.

The viola croons inwardly at the outset of the wandering Fantasie that opens the piece, but soon grows more impassioned through a series of rhapsodic, swirling figurations. The surge is short-lived, and both players retreat until the viola is left on a naked A-sharp that bleeds into the folksy theme that announces the second movement. The theme’s capricious vacillation between duple and triple meter lends a kind of crooked lilt of the vernacular; this is music of oral tradition, not suited for square Western notation. The ensuing variations go on to explore different sides of this meandering quality, whether through hobbling meter, dizzying chromaticism or a flurry of arabesque-style piano accompaniment. The movement crashes headlong into the proud Finale, but curiously, the numbered variations series continues through this movement as well. The peculiar form here is a sort of hybrid of sonata and theme and variations, but its cumulative effect serves the movement’s buildup to its stamping conclusion.

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for Piano on Park

The celebrated Czech composer Leoš Janáček darkened the traditional wind quintet sonority with his addition of the bass clarinet to his sextet for winds, written around his seventieth birthday in July of 1924 and ironically titled Mládí (Youth). Indeed, the idea of youth figured prominently into Janáček’s twilight years; he characterized his sextet as “a kind of memory of youth” in a letter to Kamila Stösslová, the object of his obsessive affection and herself 38 years his junior. Stösslová also inspired the young-looking but chronologically ancient heroine of Janáček’s opera, The Makropulos Affair, written concurrently with Mládí. Furthermore, the composer’s interviews for a biography and New York Times feature both published in 1924 gave him further reason to revisit his childhood memories, which find expression in Mládí’s spirit of unfettered spontaneity. Janáček’s musical depiction of the prosody of the Czech language — “speech melody,” as he called it — explains the inflection of the opening oboe melody, which is said to enunciate the words “Mládí, zlaté mládí!” (“Youth, golden youth!”). The boisterous gaiety of the outer movements contrasts the second movement’s folksy, sometimes melancholic variations, and the third movement trades a perky piccolo theme from Janáček’s time in the Old Brno Monastery with a lilting oboe melody that possesses a curious sort of Viennese grace.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

The fruits of Carl Maria von Weber’s well-documented relationship with the clarinetist Heinrich Baermann include several operatic, virtuosic works for the instrument in chamber and concerto genres. Thus, it is understandable that the Introduction, Theme, and Variations for Clarinet and Strings in B-flat Major, a work of questionable authorship whose elysian, Mozartian aria prefaces a buoyant theme and its spry elaborations, has traditionally been attributed to Weber. But recent scholarship points instead to Weber’s contemporary and compatriot Joseph Küffner, a composer known mostly for his guitar music, as the work’s architect.

The variations become progressively more acrobatic while remaining faithful to the jocular, if naïve, character of the theme. The rhythmic activity snowballs until a surprisingly sincere G minor Adagio arrests the blissfully ignorant chugging along, and seems a melancholic look at the untroubled aria of the introduction. The clarinet gets lost in a soliloquy before having an abrupt change of heart and diving headlong into the jubilant triplets of the sixth variation. A final Allegro assai interrupts this last variation mid-sentence as the strings egg on the agile clarinet dancing above them.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Floored by an 1832 performance by the virtuoso violinist Niccolò Paganini, the young Franz Liszt resolved to become the Paganini of the piano himself. In the process of cultivating an unparalleled pianistic technique, Liszt also pioneered the modern piano recital, introducing the theatrical elements of performing from memory, entering stage from the wings, and positioning the piano perpendicular to the stage to display his profile. Unconventional for featuring only one instrument, Liszt’s solo “soliloquies,” as he first called them, provoked hysterical enthusiasm from audiences, as women clambered for torn pieces of his clothing, hair or piano strings, and cast their own clothes onto the stage. Ever the showman, Liszt leaned into this “Lisztomania” with his own seductively dramatic piano showpieces, replete with dazzling fireworks of dexterity.

The 13th Hungarian Rhapsody is no exception; Liszt decorates the would-be simple folk melodies of his native Hungary with a mosaic of pianistic acrobatics. But for all the glitter of virtuosity, the Hungarian Rhapsody is not without substance. The meandering, appropriately rhapsodic Andante sostenuto opening is peppered with intervals of an augmented second, the unmistakable calling card of gypsies and all things eastward. The more rhythmic Vivace sections that follow unfold in Liszt’s typical pyrotechnical fashion. A page of repeated-pitch sixteenth notes passes in a flash, but not before recalling Liszt’s “La campanella” étude, itself a tribute to the composer’s own inspiration, Paganini.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music

In a letter to the music critic Max Kalbeck, staunch opponent of the Wagnerian coalition of “program music” composers, Mahler argued, “From Beethoven onwards, there is no modern music that has not its inner program.” Were it more widely known, Mahler’s assertion would be controversial even today. Just as Kalbeck and his crony Eduard Hanslick were quick to draw sharp boundaries between the so-called “absolute music” of Brahms and Beethoven versus Wagner’s “Music of the Future” with its extra-musical associations, so too do modern scholars often treat Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as an abrupt departure from the programmatic framework of his earlier, voice-bound symphonies. It is true that Mahler confined his Fifth Symphony to the purely instrumental canvas, whereas his earlier works in the genre announce their meanings in words — whether actually sung in performance, or alluded to through musical quotation. But with his vivid web of cross-movement relationships, Mahler achieves in the Fifth Symphony such a clear sense of a linear progression over the course of the work as to suggest an inner drama of its own. For the Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell, it is not that the programmatic symphony has vanished, “it has gone underground, rather, or inside.”

It is telling that Mahler would invoke Beethoven in his letter to Kalbeck; the battlefield that frames the drama of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is the tonal progress from the C-sharp minor of the opening to the Finale’s triumphant D major — a triumph not unlike the journey from C minor to C major over the course of Beethoven’s own Fifth Symphony. Mahler seems to conjure Beethoven’s Fifth even more explicitly with the trumpet call that opens the present work and bears rhythmic resemblance to Beethoven’s knocking “fate” motive.

Mahler’s remarkable variety of orchestration is one of the ways he distinguishes between characters in this self-contained symphonic drama of sorts. Indeed, solo voices are strikingly prevalent throughout this work scored for such a bloated orchestra of quadruple winds with robust brass and percussion sections. After the first movement’s lone trumpet erupts into a short-lived fanfare, the movement oscillates between snarling brass and a plaintive funeral march that calls on a familiar Viennese lilt. The vacillation between forces of varying sizes — spitting solo trumpet utterances or a mass of strings dragging the procession along — raises questions of who exactly is speaking at any given time.

The echoes of Beethoven come to life again in the Stürmisch bewegt (“Moving stormily”) second movement, whose flashes of brass and rumbling strings recall Beethoven’s literal depiction of a storm in his Pastoral Symphony. Toward the movement’s end, the clouds seem to peel away to reveal a glimpse of heaven in a glorious brass chorale — our would-be climax, if only it didn’t recede into the distance as suddenly as it arrived. We are cruelly left behind in the storm, which itself dissipates amid a pitter-patter of winds and brass, then the hushed tiptoe of sinking pizzicato, before finally, a lone timpani cooly punctuates the end of the movement.

The middle movement Scherzo serves the greater arc of the symphony as sort of macro development section. The movement highlights a solo, obbligato horn part throughout, reminding us of the earlier issues of a part versus a whole. The Scherzo also brings to the fore the idea of space as it rocks between the provincial Ländler dance with its heavy steps and horn calls, and the daintier waltz of ballrooms and sophisticates.

In another striking move of orchestrational discipline, Mahler reserved the liquid gold lyricism of his Adagietto for harp and strings alone, offering a breathtaking sense of intimacy after the raucous conclusion of the previous movement. Words pale in the face of this portrait of Mahler’s love for his wife Alma; the composer himself could only come up with this short verse that he left his beloved to accompany the movement:

"In which way I love you, my sunbeam,

I cannot tell you with words.

Only my longing, my love and my bliss

can I with anguish declare."

A naked horn call heralds the start of the Finale, music of the outdoors. Woodsy chattering in the winds gradually joins in and confirms our location, more evidence of Mahler’s expert manipulation of the musical mise-en-scène without ever making it explicit. For a composer so habitually fixated on death, this movement stands out as a rare example of unfettered joy. When the gleaming brass chorale that was defeated in the second movement finally triumphs in this movement, the ominous world of C-sharp minor where our journey began seems but a distant memory.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music

​Mahler, in his life as well as his music, represents a study in dichotomies, an unlikely and unsustainable collision of seemingly incompatible poles. First, there is the messy business of his tangled domestic identities. It was Vienna that bore many of the fruits of Mahler’s professional life, as it had for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms before him. There, in that cultural Mecca, he wrote music that bespeaks his humbler roots in provincial Bohemia, the same roots that would undermine his sense of belonging in the cosmopolitan capital, even as it supported his professional activities. There is his dual career as a conductor and composer, alternately complementary and conflicting pursuits. Not least of all, there is his straddling of two embittered religions, a begrudging conversion to Catholicism that clinched his appointment as director of the Vienna Court Opera, but didn’t spare him from the anti-Semitic forces resolved to attack his career.

And in the Ninth Symphony, there is the elegiac farewell that somehow affirms life with its dying breath. Leonard Bernstein called it “a sonic presentation of death itself…which paradoxically reanimates us every time we hear it,” and the heralds of this dual reading are present from the opening bars of the symphony. Cellos and horn utter the symphony’s first sounds as they trade pedal A’s at odd intervals, often likened to irregular palpitations of a faltering heart. But the skipping heartbeat grows distant as bell tones in the harp and its echoes in the horn awaken other voices (or is this all a dream, an illusion of extra time?). Stirring violas and double basses add to this ethereal nostalgia before the second violins, in a series of wonderful sighs, breathe fragments of lyricism into the woodsy scene. And with this breath, this most fundamental life-force, Mahler celebrates life even as he juxtaposes it against the backdrop of the inevitable death announced in the first measures.

