strings
Thurs, June 17, 2021 at 7:30 pm
⬗⬗⬗ collectif9 ⬗ RITUÆLS ⬗⬗⬗
“A sensory landscape that evokes timelessness ... the real, the important.” - Pan M 360
"Whenever we make something, especially something new, we may not always know what we’ve made.
It’s therefore quite marvelous to discover something displaying génuine mastery, created with a deep
understanding of the issues facing the audience." - Barcza Blog
"Moved, moved to tears, shivers, hairs standing up, the spine straightening on its own, the
heart tightening, a smile forming, tenderness received, all senses on alert ... in the end,
I just want to say thank you." - Audience member
A 60-minute feature-length film, RITUÆLS brings together works dating from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, launching a series of films produced by collectif9 that create various multidisciplinary universes. RITUÆLS is a mystical artistic experience confronting the infinitely large to the infinitely small, the cosmic with the microscopic, delicately questioning our place in the universe and in relation to our environment. The performance of the charismatic dancer Stacey Désilier accompanies us through the concert like a supreme presence, complementing this imagery.
The musical performance itself can be seen as a grand artistic ceremony during which the musicians occupy several spaces throughout the Church of Saint-Pierre-Apôtre (Montréal) in a way that echoes the grandeur and depth of the pieces on the program, becoming its own ritual. The lighting, scenography, and staging contribute to the creation of a succession of moments that transport us and invite contemplation, creating a moment of connection despite what separates us.
⬗ MUSICAL PROGRAMME
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179): O vis æternitatis
Arvo Pärt (born 1935): Psalom and Summa
Nicole Lizée (born 1973): Another Living Soul
Bryce Dessner (born 1976): Aheym and Tenebre
Michael Tippett (1905-1998): Lament
Jocelyn Morlock (born 1969): Exaudi
The music begins with a murmuring drone, from which the slow, monodic chant of medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen appears. From there, seamlessly into Arvo Pärt’s Psalom, which follows a style reminiscent of medieval and renaissance music - later we will play Pärt’s enigmatic Summa. Nicole Lizée is inspired by art forms of the recent past (in this case stop-motion animation) and creates a serene world that is backed by intense detail, within which “the impossible becomes possible — souls emerge from where once there were none.” The relationship between darkness and light guides Bryce Dessner’s Tenebre, and his Aheym brings guides us through a journey (the title translates to “Homeward” in Yiddish).
Michael Tippett’s Lament expresses grief using Purcell’s aria Ah! Belinda, during which a solo violin comments with a barely recognizable variation an Irish popular tune of the Renaissance, while Jocelyn Morlock’s Exaudi, also an expression of grief, includes hope. She writes of the piece: “the music moves us from an inability to comprehend our loss to passionate cries of anguish, to acceptance and angelic reassurance.” Exaudi was originally written for vocal ensemble and solo cello, and has been arranged for collectif9 by Thibault Bertin-Maghit.
⬗ ON SCREEN |
⬗ CREATIVE TEAM |
⬗ COLLECTIF9
Montréal’s classical string band collectif9 has been attracting varied audiences since their 2011 debut. Known for their innovative programming and unique arrangements of classical repertoire, the group performs “with an infectious energy and vigour that grabs an audience’s attention” (The WholeNote). collectif9 has performed over 150 concerts across North America, Europe, and Asia. collectif9 operates on the premise that a change of context can influence communication and experience.
Inspired by the processes of other artistic movements, collectif9 continually searches for new ways of expression within the classical medium, fostering communication and collaboration between artists of all kinds and members of society. collectif9 presents several new programmes every season in Montréal, Canada, and their national and international touring schedule includes performances in chamber music series, festivals, universities, and more. Recent highlights include concerts in the Festival de Música de Morelia (Mexico), La Folle journée de Nantes (France), and Sound Unbound (Barbican Centre, London).
> Visit www.collectif9.ca for the group’s complete biography.
⬗ COLLABORATORS
⬗ Stacey Désilier, dancer
Passionate about movement and possibilities of the body and fascinated by dance, Stacey quickly discovered the desire to make dance her profession. She pursued professional studies at the Montreal School of Contemporary Dance, which led her to collaborate with choreographers and performers Marie-Claire Forté, Sasha Kleinplatz, George Stamos, Helene Simard and Mélanie Demers, and the company MAYDAY.
