COMMENTS
by Richard E. Rodda
HUGO WOLF
Born March 13, 1860; Windischgraz, Styria, Austria (now Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia) Died February 22, 1903; Vienna, Austria
Italian Serenade
COMPOSED 1887
The inspiration for the Italian Serenade seems to have come to Wolf from the novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Ne’er-do-well) by the German romantic writer Joseph Eichendorff. The serenade was composed for string quartet in the space of only three days (May 2–4, 1887), during a time when Wolf was immersed in setting a number of Eichendorff’s verses for voice and piano, and bears a thematic resemblance to the first of the songs, “Der Soldat I,” about the love of a soldier for a lady who lives in a castle. Eric Sams explained in his study of the composer,
The Eichendorff novella has that same theme. Central to its plot is an Italian serenade played by a small orchestra. . . . Its hero is a young musician, a violinist, who leaves his country home and his grumbling father to seek his fortune. He soon charms everyone with his gifts or antagonizes them with
his inconsequence. Wolf could hardly have found a more congenial or compelling self-portrait in all German literature.
Wolf originally called his work simply Serenade in G major, but around 1890, he began referring to it as his “Italian Serenade.” In 1893 he made sketches for a slow movement in G minor but, already suffering from the emotional turmoil brought on by his impulsive personality and by the syphilis that would send him to an asylum in 1897, could not bring it to completion. If two of his letters from 1894 were to be taken at face value, he would have finished another movement early that year, but that score has never been recovered, and only forty-five measures of it survive in sketches. The last notations he made for this ultimately unrealized project were a few pages of a tarantella he jotted down in 1897, shortly before he was committed. Though thoughts of the suite based on the Italian Serenade were in his mind for the last decade of his life, he died in 1903 having finished no more of this proposed work than the first movement, written some fifteen years before.
this page: Hugo Wolf, ca. 1905 | opposite page: Ludwig van Beethoven, oil portrait of the composer as a young man painted by Carl Traugott Riedel (1769–1832), 1801
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The work’s several sections, joined in a loose rondo structure, allow for the depiction of various moods and characters—the gossamer strains of the lilting serenade serve as the background and foil for the ardent entreaties of the suitor (in instrumental recitative) and the coquettish replies of the lady. The joining together of these contrasts
representing the two stylistic poles of Wolf’s musical speech within a single piece marks the pinnacle of his success as an instrumental composer, and it is much to be regretted that his short life and his sad last years deprived him of the chance to provide the musical world with further such works as this masterful miniature.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria
String Quartet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 18, No. 2
COMPOSED 1799
The year of the completion of the six op. 18 quartets— 1800—was an important time in Beethoven’s career. He had achieved a success good enough to write to his old friend Franz Wegeler in Bonn,
My compositions bring me in a good deal, and may I say that I am offered more commissions than it is possible for me to carry out. Moreover, for every composition I can count on six or seven publishers and even more, if I want them. People no longer come to an arrangement with me. I state my price, and they pay.
At the time of this gratifying recognition of his talents, however, the first signs of his fateful deafness appeared, and he began the titanic struggle that became one of the gravitational poles of his life. Within two years, driven from the social contact on which he had flourished by the fear of discovery of his malady, he penned the “Heiligenstadt Testament,” his cri de coeur against this wicked trick of the gods. These first quartets stand on the brink of that crisis in Beethoven’s life.
The string quartet, perfected by Haydn, was the favorite form of musical entertainment in the salons of Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century. As early as 1795, Count Anton Georg Apponyi had suggested to Beethoven that he undertake some works in the form, but the proposal did not bear fruit until three years later, when the
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op. 18 set was begun. In 1798 Beethoven was closely associated with the noted composer and theorist Emanuel Alois Förster, perhaps as a student. (Beethoven later referred to him as his “old master.”) Förster was one of the era’s foremost composers of string quartets, and his influence may have inspired Beethoven to undertake his first works in the genre. Beethoven, at that time of his life still determined to impress the aristocracy, probably also wished to have his name attached to the most fashionable musical form of the day. At any rate, the quartets were begun in mid-1798 (though some sketches apparently date back to the early 1790s), mostly composed the following year, and completed in 1800. They were first played by the ensemble of Ignaz Schuppanzigh either (reports differ) in
the home of Förster or in the Viennese palace of Prince Karl Lobkowitz, to whom they were dedicated on their publication in 1801. Lobkowitz was so pleased with the quartets that he pledged Beethoven an annual stipend of 600 gulden. With their respectful renewal of the classical style and technique of Haydn, the quartets enjoyed a good success and were frequently heard during the composer’s lifetime. Looking back on op. 18 in 1811, a critic for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung wrote,
In them, the loveliest melodies appeal to the feelings, and the unity, the supreme simplicity, the particular and firmly sustained character in each individual piece making up those quartets raise them to the level of masterworks and join Beethoven’s name with the revered names of Haydn and Mozart.
