Beyond the Programmatic

Music for Clarinet and Strings by Peter Eötvös and Carl Maria von Weber

Thomas May

“I try to describe the world with sounds, just like writers do it with words, painters with a brush, and directors with a camera,” remarks Peter Eötvös. “We often describe the same thing; only the medium is different.” Eötvös’s understanding of the composer’s task is put to the test in fascinating ways by this evening’s selections and their interconnections. All of the music that Jörg Widmann and the Cuarteto Quiroga have chosen to perform is “purely” instrumental. Yet behind the two Eötvös compositions—one of which receives its world premiere tonight—stands a literary source by one of the recognized masters of 20th-century world literature: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Actor Paul Rhys will read excerpts from the novel. Music without text, yet at the same time bearing textual traces buried deep beneath its surface: what sort of relation obtains between these pieces and the text that ispired them? Certainly not a “programmatic” one, in the traditional sense—anymore than these new chamber compositions by Eötvös stand for the purely “absolute” side of this conventional binary opposition, a relic of Romanticism. Eötvös notes that the medium with which he as a composer works differs from that of Joyce and artists in such disciplines as film and painting. (The work of another epochal Modernist, Kazimir Malevich, has also been a recent preoccupation, as shown by the composer’s 2018 orchestral work Reading Malevich.) For his part, the music-obsessed Joyce even referred to using the musical techniques of the fugue in the Sirens episode of Ulysses. Eötvös characterizes the difference of his task as having to do with using the language of sounds as his medium. And through his specific choice of instrumentation—the combination of clarinet and string quartet—Eötvös evokes such generic predecessors as the well-known exemplar from the beginning of the Romantic century we hear at the end of tonight’s program.

Decades before the debate over programmatic versus absolute music had ossified into bitterly opposed ideological camps, Carl Maria von Weber moved fluidly between instrumental composition and works for the opera house. While nowadays for the most part we associate Weber with the stage, he also contributed several pieces to the core repertoire of the clarinet—giving the instrument, as in his beloved Clarinet Quintet, a “vocal” expression so suavely articulate that any need for words is obviated.

Sirens, Joyce, and Seduction by the Instrumental Voice Musical Transformations by Peter Eötvös

Balancing his manifold identities as a composer, conductor, and teacher, Peter Eötvös has introduced a remarkable number of new works over the past year, when he reached the milestone age of 75. Along with Joyce for Clarinet and String Quartet, these include his third violin concerto Alhambra for Isabelle Faust, the Noh theater –inflected Secret Kiss (drawn from Alessandro Baricco’s novel Silk), and, just last month at the Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal, Aurora for double bass, accordion, and string orchestra (inspired by a vision of the aurora borealis while flying over Alaska).

A variety of powerful extramusical impulses prompted this outburst of new work. In the case of Joyce, the literary catalyst was an extract from Chapter 11 of the Irish master’s Ulysses. More accurately, it was Eötvös’s own musical treatment of that literary source in his second string quartet, entitled The Sirens Cycle (2015–16). Like Arnold Schoenberg in his String Quartet No. 2, Eötvös adds a soprano voice to the strings, although there is no connection between the two works. The Sirens Cycle unfolds as a triptych exploring three different literary manifestations of the ancient Greek myth of the Sirens—the sea creatures whose beautiful music entails mortal danger, for it causes sailors to shipwreck, luring them to their deaths. Homer’s Odyssey is the locus classicus in which this tale has been incorporated into the foundational literature of Western culture, but the alluring power of the Sirens has gone on to inspire countless retellings. James Joyce’s landmark Modernist novel Ulysses, published in 1922, retraces the adventures recounted in the Odyssey, with Chapter 11 devoted to the encounter with the Sirens. According to Homer, Odysseus has been forewarned about them but cannot overcome his intense curiosity to hear their singing—so he orders his crew to tie him firmly to the mast and then to protect themselves by stopping their ears with wax. Joyce transposes the episode to a hotel restaurant, where his protagonist, Leopold Bloom, has come to dine while his wife Molly (an unfaithful Penelope) is about to meet up with her lover. Bloom’s attention is riveted by the barmaids, stand-ins for the Sirens.

Eötvös began not with Homer but with still another variant: Das Schweigen der Sirenen (“The Silence of the Sirens”), a very brief text by Franz Kafka that was published posthumously in 1931. In Kafka’s version, Odysseus stops his ears with wax, but even this precaution would normally not suffice to escape the danger of the Sirens, as their silence could be more deadly than their singing. Odysseus, however, does not hear their silence and so survives. For Joyce, Eötvös extracted the first part of The Sirens Cycle, which lasts about 20 minutes, as an independent work, replacing the soprano with a solo clarinet. The words, which are dissected and threaded across an astonishing array of high coloratura gestures in the vocal version, become, as it were, silenced—like the Sirens—but emerge subliminally in the altered phrasings by the clarinet.

