November 10 & 11, 2024

November Concert

Joseph Haydn
String Quartet in B minor, Op. 33

Felix Mendelssohn
Piano Quartet No. 2 in F minor

Anton Arensky
Piano Trio No. 1 Op. 32 in D minor

with Deborah Wong, violin

Sunday, November 10, 3 pm * First Congregational Church of Old Greenwich * 108 Sound Beach Avenue, Old Greenwich, CT
Monday, November 11, 7:30 pm * Greenwich Historical Society * 47 Strickland Road, Cos Cob

Program Notes

For most of his career, Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) was employed by the extremely wealthy aristocratic Esterházy family. Well, employed is a bit of a euphemism.  Haydn was not an employee; he was a servant.  As a servant, he was treated very well but his workload was enormous. He composed most of the music needed for church functions, operas, and court events, rehearsed, conducted, staged, and played that music, recruited and hired musicians for the court, oversaw the royal instrument collection – for starters. But more onerous for Haydn was the fact that working for the Esterházys meant living and working mostly at the Esterházy palaces in rural Austria and Hungary rather than in cosmopolitan Vienna.

But oddly, Haydn’s sequestration made him famous.  Prince Nikolaus disliked life in Vienna, but, as the Esterházys were one of the most influential families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Viennese liked the Esterházys, with a steady stream of European movers and shakers visiting the Esterházy estates. Returning home, they talked about outstanding music they had heard and praised the man responsible – Haydn.

While these visitors could talk about Haydn’s music, they could not own it. Haydn’s contract with the prince required that “[Haydn] will be bound to compose such music as his Serene Highness shall command, and not let such compositions be communicated to any other party, much less be copied, but they shall remain for his use only and his rightful ownership, and he shall not, without knowledge and permission, compose for any other person.” The result: a pent-up demand for Haydn’s music throughout Europe. When this clause was removed from Haydn’s contract in 1779, he began to look for ways to meet that demand.

Some of the first pieces Haydn promoted were the String Quartets, Op. 33, (nicknamed “The Russian” after its dedication to The Grand Duke Paul of Russia) composed in 1781. While he may have engaged in some pitch talk when he told potential clients that the quartets were composed in a “new and special” way (Madison Avenue would be proud), there are noticeable differences from Haydn’s Op. 20 Quartets composed just under a decade earlier. These quartets contain no minuets; rather there are scherzos (resulting in a second nickname – “Gli Scherzi/The Jokes”.) Formal fugal finales are replaced with rondos (where one recurring idea is separated by contrasting episodes), that maintain parity between the instruments while using a more conversational style. Perhaps most importantly, Haydn’s extended musical grammar, rather than the music’s surface effects, allows for an expansion of expressive possibilities. For instance, Charles Rosen used Op. 33 to illustrate that “the classical music style could be genuinely funny, not merely jolly or good natured.” (Search “The Humor of Haydn/St. Lawrence String Quartet” on YouTube for a great demonstration of this.)

A case in point is Quartet No. 1 in B minor (an unusual key for Haydn). It has a scherzo, the texture of the last movement is conversational, and the musical syntax is handled with freedom and creativity. One example of this creativity is the opening of the first movement. The music gives the impression that it is in D major before pivoting to B minor, its true home key, revealing that Haydn has been playing aural three-card monte with his listeners.

Do you need to understand these technical points to appreciate the quartet? Not at all. Rather, Haydn used them to engage, rather than school, his listeners at the Eszterháza Castle and beyond, then and now.

When the German composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was born, Beethoven was writing some of his best-known works and, before Mendelssohn died, he could have heard some of Wagner’s first mature operas (not yet music dramas). Coming of age during a time of such rapid musical change offered Mendelssohn a Janus-faced choice: would he take inspiration from practices of the past or from practices pointing toward the future? While Mendelssohn wrote music of great beauty and appeal, most commentators agree with the composer/critic Virgil Thomson’s claim that “[Mendelssohn] was far more interested in where music came from than in where it was going.”