The G major quartet, the second of the op. 18 set, is Beethoven’s wittiest specimen of the genre and, because of its frequently featherstitched texture, is regarded by many players to be one of his most difficult to perform.
this page: A view of the Lobkowitz Palace in Vienna, at left. Painting by Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), ca. 1759. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria | opposite page: Edvard Grieg, painting in oil by Eilif Peterssen (1852–1928), 1891. National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design; Oslo, Norway
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The opening Allegro, much indebted to Haydn in its conversational intimacy, drew from Theodore Helm, Beethoven’s nineteenth-century biographer, the following fanciful description: “The principal subject brings before one’s imagination a brilliant scene in some eighteenth-century salon, with all the ceremonious display and flourish typical of the period. The doors of the drawing room swing open to usher in the arriving guests, met with bows and gracious words of greeting.” The second movement is a remarkably daring composition. It begins with a hymnlike theme decorated with filigree by the first violin but soon comes to a dying close with a tiny melodic fragment composed more of silence than of sound. The first violin posits a quick repetition of the fragment, and suddenly, the other instruments
join it in a startling episode of skittering energy. This aberrant thought, so surprisingly stumbled upon, is quickly dismissed, however, and the hymnlike theme returns, as though nothing untoward had happened, and continues without incident to its appointed close. The scherzo, a witty descendent of those in Haydn’s quartets, is marked by a certain leonine gruffness that came more and more to characterize Beethoven’s works. Aufgeknöpft (unbuttoned) is how Beethoven referred to the convivial finale. Helm allowed that by this point in his imaginary soirée “the champagne had been passed around,” and the lighthearted gaiety and quick changes of subject that bubble through the movement do certainly evoke the high spirits and good-natured banter of a gathering of congenial friends.
EDVARD GRIEG
Born June 15, 1843; Bergen, Norway
Died September 4, 1907; Bergen, Norway
String Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 27
COMPOSED
1877–78
By 1877 Grieg had established his reputation as a composer with his Piano Concerto, incidental music for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and a growing body of well-received
songs and piano miniatures, and he felt the need to find a quiet place away from his concert tours and conducting responsibilities to carry on his creative work. He settled on a summer retreat in the village of Börve, perched atop the scenic Sörfjord east of his home in Bergen. Grieg loved socializing with the country folk around Börve, listening to their songs and stories, and playing
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them his latest pieces based on the traditional Norwegian idioms. Before he left Börve at the end of summer 1877, he had begun sketching out a string quartet into which he planned to integrate the distinctive but essentially simple gestures of Norwegian folk song. As the motto theme woven through the quartet, he chose one of his own songs—“Spillmaend” (Minstrels, op. 25, no. 1)—with a text by Ibsen that tells of the Hulder, the spirit of the Norwegian waterfall who can reveal the deepest secrets of the art to musicians, but only against the chance that the minstrel might lose his happiness and peace of mind in exchange. The quartet was finished at Börve in July 1878 and introduced in Cologne four months later.
The G minor quartet begins with a bold introductory statement of the motto theme from which is generated much of the music that follows. The main body of the first movement begins with the presentation of an agitated subject; the second theme is a fast but quiet transformation of the motto. The development section is built largely from permutations of the main theme into which are inserted frequent references to the motto. A full recapitulation and a large coda, based
on the motto, round out the movement. Rather than following a traditional classical structure, the Romance is made from the juxtaposition of two starkly contrasted types of music: the first, given at the outset by the cello, is sweetly melodic and simply accompanied; the other is slashing and tempestuous and almost febrile in character. These two musical streams are brought into increasingly close alternation as the music unfolds, but it is with a leisurely return of the sweet melody of the opening that the movement closes. The outer sections of the Intermezzo, a tribute to the dance music of Norway, are based on a vibrant tune of swinging energy and dynamic cross-accents, while the central trio, leaner in texture, uses a plain, square-phrased, duple-meter melody. In the Finale, the motto theme appears at the beginning and end to frame a sparkling saltarello, the ancient Mediterranean dance that Grieg had learned on his travels through Italy during his student days in the mid-1860s.