As with the Kafka story, the issues involved become increasingly intricate and complex the more closely they are analyzed. Take the matter of gender: in the original, a soprano voices the words, often at the extreme high end of her range, whereas Joyce assigns this role to the clarinet. As Eötvös puts it, the instrument “renders the musing by the distinctively masculine protagonist, Leopold Bloom, over the attractive barmaids with befittingly vigorous musical gestures.” Indeed, in recent years Eötvös has returned to this text by James Joyce with inexhaustible fascination and written a number of other instrumental pieces in response (such as A Call for solo violin, which varies a “siren-like sound” implied by a line from Ulysses, and the four-hand piano piece Lisztomania). Joyce comprises seven sections of varying lengths. The original Joycean text in itself is replete with references to music and sonorities —whether to actual compositions, such as The Rose of Castille, an English opera from the Victorian era by Michael William Balfe, or “Liszt’s rhapsodies,” or to sounds generated: “chirruping,” “jingling,” “coin rang,” “thigh smack,” “boomed crashing chords,” “warbling,” “plash and silent roar.” Joyce even includes purely onomatopoetic outbursts (“Fff! Oo! …Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl”).

Eötvös reconceived the solo part for the personality and technical capacity of the clarinet. The soloist thus represents a new voice, not a “translated” version of the soprano one, though there are many similarities between the two. The composer explains that “the emphasis and duration of vowels or consonants is not important, of course, for the clarinet version. But the character is still everywhere sassy and frolicsome, like the Joyce text itself. I preserved that.” At the same time, “the clarinet is capable of presiding over a greater dynamic range than the human voice, which I have exploited.” After introducing the clarinet quintet Joyce, Jörg Widmann persuaded Eötvös to create an independent solo version. While the clarinet is accorded an extensive role in the quintet, there are also considerable passages given to the string quartet alone—the relationship between these two entities is an essential part of the drama—and the string ensemble produces an enormous spectrum of sonorities that heighten the effects of the solo part. Thus Joyce for solo clarinet is also a very different piece, even if the musical content it presents is recognizably close to the original. The juxtaposition of the two pieces side by side, Eötvös hopes, “will allow the audience to discover how the same theme can be treated in different ways, even on the same instrument.”

Musical Friendship and Weber’s Clarinet Quintet

Peter Eötvös’s collaboration with Jörg Widmann has been long-lasting. The Hungarian expresses his admiration for Widmann’s all-encompassing artistic personality as a fellow performer-composerteacher. Similar connections with clarinetists helped shape the core clarinet literature: most famously, the synergy between Mozart and Anton Stadler and that between Brahms and Richard Mühlfeld. Between these two examples comes that of Carl Maria von Weber and Heinrich Joseph Baermann, principal clarinetist in the King of Bavaria’s court orchestra, whose playing style elicited kudos from Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and—having first become acquainted with him in 1811—Weber.

The friendship that developed between Weber and Baermann immediately bore fruit. Weber’s Concertino, written in 1811, was such a success that he followed it with a pair of concertos and a set of variations for clarinet and piano that same year. Indeed, the composer dedicated all of his pieces for clarinet save one to Baermann, praising the warm cantabile that became his signature and his “fingers supple as a watch-spring” (as Weber put it in a humorous poem he penned for the clarinetist). Baermann was pivotal in establishing a new playing style for the instrument, which Weber fully exploited. The composer would moreover make these colors integral to the soundscapes of his operas: we can hardly imagine Der Freischütz without the quasi-protagonist role Weber assigns to the clarinet.

Weber began sketching the Clarinet Quintet during the same year in which he so swiftly wrote his concertos, but the chamber piece took considerably longer to gestate. He finished it, after numerous interruptions, in 1815—by which time the relative success of his early opera Silvana in Berlin had encouraged him to shift his focus to opera.

Despite its chamber scoring, the Clarinet Quintet is more or less a concerto in spirit. The solo part is clearly its main focus, while the strings play an essentially accompaniment role. The opening Allegro showcases the soloist’s ability to mellifluously link high and low registers, while the slow movement (an Adagio headed “Fantasia” in G minor) transports us to the world of opera with its expressive intensity. The clarinet writing also requires tremendous dynamic control and chromatic fluidity. The third movement, some of the first music Weber composed for the Quintet, transforms the minuet into a rhythmically animated, rambunctious capriccio. These three movements were initially played in 1813 in the presence of the composer Louis Spohr (likewise an important author of clarinet music). Weber completed the rondo finale in 1815, rounding out the Quintet with music of the most charmingly fresh and inventive virtuosity.

Thomas May is a freelance writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work has been published internationally. He contributes to the programs of the Lucerne Festival as well as to The New York Times and Musical America.