Life begets life, and so Mahler permits his two-note sighing figure to bloom into ever-stretching threads of melody — never the long-spun, lyrical theme we’re waiting for, but intimations of one, a melody shrouded in the gossamer veil of memory, or, perhaps, a tune in its twilight years that strives for a life of its own but lacks the vitality to skirt the warm caress of death. What emerges is a charming and intimate elaboration on the sighing motive that sways gently, like trees in the breeze. A pickup note syncopated over the barline and a leap upward that resolves down in the sigh provide more than a vaguely familiar Viennese lilt; this is Mahler’s counterintuitive quote of a waltz by Johann Strauss, “Freuet Euch des Lebens” (Enjoy Life).

Mahler’s tender, if peculiar, homage to Strauss will serve as a place of repose throughout the movement, a shelter from the storm of the more agitated episodes in between. But for now, Mahler upsets the tranquil scene as the orchestra reels into a violent fanfare led by the horns. The turmoil is short-lived; a brief but turbulent build-up spills over into a luxuriant, resplendent recasting of the sigh motive at fortissimo. This quicksilver movement lacks the comforting organization of strict sonata form; we never know where we’re going next, only that we won’t be there for long. Instead of a formal blueprint to latch onto, we have the guideposts of the opening omens — the tripping heartbeat and the harp’s tolling of the bells, both refracted through different instruments and interval mutations — and the soothing reminder to Enjoy Life along the way, even as we don’t know what’s coming.

After the celestial settling of the first movement, the second introduces an earthbound ländler, made rustic by the hollow composite sound of widely-spaced instrument pairings: bass clarinet doubling oboe, bassoons in conversation with piccolo. This is music of the country, a dead giveaway of Mahler’s Bohemian origins. The cumbersome, provincial dance is left behind as strings take over in a più mosso section, instead suggesting a sort of demented waltz — drunken, maybe, but always good-natured. The movement continues to explore this familiar dichotomy, simple joys amid disfigured, even hostile dance rhythms, until the raucous scene recedes apologetically into the distance.

The sardonic third movement Burleske sees a crass intersection of dissonance with Baroque-style counterpoint. But even here, Mahler creates oases of calm as a solo trumpet, hopeful, but not without a tinge of melancholy, heralds the theme of the coming Finale.

That the Ninth Symphony came on the heels of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde suggests an interesting creative impetus for the symphony, the last he would complete. For all of its grand, symphonic scope, its all-encompassing summation of the past and its prophetic look toward the future, Das Lied von der Erde was still bound to the individual experience by the personal vessel of song. To give voice to the general human condition itself, Mahler had to abandon the voice altogether and take up instead the more universal language of the instrumental cosmos. The symphony is more than autobiographical, and the failing heart of the opening isn’t just Mahler’s. It signifies a farewell to tonality — to music as Mahler knew it — and maybe also an instinctual farewell to society, written on the eve of the political traumas that would plague the 20th century.

To characterize the titanic Adagio that frames the Ninth Symphony, the final chapter of this work of a lifetime, it is difficult to imagine words more eloquent than Leonard Bernstein’s:

"And so we come to the final incredible page. And this page, I think, is the closest we have ever come, in any work of art, to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up. The slowness of this page is terrifying: Adagissimo, he writes, the slowest possible musical direction; and then langsam (slow), ersterbend (dying away), zögern (hesitating); and as if all those were not enough to indicate the near stoppage of time, he adds äusserst langsam (extremely slow) in the very last bars. It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate. We hold on to them, hovering between hope and submission. And one by one, these spidery strands connecting us to life melt away, vanish from our fingers even as we hold them. We cling to them as they dematerialize; we are holding two—then one. One, and suddenly none. For a petrifying moment there is only silence. Then again, a strand, a broken strand, two strands, one . . . none. We are half in love with easeful death . . . now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain . . . And in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything."​

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music

Felix Mendelssohn shared with father and son clarinetists Heinrich and Carl Baermann a friendship based not only on common musical interests, but on culinary delights as well; in addition to their instrumental prowess, the Baermanns were evidently formidable dumpling chefs. Around Christmas 1832, Mendelssohn hosted the Baermanns at his home in Berlin, and they traded an evening of dumplings for a new piece to play together: a Concert Piece in F minor for clarinet, basset horn and piano. The evening was so enjoyable for all that they repeated the exchange, resulting in the Concert Piece No. 2 in D minor, Op. 114. The opening Presto sets a tone of operatic virtuosity and vocalism that will prevail for all three movements. The piano sits out for much of the honeyed Andante aria, and the Spanish-sounding finale evokes castanets amid swirling solo lines.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music

A newly married Mendelssohn was already at work on his Opus 44 set of string quartets during his honeymoon late in 1837. Finished days after his 29th birthday in February the following year, the E-flat major quartet, the third of the set, shares its key and its youthful zest with the celebrated Octet of his teenage years. But the richly vivacious E-flat major quartet sees a more experienced Mendelssohn painting with the limited palette of only four players, savoring the natural intimacy of the quartet in its delicate passages, while relishing the challenge of creating outsized exuberance and full textures with smaller forces.

The spry sixteenth notes called out by the violin at the outset of the Allegro vivace are the germ that will infect the texture to varying degrees throughout the extensive first movement — at first alone in the tireless, insistent violin, sometimes mosaicked in imitation across the quartet, sometimes in cascading tutti choruses, and other times checked by martial dotted figures. The light-footed Scherzo second movement is true to form for Mendelssohn, a uniquely deft composer in the scherzo style. Its effervescence and minor mode mischievousness look forward to the famous scherzo from the incidental music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” he would pen four years in the future, as does its dizzying spiral to its hushed, plucked finish. The ample warmth of A-flat major serves as the backdrop to the heartfelt Adagio non troppo, which is spiced with beautifully painful dissonances each time the theme returns, a twisting of the knife followed by the sweetest relief of its resolution. The ebullient, finger-twisting Molto Allegro finale revives the vigor of the first movement for a rollicking finish.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, French composer Olivier Messiaen was imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a German prisoner-of-war camp on the border of modern-day Germany and Poland. In transit to the camp, Messiaen met a Jewish clarinetist named Henri Akoka, and showed him sketches for a solo clarinet movement. Akoka dismissed the movement as impossible, but Messiaen persisted. Inside the prison, he met a cellist, Étienne Pasquier, and a violinist, Jean Le Boulaire. After a sympathetic guard smuggled in some paper and pencil, Messiaen began work on a quartet for the three inmates plus himself on piano: Quartet for the End of Time. It was possibly that same guard who later procured dilapidated instruments for the musicians, and the piece received its premiere inside the prison walls in January 1941, outdoors and in the freezing rain for an audience of 400 fellow prisoners and guards, while World War II raged outside. Messiaen later recalled, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.”

Perhaps primary among the wide variety of forces that shaped Messiaen and his music was his intense spirituality, so it stands to reason that the extravagant imagery of the Book of Revelation would have found resonances in his ardent brand of Catholicism. Indeed, the Quartet was inspired by an almost psychedelic passage from that final book of the Bible describing the arrival of the angel of the Apocalypse:

“And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire...and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth....And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever...that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished…”

As advertised, the idea of time is a constant presence throughout the piece. But the meeting of Messiaen’s theme of time cessation with the decidedly time-bound medium of music strikes a fascinating paradox that manifests itself in myriad ways throughout the work. At his most predictable, Messiaen does away with time signatures altogether, leaving the performers with no instructions as to the organization of musical time, as in the third, fifth and sixth movements. But on a subtler level, Messiaen erases the would-be natural accents of each bar by crafting clever rhythmic palindromes, or by stringing together idiosyncratic combinations of rhythms that form one long, repeating pattern — both of which defy the tendency of musical time to organize by smaller measured units. Messiaen uses the latter technique to disorienting effect in the first movement, whose pages are mosaicked by a thirteen-beat (seventeen-note) rhythmic pattern in the piano that repeats itself over and over irrespective of the alleged 3/4 time signature.

To make matters worse — or at least, more dizzying — Messiaen’s harmonic color only adds to this static, directionless quality that his rhythms also produce. Whereas functional tonality derives its sense of forward motion from the asymmetries of tension and resolution, Messiaen’s language is built on scales that divide evenly into coolly tessellating micro-patterns that don’t point one way or another, thus foregrounding stasis instead of direction. Ironically, the second piano chord of the piece actually contains all seven pitches of a B-flat major scale sounding at once; by folding the scale onto itself, Messiaen strips away the temporal meaning from something that would otherwise suggest motion — as if to acknowledge functional tonality and then flip it the bird. In contrast to more goal-oriented harmonies that suggest a progression over time, Messiaen’s music creates what Paul Griffiths called “a sense of time not as flow but as pre-existing, revealing itself to human temporality in sequences of brilliant, unalike instants.”

This “pre-existing” sense of musical time infects all of the Quartet’s movements, but especially the “inhumanly slow” tempos of the fifth and eighth movements, where harmonies change so infrequently that they seem prolonged for eternity. But the first movement has more to say about the logic of the rest of the piece. It introduces a juxtaposition between the birdsong presence of the physical world, and the passive transcendence of metaphysical time, both of which will dominate the musical material of the whole piece. Messiaen’s birds are the clarinet and violin, a blackbird and nightingale, respectively, and he sets their physical presence against the cosmic backdrop of the cello and piano, playing what he imagined as the “harmonious silence of Heaven.” In this way, Messiaen articulates two distinct worlds: physical and metaphysical, human and spiritual. And the friction between the two sides of this duality gives momentum to the musical arc of the rest of the piece, which to an awestruck Le Boulaire sounded like an apocalyptic duel between “monsters and cataclysms” and “adoring silences and wonderful visions of peace.”

