Felix Mendelssohn
Born February 3, 1809, in Hamburg.
Died November 4, 1847, in Leipzig.
Composed in 1847.
On April 13, 1847, during his ninth visit to London, Mendelssohn suffered an attack of dizziness while standing on a bridge across the Thames. He had to cling to the railing to avoid fainting, but quickly recovered, and carried on with the exhausting schedule of concerts, receptions and dinners that had been arranged for him. He met three times with Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, entertaining them with hours of conversation and piano playing, directed four performances of Elijah, conducted several other programs of his music, appeared as soloist in Beethoven’s G major Concerto at a Philharmonic Society concert, lunched at the Prussian Embassy, and toured art galleries. He made at least one formal public appearance every day of the week before he departed on May 8th. “Another week like this, and I’m a dead man,” he confided to his old friend Karl Klingemann, secretary of the Hanover Legation in London. Klingemann was disquieted enough by Felix’s wan complexion, lethargy and suddenly greying hair that he accompanied him on his return to Germany as far as Ostende in Belgium. When Mendelssohn tried to reenter Prussia at Herbesthal, he was detained for several hours on suspicion that he was another man of the same name who was wanted for inciting insurrection. He arrived home to his wife, Cecile, and his family in Frankfurt nearly exhausted.
Two days later, Mendelssohn learned that his beloved sister Fanny had died suddenly in Berlin from a stroke on May 14th at the age of 41. He collapsed upon receiving the stunning news, and was too ill even to attend the funeral. He canceled his upcoming performances, and largely withdrew into his own thoughts. Cécile took him to Baden-Baden, but the spa did nothing to lift his spirits or restore his health, so she convinced him to spend the summer at Interlaken in Switzerland, a town that he had always loved for its relaxed atmosphere and breathtaking scenery. There he received a few visitors, but mostly spent the time taking long, solitary walks into the hills and making sketches of the landscapes, a pastime in which he had shown considerable skill since boyhood. The beneficent locale did little to heal his mind or body, however, and he wrote to Klingemann, “When people come, and talk at random about commonplace matters, and of God and Universe, my mood becomes so unutterably mournful that I do not know how to endure it…. In the midst of all the words and questions and speechifying, one thought is always present with me — the shortness of life.” He tried again to compose, but reported to his younger sister, Rebecca, “I force myself to be industrious in the hope that later on I may feel like working and enjoying it.” Many commissions awaited his attention — a symphony for the London Philharmonic Society, a cantata to inaugurate a new hall in Liverpool, projects for Frankfurt and Cologne and Berlin — but the only work that he was able to complete that summer was the Quartet in F minor, into which he poured some of the grief spawned by Fanny’s death. (Another string quartet never got beyond its two internal movements— a set of variations and a scherzo, published after the composer’s death as his Op. 81.) The score of the F minor Quartet was finished by September, when he returned to Leipzig to try resuming his classes at the Conservatory and conducting a few concerts. He seemed to be recovering somewhat by the beginning of October, when he went to Berlin to discuss business matters with his brother, Paul. The sight of Fanny’s rooms, left exactly as they had been on the day that she was stricken, was, however, more than Mendelssohn could bear. He collapsed again, and reverted to his state of the previous months. He made it back to Leipzig, but suffered three strokes between October 7th and November 3rd. On November 4th, four months shy of his 39th birthday, Mendelssohn died. The F minor Quartet was his last important work.
“It would be difficult,” wrote the noted composer-conductor Sir Julius Benedict, a friend and biographer of Mendelssohn, “to cite any piece of music that so completely impresses the listener with a sensation of gloomy foreboding, of anguish of mind, and of the most poetic melancholy as does the F minor Quartet.” Mendelssohn himself seems to have taken Beethoven’s somber Quartet in the same key, Op. 95, the “Serioso,” as his musical inspiration for the work; the elegiac Adagio may have been modeled on the slow movement of that same composer’s Quartet, Op. 59, No. 1, whose manuscript was inscribed: “A weeping willow on my brother’s grave.” The opening movement is unsettled, almost tempestuous in mood, given for much of its length to churning rhythmic activity, probing harmonic progressions and shocking dynamic contrasts. The second theme is quieter and more lyrical, but its character is one of enervation rather than calm. The development section concerns itself exclusively with the passionate main theme. The return of the subsidiary subject in the recapitulation provides only a brief respite in the movement’s headlong rush toward its final measures.
