Schumann Quartet: Program

SCHUMANN QUARTET THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2024 | 7:30 PM Shannon Hall at Memorial Union Erik Schumann, Violin Veit Hertenstein, Viola

Ken Schumann, Violin Mark Schumann, Cello

David and Kato Perlman Chamber Music Series

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SCHUMANN QUARTET THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2024

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

String Quartet No. 18 in A Major, K. 464 (1785) Allegro Menuetto and Trio Andante Allegro

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928)

String Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata” (1923) Adagio con moto Con moto Con moto—Vivace—Andante— Tempo I Con moto

IN T E RM IS S IO N

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

String Quartet No. 12 in E-flat Major, Op. 127 (1823–1824) Maestoso—Allegro Adagio ma non troppo e molto cantabile Scherzando vivace—Trio Finale: Allegro

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PROGRAM NOTES Late Life and Late Style On this evening’s program, the Schumann Quartet has selected three works that all represent great late-in-life achievements of the composers represented: Mozart, Janáček, and Beethoven. As is often the case in the history of music, the shadow of Beethoven looms large in the imagination, and here especially his well-known “three periods.” Indeed, Beethoven’s works in his “late style”—which starts in 1811 and includes the Ninth Symphony, Missa solemnis, the Diabelli Variations, the last five piano sonatas, and, most notably, the last five string quartets—gained a status both legendary and paradigmatic. In his own time, much of Beethoven’s late-style music was considered incomprehensible and complex, a sign of a deteriorating mind and an illness-stricken body. (His Op. 132 quartet starts with a melody that he labeled in the score as a “hymn of thanksgiving to the divinity, from a convalescent, in the Lydian mode.”) Then in the 20th century, his late works and specifically the string quartets gained new appreciation as his greatest, most radical music. Subsequently, similar late styles were attributed to Schubert, Schumann, and Liszt among others (the first two because the end of their lives were marked by illness and the last due to his turn to religion). Thus the Beethoven model of a late style replete with grand abstraction and transcendental musing found its imitators.

The three late-life works on this evening’s concert, however, each in their own way put the lie to the legend. Mozart’s K. 464 Quartet— one of his six “Haydn” quartets—illustrates the composer showing not radical experimentalism, but rather greater refinement and unity. Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1 followed on the heels of his first experience of fame, and shows him balancing the experimentation of his contemporaries with an older Romanticism, all the while claiming to find a new youthful vitality for his art despite his 62 years of age.

Even Beethoven’s Op. 127 Quartet, despite bearing many of the hallmarks of the composer’s late style, also contains some of his most tuneful and approachable music.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791) String Quartet No. 18 in A Major, K. 464 (1785) About the Composer In the early 1780s, after a very successful premiere in Munich of his opera Idomeneo, Mozart left his hometown of Salzburg for the Habsburg capital Vienna where he quickly established himself as the greatest keyboard player in the city. He also began one of the most compositionally productive periods of his life, including the publication of his collection of the six “Haydn” string quartets, which were inspired by and pay homage to Haydn’s set of six quartets, Op. 33. Mozart described the works as “the fruits of a long and laborious endeavor,” and his score sketches of the time include several abandoned fragments of string quartets. The “Haydn” quartets imitate Haydn’s more democratic approach to the genre by envisioning each line as an individual player rather than a collective unit deployed only for the construction harmony. Yet, despite this fundamentally contrapuntal approach to composition, Mozart’s quartets prioritize his characteristically transparent homophony (that is, music that foregrounds a single melodic line over a subservient harmonic accompaniment). In the resulting “Haydn” quartets, Mozart concerned himself with “naturalness” by balancing the sparse simplicity of homophony with moments of imitative counterpoint (at the time considered both “learned” and archaic).

Mozart creates naturalness in the first movement with homophonic textures that maintain the separation of melody and accompaniment; yet he integrates contrapuntal movements into the formal structure by using fugue-like staggered entrances of the theme to signal transitions. In the second movement, a minuet and trio, he takes a different tack: Transitional movements break the metric regularity of the dance styles. The minuet emphasizes beats 1 and 3, but before introducing new material, Mozart displaces the meter by emphasizing beat 2; in the trio, which emphasizes beat 2 throughout, he does the inverse. A theme and variations, the third movement reinvents its opening theme over and over in an array of styles, including an uplifting singing aria, a wobbling triple-meter dance, a deconstructed and stratified call and response, and a quasi-march with a percussive cello line. In the final movement, Mozart pushes the limits of the 5

Classical style by making the opening descending chromatic line the organizing motive and creating a brash and impassioned mood that foreshadows Beethoven’s Romanticism. Written in the last six years of his life (Mozart did die young, of course), this “late” work achieved mature refinement and masterly integration of an array of techniques while maintaining communicative naturalness without mannerism or exaggeration.

