NYPSQ: Program Notes

(New York Philharmonic Quartet/Bronfman) Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN Born in Rohrau, Austria, March 31, 1732 Died in Vienna, May 31, 1809 STRING QUARTET IN D MINOR, OP. 76, NO. 2, “FIFTHS” (HOB. III:76) Composed in 1796-97; 21 minutes In 1761, at the age of 29 and with a decade of modest freelance work under his belt, Joseph Haydn accepted a prestigious job offer to serve as Vice-Kapellmeister for the wealthy and powerful Esterházy family. First in that assistant role and later as Kapellmeister himself, Haydn worked tirelessly to entertain his insatiable patrons. One new genre he began cultivating around the time he joined the Esterházy court was the quartet of two violins, viola and cello, compositions that he labeled at the time as Divertimentos. Amassing 68 such works over the next 40 years, Papa Haydn truly earned his distinction as “Father of the String Quartet.”

When Prince Nikolaus Esterházy died in 1790, Haydn was the most famous composer in the world, and his business model had gradually morphed from satisfying one court’s needs for private entertainment to juggling a variety of commissions and publishing deals. Building on those fledgling Divertimentos, Haydn elevated the string quartet into a chamber music mainstay, and he published set after set to great international acclaim. He usually released quartets in sets of six, and his last complete set, from 1797, started as a commission from a Hungarian patron, Count Joseph Erdödy. Haydn agreed to give the count two years of exclusive use of the quartets, but as soon as that period ended, the enterprising (and not entirely scrupulous) composer sold the scores to competing publishing firms in London and Vienna, which both released editions in 1799, printed as Opus 76.

The second quartet from Opus 76, in the key of D Minor, got its nickname of “Fifths” from the distinctive leaps that begin the main theme. Pairs of notes separated by the interval of a perfect fifth circulate obsessively throughout the movement, pointing the way toward Beethoven’s similarly concentrated use of compact, recognizable motives.

The quartet’s second movement—the only one in a major key—lightens the mood with cheerful variations set in a rather breezy tempo, the walking pace leaning toward an accelerated Allegretto pulse.

Often Haydn saved his most jovial music for the minuet, but this quartet instead features an unusually dark example of that dancing form, with severe themes voiced in naked octaves and layered in austere canons. Musicians, quite aptly, have taken to calling this movement the “Witches’ Minuet.”

The finale picks up in the same key of D Minor, but the attitude here is more dashing and playful. To resolve this quartet’s central argument, upward leaps of a perfect fifth arise as a bemused answer to the first movement’s dour descents. Another theme, jumping abruptly down a space of nearly two octaves, sounds an awful lot like the braying of a donkey, as if to laugh off all the turbulence. Gently at first and with growing conviction, the quartet finally reaches a hearty resolution in the key of D Major.

ROBERT SCHUMANN Born in Zwickau, Germany, June 8, 1810 Died near Bonn, July 29, 1856 PIANO QUINTET IN E-FLAT MAJOR, OP. 44 Composed in 1842; 30 minutes At the age of 20, Robert Schumann dropped out of a university law program to pursue music. He was “not a musical genius,” as he acknowledged in his diary, but he pursued his goals doggedly, moving to Leipzig to take piano lessons with the distinguished teacher Friedrich Wieck. He hoped to build a life as a virtuoso composer-performer, but in his efforts, Schumann permanently damaged his right middle finger —the result of an overzealous practice regimen and the use of an ill-advised mechanism to strengthen his fingers. The silver lining was that his time in the Wieck household brought him into contact with his teacher’s daughter, Clara, a gifted prodigy who would become his wife 12 years after they first met.

Throughout his 20s, Schumann composed piano music and little else. His range expanded during the euphoric year of 1840, when he married Clara and produced over 120 songs. Next came the “year of the orchestra” in 1841, in which Schumann issued two symphonies, a Symphonette in three movements and a one-movement Fantasy for piano and orchestra. Schumann’s obsessive focus turned next to chamber music, a fascination that occupied much of 1842.

He needed only six days to sketch out his Piano Quintet in the fall of 1842, amid a burst of chamber music activity. The work showcased the virtuosic piano playing of his wife, who gave the first public performance in January of 1843, and to whom Schumann dedicated the score. Clara had planned to participate in a private reading a month earlier, but when she fell ill that day, the Schumanns prevailed upon their friend and fellow Leipzig resident Felix Mendelssohn, who sight-read the imposing piano part.

Schumann’s score for piano and string quartet was not the first to feature that instrumentation, but it established an influential new template. There were earlier quintets that functioned as piano concertos with stripped-down accompaniment; there were also quintets intended for home performances by amateurs, with nowhere near the complexity of Schumann’s part-writing. The challenge of Schumann’s model—and, ultimately, its strength—sprang from the independence of the string quartet and the piano, each fully capable of carrying a musical discourse without the other. In the wake of Schumann, composers built the piano quintet into a chamber music powerhouse, from Brahms and Dvořák in the 19th century to Bartók and Shostakovich in the 20th.

From the start of the Allegro brillante (“fast and sparkling”) first movement, Schumann’s Piano Quintet is chamber music writ large, designed to reach every corner of the Leipzig Gewandhaus and other major concert halls where Clara performed. The central gesture of four half-notes outlining wide intervals harks back to Bach’s leaping fugue themes, a style that Schumann was just starting to study intently. (He was, after all, in the city where Bach made his name, in the company of Bach’s greatest champion, Mendelssohn.) Offsetting the muscular first theme, the lyrical second theme starts with the cello jumping down and then gliding back up, its tender entreaties mirrored in an inverted form by the viola.

The second movement, “In the mode of a march,” again reflects Schumann’s fascination with music of the past; the stately dotted rhythms are remnants of 17th- and 18th-century styles, and the plodding pulse recalls the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.

The Scherzo makes a game out of rising and falling scales, interspersed with two opposing trio sections.

The pairs of falling intervals in the first trio reinterpret the bold upward leaps of the first movement, while the minor-key second trio detours into shocking chromatic escapades.

The robust finale draws much of its rhythmic energy from a pattern that starts and ends phrases midmeasure instead of aligning accents with the downbeats, not unlike a gavotte dance from the Baroque era. Fugal passages offer further evidence that Schumann had one eye on the past throughout this forward-leaning work.