In 2018, Stacey joined the company Animal of Distinction and participated in their new creation FRONTERA. She then set off to discover the world through movement thanks to collaborations with Cirque Éloize, Les 7 doigts de la main, L'Opéra de Québec (Starmania), and most recently with the company Tentacle Tribe which brought her back to her roots of urban dance and Haitian culture. Her artistic practice and cooperative work give her an inner richness that she wishes to share with various organizations, countries, and artists.
⬗ Benoit Fry, video producer & editor
Benoit Fry is a director, editor, and cameraman, and has been creating promotional content, music videos, fiction films, and documentaries for 15 years. He is known for producing sequences filled with emotion and for his impressive efficiency. With a solid cinematographic background, he is a masterful visual storyteller. He describes himself as a “creator of atmospheres”. A perfectionist, he always follows his ideas to the very end.
Passionate about film photography (he regularly shoots Super 8 film), he is also a photographer, and produces medium format film portraits, developed in his darkroom by hand. He has been part of the Shoot Studio team in Montreal since 2017.
⬗ Lucas Harrison Rupnik, video producer
Director, cameraman, editor, sound engineer and mixer, Lucas is recognized for his versatility, his autonomy, his openness and his clear and bold vision. Son of a photographer from a varied background, he likes challenges and is an enthusiast of music, cinema and the sea. He has a recording studio, learns quickly and is not afraid of the most complex software and equipment. Lucas loves road trips, he never gets tired of watching the movie 'JAWS', he wakes up without an alarm, and loves natural imperfections.
⬗ Carl Talbot, audio producer
Carl Talbot, recording producer and sound engineer, is a well-established audio professional in his community. His productions have received nominations, honours, and awards across the globe: Grammy, Juno, Felix, Gramophone Critics’ choice awards, Diapason d’Or, and many more. His 20 years of experience have led to hundreds of albums and films. Known for his musical approach and aesthetics, he benefits from having the rare qualities of being at ease artistically and technically in many genres of music.
Carl is currently the leading producer at Analekta, Canada’s largest classical label, with whom he has produced nearly a thousand titles since 1999. He has also worked with numerous labels, including Effendi Records, Justin Time Records, Sony-BMG, EMI, Virgin Classics, and Radio-Canada.
⬗ Alexandre Péloquin, lighting designer
A much sought-after lighting designer, Alexandre Péloquin works on the pop, electronic, and contemporary music scenes. He has worked with Pierre Lapointe, Milk&Bone, Ariane Moffatt, Yann Perreau, and Ensemble SuperMusique among others, in many festivals (Mutek, Piknik Électronik, Igloofest, Complément Cirque, Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, Festival de la chanson de Tadoussac, Festival Just for Laughs).
In 2018, he was awarded a Félix at the ADISQ Gala in the Lighting Designer of the Year category for the show La science du cœur by Pierre Lapointe, his longtime collaborator. He was a finalist in this same category in 2019 (Deception Bay - Milk&Bone), 2015 (Ariane Moffatt), and 2014 (Punkt - Pierre Lapointe).
⬗ Joëlle Harbec, scenographer
Joëlle Harbec has been working as a scenographer and artistic director since graduating from the theatre program at Lionel-Groulx college in 2011. In theatre, television, cinema, or circus, her passion is above all to create worlds that are vectors of emotions. Playing with materials and colours in juxtaposition to the lighting and performers allows her to create meaningful images, as one would in a painting.
