Inside the Inside

Music for Viola and Friends

Paul Griffiths

Until early in the 20th century, the viola was almost exclusively an instrument of the inside, voicing inner parts, whether in chamber groups or orchestral scores, rarely exposing itself. Then, encouraged by some composers and determined players (Paul Hindemith was both), it began to come forward much more, to allow us to fathom what is inside the inside.

Two Violas (with Others)

The long-delayed completion of a big orchestral piece, Sudden Time, brought George Benjamin in 1993 onto a plane of mature creativity where he could re-engage with big forms and big forces. Fellow composer Tōru Takemitsu, however, must have recognized Benjamin would have something to say also with relatively frugal resources, and invited him to write a viola duo for the opening of Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, in 1997.

This prospect of two customarily soft-spoken instruments occupying a vast space gave Benjamin his creative spur. The violas would not be retiring at all; they would scald, scour, and cheerfully bubble. In doing so they would also give the impression, as in Bach’s solo string music, of several instruments struggling to get out of one. Hence Viola, Viola, an orchestral piece for two violas. Starting with a sound to be heard often in a concert hall—tuning A—Viola, Viola is a tour of textures and sonorities, created by two instruments doing the same thing at different times, and therefore different things at the same time. There are moments that sound like a folksong wrapped up in figuration, or like a weighty piece for string orchestra by Bartók, or like a Szymanowski string quartet, or like a guitar duo, or like the last of Benjamin’s own Three Inventions for chamber orchestra, with its harmonics evocative of the shō (another deference to the occasion of the premiere). Perhaps most memorable of all is the scale rising quickly and excitingly in wider and wider leaps, a gesture that helps bring about the main climax.

Much nearer the beginning of the century, Frank Bridge was, like Hindemith, a composer who favored the viola when playing chamber music. In 1912, for a concert with the viola pioneer Lionel Tertis, he wrote a pair of pieces for them to perform together, Caprice and Lament. These were not published, but the British Bridge expert Paul Hindmarsh found a virtually complete draft of Lament at the Royal College of Music and made a performing edition. The piece is begun by the second viola with a melody in a chromatic C minor, haunted by the motif of a minor-third rise followed by a step down. On entering, the first viola repeats this an octave higher, and the two continue in a companionable dialogue that can, when both players double-stop, fan out into four-part harmony. There is a middle section in major keys, begun when the first viola plucks an accompaniment to the second and the compliment is returned, and the work ends with an altered reprise. Adding two cellos and a singer completes the ensemble for Hindemith’s Des Todes Tod, composed in just three days between January 6 and 8, 1922. The first public performance took place in Berlin two months later, after which Hindemith withdrew the score and did not release it for publication until 1953. Its words he chose from a book of stories and poems, Die Hochzeit des Todes (1920), by a writer little known today, Eduard Reinacher, who, like Hindemith, had served in the First World War. Avoiding overdramatization, the three settings are all slow, all alert meditations not only on the poems but on the thematic material that is, in each case, presented in a little instrumental prelude. The first song may surprise us with the richness to be discovered with this unusual formation; the last holds a different kind of surprise.

One Viola (with Different Others)

In 1991–2, when his main projects were revising his Violin Concerto and continuing his second book of Études for piano, György Ligeti wrote two viola pieces, “Loop” and “Facsar,” to which he added four more in 1994 to make the Sonata for Solo Viola, first performed on April 23 that year in Gütersloh by Tabea Zimmermann. Like the Études that surrounded them, the six movements are manifestly constructed, demand virtuoso performance, and present images at once strongly determined and fiercely expressive, their geometry human. However, Ligeti’s contemplation of an unaccompanied string player resulted in a work unlike any other in his output. Though he drew close once more to Central European folk music, as he had in the 40s and 50s, now his situation was that of an exile, an observer and analyst. The nearer connections are with Bach, though Ligeti finds his own ways to make a solo string instrument polyphonic, to pack onto one stave a rich complexity of disparate harmonic, rhythmic, and formal purposes.

Most folkish is the first movement, whose title refers to a Romanian style identified by Bartók. In this style, as the New Grove Dictionary puts it, “the third and fourth degrees are frequently fluctuating, neutral sounds, roughly half-flat or half-sharp”—a practice Ligeti follows by asking for special fingerings of these notes, and also of the seventh; since the piece is performed entirely on the C string and stays within a compass of two octaves (except for occasional ladders of natural harmonics), the suggestion of folk music is strong and the retuning manifestly audible. Ligeti also imitates his model in making his melody out of formulae the piece separately develops, and in enjoying rhythmic freedom. But this is not pastiche. In particular, the grave tune is unsure quite which note to gravitate towards: F, C, or G. Its true home, Ligeti suggested, is the F a fifth below the instrument’s lowest note—a home that is unattainable.

