Schumann & Brahms

SCHUMANN & BRAHMS Thursday 8 October 2020, The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh –––––

PROGRAMME NOTE

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SEATING LIST VIOLIN Gordon Bragg Rachel Smith VIOLA Felix Tanner Asher Zaccardelli CELLO Philip Higham Donald Gillan CLARINET William Stafford PIANO Michael Bawtree

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Schumann (1810-1856) Märchenerzählungen, Op 132 (1853) Lebhaft, nicht zu schnell Lebhaft und sehr markiert Ruhiges Tempo, mit zartem Ausdruck Lebhaft, sehr markiert

Brahms (1833-1897) String Sextet No 2 in G, Op 36 (1866) Allegro non troppo Scherzo: Allegro non troppo Adagio Poco allegro

––––– Robert Schumann is generally regarded as a – if not the – quintessential Romantic artist. Passionate, sensitive, immersed from a young age in literature and music, it’s hardly surprising that he would find so many musical inspirations among literary sources.

What those literary sources were, however, for his 1853 Märchenerzählungen (literally ‘Fairy Tale Narratives’ – presumably to distinguish them from his Märchenbilder or ‘Fairy Tale Pictures’ of two years earlier), he didn’t say. He would doubtless have been familiar with the fantastical, sometimes grotesque tales of the Brothers Grimm and ETA Hoffmann, both published a few decades earlier. But in both his Märchenerzählungen and Märchenbilder, Schumann left the specifics of the stories he’s narrating intentionally undefined, no doubt in order to draw on the performers’ and listeners’ own imaginations in concocting outlandish tales to match the pieces’ sublime musical invention.

The Märchenerzählungen comprise one of Schumann’s very last works, and he wrote them at a particularly difficult time of increasing mental fragility, sleeplessness and deepening depression. Just four months after their composition, he would attempt suicide by throwing himself in the Rhine, leading to his pitiful final years of decline in Dr Franz Richarz’s asylum in Endenich.

Not that any of that is necessarily apparent in these seemingly blithe, carefree pieces (despite a thread of unease that also seems to run through them). Schumann himself described them as ‘predominantly cheerful pieces, written with a light heart’ in a letter to his publisher. He had been inspired to return briefly to composing following an unannounced visit from the young Johannes

He was passionate that music should be allowed its own free expression, rather than slavishly following conventional formal rules – such that some of his contemporaries felt he was simply too selfindulgent for his own good.

Robert Schumann

Brahms, who quickly became a close friend to both Robert and his wife Clara, and ended up residing with them for several weeks.

The Märchenerzählungen are also undeniably unusual pieces, in both form and instrumentation. Mozart had set a precedent for the threesome of clarinet, viola and piano with his 1786 ‘Kegelstatt’ Trio, K498, and Max Bruch would continue the fashion with his Eight Pieces of 1910. But despite the three contrasting instruments’ precarious balance of blend and individuality, it’s not a trio that has gathered an extensive repertoire.

Märchenerzählungen sound like both distinct and separate character pieces and the would-be movements of a putative sonata.

His first movement mixes harmonic

In terms of form, too, Schumann is typically idiosyncratic in the Märchenerzählungen.

He was passionate that music should be allowed its own free expression, rather than slavishly following conventional formal rules – such that some of his contemporaries felt he was simply too self-indulgent for his own good. Nevertheless, he manages

dreaminess with all the vigour and definition of a military march, with fragments of its opening theme passed back and forth between the three instruments, which seem to jostle for attention. There are more march-like rhythms in the darker second movement, a sort of sombre scherzo, whose portentous opening chords return at the end to quell the high spirits of its central episode. Schumann’s touching third movement is a tender love duet for clarinet and viola over gentle ripples from the piano (those with eagle ears might spot some surprising clashes among Schumann’s keyboard figurations). His finale brings together assertive piano chords, fanfare-like declamations from the clarinet and viola, and a gentler central section, building to a

to make the four component parts of his

conclusion of happy confidence.

Brahms – String Sextet No 2 It was about a decade after he first visited the Schumanns that Brahms began work on his Second String Sextet. His genial, optimistic First, from 1862, had proven a great success, and in the interim, he’d made great strides as a composer with two orchestral serenades, three more chamber works and – most importantly – the monumental, years-in-the-making First Piano Concerto.

The Second String Sextet, however, didn’t prove quite as big a hit as his First. That’s probably because it’s a very different beast: not without its passages of energy and positivity, certainly, but quieter, more thoughtful, also rather darker and more austere in places. It also serves as something of a sad song of lost love. Brahms had been in an intimate relationship with the Göttingen singer Agathe von Siebold, for whom he had written his new Op 14 and Op 19 Lieder. The couple had become so close that friends assumed they were about to get engaged.

Siebold, however, broke things off, leaving Brahms quietly heartbroken. Perhaps as a way of immortalising (or even exorcising) her memory, he wove her name into the fabric of his Second Sextet: appropriately enough, at the impassioned climax of the first movement’s opening exposition section, the first and second violins sing out a theme on the notes AGADHE (D replaces the non-musical T, and the German H represents what we’d call B natural). After finishing the work, he wrote to a friend: ‘Here I have freed myself from my last love.’

Brahms was also careful to meld his four movements together through similarities in their main themes: each combines, in one way or another, large leaps with small, stepwise movements. That’s most apparent in the first

Johannes Brahms

movement’s opening theme, whose stepwise tiptoe transplants the melody unexpectedly into a distinctively distant key (from G major to E flat major). His immovable tremolo in the first viola not only generates a sense of unease, but also returns to permeate virtually the whole of the central, more tempestuous development section.

Brahms’s second movement is a sprightly if slightly sombre scherzo that makes great play of intertwining the voices of his six players, with a bright and breezy central section in dashing Hungarian gypsy style. His third movement opens with a pensive theme from just the sextet’s two violins and one of its violas, before blossoming into five diverse variations so assertive and elaborate that at times it hardly feels like a ‘slow’ movement at all. The arresting rush of notes that kicks off his last movement contrasts with its easier-going main theme, both of them recurring and recombining throughout an energetic dash of a finale. © David Kettle

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