July 16 MOZART & BRAHMS

MOZART Quartet No. 1 for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello in G minor, K. 478
   Allegro
   Andante
   Rondo: Allegro

Kerry McDermott, violin
Zoë Martin-Doike, viola
Brook Speltz, cello
Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

BRAHMS Sextet No. 1 for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Two Cellos in B-flat major, Op. 18
   Allegro ma non troppo
   Andante, ma moderato
   Scherzo: Allegro molto
   Rondo: Poco Allegretto e grazioso

Dover Quartet
   Joel Link, violin
   Bryan Lee, violin
   Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola
   Camden Shaw, cello

Paul Neubauer, viola
Brook Speltz, cello

Quartet No. 1 for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello in G minor, K. 478 (1785)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

As Mozart reached his full maturity in the years after arriving in Vienna in 1781, his most expressive manner of writing, whose chief evidences are the use of minor modes, chromaticism, rich counterpoint and thorough thematic development, appeared in his compositions with increasing frequency. Among the most important harbingers of the shift in Mozart’s musical language was the G minor Quartet for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello (K. 478), which he completed on October 16, 1785 in response to a commission for three (some sources say six) such works from the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister. Hoffmeister had only entered the business a year earlier, and Mozart’s extraordinary and disturbing score, for which the publisher saw little market, threw a fright into him. “Write more popularly, or else I can neither print nor pay for anything of yours!” he admonished. Mozart cast some quaint expletives upon the publisher’s head, and said it was fine with him if the contract were canceled. It was. (Composer and publisher remained friends and associates, however. The following year, Hoffmeister brought out the Quartet in D major, K. 499, which still bears his name as sobriquet.) Artaria & Co., proving more bold than Hoffmeister, acquired the piece, and published it a year later; there are hints in contemporary documents that it enjoyed a number of performances in Vienna.
Alfred Einstein, in his classic 1945 study of Mozart, called the G minor tonality in which the K. 478 Quartet is cast the composer’s “key of fate.... The wild command that opens the first movement, unisono, and stamps the whole movement with its character, remaining threateningly in the background, and bringing the movement to its inexorable close, might be called the ‘fate’ motive with exactly as much justice as the four-note motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” Contrast to the movement’s pervasive agitation is provided by a lyrical melody initiated by the strings without piano. The Andante, in sonatina form (sonata without a development section), is probing, emotionally unsettled music, written in Mozart’s most expressive, adventurous harmonic style. Of the thematically rich closing rondo, English musicologist Eric Blom noted, “[It] confronts the listener with the fascinatingly insoluble problem of telling which of its melodies ... is the most delicious.” So profligate is Mozart’s melodic invention in this movement that he borrowed one of its themes, which he did not even bother to repeat here, for the principal subject of a piano rondo (K. 485) he composed three months later.

Sextet No. 1 for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Two Cellos in B-flat major, Op. 18 (1860)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