In the preface to his score, Messiaen wrote about the Abyss of the birds movement for solo clarinet, “The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness.” It is curious that Messiaen’s movement for a lone clarinet, the only instrument of the group bound to a single line without the ability to provide harmony or accompany itself, would become the piece’s longest (if one is to take Messiaen’s written tempos to heart). But the instrument’s limited ability to keep time for itself makes it ideally-suited to destroy the listener’s sense of time, its unfeeling crooning instead mapping a desolate, boundaryless void, and its inexorable crescendos on single notes leaving listeners with volume as the only metric to measure the passage of time. The stark nakedness of the clarinet does indeed evoke the vacant melancholy that Messiaen’s preamble suggests, and the implicit connection to Gregorian chant of the monophonic texture amplifies the spiritual orientation of the Quartet.

Messiaen’s magnum opus is highly unusual for its varied orchestration across its movements, and the sonic distance between a solo clarinet and, say, the brutal unisons of the sixth movement — where the four players join forces to form one towering, trumpet-like instrument — or the seventh movement’s dizzying swirls where we lose harmony and melody altogether, creates a sense of earth-shattering scope fit for the awe-inspiring subject matter. In fact, the scope is so broad — between terror and tenderness, between the divine love of the two Praises to Jesus and the jolting unisons of all four instruments together — that it’s almost hard to believe that all of this music was written by the same person. But Messiaen was the sum of so many powerful influences. He was synesthetic, and saw colors when he heard chords; he was obsessed with birds, had them stuffed all over his apartment walls and spent hours at a time studying their songs; he was pioneering and meticulously mathematical in his approach to rhythm; and he was a devout Catholic, and played organ in a Paris church for over sixty years, right up until his death.

Quartet for the End of Time represents the miraculous collision of all of these influences under the most unlikely circumstances. To introduce such timeless music that eludes time itself, a piece that invites endless commentary but exists on a plane beyond words, it is difficult to imagine words more eloquent than Rebecca Rischin’s, from the inscription of her book about the piece:

“This is the story of a quartet for all time,

based on the Apocalypse and written in apocalyptic times,

music for the future, defiant of the past,

​music for the moment, and for eternity.”

© Graeme Steele Johnson

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's late love affair with the clarinet is immortalized by the handful of masterpieces he left behind for the instrument, but plagued by a tattered paper trail; the sublime Clarinet Quintet, K. 581 and Clarinet Concerto, K. 622 are both missing their autographs, and only 93 bars remain of the Allegro in B-flat major for Clarinet and String Quartet, K. 516c. The present fragment may well have been longer, and perhaps even torn from a finished movement, as suggested by the completeness of the extant portion. Mozart’s other fragmentary autographs are dotted with blank spaces in the accompanying voices to be filled in later, which Robert Levin explains as the master’s practice of “creat[ing] in his head, not on paper.” Nevertheless, 93 measures is enough to provide a complete exposition before stopping short three measures into the development — a not inconsequential window into the heartbeat of the movement, and for the astute Robert Levin, sufficient momentum to devise a faithful and imaginative completion. Mozart’s share of the compositional labor likely dates from 1787, the same year that also bore Don Giovanni as well as the two Viola Quintets in C Major and G Minor, and the clarinet quintet fragment shares with with those contemporaneous works the proto-Romantic harmonic daring of a mature Mozart. But unlike the inconsolable G minor Viola Quintet, this buoyant, sun-specked Allegro oozes a degree of wonder and levity rare even for Mozart’s overall joyous clarinet catalog.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

To call Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s premature death at the young age of 35 untimely would be a tragic understatement; for the musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon, it was no less than “the greatest tragedy in the history of music” that cut short the composer’s life just as he was on the threshold of a magical new style. Finished just two months before his death, the Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622 was Mozart’s last major completed work, and thus is conventionally regarded as his swan song. But considered in the context of the entirely new language that emerged in Mozart’s other twilight works (the Concerto shares with The Magic Flute a remarkable blend of simplicity and gravitas), the Clarinet Concerto represents as much a new beginning, albeit tragically curtailed, as a final destination. Originally conceived for the basset clarinet and its extended low range, the Clarinet Concerto signifies a continuation of Mozart’s lifelong penchant for darker timbres (in chamber music settings he much preferred playing the viola to the violin). This mellow quality that Mozart achieves in sonority is also reflected in the general character of the piece, which concentrates less on virtuosic passagework (solo cadenzas are conspicuously absent) and more on long-breathed melody and operatic registral contrast. The first movement Allegro opens joyously before introducing striking forays into minor keys that Mozart will continue to probe for the rest of the piece. The delicate and breathtaking Adagio movement somehow fuses absolute peace and sublime beauty with just a tinge of melancholy, which finds expression near the end of the movement in a time-stopping deceptive cadence poignantly punctuated by silence. The buoyant Rondo finale swirls through characters and keys with Mozart’s quintessential quicksilver grace before spilling over into a glorious finish.

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Frustrated with the limited career opportunities in his native Salzburg, a 21-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart abandoned his post in the Archbishop’s court to pursue fortune abroad. His circuitous journey with his mother included an extended sojourn in Mannheim, where Mozart was introduced to the wealthy surgeon Ferdinand De Jean, also an amateur flautist. Mozart’s father was relieved when De Jean commissioned his son for three concertos and four quartets, but Mozart fils bemoaned the task, writing, “I become quite powerless when I am obliged to write for an instrument I can’t stand.” Dragging his feet, Mozart produced only two flute concertos of the promised three, but De Jean refused to pay for one of them when he realized it was merely a transposition of the extant Oboe Concerto, K. 314.

In spite of his purported distaste for the flute, Mozart fashioned a delightfully buoyant Flute Quartet in D major, K. 285, whose sparkling outer movements sandwich a slow movement of remarkable poignancy. Some listeners have suggested a foretaste in that Adagio of the second movement of Mozart’s eventual A major Piano Concerto, K. 488, pointing to a vague resemblance between the melodic contour and sparse accompaniments of the two movements. But a more useful comparison might be found in the Largo movement of Vivaldi’s “Winter” violin concerto, where the suspended solo line shimmers over a naked pizzicato texture, as here. In the Flute Quartet, this Baroque-style aria’s position between two more spirited movements replete with Mozart’s typical cast of quicksilver characters amplifies its austere grace, and explains why we perceive a similar sort of poetry in the second movements of this Quartet and the later Piano Concerto, alike.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Rightfully wide-eyed but inevitably futile attempts to pin down Mozart’s genius typically take the form of variations on the theme of “perfection.” The musical canon has readily acknowledged the genius of many master composers, but Mozart’s brilliance somehow stands apart from even the most celebrated voices. Mozart’s music glows with a transcendent otherworldliness that puts to shame attempts to capture it in words, but it is its paradoxical self-evidence — as inevitable and fundamentally part of this world as nature itself — that really makes it elude explanation. Mozart’s grace lies in his music’s effortless, unlikely cohabitation of opposites. It is at once scintillatingly fresh and deeply familiar, simple but not simplistic, and, in the words of Scott Burnham, “somehow both unerring and human…untouchable and touching.”

Alluding to his impeccably conceived musical characters and their rich development over the course of his music, Paul Henry Lang anoints Mozart “the greatest musico-dramatic genius of all times.” Nowhere are these interactions between musical and dramatic revelation more explicit than in Mozart’s operas. The Marriage of Figaro, completed in 1786 during his prolific Vienna period, marked the beginning of Mozart’s working relationship with Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. The comic opera weaves a web of illicit seduction, deception and ridiculous contingencies, and the overture opens appropriately with scurrying, Presto eighth notes evocative of chattering gossip flitting about Count Almaviva’s estate. The mercurial overture vacillates between hushed scampering and eruptive tutti outbursts until a delightfully long-breathed theme in A major emerges. Floating atop a bed of constant eighth notes, this refreshingly tuneful melody seems to momentarily suspend time, only to evaporate just as quickly as it came, in true paradoxical Mozartean fashion. Virtuosity, with its inherent self-indulgence and exertion, has no place in the poised elegance of Mozart, but this unrelenting overture is a veritable tour-de-force for orchestras and pianists — here, in Czerny’s six-hand arrangement — alike.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music

Trading oboes for clarinets and dispensing with the popular trumpet and timpani fixtures of contemporary orchestras, Mozart designed a darker, mellower orchestration that reflects this concerto’s inward, lyrical quality. Indeed, the 23rd concerto is generous and personal, and seems to sing to itself rather than declaiming from a stage as in Mozart’s hallmark operatic style found in so many of the other concerti.

Piano passagework is florid in the Allegro first movement, more cascading and graceful — though no less demanding — than the fiery acrobatics of the other late concerti. The orchestra’s role in the dialogue is involved but never grandiose, and the soloistic wind writing throughout the piece lends an intimacy closer to chamber music than the typical concerto style. Deceptive resolutions, aptly termed for their jarring intrusion of the minor mode when we expect the home key, and a favorite device of Mozart’s for phrase extension, are an important feature of the harmonic fabric here. But in this setting, they lack the impish irony they add to Mozart’s lighter movements as well as the gravitas of his more breathtaking sequences; rather, these gentle subversions of expectations may prompt the listener to lean forward, drawing him closer to this introspective work.

