SINGULAR VOICES
Despite its rich history and its rich sound, the viola remains the least
noticed among string instruments. Given the comparative lack of
repertoire composed specifically for its special voice, it is not surprising
that violists need to be enterprising in their search for material, one
important avenue being music conceived originally for other
instruments but deemed suitable by the composer for viola as well. Thus
it is that we owe the two viola sonatas of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
to a clarinetist Brahms encountered at a time when he might not
otherwise have been composing at all.
It was in January 1891 that the fifty-seven-year-old Brahms, on a
visit to the town of Meiningen, whose orchestra he used frequently for
trial runs of his works, heard that ensemble’s principal clarinetist,
Richard Mühlfeld, perform a Weber concerto and Mozart’s Clarinet
Quintet. Already in October 1890, in a letter to his publisher Simrock
after the publication of his G major string quintet, Opus 111, Brahms
had hinted that there might be no further music from him. But so
taken was he with Mühlfeld’s playing that, in the summer of 1891, he
produced the Trio in A minor for clarinet, cello, and piano and the
Quintet in B minor for clarinet and strings. These were published in
1892, Mühlfeld having participated in the public premiere of both
works on December 1, 1891. Then Brahms turned away from large
projects, choosing instead to compose, as his biographer Jan Swafford
puts it, "for himself alone." The result was the series of pieces for his
own instrument, the piano, published in 1892 and 1893 as his Opp. 116
through 119.
But Brahms did write two more pieces of chamber music the two
sonatas for clarinet and piano, which he completed in the summer of
1894, a few years before his death. Mühlfeld and Brahms gave the first
performance, a private one, in Meiningen soon after the works were
completed. Another early, private performance was given by Brahms
and Mühlfeld in Frankfurt that November for the seventy-five-year-old
Clara Schumann. In fact, Brahms so enjoyed performing the sonatas
with Mühlfeld whom he came affectionately to call by a variety of
nicknames, including "Fräulein Klarinette,","my dear nightingale," and
"Fräulein von Mühlfeld" - that he retained the manuscripts for a year
before finally handing them over to his publisher for printing in 1895 as
his Opus 120. After this, he would complete just two more works, both
in 1896 - the Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), Opus 121, and
the posthumously published Eleven Chorale Preludes for Organ, Opus
122.
Though the music was conceived for Mühlfeld’s clarinet, Brahms
also recognized the suitability of these warmly characterful sonatas to
the timbre of the viola. Previously he had exploited the viola to this
extent only in his Two Songs for contralto, viola, and piano, Opus 91.
Now he enriched the chamber literature for that instrument by
producing alternative versions of the sonatas that take full advantage of
the viola’s vibrant tone color, and of such specific string-instrument
techniques as double- and triple-stopping, i.e., the sounding of two or
three notes simultaneously to produce a chord. (One noteworthy
instance of the latter comes in the second movement of the E-flat
sonata, when, at the transition from that movement’s middle section to
the return of the opening material, the viola line not only employs
double-stops but is a bit longer than the original clarinet line.)
This period in the aging composer’s life was marked by numerous
honors and celebrations, but also by the deaths of some close friends,
and spats with others. Yet none of this affected his confidence as a
composer. Yes, as we are so often told, there is an elegiac feel to this
music; but there is strength and determination as well. In these sonatas
we find Brahms not just inspired but at the height of his powers, as
reflected in his mastery of form; in the intrinsically Brahmsian, tightly
based motivic construction that was his hallmark; in contrapuntal
ingenuity; in his feel for the instruments at hand, and in the utter
concision of his writing. Not a note is wasted.
The F minor sonata’s opening Allegro appassionato sets the tone for
both works, which are simultaneously passionate and understated, with
nothing showy about them - which is not to say that they are not
difficult. In the first movement of the F minor, the contours of Brahms’s
musical lines and his canny use of contrary motion imbue the
proceedings with emotional expressivity. Noteworthy in the piano part
are the rich, bell-like tones that characterize so much of his writing for that instrument (and some of his orchestral writing as well). The slow
second movement is filled with whispered confidences; this is one of
those songful, recognizably Brahmsian effusions in which the slightest
change of motion or rhythmic activity suggests a change of thought or
mood. The third movement is dancelike, with some Ländler in it.
Brahms here modifies his basic "Allegretto" with "grazioso," one of his
favorite markings; this is music with a smile. Though the contrasting
middle section returns to the sonata’s home F minor, the predominant
marking there is "dolce" ("sweetly"), another of Brahms’s favorites. As
heard both high and low in the piano, there are further suggestions of
distant bells. A repeated-note motive serves as springboard for the
finale, a lively rondo in F major. A subsidiary theme-group briefly
suggests the outdoor world of Brahms’s Trio for horn, violin, and piano
composed more than a quarter-century earlier, but it is the overall
ingenuity of Brahms’s conception, marked by the brilliant sharing,
exchange, deconstruction, and recombination of the thematic materials,
that carries this music triumphantly home.
Throughout its three movements, the E-flat major sonata shares
with the F minor a generally understated intimacy that makes its
"bigger" moments register that much more effectively. The first
movement is both "Allegro" ("fast") and "amabile" ("loving"), with a
simplicity of expression that belies the motivic and rhythmic complexity
of the materials. From the viola’s opening utterance, the ear is totally
engaged by Brahms’s skillful union of lyricism and forward motion. The movement ends "Tranquillo": this is elegiac music. The triple-time
second movement is an Allegro appassionato in E-flat minor that is as
songful as it is impassioned. A solemn, Sostenuto middle section in
strongly contrasting B major sounds as if from another world; here the
piano takes the lead, its deep bell-like tollings once more coloring the
mood before the Allegro returns. To close his final chamber work,
Brahms writes a gentle, valedictory theme-and-variations - a form no
composer mastered better than he did. The initial dotted rhythm in the
viola, subsequently taken up by the piano, seems already to suggest a
variation, of a theme left unheard. Changes of texture, note-values, and
mood all play their part as the variations unfold. A forceful E-flat minor
Allegro is followed by the restoration of major-mode tranquility, which
leads in turn to the energetically assured close.