The Principality of Lippe-Detmold, midway between Frankfurt and Hamburg, was one of the leading centers of 19th-century German music. The reigning Prince, Leopold III, had a taste for music, which he was able to gratify by employing a permanent orchestra of 45 players that presented a broad spectrum of works from Mozart through Wagner. A great deal of chamber music was played by the principals of the orchestra, a choir was formed from members of the household and townsfolk, and guest artists were often asked to visit the court to perform with the resident forces. One such visitor was the piano virtuoso Clara Schumann, who not only performed but also gave lessons to one of the Prince’s sisters and to the sister of the Court Chamberlain. When Clara moved from Düsseldorf to Berlin in 1857, a year after her husband’s death, she recommended that the couple’s young friend, the composer Johannes Brahms, continue the ladies’ lessons. So taken were they with their 24-year-old teacher that they wrangled for him a position at court which included conducting the chorus and orchestra, participating in chamber music and, of course, continuing their instruction. The post was only for the three months of October through December, but the salary was sufficient to sustain Brahms in his modest life style in Hamburg for a full year. He returned again in 1858 and 1859.
Brahms found much to like at Detmold. The rich musical atmosphere was an inspiration to his study of the Classical masters, aided by the performances of Mozart and Haydn that the Prince required from the orchestra. The financial reward left him much time free to compose. Perhaps equally important to him were the lovely parks and forests surrounding the palace, where he took long walks to calm himself and ponder his future and his art. In those painful years after Schumann’s death, Brahms was not only confronting his grief at the loss of his dear friend and mentor, but was also sorting out his strong personal feelings for Clara. At Detmold, as throughout his life, he found the antidote to his feelings for her in music. When he returned there in autumn 1859 he wrote to his Aunt Auguste, “I am quite ecstatic: I think of nothing but music, and of other things only when they make music more beautiful to me. If things go on like this, I am perfectly capable of evaporating into a musical chord and floating away in the air.” It was under this halcyon spell that Brahms created his first chamber work for string ensemble, the Sextet in B-flat major.
The Sextet was conceived at Detmold in 1859, but largely composed between March and September of the following year. The work was first heard in Hanover in October 1860, played by a group under the direction of the composer’s friend and champion, violinist Joseph Joachim. Daniel Gregory Mason noted that the work marked an important artistic and stylistic passage for Brahms, “unmistakably the moment of his musical adolescence.... It is the first piece of chamber music in which, freeing himself once for all from the subjectivity and turgidity of romanticism, he starts to explore the road of classical universality in beauty, in which he was to discover such unprecedented treasures.” Mason then went on to point out the Sextet’s indebtedness to the clear Classical formal models of Mozart and Beethoven. In a later study of Brahms, however, Burnett James, while allowing the dominant vein of neo-Classicism in the Sextet, adds, “Yet underneath there is the firm, irresistible, romantic spirit moving.” In noting the apparently antithetical qualities in this music, these two writers have summarized the essential characteristic of Brahms: effulgent Romantic emotional expression fully disciplined by impeccable Classical form. The B-flat Sextet is among the earliest indisputable evidences of Brahms, the master.
Brahms was absolutely profligate with fine melodies in the opening, sonata-form movement. The first-theme group comprises the lyrical cello strain given immediately at the beginning and a Ländler-like tune (with a dotted rhythm) played in close harmony; a wide-ranging cello melody and another dotted-rhythm motive provide contrast. The development section is concerned just with the first-theme group motives, but all of the thematic material is returned in the recapitulation in heightened settings. The second movement is a theme with variations of which Brahms was so fond that he made a two-piano version (now lost) to play at parties with friends, as well as a transcription for solo piano (as Theme and Variations in D minor, which he presented to Clara as a birthday gift in 1860). The Scherzo is both vivacious and sly, filled with deceptive but delightful rhythmic cross-accents that fuddle the toe-tapping proclivities of many a listener. The closing Rondo, in its form and thematic material if not in its somewhat prolix working-out an homage to Mozart, confirms Walter Niemann’s words about this Sextet: “In it, Brahms’ grave face wears an almost Apollo-like brightness and breathes a strong, healthy spirit of almost exuberant vitality.”
©2020 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

July 23 YANG & DOVER PLAY DOHNÁNYI

July 23 YANG & DOVER PLAY DOHNÁNYI

BACEWICZ Quartet (1949)
   Allegretto - Allegro giocoso - Poco meno - Poco meno - Tempo II
   Andante tranquillo
   Molto allegro

Kerry McDermott, violin
Oliver Neubauer, violin
Clara Neubauer, violin
Paul Neubauer, viola

HAYDN String Quartet in D minor, Op. 76, No. 2, “Quinten”
   Allegro
   Andante o più tosto allegretto
   Menuetto: Allegro ma non troppo
   Vivace assai

Dover Quartet
   Joel Link, violin
   Bryan Lee, violin
   Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola
   Camden Shaw, cello

DOHNÁNYI Quintet No. 1 for Two Violins, Viola, Cello and Piano in C minor, Op. 1
   Allegro
   Scherzo: Allegro vivace
   Adagio, quasi andante
   Finale: Allegro animato

Dover Quartet
   Joel Link, violin
   Bryan Lee, violin
   Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola
   Camden Shaw, cello

Amy Yang, piano

BACEWICZ Quartet (1949)

