Mozart, Schumann & Strauss

MOZART, SCHUMANN & STRAUSS Thursday 12 November 2020, The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh –––––

PROGRAMME NOTE

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PERFORMERS VIOLIN Stephanie Gonley Aisling O’Dea VIOLA Felix Tanner Asher Zaccardelli CELLO Philip Higham Su-a Lee DOUBLE BASS Nikita Naumov

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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Mozart (1756-1791) Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K 546 (1788) Adagio Fugue

Schumann (1810-1856) Etudes in Canonic Form, Op 56 (1845) Transcribed for string quintet by Philip Higham Nicht zu schnell (C major) Mit innigem Ausdruck (A minor) Andantino (E major) Innig (A major) Nicht zu schnell (B minor) Adagio (B major)

Strauss (1864–1949) Metamorphosen (1945) Realisation for String Septet by Rudolf Leopold (1996)

––––– The concept of catharsis has been around since the time of Aristotle, even if what it actually means has long been up for debate. It’s interesting that in a medical environment, the term can refer to the release of noxious substances. In the arts, it generally means a somewhat paradoxical purging of emotions by first experiencing those same emotions more strongly. Nobody would deny that we’re living in a time of great stress, sadness, frustration, even sometimes despair. Perhaps today’s seriousminded programme, which stares loss and devastation squarely in the face, will help provide relief from those very feelings.

Mozart didn’t quite plumb the depths of despair in his C minor Adagio and Fugue, but it’s a chilly, uncompromising work nonetheless. And it had a somewhat complicated genesis, too. Mozart entered it into his own catalogue of works on 26 June 1788, describing it as “a short Adagio for two violins, viola and bass, for a fugue that I wrote some time ago for two pianos.”

That earlier two-piano work was his K426 Fugue in C minor from 1783, and it’s almost as if in transcribing the piece for strings, he decided to accompany it, as Bach had done decades earlier, with an introductory movement.

Indeed, the influences of Bach don’t end there. At a time when the earlier composer’s music was generally sniffed at as excessively dense and intellectual (certainly when compared with the lighter, wittier galant style that was all the rage), Mozart nonetheless held the composer in profound respect. His appreciation had been kindled during his early days in Vienna by his patron Baron Gottfried von Swieten, who had given Mozart the scores of works by Handel and

There’s plenty of wit in Mozart’s treatment of his distinctive fugue theme – which he turns upside down on top of itself, or layers in insistent entries that jostle for our attention – but any hint of actual humour is banished by the music’s surliness.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Bach to take home and play or study. Mozart later wrote: ”When [my wife] Constanze heard the fugues, she fell quite in love with them. She will listen to nothing but fugues now. Having often heard me play fugues off the top of my head, she asked if I had

and harmonies that refuse to settle. His subsequent Fugue, however, plunges us into an atmosphere of gruff ill humour. There’s plenty of wit in Mozart’s treatment of his distinctive fugue theme – which he turns upside down on top of itself, or layers in

ever written any down, and when I said I had not, she scolded me very thoroughly for not having written anything in this most artistic and beautiful of musical forms.”

insistent entries that jostle for our attention – but any hint of actual humour is banished by the music’s surliness.

Mozart sets an ominous atmosphere of foreboding in his angular opening

Like Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue, Schumann’s Etudes in Canonic Form also began life as a keyboard work, though for an instrument we seldom encounter today.

Schumann had a tough time teaching at Felix Mendelssohn’s recently established Leipzig Conservatory in 1843-4, and felt relieved to leave, and move to Dresden in 1845. But it was while teaching in Leipzig that he’d first encountered a pedal piano, a standard upright piano with a set of foot pedals added to it in the same form and shape as a piano keyboard. The idea behind the amalgam was to emulate the keyboard-

Adagio, full of clipped dotted rhythms

plus-pedals layout of an organ, so that

Years later, counterpoint – the intricate interweaving of musical melodies of which Bach was such a master, and which reaches its apogee in the formal elegance of a fugue – came to occupy Mozart’s writing, not least in the great fugal finale of his ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, No 41. The fugue form finds perhaps its hardest-edged, severest example in Mozart’s music in this Adagio and Fugue.

Schumann manages to spin creations of gentle beauty from what might have ended up as rather dry academic exercises.

Robert Schumann

organists could use an upright piano as a practice instrument, but the instrument soon took off in its own terms (Liszt and Gounod, among other composers, also wrote for it).

What Robert and Clara Schumann acquired for their Dresden home was a set of pedals

from what might have ended up as rather dry academic exercises.

that could be attached to their own piano, triggering hammers on that instrument’s existing strings. And alongside these six Etudes in Canonic Form, Schumann wrote two other pieces for the instrument: his Four Sketches, Op 58, and Six Fugues on BACH, Op 60.