Though published together as his Opus 91 in 1884, Brahms’s Two
Songs for contralto, viola, and piano originated years apart. The
composer presented an early version of "Geistliches Wiegenlied"
("Sacred Cradle Song") as a gift to his friend and musical adviser,
Joseph Joachim, and Joachim’s wife Amalie upon the birth of their first
child, Brahms’s godson, named Johannes, in September 1864.
According to his early biographer Florence May, Brahms sent a
manuscript of the song to the Joachims on the occasion of the child’s
christening, which the composer could not attend. Brahms’s personal and professional relationship with Joachim spanned their adult lives.
Years earlier, on September 30, 1853, it was Joachim who had
introduced the twenty-year-old Brahms to Robert and Clara
Schumann, after which Robert wrote his famous article Neue Bahnen
("New Paths") heralding the young composer as music’s new champion.
In 1887, Brahms would write his Double Concerto for violin and viola
in part as a peace offering to Joachim after an estrangement between the
two that developed during Joachim’s difficult separation and divorce
from Amalie.
The text of "Geistliches Wiegenlied" is a German version by
Emanuel Geibel of the Spanish dramatist-poet-novelist Lope de Vega’s
"Cradlesong of the Virgin." To open the song, Brahms gives the viola,
with its timbre suggestive of Amalie Joachim’s contralto voice, the tune
of a well-known lullaby-folksong-carol, "Josef, lieber Josef mein"
("Joseph, my dear Joseph, help me rock my fair child to sleep..."; the
German words are printed beneath the viola line in the published
score). As the song continues, viola and piano interweave to provide an
appropriately rocking cushion for the voice. Along the way, the viola
repeats the folk lullaby as a refrain. To quote Eric Sams: "Art-song and
folk-song are blissfully at one."
When Brahms published "Geistliches Wiegenlied" in 1884"
having perhaps returned to the song in an unsuccessful attempt to
reunite the Joachims, whose marriage had by that time come apart - the composer paired it with his setting of Friedrich Rückert’s "Gestillte
Sehnsucht" ("Stilled Longing"). In both we find Brahms drawn to a
poetic theme that pervades so much of his song output, indeed, so
much of German Romantic poetry and song in general - nature as a
reflection of, and contributor to, the human emotional or psychological
state. Here the recurrent imagery is of wind and birdsong, which the
poet hopes can lull the soul, and its sometimes troubled longings, to
rest. When singing of the wind, the contralto takes up the melodic line
introduced at the start by the viola, whose soft arpeggiations suggest the
wind’s rustling.
Robert Schumann (1810-1856) is defined in the public
consciousness through frequent performance of his orchestral works,
piano music, and songs; but his chamber music, even in the standard
genres of string quartet and piano trio, continues to lack champions,
even though his quartet and quintet for piano and strings are heard with
some regularity. Among Schumann’s works for unusual chamber
combinations are a significant number, composed between 1842 and
1853, whose titles bespeak his never-ending awareness of music’s poetic
and literary connotations, and his equally strong inclination to imbue
his own works with those characteristics - the Phantasiestücke ("Fantasy
Pieces") for clarinet and piano; the Phantasiestücke for violin, cello, and piano; the Romanzen for oboe and piano; the Märchenerzählungen
("Fairy Tales") for clarinet, viola, and piano; and, as heard on this disc,
the Märchenbilder ("Fairytale Pictures") for viola and piano. Schumann
biographer John Daverio sees these works as representing on
Schumann’s part "a systematic exploration of the coloristic possibilities
of the few-voiced instrumental chamber idiom, situating Schumann in
the center of a tradition bounded by J.S. Bach on the one end and
Hindemith on the other."
Schumann composed the Märchenbilder in Düsseldorf between
March 1 and 4, 1851, though their title was finalized only upon their
publication a year later, earlier alternatives having included
"Violageschichten" ("Viola Stories") and "Märchenlieder" ("Fairytale
Songs"). Schumann dedicated the pieces to Wilhelm Josef von
Wasielewski, concertmaster of the Düsseldorf Orchestra and later the
composer’s biographer, who played through them (on viola) with Clara
Schumann at the piano that March 15. The same duo also gave the first
public performance, on November 12, 1853, in Bonn.
The four Märchenbilder revolve harmonically around a D
minor/major axis (their keys are respectively D minor, F major, D minor,
and D major). Overall tempo contrasts are equally straightforward: two
quick-moving inner pieces are framed by two slower ones. Third-related
keys figure prominently for contrast of mood and color, as in the B
major middle section of the third piece, or as the music hovers around F
major in the middle section of the fourth. Schumann provides no clues
as to specific pictorial content, leaving that to the listener’s imagination,
though it is not hard to hear, along the way, suggestions of wistful
reminiscence (perhaps of an exotic locale), military pomp, dance, a
windswept landscape, and lullaby. The first two pieces are marked "Not
fast" and "Lively." Beyond its basic tempo designation ("Quickly"), the
third movement bears the further indication "Mit springendem Bogen"
("with springing bow"). Belying its major-key signature, Schumann
marks the finale "Langsam, mit melancholischem Ausdruck" - "Slow,
with melancholy expression" - the composer’s singularly poetic voice
reflected here in his specific instruction to the performer.
-- Marc Mandel
Marc Mandel is Director of Program Publications of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra. Notes copyright 2000 Marc Mandel; all rights reserved.
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