ACO SOLOISTS by Australian Chamber Orchestra

PRINCIPAL PARTNER

ACO SOLOISTS Satu Vänskä Director & Violin Glenn Christensen Violin Timo-Veikko Valve Cello CRAWFORD SEEGER Andante for Strings VIVALDI Concerto for Two Violins and Cello in G minor, Op.3, No.2, RV578 I. Adagio e spiccato II. Allegro III. Larghetto IV. Allegro JAMES LEDGER The Natural Order of Things

world premiere

LOCATELLI Violin Concerto in D major, Op.3, No.12 The Harmonic Labyrinth I. Allegro II. Largo – III. Allegro Interval DEBUSSY (arr. Symonds) Sonata for Violoncello I. Prologue: Lent, sostenuto e molto risoluto II. Sérénade: Modérément animé III. Finale: Animé, léger et nerveux MENDELSSOHN (arr. strings) String Quartet in A minor, Op.13 I. Adagio – Allegro vivace II. Adagio non lento III. Intermezzo: Allegretto con moto – Allegro di molto IV. Presto – Adagio non lento

The Australian Chamber Orchestra reserves the right to alter scheduled artists and programs as necessary.

Approximate durations (minutes): 5 – 9 – 13 – 22 – INTERVAL – 12 – 28 The concert will last approximately two hours, including a 20-minute interval.

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HE AR Antonio Stradivari, Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, Giuseppe Guarneri filius Andreæ, Hieronymus and Antonio Amati. Some of the greatest instrument makers the world has ever seen. And their artistry, pursuit of perfect craftsmanship and invention ushered in the era of the virtuoso, particularly for the violin. Composers such as Tartini, Corelli, Albinoni, Geminiani, and Antonio Vivaldi and Pietro Locatelli, both of whom are featured on this program, were eager to demonstrate the full range of virtuosic brilliance the violin could offer. Locatelli’s 12th concerto from his Opus 3 set, L’arte del violin, published in 1732, even comes with a warning to those who dare to play it: easy to enter, hard to exit. PICTURED: The difficulty of Locatelli’s The Harmonic Labyrinth is best depicted by the number of notes on just one of the many pages of this fiendishly difficult Concerto.

But these words of caution are not a deterrent to ACO Principal Violin and curator of the ACO Soloists program, Satu Vänskä; rather they serve as a source of inspiration and encouragement. “The Locatelli is such a peculiar and, in some ways unconventional piece. It has taken me months to get my head around it. There are just so many notes to play. He was the one that encouraged Paganini. Locatelli wrote 24 Caprices, then Paganini obviously played them and wrote his. Everyone knows Paganini’s but few people know the original inspiration,” says Satu. “Locatelli’s concerto is just so physically exhausting; the whole piece is relentless. But I find that really compelling as a violinist. It isn’t performed very often. I’m not even sure if it has been played in Australia before. The ACO certainly hasn’t.” “This whole concert is about showcasing the ACO in all its diversity. It demonstrates the range of what we can do and what we can play,” she says. Timo-Veikko Valve, Principal Cello and also soloist in this concert concurs. “In a program such as this, one can really experience and hear all the voices that make this an Orchestra of soloists, not just those at the front.” “This program might look esoteric on paper, but there is a lot of thought into how it all fits together,” Satu continues. “We have the ‘new’ pieces – Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Adagio and James Ledger’s The Natural Order of Things – juxtaposed with these Italian Baroque masterpieces by Locatelli and Vivaldi. It is like a trompe l’oeil except for the ear, hearing these old pieces with some fresher pieces and making them sound a bit like ghosts, taking them into the 21st century.”

Glenn Christensen, a former Emerging Artist and now full-time member of the ACO, will be joining Satu and Tipi for Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Violins and Cello. “Vivaldi was so extraordinarily prolific and inventive in his writing. His music is so exciting and distinctive, that even after hundreds of years it’s still relevant” Glenn says.

PICTURED: Satu Vänskä

Tipi will come front and centre for Jack Symonds’ arrangement of Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano. “Jack has reworked the delicate and characterful dialogue between the cello and piano in a way that the original cello part stays unchanged, but the piano part is divided into 11 solo string parts. This method highlights the intimacy of the conversation without overorchestrating the original score and thus making it a concertante piece, soloist versus orchestra.” But it is Mendelssohn’s String Quartet arranged for string orchestra that all three soloists agree is the binding force on the program. “I’m excited to revisit this work after performing it numerous times with my quartet in Finland. It’s definitely one of the cornerstones that has, after Haydn and Beethoven, secured this art form’s importance,” said Tipi.

