PROGRAM NOTES
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
(1913–76)
Phantasy for Oboe and String Trio in F minor, Op.2
In a serendipitous coincidence, Benjamin Britten’s birthday was November 22nd, St. Cecilia’s Day, the name day of the patron saint of music. It was a fact in which he apparently delighted. A prodigiously talented musician, he began composing at an early age and, by his late teens, was turning out (in his words) “reams and reams” of music.
The Phantasy for oboe and strings was one of those early pieces. Britten wrote it in the fall of 1932, around the time he turned nineteen, and it received its first performance the following summer, courtesy of oboist Leon Goosens and a trio of string players Britten described as “intelligent players [but not] really first class instrumentalists.” Regardless, the piece established Britten as a major player in new music in England, with a London Times critic taking a swipe at Britten’s then-teacher, John Ireland, by suggesting that the Phantasy made Ireland’s “15-year old pianoforte trio sound old fashioned.”
Britten’s title refers to a genre of Elizabethan and Jacobean instrumental music that was revived by a number of English composers in the first decades of the 20th century thanks to a competition sponsored by one Walter Wilson Cobbett, an amateur musician and writer on chamber music. Indeed, Britten won the Cobbett prize in 1932 for a string quintet, though his subsequent (and more highly regarded) Phantasy received no such accolade.
The Phantasy for oboe, violin, viola, and cello is built around three general ideas: the first, a march figure; the
second, a lyrical oboe melody; and the third, a brisk violin motive. Formally, it’s a marvelous example of Britten’s progressive conservatism, taking a basic sonata form structure and inserting a slow movement between the development and recapitulation.
Throughout there are marvelous, surprising touches. The slow section, for one, is striking. Not only does it come as a dramatic surprise, but also it hardly features the oboe. After this ends, the recapitulation echoes, exactly, the exposition, but in reverse: first we hear the exposition’s fast music, then its slow opening march. At the end, the solo cello repeats its opening gesture, but this, too, is played backwards, now note for note. There’s also a striking moment in which the oboe, playing at the bottom of its range, anchors the strings, playing in their upper registers. And so forth.
Few 20th-century composers embodied the idea of music as a craft—a concept Bach would have been well familiar with—as thoroughly as Britten did, yet, as with most of his music, there’s never a sense in the Phantasy of a composer simply showing off his technique. Here, in microcosm, is a demonstration of the compositional maturity and depth of expression that would later explode in pieces like the Sinfonia da Requiem, the Violin Concerto, and, most of all, the operas and the War Requiem.
© Jonathan Blumhofer
FRANCIS POULENC
(1899–1963)
Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano, FP 43
I. Presto (Lent – Presto - Le double plus lent – Presto)
II. Andante (con moto)
III. Rondo (Très vif)
At the Hotel de Polignac on 25 June 1923, the 24-year-old Poulenc and his former piano teacher, Ricardo Viñes, jointly operated a large Don Quixote marionette in the Paris debut of Manuel de Falla’s puppet-opera Master Peter’s Puppet Show. Poulenc had been signed up by Falla’s London publisher, J. W. Chester, prompting him to begin work on a Caprice espagnol for oboe and piano. But finding it unworthy of Falla, he tore up his first effort in 1923. Persevering with the oboe and piano, but adding the bassoon, this Trio finally suggested itself as an adequate replacement.
Though Poulenc aspired to do something as original as Debussy or Stravinsky, he accepted that he probably would not. Of the many composers Poulenc ventriloquised, Mozart’s seemed to Koechlin to be his most successful, albeit Mozart with wrong notes, as in the Trio’s slantwise opening double take on Eine kleine Nachtmusik and the buglecall Reveille. He also, of course, tried Stravinsky; though more importantly, he followed the Russian’s concrete advice by modifying the tempo of this opening. Thereafter, he intended the Presto proper to reinvent a Haydn allegro, while the trio format itself gestured toward his revered Debussy’s late Sonata for flute, viola and harp. Poulenc wanted the last movement to recall the scherzo of Saint-Saens’s Second Piano Concerto, but Wilfrid Mellers heard instead ‘an Offenbachian gallop’. And Poulenc would have been pleased that the English musicologist also noted ‘the tight Stravinskian coda’.
