Nikolaj-Szeps Znaider & Robert Kulek

Form and Fantasy

Works for Violin and Piano

Gavin Plumley

According to his detractors, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born with a silver (even gold) spoon in his mouth. Certainly, the composer’s father Julius’s role as chief music critic of the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna guaranteed him audiences with the leading cultural figures of the time, including Mahler, Strauss, and Puccini. And yet, for his supporters, both then and now, Korngold’s talent entirely matched early interest in his work—from a very young age, he revealed technical mastery as well as a generous gift for melody. Korngold’s music for Much Ado About Nothing dates from the same period as his hugely successful opera Die tote Stadt, written with his father as librettist (albeit under a judicious pseudonym). A production of Shakespeare’s play had been planned for the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1919, but production costs ran high and it had to be mounted instead at the Schlosstheater at Schönbrunn the following year. Korngold provided the score, but then had to adapt the incidental music when the run was extended and the original chamber orchestra (including members of the Vienna Philharmonic) was no longer available.

This second iteration provided the basis for a series of later suites. Cutting the chattering Overture, the violin and piano version opens with “The Maiden in the Bridal Chamber,” a movement that originally accompanied Hero’s wedding preparations. The music hints at both her excitement and her trepidation, given the defamatory accusations she will receive from her beloved Count Claudio. Hero’s dishonor is investigated by Dogberry, the ineffectual constable in charge of the night watch in Messina. Korngold introduces him and his equally useless sidekick, Verges, with a wonderfully pompous march. A very different mood is struck in the slowly waltzing Intermezzo, “Scene in the Garden,” as Beatrice and Benedict’s animosity falls away, reflected in the latter’s heartfelt words, “Serve God, love me, and mend.” The suite closes with a virtuoso hornpipe, taken from one of the play’s party scenes, with characteristically Shakespearean tales of mistaken identity.

Just a month and a half before Korngold’s birth in Brno in May 1897, the Central European musical community had witnessed the death of Johannes Brahms. He had been indelibly associated with the greatest musical institutions in the capital of the AustroHungarian Empire, lauded by its critics, not least Julius Korngold’s predecessor Eduard Hanslick, and its public alike. And Brahms had similarly staunch advocates among the younger generation, not least Schoenberg and his brother-in-law, Zemlinsky. Yet despite such contentment, Brahms often escaped the city during the summer. The Carinthian town of Pörtschach, situated on the Wörthersee, proved a particularly restorative and, moreover, inspirational place of solace.

Based on the northern side of a lake that would, later, provide Mahler with a stimulating environment, Brahms spent the summers of 1877, 1878 and 1879 in Pörtschach. There, he produced some of his greatest compositions, including the Second Symphony and the Violin Concerto, as well as Hungarian Dances, various other works for piano, the motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen?, and several songs. It was while he was working on the Violin Concerto, superseding his plans to write a second piano concerto—that particular project would have to wait until 1881—that Brahms began another piece for violin, although with piano rather than orchestral accompaniment. He completed the Sonata in G major Op. 78 the following summer and it was first performed in Bonn on November 8, 1879.

The work has long been known as the “Regenlied-Sonate” (“rain song sonata”), due to its allusions to two of Brahms’s Op. 59 songs, Regenlied and Nachklang, both with texts by his friend Klaus Groth. Their identical opening melody is the source of the restive music at the beginning of the sonata’s finale, while Regenlied also provides the impetus for the third of the three subjects heard in the exposition of the first movement.

The Sonata begins, however, with a seemingly untrammeled pastoral mood, familiar from the Second Symphony that Brahms had completed in Pörtschach in 1877. As such, the tempo marking of Vivace ma non troppo may appear at odds with the initially gentle, tolling chords of the piano. But as the violin adds its curling, falling first subject, the accompaniment begins to circle and the pace and cross-rhythms, though rarely the dynamic, increase. The second subject, in the dominant, sees the two instruments coming together for a particularly ardent melody, marked “con anima.” And then follows the more faltering third subject, evoking Regenlied and its seaside memories from childhood, experienced during a summer storm. Fittingly, more thunderous thoughts then emerge in the development, just as in the first movement of the Second Symphony, though the recapitulation soothes all and builds to an outspoken coda.

The second movement is more reserved—“innig,” Brahms’s idol Schumann might have written. The piano takes the melodic lead, with a chorale-like melody in E-flat major. Some of the rhythmic discrepancies witnessed in the first movement return as the view darkens, marked by a shift towards the surprising key of B minor (again stated in the first movement). But as the music modulates back to the tonic, the melody passes to the violinist, who speaks with yet more heartfelt tones. The finale begins in a melancholy, even quietly fretful, mood, as the anacrusis from the first subject of the Vivace ma non troppo triggers the recollection of Groth’s Nachklang:

Raindrops from the trees Fall into the green grass, Tears from my sad eyes Moisten my cheeks.