Grazyna Bacewicz was Poland's most acclaimed woman composer in the 20th century. Her training included periods in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger and studying violin with Carl Flesch, and she became principal violin of the Polish Radio Orchestra. Bacewicz seems to have had the ability to navigate the complex political world of post-war Poland despite never writing overtly political works. She died just before the age of 60, leaving a substantial body of work with several orchestral works, concertos and seven string quartets. 
Quartet for four violins was designed as a teaching piece in 1949. The three contrasting movements display an elegant, refined technique with a strong influence of neo-classicism (something which Bacewicz seems to have imbibed during her time in Paris in the 1930s). There are folk hints too and some imaginative use of texture in writing for our violins. For this performance violist Paul Neubauer plays the fourth violin part on the viola. 
Excerpted and adapted from Planet Hugill, 2017.  

String Quartet in D minor, Op. 76, No. 2, “Quinten” (1796-1797)
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Haydn was universally acknowledged as the greatest living composer upon his return to Vienna in 1795 from his second London venture; he was 63. Though his international renown had been founded in large part upon the success of his symphonies and keyboard sonatas, he repeatedly refused offers to compose further in those genres, and instead concentrated the creative energies of his later years on the string quartet and the vocal forms of Mass and oratorio. Except for the majestic Trumpet Concerto, his only instrumental compositions after 1795 were the six quartets of Op. 76, the two of Op. 77 and the unfinished torso of Op. 103 — they were the culmination of nearly four decades of experience composing in the chamber medium. “The eight quartets which he completed show no signs of flagging powers,” wrote Rosemary Hughes in her study of Haydn’s chamber music. “In that last great wave of energy which carried them to completion, he gathers up all the efforts and conquests, all the explorations, all the personal idiosyncrasies too, of nearly half a century of unbroken creative life…. And behind this and permeating it all is a quality hard to define, but one in which we can sense the weight of a lifetime’s experience, human and musical. No young mind and heart could have conceived this music, could have so tempered exuberance with gentleness, or touched sober steadfastness with vision.”
The six Op. 76 Quartets were written on commission from Count Joseph Erdödy, scion of the Viennese family who had encouraged Haydn’s work since at least 1776 and whose members became important patrons of Beethoven after his arrival in the capital in 1792. The Quartets were apparently ordered and begun by the end of 1796, because Haydn was able to play them at the piano for the Swedish diplomat Frederik Samuel Silverstolpe the following June. They were probably given their formal premiere on September 28, 1797, when they were played for the visit of Archduke Joseph, Viceroy of Hungary, to Eisenstadt, family seat of Haydn’s employer, Prince Nicholas Esterházy II. The Quartets were issued in Vienna by Artaria in 1799 (“Nothing which our house has ever published equals this edition,” trumpeted the advertisement in the Wiener Zeitung on July 17th), and appeared shortly thereafter in London. “[I have] never received more pleasure from instrumental music,” wrote Charles Burney, the preeminent English music scholar of his day. “They are full of invention, fire, good taste and new effects, and seem the production, not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well already, but of one of highly cultivated talents, who had expended none of his fire before.” Critical opinion has not wavered since.
The Quartet, Op. 76, No. 2, the only work in the set in a minor key, opens with the falling-interval, long-note motive that gives the composition its nickname — “Quinten” (“Fifths”). This germinal fragment courses inexorably throughout the movement in an amazing variety of transformations, interwoven with more animated material for which it serves as an emotional and textural foil. The mood brightens for the formal second theme area, but the development section is imbued with the proto-Romantic pathos with which the Quartet began. The recapitulation and coda maintain the music’s stormy demeanor to the end of the movement. The Andante is an ornate instrumental song divided into three large structural paragraphs: A (major) — B (minor) — A (major). The haunted third movement, sometimes referred to as the “Witches’ Minuet,” is constructed from a barren canon in which paired voices chase each other in precise imitation at the interval of an octave; the central trio provides contrast with its more cheerful key and soaring violin line. The finale is a bustling rondo based on a fiery theme inspired by the Gypsy music that Haydn heard from the locals in the courtyard of the Esterházy Palace in western Hungary.
©2020 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Quintet No. 1 for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello in C minor, Op. 1 (1895)