Graeme Skinner ©2008
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–97)
Piano Quartet No.3 in C minor, Op.60 Werther
I. Allegro non troppo
II. Scherzo (Allegro)
III. Andante
IV. Finale (Allegro comodo)
“On the cover you must have a picture, namely a head with a pistol to it. Now you can form some conception of the music! I’ll send you my photograph for the purpose. You can use blue coat, yellow breeches and top-boots, since you seem to like colour printing.”
Brahms was joking, of course. In asking his publisher to use this illustration on the cover of his C minor Piano Quartet, Brahms was alluding to the hero of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. In an action which caused a spate of real suicides at the time of the book’s publication, Werther shoots himself in despair at his love for a woman whose husband he reveres. But now it was 1875 and Brahms, in his early forties, was established as a major composer and resigned to being ‘free (that is, ‘single’) but happy’. As Karl Geiringer notes, at this time of his life Brahms ‘grew calmer, more balanced and content…even his outward appearance revealed the tranquility of the mature man.’
What, then, has the image of violent suicide to do with the C minor Piano Quartet? In fact, the work had its genesis in the mid-1850s, a time when much of Brahms’ work was imbued with Romantic angst. In 1854 his mentor, Robert Schumann, had succumbed to severe mental illness and was confined to an asylum; Brahms spent ever more time in the company of, or corresponding with, Clara Schumann. It was she who persuaded him to give more public performances, and gave him frank and helpful advice about his
composition. Brahms’ feelings for Clara at this time were intense, and there is reason to suppose that his unrequited love for her caused him profound unease at the thought of betraying Robert.
In 1856 Brahms and the violinist Joachim played through a three movement Piano Quartet in C sharp minor. Although Brahms then wrote a substitute slow movement—described by Clara as a ‘wonderful Adagio’—he put the piece aside, though in 1868 showed the first movement to a friend, saying, ‘Imagine a man who is going to shoot himself, for there is nothing else to do.’ Five years later he took the piece up again, and apparently at the suggestion of Joachim, heavily revised it in the new key of C minor. Brahms claims to have retained only the first movement and the scherzo, but the original work appears not to have had a scherzo. It is believed that Brahms was referring to the original finale, which became the second movement of Op.60. For the work in its final form he composed two new movements. Michael Musgrave has suggested, on the basis of the cello and violin solos which begin the third and fourth movements respectively, that Brahms may have used material from discarded sonatas for those instruments.
Recasting the work in C minor was a masterstroke. It immediately links it to the tradition—exemplified by Beethoven—of composing works of an implicitly tragic character in that key. Moreover, it allows the viola and cello the full resonance of their lowest strings, an element that Brahms wastes no time in exploiting. After a solemn call to attention in piano octaves, the strings play a theme characterised by short, two-note sighs followed, as Malcolm McDonald has pointed out, by a version of Schumann’s musical emblem for ‘Clara’. The emotional turbulence is enhanced by Brahms’ use of variation form with the sonata design:
the second theme is no sooner stated than it is varied, and in the movement’s recapitulation Brahms inserts yet more variations. The rhythmically dynamic Scherzo, by contrast, reins in the expansionist tendencies of the first movement through extreme concentration—indeed, Brahms appears subsequently to have added thirty-three bars to make the piece less concise.
The Andante is in E major, a key whose close relationship to C sharp minor has led some commentators to suggest, wrongly, that it too dates from the 1850s. The contrast with C minor is, however, breathtaking, and the movement ushers us into a completely new world. The solo cello joins with the violin in a serene duet, and there are numerous instances of refined and beautiful scoring, like the return of the cello theme in the piano with an accompaniment of string pizzicatos.
The Finale, however, gradually readmits the emotive instability of the opening: the violin solo is accompanied by a relentless passage of quavers which increasingly predominate, the strings try out a kind of chorale which the piano refuses to take seriously. The development begins with alternating minor and major thirds and takes up material for the chorale, which the piano pounds out in C major in the work’s final pages. The chorale (and all it stands for) fails to provide solace: one subsequent burst of energy is dissipated in an oddly stark and quiet passage, which is brought to a close by an abrupt cadence just as it fades from view. Maybe Brahms wasn’t joking after all.
© 2002 Gordon Kerry
