Widmann & Lonquich

Speaking, Singing, Dancing

Music for Violin and Piano, Piano, or Violin

Wolfgang Stähr

But That Tone!

Leoš Janáček, the master from Moravia? His compositions do not sound masterful at all, some of them are provocatively imperfect. Janáček’s anarchic art is hard to reconcile with form, at least western, classical, erudite form. He did not complete his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory, did not even keep two violin sonatas he began to write at that time, and when he started to compose another sonata for violin and piano more than 30 years later—technically his “Third”—he could hardly finish it, shifting the movements around or switching them, changing, adding, and rewriting over a period of eight years, until 1922.

Janáček began writing his only (surviving) Violin Sonata in 1914, “at the beginning of the war, when we were already expecting the Russians in Moravia,” the Slavic brothers-inarms and longed-for liberators. Janáček confessed writing the sonata with the “shimmer and roar of sharp steel” in mind, even celebrating the advance of the Russian troops in the finale. But does one actually hear war in this music? Or the militant patriotism of the composer, who experienced the founding of the Republic of Czechoslovakia on October 28, 1918 as a day of “national rebirth,” the longawaited and hard-won independence from central Habsburg rule and the hegemony of German culture? Janáček’s Czech nationalism occasionally came questionably close to fanaticism and hysteria, as seen, for example, by his embittered refusal to use the tram in Brno as long as the cars displayed signage in German. But his almost obsessive exploration of the everyday Czech language, in its wording and melodic phrasing, exceeds the patriotic cause, the realm of folklore, home province, and Moravian pride. “You know, it was odd— somebody might speak to me, and I might not even understand his words—but that tone!” Janáček wrote enthusiastically. “I knew at once what he felt, whether he was lying, or excited.” Janáček used every opportunity imaginable to note everyday speech melodies on bits of paper, newspaper margins, postcards, even on the cuffs of his shirts. In these melodies, he heard an “unerring echo of human inner life.”

Naturally, these studies benefited the musical dramatist whose operas gave a voice mainly to tortured existences, those who were luckless, despised and cast out. But they also left their mark on the wordless yet eloquent, abruptly human melodies of his Violin Sonata: this genuine and nervous, loving and exalted music has enchanting melodies to offer, short motifs, passionate exclamations, jubilation, cries. Hastily whispered riddles, as in the first movement, or hoarse, wild (“feroce”) contradictions scratched across the G-string, as in the finale. Contradictory dance rhythms defying order or measure. Janáček wrote his four-movement sonata as if in a fever, unbridled, unfettered. He also loved this eruptive music-making, this elementary playfulness, enjoyment of improvisation, rounds and roundelays with endless refrains in the folk music he listened to locally: among the Moravian farmers, farm workers, artisans, and villagers. Occasionally he would notate the songs and dances, putting pencil to paper like an ethnologist on an expedition in his own country, his native landscape, the Lašsko region. He also made notes about the sequence of dance steps, gestures, customs, traditional dress, and props. Musical snapshots: “The score, the measures depict the living room full of people with sweaty, red faces: everything moving, bending, turning.”

Futile Dances

Everything revolves around Franz Schubert. Late in the evening, among his cheerful and sociable circle of friends, a colorful mix of artists and music lovers, having made music, eaten, and partaken of plenty of punch, Schubert would often sit down at the piano again and play for dancing. He, who never danced himself, willingly held out at this post until the morning hours, entertaining the high-spirited company with waltzes, ländlers, ecossaises and German dances. Schubert improvised on the spur of the moment, aided occasionally by manuscripts in which he had noted short phrases as aide-memoires and inspiration. He also wrote some of his dances out in detail, combining them into anthologies and preparing them for publication. All in all, about 500 piano dances by Franz Schubert have come down to us, German dances making up the lion’s share. This folkloric partner dance in triple time, which was overtaken in popularity and all but drowned out by the triumph of the waltz in the 19th century, had already completed a significant social climb by the time Schubert sounded it amidst bourgeois salons. This can be gleaned from music history: in the finale of Act I of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Leporello dances a German dance (“la Teitsch”) with the unruly swain Masetto, while Donna Anna and Don Ottavio display their social superiority by dancing a minuet and Don Giovanni asks Zerlina, the object of his desire, for a contredanse. In the third movement of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, the titular “merry gathering of country folk” features a German dance, in keeping with the milieu. Musically and typologically, the German dance of Mozart and Schubert (and not only theirs) reveals itself as a chameleon, assimilating the characteristics of other dances at will and thereby resembling the aristocratic minuet, the ländler, the waltz, or even Alpine folklore, with cheering and yodel motifs. With this, the German dance itself replicates the social confusion and entanglements it caused when the paths of the privileged and the rising classes crossed at Vienna’s masked balls—only symbolically, for the time being.

Schubert composed his Twelve German Dances D 790 in 1823, which was, for him, an annus horribilis: his venereal disease was diagnosed, requiring him to undergo torturous treatments with toxic mercury vapors. The form and sequence of the dances, without endings or with only makeshift ones, was—unusually—not picked over by editors, remaining unchanged until the posthumous publication. It is not necessary to push Franz Schubert into the slot of Viennese folklore to ask oneself whether this might not be evidence of a specifically Austrian mentality. Michael Scharang, a writer of our own times and a resident of Vienna, draws his very own (and very un-German) conclusions about his compatriot, the composer of these German dances: “If everything is futile, the only thing that remains is to play the music that expresses this futility best: the music of Schubert.”

