BACEWICZ, BACH & BEETHOVEN Thursday 17 December 2020, The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh –––––
PROGRAMME NOTE
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PERFORMERS VIOLIN 1 Benjamin Marquise Gilmore Kana Kawashima Aisling O’Dea Siún Milne VIOLIN 2 Marcus Barcham Stevens Gordon Bragg Amira Bedrush-McDonald
VIOLA Hannah Shaw Jessica Beeston Steve King CELLO Donald Gillan Niamh Molloy DOUBLE BASS Nikita Naumov
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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR BACEWICZ (1909-1969) Quartet for Four Violins (1949) Allegretto - Allegro giocoso Andante tranquillo Molto allegro
BACH (1685-1750) The Art of Fugue (excerpts) (1742-46; rev. 1748–50) Contrapunctus I Contrapunctus 3 Contrapunctus 9 Contrapunctus 8 Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit
BEETHOVEN (1770-1827) Grosse Fuge (1825–26) Allegro
––––– A quartet for four violins is an unusual conception at any time, perhaps all the more so as a foursome of similar voices before we hear two contrapuntal masterpieces that interweave multifarious strands of music. But Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz ensures such a richness and diversity of sound from her self-similar group that it’s easy to forget that four of the same instrument are playing. And likewise, that notes much below middle C are almost entirely absent. Bacewicz was a celebrated violinist herself, and one of Poland’s most respected composers in the early part of the 20th century – neglected, as so many women composers have shamefully been, although there’s ever-increasing interest in her distinctive, sometimes idiosyncratic music. It blends a wit and clarity that she no doubt picked up during her studies in Paris – where she learnt composition with Nadia Boulanger and violin with Carl Flesch – with an earthier, more folk-like idiom that lends it a rougher, sometimes more uncompromising edge. She proved adept at navigating the predilections of Poland’s political landscape, too: she wrote this Quartet in 1949, just as Polish music was being steered away from supposedly bourgeois modernism and towards a folksier style that would appeal to the broader masses, and she managed to satisfy political demands without compromising her own, gently acerbic language. The brief, three-movement Quartet, premiered in Krakow in February 1950, was originally conceived as a teaching
Bacewicz was a celebrated violinist herself, and one of Poland’s most respected composers in the early part of the 20th century – neglected, as so many women composers have shamefully been. Grażyna Bacewicz
piece, but always frames its technical challenges as means of musical expression. Its opening movement feels
The Art of Fugue. For a start, what instrumentation he had in mind, since he didn’t specify any – or whether
like a succession of dance episodes, with more than a hint of Bartók, and a remarkable fluidity between its varied ideas. Bacewicz shows off her remarkable ear for sonority in the contemplative second movement, employing pizzicatos, harmonics and trills to broaden her sonic palette, with a perhaps inadvertently bluesy central melody on the first violin. High spirits return in the demonstrative closing movement, full of spiky rhythms and with a striking, all-pizzicato passage towards its end.
he had any particular instruments in mind at all, since it seems like a work written for the mind itself. The Art of Fugue is entirely playable on a keyboard instrument, leading many to assume that a harpsichord was Bach’s intended medium, although it’s regularly performed by many instrumental groupings, including a string ensemble as today.
Following Bacewicz’s stirring Quartet, we turn to the two aforementioned monuments of contrapuntal music.
Likewise, we don’t know how the work might have looked if Bach had completed it, since he left it unfinished when he died in 1750. In fact, it’s one of a clutch of works that Bach wrote late in life in which he seemed intent on encapsulating all the techniques
There’s lots we don’t know about Bach’s
he’d explored and discoveries he’d
...he seemed intent on encapsulating all the techniques he’d explored and discoveries he’d made across his composing career, and pushing them to the extremes of possibility. Johann Sebastian Bach
made across his composing career, and pushing them to the extremes of possibility. In the case of The Art of
way that the same melody is layered upon staggered versions of itself, and how harmony is generated as a result.