She has collaborated on several theatrical projects with director Nicolas Gendron (Mélanie sans extasy, L’enfance de l’Art, Et au pire on se mariera). On television, her recent set designs have been seen on Projet 2000 on Tou.tv, Danser sa vie on Radio-Canada, and L’Heure est grave on Télé-Québec. In 2019, Joëlle worked as artistic director for the first time for a feature film with director Rodrigue Jean for L’Acrobate.
strings
Thurs, May 27, 2021 at 7:30 pm
CARDUCCI QUARTET
with clarinetist JULIAN BLISS
DAVID BRUCE (b. 1970)
Gumboots, for clarinet/bass clarinet and string quartet (2008)
Part one
Part two
Dance 1. Angry, “with attitude” –
Dance 2. Presto –
Dance 3. –
Dance 4. Light and joyful –
Dance 5. Jubilante
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
Clarinet Quintet in A, K.581 (1789)
Allegro
Larghetto
Menuetto
Allegretto con variazioni
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born in Salzburg, Austria, January 27, 1756; died in Vienna, December 5, 1791
Clarinet Quintet in A, K.581 (1789)
Allegro
Larghetto
Menuetto
Allegretto con variazioni
Mozart loved the clarinet, an instrument he first heard in London at the age of eight. Each of the four movements of his Clarinet Quintet reveals his genius in setting off the many tone colours of the instrument against that of the strings. He wrote it for Anton Stadler whom he first met in 1781, shortly after moving from Salzburg to Vienna. Stadler was then the best-known wind player in the city, though the clarinet was still rare as a wind soloist and only just emerging as a full-time member of the orchestral wind section. The two quickly became close friends and fellow masons and Mozart continued to lend Stadler money, even when his own life was full of hardship and borrowing from friends and patrons. He had several nicknames for Stadler, deliberately misspelling his name as Stodla on occasions, Nàtschibinìtschibi, meaning something like ‘poor miserable fellow of stupidities’, and Ribisel-Gesicht, literally ‘red-currant face.’
Nevertheless, Stadler’s playing was to inspire not only this Quintet, one of the most sublime works in the repertoire, but also Mozart’s Clarinet Trio (Kegelstatt trio, K. 498), and the serene, melancholy Clarinet Concerto he composed a little more than a year after the Quintet. With the clarinet as the first amongst equals, the opening movement includes passages where each instrument leads the ensemble through the most poignant of sequences, the texture limpid, the line lyrical. Sometimes, as in the glorious slow movement, Mozart creates a blend between the wind and the string sonorities. Here, the warm, romantic, chalumeau sonority of the clarinet is delicately supported by the four string instruments, which are played with their mutes on throughout.
The minuet that follows brings us back to reality, though the movement’s very presence makes the Clarinet Quintet the only work for wind instrument and strings that Mozart wrote in four, rather than three movements. One of its most striking moments is the first trio section, where the strings play alone in the minor key in a somewhat anxious, poignant moment. The second trio – a rarity in Mozart’s chamber music – is a more rustic dialogue between clarinet and first violin. After abandoning a few pages of his first ideas for a finale, Mozart settles upon a set of five variations and coda on one of his disarmingly cheerful themes. Though the music frequently has the outward appearance of sweetness, there is an underlying sense of despair behind its radiance. It has been said that this music smiles through its tears.
DAVID BRUCE
Born in Stamford, Conn., USA in 1970
Gumboots, for clarinet/bass clarinet and string quartet (2008)
American-born, but UK-raised, David Bruce now has a thriving career on both continents. While composer-in-residence with the Royal Opera House in London, his Nothing, an opera for young people, had its première at Glyndebourne in 2016 to critical acclaim. It followed the success of his chamber opera, The Firework Maker's Daughter. Gumboots was Bruce’s first major commission, now the first of four commissions for Carnegie Hall, written in 2008 for the St Lawrence String Quartet and Todd Palmer. Since then, it has been taken up by many performers and is by far the composer’s most played work – though, intriguingly, David Bruce admits – not necessarily his ‘best.’
The title pays homage to Gumboot (rubber boot) dancing, dances born out of the harsh working conditions in Apartheid-era South African gold mines. Miners wore gumboots in the dark, flooded mines and were chained together, communicating illicitly by means of slapping the boots and rattling the chains. Soon, above-ground, a rhythmic dance was developed by the miners and the idea began to spread. Dances were presented for entertainment. Dance troupes were formed and shows were later given for tourists (and, of course, for cash). Inevitably, they’re now easily found on YouTube. “The idea is, for me, a striking example of how something beautiful and life-enhancing can come out of something far more negative,” David Bruce says. “Of course, this paradox has a far simpler explanation – it’s the resilience of the human spirit.”