When, however, a “radical” German composer writes a ländler in 1979, one invariably expects deconstruction, destruction, critical revelation, parody, or at least distancing discourse. Wolfgang Rihm’s Ländler for piano, however, offers none of these. Instead, the composer moves slowly and quietly through an implied dance, as if having difficulty deciphering or remembering the notes. Everything seems far off, faded, disappearing—the entire ghostly piece contains exactly one loud note, which interrupts unexpectedly and pointlessly like a guest who has rung the wrong doorbell. Rihm once called the piano a “large coffin,” and this greying, fatigued, fatally melancholy dance has far more in common with funeral music than with any festivity. It paces with the dragging, syncopated dignity of a Sarabande, despite the ländler in its title, or like an aged dancer taking to the parquet with deliberate watchfulness. “To me as a composer, the piano has remained the instrument for fantasizing to this day,” Rihm declared in his early years when he composed his Ländler. “I like the words Taste [key] and tasten [to grope, search, fumble] very much. They capture exactly what composing can also be: an attempt. At least at a stage where finding something is the point. The piano seems to embody this. Except, of course, when it is played by lions of the keyboard.”

Extreme Notes in the Violin

Piano and violin. Piano or violin? Which answer might clarinetist Jörg Widmann give, asked about his favorite instrument? He would certainly not reject the violin, his sister Carolin’s instrument, out of hand: “I love extreme notes in the violin, and the more difficult they are to produce, the more beautiful I find them.” His Études for solo violin—the work, not originally conceived as a cycle, currently includes six such studies—are radically inspired and sparked by this love for extreme notes. Technique itself is the theme here, to the point of madness or perplexed exhaustion. Virtuosity, Jörg Widmann emphasizes, is “part of my self-image; it is almost something that exerts a certain pull on me. To me, virtuosity is: amazement! When I’m listening, playing, composing, I want to be amazed! Like a child.”

Jörg Widmann’s Études are both: “‘Etude’ is taken literally here, as a compositional exercise, a concisely delineated field of experimentation, but also as a violinistic study of a certain playing technique.” The second Étude of 2001, dedicated to

Isabelle Faust, begins as a chorale sung and played by the violinist, only to leave this serious and lament-like beginning behind for an imitation of violinistic mannerisms and kitsch, with sobbing cantilenas, languishing notes, rhapsodic exaggerations. Finally, the playing accelerates to a breakneck (“rasend schnelles”) tempo, and in this immense haste, it breathlessly and tonelessly falls into the next, the third Étude of 2002 (dedicated to Carolin Widmann). This takes one characteristic of many “exercises” to the extreme: the monomaniac, obsessive, ultimately almost senseless fixation on one single task, one individual, isolated figure. “Wie von Sinnen,” or “as if taking leave of one’s senses,” reads the paradoxical instruction where the piece reaches its climactic boiling point—surely that is the one thing the violinist cannot afford to do. “In the third Étude, the music reaches a point,” Widmann explains, “from which the virtuosic running figure is perceived as a surface. The individual, successive notes are suddenly transformed into a vertical. My notion of ‘ecstasy’ has to do with that very breaking point, where the music reaches a new state of consciousness.”

Time Is Out of Joint

“Freedom alone, going further, is ever the purpose in the world of art, as in God’s great creation as a whole.” 1802 was Ludwig van Beethoven’s annus horribilis, marked by his most profound biographical crisis, the inexorable worsening of his deafness and the social isolation this invariably brought, which led him to write his “Heiligenstadt Testament” while still in his early 30s. Yet Beethoven did not sink into the muted silence of creative depression, on the contrary: in addition to the most astounding piano sonatas and variations and the Second Symphony, he wrote the three sonatas for violin and piano that he published under the joint opus number 30 in 1802. Beethoven occupied himself with the genre of the violin sonata over a relatively short, concentrated period of time. “Tre Sonate Per il Clavicembalo o Forte-Piano con un Violino”: under this title, the Vienna publishers Artaria printed his Sonatas Op. 12 in late 1789 or early 1799. The title was conventional, unlike the pieces. The next set of sonatas was also published under the traditional description “Deux Sonates pour le Piano Forte avec un Violon” (Op. 23 and 24) and even “Trois Sonates pour le Pianoforte avec l’Accompagnement d’un Violon”

(Op. 30). It is the “Kreutzer” Sonata that first mentions a Violino obligato in the title; and in the first edition of Opus 96, the title is simply and accurately “Sonate für Piano-Forte und Violin.” In these titles, of course, the long tradition of the “accompanied piano sonata” lived on. But Beethoven in fact always wrote duo sonatas in the spirit of an equal partnership between both instruments, giving both the same importance from the very beginning. Beethoven’s Viennese contemporaries may have considered him first and foremost a piano virtuoso, admired “for his special speed and the extraordinary difficulties […] he executes with such ease.” But as a child, he had learned to play the violin from his father and an acquaintance, and he later continued these lessons in Vienna; in addition, he had played viola in the Court Orchestra in Bonn. He was therefore not only at home on the pianoforte, but also familiar with the string instrument in concert: he knew both “parts” of the piano-violin sonata well enough to write for their specific strengths and differences, resulting in fruitful dialogue and constructive contrasts.

The middle one of the Three Sonatas Op. 30, in C minor, expands the playing field of chamber music into the highly dramatic realm, taking contrasts, interval leaps, dynamics, and acceleration to extremes. On the other hand, even the most profound seriousness is invariably undermined by irony and “pretend” aesthetics, as in the opening movement with its playful parody of a march. Time is out of joint when sforzati burst into the scherzo like false accents, unhinging any meter and driving the voices apart. This Sonata, then, is both humoristic and “heroic.” But no listener would suspect that its composer was mired in desperation when he wrote it.