Ernst von Dohnányi (1877-1960)

Ernst von Dohnányi was among the 20th-century’s foremost composers, pianists, teachers and music administrators. Born on July 27, 1877 in Pozsony, Hungary (now Bratislava, Slovakia), he inherited his musical interests from his father, a talented amateur cellist, who gave him his first lessons in piano and theory. At seventeen, he entered the newly established Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, the first Hungarian of significant talent to do so. The young composer was honored with the Hungarian Millennium Prize for his Symphony No. 1 in 1895, and two years later he received the Bösendorfer Prize for his First Piano Concerto. He graduated from the Academy in 1897, and toured extensively for the next several years, appearing throughout Europe, Russia, the United States, and South America. From 1905 to 1915, Dohnányi taught at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, a position he assumed at the invitation of his friend, the eminent violinist Joseph Joachim. He returned to Budapest in 1915, becoming director of the Academy in 1919 and musical director of Hungarian Radio in 1931. He served as conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic for the 25 years after 1919 while continuing to concertize at home and abroad and remaining active as a composer. In addition to his work as a performer and composer, Dohnányi’s contributions to the musical life of his homeland included inspiring and performing the works of younger composers (notably Bartók and Kodály), reforming the Budapest Academy’s music curriculum, guiding the development of such talented pupils as Georg Solti, Géza Anda and Annie Fischer, expanding the repertory of the nation’s performing groups, and serving as a model in musical matters through the strength of his personality and the quality of his musicianship.
In 1944, Dohnányi left Hungary, a victim of the raging political and militaristic tides that swept the country during World War II. He moved first to Austria, then to Argentina, and finally settled in Tallahassee in 1949 as pianist and composer-in-residence at Florida State University, where his students included Pulitzer Prize-winner American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and his grandson, conductor Christoph von Dohnányi, former Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Though Dohnányi was in his seventies, his abilities remained unimpaired, and he continued an active musical life. He appeared regularly on campus and in guest engagements; his last public performance was as conductor of the FSU Symphony just three weeks before his death. He died in New York on February 9, 1960 during a recording session.
Dohnányi composed the Piano Quintet No. 1 in 1895, when he was eighteen and still a student at the Franz Liszt Academy; after having written nearly seventy pieces during his teenage years, he deemed it the first of his compositions worthy of an opus number. The work’s premiere in Budapest that same year drew the attention of Brahms, who sponsored the performance of the Quintet in Vienna that helped to establish Dohnányi’s international reputation as a composer. The opening movement, passionate, spacious and almost symphonic in scale and sonority, takes as its main theme a bold, striding melody announced by the piano. An arching phrase in the cello provides the transition to the movement’s formal second theme, a sweetly lyrical strain given by the strings. The development treats all three themes and reaches its climax just as the recapitulation begins. After the thematic materials are returned in expressively heightened settings, a majestic reworking of the principal subject brings the movement to a confident close. The Scherzo, with its fiery cross-rhythms and headlong energy, is reminiscent of the Bohemian furiant; a gently swaying central trio provides formal and expressive balance. The elegiac Adagio follows a broad three-part form (A–B–A), with a poignant theme first sung by the viola heard in the outer sections and a more passionate strain occupying the center of the movement. The finale summarizes the remarkable state of Dohnányi’s craft and creative gifts at the outset of his career: a Classical rondo form whose reiterations of a folk-influenced, mixed-meter theme are separated by episodes of Schubertian lyricism, Bach-inspired fugue and even a recall of the first movement’s principal theme to round out the Quintet’s structure, all concluded by a coda of Beethovenian triumph.
©2020 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

July 30 SCHUBERT, BARBER, MENDELSSOHN 

SCHUBERT Sonata for Viola and Piano in A minor, D. 821, “Arpeggione”
   Allegro moderato
   Adagio
   Allegretto

Paul Neubauer, viola
Amy Yang, piano

BARBER Adagio for String Quartet

Dover Quartet
   Joel Link, violin
   Bryan Lee, violin
   Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola
   Camden Shaw, cello

