A SOULFUL DIALOGUE
Five of the most brilliant composers, speaking to each other across two centuries. Mozart flows with perfect form and grace, Beethoven shakes up Mozart’s staid world, Tchaikovsky digs even deeper into the human condition and channels Shakespeare in an elegy to the agonized Hamlet, Grieg takes us to the beautiful Romantic landscapes of Norway in a vision of hope and loss, and Joan Trimble brings the spirit of the Romantic into the Twentieth Century with a stunning Suite for Strings that will leave you dancing at the end. It’s a musical dialogue across time; come be part of it.
Five of the most brilliant composers, speaking to each other across two centuries. Mozart flows with perfect form and grace, Beethoven shakes up Mozart’s staid world, Tchaikovsky digs even deeper into the human condition and channels Shakespeare in an elegy to the agonized Hamlet, Grieg takes us to the beautiful Romantic landscapes of Norway in a vision of hope and loss, and Joan Trimble brings the spirit of the Romantic into the Twentieth Century with a stunning Suite for Strings that will leave you dancing at the end. It’s a musical dialogue across time; come be part of it.
Available digitally to subscribers and single ticket buyers October 25, 2020
Mozart Divertimento in D Major
Tchaikovsky Elegy in G Major from Hamlet
Joan Trimble Suite for Strings
Grieg Two Elegiac Melodies
Beethoven String Quartet in f, op. 95, "Serioso” orchestrated by Mahler
Mozart Divertimento in D Major
Tchaikovsky Elegy in G Major from Hamlet
Joan Trimble Suite for Strings
Grieg Two Elegiac Melodies
Beethoven String Quartet in f, op. 95, "Serioso” orchestrated by Mahler
How will the video concerts work?
Our musicians will be recording on each originally-announced concert date in a private, physically-distanced session at First Christian Church. The final recording will include information about the repertoire, reflections on what it is like to perform in this time of Covid-19, and more! The concert videos will be made available to our subscribers via private link on Sunday, September 27; Sunday, October 25; and Sunday, November 22; and you will be able to watch them at your convenience in the comfort of your own home. We hope you’ll sit and relax, grab something to eat and drink, and enjoy these performances, made just for you! In addition to the online video, each concert will be rebroadcast on KCME 88.7 FM. Tune in at 3 p.m. on the Sunday following each video release.
Our musicians will be recording on each originally-announced concert date in a private, physically-distanced session at First Christian Church. The final recording will include information about the repertoire, reflections on what it is like to perform in this time of Covid-19, and more! The concert videos will be made available to our subscribers via private link on Sunday, September 27; Sunday, October 25; and Sunday, November 22; and you will be able to watch them at your convenience in the comfort of your own home. We hope you’ll sit and relax, grab something to eat and drink, and enjoy these performances, made just for you! In addition to the online video, each concert will be rebroadcast on KCME 88.7 FM. Tune in at 3 p.m. on the Sunday following each video release.
A SOULFUL DIALOGUE PROGRAM NOTES
by Mark Arnest
Overview: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria, died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1772
Mozart composed this Divertimento when he was 16 and had recently been appointed Konzertmeister to the Salzburg court, giving him high hopes that would be thoroughly dashed by the time of his angry resignation nine years later. It is sometimes described as a quartet rather than as a divertimento, and was probably composed at the same time as the divertimenti K. 137 and 138.
The music Mozart composed at this time is so polished that it’s difficult for us today to comprehend how rapidly musical style was then evolving. The prevailing style of Mozart’s youth was no longer Baroque, but not yet the mature Classical style that Mozart and Josef Haydn perfected (and which Beethoven would extend and ultimately transcend). This Gallant style favored clarity and charm over either intellect or emotion, unfolding a profusion of short motifs over a strongly directional harmonic structure. (Musicologist Alan Luhring described the style as the musical equivalent of pleasant small talk.) In the 1770s, the divertimento would evolve into the string quartet, with its greater independence of the musical lines; but here, while the second violins get a great deal of attention, and even the violas get their moments in the sun, the cellos and basses mostly provide harmonic and rhythmic support.