PICTURED: Glenn Christensen

PICTURED: Timo-Veikko Valve

Satu has always wanted to perform this quartet with the full forces of the ACO. “It follows on nicely from the late Beethoven quartets we performed last year. Beethoven’s late quartets were certainly not popular in his lifetime. Mendelssohn’s own father and his peers did not value the strange, internal, complex quartets written by the then fully deaf master. However, the young Mendelssohn was fascinated by them and eagerly studied the scores that had only been published recently. A genius himself, he saw the quality in Beethoven’s works and used them as an inspiration when writing his first mature quartet in A minor. Mendelssohn was ahead of his time in acknowledging the uniqueness of these late Beethoven works. This is a mindset we like to follow at ACO also: forward-thinking and without prejudice.”

ABOUT THE MUSIC RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER Born East Liverpool, Ohio, 1901. Died Chevy Chase, Maryland, 1953. ANDANTE FOR STRINGS Composed 1931. Orchestrated by the composer 1938. Raised in Florida, Ruth Crawford Seeger studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, where she studied composition and theory with Adolf Weidig. With her first Piano Preludes of 1924, Crawford had already developed her own unique, ‘ultra-modern’ voice. In 1926, Crawford composed her Sonata for Violin and Piano, often performed at modern music concerts in the late twenties; critics remarked that Crawford could ‘sling dissonances like a man’. She was recognised early on as a woman composer who did not fit the sentimental stereotypes.

PICTURED: Ruth Crawford Seeger. 14

‘. . .a study in dissonant dynamics . . . carefully organised to be shaped through single pitches in each instrument. . .’ RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER By 1930, Ruth Crawford was a force to be reckoned with in American modernism. Stylistically, her work stood out in its uncompromising use of dissonance, contrapuntal ostinato, striking choice of texts and tidy formal construction. In March 1930, Crawford won a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Europe; the first woman so honoured. The following year witnessed her most famous work – String Quartet, from which the Andante comes. In 1929, she began studies with Charles Seeger, a key figure in American music as a composer, theorist, and musicologist. They married in 1932, with Ruth assuming responsibility for his children from a previous marriage, including son Pete, soon to become one of America’s best known folksingers. She likewise adopted several of Seeger’s theoretical methods that mark the works of her most productive period, 1930-33. However, her composing came to a virtual standstill after 1934. Among her children with Seeger were daughter Peggy and son Mike, both to become renowned folksingers and teachers in adulthood. In 1936, the Seegers moved to Washington DC to work in folksong collecting for the Library of Congress. PICTURED: Charles Seeger.

As Ruth Crawford Seeger, she published her own pioneering collection, American Folk Songs for Children in 1948. She only returned to serious composition with the Suite for Wind Quintet in 1952. By the time it was completed, she learned she had cancer. She died at the age of 52, ending prematurely a career that had begun with extraordinary promise. Crawford Seeger’s 1931 String Quartet is widely considered to be a masterpiece. She described the slow movement as ‘a study in dissonant dynamics, the waxing and waning of crescendos and diminuendos carefully organised to be shaped through single pitches in each instrument’. She arranged the slow movement for string orchestra in 1938. Describing its concentrated power, music critic Peter Dickinson described her as ‘a kind of American Webern’. Australian Chamber Orchestra © 2017

ANTONIO VIVALDI Born Venice, 1678. Died Vienna, 1741. CONCERTO FOR TWO VIOLINS AND CELLO IN G MINOR, OP.3, NO.2, RV578 Composed 1711. I. Adagio e spiccato II. Allegro III. Larghetto IV. Allegro Both Antonio Vivaldi and Pietro Locatelli enjoyed careers as violin virtuosos and composers, and both benefited immensely from the developments in printing being made by music publishers in the Netherlands. Vivaldi’s works included some 500 concertos as well as many operas, instrumental sonatas and a large body of sacred music. His playing was clearly prodigious. One contemporary describes how Vivaldi ‘put his fingers but a hair’s breadth from the bow, so that there was scarcely room for the bow’. Vivaldi pioneered technical advances, such as using the highest register of the strings, which were unknown at the time. PICTURED: Antonio Vivaldi.