The second movement is not one of those scherzos of elfin grace that had vivified Mendelssohn’s compositions since his teenage years, but is rather sardonic and macabre, music that presages some of Mahler’s bitter scherzos of a half-century later. The barren Trio that stands at the movement’s center is supported by a quasi-ostinato line sounded in hollow octaves by the viola and cello. The Adagio, the expressive heart of Mendelssohn’s touching memorial to his sister, herself a composer and pianist of excellent talent, is based on a little song melody that he had sent to her in a letter in June 1830, soon after he had celebrated his 21st birthday; she was then 25. The finale resumes the troubled character of the opening movement with one of Mendelssohn’s most extraordinary compositions. This music may have marked the beginning of a new creative phase for Mendelssohn, one in which he was ready to step beyond the Romanticized Classicism that had been his manner of musical speech since childhood into a realm of more intense emotions and greater formal risks. (Wagner’s Dutchman and Tannhauser, the first two documents in a movement that was to revolutionize the art, had already been launched in 1843 and 1845.) The music of the finale is at times almost athematic, consisting wholly of bare figurations and skeletal arpeggios such as can be found nowhere else in Mendelssohn’s output. The sense of grief remains unassuaged through the anxious closing measures of the Quartet.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg.
Died December 5, 1791, in Vienna.
Composed in 1785.
Premiered on February 12, 1785 in Vienna.
Of all the famous composer pairs — Bach and Handel, Bruckner and Mahler, Debussy and Ravel — only Mozart and Haydn were friends. Mozart first mentioned his acquaintance with Haydn in a letter to his father on April 24, 1784, but he probably had met the older composer soon after moving to Vienna three years earlier. Though his duties kept him across the border in Hungary at Esterháza Palace for most of the year, Haydn usually spent the winters in Vienna, and it is likely that he and Mozart attended or even played together at some of the many “string quartet parties” that graced the social calendars of the city’s music lovers during the cold months. True friendship and mutual admiration developed between the two master musicians, despite the 24 years difference in their ages, and they took a special delight in learning from and praising each other’s music. Mozart’s greatest testament to his respect for Haydn is the set of six superb string quartets composed between 1782 and 1785, and dedicated to his colleague upon their publication in September 1785. “To my dear friend Haydn,” read the inscription. “A father who had resolved to send his children out into the great world took it to be his duty to confide them to the protection and guidance of a very celebrated Man, especially when the latter by good fortune was at the same time his best Friend.”
These works are not just charming souvenirs of personal sentiments, however, but they also represent a significant advance in Mozart’s compositional style, for in them he assimilated the techniques of thematic development and thorough integration of the instrumental voices that Haydn had perfected in his Quartets, Op. 20 (1771) and Op. 33 (1781). “They are,” Mozart noted in the dedication, “the fruit of long and laborious endeavor,” a statement supported by the manuscripts, which show more experimentation and correction than any other of his scores. The superior quality of the “Haydn” Quartets was recognized both by the publisher Artaria, who paid Mozart the extraordinary fee of 100 ducats, a sum usually reserved only for complete operas, and by the composer himself, who insisted that the Parisian publisher Sieber pay considerably more for them than for a set of three piano concertos. “The ‘Haydn’ Quartets are models of perfection,” wrote Homer Ulrich, “not a false gesture; not a faulty proportion. The six Quartets stand as the finest examples of Mozart’s genius.”