All three movements are in the then newly developed sonata form, a multi-themed form that dramatizes structural key changes by associating them with contrasting themes. The first movement’s elegantly energetic opening theme is very much in the Gallant style, and could have been written by Giovanni Sammartini or J. C. Bach. But Mozart’s musical thinking has already gone beyond the Gallant style’s short-breathed phrases: The movement’s most striking feature is Mozart’s delay of the exposition’s cadence in A major, which he holds off until the final bars. (This kind of long-range thinking is not evident in the other movements: In the second movement, Mozart drops us off in the dominant with no preparation; and in the third movement, there’s only a perfunctory four-bar modulation.) The development section begins with a transposed version of the opening motif, and features another striking moment when Mozart delays the recapitulation by inserting a passage in D minor at a moment when we expect the return of D major.
The second movement’s opening motif is an elegant decoration of the note “D.” The second theme features a long note floating above the rest of the instruments – a device Mozart would return to again and again in his music. A minuscule development section serves to prepare the return of the first theme.
The third movement’s bubbly opening theme is clearly related to the first movement’s main theme. The imitative development section harks back for a moment to the earlier Baroque style before the recapitulation brings this delightful work to a close.
Overview: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia; died November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Work Composed: 1884
Today, Tchaikovsky occupies an unassailable position in the pantheon of composers; but during his lifetime, he was controversial, because his more nationalistic colleagues didn’t see his music – Russian tinged but clearly flowing out of the European tradition – as sufficiently Russian.
The Elegy was composed in 1884 for the Russian actor and producer Ivan Samarin, as part of a celebration of Samarin’s 50 years as a performing artist. Originally called Address of Gratitude, it was renamed Elegy for Ivan Samarin when Samarin died nine months after its premier; and to complicate things further, Tchaikovsky used it as an entr’acte in his incidental music to Hamlet four years later.
The piece is in ABA form, with the elegiac outer sections enclosing a stormier middle section. As a work by a composer who was a fountain of lyricism, it’s not surprising that the outer sections are intensely melodic. But the piece is not as simple as it sounds. If it seems counterintuitive to put an elegy in a major key, Tchaikovsky makes it work by keeping the sense of key ambiguous for much of the first section, alluding to the keys of A minor and E minor before finally settling in G.
Meanwhile, it’s easy to hear what the nationalists would have objected to. The lovely theme owes nothing to Russian folk music, and the middle section’s rhythmic ostinato is a device that came to Tchaikovsky via Schumann.
Overview: Joan Trimble
Born June 18, 1915, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Ireland; died August 6, 2000, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Ireland
Work Composed: 1951
During her lifetime, Joan Trimble was better known as a pianist and teacher than as a composer. Her father was a distinguished folksong collector, starting Trimble on a lifetime of immersion in Irish folk music – to the point that, in such works as this Suite for Strings, the tunes sound completely folk-like even though they are Trimble’s own.
In the 1930s, she studied composition with Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and her Phantasy for Piano Trio won the 1940 Cobbett competition for English chamber music. But World War 2 intervened, and her career as a duo-pianist with her sister Valerie took precedence; during the war, they regularly performed on BBC radio and at Myra Hess’s legendary National Gallery concerts. (Trimble also managed to work full time for the Red Cross.) The sisters’ success continued after the war, when they premiered two-piano concertos by English composers Arthur Bliss and Lennox Berkeley.
In addition to her career as a pianist and teacher, she raised three children. As a result, Trimble’s compositional output was small; but it is well crafted, and she lived long enough to be recognized as Ireland’s most prominent female composer.
Some of the most fearsomely modern music ever composed comes from the decades following World War 2, when faith in and respect for the traditions that had culminated in the war were at an all-time low; but Trimble’s music is untouched by these experiments – “I am free to be myself, regardless of fashion,” she wrote – and is closer in spirit to the music her teacher Vaughan Williams composed several decades earlier.