Principal Cellist. He writes:

These transcriptions of Schumann’s keyboard pieces for string ensemble were created by Philip Higham, the SCO’s

Indeed, also like Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue, Schumann looks back directly to JS Bach in these Canonic Studies. At the time of writing, he and his wife Clara were immersed in an intense exploration of Bach’s counterpoint. And while the canon – also known as a round, in which a melody is sung or played against itself (just think of ‘Frère Jacques’) – might be considered the humblest form of counterpoint, Schumann

“I had the idea to make this transcription for string quintet (with two cellos) soon after I first encountered the six Etudes in 2015, when I performed a version for piano trio made by Theodor Kirchner. Deciding to cast first violin and first cello, for the most part, as the two canonic voices, the singing lines of Nos 2, 4 and 6 especially seem well suited to expressive characteristics of stringed instruments; the fragment that begins and ends No 3 even recalls the opening of Schumann’s Third String Quartet, Op 41, written four years earlier. The second cello takes the ‘pedal’ part throughout.

There are occasional ‘pianistic’ textures and figurations to be negotiated when

manages to spin creations of gentle beauty

transcribing for strings, but then that is so

Whatever Strauss’s motivations or beliefs, his Metamorphosen remains an enormously powerful, deeply moving outpouring of emotion.

Richard Strauss

often to be found in Schumann’s symphonies and elsewhere in his string chamber music; the piano remained central to his composing throughout his whole life.

“There's no question that my transcription fulfils a kind of selfish desire to play these pieces again (which I could certainly not manage on a piano!). But above all, it's my hope that both their beauty and their ingenuity are further enhanced and illuminated through the myriad timbres within the string quintet. In expanding the pieces for a group, it's also a kind of invitation to others to share in my enthusiasm for them – one that, happily, was unequivocally accepted by my colleagues!”

final piece in today’s concert that we return inescapably to darkness and sorrow.

Richard Strauss was almost 80 when he began writing his Metamorphosen in August 1944, holed up in his Alpine villa in

Despite the composer’s fragile mental condition (he would attempt suicide less than a decade after he wrote the work), Schumann’s Canonic Etudes are generally blithe, carefree works with song-like

Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria while the Second World War ground on to what would prove to be its final stages. His immediate inspiration came from the destruction of the Hoftheater in his birthplace of Munich, by Allied bombers in October 1943. About that particular event, he wrote to his biographer: “The burning of the Munich Hoftheater, the place consecrated to the first Tristan and Meistersinger performances, in which 73 years ago I heard Freischütz for the first time, where my good father sat for 49 years as first horn in the orchestra – where at the end of my life I experienced the keenest sense of fulfilment of the dreams of authorship in ten Strauss productions – this was the greatest catastrophe which has ever been brought into my life, for which there can be no

melodies and glowing harmonies. It’s in the

consolation and, in my old age, no hope.”

Almost immediately, Strauss began sketching ideas for a work he initially called Trauer um München (‘Mourning for Munich’).

When he later received a request from conductor and philanthropist Paul Sacher for a new work for his Collegium Musicum Zurich, Strauss developed those initial ideas into the piece we know today.

Metamorphosen is widely seen as Strauss’s lament for what he viewed as the destruction of centuries-old German culture. But in the context of the events of the Second World War, and the decisions that Strauss took at the time, that’s an appraisal that raises immediate questions.

Strauss was never a member of the National Socialist Party, but he proved accommodating to its demands on several occasions, notably in the 1930s. When Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda, appointed Strauss president of the newlyformed Reichsmusikkammer in 1933 without the composer’s consent (or even knowledge), Strauss had little choice but to accept, although he vowed to remain apolitical (and was dismissed in 1935 after writing a letter to Jewish poet Stefan Zweig questioning Nazi policies). Also in 1933, Strauss stepped in to conductor Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth when the scheduled conductor, Arturo Toscanini, withdrew in protest at Nazi treatment of Jewish artists. Toscanini later said: “To Strauss the composer, I take off my hat. To Strauss the man, I put it back on again.”

Strauss used his position for protest and resistance too. He continued to collaborate with Zweig on the opera Die schweigsame Frau, premiered in Dresden in 1935, but it only lasted three performances before being banned by the authorities. He went to great efforts to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law

Alice and half-Jewish grandson Franz, who were confined to house arrest in Garmisch in the later parts of the war.

Whatever Strauss’s motivations or beliefs, his Metamorphosen remains an enormously powerful, deeply moving outpouring of emotion. It sets the mournful tone in its sombre opening section, only to move into greater hope and brightness in its quicker central section, before at the moment of greatest excitement making a precipitous plunge back into the sorrow of the opening, and a conclusion that stares blankly at despair. A distinctive motto theme runs throughout the work: it begins with a single note repeated four times, continuing with a descent in a distinctive ‘Scotch snap’, short-long short-long rhythm. The theme might sound vaguely familiar, and it’s only at Metamorphosen’s bitter conclusion that Strauss reveals it to be a quotation from the funeral march from Beethoven’s 'Eroica' Symphony, writing at that point in the score ‘In memoriam!’.

We usually hear Strauss’s 1945 version of Metamorphosen for 23 solo string players, but his original short score for seven strings was rediscovered in Switzerland in 1990, and edited by Rudolf Leopold, cello professor at the University of Graz, into the chamber version you hear here. While it might not quite achieve the richness and opulence of Strauss’s string orchestra version, it more than makes up for that with its raw intimacy and its gripping directness. At any time, and certainly in our current era of uncertainty and worry, Metamorphosen provides a profound sense of solace through unflinchingly facing its own anxieties and pain. © David Kettle

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