Alina Ibragimova & Cédric Tiberghien

“The Tonal Analogue of Emotive Life”

Works for Violin and Piano

Harry Haskell

Are musical form and feeling two sides of the same coin, or are they separate spheres that coexist in a perpetual state of unresolved tension? For Mozart and his contemporaries, the question hardly arose; composers in the late 1700s viewed musical form as the conventional vessel into which feeling was poured, to be decanted later in performance. By the time of Guillaume Lekeu a century later, the formal vessels of the Classical era were bursting at the seams under the explosive pressure of Romantic emotion. And by the middle of the 20th century, composers like John Cage and George Crumb were radically redefining the relationship between form and feeling, in part by basing their musical structures on extramusical sources such as the I Ching. In her classic philosophical text Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer postulates that “music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.” The four works on tonight’s program remind us that musical feeling can take many different forms—or even, in the traditional sense, no form at all.

“No One Can Play an Adagio with More Feeling…”

Over the course of his career, Mozart wrote some three dozen sonatas for violin and piano. Most were designed to showcase his own virtuosity at the keyboard and cast the violin in a subservient role. But in 1784 Mozart met his match in the brilliant Italian violinist Regina Strinasacchi, and it was her artistry that inspired him to write the B flat–major Sonata. Light in weight and mood, the two outer movements share a spirit of good-humored competition, the two players now matching wits in decorous dialogue, now nipping impishly at each other’s heels. In some respects, the piece resembles a miniature violin concerto. A majestic introduction sets the stage for the exuberantly athletic Allegro and offers a foretaste of the Sonata’s exquisite slow movement. The final Allegretto is a cheery rondo that culminates in a playful dash to the finish line, the piano’s cascading 16th-note runs outpacing the violin’s sprightly triplets.

But the expressive energy of the Sonata is concentrated in the stately Andante. By all accounts, Strinasacchi was in her element here. As Mozart’s father observed, “No one can play an adagio with more feeling than she does. Her whole heart and soul are in the melody that she is playing, and her tone is as beautiful as it is powerful.” The violin presents the principal theme, a broad melody in E-flat major, which the piano picks up and elaborates. A moment later the violinist strikes off in a bold new direction, once again challenging the pianist to follow suit. In the ensuing game of imitation and variation, each instrument takes the lead by turns as the music ranges through a succession of tonal centers before returning to the home key. The Andante calls for passion as well as poise, qualities that Strinasacchi apparently possessed in spades.

She and Mozart premiered the Sonata at Vienna’s Kärntnertor Theater on April 29, 1784. The performance gave rise to one of the more enduring legends in the Mozart literature. According to his biographer Hermann Abert, Mozart was dilatory in copying the piece out and “it was only with difficulty that the violinist was able to extort [her] part from the composer on the eve of the concert. She had to rehearse it on her own the next morning. Mozart himself turned up at the concert with a sketch containing only the violin line and a few accompanying chords and modulations, playing the work virtually entirely from memory and without any rehearsal, a feat observed by the emperor in his box by means of his lorgnette. In spite of this, the performers achieved an excellent rapport and were much applauded.” Whether true or apocryphal, this fetching anecdote has long given the “Strinasacchi Sonata” a special place in Mozart’s oeuvre.

Sounds and Silcences

In their distinctive ways, John Cage and George Crumb represent what has been called the “maverick tradition” in American music. Both composers refused to swim with the musical tide, be it the serialist orthodoxy of post–World War II modernism or the stylistic promiscuity of late–20th century postmodernism. And both used unfamiliar timbral effects, unconventional instrumental techniques, and other avant-garde elements to forge musical voices that were both expressive and highly individual. Just as Crumb’s Four Nocturnes seem to emanate from a surreal, Webernesque world in which both the passage of time and the traditional rules of musical syntax are suspended, so Cage in his similarly compact Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard (as the score specifies) eschews any sense of thematic development and harmonic progression, producing music that, in his words, “has no beginning, middle, or ending, nor any center of interest.” Although the lengths of the six pieces and the durations of the notes are determined by the mathematically precise proportions of the work’s underlying rhythmic structure, the music’s audible surface is free-floating and nondirectional, reflecting Cage’s immersion in Zen Buddhism and his attraction to the aesthetic values of Asian cultures. Composed in 1950, Six Melodies is dedicated to the artists Anni and Josef Albers, whom Cage had befriended two years earlier on a visit to Black Mountain College, the innovative school in North Carolina where they and other Bauhaus exiles had found a home after fleeing Nazi Germany. The work’s basic building blocks are a set of single tones, intervals, and chord-like “aggregates” that constitute what Cage called “a gamut of sounds.” Rather like the interaction of colors in one of Josef Albers’s Homages to the Square, or of geometric shapes in one of Anni’s richly patterned textiles, Cage’s delicate, finely nuanced sonorities arise from the often playful interpenetration of sound and silence, consonance and dissonance, motion and stasis. Yet the music’s lack of directionality doesn’t bespeak a lack of interest or variety: compare the graceful, almost dancelike verve of No. 4 with the wide leaps and trudging rhythms of No. 5. Not until 1951 would Cage fully embrace chance operations in his landmark Music of Changes, based on the I Ching, but he had already begun ceding authorial control to the “objective” processes of indeterminacy.