The suite is in three movements. The opening Prelude is in duple meter and features strong rhythm and sophisticated, very unfolk-song-like harmonies that occasionally suggest Impressionism. A lovely lyrical theme about a minute in is immediately repeated in the cellos underneath an airy accompaniment, and then never heard again, although the second movement’s main theme is related to it. Aside from this theme’s non-recurrence, the form is a sonata.
The slow second movement features a sweet and sad melody in triple meter. It’s further contrasted from the first movement by its simple harmonies – though they get more chromatic in the piece’s second half. A violin solo two-thirds of the way through is reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending.
The Finale features several sprightly tunes. The string writing throughout the suite is assured and effective, and justifies Trimble’s reputation as a composer whose works deserve wider hearing.
Overview: Edvard Grieg
Born June 15, 1843, Bergen, Norway; died September 4, 1907, Bergen, Norway
Work Composed: 1870s, string arrangement 1880
Along with his many musical innovations, Frédéric Chopin was the first composer to become widely regarded as the voice of his country: His mazurkas and polonaises gave voice to a Polish nation that, partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, no longer existed as a state. (The Russian nationalist Mikhail Glinka was a few years older than Chopin, but his success came later than Chopin’s, and he never had Chopin’s international reputation.)
After Chopin, the floodgates were open, and many later 19th-century composers make use of national folklore and/or folk music: Verdi in Italy; Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin in Russia; Dvořák and Smetana in what’s now the Czech Republic; Grieg in Norway; Sibelius in Finland; Enescu in Romania; Bartók and Kodaly in Hungary; Albeniz, Granados, and de Falla in Spain – the list goes on and on.
No composer embraced this role more wholeheartedly than Grieg. While his early music reflects his German musical education, after about 1865 his work is drenched in Norwegian history, culture, and folklore. He arranged Norwegian folk songs and composed new tunes in folk-song style, stressing distinctively Norwegian stylistic traits; he set Norwegian poems to music and composed incidental music to Norwegian plays. His determination to minimize non-Norwegian influences results in a more constrained musical world than most composers, but few composers are more distinctive.
The Two Elegiac Melodies were originally composed for the Twelve Songs, Op. 33, to poems by Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. Grieg knew a good tune when he wrote one, and he transcribed these two songs both for piano solo and for string orchestra. They are strophic: The first song consists of three repeated verses, and the second song of two repeated verses. This emphasizes Grieg’s strength as a composer, which was the quality of his ideas; where he sometimes got into trouble was in his development and structuring of them, and his transitions.
The poem that inspired the first piece, The Wounded Heart, tells of a heart broken by life’s travails, and yet, “when rain falls from the sky, flowers sprout from the wounds.” The second piece, The Last Spring, is one of Grieg’s longest and most radiantly bittersweet melodies. The poem’s narrator hopes to see winter give way to spring one last time. At the beginning of the second verse, Grieg divides the violins into four parts for an otherworldly effect.
Overview: Ludwig van Beethoven
Baptized December 17, 1770, Bonn, Germany; died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1810-11; Mahler’s arrangement, 1898-99
Between 1810 and 1817, Beethoven's compositional productivity fell dramatically. There are several reasons for this: his increasing isolation due to deafness; his machinations in the matter of his nephew Karl (in which Beethoven does not come off very well); and perhaps most importantly, a creative crisis due to his having taken the heroic style of his mid-life masterpieces as far as he could. Beethoven never ceased composing, but the works of this period come more slowly, and they're among the most experimental pieces he ever composed, such as the song cycle An die Ferne Geliebte, the Piano Sonata Op. 101, and this quartet.
