Orpheus Chamber Orchestra: Program Notes

Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad Symphony for String Orchestra in A-flat Major [1874-75] HANS ROTT Born August 1, 1858 in Vienna, Austria Died June 25, 1884 in Vienna, Austria The Austrian composer Hans Rott was just 16 when he enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory, and his teachers (including Bruckner) recognized him as the brightest of prospects. Rott probably began his earliest surviving work, the Symphony for String Orchestra, during his first semester at school, in the fall of 1874. It foreshadowed his true Symphony No. 1 from 1880, a precocious score that had a strong influence on his friend and classmate Gustav Mahler. Alas, that symphony was also the source of Rott’s ruin: After Brahms criticized it, the unstable young composer grew paranoid and delusional, to the point that he pulled a gun on a fellow train passenger who was trying to light a cigar —the flame of which would set off explosive charges rigged by Brahms, so Rott believed. He spent his remaining years in a psychiatric hospital, surviving several suicide attempts and ultimately dying of tuberculosis at the age of 26.

Rott’s early Symphony for String Orchestra captures the promise and possibility of a budding composer in search of a voice. It harks back to Vienna’s first musical heyday (the time of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert), adopting the crisp contrasts and transparent architecture of that Classical paradigm. There are even passages of formal counterpoint, showing this student’s command of a complex, learned technique.

Harmonies stray more freely in the slow second movement, a sign of Rott’s proclivity toward the Wagner/Bruckner lineage, while the Scherzo melds Beethoven’s muscle with Mendelssohn’s whimsy. By convention there should have been a fourth movement, but Rott abandoned his sketches and shelved the rest of the work. The three completed movements only reached the public for the first time in 2004.

Cello Concerto in A Major, Wq. 172 [1753] CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH Born March 8, 1714 in Weimar, Germany Died December 14, 1788 in Hamburg, Germany Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach.

After studying in his native Leipzig, Emanuel secured his first major job in 1738 with the prince-elector of Brandenburg, soon to be crowned King Frederick II of Prussia (“Frederick the Great”). Bach served as the court’s main harpsichordist, a demanding position considering the king’s love of music as both a spectator and a participant. In those years Bach composed dozens of concertos that he could perform at the harpsichord; he also converted a number into concertos for flute, the king’s instrument. Working off of

a concerto that had already appeared in versions for harpsichord and flute, Bach transcribed this Cello Concerto in A Major in 1753, possibly to showcase the court orchestra’s principal cellist.

The fast outer movements demonstrate how crucial a bridge Bach was between the Vivaldi-style concerto form he learned from his father and the emerging Classical approach advanced by Haydn and others in the coming decades. The central slow movement is especially remarkable, demonstrating Bach’s “sensitive style” (empfindsamer Stil) in a minor-key lament accompanied by muted strings. Moving away from the dense counterpoint of his father’s generation, Bach pioneered this achingly vulnerable and direct form of expression.

String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”) [1824] Arranged by Gustav Mahler FRANZ SCHUBERT Born January 31, 1797 in Vienna, Austria Died November 19, 1828 in Vienna, Austria As of 1817, Franz Schubert’s music had not been published, mentioned in a newspaper, or performed publicly in Vienna a single time, even though the 20-year-old had already composed some 300 songs (half of his lifetime output) and a large body of orchestral and chamber music. One song from that year, Death and the Maiden, stands out as a particularly haunting and prescient work. Setting a text by Matthias Claudius, the song’s first stanza comes from the perspective of the Maiden, who pleads for Death to pass her by in impassioned D-minor music. The response is the voice of Death himself, who takes the Maiden’s hand through a smooth and static D-major melody.

Eventually Schubert had some success publishing songs, but otherwise his career was a continual struggle, leaving him dependent on a small circle of friends and supporters.

Meanwhile his purported sexual excesses caught up with him: He contracted syphilis in late 1822 or early 1823 and died of the infection in 1828. When Schubert returned to his earlier song Death and the Maiden in 1824 as the inspiration for a string quartet, he must have known on some level that his own death was all too near.

Schubert had previously incorporated songs into instrumental works; one familiar example is the “Trout” Quintet, with a set of variations on the bubbling melody and accompaniment of another 1817 song, The Trout. With the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, Schubert’s instrumental treatment goes beyond a simple theme and variations. In the opening Allegro movement, the intense descending motive at the beginning recalls the tailing end of the maiden’s verse from the song, when she awaits death’s answer. By echoing that pregnant moment and dwelling in it for an entire movement, the music hovers in that harrowing interval before death responds.

A direct quotation of the song comes in the second movement, a broad set of variations.

The quartet borrows only the element of the song associated with Death, a somber chorale, leaving aside the Maiden’s more urgent plea. The mounting tension eases for an ornate major-key variation, and then the movement closes its final variation with a poignant return to the prayer-like texture.

The third movement reframes the song’s tension between its starting key of D minor and its closing key of D major. The scherzo’s minor-key music is loud and brittle, while the contrasting trio section moves to the major key for a smooth and quiet response.

The finale features the breakneck triplet rhythm of a tarantella, a manic Italian dance supposedly meant to rid a victim of deadly tarantula venom. The prestissimo coda flirts with an optimistic major-key resolution, but in the end the key of D minor regains its mortal grip.

Gustav Mahler created this arrangement for string orchestra in 1894, around the same time he was finishing his “Resurrection” Symphony and shortly after the death of the conductor Hans von Bülow, Mahler’s friend and champion. The arrangement consisted of penciled annotations on the published quartet score—mostly markings for where the basses should double the cellos, plus indications for mutes and changes to dynamic levels. Mahler conducted the slow movement in Hamburg in November 1894, on the orchestral series he took over from his late friend. After Mahler’s daughter Anna noticed the annotations decades later, she entrusted a team of musicologists to create a performing edition of the arrangement. © 2018 Aaron Grad.