Jörg Widmann & Mitsuko Uchida

Solo and Duo, Sonata and Fantasy

An Evening with Jörg Widmann and Mitsuko Uchida

Thomas May

The clarinet and the piano are such familiar instruments that it can come as a surprise to realize how recently they were introduced. Indeed, it was not until near the beginning of the 18th century— curiously, at roughly around the same time—that both instruments emerged on the scene. Credit for their creation has traditionally been ascribed, respectively, to a woodwind maker from Nuremberg, Johann Christoph Denner, and the Tuscan Keeper of the Instruments for the Medici family, the Paduan Bartolomeo Cristofori.

Mozart played a significant role in making the clarinet an integral member of the modern orchestra, though he began implementing the relatively new instrument as part of his full orchestral apparatus only in the 1780s. He likewise established greatly influential models for the use of the clarinet in chamber music. These find an echo in Brahms’s late-in-life fascination with the instrument, a beloved example of which opens this program.

While Brahms’s reverence for Classical tradition shapes the Sonata in F minor, the composition also exploits his gift for deriving complex structures from simple ideas, using advanced techniques that point into the musical future. They were admired and closely studied by Arnold Schoenberg, for example, whose former student Alban Berg is also represented on the program with his brief but powerfully resonant Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano. Brahms’s champion and mentor, Robert Schumann, also explored the combination of clarinet and piano in his Fantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces) of 1849, which exhibit a Romantic preoccupation with capturing the fluid imagination through what biographer John Daverio calls “cycles of poetic miniatures.” Franz Schubert, a composer for whom Mitsuko Uchida has shown profound affinity, in turn helped pave the way toward this aesthetic with the concentrated expression of his late-period Impromptus.

Tonight’s program thus traces a wide arc of developments in music history through the lens of the clarinet and piano, including two works that represent contemporary responses to these traditions. As an actively performing composer, Jörg Widmann recalls the dual musical personalities of Mozart himself, who was celebrated as a keyboard virtuoso while composing his series of pathbreaking concertos for his own performance. Written for Uchida, Widmann’s Sonatina facile pays tribute, though spiked with brilliant irony, to his Austrian predecessor. His Fantasy for Solo Clarinet meanwhile juxtaposes a similar relationship between the Romantic past and its love of the poetic imagination with a contemporary sensibility.

A Late-Life Awakening

Johannes Brahms initially intended to retire from his career as a composer with his Op. 111 String Quintet of 1890. Yet—in one of music history’s most striking examples of a composer being inspired by the specific artistry of a performer—an encounter with the playing style of the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld moved him to reconsider. Mühlfeld had started out as a violinist with the Meiningen Court Orchestra but later became its principal clarinet. Located in central Germany, Meiningen hosted several important Brahms premieres in the 1880s. During a visit in 1891, the composer was especially drawn to the beauty of Mühlfeld’s playing and wrote two pieces for him: the Clarinet Trio Op. 114 and the Clarinet Quintet Op. 115. A few years later, in 1894, he composed a pair of clarinet sonatas (Op. 120) that became his last major pieces of chamber music. Brahms suffered the deaths of several close friends around this time, and a sense of melancholy imbues these late works. After giving some private performances of the new pieces together, he and Mühlfeld premiered them in public in Vienna in 1895.

The first movement of the Sonata in F minor builds organically from the waltz-like idea played in unison at the outset by the piano, while the clarinet enters with the first theme proper in this passionate movement built from powerful contrasts. The slow movement unfolds in basic song form, its lyrical eloquence exploiting the clarinet’s warmth. The main melodic idea is separated by a faster middle section and then repeated in the final part (where the piano writing becomes more elaborate).

Brahms turns to his favorite intermezzo format—lighter than a scherzo—for the third movement, also in tripartite form and again gently alluding to the rhythms of the waltz. Even though the rondolike Vivace concludes the sonata in F major, it remains tinged occasionally with hints of the late-style pensiveness characteristic of the first movement.