The quartet is unusual in several respects. After the expansive middle-period quartets, it’s highly concentrated, its four movements lasting less time than the first two movements of Op. 59 No. 2. The first movement’s themes are almost aphoristic, and in stark contrast to the enormous development sections of such middle-period masterpieces as the Eroica symphony and the Waldstein sonata, its development section is a mere 22 bars long – shorter than two choruses of the blues. It has no true slow movement, and the second movement that takes the slow movement’s place contains a fully developed and unusually poignant fugue. It also has no true scherzo; the fierce third movement is marked “serioso” and is anything but a joke. The finale climaxes in a passage that’s intense even for Beethoven before dissolving into a coda that could have come from a comic opera. Throughout the work, there’s an unusual emphasis on cross-relations – different chromatic inflections of the same note, such as the D-flat and D natural heard in the first bar – and on the relatively unusual tonality of the Neapolitan, one half-step above the tonic.
This pervading strangeness links this quartet more to the enigmatic and visionary quartets that Beethoven would compose in the 1820s than to those which precede it. Beethoven biographer Jan Swofford writes of the quartet, “If the Serioso is a cry from the soul that seemed to him too intimate to be made public, it is a tightly disciplined cry, a systematic experiment with the musical norms and forms Beethoven inherited. In that respect it amounts to something he could not have understood yet: a prophecy of music he was going to be writing a decade later.”
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) made this arrangement shortly after becoming conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. It’s very faithful to Beethoven’s original: He only adds basses to the cellos in a few passages, and changes none of Beethoven’s music. (Such a light touch was not typical for Mahler, an orchestral wizard who often rescored works by earlier composers.) But moving the music from a small ensemble to one several times as large – and in particular, a piece that Beethoven wrote was composed “for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public” – greatly alters the piece’s effect.
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria, died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1772
Mozart composed this Divertimento when he was 16 and had recently been appointed Konzertmeister to the Salzburg court, giving him high hopes that would be thoroughly dashed by the time of his angry resignation nine years later. It is sometimes described as a quartet rather than as a divertimento, and was probably composed at the same time as the divertimenti K. 137 and 138.
The music Mozart composed at this time is so polished that it’s difficult for us today to comprehend how rapidly musical style was then evolving. The prevailing style of Mozart’s youth was no longer Baroque, but not yet the mature Classical style that Mozart and Josef Haydn perfected (and which Beethoven would extend and ultimately transcend). This Gallant style favored clarity and charm over either intellect or emotion, unfolding a profusion of short motifs over a strongly directional harmonic structure. (Musicologist Alan Luhring described the style as the musical equivalent of pleasant small talk.) In the 1770s, the divertimento would evolve into the string quartet, with its greater independence of the musical lines; but here, while the second violins get a great deal of attention, and even the violas get their moments in the sun, the cellos and basses mostly provide harmonic and rhythmic support.
All three movements are in the then newly developed sonata form, a multi-themed form that dramatizes structural key changes by associating them with contrasting themes. The first movement’s elegantly energetic opening theme is very much in the Gallant style, and could have been written by Giovanni Sammartini or J. C. Bach. But Mozart’s musical thinking has already gone beyond the Gallant style’s short-breathed phrases: The movement’s most striking feature is Mozart’s delay of the exposition’s cadence in A major, which he holds off until the final bars. (This kind of long-range thinking is not evident in the other movements: In the second movement, Mozart drops us off in the dominant with no preparation; and in the third movement, there’s only a perfunctory four-bar modulation.) The development section begins with a transposed version of the opening motif, and features another striking moment when Mozart delays the recapitulation by inserting a passage in D minor at a moment when we expect the return of D major.
The second movement’s opening motif is an elegant decoration of the note “D.” The second theme features a long note floating above the rest of the instruments – a device Mozart would return to again and again in his music. A minuscule development section serves to prepare the return of the first theme.
The third movement’s bubbly opening theme is clearly related to the first movement’s main theme. The imitative development section harks back for a moment to the earlier Baroque style before the recapitulation brings this delightful work to a close.
Overview: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia; died November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Work Composed: 1884
Today, Tchaikovsky occupies an unassailable position in the pantheon of composers; but during his lifetime, he was controversial, because his more nationalistic colleagues didn’t see his music – Russian tinged but clearly flowing out of the European tradition – as sufficiently Russian.
