About
Artistic Soirées
Program
F. Schubert (1797-1828)
String Quartet Nº 13 in A minor “Rosamunde” F. Schubert
Allegro ma non troppo (1o min,)
Allegro Moderato (6 min.)
D. Shostakovich (1909-1975)
String Quartet Nº 8
Largo (5 min,)
Allegro molto (3 min.)
Allegretto (4. min.)
Largo (5 min.)
Largo (3 min.)
G. Puccini (1858-1924)
“Crisantemi” Elegy for String Quartet (5 min.)
Musicians:
Roberto Cani (Violin) – LA Opera Concertmaster
Ana Landauer (Violin) – LA Opera principal
Shawn Mann (Viola) – LA Opera
Michael Kaufman (Cello) – LA Opera
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
Franz Schubert: String Quartet Nº 13 in A minor “ROSAMUNDE”
There were at least eleven early string quartets by Schubert, intended for performance within the Schubert family-and-friends circle. The breakthrough, if you will, came in 1820, with the Quartet Movement in C minor, D. 703, in which the notion of comfortable domesticity is left behind once and for all, to be replaced by agitation, tension, and strife-ridden chromaticism. There is no obvious musical point of departure toward this new emotional and stylistic world, no single “transitional” work prior to the passion that inhabits D. 703, and the still deeper emotionalism of the A-minor Quartet. There can be little doubt, however, that the composer’s bouts of ill health – with a diagnosis of syphilis in 1822 – and possibly a blighted love affair were major contributory factors.
The A-minor Quartet was first performed in July of 1824 by its dedicatees, the members of the Schuppanzigh Quartet, which had premiered most of Beethoven’s quartets. It is one of the chamber music works with which Schubert wanted to “pave the way to the great symphony” in spring 1824. At the same time, he was paving his way to a wider audience, as the “Rosamunde” Quartet was the first and only string quartet that was not only publicly performed in Schubert's lifetime but also published in parts
Schubert scholar Maurice Brown, writing in 1958, notes: “The Quartet in A minor is a beloved work; in some way we group it with the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony as giving us the heart of the composer. But with the quartet as with the symphony, it is doing him an injustice to let the emotional directness, the poetry, the sheer beauty of the musical sound… prevent admiration and appreciation of his technical power: power used with masterly ease in development and formal construction.”
“Rosamunde,” the nickname usually employed for the A-minor Quartet and the theme of its graciously serene second movement, has its origins in a theme from Schubert’s incidental music for a play of the same name and which is again used for one of his D. 935 Impromptus for solo piano.
(Herbert Glass has written for many publications in the U.S. and abroad and was for 15 years an editor-annotator for the Salzburg Festival).
Dimitri Shostakovich: String Quartet Nº 8
In the summer of 1960 Shostakovich's work on the score of a Soviet-East German film took him to Dresden, the German city that had been destroyed in 1945 by an Allied firebombing which killed more people than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. There, in a span of three days, Shostakovich composed a quartet inscribed “In memory of victims of fascism and war.” That much is beyond question. Everything else about this quartet, its genesis, and its meaning, has been much debated.
The Eighth Quartet quotes liberally from Shostakovich’s own music and uses his personal motto theme, suggesting that it is about Shostakovich himself. Shostakovich was quoted in Testimony, a book purporting to be his recollections told to the Russian journalist Solomon Volkov (and published in America after Shostakovich's death), as contradicting his inscription, saying that the quartet is clearly pure autobiography and “you have to be blind and deaf” to think it about fascism; the implication being that it was really about the composer's own struggles against Stalinist totalitarianism, disguised to avoid official retribution.
But there are reasons to doubt this description as well. If the disguise were so transparent as to fool only the blind and deaf, it would scarcely have served its purpose. Testimony has been derided for being more Volkov's version of what he thought Westerners wanted to read than Shostakovich's own words, and demonstrated to be at least partially fraudulent. Moreover, some of the quartet has no apparent autobiographical connection (for example, the dramatic appearance of a “Jewish” theme in the middle movement seems a reference to the Holocaust). The situation is complicated by timing: in 1960 Shostakovich became a Communist Party member and First Secretary of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic Composers Union.