Five dances were the first part of Gumboots to be written, though now they form Part 2 of the work. Each is based, for the most part, on a single idea and is only a few minutes in duration. “I like the crispness of form you get from keeping things short,” Bruce says. “My interest in folk music is usually less to do with specific melodies or harmonies and more to do with colours, ways of playing, ways of interacting and, of course, rhythms,” Bruce continues. Tension lies close to the surface in the first dance, marked “Short, spikey, with military precision.” The clarinet tries a flippant attitude, but anger boils to the surface at the movement’s climax, and the tension continues to the end. The second dance is inspired by a call-and-response type of African singing, with the clarinet becoming the leader and the other strings interjecting brittle, plucked chords. Dance 3, a perkily playful scherzo, seems almost designed to keep your foot tapping. The exuberance of Dance 4 layers rhythm upon rhythm in a virtuoso way, while the teasing rhythmic drive of Dance 5 derives from a nine-beat polyrhythm Bruce found among the Baka people of Cameroon.
Bruce then took some time to realise that a counterbalance to the dances could be provided with a prefatory single long slow movement. “It just felt right,” he says. “It felt interesting because it was such a unique structure.” The first part opens with bass clarinet and viola introducing a sombre, reflective tune, each instrument taking a slightly different approach, not always in step with the other, the whole a little distant and melancholy. The movement plays out as a kind of meditation upon this theme, unhurried, thoughtful, carefully crafted – or, as the composer puts it: “tender and slow moving, at times 'yearning'; at times seemingly expressing a kind of tranquillity and inner peace.”
— Program notes © 2021 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
strings
Thurs, May 13, 2021 at 7:30 pm
JACK QUARTET
RODERICUS (fl. late 14th c) arr. Christopher Otto
Angelorum psalat tripudium (Antiphon of the Angels) (c 1390s)
RUTH CRAWFORD (SEEGER) (1901-53)
String Quartet 1931
Rubato assai –
Leggiero –
Andante –
Allegro possibile
ELLIOTT CARTER (1908-2012)
String Quartet No. 3 (1971)
Duo II: Maestoso (giusto sempre)—Pause—Grazioso—Giusto, meccanico / Duo I: Furioso (quasi rubato sempre)—Leggerissimo— Andante espressivo—Pause
Duo II: Pause—Scorrevole / Duo I: Giocoso—Pause
Duo II: Giusto, meccanico—Grazioso / Duo I: Leggerissimo—Furioso—Pause
Duo II: Maestoso—Pause / Duo I: Giocoso—Andante espressivo
Duo II: Largo tranquillo—Appassionato—Largo tranquillo / Duo I: Pause—Leggerissimo—Giocoso—Furioso
Duo II: Scorrevole—Appassionato—Coda / Duo I: Andante espressivo—Furioso—Coda
TYSHAWN SOREY (b. 1980)
Everything Changes, Nothing Changes (2018)
RODERICUS (fl. late 14th c) arr. Christopher Otto
Angelorum psalat tripudium (Antiphon of the Angels) (c 1390s)
The mediaeval music manuscript known as the Chantilly Codex is to be found today in the museum at the Château de Chantilly in Chantilly, Oise, about 35 km north of Paris. It contains 112 secular polyphonic pieces, mostly by French composers, comprising popular courtly dance styles of the time, including ballades, virelais, and rondeaus. Angelorum psalat tripudium (Antiphon of the Angels) is one of two Latin ballades in the collection and is the only surviving piece attributed to ‘Rodericus’, under the reversed form of his name S Uciredor. Like most of the collection, this two-part ballade is written in a complex notation which encompasses voice, pitch and rhythm in some 20 different note shapes, some aspects of which cannot be reproduced in today’s notation, which it predates.
The JACK’s viola player Christopher Otto was drawn to the intricacy of the 700-year-old Antiphon of the Angels which allows for several realisations. “For my arrangement,” he writes, “I have relied on the transcription of Nors. S. Josephson, in whose interpretation the note shapes signify a radical expansion of rhythmic possibility, specifying a much richer variety of speeds and durations than most Western music before the twentieth century. I have given the first violin and viola the original two parts and added the second violin and cello parts to clarify the underlying grid of these complex rhythms.”