The Elegy was composed in 1884 for the Russian actor and producer Ivan Samarin, as part of a celebration of Samarin’s 50 years as a performing artist. Originally called Address of Gratitude, it was renamed Elegy for Ivan Samarin when Samarin died nine months after its premier; and to complicate things further, Tchaikovsky used it as an entr’acte in his incidental music to Hamlet four years later.
The piece is in ABA form, with the elegiac outer sections enclosing a stormier middle section. As a work by a composer who was a fountain of lyricism, it’s not surprising that the outer sections are intensely melodic. But the piece is not as simple as it sounds. If it seems counterintuitive to put an elegy in a major key, Tchaikovsky makes it work by keeping the sense of key ambiguous for much of the first section, alluding to the keys of A minor and E minor before finally settling in G.
Meanwhile, it’s easy to hear what the nationalists would have objected to. The lovely theme owes nothing to Russian folk music, and the middle section’s rhythmic ostinato is a device that came to Tchaikovsky via Schumann.
Overview: Joan Trimble
Born June 18, 1915, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Ireland; died August 6, 2000, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Ireland
Work Composed: 1951
During her lifetime, Joan Trimble was better known as a pianist and teacher than as a composer. Her father was a distinguished folksong collector, starting Trimble on a lifetime of immersion in Irish folk music – to the point that, in such works as this Suite for Strings, the tunes sound completely folk-like even though they are Trimble’s own.
In the 1930s, she studied composition with Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and her Phantasy for Piano Trio won the 1940 Cobbett competition for English chamber music. But World War 2 intervened, and her career as a duo-pianist with her sister Valerie took precedence; during the war, they regularly performed on BBC radio and at Myra Hess’s legendary National Gallery concerts. (Trimble also managed to work full time for the Red Cross.) The sisters’ success continued after the war, when they premiered two-piano concertos by English composers Arthur Bliss and Lennox Berkeley.
In addition to her career as a pianist and teacher, she raised three children. As a result, Trimble’s compositional output was small; but it is well crafted, and she lived long enough to be recognized as Ireland’s most prominent female composer.
Some of the most fearsomely modern music ever composed comes from the decades following World War 2, when faith in and respect for the traditions that had culminated in the war were at an all-time low; but Trimble’s music is untouched by these experiments – “I am free to be myself, regardless of fashion,” she wrote – and is closer in spirit to the music her teacher Vaughan Williams composed several decades earlier.
The suite is in three movements. The opening Prelude is in duple meter and features strong rhythm and sophisticated, very unfolk-song-like harmonies that occasionally suggest Impressionism. A lovely lyrical theme about a minute in is immediately repeated in the cellos underneath an airy accompaniment, and then never heard again, although the second movement’s main theme is related to it. Aside from this theme’s non-recurrence, the form is a sonata.
The slow second movement features a sweet and sad melody in triple meter. It’s further contrasted from the first movement by its simple harmonies – though they get more chromatic in the piece’s second half. A violin solo two-thirds of the way through is reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending.
The Finale features several sprightly tunes. The string writing throughout the suite is assured and effective, and justifies Trimble’s reputation as a composer whose works deserve wider hearing.
Overview: Edvard Grieg
Born June 15, 1843, Bergen, Norway; died September 4, 1907, Bergen, Norway
Work Composed: 1870s, string arrangement 1880
Along with his many musical innovations, Frédéric Chopin was the first composer to become widely regarded as the voice of his country: His mazurkas and polonaises gave voice to a Polish nation that, partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, no longer existed as a state. (The Russian nationalist Mikhail Glinka was a few years older than Chopin, but his success came later than Chopin’s, and he never had Chopin’s international reputation.)