In a lecture delivered in 1950 at the Artists’ Club in New York City, frequented by the abstract expressionists with whom he was closely allied, the composer declared: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” Crumb’s Four Nocturnes of 1964 is recognizably cut from the same piece of musical cloth as Cage’s Six Melodies. Yet despite the superficial similarity of their sound worlds, the two composers’ artistic philosophies and attitude toward “emotive life” are markedly different. Unlike many of his fellow university-based composers, the 90-yearold Crumb has never aligned himself with Serialism, Aleatorism (indeterminacy), Minimalism, or any of the other isms associated with the musical avant-garde in the latter part of the 20th century. Instead, he borrowed freely and fruitfully from a wide range of styles and sonic resources to create an important body of poetic, image-laden, and vividly atmospheric works such as Vox balaenae (inspired by the song of the then-endangered humpback whale), Black Angels (an electric string quartet written in protest of the Vietnam War), and the hauntingly ritualistic Ancient Voices of Children (set to texts by his favorite poet, Federico García Lorca). A sequel to Crumb’s surrealistic Night Music I of 1963, the Four Nocturnes (subtitled Night Music II) represent an early stage in the evolution of his highly expressive musical language. Their idiom is clearly indebted to Bartók’s iridescent, phantasmagorical “night music,” as well as to the tonally untethered, coloristic harmonies of Debussy. Yet Crumb’s use of extended instrumental techniques and special timbral effects—including harmonics, violin and piano pizzicato, and rapping, rustling, and scraping sounds—are unmistakably of their time. The spare-textured, pointillistic idiom of Four Nocturnes marks Crumb, like Cage, as Webern’s soulmate. For all three composers, silence is as meaningful as sound. Four Nocturnes is steeped in quietude; as Crumb writes in a program note, “the prevailing sense of ‘suspension in time’ is only briefly interrupted by the animated and rhythmically more forceful second piece.” And, he might have added, by the dry, insistently pattering piano notes at the end of No. 3, which, tellingly, are marked “rain-death” in the score. The appearance of similar note-patterns in Nos. 1 and 4 gives the work as a whole a sense of both symmetry and closure.

An “Infinitely Sentimental” Art

Had he not succumbed to typhoid fever in January 1894, one day after his 24th birthday, Belgian composer Guillaume Lekeu might be ranked alongside his teacher, César Franck, as one of the leading exponents of French Romanticism. Instead, he is remembered today for a mere handful of works dating from his brief maturity, of which the ultra-Romantic Violin Sonata in G major is the best known and most frequently performed. Lekeu composed it at the behest of Eugène Ysaÿe, for whom Franck had recently written his great A-major Violin Sonata. In early 1892, the Belgian virtuoso heard excerpts from Lekeu’s prize-winning cantata Andromède performed in Brussels and was so impressed that he immediately secured first-performance rights for all the composer’s forthcoming chamber works. Lekeu began drafting the Violin Sonata that May and finished it in early fall. The premiere took place in Brussels on March 7, 1893, under the auspices of the artists’ collective known as the Cercle des XX, which championed the music of Debussy, Fauré, Chausson, and other progressive-minded composers. “You can’t imagine what my Violin Sonata became in Ysaÿe’s hands,” Lekeu enthused to his father four days later; “I’m still completely blown away.”

Lekeu wore his heart on his sleeve, in his music as well as his private life. “For me,” he once confessed, “art is infinitely sentimental,” a philosophy that led him to devise detailed emotional synopses for a number of his instrumental works. Although the G-major Sonata has no such written program, the trajectory of feeling traced by the work’s three movements is nonetheless plain to the ear. Like Franck’s Violin Sonata, Lekeu’s epitomizes the spirit of French Romanticism in its blend of vehemence and restraint, intense emotion and scintillating showmanship. The tender reverie of the opening Très modéré is tinged with melancholy, the profusion of themes tumbling forth in a harmonic stew characterized by constant modulations. Emulating Franck’s affinity for cyclical form, Lekeu brings several of the themes back in the second and third movements, highlighting their pronounced family resemblance. The rhapsodic feeling of the Très lent, with its asymmetrical 7/8 meter, contrasts with the second movement’s waltz-like midsection (to be played, Lekeu indicates, “very simply and with the feeling of a popular song”). After a broad, emphatic introduction, the animated finale bursts out of the starting gate, the piano’s galloping 16th notes set against an urgent, gracefully swooning melody in the violin.

A grateful Lekeu dedicated his sonata to Ysaÿe, but he bestowed the manuscript score on another member of the famed Ysaÿe Quartet, second violinist Mathieu Crickboom. Addressing his bosom friend in a characteristically personal inscription, he refers to the sonata as “the first musical notes in which I believe I have put something of myself,” expresses a desire “not to hide any of my thoughts from you,” and equates the act of composition with an effort to “translate” Crickboom’s own “most intimate feelings.” In the last letter he wrote before his death, on December 29, 1893, Lekeu sent his regrets to Ysaÿe and Crickboom, apologizing that he was unable to attend the Paris premiere of the string quartet Debussy had written for them.

A former music editor for Yale University Press, Harry Haskell is a program annotator for Carnegie Hall in New York, the Edinburgh Festival, and other venues, and the author of several books, including The Early Music Revival: A History, winner of the 2014 Prix des Muses awarded by the Fondation Singer-Polignac.