Mozart played the first three of the Quartets (K. 387, K. 421, K. 428) for Haydn on January 15, 1785, and proudly sent a report on the occasion to his father in Salzburg, with which he enclosed the scores for the new pieces. A month later, on Friday, February 11th, Leopold arrived for his only visit to Vienna following Wolfgang’s marriage in 1782 (which Papa constantly decried). That same evening, Mozart whisked his father to a concert at which he played the new D minor Piano Concerto (K. 466), the first of six heavily subscribed “Academies” he presented that spring. The next night Mozart gave a long-planned party for Leopold and several friends at his flat in Schulerstrasse at which the last three of the “Haydn” Quartets were introduced. (K. 464 and K. 465 were finished on January 10th and 14th; K. 458 was composed the previous November.) Haydn and Mozart were joined in the performance by their Masonic lodge brothers Anton and Bartholomäus Tinti. In a letter to his daughter in Salzburg, Leopold, bursting with pride over the accomplishments and recognition of his son in the Imperial city, recorded the highlight of that soirée: “Herr Haydn said to me: ‘I tell you before God and as an honest man that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.’” For the father who had devoted so much of his life to the training and nurturing of his extraordinary son, that moment was, according Alfred Einstein, “the climax of his life.”
The last of the “Haydn” Quartets (C major, K. 465, completed on January 14, 1785) quickly gained the sobriquet “Dissonant” from its listeners for the adventurous harmonic excursions of its slow introduction. Some music dealers in Italy returned the scores to the publisher because they thought the rich chromaticisms were mistakes; the Hungarian Prince Grassalokovics was so incensed by the work’s tonal audacities that he tore up the parts from which his household quartet were performing; and even Haydn expressed some initial shock, but defended the bold prefatory chords by saying, “Well, if Mozart wrote it, he must have meant it.” Actually, the introduction’s heightened expression, a quality increasingly evident in the works of Mozart’s later years, is simply the perfect emotional foil for setting off the sunny nature of much of the music that follows. The main body of the opening Allegro is disposed in the traditional sonata form, invested with the thorough motivic working-out and instrumental interweavings that Mozart learned from Haydn. The following Andante, in sonatina form (sonata without development section), is one of Mozart’s most ecstatic inspirations. The Menuetto is not the rustic variety often favored by Haydn, but is rather an elegant dance subtly inflected with suave melodic chromaticism. The finale returns the ebullient mood and rhythmic vivacity of the opening movement.
Franz Schubert
Born January 31, 1797, in Lichtenthal, near Vienna.
Died November 19, 1828, in Vienna.
Composed in 1824.
Premiered on February 1, 1826 in Vienna.
When Wilhelmine von Chezy’s play Rosamunde, with extensive incidental music by Franz Schubert, was hooted off the stage at its premiere in Vienna on December 20, 1823, the 27-year-old composer decided to turn his efforts away from the theater, where he had found only frustration, and devote more attention to his purely instrumental music. The major works of 1823 — the operas Fierrabras and Der hausliche Krieg, the song cycle Die schone Mullerin and Rosamunde — gave way to the String Quartets in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”) and A minor, the A minor Cello Sonata (“Arpeggione”), several sets of variations and German Dances, and the Octet. At that time in Schubert’s life, composition may have been something of an escape from the difficulties of his personal situation. He was suffering from anemia and a nervous disorder as the result of syphilis and its treatment (mercury in the early 19th century!), and was constantly broke, living largely on the generosity of his devoted friends, with only an occasional pittance from some performance or publication. In March 1824, he poured out his troubles in a letter to Leopold Kupelweiser, a close friend recently moved to Rome: “In a word, I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and whose sheer despair over this makes things constantly worse instead of better; imagine a man whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the felicity of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain; whom enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating kind) for all things beautiful threatens to forsake, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?” Schubert then quoted some forlorn lines from Goethe’s poem Gretchen am Spinnrade (“_Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel_”), which he had set in 1814: “_‘My peace is gone, my heart is sore, I shall find it never, nevermore’_ [are words which] _I may well sing every day now, for each night on retiring to bed, I hope I may not wake again, and each morning but recalls yesterday’s grief._” Such anguish, however, did not seem to thwart Schubert’s creative muse, and the year 1824, when his physician was able to restore somewhat his health through regular mineral baths, a strict diet and confinement to his room, was one of the most productive periods of his life. Moritz von Schwind, the artist who captured so well the decorous atmosphere of the Biedermeier period and whose woodcuts for children were to inspire the third movement (“Frère Jacques”) of Mahler’s First Symphony sixty years later, reported on Schubert’s absorption with his creative activity at the time: “Schubert has now long been at work with the greatest zeal. If you go to see him during the day he says, ‘Hello, how are you? — Good!’ and simply goes on working, whereupon you depart.”