After Chopin, the floodgates were open, and many later 19th-century composers make use of national folklore and/or folk music: Verdi in Italy; Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin in Russia; Dvořák and Smetana in what’s now the Czech Republic; Grieg in Norway; Sibelius in Finland; Enescu in Romania; Bartók and Kodaly in Hungary; Albeniz, Granados, and de Falla in Spain – the list goes on and on.
No composer embraced this role more wholeheartedly than Grieg. While his early music reflects his German musical education, after about 1865 his work is drenched in Norwegian history, culture, and folklore. He arranged Norwegian folk songs and composed new tunes in folk-song style, stressing distinctively Norwegian stylistic traits; he set Norwegian poems to music and composed incidental music to Norwegian plays. His determination to minimize non-Norwegian influences results in a more constrained musical world than most composers, but few composers are more distinctive.
The Two Elegiac Melodies were originally composed for the Twelve Songs, Op. 33, to poems by Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. Grieg knew a good tune when he wrote one, and he transcribed these two songs both for piano solo and for string orchestra. They are strophic: The first song consists of three repeated verses, and the second song of two repeated verses. This emphasizes Grieg’s strength as a composer, which was the quality of his ideas; where he sometimes got into trouble was in his development and structuring of them, and his transitions.
The poem that inspired the first piece, The Wounded Heart, tells of a heart broken by life’s travails, and yet, “when rain falls from the sky, flowers sprout from the wounds.” The second piece, The Last Spring, is one of Grieg’s longest and most radiantly bittersweet melodies. The poem’s narrator hopes to see winter give way to spring one last time. At the beginning of the second verse, Grieg divides the violins into four parts for an otherworldly effect.
Overview: Ludwig van Beethoven
Baptized December 17, 1770, Bonn, Germany; died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1810-11; Mahler’s arrangement, 1898-99
Between 1810 and 1817, Beethoven's compositional productivity fell dramatically. There are several reasons for this: his increasing isolation due to deafness; his machinations in the matter of his nephew Karl (in which Beethoven does not come off very well); and perhaps most importantly, a creative crisis due to his having taken the heroic style of his mid-life masterpieces as far as he could. Beethoven never ceased composing, but the works of this period come more slowly, and they're among the most experimental pieces he ever composed, such as the song cycle An die Ferne Geliebte, the Piano Sonata Op. 101, and this quartet.
The quartet is unusual in several respects. After the expansive middle-period quartets, it’s highly concentrated, its four movements lasting less time than the first two movements of Op. 59 No. 2. The first movement’s themes are almost aphoristic, and in stark contrast to the enormous development sections of such middle-period masterpieces as the Eroica symphony and the Waldstein sonata, its development section is a mere 22 bars long – shorter than two choruses of the blues. It has no true slow movement, and the second movement that takes the slow movement’s place contains a fully developed and unusually poignant fugue. It also has no true scherzo; the fierce third movement is marked “serioso” and is anything but a joke. The finale climaxes in a passage that’s intense even for Beethoven before dissolving into a coda that could have come from a comic opera. Throughout the work, there’s an unusual emphasis on cross-relations – different chromatic inflections of the same note, such as the D-flat and D natural heard in the first bar – and on the relatively unusual tonality of the Neapolitan, one half-step above the tonic.
This pervading strangeness links this quartet more to the enigmatic and visionary quartets that Beethoven would compose in the 1820s than to those which precede it. Beethoven biographer Jan Swofford writes of the quartet, “If the Serioso is a cry from the soul that seemed to him too intimate to be made public, it is a tightly disciplined cry, a systematic experiment with the musical norms and forms Beethoven inherited. In that respect it amounts to something he could not have understood yet: a prophecy of music he was going to be writing a decade later.”
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) made this arrangement shortly after becoming conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. It’s very faithful to Beethoven’s original: He only adds basses to the cellos in a few passages, and changes none of Beethoven’s music. (Such a light touch was not typical for Mahler, an orchestral wizard who often rescored works by earlier composers.) But moving the music from a small ensemble to one several times as large – and in particular, a piece that Beethoven wrote was composed “for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public” – greatly alters the piece’s effect.