The sparing, poignant Adagio feels especially poetic, made more so by the fact that it is Mozart’s only work in F-sharp minor, and the last minor key slow movement he would write for an instrumental piece. The spirited rondo finale recovers some of the Mozartean zippiness that laid dormant for the first two movements, but is decidedly tempered by the distinctive reservedness of the concerto as a whole.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music​

By 1786, Mozart relished a rare period of professional security; having just completed his six “Haydn” quartets the previous year, he premiered his miraculous The Marriage of Figaro in May, and still penned three of his greatest piano concertos and three mature trios. In the trios, Mozart achieved an unprecedented independence of voices that was far ahead of the “accompanied sonata” -style piano trios of his time, elevating the role of the string instruments and laying the groundwork for Beethoven’s work in the genre. But in Mozart’s mystifying, paradoxical fashion, he somehow marries the newfound importance of the strings with brilliant, concerto-style piano writing and still preserves his crystalline melodic clarity. In the B-flat major Trio’s effervescent Allegro, Mozart mimics Haydn by recycling his first theme in place of a would-be second theme, creating space for the surprise of an entirely new theme in the development — a reminder of the flexibility of sonata form in the right hands. A spellbinding, pleading Larghetto follows, often voiced by the piano alone and again revealing Mozart’s concerto proclivities. The concluding Allegretto frequently dips into a “learned” contrapuntal style, but is leavened in all voices by Mozart’s inimitable grace and wit.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Largely driven by the demand of the lesser nobility, the latter part of the 18th century saw a utilitarian flowering of music for wind ensembles, known as Harmoniemusik. In addition to being more financially accessible to the middle-aristocracy than a full orchestra, Harmoniemusik also offered the flexibility of being suitable for both indoor and outdoor performance, and thus functioned well for entertaining as well as for the curious but popular custom of wooing a lover by hiring musicians to perform outside her window. While its two minuets and boisterous finale do bespeak the work’s dialogue with a tradition of music for outdoorsy entertainment, Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 for winds in B-flat major, K. 361, "Gran Partita" represents an unprecedented inflation of the scale and scope of Harmoniemusik. The nearly 50-minute piece for 13 instruments dwarfs the modest proportions of the genre’s earlier, lighter works, and even exceeds the length and ensemble size of Mozart’s other two great Viennese wind serenades in E-flat and C minor. Moreover, the Gran Partita achieves in its seven movements — particularly in the miraculous Adagio — an emotional profundity and compositional sincerity previously foreign to wind ensemble music. Although the Serenade is best known today by its colloquial name, the misspelled subtitle “Gran Partita” was actually added to the autograph by an unknown hand other than Mozart’s sometime after he finished the piece. The work is shrouded in further uncertainty regarding its date of composition and the occasion of its premiere; some scholars have posited that the piece was first performed at Mozart’s own wedding in 1782, while more recent evidence suggests Mozart composed the Serenade for a 1784 benefit concert for the clarinetist Anton Stadler. With his addition of a pair of basset horns, two extra French horns and a string bass (sometimes doubled by or substituted for a contrabassoon) to the traditional wind octet, Mozart fashioned a textural palate of orchestral proportions, whose impressive depth announces itself from the first gleaming chord.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello in G Minor, K. 516 in 1787, a trying year for his professional floundering in Vienna, underwhelming creative output, and his father’s serious illness. Letters to his father from this period reveal Mozart’s despondent outlook, and this Viola Quintet seems to reflect his personal despair, set as it is in the same G minor that frames some of Mozart’s other anguished works, including Pamina’s heartbroken aria over her loss of love and joy in The Magic Flute.

The pained Allegro opens with our familiar, proto-Dvořákian texture of two violins paired with viola. But unlike in the Terzetto, Mozart has fashioned a decidedly transparent, weightless voicing, as if to give the violin’s climbing melody a chance to leave the cruel world. Not surprisingly, the illusion of escape is a ruse, and soon enough the lower strings pull the violin back to earth.

Resisting courtly dance traditions, the Menuetto movement shrieks at its opening and continues in a declamatory manner that foreshadows the analogous movement of the later G minor Symphony No. 40, but does concede a heartfelt, weeping Trio at its midpoint.

As in many of Mozart’s late works, the slow movement here seems the emotional anchor of the work as a whole. The velvety, muted tones turn the focus inward as this Adagio ma non troppo explores the intersection of beauty and sorrow, love and pain.

When, on the heels of the previous breathtaking slow movement, throbbing eight-notes reveal another Adagio, the effect is poetic and disorienting. The first violin laments a mournful aria in G minor, its unending phrases ridding us of delusions that a sunnier Allegro will ever chase away these dark clouds — until it does. Somehow, though, the Allegro respite seems contained, less raucous than Mozart’s more celebratory movements, as if tempered by the more sentient reality presented in the rest of the piece.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Mozart can be said to have invented the soul of the clarinet, liberating the instrument from its early-Classical trumpet-like role, and realizing for the first time its potential for agility as well as lyrical cantabile. Although other wind instruments were further along in their development—the flute’s prehistoric origins make it one of the oldest instruments in existence, while the double reed instruments sport concertante works from such Baroque masters as Bach and Vivaldi—in Mozart’s time the winds were seen as cumbersome and generally relegated to tutti punctuations in the background of the orchestral fabric. Indeed, Mozart himself suggested to his publisher that the wind parts could be omitted from his piano concerti of 1782-1784 in order to facilitate sales. A sudden shift in Mozart’s orchestral writing occurred immediately after the radical experiment of 1784 in the present Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat Major, K. 452, as the wind instruments emerged as solo voices in his symphonies and piano concerti that followed. Evidently, this new medium took some work; surviving extensive sketches of the Quintet illustrate a degree of planning and revision rare for a composer known for his compositional spontaneity. Mozart would further enrich the wind repertoire with concertos and other chamber music for all five instruments of the modern woodwind quintet (even the flute, which Mozart purportedly disliked and is absent here). And if this flowering of music wasn’t evidence enough of a successful wind experiment, Mozart even wrote to his father that he considered the Quintet “the best work I have ever written.” A ringing endorsement of this lofty superlative came 12 years later in Beethoven’s own Quintet, Op. 16 in the same key, instrumentation and formal structure.

That the clarinet has become inextricably linked with such an impressive variety of styles and that it captured the hearts of so many master composers in its relatively short lifespan must be a testament to the instrument’s chameleon versatility, if not also to some universal appeal of its fundamental voice. It was, in fact, the instrument that most closely resembled the human voice according to Mozart, who himself can be said to have invented the soul of the clarinet. With his miraculous Concerto and chamber music, Mozart liberated the clarinet from its early-Classical trumpet-like role, and realized for the first time its lyrical, cantabile potential, its agility, and the vocal, operatic qualities inherent in the contrast between its registers. The uniquely vocal qualities of the clarinet found resonances in successive composers as well, as Schubert, that peerless architect of German art songs, singled out the clarinet to elevate to an equal plane as his soprano in Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock). For their part, Mendelssohn and Weber styled more operatic interpretations of the instrument’s persona, but clearly very much in line with the tradition initiated by Mozart. The clarinet would intersect with opera again in the second half of the 19th century, as clarinetist-composers engaged by Verdi and Mascagni milked the pyrotechnic capabilities of the instrument to create dazzling fantasies on beloved opera themes for advertising purposes.

Musicians outside the classical canon also embraced the clarinet for its vocal potential. The clarinet is virtually inseparable from the aesthetic identity of Jewish klezmer music, which uses it as a melodic instrument for its ability to imitate human laughs and sobs. As the Jews and Roma lived side-by-side in Eastern and Central Europe, so did their klezmer and Romani musical traditions rub against each other, and so the clarinet unsurprisingly figures prominently into gypsy music as well. Certain Hungarian classical composers provided notated estimations of the clarinet’s function in their native folk idiom, such as in the gypsy-inspired cadenzas in Zoltán Kodály’s orchestral suite, Dances of Galanta, or in Béla Bartók’s trio, Contrasts, for clarinet, violin and piano. Even Brahms, often judged a musical purist by his contemporaries, referenced the clarinet’s gypsy-klezmer heritage in the folksy, rhapsodic second movement of his Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115.

It is worth pausing to consider Brahms’ intimate, serendipitous relationship with the clarinet. Like Mozart before him and Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Poulenc and Nielsen after, Brahms came to the clarinet late in life, having intended to put down his pen after the triumph of the great G major Viola Quintet, Op. 111. It was only upon hearing the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld — in a performance of works by none other than Mozart and Weber — that Brahms was inspired to come out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. It is therefore to Mühlfeld that we owe those crowning masterpieces from Brahms’ twilight years, the glowing embers of his mature genius: not just the four sublime clarinet works (a Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Op. 114, the Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115, and two Sonatas, Op. 120), but the treasured piano music, Chorale Preludes and Four Serious Songs written in those years as well.

One of Brahms’ affectionate nicknames for Mühlfeld was “nightingale of the orchestra,” and he was neither the first nor the last to draw the comparison between the clarinet and birds. Whether channeling perky chirping or honeyed birdsong, composers from Beethoven (Pastoral Symphony) to Mahler (First Symphony) and Respighi (Pines of Rome) to Messiaen (Quartet for the End of Time) looked to the clarinet to play the role.

In France, the clarinet profited from a storied woodwind pedagogical tradition at the Paris Conservatory, and the school’s annual Concours nourished the instrument’s repertoire as composition professors penned new contest pieces each year. Incredibly, it was these rather prosaic conditions that gave birth to Debussy’s otherworldly Première Rhapsodie, a spellbinding work that the composer ultimately declared “one of the most pleasing [he had] ever written.”