“Loop,” the second movement and first to be written, sounds more like a folk dance, alternating bars of eight beats (usually 5+3) and ten (usually 2+2+3+3), and reveling in all the possibilities of syncopation. The promised loop is a chain of 44 double stops, whose durations are progressively shortened: at its first appearance, after an initial run through just the first four chords, the loop occupies 37 quarter notes; at its ninth and last, now going in almost continuous 16th notes, it is all done in twelve.

“Facsar” (Wring), which follows, is also based on a repeating unit of 44 items: this time a melody whose rhythmic profile is preserved until very near the end, but which gains an increasing density and acerbity of accompanying harmony and counterpoints. At first the melody is uncomplicated, though it has the wavering tonality so typical of late Ligeti. It is also characteristic in its similarities both internal (most notably, the last bar is identical with the third, up a fourth) and external (to the first movement). Because it has no decisive final or tonic, it moves on easily—loops—into a repetition of itself. And being harmonically polyvalent, it will accept all kinds of harmonic interpretation: the progress of the piece therefore becomes, very characteristically, an unpacking of what is inherent in the basic material.

The fourth movement, “Prestissimo con sordino,” is a wave machine of even eighth notes played as fast as possible (which will be more or less fast, and the eighths more or less even, depending on the changes of fingering that are needed). After this, the “Lamento,” all in multiple stops, cuts between ferocious fortissimo interjections and distant pianissimos, these related to the main motif of the composer’s Horn Trio and latterly played in harmonics. The finale brings together, as its title of “Chaconne chromatique” implies, two recurrent machines in later Ligeti: a repeating ground bass (here classically in eight bars of triple time) and the chromatic scale. As usual, the development is towards increasing disorder that arrives out of, not in contradiction to, the initial order. From one falling chromatic scale others branch out until, as in the third movement, the fact of repetition is concealed within thickets of power and fury. Like Ligeti, with whom he enjoyed a friendship dating back to their student days together in Budapest, György Kurtág had unreserved admiration for the folk music of Hungary and Romania (in whose territory both composers were born). When Harry Vogt, as director of the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, invited him to contribute to a sequence of In nomine pieces, on the pattern of the In nomines produced by numerous English composers of the 16th and 17th centuries, this admiration rose up and he offered in 2001 an In nomine – all’ongherese, originally for solo cor anglais, adapted for viola or violin in 2004. There may be some relation to what was the model for the old In nomines—John Tavener’s setting of these words in his Gloria tibi trinitas mass, with its motif of a rising minor third followed by a scalewise descent—but the character is that of a folk lament.

This brings us to Luciano Berio’s conversation with folk music. Berio had a particular liking for the viola, to which he devoted not only one of his solo Sequenzas but also two concertos arising from that composition and a third concerto, Voci (1984), based on Sicilian folksongs. Naturale is a derivative of this last piece, composed the next year for a performance by the Italian dance company Aterballetto—though, as so often with Berio, the theater is implicit in how the music acts, and the composition creates its own stage. On this stage, within the echo of a tam-tam stroke, two characters enter: a viola player, live, and a singer, Peppino Celano, heard from recordings. Visible and invisible, these two also come from different cultural spheres: folk music, such as anyone (Sicilian) might sing, and highly determined, highly individualized virtuosity— the raw and the cooked. Their relationship is ambiguous. Does the singer challenge or encourage the viola player? Is he the viola’s starting point or its destination? And to which sphere does the percussionist belong, if to either? As the piece unfolds, through 20 minutes or so, we may feel voice and viola coming closer, to a point of crisis.

“My links with folk music are often of an emotional character,” Berio once said. “When I work with that music I am always caught by the thrill of discovery. I return again and again to folk music because I try to establish contact between that and my own ideas about music. I have a utopian dream, though I know it cannot be realized: I would like to create a unity between folk music and our music—a real, perceptible, understandable conduit between ancient music-making, which is so close to everyday work, and our music.” The folk-singing viola of Naturale circles very near this impossibility.

Paul Griffiths has been writing on music professionally for almost half a century. He is the author most recently of O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!, commissioned for the opening of the City of Bonn’s “BTHVN 2020” celebrations, and Mr. Beethoven, a novel to be published in April 2020.