MENDELSSOHN Octet for Four Violins, Two Violas and Two Cellos in E-flat major, Op. 20
   Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco
   Andante
   Scherzo: Allegro leggierissimo
   Presto

Dover Quartet
   Joel Link, violin
   Bryan Lee, violin
   Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola
   Camden Shaw, cello

Oliver Neubauer, violin
Clara Neubauer, violin
Paul Neubauer, viola
Brook Speltz, cello

Sonata for Viola and Piano in A minor, D. 821, “Arpeggione” (1824)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

The guitar player Vincenz Schuster was among the regular participants in the evening musical salons that Ignaz Sonnleithner held at his Viennese townhouse during the 1820s. It was there that Schuster met Franz Schubert, whose compositions and piano playing were the chief attractions of those convivial soirées. When Schubert returned to Vienna in September 1824 after spending the summer as music master to a branch of the Esterházy family in Zseliz, Schuster pestered him to write a piece for a new instrument, a curious hybrid of guitar, cello and viola da gamba called an “arpeggione,” that a local inventor, Georg Staufer, had devised the year before. The arpeggione was about the size of a modern cello, but had a smooth waist, a series of some two-dozen frets fixed to the fingerboard (like a guitar), six strings tuned in fourths, and an elaborately carved scroll (like the old gamba). The instrument could either be bowed or strummed. Schuster had become one of its first exponents, and he must have envisioned a future for the instrument because he not only cajoled Schubert into composing his “Arpeggione” Sonata, but also wrote a tutorial for it. Schuster’s faith quickly proved to be misplaced, however, and the arpeggione became extinct within a decade. Schubert’s piece, dedicated to Schuster, is the only one known to have been composed for the instrument. When the score of the Sonata was first published in 1871 as part of the collected edition of Schubert’s works, it was issued in a version for cello, the form in which it has become the best-known of his few compositions for solo instrument and piano, though practitioners of violin, viola, flute, double bass and clarinet have also appropriated it for their repertories.
The “Arpeggione” Sonata is a friendly and ingratiating specimen of Biedermeier Hausmusik, exactly the tuneful and easily likeable sort of creation that made the composer’s Schubertiads such a draw for his friends. The opening movement, more wistful than dramatic, is one of the most compact realizations of sonata form that Schubert devised during his later years, eschewing the glorious prolixity — the “heavenly length” Schumann attributed to the C major Symphony — that marked the quartets, piano sonatas and symphonies from 1822 to the end of his life. The Adagio is a song of sweetness and simplicity that leads without pause to the finale, constructed in a sectional design buttressed by the returns of the lyrical main theme.

Adagio for String Quartet (1936)
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

Samuel Barber was among those many talented American musicians who lived, studied and worked in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, not only polishing their professional skills but also proving to the world that their country had come of artistic age. Barber spent much time overseas after 1928, thanks to such emoluments as the American Prix de Rome and Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship. In Rome, he wrote a Symphony in One Movement, which was premiered there in 1936 and given its first American performance in Cleveland by Artur Rodzinski early the next year. Rodzinski also played the Symphony at the Salzburg Festival in 1937, making it the first American work to be heard at that prestigious event. The chief conductor of the Salzburg Festival at that time was Arturo Toscanini, who was to begin his tenure with the NBC Symphony in New York later that year. Toscanini asked Rodzinski if he could suggest an American composer whose work he might program during the coming season, and Rodzinski advised that his Italian colleague investigate the music of the 27-year-old Samuel Barber. By October, Barber had completed and submitted to Toscanini the Essay No. 1 for Orchestra and an arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement from the String Quartet (Op. 11, in B minor) he had written in Rome in 1936 — the Adagio for Strings. Toscanini accepted the pieces for performance, and broadcast them on November 5, 1938 with the NBC Symphony. The Adagio was an instant success. It was the only American work Toscanini took on his tour of South America. Sibelius praised it. The audience at its 1945 Russian premiere, in Kiev, would not leave the hall until Stokowski encored it. It was the music broadcast from New York and London following the announcement of the death of President Roosevelt. The Adagio for Strings, with its plaintive melody, rich modalism, austere texture and mood of reflective introspection, is among Samuel Barber’s greatest legacies, a 20th-century masterwork.