Meanwhile, Debussy’s fellow Impressionist Maurice Ravel (who also availed himself of the clarinet in his chamber music: Introduction and Allegro and Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé) became acquainted with George Gershwin and fascinated by jazz, in which the clarinet also found itself at home. Indeed, in the collective conscious, Gershwin and the clarinet are practically synonymous, thanks to the iconic, wailing clarinet glissando that opens his Rhapsody in Blue. In addition to his sensational performances in the jazz idiom, Benny Goodman was also behind several of the most important clarinet commissions of the 20th century; Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata, and Bartók’s Contrasts are among some of the works written for the “King of Swing.” It is telling that the clarinet’s robust repertoire also sports such 20th-century landmark works as Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire; that the instrument so often finds itself in the hands of such masters surely points to its unique expressive qualities.

The diversity of the clarinet instrumental family also contributes to its versatility, and nowhere is the breadth of the clarinet’s relatives put on display like in the clarinet choir. If Mozart did, in fact, invent the soul of the clarinet, so, too, did his music for clarinet ensembles breathe life into the future genre of the clarinet choir. While still a far cry from the 27-piece clarinet assemblage that sprouted in Brussels 100 years after his death, Mozart’s works for three to five mixed members of the clarinet family seem to respond to the same homogeneity of timbre and extensive range that made the full-sized clarinet choir attractive in later centuries. Indeed, its uniform, reedy texture throughout its formidable range of up to six octaves has prompted some to point to the organ-like qualities of a full-range clarinet choir, an association that Guido Six tests in his arrangement of Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor featured on this summer’s “Clarinet Critical Mass” program.

The aforementioned Belgian band of clarinets was created in 1896 by Professor Gustave Poncelet at the Brussels Conservatory, and is generally considered the earliest true clarinet choir. It was after hearing Poncelet’s group — in an arrangement of none other than Mozart’s G minor Symphony — that Richard Strauss was inspired to include the entire instrument family in his orchestras: he did so in his 1909 opera Elektra, which calls for eight players of various clarinets and its derivatives.

In the United States, New York Philharmonic Principal Clarinetist Simeon Bellison spearheaded the most significant clarinet choir of its time, growing the ensemble from its humble beginnings as a quartet of his students in 1927, to a 75-member, mixed-gender choir by 1948. Sponsored by the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, Bellison’s Clarinet Ensemble appears in New York Philharmonic’s program archives as early as 1931 for performances at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, and received financial support from the orchestra for instrument commissions and member scholarships.

​The Clarinet Ensemble’s repertoire consisted of works written specifically for it, supplemented by arrangements of music of the great composers done by Bellison himself. One New York Philharmonic program from 1936 asserts that “the clarinet is the only wind instrument which can be assembled as an orchestral unit, owing to its colorful tone approximating the human voice, its technical flexibility and its long range.” Chamber Music Northwest’s Clarinet Celebration was designed to honor and affirm the storied tradition of the clarinet and its repertoire in a similar fashion to Bellison’s programming: an eclectic array of originals and adaptations bookended by Mozart, to whom we owe all of the instrument’s magnificent heritage.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

At the Shanghai Quartet’s 2008 premiere of his String Quartet No. 3 during the composer’s 75th birthday celebration, Krzysztof Penderecki announced from the stage the subtitle “Leaves of an unwritten diary,” suggesting an autobiographical program for the work. Written 40 years its predecessor, the Third String Quartet represents a striking stylistic departure from Penderecki’s earlier contributions to the genre.

The chilling Grave introduction sets the tone for this dark work, full of Penderecki’s characteristic bleakness and mechanical rage. A rabid, seemingly unrelenting waltz follows, but pregnant silences stop the hell-bent waltz dead in its tracks, and the dance grows more demented with each reiteration. Instead of being delineated by movements, this continuous quartet seems to collide head-on with different stylistic areas: the crazed waltz makes many repeat appearances between bodiless harmonic sonorities, haunting sul ponticello (on the bridge) tremolos in all four voices, and a memory of a Hutsul folk melody the composer’s father used to play on violin. As a potpourri of contrasting but always authentic styles, the single-movement quartet functions as a survey of sorts of Penderecki’s compositional activities since his previous quartet.

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Like Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Debussy and Nielsen before him, Poulenc’s music for clarinet was some of his last. Written just months before his death, Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata shares with Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, Bartók’s Contrasts and other landmark works a debt to Benny Goodman, who was responsible for many of the most important clarinet commissions of the 20th century. The King of Swing was slated to give the premiere of the Sonata at Carnegie Hall in April 1963 with the composer at the piano, but after a heart attack claimed Poulenc’s life in January that year, Leonard Bernstein joined Goodman for the memorializing performance instead. The piece itself represents a memorial of its own; Poulenc christened it with the dedication “to the memory of Arthur Honegger,” one of Poulenc’s colleagues in the Montparnasse composer group Les Six, the artistic disciples of enfants terribles Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. Seeking to move on from the grand Wagnerian and Debussian responses on either side of the fin-de-siècle artistic crisis, Les Six aimed to inflect modern music away from “high art” and toward the quotidian styles of folk and popular song, jazz, music-hall, children’s songs and operetta airs. The odor of popular music does indeed permeate Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata, with its percussive opening, its cool, wistful monotones, and its rambunctious wit. Finally, Poulenc declared, “the music hall was invading Art with a capital A.”

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music

Poulenc’s Mouvements perpétuels finds an unlikely companion in Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsodies; like Enescu, Poulenc was only 19 when he wrote the short piano piece, and like Enescu, Poulenc also misjudged posterity’s opinion of what he thought to be a trivial work. In his maturity, Poulenc predicted, “if people are still listening to my music in 50 years’ time it will be for my Stabat Mater rather than the Mouvements perpétuels.” As it turns out, Poulenc is celebrated today for both sides of his musical persona — “half monk and half naughty boy,” as one critic described him — and the present work, lighthearted as it may be, remains one of the composer’s most popular. The piece has an overall circular quality dressed in the urban charm of the early-century salons of Erik Satie (Poulenc’s teacher) and the Paris intelligentsia — all clever irony and understated beauty. Full of innocence, the first movement’s untroubled theme drifts downward over a chugging accompaniment. Even as the theme is refracted through heavy chromaticism, Poulenc cautions the performer, incolore (“colorless”), permitting only a passing observation of the theme’s contortions. The second movement’s pairing of a pseudo-folk melody in counterpoint with a slinking chromatic accompaniment seems reminiscent of the dual influences of Poulenc’s parents: his father’s Catholic piety (suggested by the modal, chant-like melody) with his mother’s cosmopolitan, artistic background in the chromatic bass. After the second movement’s finishing wink, the third movement crashes onto the scene with a stomping first theme before more the expansive, floating subjects that follow. Like the preceding movements, this one feels open-ended, as Poulenc again dodges firm closure to avoid a hard stop to the feeling of constant motion.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music

Sergei Rachmaninoff suffered a total nervous breakdown after the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony in 1897, plunging him into three years of depression and concomitant writer’s block—“Like the man who had suffered a stroke and for a long time had lost the use of his head and hands,” he described it. It was only through hypnosis that the composer was finally cured, administered by Dr. Nicholas Dahl, who chanted, “You will start to compose a concerto—You will work with the greatest of ease—The composition will be of excellent quality” in daily sessions between January and April of 1900. By that summer, Rachmaninoff felt that “new musical ideas began to stir” and resumed composition, completing the beloved Piano Concerto No. 2 within the next year. The work rehabilitated Rachmaninoff’s sullied reputation and was the first to spread his name to an international audience. In gratitude, Rachmaninoff dedicated the Concerto to Dr. Dahl.

His confidence restored, Rachmaninoff composed his Sonata in G minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 19 on the tailwind of the Piano Concerto’s success, in the summer of 1901. One would be forgiven for hunting for aftershocks of the composer’s psychological upheaval in the Sonata’s score, with its references to chant—if not the hypnotherapy kind, then at least the incense-perfumed hymns of the Russian Orthodoxy that colored Rachmaninoff’s life and work—and the conflict throughout the work between half-steps and whole-steps, or the modal fluidity by which burnished major sonorities slip into shadowy minor—a rather Freudian division of the musical self (In this reading, the mercurial second movement neatly echoes the menacing gallop and multiple personalities of Schubert’s Erlkönig.). Freud might also have detected in the throbbing third movement a provocative mixture between the language of sexual release and the sounds of the church: a certain exotic, “quivering harmonic ambivalence” woven with bell tones and solemn recitation, welling to a passionate climax. It is a profoundly big work, symphonic in scope and scale, sporting two full sonata-form movements as its bookends. The composer’s fabled pianism also looms large in the work, which could be convincingly characterized as a sonata for piano with cello accompaniment, rather than the other way around. Of course, neither description is fully satisfying; the work is a gem of pure chamber music—regrettably, the last piece of chamber music Rachmaninoff would compose, though he had another 42 years of life ahead of him.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Phoenix Chamber Music Festival

Given his exceptionally imaginative and sensitive musical language, it makes sense that Ravel harbored a sort of wide-eyed empathy for children; he was even known to retreat to the nursery to play on the floor with children when bored at adult parties. Although he eventually orchestrated the piece and augmented it for a ballet adaptation, Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite began as a four-hand piano duet for Mimi and Jean Godebski, ages six and seven. Each of the five movements invokes a different fairy tale by such French authors as Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy and Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, and the suite borrows its title from the colloquial name for one of Perrault’s collections of fables, “Mother Goose.” Ravel’s sparing but characterful piano writing bespeaks a musical scope that reflects the delicate innocence of childhood; these brief vignettes flirt curiously with fantasy, but their time runs out just before anything too serious can happen.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Ottorino Respighi lifted the text from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s morbid 1816 poem “The Sunset” for his work of the same title for string quartet (or string orchestra) and mezzo-soprano. Written during the art world’s pivotal post-Wagner years, a century after its source material, Il tramanto reads like a retelling of the fetishistic nocturnal fixation that gripped the star-crossed lovers Tristan and Isolde, a sort of Respighian Liebestod. Shelley’s poem chronicles a tragic romance between a lady and her youth, one that met its mortal end after the youth’s final musing, “‘Is it not strange…I never saw the sun? / We will walk here / To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.’” The echoes of Tristan are loud and clear in this image of the day as a destroyer of love, and like Wagner’s ill-fated lovers, Shelley’s pair only achieves their erotic reunion in the eternal night of death.​

