PROGRAM NOTES
This program is about the cherished moments composers spend with friends, colleagues, and mentors. Inspired by our February concert, “Unrequited,” “Dear Friend” draws on the intimate format of chamber music to uncover connections between composers across generations and perspectives.
Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952)
Aure for Violin and Viola
Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho initially met Henri Dutilleaux (1916-2013) during a performance of her work at a small conference in Paris in the late 1980s. In an interview, Saariaho recollects how the French composer became a model for her, not only for his artistry but for his spirit of generosity. Aure was commissioned as part of a set of celebrations for Dutilleaux’s 95th birthday. Following is Saariaho’s own note for the work.
The Shadows of Time for orchestra by Henri Dutilleaux is a work that I particularly admire. It is a rich and extraordinarily shaped composition. I find the third movement, “Mémoire des ombres” (Memories of Shadows) deeply moving in its subject (the text is a sentence from Anne Frank’s diary: “Why us, why the star?”), in its dedication: “for Anne frank and for all the children in the world, all innocent (1945-1995),” and in its unforgettable compositional mastery.
I took the phrase, the first one sun by the child’s voice, as a point of departure for my little homage because it has often come to my mind since 1998, the year I first heard the work.
I wrote this piece originally as an homage to Henri Dutilleaux’s 95th birthday.
Aure: physics, old word. Breeze, breath, air:
We were caressed by a gentle breeze that our ancient language called “aure”; a kind of delicate morning breeze, misty and scented in the dew.
Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe
(Memories from Beyond the Grave)
Steven Stucky (1949-2016)
NELL’OMBRA, NELLA LUCE
A 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for his Second Concerto for Orchestra, American composer Steven Stucky died tragically early from aggressive brain cancer. His career was brilliant, launched from his education at Baylor University and Cornell University into positions on faculty at Cornell and Juilliard. His output was astonishingly prolific, and his works were widely performed by the best orchestras and ensembles in the world. Stucky’s program note for Nell’ombra, nella luce follows.
Nell’ombra, nella luce (“In Shadow, in Light”) is based on simple oppositions between “bright” and “dark” musics—between music of high register, forceful gesture, clear harmony, optimistic tone on the one hand, and of low register, mysterious manner, and denser, less clear harmony on the other.
These contrasts are exposed almost immediately: the opening idea gioioso (joyous), alternates with another idea, soave (gentle), but very soon these musics of the light are suddenly replaced by a shadowy, furtive music marked oscuro (dark). Throughout the 17-minute course of the piece, all these ideas and others like them will return several times, continually transformed but always in the service of the fundamental opposition between light and dark. At the same time, the rough outlines of a familiar formal layout may be glimpsed, especially something like a slow movement, and something like a scherzo (with trio!).
As often happens in my music, all the ideas are defined as much by factors like register, dynamic, instrumental texture, and expressive character, as by traditional thematic markers such as melody, rhythm, and motive. In this sense, like much of my work, Nell’ombra, nella luce is as much a composition of colors as a composition of lines.
The work was commissioned by the Howard Hanson Institute of American Music at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and composed between August 1999 and January 2000. The first performance was given by the Cuarteto Latino americano in Pittsburgh on 12 February 2000.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
HYMN IN VENERATION OF THE GREAT JOACHIM
The meeting and subsequent friendship between the young 20-year-old Johannes Brahms and Robert and Clara Schumann became legendary for fast-tracking the launch of Brahms’ career. It is typically framed with the gravity of the moment, and rightly so, but what gets lost in the telling is Brahms’ personality as a young man barely out of his teenage years. A glimpse of insight is available to us via one of the Schumann children, Eugenie, who reminisced, “I see, as though it were in a picture a group of children standing in the hall of our house in Düsseldorf. With amazement and admiration they are looking up at the banisters, on which a young man with long, blond hair is performing the most daring gymnastics. He hoists himself from right to left and up and down; at last he raises himself firmly on his arms, with his legs high in the air, and a final leap lands him below in the midst of the admiring crowd of children.” One can imagine the accompanying bursts of applause and squeals of delight.
This spirit of spontaneity also found its way into Brahms’ delightful work Hymn in veneration of the great Joachim, written in 1853 for the 22nd birthday of his new friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim. A protégé of Felix Mendelssohn, Joachim was becoming well-established on the world stage, having also recently become a collaborator with Clara Schumann. It was Joachim who provided the letter of introduction for the yet unknown Brahms to take to the Schumanns’ house later that year when he traveled to Düsseldorf. The two remained close friends until Brahms expressed sympathy for Joachim’s wife during divorce proceedings. Even then, Joachim continued to promote the works of Brahms through the remainder of his career.
In the Hymn two elements stand out as particularly charming: the pretend tuning and false start written into the score at the very opening of the work, and the insertion of Hungarian folk tunes, an homage to Brahms’ and Joachim’s joint interest in integrating and promoting the style, and perhaps a nod to the friend who introduced them, the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi.