Octet for Strings in E-flat major, Op. 20 (1825)
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

It was with the Octet for Strings, composed in 1825 at the tender age of sixteen, a full year before the Overture to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that the stature of Mendelssohn’s genius was first fully revealed. He wrote the work as a birthday offering for his violin and viola teacher, Eduard Rietz, and premiered it in October at one of the household musicales the Mendelssohns organized to showcase young Felix’s budding gifts; Rietz participated in the performance and young Felix is thought to have played one of the viola parts. (Rietz and his family remained close to Mendelssohn. Eduard’s brother, Julius, succeeded Mendelssohn as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts upon the composer’s death in 1847 and edited his complete works for publication in the 1870s.) The scoring of the Octet calls for a double string quartet, though, unlike the work written in 1823 for the same instrumentation by Louis Spohr (a friend of the Mendelssohns and a regular visitor to their family programs), which divides the eight players into two antiphonal groups, Mendelssohn treated his forces as a single integrated ensemble, a veritable miniature orchestra of strings. Even allowing that Mendelssohn, by age sixteen, was already a veteran musician with a decade of experience and a sizeable catalog of music to his credit, the Octet’s brilliance and originality are phenomenal.
The Octet is splendidly launched by a wide-ranging main theme that takes the first violin quickly through its entire tonal range; the lyrical second theme is given in sweet, close harmonies. The development section, largely concerned with the subsidiary subject, is relatively brief, and culminates in a swirling unison passage that serves as the bridge to the recapitulation of the earlier melodic materials.
The following Andante, like many slow movements in Mozart’s instrumental compositions, was created not so much as the fulfillment of some particular formal model, but as an ever-unfolding realization of its own unique melodic materials and world of sonorities. The movement is tinged with the delicious, bittersweet melancholy that represents the expressive extreme of the musical language of Mendelssohn.
The composer’s sister Fanny noted that the featherstitched Scherzo was inspired by gossamer verses from Goethe’s Faust, to which Mendelssohn’s fey music is the perfect complement:

Floating cloud and trailing mist,
O’er us brightening hover:
The rushes shake, winds stir the brake:
Soon all their pomp is over.

The closing movement, a dazzling moto perpetuo with fugal episodes, recalls Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony (No. 41, C major, K. 551) in its rhythmic vitality and contrapuntal display, simultaneously whipping together as many as three themes from the finale and a motive from the Scherzo during one climatic episode in the closing pages.
©2020 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

August 6 BRONFMAN & MCDERMOTT

SCHUBERT Marche militaire in D major for Piano, Four Hands, D. 733, No. 1

SCHUBERT Fantasy in F minor for Piano, Four Hands, D. 940
   Allegro molto moderato - Largo - Allegro vivace - Tempo I

BRAHMS Sonata in F minor for Two Pianos, Op. 34b
   Allegro non troppo
   Andante, un poco adagio
   Scherzo: Allegro
   Finale: Poco sosenuto - Allegro non troppo

Yefim Bronfman, piano
Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

Marche Militaire in D major for Piano, Four Hands, D. 733, No. 1 (1818)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