Respighi’s timely resurrection of Shelley’s poem in a post-Romantic context also had resonances with the contemporary Italian Symbolist movement, and his syllabic vocal line sensitive to the idioms of spoken Italian recalls the innovative direct libretto setting of Debussy’s recent Pelléas et Mélisande. Respighi’s creation is intensely expressive, but bound up in the delicate intimacy of chamber music and perfumed with fleeting chromaticism — in this respect a far cry from the larger-than-life scale and more aggressive brand of harmony of Wagner. A crepuscular tenderness enswathes Il tramanto and seems a faithful realization of its affective essence: chamber music instead of opera, poetry instead of dramatic libretto.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

American composer Ned Rorem wrote his song cycle Ariel in New York in 1971 as a gift to the prolific soprano Phyllis Curtin, whose voice he remembered as “less beautiful than it was dramatic.” Rorem matched Curtin’s vocal grit to Sylvia Plath’s portrait of a woman’s tortured mind in five of her late poems, and he borrowed the cycle’s title from that of Plath’s 43-poem collection, posthumously published two years after her 1963 suicide. By and large, Plath’s work reflects her lifelong struggle with mental illness and self-harm, which she renders even more haunting through her stripped-down poetic style; her poems tend to be short, often consisting of terse, unrhymed stanzas and uncomplicated, but vivid, diction. Just as Plath grafts mundane images from everyday life and charges them with nightmarish significance, Rorem fashioned sparse textures out of relatively limited musical materials to yield an arresting emotional trajectory over the course of the five-song set. In his musical account of Ariel, Rorem retrogrades the published order of appearance of the five poems in the set (although this original 1965 version of Ariel was itself reordered and reconfigured by Plath’s estranged husband Ted Hughes), so that the song cycle begins with the published collection’s final poem, Words. The slashing dissonances that paint the opening “Axes” cue a general affective zone that Rorem will return to in all three of the cycle’s odd-numbered songs, a volatile sound-world of angular melodic writing, dissonant clusters and rather schizophrenic clarinet lines. By contrast, the second and fourth songs, Poppies in July and Poppies in October, represent hallucinatory oases, daydreams of narcotic dullness told with chilling detachment between the violent episodes that surround them. Lady Lazarus, the song cycle’s morbid last word, was actually the first poem of the collection that Rorem set to music. For her part, Plath mixes the title’s biblical allusion (Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead) with a complex of images derived from Nazism, male oppression and mythology. Rorem responds musically with oblique klezmer references (the augmented second is a salient feature of the movement’s harmonic makeup, and can be read as a marker of that clarinet-centric Jewish folk style) and machinelike instrumental writing that serves to antagonize the singer. Plath’s gruesome poem is commonly understood as a caustic, thinly fictionalized account of her own suicide attempts before an unsympathetic society (“The peanut-crunching crowd”). In 1962, the year before Plath ultimately took her own life, she described her poem to the BBC: “The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first.”

© Graeme Steele Johnson for The Graduate Center, CUNY

If the Quartettsatz offers an early glimpse of Schubert’s late style, then the Quintet in C Major for Two Violins, Viola, and Two Cellos, D. 956 represents its fullest expression. Completed in September of 1828, the work dates from the last months of Schubert’s life, which saw a remarkable flowering of varied, ingenious music even as the composer was succumbing to the syphilis that ultimately claimed his life that November at the age of 31 (The three late piano sonatas, the song collection Schwanengesang, and the lied Der Hirt auf dem Felsen for soprano, clarinet and piano were all also written in Schubert's final two months, crowning the short-lived composer’s massive catalog of over 1,500 compositions.).

Not unlike Schubert himself, the Cello Quintet teeters on the edge of life—with its pain and tragedy but also the rustic delights of the natural world—and celestial unreality, maybe the hereafter—a fantasy kept out of reach from the earthbound mortals who play, hear and, yes, compose this heavenly music. A quivering C major emerges from a distance. Distance, immediately—a conceptual conceit throughout the Quintet: a tantalizing barrier between where we find ourselves and the visions beyond our grasp; a length of travel, of wandering, as the Roma heard throughout the work do and as so much of Schubert’s music does, permanently in exile; and other times, as in the third measure, an unnervingly short distance, the narrow tightrope that separates the tonic purity of the “chord of nature” from its dissonant, diminished alter-ego lurking behind the mirror.

Much has been written about Schubert’s countercultural aesthetic and sexual identities and the traces of alienation they left on his music; several of his pieces share a wandering trope, including the “Wandrers Nachtlied,” Wanderer Fantasy for piano, and the searching, peripatetic song cycle Winterreise. Although not made as programmatically explicit, Schubert’s Cello Quintet musically reflects the same sense of exile from its inhospitable opening. Having been immediately blindsided by a wounding dissonance, the “home” key, as it is known, has lost its expected stability. Without the typically grounding effect of this opening material, the music must leave home in search of greener pastures, to be found in the Arcadian oasis of the second theme, sung in duet by the two cellos in tender thirds. Notably, Schubert spends nearly double the amount of time in this second thematic area as compared to the first—it is the second theme, not the first, that provides a stable place of rest, so much so that it even bleeds into the development space in place of the expected first theme. Or maybe it was all just a mirage, dreamed and then departed on the way through a turbulent midsection.

In the mid-movement outbursts of virtuosic fiddle licks, martial dotted rhythms and sudden shifts in tonality, Schubert imitates the passionate playing of the Roma bands that wandered throughout central Europe. Schubert must have felt a personal kinship with the nomadic Roma people, and in any case they were a familiar fixture of contemporary life in Vienna, with many nineteenth-century composers writing in the so-called Style Hongrois as a musical reference to the Roma’s Hungarian folk idiom.

The aroma of the Style Hongrois perfumes all four movements of Schubert’s Cello Quintet. In the breathtaking Adagio it is mixed with a unusually Beethovenian rhetorical quality: the movement opens surprisingly themeless for Schubert the great tunesmith. After having gifted us the touching second theme of the first movement, in the second movement Schubert trades melody for naked harmony. It is not the drones who accompany, but the outer voices, gazing upon the elemental clarity of harmonic color in quiet awe, only able to muster the same repeated syllable. The Roma fiddlers return in the central section, and Beethoven's terrifying motivic obsession is here too.

The rustic Scherzo also has its share of fiddling, while the outdoor voices of bagpipe drones and hunting horn calls place us on the road with the traveling Roma. Counterpointing this jovial scene is a hymn-like Trio with angular speech rhythms and soulful harmony, conjuring the mystery and oral history of folksong.

The Roma band has made it to the Austrian capital by the finale, which blends lilting Viennese waltz topics with the more raucous abandon of the Style Hongrois. But it is the music of the migrants that wins out in the end; though Vienna would become Schubert’s final resting place in two short months, neither he nor the Roma were to find the sense of belonging they searched for there.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Phoenix Chamber Music Festival

Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet bears the dedication “to my wife,” even though it was produced in 1908 during her affair with their friend and neighbor Richard Gerstl. Although this quartet is often cited as a revolutionary, forward-looking work, Schoenberg’s emotional state seems to have found its way to the surface in the late-Romantic brush strokes of rich tones and generous, Mahlerian textures. But the quartet’s emotional palette was not to shackle it to the bygone forms of centuries past; Wassily Kandinsky, who was so struck by this quartet that he began a friendship with Schoenberg the composer-painter, praised him for the “anti-geometric, antilogical way” of his “modern harmony.” He continued, “The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.” Then again, today’s ears will recognize this quartet as markedly tamer than the mid- and post-war works Schoenberg would compose only a few years later in his hallmark twelve-tone system.

In many ways, the piece represents a delicate, unsustainable balance of opposing poles — at once forging ahead into the anxiety of modernism but with one foot in the tradition of old-world folk songs, Viennese waltzes and the like, all in the context of the storied musical capital of Vienna. For the Brentano Quartet’s Mark Steinberg, it is this straddling of two centuries that forms the “central issue of the piece, familiar steps in an unfamiliar landscape.” Among these familiar steps is Schoenberg’s inclusion of poetry to be sung by soprano in the third and fourth movements, which parrots Mahler’s addition of the voice to the same movements of his Second Symphony. And last but not least, there is the large-scale picardy third that allows the piece to end in F-sharp major instead of minor, an unmistakable nod to the same harmonic motion over the course of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The ending lacks the Beethovenian sense of heroic triumph, but does represent a rare note of optimism and simple beauty for Schoenberg.

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Schubert’s landmark Octet for Winds and Strings in F major, D. 803, Op. 166 dates from 1824, the same year that produced the bleak “Rosamunde” and “Death and the Maiden” Quartets, and a miserable period of declining health and happiness for the composer. It is remarkable then, if counterintuitive, that Schubert left behind a work of such sustained verve and character in the midst of his own suffering. Schubert wrote the Octet on commission from Count Ferdinand Troyer, a nobleman, philanthropist and amateur clarinetist who requested a companion piece to Beethoven’s exceedingly popular Septet. Schubert stretched Beethoven’s orchestration with the addition of a second violin, but maintained his uncommon six-movement structure, including both a scherzo and a minuet, a theme and variations fourth movement, and slow introductions to the outer movements. Like in Beethoven, Schubert’s Octet also privileges the clarinet and violin as the primary solo instruments, but substantial solo material abounds for all instruments.