The D minor Quartet (popularly subtitled “Death and the Maiden”) was largely composed in March 1824, immediately after the one in A minor had been completed. The second Quartet seems not to have been played, however, until January 29 and 30, 1826, when Schubert directed two rehearsals at the Viennese home of the musical amateurs Karl and Franz Hacker in preparation for the formal premiere at the residence of the lawyer Josef Barth on February 1st. Schubert was said to have made some revisions to the score during the rehearsals. The Quartet was heard again later that month at the home of the composer, conductor and intimate of Schubert Franz Lachner in suburban Landstrasse. Schubert offered the Quartet for publication to Schott in February 1828, along with the Quartet in G major, three operas, the Mass in A-flat, the E-flat Piano Trio and several dozen songs, but he was refused, and the score was not issued until Josef Czerny of Vienna brought it out in July 1831, three years after the composer’s death.
Though Schubert spoke of the D minor and A minor Quartets and the exactly contemporaneous Octet as preparatory exercises for a “grand symphony,” there is nothing tentative or unpolished in the structure, style or expression of any of these splendid creations. Indeed, these compositions rank with the greatest instrumental works that Schubert ever wrote — the D minor Quartet was described by Maurice Brown as “one of the supreme accomplishments of all chamber music.” The first movement opens with a bold, dramatic gesture, founded upon a pregnant triplet-rhythm motive, which Jack Westrup said represents “not acceptance of the world’s misery; it is rather defiance.” (“My compositions are the product of my mind and spring from my sorrow,” Schubert confided to his diary in March 1824, just when he was writing this Quartet. “Those that were born of grief give the greatest delight to the outside world.”) The opening motive is whipped to a considerable frenzy before the music quiets, pauses on two chords surrounded by silence, and then launches into the subsidiary subject, a lilting violin duet of contrasting lyrical quality. This theme soon slips out of the halcyon realm of F major into the more troubled tonality of A minor, however, where it brings the movement’s exposition to a close amid the turbulent emotions of the opening. The development section is a compact and closely worked contrapuntal elaboration of the second theme. A rising wave of expressive tension leads without pause to the recapitulation, which is announced by a stark, barren octave splayed across all four instruments of the ensemble. The music gravitates toward the calmer region of D major for the return of the second theme, but then reverts to the agitated key and mood of the movement’s opening for its extended coda.
The sobriquet of the D minor Quartet — “Death and the Maiden” — is derived from the source of the theme of its second movement, a song that Schubert composed on a poem of that title by Matthias Claudius in February 1817. Claudius’ brief text contrasts the terror of a young girl (“Pass by, horrible skeleton! Do not touch me!”) with the mock-soothing words of death (“I am your friend. Be of good cheer! I am not fierce! You shall sleep softly in my arms!”). The song begins with a piano introduction depicting the solemn tread of death, continues with the maiden’s music of panic and fear, and ends with the words of death set to the strains of the introduction. It is from the opening and closing sections of the song that Schubert borrowed the theme for the Quartet, which he worked as a set of five variations. The Andante is, at the very least, the expressive heart of this masterful Quartet, but Sir George Grove went so far as to call this deeply affective movement “the most poetical, the most mournful, the most musical thing in the world.” The theme, more harmony than melody (and, therefore, the perfect subject for variations), is given in simple chorale texture by the ensemble. The opening variation is devoted to floating arabesques from the first violin. The cello’s long, lyrical line is supported by a richly textured accompaniment in the second variation. The third variation is more energetic and vigorous in its rhythms, while the fourth migrates to the expressive purity of G major. The final variation combines lyricism with drama, and recalls the triplet figurations of the opening movement before it draws to a sorrowful close.
The Scherzo, with its unsettling rhythmic syncopations and restless expression, reinstates the defiant mood of the first movement. Its main theme, bursting with tension and barely contained energy, has been interpreted by many commentators as a precursor to the swaggering Nibelungen theme in Wagner’s Das Rheingold. The finale, a feverish tarantella, combines formal elements of rondo and sonata to close what George R. Marek called “the most consistently inspired and moving quartet that Schubert ever wrote.”
©2006 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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