In 1711, Vivaldi met the Amsterdam-based printer Estienne Roger, who had revolutionised music printing. Instead of moveable type, Roger engraved plates, and used beams to link shorter notes like quavers and semiquavers. The music could therefore be printed as often as needed, and it had the great virtue of being much more legible. Vivaldi’s Opus 3, or L’estro armonico (The harmonious fancy), a collection of 12 concertos for a variety of instrumental combinations appeared in Roger’s edition in 1711. Roger was so impressed at the collection’s popularity that he ordered what became Opp. 5, 6 and 7 and engraved them at his own expense. It soon became, as scholar Michael Talbot puts it ‘perhaps the most influential collection of instrumental music to appear during the whole of the 18th century’. L’estro armonico includes four solo concertos and eight concerti grossi where a group of soloists (the concertino) is pitted against the rest of the band (the ripieno). In the G minor work the concertino consists of two violins and cello. Vivaldi’s treatment of the concertino is different from that of older composers in that he treats each member of it as a soloist,

mixing and matching the solo, duet and trio possibilities it offers. The G minor concerto is also unusual, and slightly oldfashioned, in that it is what was known as concerto da chiesa, or ‘church concerto’. This is not to say that it was used in liturgical contexts, but refers to the fact that it consists of four movements, slow-fast-slow-fast, unlike the concerto da camera, or chamber concerto, that Vivaldi pioneered with its fast-slowfast movement layout. A recent recording of the manuscript version shows the small but significant revisions that Vivaldi made before allowing Roger to publish the piece. PICTURED: 1st Edition title page of L’estro armonico by Etienne Roger, 1711.

The opening consists of those implacable spiky figures that Vivaldi turns to illustrative effect in the ‘Winter’ concerto of the Four Seasons, with the concertino violins only emerging at the end. For much of the following allegro they play ornate figures in rhythmic unison against simple accompaniment, though Vivaldi introduces passages of syncopated motifs against driving fast semiquavers that swap from concertino to orchestra and treble to bass in what is known as invertible counterpoint. There are also substantial duets between first violin and cello. The slow movement, with its use of short motifs dominated by dotted rhythms, cultivates a ceremonial air, its material passed from the orchestra to the concertino trio. This is dispelled by the finale, whose boisterous 12/8 metre suggests a gigue or tarantella. Gordon Kerry © 2017 17

JAMES LEDGER Born Perth, 1966. THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS

world premiere

Composed 2016. The orchestral music of James Ledger is well known to Australian concertgoers. His first work for orchestra, Indian Pacific (1996), is still regularly performed around the country. Ledger has been composer-in-residence with the West Australian, Adelaide and Christchurch (NZ) Symphony Orchestras and at the Australian National Academy of Music, the Australian Festival of Chamber Music (Townsville) and the Four Winds Festival (Bermagui). He has won APRA Art Music Awards for his violin concerto Golden Years and the orchestral work Chronicles.

PICTURED: James Ledger.

Ledger enjoys an ongoing collaboration with songwriter Paul Kelly. Their song-cycle Conversations with Ghosts won an ARIA award in 2013. In 2015 the Sydney and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras simultaneously premiered War Music for choir and orchestra, with text by Kelly. James Ledger is currently lecturer in composition at the School of Music at the University of Western Australia. For more information please visit jamesledger.com 18

CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF SIMON LIBLING Simon Libling’s life is a story of vicissitudes: fortitude, hard work, success followed by disaster, the process repeated over and over. He was born in 1912 in Krakow, which was then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to a very wealthy family. His father died before he was born. His mother invested all in debt instruments. The post-WWI hyperinflation reduced her to penury, unable to support her children, so Simon lived with his grandfather. He became a furrier and, despite the Great Depression, established a flourishing business. He supported many members of his family, no matter what their circumstance. Simon was never afraid of work, often working for 20 hours a day, seven days a week for the half-year fur season. In the other six months, he studied philosophy at University, went to the theatre and concerts, and read. Books were real to him. He seemed to think that there were answers to life to be found in philosophy and great literature. He was also a qualified skiing instructor, as well as district figure-skating champion. The German invasion of Poland ended that life. The closing of synagogues led to an unexpected bonus. He visited a friend on the Day of Atonement and there met his future wife Mary, who was by his side for their 46year marriage, until his death in 1987. Mary, now 96, lives in Melbourne. Simon escaped from the Plaszow Concentration Camp. He would never say much about this except for: ‘I did not like it, so I left.’ His life was saved by hiding in a former walk-in wardrobe with so little space that after the war he had to re-learn to walk.