Fugue, that means subjecting a single theme to all manner of transformation and variation, combining it against itself and variations of itself until the resultant music’s complexities are as bewildering as they are fascinating. Before we go any further, it’s probably worth – for the sake of both Bach’s The Art of Fugue and Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – sketching out what a fugue actually is. The concept of counterpoint is about combining melodic lines together, rather than simply accompanying a melody with – well, an accompaniment. One of its the simplest forms of counterpoint is a canon, or round: just think of ‘Frère Jacques’ or
A fugue is more complex, but obeys similar principles. An instrument or voice sets out a main melody (or subject), but when a second line joins with the same (or similar) theme, the first line moves on to something different (called the countersubject). When a third line enters, the second moves on to the countersubject, and the third does something a bit freer. The same process continues if there’s a fourth, fifth or sixth line, and naturally, things can get more complicated still. The composer might turn the original theme upside down, slow it to half its original speed, or speed it up to double its original speed. They might set themes coming in breathlessly one after the other, before
‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’, and the
the previous entry has had a chance to
...as with Bach’s The Art of Fugue, it’s crucial to remember that this is music, that its purpose is to express – and that its intellectual rigour and serious-minded complexities only serve to add to the depth and intensity of its expression. Ludwig van Beethoven
finish. They might even do all these at the same time, and layer up more than one of these processes at the same time.
The Art of Fugue stretches to 14 fugues (the last of which remains unfinished) and four canons, of which today’s
It can be a complex process. And the music generated can indeed be pored over and analysed for its mathematical intricacies. It’s not for nothing that The Art of Fugue has long been surrounded in an aura of magic and mystery, with some claiming it to be full of numerological symbolism (indeed, Bach carved his own surname as the letters B-A-C-H, using the German version of B natural as H, into some of its textures). But despite the technicalities, it’s crucial to remember that this is first and foremost music, and intended to be appreciated as such – in this case, as complex but expressive movements that explore particular moods and
concert features five sections. In the serious, thoughtful Contrapunctus I, Bach simply introduces the work’s main theme, heard right at the start and as subsequent musical lines enter, with no official countersubject as such. In Contrapunctus 3, things are already more complicated: Bach only uses the upside-down version of his main theme, and his countersubject is a distinctive, slithering idea that comes to dominate the movement. Next, we jump forward to Contrapunctus 9, which is a double fugue (in other words, using two separate themes) based on a running idea with a distinctive octave leap at its start, itself based on the main opening theme. We hop back one movement to
ideas.
Contrapunctus 8, which is a fugue with
three themes, the second of which is particularly distinctive with its insistent repeated notes. Today’s selection of
even eminent 20th-century critic and musicologist Joseph Kerman called it ‘the most problematic single work
movements concludes with the touching chorale prelude ‘Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit’, a short, contrasting piece in the major, originally included by JS’s son CPE Bach to fill out the incomplete Art of Fugue at its first publication, and which has stuck as a poignantly simple, direct sign-off to this complex, demanding work.
in Beethoven’s output’. Stravinsky famously described it as ‘an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever’.
It was 75 years later that Beethoven wrote an equally complex, demanding fugue, originally as the finale to his String Quartet in B flat, Op 130. He knew it was a dense, difficult, intellectually demanding work, which looked back specifically to the rigour and invention of Bach for inspiration. At the Grosse Fuge’s first performance – in its original place as the Op 130 Quartet’s finale – by his friends in the Schuppanzigh Quartet, Beethoven was so apprehensive about reactions that he went to the pub rather than sitting in the audience, asking one of the Schuppanzigh players to report to him how the quartet had gone down. The feedback was positive: the small, private audience had enjoyed it, so much so, in fact, that they’d asked for two of the quartet’s middle movements to be repeated. Beethoven’s reaction was furious: “And why didn't they encore the Fugue? That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!” Those early listeners weren’t alone in their cool reactions. The following year, a critic for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung described the Grosse Fuge as ‘incomprehensible, like Chinese’, and
It’s probably no surprise that Beethoven’s publisher, concerned about the commercial wisdom of closing a string quartet with such a serious, difficult movement, suggested that the composer might write an alternative finale. Beethoven duly obliged, and excised the Grosse Fuge as a standalone work, Op 133, though quartet performers nowadays often respect his original wishes when performing Op 130. It’s also often played in a version for larger string ensemble that casts Beethoven’s creation across a richer canvas. And, as with Bach’s The Art of Fugue, it’s crucial to remember that this is music, that its purpose is to express – and that its intellectual rigour and serious-minded complexities only serve to add to the depth and intensity of its expression. Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge is so great that it begins with its own Overture, marked as such in Beethoven’s score, in which we get to hear his jagged, uncompromising theme in four different contexts, before the main fugue begins in earnest. Beethoven divides it into two large sections, separated by a more soothing, lyrical section, which he returns to at the very end of the piece – as if to bring us back from the brink. © David Kettle
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