April 5 2020 92y program notes

Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad Piano Quartet in A Minor [c. 1876] GUSTAV MAHLER Born July 7, 1860 in Kalischt, Bohemia Died May 18, 1911 in Vienna, Austria This Piano Quartet, the earliest surviving music by Gustav Mahler, dates from his three years as a piano and composition student at the Vienna Conservatory. He was probably sixteen when he composed the one complete movement and a bit of a scherzo, and the music was presumed to be lost until it turned up in 1964 among his widow’s papers.

We should not be surprised that young Mahler was trying on different musical personalities in this student work, drawing from his living heroes. There are echoes of Wagner in the heroic themes, while textures built from misaligned rhythmic layers (like the four-square melody that glides over triplets) point to the influence of Vienna’s reigning king of chamber music, Brahms. It was only a few years later that Mahler began his meteoric rise as a conductor, a career that left him scant time for drafting the songs and symphonies that he settled on as his exclusive outlets for composing. This one sturdy sonata movement suggests that he could have thrived as a composer-pianist had his professional life veered onto a different path.

Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 47 [1842] ROBERT SCHUMANN Born June 8, 1810 in Zwickau, Germany Died July 29, 1856 in Endenich, Germany In the spring of 1842, Robert Schumann stayed home in Leipzig for six brooding weeks while his wife toured Europe as a superstar pianist. He busied himself with the study of string quartets by Haydn and Mozart, and went on to write three quartets that summer, the first chamber music he had completed since a modest group of quartets from his teenage years. He continued with a Piano Quintet in E-flat that October, and then he turned to the Piano Quartet in the same key in November. The chamber music explosion continued with the Phantasiestücke for piano trio in December and the Andante and Variations for two pianos, two cellos and horn from early 1843.

The chamber music ensemble of piano with a violin (or two), viola and cello is so essential now that it’s easy to forget how rare such quartets and quintets were when Schumann started experimenting with them. Mozart wrote two quartets in that same configuration, and he also wrote a famous quintet for piano and winds, a format later imitated by Beethoven, but these genres were hardly mainstays of Viennese chamber music like the string quartet or piano trio. Working alongside his friend Mendelssohn in

Leipzig, Schumann breathed new life into Classical principles and redefined them for the Romantic age, seeding the tradition that flourished in works by his protégé Brahms, and his protégé Dvořák, and on and on.

The first movement of Schumann’s Piano Quartet enters with the mysterious sound of an incomplete and inverted E-flat chord, leading into a haunting string chorale with brokenoctave comments from the piano. This Sostenuto assai introduction lasts only 12 measures, but its strange beauty informs the more cheery body of the movement, and the distinct sound returns for short but significant reminders.

Just when the spooky leanings seem resolved by a good-natured conclusion, a veiled Scherzo introduces another mischievous note. The dissonant and unstable chord that opens the Andante cantabile suggests more trickery ahead, but the violin spins out a quick resolution that welcomes in the cello for a sweet, singing melody. The contrasting key area of G-flat major is a surprising departure from the home key of B-flat, and another unexpected touch is the cello’s retuned low string that facilitates the deep resonance of a B-flat pedal tone to anchor the keynote conclusion. The finale cleverly picks up the contours of the three-note motive from the end of the slow movement, launching a frenetic romp featuring some of Schumann’s most nimble counterpoint.

String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat, Op. 18 [1860] JOHANNES BRAHMS Born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897 in Vienna, Austria The first work of chamber music that Brahms issued publicly was his Piano Trio No. 1, composed in 1853 after his pivotal introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann. The following year, after Robert’s leap into the Rhine River and confinement in an insane asylum, the 21-year-old Brahms moved to Düsseldorf to help manage the Schumann household and care for the children while Clara supported the family playing concert tours. In the two years that Brahms spent as the de facto head of the Schumann household, he developed a deep (and not entirely platonic) affection for Clara, 14 years his senior.

It took Brahms a few years to stabilize after he left the Schumann orbit, musically and personally, but he found his footing by concentrating on chamber music between 1860 and 1865, when he created a series of seven groundbreaking scores. The earliest of the series employed an uncommon ensemble, forming a sextet with pairs of violins, violas and cellos. There were very few examples of earlier string sextets (just a handful from the previous century by the cellist-composer Boccherini, and a more recent effort from Spohr), but this lack of tradition probably appealed to Brahms, who shied away from legacy-laden genres like string quartets and symphonies until later in life. The Sextet in B-flat debuted in Hanover on October 20, 1860, featuring Brahms’ close friend Joseph

Joachim on violin, and it clearly pleased the composer, since he returned to the same format for a second sextet in 1865.

In the opening movement of the First String Sextet, the ensemble makes the most of the diverse textures that can be achieved with six instruments, culminating in an all-plucked coda. In the middle movements, Brahms updated two older traditions—first a theme and variations, and then a scherzo—demonstrating how well he had integrated the lessons of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The Rondo finale maintains that Classical connection, with light-hearted music in the spirit of a Serenade. The Sextet may have been a rarity when Brahms approached it, but his two contributions proved so influential that they birthed a new chamber music genre, with major additions following from Dvořák, Tchaikovsky and Schoenberg in the decades to come. © 2020 Aaron Grad.