At the end of the war, he and Mary sacrificed a precious stone from a ring in exchange for rucksacks of food which they then walked from Krakow to Prague to exchange for perfume, which they then walked to Vienna, selling it to American soldiers. Now having money, they returned to Krakow and repeated the process. The Czechoslovakian State decorated Simon for saving tens of thousands of lives from starvation. He also made enough money to establish Poland’s largest gumboots and allied shoe wear factory. In 1947, when the Stalinists took over Poland, Simon was classified a class enemy. Not the deadly designation it would have been in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but it did make life difficult and unpleasant until 1956. During those difficult years, Simon found solace in music, going to concerts in Krakow and Warsaw. He also developed a deep affection for gypsy and piano accordion music, befriending and assisting many of its practitioners. Simon was a devoted father. Virtually every Sunday, Simon took his son for a long walk, during which they talked of everything from anti-semitism to the gold standard. But his son’s independent thinking came at a price: Simon was charged and convicted in 1959 of ‘bringing up an anti-socialist child’. The sentence was five years with hard labour, but he avoided serving the sentence and left Poland. In October 1960, the Liblings arrived in Melbourne with less than $100, some, not entirely suitable, clothing and no knowledge of English. Simon’s legacy of hard work, self-reliance and devotion to doing the right thing lives on through his grandsons.

The story of Simon Libling’s life reads like a film script.

The composer writes: The Natural Order of Things came about through a commission for the Australian Chamber Orchestra by David and Sandy Libling. I first met them both in January 2015. David sought to commission a piece in celebration of his father, Simon. I asked David if he would write a little about his father just so I could form some ideas for the work. What I received was an account of his father’s truly astounding life. Simon lived in Poland and experienced a great many setbacks – ‘a story of vicissitudes’ as David put it. A life that included time in and escaping from Plaszow concentration camp and having to learn to walk again after hiding in a wardrobe during the war. After the war, he and his wife Mary walked from Krakow to Prague (to exchange food for perfume) and then to Vienna (to exchange perfume for money). He was decorated by the Czechoslovakian State for saving tens of thousands of lives from starvation. The story of Simon’s life reads like a film script. Perhaps the most memorable part for me was how Simon would take David for long walks virtually every Sunday throughout Simon’s boyhood. Here, ‘they talked of everything from antiSemitism to the gold standard’. The thought of ‘passing the baton’ between father and son, down the generations, led to the title, The Natural Order of Things. The work had an incredibly long gestation, and went through many different shapes and forms before settling on its final iteration which consists of five short movements – each having it’s own mood and characteristic: I. Static and serene II. With a sense of burden III. Threatening and agitated IV. Ceremonial V. Calm and resolute The Natural Order of Things was commissioned by David and Sandy Libling in celebration of the life of Simon Libling for the Australian Chamber Orchestra. It was an honour for me to write this work. James Ledger © 2017

PIETRO ANTONIO LOCATELLI Born Bergamo, 1695. Died Amsterdam, 1764. VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MAJOR, OP.3, NO.12 THE HARMONIC LABYRINTH

Composed 1733. I. Allegro II. Largo – III. Allegro A generation younger, Locatelli pushed violin technique even further than Vivaldi, devising new positions to play ever higher on the instrument, as well as expanding the role of double- and triple-stopping, and polyphonic playing. His compositions exist largely to demonstrate that prodigious technique, though, curiously, Locatelli avoided the public limelight as his career progressed. He worked largely in Rome until 1723, when his patron, Monsignor Cybo left the papal court, and from then until 1729 seems to have performed in various German cities before settling in Amsterdam. He had had works published by Vivaldi’s publisher, Roger in 1721, but a decade later was granted a monopoly to print his own music (in the days before copyright a composer’s work was fair game). He only gave private weekly concerts to well-heeled music lovers at his home in Amsterdam, where he lived out the rest of his life.

PICTURED: Pietro Antonio Locatelli c. 1733. From a mezzotinto by Cornelis Troost (1696–1750). 21

PICTURED: Dedication page of L’Arte del Violino.