LEOŠ JANÁČEK (1854–1928) String Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata” (1923) Although he wrote music throughout his life, Leoš Janáček did not find real acclaim beyond regional notoriety in Moravia until his opera Jenůfa became an overnight sensation after its 1916 premiere in Prague, catapulting the nearly 62-year-old composer to immediate fame. For the remainder of his life, he traveled the continent to premiere new works developing an international reputation. One year into his new-found fame, he fell in love with a 27-year-old married woman named Kamila Stösslová, with whom he exchanged ongoing love letters for a decade. Although the extant correspondence is one sided—the pair agreed to burn each other’s letters after they shared their first kiss in 1927, but only Janáček followed through—what emerges from the letters is a composer whose discovery of his muse breathed new life into his art, inspiring in the old man a youthful and more modern style, whereas his long and strained marriage had left him stymied.

If you find this all sounds a bit like a licentious novel, you would be right: As musicologist Geoffrey Chew has pointed out, Czech literature of the late 19th century was littered with stories of artists finding inspiration in adulterous muses, including works by Zeyer, Auřendníček, Kvapil, Lešehradu, and Suchý. Indeed, Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1 drew inspiration from Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata—itself a story of a strained marriage and an affair ending in a jealousy-driven murder. As the composer wrote to Stösslová, “I had in mind a poor woman, tormented, beaten, battered to death, as the Russian Tolstoy wrote in his work The Kreutzer Sonata.”

Cast in four movements, the first two often played without pause, 6

Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1 offers a visceral experience, full of juxtaposed torment and passion befitting the novel and the composer’s emotional state. Yet it also shows a balancing of restrained tonality with expressionistic “modern” harmonies for which Janáček was praised, especially among the Communist intelligentsia of Czechoslovakia after his death. The first movement deploys an impassioned Adagio introductory motive, ornamented with folkinspired trills, as the recurring idea between sections of a spritely tonal melody in 2/4 and a complex, rhythmically layered theme that overlays triple and duple meters. The second movement similarly contrasts cogent moments of tonal melodies with blurry melodies distorted by trills. The third movement, in an ABA form, starts with Janáček’s characteristic “interruption motifs,” which resemble a common practice in Czech folk music in which a main violin melody is disrupted or overwhelmed by trills and ornamentation in other instruments. The final movement starts with the same Adagio introductory motif from the first movement, out of which a lyrical melody develops against changing accompaniment styles that express anxiety, calm, drive, and more, only to reach a climactic end. Ultimately, it is easy to project a narrative of the joys and torments of illicit love, which the composer himself confessed to experience, onto this emotive work. Whether this is a case of Janáček patterning his art after his life or patterning his life after the scintillating literature of his day remains ambiguous.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) String Quartet No. 12 in E-flat Major, Op. 127 (1823–1824) In the last three years of his life, after completing his Ninth Symphony and Missa solemnis, Beethoven dedicated himself exclusively to the string quartet—in part, because he had accepted a commission to write one, two, or three of them by 1822 for Prince Nikolay Golitsïn, which he had failed to do alongside the demands of premiering symphonic works. He ultimately wrote his five final string quartets, a collection that the 20th century deemed his greatest music, marked by transcendent insight and deeply authentic exploration of self.

When the quartets premiered, however, they were not well received by audiences, who understood them as difficult and bizarre works and the result of a man in mental and physical decline. Despite these 7

interpretations from outside audiences, Beethoven’s own approach to composition in this period was less moribund than it was retrospective (he was publishing several of his early works as well as reworking and reviving others) and less solipsistic than it was focused on lyricism and imitating folk songs (he was also transcribing more than 150 folk songs). Yet, the overarching impression of his late-period works as difficult and abstract comes from the composer’s fascination with fugue procedures and expansive variation techniques. A closer listen to the first of his final five string quartets, Op. 127, displays not only the composer’s increasingly mannerist style but also his newly refined lyricism.

The brief first movement alternates a slow block chord introduction (something he learned from Hadyn) with a folk-like triple-meter allegro tune. In lieu of a second theme of new materials, he instead repeats opening, modulating, as he became increasingly fond of doing, by major third rather than the axiomatic fifth of sonata-allegro form. This brief first movement acts as a kind of grand introduction to the massive second movement—more than 15 minutes long unto itself—which is a theme and variations. The opening theme that emerges from ambiguous long held chords (another Beethovian fingerprint, like the opening of the Ninth Symphony) is one of his most lyrical melodies, which he then proceeds to develop into a series of variations. Just as the main tune emerges from the ambiguous opening, Beethoven treats each variation as a natural outgrowth of the last, building in drama and defying the traditional approach to the form in which the juxtaposition of diverse variations is the highlight.