In June 1816, when he was nineteen, Schubert received his first fee for one of his compositions (a now-lost cantata for the name-day of his teacher, Heinrich Watteroth), and decided that he had sufficient reason to leave his irksome teaching post at his father’s school in order to follow the life of an artist. He moved into the Viennese apartments of his devoted friend Franz von Schober, an Austrian civil servant who was then running the state lottery, and celebrated his new freedom by composing incessantly, rising shortly after dawn (sometimes he slept with his glasses on so as not to waste any time getting started in the morning), pouring out music until early afternoon, and then spending the evening haunting the cafés of Grinzing or making music with friends. Those convivial soirées became more frequent and drew increasing notice during the following months, and they were the principal means by which Schubert’s works became known to the city’s music lovers. In September 1817, Schober’s brother returned from Paris, and the penniless composer reluctantly removed himself from his room in the city to his father’s home and school in the suburbs. Schubert remained with his family until the following summer, when he eagerly accepted a temporary post as music tutor to the daughters of Count Johann Esterházy in Zseliz (now Zeliezovce in Slovakia), 150 miles east of Vienna. “Thank God I can live at last,” he wrote to a friend over the prospect of being on his own.
At Zseliz, Schubert was charged with teaching piano and singing to the two countesses, Marie (aged sixteen) and Karoline (twelve), and to provide musical entertainment for the family and their guests. He apparently liked instructing the young countesses (“nice children,” he called them), got along well with the staff, and enjoyed the rural surroundings, and the creativity that had been temporarily stunted by returning to the paternal home in Vienna was again unleashed. Several works for piano four hands suited to the requirements of his appointment at Zseliz followed: the Sonata in B-flat, D. 617; a set of German Dances, D. 618; the Variations on a French Song, D. 624; and the Trois Marches Militaires, D. 733. The Marches Militaires, published in 1826 by Diabelli, are delightful souvenirs of the convivial, drawing-room self-entertainment that was the principal form of music-making in 19th-century Europe.

Fantasy in F minor for Piano, Four Hands, D. 940 (1828)
Franz Schubert

On March 26, 1828 in the hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, Schubert gave the only public concert entirely of his works held during his lifetime. The event, prompted and sponsored by his circle of devoted friends, was a significant artistic and financial success, and he used the proceeds to celebrate the occasion at a local tavern, pay off some old debts, acquire a new piano, and buy tickets for Niccolò Paganini’s sensational debut in Vienna three days later. The first important composition Schubert completed after that milestone in his career was the Fantasy in F minor, the most poetic of his creations for piano duet (i.e., four hands at one keyboard). The work was finished in April, but apparently had been sketched soon after the beginning of the year, since Schubert offered it for publication to Schott in February 1828 along with the Quartets in G major and D minor (“Death and the Maiden”), three operas, Mass in A-flat, E-flat Piano Trio and several dozen songs. His proposal was refused, and the score for the Fantasy was not issued until Diabelli of Vienna brought it out in 1829, a year after the composer’s death. On May 9, 1828, Schubert and Franz Lachner performed the piece for their friend, the writer and Schubertian Eduard von Bauernfeld, who recorded in his diary, “Today Schubert (with Lachner) played this new, wonderful four-hand Fantasy to me.” The score was dedicated to Countess Caroline Esterházy, a young student of his upon whom the bachelor Franz seems to have had a crush — he once told her that everything he wrote was secretly dedicated to her, though the Fantasy is the only one of his compositions to bear her name.
Schubert was skilled as a violinist, violist and solo pianist, but his favorite form of participatory chamber music was the piano duet. He wrote some sixty works for this convivial medium, though most date from his younger years, before he took up his bohemian existence in central Vienna when he was twenty. The Fantasy in F minor is his last and greatest contribution to the four-hand repertory, which, according to Maurice Brown in his study of Schubert, “has, in the highest degree, all those characteristic qualities of the composer that have endeared him to generations of music lovers.” The Fantasy is spread across four continuous formal sections, the first and last spawned from the same thematic material so as to unify the overall structure. The opening portion, with its delicately rocking accompaniment and precisely etched melody, achieves a haunting blend of mystery and nostalgia that only Mozart could rival. Sterner motives are introduced for the sake of contrast. The following Largo section uses dramatic dotted-rhythm figurations at its beginning and end to frame the more tender melody that occupies its central region. A brilliant triple-meter Allegro, the pianistic analog of the Scherzo in the contemporaneous C major Symphony (“The Great”), forms the dancing heart of the Fantasy. The themes of the opening section return in heightened, often contrapuntal settings to round out this masterpiece of Schubert’s fullest maturity.

Sonata in F minor for Two Pianos, Op. 34b (1862-1863)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

When Brahms ambled into his favorite Viennese café one evening, so the story goes, a friend asked him how he had spent his day. “I was working on my symphony,” he said. “In the morning I added an eighth note. In the afternoon I took it out.” The anecdote may be apocryphal, but its intent faithfully reflects Brahms’ painstaking process of creation, which is perhaps seen nowhere better than in the Sonata for Two Pianos in F minor.
Brahms began work on the piece as a string quintet with two cellos, the same scoring as Schubert’s incomparable C major Quintet, in early 1862, and by August he had the first three movements ready to send to his friend and mentor Clara Schumann. On September 3rd, she replied, “I do not know how to start telling you the great delight your Quintet has given me. I have played it over many times and I am full of it.” When she received the finale in December, she wrote, “I think the last movement rounds the whole thing off splendidly…. The work is a masterpiece.” The violinist Joseph Joachim also received a copy of the new String Quintet from Brahms. At first he was enthusiastic, writing to the composer on November 5, 1862, “This piece is certainly of the greatest importance and is strong in character.” After playing through the composition several times over the ensuing six months, however, Joachim began to have reservations about it. “The details of the work show some proof of overpowering strength,” he noted, “but what is lacking, to give me pure pleasure, is, in a word, charm. After a time, on hearing the work quietly, I think you will feel the same as I do about it.” Brahms tinkered with the score to satisfy Joachim’s objections, and had it played privately in Vienna, but decided that medium and music were still unhappily coupled.
By February 1863, the String Quintet had been recast as a Sonata for Two Pianos, which Brahms performed at a concert in Vienna on April 17, 1864 with Carl Tausig, a musical ally for whom he had written the Paganini Variations the year before. The premiere met with little critical acclaim. Clara continued to be delighted with the work’s musical substance, but thought that “it cannot be called a Sonata. Rather it is a work so full of ideas that it requires an orchestra for its interpretation. [Those were the years before the First Symphony appeared, when Clara pestered Brahms repeatedly to write something in that grand genre.] These ideas are for the most part lost on the piano. The first time I tried the work I had the feeling that it was an arrangement…. Please, remodel it once more!”
One final time, during the summer of 1864, Brahms revised the score, this time as a Quintet for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello, an ensemble suggested to him by the conductor Hermann Levi. The Quintet was published by Rieter-Biedermann in 1865, and given its formal public premiere in Paris on March 24, 1868. Unlike the original strings-only version of the work, which he destroyed (Brahms was almost pathologically secretive about his sketches and unfinished works), he also allowed the Sonata for Two Pianos to be published in 1872. Shortly before its appearance, he had played the Sonata with Clara for the Princess Anna von Hessen, who was enthralled by it. As a result, Brahms dedicated both versions of the work to the Princess, who purchased for the composer the manuscript score of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor as a token of her gratitude.
The opening movement — tempestuous and tragic in mood, not unlike the D minor Piano Concerto, completed in 1859 — is in a tightly packed sonata form. The dramatic main theme is stated immediately in unison, and then repeated with greater force. The complementary theme, given in C-sharp minor above an insistently repeated triplet figuration, is more subdued and lyrical in nature than the previous melody. The closing theme achieves the brighter tonality of A-flat major to offer a brief respite from the movement’s pervasive strong emotions. The development section treats the main and second themes, and, also like the First Piano Concerto, ushers in the recapitulation on a great wave of sound.
The outer sections of the three-part form (A-B-A) second movement are based on a gentle, lyrical strain in sweet, close-interval harmonies, while the movement’s central portion uses a melody incorporating an octave-leap motive.
The Scherzo is one of Brahms’ most electrifying essays. The Scherzo proper comprises three elements: a rising theme of vague rhythmic identity; a snapping motive in strict, dotted rhythm; and a march-like strain in full chordal harmony. These three components are juxtaposed throughout the movement, with the dotted-rhythm theme being given special prominence, including a vigorous fugal working-out. The central trio grows from a theme that is a lyrical transformation of the Scherzo’s chordal march strain.
The Finale opens with a pensive slow introduction fueled by deeply felt chromatic harmonies, exactly the sort of passage that caused Arnold Schoenberg to label Brahms a “modernist.” The body of the movement, in fast tempo, is a hybrid of rondo and sonata forms, a formal technique that finds its roots in the music of Haydn. Despite the buoyant, Gypsy flavor of the movement’s thematic material, the tragic tenor of the work is maintained until its closing page.
©2020 Dr. Richard E. Rodda