L’arte del violin was published in 1732. It is a series of 12 concertos, in the three-movement design established by Vivaldi, but the fast outer movements have unaccompanied Capriccios grafted onto them. The first movement, nicknamed the ‘harmonic labyrinth’ by the composer, which bears the inscription ‘facilis aditus, difficilis exitus’ (easy to enter, difficult to exit). It is introduced by a simple D major sentence from the cello before the others join in with, soon enough, the soloist playing in extravagant threepart harmony above the fray. The Capriccio acts as a kind of cadenza, that is the unaccompanied, quasi-improvised starturn for the soloist – and is a simple pattern of chords on the page, marked ‘arpeggio’ – thus an opportunity for pyrotechnic display. After a short orchestral introduction, the slow movement, in the relative minor key (a more classical than Baroque practice) begins with a long and ornate melody for the soloist accompanied only by continuo – that is the cello with optional harmony from a keyboard. At its centre the movement has a much faster (presto) section where isolated orchestral chords support a feverish moto perpetuo from the soloist. A version of the opening material acts as a bridge to the finale, a gracious dance in 3/8 metre, that again offsets a brilliant capriccio in driving semiquavers and always in two- or three-part harmony. Gordon Kerry © 2017 22

CLAUDE DEBUSSY Born St Germain-en-Laye 1862. Died Paris 1918. SONATA FOR CELLO AND PIANO Composed 1915. I. Prologue: Lent, sostenuto e molto risoluto II. Sérénade: Modérément animé III. Finale: Animé, léger et nerveux Paris before the outbreak of World War I was a city giddy with the progress of science, industry and art. It was the time of ‘La Belle Epoque’, as we now call it. The good old days . . .

PICTURED: Claude Debussy by Donald Sheridan.

Claude Debussy was witness to the end of these heady days, as Paris and indeed the world prepared for the Great War. This pre-War period saw the rapid decline of his health. As with Mozart, the miserable circumstances in which Debussy found himself during his dying days are not reflected in the music which he composed at the time. In agony from the final stages of cancer, with the First World War at its height with millions of young people going to senseless deaths, and with 23

. . . an example ‘of what a sick man can write in wartime’. CLAUDE DEBUSSY

most of his own musical masterpieces mistakenly interpreted under the label of ‘impressionism’, the composer, in his mid-50s, was close to despair. And yet, even as he felt the dark night closing in around him, he set out to compose a series of six sonatas for various instruments, three of which were completed before he succumbed to the inevitable, and none of which could be described as reflecting his current mental state. True, he described the Sonata for flute, viola and harp as ‘frightfully mournful’, but to the listener, it’s radiant. The Violin Sonata represents a triumphant rediscovery of the Classical style. Its simplicity and structural clarity was a call-to-arms to his countrymen – he wrote ‘I want to work, not so much for myself, but to give proof, however small it may be, that even if there were thirty million Boches, French thought will not be destroyed!’

PICTURED: First page of the Sonata for Cello and Piano by Claude Debussy.

And the Cello Sonata, Debussy described as an example ‘of what a sick man can write in wartime’. It’s almost whimsical in its jaunty good humour and sense of invention and is a picture of musical health. But perhaps most surprising, is Debussy’s decision to use a traditional sonata form structure – one of the rare occasions he did, in fact. He wrote to his publisher Jacques Durand, ‘It’s not for me to judge [the Cello Sonata’s] excellence, but I like its proportions and its almost classical form, in the good sense of the word.’ In this concert, we will be hearing an arrangement for cello and strings by Australian composer Jack Symonds. Australian Chamber Orchestra © 2016

From Jack Symonds: Debussy’s piano writing is as original as it is idiomatic. Transcribing any of his piano music for strings is probably just perverse. However, a string ensemble is greatly flexible beyond the obvious ‘expanded string quartet’ colour often associated with it. I have tried in this arrangement to catch Debussy’s extraordinary sense of attack and decay in detailed mixtures of string soloists. When one plays this Sonata at the piano, there’s a constant sense that the composer is gently guiding your feet on both pedals to conjure a half-lit world beyond the 88 keys and mechanism of the piano. The string colour choices I have made are sometimes quixotically linked to how I like to play this piece, but ultimately I hope they have illuminated the downright strange and dazzling relationship between solo cello and ‘accompaniment’ Debussy originally imagined. 24

FELIX MENDELSSOHN Born Hamburg 1809. Died Leipzig, 1847. STRING QUARTET IN A MINOR, OP.13 (arr. strings) Composed 1827. I. Adagio – Allegro vivace II. Adagio non lento III. Intermezzo: Allegretto con moto – Allegro di molto IV. Presto – Adagio non lento Classicism, in the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, largely came and went in the years between the death of Locatelli and the births, in very different circumstances but within a year of each other, of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin. These, along with the Liszt and Wagner were the Romantic Generation, as Charles Rosen calls them in his book of the same title. Felix Mendelssohn was the eldest, born in 1809 to a wealthy Jewish banker (who later converted to Lutheran Christianity).