The initial movement, first poised and affected and then buoyant, articulates dotted figures as a unifying motive that threads the whole Octet. The tender Adagio flaunts Schubert’s endless melodic imagination as he lavishes the movement with theme after glimmering theme. A boisterous Scherzo restores the essential levity of the serenade tradition, music of the outdoors. The fourth movement spins clever, characterful variations out of a charmingly uncomplicated theme before the Menuetto marries the stately tradition inherited from 18th-century models with Schubert’s ever-vocal style. Again heeding Beethoven’s precedent, the fraught tremolos and throbbing chords of the Andante introduction to the finale signal a darker turn just before the jubilant Allegro that rounds out the work. The grandeur of the finishing chords aptly crown the Octet’s tremendous scope in instrumental forces, compositional breadth and emotional depth.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Franz Schubert’s Quartettsatz (Quartet Movement) in C minor, D. 703 was the composer’s first foray into the string quartet genre since his E major Quartet four years earlier. Written in 1820, the movement represents a fragment of a projected quartet that extended 41 bars into a second movement before being left unfinished for unknown reasons. The completed first movement offers a foretaste of Schubert’s mature style, which would give birth to three complete, late quartets in the coming years. The present movement deals in promises of hope, short-lived, dangling carrots that fool us into turning a blind eye to the dark, C minor clouds of Fate. The music opens practically themeless, a mess of uneasy, quivering sixteenth notes without preamble, seeming to have begun in the middle of things — as if our fate has already been predetermined. The graspless quality of the beginning and the searching triplets that follow makes the quick pivot to A-flat major and the stability of its triadic, tuneful theme all the more comforting. The violin whistles its carefree tune atop chugging triplets long enough to forget the anxiety of the opening, until the jolting interruption of the rehabilitated sixteenth notes. Schubert continues to tease the possibility of a happy ending, especially when the major mode universe returns first after the development, seeming for a moment to have skirted the threat of C minor. Not so in the Quartettsatz; the violins and viola have just optimistically evaporated into C major when Schubert drops in the sinister opening material for the finishing blow.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

The final years of Franz Schubert’s short life were plagued by the dehumanizing symptoms of syphilis; by the time of his untimely death at 31, he suffered from constant headaches, fever, swollen joints and mercury poisoning (mercury was a common treatment for syphilis), and was unable to retain solid food. Schubert’s syphilitic symptoms first appeared in 1823, five years before his death, and in March of the following year he wrote in anguish to a friend:

“I feel myself to be the most unfortunate, the most miserable being in the world. Think of a man whose health will never be right again, and who from despair over the fact makes it worse instead of better; think of a man, I say, whose splendid hopes have come to naught, to whom the happiness of love and friendship offers nothing but acutest pain, whose enthusiasm…for the Beautiful threatens to disappear…

​My peace is gone, my heart is heavy,

I find it never, nevermore…

so might I sing every day, since each night when I go to sleep I hope never again to wake, and each morning merely reminds me of the misery of yesterday.”

The dismal Goethe referent of Schubert’s letter is lifted from the opening lines of a poem that he set to music ten years earlier, yielding “Gretchen am Spinnrade”. Echoes of that song’s famous perpetual motion accompaniment resonate in the similarly-contoured second violin pattern that threads the first movement of the String Quartet No. 13 in A Minor, D. 804, Op. 29 (“Rosamunde”), perhaps a subtle cue for the emotional context of the work. Indeed, the A minor Quartet received its premiere just two weeks before Schubert dated his pained note, and its deeply personal, melancholic writing seems to reflect a similar sentiment. The Quartet also borrows musical material from another of Schubert’s songs, whose bleak text begins, “Beautiful world, where art thou?”

In spite of the despair that pervades much of the work, it is the rare glimpse of sunlight in the untroubled theme of the second movement that gives the Quartet its nickname. That theme comes from Schubert’s earlier incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and he would later recycle it yet again for his B-flat Major piano Impromptu. The theme’s dactylic rhythmic profile seems a clear nod to the hypnotic dirge of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. But whereas that funereal movement in Beethoven represents a solemn turn in the midst of an overall exuberant work, Schubert inverts that affective paradigm by tempering his second movement’s reprieve with the grief of the surrounding music.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Franz Schubert wrote "Der Tod und das Mädchen", D. 531 (Death and the Maiden) in 1817 on a text by Matthias Claudius. The tolling bells of the piano’s opening theme announce the ominous scene illustrated in the poem, made more so by the song’s eery, ambiguous ending in a sunlit D major. In this respect, the song recalls Schubert’s setting of “Erlkönig” from two years earlier, which also chronicles a sinister force behind a saccharine guise.

Schubert’s String Quartet in D Minor, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden” takes its name from the ceaseless tolling of that same death knell from the earlier song, now droning inexorably throughout the second movement’s variations. This unrelenting sense of dread infects all four movements—all in the minor mode—from the alternately snarling and trembling Allegro, to the angular, disturbed Scherzo, to the panicked, galloping tarantella of the finale. The oppressively grim orientation of the Quartet as a whole coincides with Schubert’s confrontation of his own mortality; he wrote the piece in 1824, racked with what was likely tertiary stage syphilis and convinced that he was dying.

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Clara Schumann’s precocious musical ability gave her an early start to a 60-year performing career that would intersect with some of history’s most celebrated musical figures. Robert Schumann, her future husband, was so struck by a nine-year-old Clara’s piano playing that he abandoned the study of law to take music lessons from her father. An impressed Paganini offered to appear in concert with the child prodigy, and at 16 she premiered her concerto under Mendelssohn’s baton. Chopin urged Liszt to see her play, and she later developed a deep friendship with Brahms. These examples illustrate her unique position in musical history, but it is an unfortunate oversight that Clara is so often defined in relation to the men around her. Clara’s legacy is omnipresent today in the concert practices she codified by example in her 1,300-odd performances: she was one of the first pianists to perform from memory, and her championing of her husband’s compositions and other “serious” contemporary music fostered a culture of reverence for the archetypal master-composer that still prevails today. While the C minor Scherzo exhibits the flash of her earlier concert programs, its middle section is imbued with a mature lyricism that rivals that of her Romantic admirers.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Shostakovich’s late adoption of the Communist Party in 1960 has been variously interpreted as an act of free will, cowardly resignation, or political coercion (allegedly by blackmail and with pressure from Krushchev himself). The widely-held belief that Shostakovich did not join the Party of his own accord privileges an autobiographical reading of his String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, written that summer in Dresden over just three days. Shostakovich’s own words lend support to that angle; he hinted to one friend that the quartet was to be a sort of suicide note, and wrote to another, “When I die, it’s hardly likely that someone will write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write it myself.” If we are to believe the composer, it appears that he counted himself among the “victims of fascism and war,” to whose memory he actually dedicated the Quartet.

Shostakovich’s music makes the message almost as explicit as do his words. The piece is mosaicked throughout with his DSCH musical monogram (translated from German: the pitches D, E-flat, C, B) and brazenly conspicuous self-quotations of some of his best-known pieces: the First, Eighth and Tenth Symphonies, Cello Concerto No. 1 and Piano Trio No. 2, to name just a few. It is indeed curious that Shostakovich would parrot such iconic works of his. An analogous issue dissuades some directors from casting actors who are too famous to be seen in new roles with fresh eyes; a musical quote of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for example, would surely corrupt the artistic autonomy of its new context. But in the Eighth String Quartet, Shostakovich’s autographed self-referencing is by design. The effect is something like hearing the horrors of war directly from the mouth of Shostakovich himself, even while he falls in line, lips closed, out of self-preservation.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Shostakovich’s Eleventh String Quartet received its Leningrad premiere in May 1966 on a program that also featured Shostakovich himself at the piano, the last time he would perform in public. After the concert he collapsed and suffered a heart attack, spending the remainder of his life battling chronic ill health and polio. Having witnessed firsthand the horrors of two world wars, Shostakovich was no stranger to the issue of mortality in his music, but the subject of the Eleventh Quartet is not the composer; he had another nine years left in him, and still refused to give up cigarettes and vodka. Rather, Shostakovich wrote the Quartet in memory of Vasily Shirinsky, the late second violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, which premiered 13 of his 15 string quartets and worked closely with the composer for almost four decades.

Shirinsky’s death in 1965 marked the Quartet’s first personnel change in its then 42-year history, and Shostakovich gives voice to the gaping hole left by an empty chair by frequently pitting a lone solo instrument against the rest of the ensemble — one alone has departed, “and then there were three.” The naked, searching violin of the opening is one such example, gradually shadowed by the throbbing chorus of the remaining voices, icy, desolate, lost. The first movement bleeds into an unfeeling, robotic Scherzo, made even hollower by perfunctory glissandi passed around the ensemble. The movement flatlines on a vibrationless open string in the viola, followed by a triptych (united by a constant pulse) of raw, artless catharsis: deranged slashing at the strings, a sort of demented take on “Flight of the Bumblebee,” and a scowling, martial section upended by a maddening chirping in, significantly, the second violin. Snarling in the depths of their range, the viola and cello announce the tortured Elegy, the emotional heart of the piece. After such a profound expression of grief, the fatigued Finale presents a bleak look at life after loss. Pallid and fractured, the movement offers no resolution: the lower voices abandon the violin on its stratospheric C, and it ends alone, morendo (dying).