Thus, while the Eighth Quartet is clearly full of extramusical significance, exactly what it signifies is unclear. It could be an orthodox Soviet artist's personal revulsion against the fruits of fascism; or a disguised dissident protest against the Soviet state, or an outcry against totalitarianism of any kind. All these viewpoints, and a few others, have been advanced by persons of intelligence and good will, and we are unlikely ever to know with any certainty what Shostakovich's real message was, or whether there was a specific message, as opposed to a series of emotional impressions and reactions, at all.
The quartet is in five movements played without pause. Its most important landmark, and primary building block, is a four-note theme built on an abbreviation of the composer's name, DSCH, which becomes D-E-flat-C-B in German nomenclature. Shostakovich had used it as a theme previously, notably in his Tenth Symphony. The quartet begins by introducing this four-note motif fugally. It is followed by a theme (in the first violin and viola) from the introduction of his First Symphony, the work that first brought him to national prominence. The two themes are part of a loose rondo-like structure that also includes a descending theme in the first violin that refers to his Fifth Symphony, the work that restored him to favor in 1937 after official attacks had endangered his career, if not his life.
The elegiac mood of the first movement is shattered by the following Allegro molto, a Blitzkrieg out of which several versions of the DSCH theme, in varying note lengths, emerge. At a climactic moment in mid-movement, the violins wail out a theme from Shostakovich's Second Piano Trio, which was written in 1944. In a less controversial portion of Testimony that may express much of his artistic creed, Shostakovich called this a “Jewish” theme, saying: “Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me… it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It's almost always laughter through tears. This quality… is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.”
The third movement is a spooky little waltz-rondo in G minor or major — the violin's melody (the DSCH motif) continually sounds a B-natural (the distinguishing note in a G-major scale) against the B-flat (which distinguishes the G-minor scale) in the viola's accompaniment. This feeling of knowing that there is a key but not knowing what it is, far more unsettling than being in no key at all, is a hallmark of Shostakovich's style. The third section of the rondo goes into duple time and introduces the march-like principal theme of the First Cello Concerto, composed the previous year.
The movement dies away in a recapitulation of its themes, with the cello concerto's five-note motif and three-note martial accompaniment heard last. The first violin, left alone for a few bars, elongates it, at which point the other instruments begin the fourth movement by transforming the three-note accompaniment into an ominous banging that interrupts equally ominous soundings of a new theme. It has been suggested that the banging represents gunfire, and the pianissimo droning of the first violin represents distant aircraft. That droning becomes the first four notes of the Dies irae from the Catholic requiem mass (not coincidentally, these are the DSCH notes in a different order), followed immediately by the lower three instruments sounding a Russian funeral anthem (“Tormented by the weight of bondage, you glorify death with honor”). The banging transformation of the cello concerto theme comes again; then the violins, over droning low Cs in the cello and viola, play a Russian revolutionary song (“Languishing in prison”). This is followed by a melody, in the cello's upper range, of an aria in Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (this work was the immediate trigger for the first official criticism of Shostakovich, which turned out to be the first of many state crackdowns on artists). After a last fateful banging of the cello concerto themes, the first violin sounds the Dies irae beginning again, turns it into the DSCH theme, out of which is built the fugal elegy that is the fifth movement. — Howard Posner
Giacomo Puccini: Crisantemi
On February 6, 1890, Puccini wrote to his brother Michele (who had settled in the far-off little city of Jujuy in the Andes) that he had composed a work for string quartet in just one night and dedicated it to the memory of Prince Amadeo di Savoia, Duca d’Aosta and King of Spain, who had died on January 18. Puccini called it Crisantemi because in Italy chrysanthemums are associated with funereal ceremonies and events. (Michele, always interested in his brother’s music, made piano versions of it both for two and four-hands from a copy his brother had sent.)
The February 6 letter also mentions a successful—probably the first—performance of the work at the Milan Conservatory by the Campanari Quartet and another performance by the same musicians in Brescia. Though the piece is now performed by quartets or string ensembles looking for an interesting addition to their standard repertoire, Crisantemi is most often heard in Puccini’s reworking of it for some of the most poignant moments in Acts III and IV of his opera Manon Lescaut. The short melancholy quartet follows da capo form—A-B-A, where A is an exact repeat of the opening section. The “A” theme is used for the opening of Manon Lescaut’s final act, and the “B” theme for the orchestral passage accompanying Des Grieux as he addresses Manon through her prison window in Act III.