PICTURED: Mendelssohn, 1830, aged 21 – from a watercolour by James Warren Childe. 25

PICTURED: Adagio – Adagio vivace opening movement from Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A minor.

During the Napoleonic wars, the family moved from Hamburg to the safety of Berlin in 1811; the Prussian government’s Emancipation Act of 1812 guaranteed the civil rights of Prussian Jews, and Abraham Mendelssohn’s financing of the war effort had made him a valued member of the community. Felix enthusiastically absorbed the music he heard in Berlin’s concert-halls and opera houses – notably that of Weber, whose Der Freischütz he heard at the newly rebuilt Schauspielhaus. At the age of 10 he began lessons with the esteemed composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, who gave Mendelssohn strict lessons in harmony and counterpoint with particular reference to the music of the 18th century. Mendelssohn’s love of the Baroque and classical periods would have far-reaching effects on his own music and his career as a conductor, and make him seem, misleadingly, the most conservative of the Romantic Generation. We have him largely to thank for the Bach revival, and the resulting revival of other Baroque composers.

PICTURED: Carl Friedrich Zelter – Mendelssohn’s first teacher. 26

Keen to support the musical talents of his children, in 1822 Abraham Mendelssohn initiated a series of Sunday concerts at the family home where Felix and his brilliant sister Fanny would perform with paid members of the Court Orchestra. By 1827, when Mendelssohn was 18, he had already composed a formidable amount of music, including 13 Sinfonias (composed for those Sunday concerts), which established his effortless

Like Beethoven, Mendelssohn is able to create moments of extraordinary grace out of seemingly no material . . . technique in writing for strings. His early masterpiece, the Octet dates from 1825 and one of his most defining works, the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was composed a year later. His later music includes a number of classicising symphonies and sacred oratorios, and as conductor of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra in later life, he effectively founded the modern practice of performing past masterpieces rather than only new works. The String Quartet Op.13 was written in 1827 during the composer’s summer vacation from the University of Berlin, where his mother hoped he would get an education ‘so rare in musicians’. Beethoven had recently died, and Mendelssohn – despite those accusations of musical conservatism – understood the importance of the late Beethoven quartets more than many of his contemporaries. This work shows a number of subtle influences from Beethoven’s Opp.95, 74, 130 and 132 without, however, sounding derivative. Like Beethoven, Mendelssohn is able to create moments of extraordinary grace out of seemingly no material, and as in late Beethoven there is a fruitful tension between the popular and the ‘learned’. Mendelssohn shows his mastery of fugue, for instance, but can then write the simplest melody and accompaniment as in the Intermezzo, which is itself balanced by a shimmering Trio section that recalls the fairy music from the ‘Dream’ overture. The whole work, more interestingly, is derived from the melody of his song Frage (Question), Op.9 No.1, known also as Ist es wahr? – Is it true?. The first three notes of the song form a characteristic ‘motto’ theme (like Beethoven’s ‘Muss es sein?’ in his Op.135), which is heard, transformed, in all four movements. As Mendelssohn himself put it, ‘you will hear it – with its own notes – in the first and last movements, and in all four movements you will hear its emotions expressed’. The motto appears sometimes as a whole-tone step down followed by a rising third (or the same contour upside down), or by the rhythm of a dotted quaver, semiquaver and longer note as in the urgent main theme of the first movement. The work is further unified by the pensive music sounded at the very beginning and end. Just how Beethovenian the Second Quartet is, was brought home to the composer some years later when he attended a performance of the work in Paris. The man next to him at one point said ‘He has that in one of his symphonies.’ When asked ‘Who?’ the man replied ‘Beethoven, the composer of this quartet’. In a letter home Mendelssohn described it as ‘a very dubious compliment.’ Gordon Kerry © 2017 27