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Strauss wrote his posthumously titled and published Four Last Songs in 1948, the year before his death. While the 84-year-old composer did go on to compose the song “Malven” later that same year, the Four Last Songs are commonly viewed as his swan song, and their texts (by Joseph von Eichendorff and Hermann Hesse) and musical settings bespeak a quiet acceptance of the end of his long time on Earth. Without a trace of decadence or complexity, the songs glow with an aura of serene gratitude for life, enswathed in a most personal, ethereal lyricism. The radiant orchestral setting of the original makes prominent use of the horn in consort with the vocal line, a metaphor for Strauss’ hornist father and soprano wife. Strauss devised another self-reference in “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset), traditionally performed last in the set: after the singer utters the poem’s final line, “Ist dies etwa der Tod?” (“Is this perhaps death?”), Strauss quotes the seven-note “transfiguration theme” from his Death and Transfiguration, composed 60 years earlier. The four-song collection neatly frames Strauss’ lifelong relationship with the voice, beginning with the first song he wrote at age six, and ending in the elegiac farewell of the Four Last Songs.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

The Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev launched his Ballets Russes company in 1908, hoping to capitalize on cosmopolitan Parisians’ appetite for the exotic by engaging other expat artists from his faraway homeland. His aim was to synthesize works of art, theater, music and dance by Russian artists into a unified whole, a sort of Franco-Russian reincarnation of the spirit behind Wagner’s 19th century Gesamtkunstwerke.

After the breakdown of agreements with other composers and under pressure from approaching deadlines, Diaghilev took his ballet concept for The Firebird to a fledgling, 27-year-old Igor Stravinsky. The ballet was to fuse two of Russia’s most famous legends, the Firebird and Kaschei the Immortal. Stravinsky responded by concocting a hybrid between the folk influences and orchestration techniques he inherited from his Russian predecessors, and the piquant colors being explored by French modernists. To borrow an apt metaphor from the composer Constant Lambert, Stravinsky “applied the rejuvenating influence of Debussy’s impressionism to the by now somewhat faded Russian fairytale tradition in much the same way that one pours a glass of port into a Stilton.”

Stravinsky’s formidable feats of musical depth and scope in his score, made more impressive by the fact that this was his first large-scale work for orchestra, earned him a fruitful collaborative relationship with Diaghilev and an ecstatic public response to The Firebird — decidedly more favorable than the riotous reception that greeted The Rite of Spring, which the two partners would produce three years later. Newfound fame and further successful collaborations notwithstanding, Stravinsky eventually found himself in unstable financial straits in the wake of the First World War. Having signed an exclusivity agreement with Diaghilev on the rights of the ballet, Stravinsky could only make money off of concert performances of his orchestral suite to The Firebird. But this 1911 suite, scored for the same massive orchestra of quadruple winds and three harps as the original ballet version, was hardly financially feasible for groups in post-war Europe. He thus reorchestrated the work in 1919, paring it down to a more manageable-sized orchestra, and creating the version most often heard today.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music​

Even in the context of a general trend of increasing specificity in musical notation over time, Igor Stravinsky stands out as a touchstone of an especially micromanaged notational style. Rare in his scores are notes unadorned with meticulous articulation, dynamic or character instructions, a reflection of the composer’s hostility to any interpretation on the performer’s part. In a discussion of the present Octet for Winds, Stravinsky wrote, “To interpret a piece is to realise its portrait, and what I demand is the realisation of the piece itself and not of its portrait.” Rather, Stravinsky conceived of performers as “executants” of the composer’s emotive object, and in the Octet he steered clear of what he thought overly expressive string instruments, “less cold and more vague” than their wind cousins. As one of Stravinsky’s early forays into neoclassicism, the 1923 Octet sounds strikingly buttoned-up next to the primitivism of The Rite of Spring from the previous decade, but its angular melodic lines and hobbling pulse betray Stravinsky’s sardonic take on past forms.

​© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest

Clarinetists today owe much of the instrument’s star-studded repertoire to a series of fortuitous relationships between composers and virtuosos, the muses behind the masterpieces: Anton Stadler for Mozart, Richard Mühlfeld for Brahms, and Benny Goodman for Bartók, Copland and Poulenc, to name just a few. Few clarinet collaborations were as fruitful, however, as the partnership between Carl Maria von Weber and the German clarinetist Heinrich Baermann, for whom the composer wrote a concertino, two concertos, a quintet for clarinet and strings, and the Silvana Variations, Op. 33. Baermann’s playing evidently captured the attention of Weber’s contemporaries as well, inspiring clarinet dedications from the likes of Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Danzi.

This flowering of clarinet works early in the 19th century coincided with significant developments in the inchoate instrument’s mechanics. The clarinet as we know it was still a work in progress, and its role as a solo instrument was a revelation of only the recent past. It was Mozart—as recently as his swan song Clarinet Concerto of 1791—who has been said to have invented the soul of the clarinet, liberating the instrument from its early-Classical trumpet-like role, and realizing for the first time its lyrical, cantabile potential, its agility, and the vocal, operatic qualities inherent in the contrast between its registers. Shortly before meeting Weber just 20 years later, Baermann received a 10-key instrument from makers Griessling and Schlott that allowed for newfound facility in chromatic passages. Furthermore, Baermann departed from the established tradition of touching the reed to the top lip, championing instead the practice of playing with the reed on the bottom lip, as is done today. Baermann’s modern embouchure concept likely allowed for greater control over his tone-color; indeed, commenters such as the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung lauded the warmth of Baermann’s tone, “which has not the slightest strain or shrillness in it, both of which are so common among clarinetists.”

Just as his clarinet works gave rise to a new generation of music for the instrument, Mozart loomed large in Weber’s personal history as well. Mozart’s marriage to Weber’s cousin Constanze must have stoked his father’s Mozartean aspirations for the young composer. But while the young Weber shared Mozart’s precocious ability as a composer, pianist and conductor, his early career stopped short of the celebrity Mozart had achieved as a child. Weber hit a low point in 1810 when he was imprisoned on embezzlement charges and subsequently banished from Württenberg. Visiting numerous German cities over the next year, Weber met Baermann in Munich, where he served as principal clarinetist in the court orchestra of King Maximilian I.

The encounter quickly proved serendipitous for all parties. In the span of six days, Weber dashed off the Concertino, Op. 26, which joins a portentous introduction to a jaunty theme and variations set. In the Concertino, as in the clarinet works that followed it, Weber achieved a remarkably dramatic marriage of Baermann’s technical dexterity and vocal tone-color manipulation. In addition to providing an early foretaste of Weber’s later success as an opera composer, this mingling of clarinet coloratura and aria, as it were, delighted the Bavarian king, who promptly commissioned Weber for two full-scale concertos.

Whereas the Concertino unfolds in a single movement—the ominous introduction giving way to an untroubled theme in E-flat major, whose ensuing variations snowball in virtuosity—both of Weber’s concertos take up the traditional three-movement form. Inside that basic structure, however, Weber’s movements make room for more than their share of peculiarities. The opening movement of the F minor Concerto, Op. 73, for instance, defies the dictates of the expected sonata form, most brazenly by the clarinet’s dodging each of the themes suggested by the orchestra. Instead of picking up the martial theme offered by the low strings at the movement’s outset, the clarinet enters with a weeping melody of its own, con duolo (“with pain”). As the orchestra sidesteps to D-flat major, the clarinet effortlessly invents another new theme overhead, and again introduces new material in the A-flat major section that follows. Spouting yet-unheard themes at practically every entrance, the clarinet in this movement seems the personification of Mozart’s melodic facility—as if to say to Weber’s ambitious father, “I can do it, too!” After yet another new idea from the clarinet at the movement’s midpoint, Weber backs into the exposition’s themes in reverse order; scholars have since termed this device the “tragic” reverse recapitulation for the way it subverts expectations and invokes a tradition of tragic works initiated by none other than Haydn and Mozart.

Forgetting the tragic for the moment, the honeyed aria of the Adagio ma non troppo leaves the clarinet to fulfill its first movement urges for long-breathed melody unimpeded. A frightening outburst seems to glance backward at the movement left behind, but after the dreamy horn trio that follows, the tumult of the Allegro and its aftershock are but distant memories. Just in case there was any doubt, the near-slapstick gaiety of the third movement Rondo dispels any pretense of seriousness; it’s all fun and games and clarinet acrobatics until the piece’s end.

Following on the heels of the previous two works for clarinet and orchestra, Weber’s Second Concerto, Op. 74 only gets as far as the clarinet’s initial entrance before betraying its courtly humor. Its annunciatory gesture—an unsingable, three-octave nosedive before a scurrying scale back to the top—seems a caricature of operatic histrionics. In turn, the ensuing movement is thoroughly virtuosic, ending with bottle-rocket arpeggios that nudge the ceiling of the clarinet’s range.

The emotional core of the Concerto, the Romanza takes a turn inward in a strikingly explicit acknowledgement of Weber’s operatic impulse. An agitated Recitative splits two sections of aria, where once again it is difficult to resist a glance toward Mozart; his “Ach, ich fühl’s” from The Magic Flute sets out the same anguished G minor in throbbing 6/8 meter as in the present movement. Pamina’s kindred aria echoes here as a sort of unheard voice for Weber’s textless, inconsolable clarinet: “love’s happiness is fled forever,” she sings in Mozart.

The second movement’s sobs transform into the breathless offbeats that inaugurate the jocular Alla Polacca, a Polish dance on the order of similar movements in Chopin and Beethoven. In the spirit of those pianistic composers, the cascading sextuplets that crown the Concerto seem almost better suited for the keyboard than the clarinet; even today, Weber’s writing continues to imagine unforeseen possibilities for the instrument.

© Graeme Steele Johnson for Ricardo Morales / Centaur Records