Berg as Miniaturist

“Alban Berg is an extraordinarily gifted composer, but the state he was in when he came to me was such that his imagination apparently could not work on anything but lieder. Even the piano accompaniments to them were songlike. He was absolutely incapable of writing an instrumental movement or inventing an instrumental theme.” So wrote Arnold Schoenberg about one of his two bestknown students. Even though Berg’s period of formal studies with him concluded in 1911 after seven years, the young composer continued to crave approval from his mentor, whom he revered as a figure of father-like authority.

Composed in 1913, the Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano Op. 5 (which he dedicated to his former teacher) may be among the recent endeavors Schoenberg had in mind when he issued a severe, traumatizing rebuke to Berg in a meeting they had in Berlin in early summer of that year. One of his critiques (though this is not certain) appears to have been of Berg’s turn to miniature forms. As the Berg scholar Douglas Jarman writes, the Four Pieces take to even further extremes the miniaturism of his recent Altenberg Songs (which had caused a famous scandal concert in March 1913), “compress[ing] large-scale dramatic gestures into tiny forms.” They “represent the furthest step Berg took in renouncing distinct thematic and motivic features in favor of a music whose material is generated from the manipulation of small cells …” The pieces were first performed in public on October 17, 1919 in Vienna.

In sharp contrast to the sense of objective distance conveyed in the miniatures of Anton Webern (the other famous Schoenberg student), Berg’s clarinet pieces are still rooted in the world of Romantic expressivity—above all in the feelings of despair they communicate. The grouping of four pieces, with inner parts that could be perceived as a slow movement and a scherzo, have naturally encouraged some commentators to perceive a hidden four-movement sonata plan. Berg places stringent demands on the clarinetist, from sotto voce notes high in the register to flutter-tongue gestures. Schoenberg’s observation about Berg’s lieder predisposition certainly holds true with this music, which seems at times to touch on the edge of song, the words only remaining undisclosed.

Portrait of the Artist as a Very Young Man

A familiar presence at the Pierre Boulez Saal and a member of the Barenboim-Said Akademie faculty, Jörg Widmann was most recently on the program here last June for the world premiere of Labyrinth IV, a work for soprano and ensemble. But the Fantasy for Solo Clarinet gives us a glimpse of this remarkable artist from very early in his career—in both his capacities as a performer and a composer. Written by the 20-year-old Widmann in 1993 and premiered by him on Bavarian Radio in March 1994, the Fantasy represents what the clarinetist considers his first real piece for his own instrument, drawing on his experience playing Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet (1919) as well as the “tonal innovations that were not seen in music before Carl Maria von Weber’s notation for the clarinet.” Widmann’s attitude toward virtuosity here is both refreshingly off-the-cuff and ironic, unexpectedly blending Romantic mannerisms —the concept of a rhapsodic Fantasy itself being prime Romantic real estate, and the score even forsakes the use of bar lines—with hints of jazz, klezmer, and dance music. He describes his Fantasy as implying “a small, imaginary scene that unities dialogues from different people who are in close proximity, in the spirit of the commedia dell’arte.”

During Franz Schubert’s brief life, the growth of the middleclass market for amateur pianists helped encourage the emergence of miniature forms in lieu of what by now seemed the old-fashioned genre of the piano sonata. Lighter fare such as dances and atmospheric pieces were intended to meet this demand.

Schubert’s two sets of Impromptus (D 899 and D 937) both date from the latter part of 1827, the year before he died. His autograph score numbers these eight pieces consecutively (I–IV and V–VIII, respectively), suggesting a two-part anthology or a sequel, though each is so distinctive in character that all eight clearly seem intended as self-standing pieces. His publisher Haslinger added the title “Impromptus” to the first set, rejecting the second set as “unmarketable”—so little did they conform to his lightweight, modestly demanding, populist notion of the miniature. But the term “impromptu” is misleading, according to Robert Schumann, to the extent that it suggests a spontaneous fantasy or improvisation. In general, such short-form pieces were “well-suited to performances by Schubert himself at social gatherings,” writes the biographer Brian Newbould, referring to the Schubertiades with like-minded friends. Yet these works “sometimes touch the world of the sonata, just as they often embody the dance spirit.”