This may have been because of the musical education Felix and his sister Fanny* received from their teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832), a conservative composer with a deep love of the then unfashionable music of J. S. Bach. Perhaps it was due to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Mendelssohn family’s Berlin household, which included guests such as Heine, Hegel, and Humboldt. (It was said, “Europe came to their living room.”). We know the family’s emphasis on culture and learning (the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn was Felix’s grandfather) provided Felix and Fanny with a thorough classical education. But most likely it was that Felix, one of music’s great prodigies, formed his musical sensibility at a very young age, before the works of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner made their mark. In fact, in 1823, a time when Beethoven was hard at work composing his Ninth Symphony, the fourteen-year-old Felix, with over one hundred accomplished pieces under his belt, wrote one of his first published works, the Piano Quartet No. 2 Op. 2.

The Quartet is in four movements and is dedicated to Zelter. While the music shows the influence of the music Mendelssohn studied under Zelter’s tutelage (especially Mozart), it also has characteristics that point to the staggering achievements of the Octet, Op. 20 and the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 21 that Mendelssohn would compose by the age of seventeen. The second movement presages Mendelssohn’s own Songs Without Words, the third movement Intermezzo hints at the archetypal Mendelssohnian scherzo, and the dramatic opening and closing movements demonstrate how that “arsenal of romanticism,” Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, swept the twelve-year-old Felix off his feet.

*(Fanny Mendelssohn-Hansel (1805-1847) was considered in some ways to be more talented than her brother, but her father told her that “Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.” The suppression of her possible output is one of music’s great losses.)

The next time you talk to a college student, ask if they know (any of) the great silent movie clowns – Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. Most know of Chaplin, but few have heard of the others. (I checked this out with students at a prestigious Ivy League university. Don’t even get me started on asking about Bugs Bunny).

This is not surprising. Time foreshortens the full picture of any historical era (no Borgesian 1:1 scale maps of the past!) and, as a result, many important, influential, and interesting figures fade from public consciousness. Such is the case of Anton Arensky (1861-1906).

Born in Novgorod, Russia, Arensky grew up in a cultured and musical family. He enrolled in the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1879, studying with Rimsky-Korsakov. After graduating in 1882, Arensky moved to Moscow to teach at the Moscow Conservatory where he taught Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Glière and where Tchaikovsky became a colleague, friend, and mentor. Arensky moved back to St. Petersburg in 1895 to serve as the (very well paid) director of the Imperial Chapel, and retired 1901 on a generous pension, spending his remaining days touring as conductor and pianist until his death from tuberculosis.

Living and working in both of Russia’s cultural centers meant dealing with proponents of two competing schools of thought over the identity of Russian music. Rimsky-Korsakov originally was a member of a group of composers known as the Mighty Five, which advocated the use of musical procedures based on Russian sources (such as the Russian language), while Tchaikovsky was more influenced by procedures developed in Western Europe. Arensky soon found himself in the middle of a feud.

And after Arensky came under the influence of Tchaikovsky, his reputation was caught in the crossfire. Rimsky-Korsakov’s opinion of Arensky as “our well-known talented composer” changed to “he will soon be forgotten.” Others criticized the influence of Tchaikovsky as proof that Arensky was a derivative composer lacking an individual voice. (It didn’t help that Arensky drank, gambled, and, later in life, was considered “a strange man, drunken, debauched, flighty and unpredictably irascible, unreliable in meeting commitments or commissions.”)

While in his day some considered Arensky’s extensive output to be derivative, increasingly it has been seen as eclectic. Whichever it was, Arensky had the sense to choose from the best. His Piano Concerto, Op. 2, channels Chopin, Tchaikovsky’s influence can be seen in more than the theme for the Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky, Op. 35a, and his best-known work, the Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 32 composed in 1894, throws Mendelssohn into the mix.

Arensky, following the precedent of Tchaikovsky’s elegiac Piano Trio, Op. 50 (subtitled “To the memory of a great artist” – the pianist Nicholas Rubenstein), dedicated his trio to the memory of his friend, the virtuoso cellist Karl Davïdov (1838-1889). It is in four movements, all of which, appropriately enough, have a prominent cello part: a first movement with echoes of Tchaikovsky, a Mendelssohnian scherzo, and a Schumannesque finale in which the main theme alternates with “contrasting episodes that literally and figuratively operate as memories.” But it is the slow, plangent third movement, a tribute to Davydov entitled Elegia, that is the trio’s soul.

A final note: Search “d60944 arensky trio” on YouTube to hear (very scratchy) recordings of Arensky, himself a concert pianist, playing parts of the trio.

© 2024 Ubaldo Valli