RUTH CRAWFORD (SEEGER)
Born July 3, 1901 in East Liverpool, Ohio; died November 18, 1953, in Chevy Chase, Maryland
String Quartet 1931
Quartet in A minor, Op. 51 No. 2 (1865-73)
In the Epilogue to her biography Ruth Crawford Seeger : A Composer's Search for American Music, Judith Tick quotes Seeger’s daughter Peggy trying to come to terms with her mother’s early, progressive new music: "I don't understand how the woman that I knew as a mother created something like the 1931 string quartet. It is like someone crying; it is like someone beating on the walls... and I don't want to think about this as regarding my mother because my mother always seemed to me to have it all together, to have gotten a life that pleased her."
Ruth Crawford’s search for American music started in earnest while studying piano in Chicago in her early twenties, soon attracting the attention of Henry Cowell. This American composer and pianist, just four years older than Crawford, was already well established as a musical pioneer and, appreciating her as a “completely natural dissonant composer,” suggested Crawford study in New York with his own teacher Charles Seeger. Here Crawford’s Modernist interests in dissonant harmony and linear musical structure meshed with the analytical work Seeger was doing for his treatise on dissonant counterpoint in the rugged American new music of the time. She was to continue collaborating with Seeger on this aspect of his many specialties for years to come. Meanwhile, with music published in Cowell’s New Music Quarterly and her chamber and solo works being played in the concerts of prestigious new music organisations in both New York and Chicago, Crawford became the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, which funded study in Berlin and Paris.
Throughout her time in Europe (1931-2) Crawford continued to develop her ideas about composition, with Seeger’s regular advice sent by mail. On returning to the United States, she married Seeger in 1932, immediately becoming wife and mother to Seeger’s three boys (Charles, John, and Pete) and soon mother to four of their own children (Mike, Peggy, Barbara and Penny). With a move to Washington, D.C. and with her own progressive new music taking second place to motherhood, Crawford (now Crawford Seeger) turned a composer’s search for American music in the direction of another of Seeger’s interests, towards folk music. Working at the Archive of American Folk Song, Crawford painstakingly transcribed hundreds of folksongs gathered by John and Alan Lomax, wrote articles about folk song, published her own song arrangements, and built a wide reputation as an educator. After wryly referring to her recent work in 1938 as ‘composing babies,’ Crawford was only able to return to composition in the late 1940s. Her Suite for Wind Quintet won a national competition in 1952 and, after a creative silence of two decades, Crawford intended it as a return to exploratory, probing creativity. However, a diagnosis of intestinal cancer the following year was to lead to her death at the age of just 52.
The String Quartet 1931 is the centrepiece of a tiny catalogue of important but short compositions dating, for the most part, from the years 1930-33. Composed mostly in Europe, its structure is compact (11-12 minutes) and its four movements follow one another attacca, without break. The first, with four main thematic ideas, primarily explores the tension between the two opening themes, the first on violin, high and lyrical, simultaneously with a brusque, angular rising theme on cello. Throughout the brief movement, the lyrical theme recurs in one iteration or another, usually enveloped in evolving versions of the other three themes, all played with a feeling of ebb and flow. The richness and multiplicity of ideas within each instrumental line was an idea soon to be taken up by Elliott Carter. The movement winds down to long, sustained notes from all but second violin. A sudden, terse chord marks the opening of the second movement, now rhythmically precise, as the instruments chase one another in scalar fragments through a fleeting, contrapuntal web.
Crawford describes the highly original third movement (Andante) as “a sort of counterpoint of crescendi and diminuendi” where each instrument hovers over a single note for several measures. The pulsing mosaic-like effect increases in intensity as the melodic line constantly emerges and then disappears into the shifting harmony until it reaches a breaking point. Here, the pulsing is shattered by jagged shards, only to quickly unwind to the point from which the movement began. The fourth movement is a rigorously constructed dialogue between violin 1 and the other three instruments. Its opening section has the violin line building an additive structure, beginning with a one-note statement, then a two-note, then three and so on. Meanwhile the other instruments answer with a subtractive response, initially a 20-note phrase, then 19 and so on up to the turning point, when the entire process is reversed – the violin ending the movement with a single note. There is much more at play within this overall structure, adding to the unity and cohesion of the piece. Writing to Charles Ives a few months after the première of Crawford’s quartet, Henry Cowell said of its Andante that it was “perhaps the best thing for quartet ever written in this country.”