When the sun shines again, The grass gleams twice as green: Twice as ardently on my cheeks My scalding tears will glow.

But as well as evoking this song, Brahms refers back to the first two movements of the Sonata, offering yet more “distant echoes” (as per the song’s title). First comes the yearning chorale of the Adagio and then the sanguine lilt of the Vivace, the ardent mood of which caps the Sonata in a gesture indicative of the return of sunlight described in Groth’s poem.

While a state of contiguity is present throughout Brahms’s Sonata, Arnold Schoenberg’s 1949 Phantasy (the composer’s own spelling) for violin and piano tells a different story. A “piece for violin solo, accompanied by the piano,” it was written for violinist Adolph Koldofsky, who had taken part in the premiere of Schoenberg’s Piano Trio Op. 45. Koldofsky settled in Schoenberg’s adopted hometown of Los Angeles in 1945, where he played in the RKO studio orchestra and established a local chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music.

Composed far away from Vienna, the Phantasy nonetheless harks back to the music of Schoenberg’s birthplace, specifically Mozart’s Fantasy in C minor (for piano solo) K. 475 and, moreover, Schubert’s Fantasy in C major for Violin and Piano D 934. Both cases (and Schoenberg’s own) reveal structures cited by the composer in his Structural Functions of Harmony of the previous year as “so-called free forms”: “Introduction, Prelude, Fantasia, Rhapsody, Recitative and others are types of musical organization which previous theorists did not describe but simply called ‘free,’ adding, ‘no special form is adhered to’ and ‘free from formal restrictions.’ Form to them was not organization but restriction; thus, ‘free’ forms would seem amorphous and unorganized.”

In short, structure should not be something that happens outside music, to be placed upon it, but emerges instead from within. And Schoenberg speaks, by inference, not only of the dialectics of freedom and organization witnessed within benchmark works by Schubert and Mozart but also of the developing variation technique he had observed so acutely in Brahms’s music. That sense of variation is, of course, intrinsic to Schoenberg’s serial practice, with the through line of the violin part, written first, providing the motivic kernel for the whole work. Initially, it is abrasively angular, but there are swooningly lyrical passages too, often tripping into triple time and thereby harking back to a Viennese heyday. The premiere of the Phantasy marked the composer’s 75th birthday, on September 13, 1949.

Five days before that first performance, another bastion of European musical modernism, Richard Strauss, died at his home in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Strauss’s had been a long life, with periods of great fame and fortune, albeit ending with a chapter that was overshadowed by the composer’s stupidly naïve associations with the Third Reich, followed by a humble retreat into Bavarian solace. He died, however, known for his abiding love of the human voice and the box-office smashes of his many operas, not least the bracingly modernist Salome and Elektra and the simultaneously nostalgic and proto-postmodern Der Rosenkavalier. And, before those had come along, there were the successful orchestral works and tone poems, marking a unique path between Brahms’s symphonism and the more plural language of (Mahler and) Schoenberg’s contributions to the orchestral repertoire.

Less celebrated are Strauss’s chamber works. Looking at his early output, however, we find a host of small-scale instrumental compositions, including piano trios, miniatures for violin and piano, quartet movements, a completed String Quartet in A major Op. 2 from 1880, the Sonata in F major for cello and piano Op. 6, written between 1880 and 1883, and the Piano Quartet in C minor Op. 13, completed the following year. The Violin Sonata Op. 18, his next catalogued chamber work, dates from 1887, the year Strauss completed Aus Italien and began work on his first opera, Guntram, thereby announcing the genre that would dominate the rest of his career.

And yet the Violin Sonata is not so easily dismissed, as the piano declaims, with great panache, at the start of the first movement. The violin’s response is, at first, more introverted, though we are soon launched into the drama proper of this sonata-form Allegro. The piano sets the rhapsodic tone for a narrative that moves through various tonal centers and has the melodic honors being shared equally between the two players. It is a rising motif from the violin, however, that lends the movement its impassioned tone, a prequel, perhaps, to Ein Heldenleben or the audacious climaxes of many of Strauss’s later operas.

The second (ternary-form) movement proves more tranquil, even melancholy at times, its aching melody showing kinship with Strauss’s lieder and, again, his works for the stage, albeit in their more touching moments. The second section is less formal—Strauss published this movement separately under the title of “Improvisation” —as shorter phrases come to characterize the interactions between the players. Rumblings in the piano suggest that something more stirring is at foot and when the initial melody returns, its melancholy has been transformed. Shadows linger in the introduction to the third and final movement, though these are only brief. Instead, the finale bounds off in another courageous caper, speaking of the breathless melodies and quasi-orchestral accompaniments of the Sonata as a whole and providing a perfect distillation of Strauss’s style, albeit heard in unfamiliar, chamber-like circumstances.