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
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PROFILES
David Taylor Violin
David Taylor joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as assistant concertmaster in 1979. Born in Canton, Ohio, he first studied violin with his father at age four and continued with Margaret Randall and Rafael Druian at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He later studied with Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School, where he received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Taylor became a member of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1974. With the Chicago Symphony, he has made numerous solo appearances, including performances with Sir Georg Solti. He also served as acting concertmaster of the St. Louis Symphony and concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.
He served as temporary concertmaster of the Seattle and Dallas symphony orchestras. As a lover of chamber music, he often appears in recital and solo performances in the Chicagoland area, at the Ravinia Festival, and on WFMT-FM. Taylor is also a frequent soloist with the region’s local orchestras. He teaches privately and at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts. A frequent coach of orchestral violinists, he has students in orchestras across the United States and Japan.
David Taylor resides in downtown Chicago and is married to Michelle Wynton, also a violinist. He plays a J.B. Guadagnini violin made in 1752.
Danny Yehun Jin Violin
Originally from South Korea, violinist Danny Yehun Jin made his debut as a soloist with the Seoul Royal Symphony at age nine. Jin, who was co-concertmaster of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra and concertmaster of the Music Academy of the West Orchestra in 2023, has also recently appeared as a soloist with the Seoul Philharmonic, Suwon Philharmonic, and Charleston Symphony Orchestra.
Jin is an award-winning violinist, receiving fifth prize at the Menuhin Competition Beijing in 2012 and winner of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra’s second Young Artist Competition in 2016. After studying at the Korean National University of Arts and the Korean National School for the Gifted in Arts, Jin received his bachelor’s degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2023 as a Sandra G. and David G. Marshall Fellow. At Curtis, he was a student of Ida Kavafian and Erin Keefe.
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PHOTOS BY TODD ROSENBERG
Wei-Ting Kuo Viola
A native of Taiwan, Wei-Ting Kuo has been a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 2014.
From 2011 to 2014, he served as assistant principal viola of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Kuo began his viola studies at nine, coming to the United States on completing army service in Taiwan at age twentyfour. While a student, he was invited to perform as part of the Taos Music Festival, Ravinia Festival, and the Verbier Festival Academy. His competition experience includes selection as a 2008 finalist in the Primrose International Viola Competition and two awards from the 2009 Tokyo International Viola Competition.
An active soloist and chamber musician, Kuo has performed throughout Asia with violist Nobuko Imai. He has worked with Frank Almond, Nai Yuan Hu, Menahem Pressler, and the Arcas Quartet, in addition to a concerto performance in 2014 with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Kuo earned a bachelor’s degree from the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, a master’s degree from the Mannes School of Music, and an artist diploma from the Colburn School, where he also minored in piano performance. Kuo has studied with Paul Coletti, Hsin-Yun Huang, and Yizhak Schotten. He joined DePaul University’s viola faculty in 2017.
Daniel Katz Cello
A Chicago native, Daniel Katz was appointed to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2011 by Riccardo Muti. Prior to joining the Orchestra, he was a regular substitute with the CSO and the Cleveland Orchestra and a member of the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra. He received a doctor of musical arts degree with honors from Northwestern University under Hans Jensen, a master’s degree from the New England Conservatory under Laurence Lesser, and a bachelor’s degree from Northern Illinois University with Marc Johnson. Other teachers include Paul Katz, Richard Hirschl, and Gilda Barston.
A dedicated teacher, Katz serves on the faculty at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts and maintains a private studio. Previously, he was an adjunct assistant professor and artist-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame. Katz has participated in a number of major music festivals, including Tanglewood, Verbier, Sarasota, and Norfolk. He has performed for live solo and chamber music broadcasts on WFMT-FM Chicago. Recently, Katz recorded an album of works by Victoria Bond (Naxos) and a disc of James Stephenson’s works (Liquid Melancholy: Clarinet Music of James M. Stephenson, Cedille), both with the ensemble Chicago Pro Musica.
PROFILES
PHOTOS BY TODD ROSENBERG