The Scherzando movement, in ABA form, showcases staggered entrances and fugal treatment of a crisp dotted-rhythm motive for the opening before the B section provides a homophonic country dance.

The return of the A section is not quite a simple repetition; instead, the fugal material is periodically interrupted with new melodies and brief recalls of the country dance. The fast-paced Finale follows a very traditional path using a tight, economical approach to the main theme until reaching the final coda, in which Beethoven completely changes the mood, introducing entirely new material and proceeding to develop that material before ending the quartet abruptly as if unfinished. As a whole, the exaggeratedly disproportionate movement lengths, the first movement’s extreme juxtaposition of tempos, the 8

second movement’s organic approach to variation, the third movement’s integration of fugal writing in a standard scherzo, and the finale’s left-turn coda all defied many expectations of audiences when it premiered and contributed to Beethoven’s reputation as increasingly unmoored. And yet, in Op. 127 it is just as easy to find some of Beethoven’s most expansive melodies, toe-tapping dances, and truly achingly beautiful music amid the creative chaos.

In the end, the three works presented by the Schumann Quartet may pour some cold water on a well-trodden myth of a universal late style.

But they might also provide some freedom from the constraints of such prescriptive tales, acting as a reminder that, in fact, there is no script for one’s third act.

—Eric Lubarsky

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ARTIST BIO SCHUMANN QUARTET Erik Schumann, Violin Ken Schumann, Violin Veit Hertenstein, Viola Mark Schumann, Cello The Schumann Quartet has reached a stage where anything is possible, because it has dispensed with certainties. This also has consequences for audiences, which from one concert to the next have to be prepared for all eventualities: “A work really develops only in a live performance,” the quartet says. “That is ‘the real thing,’ because we ourselves never know what will happen. On the stage, all imitation disappears, and you automatically become honest with yourself. Then you can create a bond with the audience— communicate with it in music.” This live situation will gain an added energy in the near future: Sharon Kam, Kit Armstrong, Anna Lucia Richter, Sabine Meyer, Katharina Konradi, and Alexey Stadler are among the quartet's current partners.

Special highlights in the 2023/2024 season: In autumn 2023, the ensemble performed the opening concert for the new hall at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, performed at the Dvorak Prague International Music Festival, and gave a concert in Linz in honor of the great patron Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge, among other events. In January 2024, they performed two concerts of works

by Aribert Reimann in Madrid on royal Stradivari instruments, and embarked on a US tour that concludes with a residency in New York City at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. They will also perform at the Philharmonie in Berlin and in Essen with Kit Armstrong, a Mozart project in Luxembourg and Cologne, as well as at the Wiener Konzerthaus and the SWR Festival in Schwetzingen.

The quartet’s album Intermezzo (2018; Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Schumann, and Reimann with Anna-Lucia Richter) has been hailed enthusiastically both at home and abroad and received the Opus Klassik award in the quintet category. In 2020, the quartet expanded 10

its discography with Fragment, examining one of the masters of the string quartet: Franz Schubert. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the radio, the quartet dedicated itself to a very special project: An album of pieces around and from 1923. Together with the Bavarian Radio, they recorded works by Alban Berg, Leoš Janáček, Ernst Krenek, and Aaron Copland.

The three brothers Mark, Erik, and Ken Schumann have been playing together since their early childhood; violist Veit Hertenstein completes the quartet. The four musicians enjoy the way they communicate without words. Although the musicians’ individual personalities clearly manifest themselves, a common space arises in every musical work in a process of spiritual metamorphosis. The quartet’s openness and curiosity is in part the result of the formative influence exerted on it by teachers such as Eberhard Feltz, the Alban Berg Quartet, and partners such as Menahem Pressler.

It is always tempting to speculate on what factors have led to many people viewing the Schumann Quartet as one of the best in the world. But the four musicians themselves regard these stages more as encounters, as a confirmation of the path they have taken. “We really want to take things to extremes, to see how far the excitement and our spontaneity as a group take us,” says Ken Schumann. They sidestep any attempt to categorize their sound, approach, or style, and let the concerts speak for themselves. And the critics approve: “Fire and energy. The Schumann Quartet plays staggeringly well [...] without doubt one of the very best formations among today’s abundance of quartets, […] with sparkling virtuosity and a willingness to astonish” (Harald Eggebrecht in Süddeutsche Zeitung).

Erik Schumann plays on a violin by Giuseppe Guarneri filius Andreae from 1690, kindly made available to him by the Guadagnini Foundation Stuttgart. Ken Schumann plays an Italian violin from the mid–18th century, kindly made available to him privately. Veit Hertenstein plays a viola made by the Amati brothers in 1616. Mark Schumann plays a cello by Giovanni and Francesco Grancino from 1680, generously loaned to him by Merito SIT Vienna.

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