ELLIOTT CARTERBorn in New York City, December 11, 1908: died in New York City, November 5, 2012
String Quartet No. 3 (1971)
American composer Elliott Carter was referred to as the Haydn of new music when he was already over 100 years old and a quarter century into a remarkably productive Indian summer of composition. His five string quartets span his mature creative career at roughly ten-year intervals, challenging, provoking, rethinking, and energising a musical genre rather than comfortably falling back on a well-established tradition of civilised discourse. Late in life (in a 2012 interview with Laura Emmery) Carter said: “I consider all these pieces [his quartets] an adventure. Hence, I have to do something I haven't. I already had one adventure and now I want another one that's different. As a result, I think up something that intrigues me. When I'm writing, it's not like Haydn or Mozart who wrote a whole string of string quartets one after the other. They are all more or less in the same general pattern, although they are filled with variety and differences. My quartets are in very different patterns, very different conception.”
Carter referred to the Third Quartet as “the most complicated one of them all.” It took the Juilliard Quartet, who gave the première, over an hour just to put the first measure together. The piece, Carter says, “divides the instruments into pairs: a Duo for violin and cello that plays in rubato style and one for violin and viola in more regular rhythm. The violin-cello Duo presents four different musical characters: an angry, intense Furioso, a fanciful Leggerissimo, a pizzicato giocoso and a lyrical Andante espressivo, in short sections one after the other in various orders, sometimes with pauses between. The violin-viola Duo, meanwhile, presents the six contrasting characters listed in the program. During the Quartet each character of each Duo is presented alone and also in combination with each character of the other Duo to give a sense of ever-varying perspectives of feelings, expression, rivalry and cooperation.”
TYSHAWN SOREYBorn in Newark, New Jersey, July 8, 1980
Everything Changes, Nothing Changes (2018)
Announcing an upcoming audio recording on the website of New Music USA, the JACK Quartet gives some background to Tyshawn Sorey and his first string quartet, which concludes this virtual concert.
“The music of Tyshawn Sorey defies time-worn genre definitions and challenges the gate-keepers of classical music to recognize the compositional work of musicians of colour, often incorrectly categorized as jazz artists. An excellent improvisor in a number of styles, from the most outré sonic experimentations, to modern jazz, and more popular styles, Sorey has made a name for himself as a performer of his own and others’ music. However, his compositional voice enters the concert hall as a unique presence in the young generation, as he possesses a singular ear for harmony and a staggering formal control. Sorey uses number games as well as his polymath sonic imagination to create ground-breaking scores.
“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes is the first quartet by Tyshawn Sorey, written for and premiered by JACK in July 2018, at the Banff Centre for the Arts as part of the EQ: Evolution of the String Quartet program. JACK and Sorey collaborated on details of Everything Changes, Nothing Changes while in residence at the Banff Centre. Sorey’s piece is a tour-de-force of subtle voicings, beautifully shifting harmonies, and a meltingly perfect pacing of pulsating string sounds over a long form.”
"It's dark ... literally ... that's all I can say," adds violinist John Richards from the JACK Quartet.
— Rodericus, Crawford Seeger and Carter program notes © 2021 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca
strings
Thurs, April 15, 2021 at 7:30 pm
CASTALIAN QUARTET
JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)
Quartet in C, Op. 76 No. 3 (Hob.III:77) (‘Emperor’) (1797)
Allegro
Poco adagio cantabile
Menuet. Allegro & Trio
Finale. Presto
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Quartet in A minor, Op. 51 No. 2 (1865-73)
Allegro non troppo
Andante moderato
Quasi minuetto, moderato
Finale - Allegro non assai
JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)
Quartet in C, Op. 76 No. 3 (Hob.III:77) (‘Emperor’) (1797)
In 1796, the city of Vienna was under threat of invasion from Napoleon. French troops led by Napoleon were advancing from the Po valley into Styria. Other troops were advancing from the East and both were closing in on Vienna in a pincer-like move. Vienna was in a state of emergency and a civilian militia had been mobilized to protect the city. Following a state commission, Haydn, a strong nationalist, was commissioned to write national song for the cause. His beautiful, heartfelt Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser (God Preserve Franz the Emperor) was a bold challenge to the Marseillaise and was instantly adopted as the Austrian national anthem. In fact, so universal was the appeal of Haydn's melody that it was later to be used as the ‘Brotherhood’ anthem of Freemasonry, as the German national anthem Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, and even as the Protestant hymns Praise the Lord! Ye heavens, adore him and Glorious things of Thee are spoken.