Joseph Joachim (1831-1907)
QUARTETTSATZ IN C MINOR
As music moved into the public sphere in the 19th century, and with the development of ticketed concerts, composers and performers were confronted with a new question: what kind of public persona would they choose? In her absorbing article on this topic, musicologist Karen Leistra-Jones notes that two positions emerged, with one group choosing “theatricality” and the other “authenticity.” Joachim, along with his mentors, Felix Mendelssohn and Robert and Clara Schumann, and friend Johannes Brahms, gravitated toward the latter, whilst figures like Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner tended toward the former. As a result, Joachim occupied a unique position in the lineage of violin virtuosos where he rejected the flashy showstopper model established by Paganini, and deliberately cultivated an image of a more serious, interior oriented artist. Leistra-Jones quotes a contemporary audience member account from later in Joachim’s life that observed him to be a “quiet gentleman-artist,” who “advances in the most unpretentious way, but as he adjusts his violin he looks his audience over with the calm air of a musical monarch, as much as to say, ‘I repose wholly in my art, and I’ve no need of any ways or manners.’” Throughout his long career, which began in childhood when Mendelssohn took him on tour to England as a 12-year-old, Joachim would be celebrated for performing and elevating works like Bach’s Chaconne, and for writing cadenzas to numerous concertos, including those by Beethoven, Mozart, and Spohr.
In addition to his unique contribution to emerging performance styles, Joachim was dedicated to chamber music, founding his first string quartet in 1855 at age 24. It’s likely that his Quartettsatz (Quartet Movement) would have been written for their performances.
Clara Schumann (1819-1896)
VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY ROBERT SCHUMANN, OP. 20, arr. Alex Fortes
In 1850, Robert and Clara Schumann moved their large family from Dresden to Düsseldorf when the position of Municipal Director of Music was offered to Robert. It was a difficult transition complicated by the ongoing mental and physical health challenges with which Robert contended. Clara was one of the most famous piano soloists of her time and continued to perform when possible. In the spring of 1853, just four months after giving birth to their seventh child, she participated in the Lower Rhine Music Festival where a friendship with violinist Joseph Joachim began. A few months later, Johannes Brahms arrived at their doorstep.
In May of that same year Clara began writing her Variations on a theme by Robert Schumann, published as Op. 20. It was to be a gift for her husband’s birthday in early June. She noted in her diary, “Today I once more began…for the first time in years, to compose again; that is, I want to write variations on a theme of Robert’s out of Bunte Blätter, for his birthday.” Bunte Blätter, or “colorful leaves,” was a collection of previously composed works that contained a piece titled Ziemlich langsam (Pretty slow) that opened with Robert’s “Clara motive,” where he used musical notes to spell out her name as closely as possible: C-B-A-G#-A. This is the theme you hear at the beginning of Clara’s variations. Additionally, she kept the work in the same key, F-sharp minor. In the manuscript, she wrote the dedication: “To my beloved husband on June 8, 1853; this renewed feeble attempt from his old Clara.”
It was amongst her last compositions. Over the next several months Robert’s condition became increasingly debilitating, reaching a breaking point on the night of February 27, 1854, when he left the house and plunged himself into the icy Rhine river. After being rescued, he was placed in a sanatorium in Bonn where he died three years later. The burden of caring and providing for the family landed solely on Clara. Returning to concertizing and teaching, she dedicated the rest of her life to preserving and proliferating the works of her late husband.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
STRING QUINTET NO. 1 IN F MAJOR, OP. 88
Throughout most of his professional career, Brahms struggled against intense perfectionism. This personality trait explains the relatively small body of work he published given the scope of his fame. For perspective, Brahms’ entire chamber music output totaled 24 pieces, while Beethoven’s string quartets alone add up to 16.
That tendency was likely exacerbated by the tremendous amount of admiration and praise he received quite suddenly and unexpectedly at an early age, when Robert Schumann was so moved by Brahms’ works that he wrote and published an essay titled New Paths. There, for all the music world to see, he spoke of how he had anticipated the arrival of “one man who would bring us mastery, not as the result of a gradual development, but as Minerva, springing fully armed from the head of Cronus.” That person, he pronounced unequivocally, “is Johannes Brahms.” Stunned, Brahms wrote a tentative thank you letter, confessing, “The praise that you have openly bestowed on me will arouse such extraordinary expectation of my achievements by the public that I don’t know how I can begin to fulfill them even somewhat.” One solution he landed on was burning any of his music he didn’t feel worthy of posterity.
In the turbulent emotional time following Schumann’s death, just three years after New Paths appeared, Brahms spent an extended period focused on composing chamber music, but in typical fashion he avoided certain formats that were more popular and therefore could cause too much anxiety to write. Famously, it took Brahms two decades to write his first symphony, but it took him as long to produce his first string quartets, too. His two string quintets, Op. 88, and Op. 111, both with added viola, arrived late as the last pieces for string chamber ensemble he would write in 1882 and 1890, respectively. The String Quintet No. 1 was written during a time of rest in the Austrian resort town of Bad Ischl after a particularly busy year that included both tours and numerous performances of the second piano concerto, with Brahms stepping into the role of soloist for a total of 22 appearances. Perhaps influenced by his surroundings, the F major quintet is pervaded by a mostly sunny, calming mood. Moreover, it finally met the composer’s self-imposed high standards. When he wrote to Clara Schumann about it, he remarked it was one of his “finest works.”
Kathryn J. Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/harpsichordist, musicologist, music and cultural critic, and freelance writer. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.