The first, in C minor, stands out from its companions in its reference to vestigial Classical forms (the others are in ternary form). It might be viewed as a kind of miniature double variation or even a freer sonata form. The opening theme, solemn and like a funeral march, acquires a more violent accompaniment by the end and is contrasted with warmly lyrical material.

Widmann’s Difficult Sonatina facile

While Jörg Widmann conceived the Fantasy for his own performance on the instrument that is his alter ego, he tailored the Sonatina facile for his colleague Mitsuko Uchida—in both cases putting a very personal stamp on the concept of a “display piece.” The pianist commissioned the work together with Carnegie Hall and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie—where she premiered it during the new hall’s opening week, on January 18, 2017.

A deep, abiding admiration for the music of Mozart is a link between both artists, and Widmann grounds his piece for Uchida in a nod to her status as one of the finest Mozart interpreters we have today. The title alludes to the Piano Sonata in C major K. 545 from 1788, which Mozart described in his composition catalogue as being intended “for beginners”—which is why it is sometimes known as his “Sonata facile.” (Incidentally, on the same day, he entered his great Symphony in E-flat major K. 543.)

Widmann goes further by borrowing Mozart’s three-movement structure, even using the same movement headings (Allegro – Andante – Rondo). In the Allegro and Rondo, he moreover grafts thematic ideas from K. 545 into his composition—or perhaps it should be viewed the other way around: he attaches his riffs to this material as a basis. But Widmann recontextualizes comfortably familiar tropes from Mozart and the Classical era within an all-styles-always-available postmodernist perspective. Uchida has made an advanced art of probing the deceptive “simplicity” of Mozart’s musical language—which is anything but simple to perform persuasively. Similarly, Widmann plays with the concept of simplicity by ironically juxtaposing outrageously difficult technical demands and “showy” figuration.

The term “sonatina” is itself disarming. It means a “lighter” sonata that forsakes a more rigorous development of ideas as well as, simply, a sonata that is smaller in scale. Yet Widmann jolts the listener back and forth unexpectedly into different stylistic registers, including a kind of speeded-up time capsule of music history (references to Beethoven’s late-style trills and to Boulez’s restless development, for example). But for all the complications thereby introduced, the ultimate demand made on the pianist is to pull these off in a way that is never less than entertaining.

Fantasy as “Counterforce”

In 1849, the revolution against the old regime that was sweeping through Europe at last arrived in Dresden, where Robert Schumann was living. Even so, this turned into what the composer described as his “most fruitful year,” adding: “It seemed as if the outer storms drew people to look inward, and only therein did I find a counterforce against the forces breaking in so frightfully from without.”

The Fantasy Pieces Op. 73, which Schumann originally scored for clarinet and piano, took just two days to compose. In an effort to increase their marketability, he allowed for alternative instrumentation, with either violin or cello replacing the clarinet part. The title refers to a concept of great significance for the early Romantics, and for Schumann in particular: that of the fantasy, or the power of imagination, when it is channeled into musical form. Fantasy was perceived as an essentially poetic vehicle able to transport the listener to a higher, more enraptured state of awareness. Although there is no particular program to this composition, Schumann, an avid lover of literature, was intent on evoking the kinds of intimate emotions that he also associated with lyric poetry.

Overall, the Fantasy Pieces do trace a recognizable emotional arc. Despite their seeming spontaneity of gesture, the three pieces in this set are linked through subtle thematic connections. Each one likewise unfolds in a simple but robust song-form pattern, which gives them a further lyrical dimension. All three share the tonic of A, with the first starting in A minor and suggesting a tender melancholy. The other two shift to A major, as the second piece lightens in mood and alternately spotlights the clarinet and the piano. “Quickly, with fire” is Schumann’s indication for the third piece, which echoes some of the melancholy from the first but is dominated by reinvigorating passion.