The slow movement of the Op. 76 No. 3 String Quartet is a set of variations on this celebrated, dignified tune. Hence the quartet's nickname Emperor, or Kaiser. Each instrument in turn introduces the solemn melody, while the other three instruments weave an increasingly intricate web around it. But Haydn goes further. He structures the entire work around the slow movement, making it the focal point of the quartet. The melody finds its way into the first movement whose five-note theme derives from Haydn’s patriotic song: G (Gott) – E (erhalte) – F (Franz) – D (den) – C (Kaiser). This cryptic message would have been recognized in Haydn's day as one of the many ‘learned’ effects he used in his late quartets, complementing such popular elements as the lively country dance he fashions out of the same notes over a viola and cello drone in the central development section. The intensity and dignity of the four slow movement variations is set into relief by a forthright minuet. The finale, an intense, powerful movement, then completes the strong architectural structure that Haydn has built.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Born in Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833; died in Vienna, Austria, April 3, 1897
Quartet in A minor, Op. 51 No. 2 (1865-73)
"It took Mozart a lot of trouble to compose six lovely quartets," Brahms wrote of the collection Mozart dedicated to Haydn, "so I will try my hardest to turn out two passable ones." But it wasn’t until he was 40 years old, with a secure reputation as both composer and pianist, that his first two quartets saw light of day. Brahms was a fierce critic of his own music. As a 20-year-old composer he had at one point intended to publish a B minor quartet as his Op. 1. But it was only 20 years – and 20 string quartets later – that the two quartets we now know as his Op. 51 were to mark his official début as a composer in the medium. Four years later he felt confident enough to introduce his First Symphony to the public. What held him back from publishing both quartets and symphonies was a fear of being compared with the established masters of the Viennese classical tradition. Towering above them all in Brahms’s mind was the presence of Ludwig van Beethoven, a musician whose bust dominated his study in Karlgasse in Vienna.
So what happened to the 20 early quartets? "The boxes with the old papers remained in Hamburg for a long time,” Brahms told a friend many years later. "When I was there two or three years ago, I was overwhelmed. The whole room was most beautifully papered with my notes, even the ceiling. I had only to lie on my back to marvel at my sonatas and quartets. It looked very good. Then I tore everything down – better that I should do it than someone else! The stuff has all been burned." Brahms knew that sketches and fragments had a story to tell, since he owned sketchbooks by Beethoven, so he made a thorough job of the burning; no fragment or sketch has ever been tracked down.
Brahms frequently worked on pairs of works simultaneously. He wrote the two piano quartets, the two clarinet sonatas, the first two symphonies, the serenades and the sextets together. But these 'twinned' works were never born as identical twins. The C minor quartet, Op. 51 No. 1, for instance, continues the powerful tradition of Beethoven's Razumovsky quartets. Today’s A minor quartet, Op. 51 No. 2, comes closer to the dreamy, melancholy world of Schumann's music. Its tender, lyrical nostalgia and longing provide a positive feeling to the music. The opening soaring violin melody contains a tribute to the great violinist Joseph Joachim. Brahms weaves Joachim's personal motif, the notes F-A-E, standing for Frei, aber einsam (‘Free, but alone’) into the beginning of the phrase. Brahms also incorporates the phrase he took as his own motif, the notes F-A-F (Frei, aber froh – ‘Free, but happy’) into the score. It's a small indication of the wealth of contrapuntal invention that he uses throughout this quartet.
— Program notes © 2021 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca