| Overview |
After decades of blossoming and dominating the artistic scene with its uninhibited emotional expression and ardent passion, Romanticism, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, began to experience somewhat of a decline. Its fanciful ideals, rooted outside the scope of everyday life, inevitably took a turn toward the more concrete, and the influences of Realism became a logical consequence. As a result, Romantic "programme music" began to attract audiences and artists with its preoccupation with story-telling, pictures, imagery and messages which were used as extra musical elements in composition. In addition, due to growing nationalism within the arts, Romantic music started to lose its universal characteristics, becoming variously more German, more Russian, more Bohemian or more Scandinavian. However, not all Romantic composers were affected by these developments or the new tenets, and the greatest among them was Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).
Brahms’ utter respect for traditions of pure music and his mastery of musical architecture brought him closer to the spirit of the Great Masters of Romanticism who preceded him than any of his contemporaries. Indeed, everything that is Romanticism is found and experienced in Brahms’ works, in captivating intensity for both the audience and performers themselves. From his chamber music repertoire totalling 24 works, our programme for this performance is a wonderful display of the depth and the power of Brahms’ musical intellect, his wisdom, the lyricism, warmth and charm of his melodies, and of the manifold beauties and moving, passionate passages contained within the music of the ultimate - - both the utmost and the last - - great Romantic composer.
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| Programme Notes |
In the middle of the 19th century, Romanticism began to experience somewhat of a decline. The German revolution of 1848, the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx, the increasing interest in Socialism as a form of government, and the discovery of the "science of sociology" - - all these processes indicated a new spirit of the times. The figure of the Romantic Hero, with its uninhibited emotional expression and ardent passion, lost its supremacy to the common man; and Romantic ideals, characteristically beyond the realm of everyday life, could no longer resonate with the new society. Scientism and positivism took hold. Inevitably there was a demand for everything had to become more "practical." The logical consequence of this in the arts was Realism.
Composers responded by promoting new means of expression to accurately mirror the new tents of Realism. There arose the fascination with story-telling in music and extra-musical devices like messages or pictures that could be laid down in composition - - in a word, "program music." In this domain, absolutely marvelous, stunning results were achieved by Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), Franz Liszt (1811-1886) and Richard Wagner (1813-1883).
Other composers in search of new means of expression turned elsewhere. With the desire for national recognition growing in many parts of Europe, artists turned their attention to the folklore, customs, and cultural heritage of their own people, and a period of Nationalism in the arts developed. In music, this process resulted in the use of folk music, national dances, and musical idioms to the extent that music started to lose its universal Romantic characteristics, becoming variously more Russian (Rimsky-Korsakov, Mossorgsky), more Bohemian (Smetana, Dvořák) or more Scandinavian (Grieg, Sibelius).
In its conversion to Realism, late 19th century Romanticism developed along these two parallel and often intersecting paths. Programme music, preoccupied with the depiction of a story line, abstained from traditional musical forms and compositional techniques and instead developed its own – tone poems and characteristic pieces like "Étincelles" (Sparks), "Papillons" (Butterflies), "Berceuse" (Lullaby) were among a few new examples. National music, on the other hand, turned to folk songs, rhythms, and dances, and superimposed them upon existing Romantic musical models.
However, not all Romantic composers were influenced by the new tenets and trends - - and the greatest among them was Johannes Brahms. Brahms’ utter respect for traditions of "pure music" (in other words "music for its own sake") and his incredible mastery of musical architecture brought him closer to the spirit of the Great Masters of Romanticism who preceded him than any of his contemporaries. Indeed, everything that is Romanticism is found and experienced in Brahms’ works: the lyricism, warmth and charm of melodies, passion and power of dramatic passages, wisdom and depth of musical development. It seems that Brahms was almost destined to continue the Great Masters’ traditions. Once Robert Schumann’s predicted that Brahms was to become the next great composer of a stature comparable to Beethoven, Brahms spent ten years working on his first symphony, which is often called "Beethoven's Tenth" - - meaning that Brahms' music was the next logical step after Beethoven's Ninth. .
If in composing music Brahms was somewhat a perfectionist (it is thought that the symphony known as his first may not have been such, since Brahms often destroyed completed works that failed to meet his standards), his approach to performance was generally more spontaneous. A rhythm that could sound unclear or inaccurate to us today, would not necessarily have seemed so to an audience prior to the 1900’s (and vice versa – our modern interpretation could be consider dry and mechanical by the earlier audience), and Brahms himself on many occasions expressed his sentiment that the steady beat of the metronome during a performance is intolerable. This confirms what Carl von Weber wrote earlier: "The beat should not be a tyrannical restriction or the driving of a mill-hammer. On the contrary, it should be to music what the pulse beat is to the life of man".
It is absolutely remarkable that, after all the cataclysmic historical events of the twentieth century, we still have an important "window" to the world of nineteenth century music performance practices - - a recording of Brahms playing his own music! On December 2nd 1889, at the encouragement of a representative of American inventor Thomas Edison, Theo Wangemann, who visited the composer in Vienna, Brahms participated in an experimental cylinder recording by playing measures 13-72 of his 1872 arrangement of the first Hungarian Dance for solo piano. This faint but precious phonograph recording, largely inaudible due to heavy surface noise, remains the earliest recording made by a major composer. It conveys a great sense of the vitality and tells us a great deal about the performance style of a musician who began performing in public while Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin and Donizetti were still alive.
A thorough examination of this recording can help to illuminate the spontaneity of late nineteenth-century performance practices in which musical tempo was considerably more flexible than it is to day. The most striking agogic feature in this performance is Brahms' tendency towards elongation of certain notes in repeated musical figures. He naturally departs from the score, both by melodic insertion or alteration. His manner of interpretation is free, very elastic and expansive. Brahms would prefer to lengthen a phrase rather than spoil it by compensating and forcing it into the metronomic bar.
From his chamber music repertoire totalling 24 works, our programme for this performance is a wonderful display of the manifold beauties and Romantic spirit contained within the music of the ultimate - - both the utmost and the last - - great Romantic composer.
Clarinet Sonata No.1 in F minor Op.120 (1894). By 1890, Brahms decided to retire from composing, but his plan was short lived. In March 1891 he made a trip to Meiningen for an arts festival and was mesmerized by performances of the Weber Clarinet Concerto and the Mozart Clarinet Quintet by clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld. The beautiful tone, most perfect technique and command of the instrument (Brahms called Mühlfeld the nightingale of the orchestra, while Liszt compared his playing to the sensation of biting into a ripe peach) inspired Brahms to begin composing again. In the summer of 1894 at his Bad Ischl retreat (a spa town in Austria), Brahms completed both Clarinet Sonata in F minor and Clarinet Sonata in E-flat major (corresponding to the keys of the two clarinet concertos by Carl von Weber), and they were first performed privately for Duke of Saxe Meiningen Georg II and his family in September of that year. The two clarinet sonatas of Op.120 were the last chamber pieces Brahms wrote before his death and are considered to be among the great masterpieces in the clarinet repertoire.
Cello Sonata No.1 in E minor Op.38 (1862-65). Brahms composed the first two movements (as well as an Adagio which was later deleted) during the summer of 1862, when he was not yet thirty, but the finale was not added to the long-completed first two movements until 1865. The actual title of the work is "Sonate für Klavier und Violoncello" (for Piano and Cello) and the piano "should be a partner - often a leading, often a watchful and considerate partner - but it should under no circumstances assume a purely accompanying role". It is dedicated to Josef Gänsbacher, a singing professor and amateur cellis. It is also "an homage to J. S. Bach", since the principal theme of the first movement and of the fugue are based on Contrapunctus 4 and 13 of The Art of Fugue. Brahms performed the sonata in Mannheim in July 1865 and then offered it to Breitkopf & Härtel, but the work was dismissed. He resubmitted the sonata to Simrock, describing it as "a violoncello sonata, which, as far as both instruments are concerned, is certainly not difficult to play." This is probably the most deceitful statement ever made by a composer about his own work! Simrock published it in 1866.
Trio for Piano, Clarinet, and Cello, in A minor Op.114 (1891). Two Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano Op.120 were not the first works composed by Brahms for clarinet. Until becoming acquainted with Mühlfeld, Brahms had never written for the clarinet in his chamber music (interesting fact considering that the clarinet was favoured by Romantic composers for its expressive qualities). On 12 December 1891, as a result of hearing Mühlfeld’s playing, Brahms premiered not one but two masterpieces that included clarinet – Clarinet Trio Op. 114 and his most celebrated Quintet for Clarinet and Strings Op.115. Brahms himself was at the piano in the premiere of the Trio (with Robert Hausmann the cellist of the Joachim Quartet playing cello part), and the Quintet was performed by Mühlfeld partnered with the Joachim Quartet. The Trio may have had mixed reaction, but it seems it was the favourite of several of Brahm's friends, including Eusebius Mandyczewski, a respected musical scholar, who later wrote of the Clarinet Trio: "It is as though the instruments were in love with each other.
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my speech before the concert...
Kerri is presenting the next season...
the Clarinet Sonata...
the Cello Sonata...
and the Trio...