Juilliard Chamber Music: Strauss and Beethoven

Wednesdays at One are a series of free lunchtime recitals, each lasting an hour, given by Juilliard students at Alice Tully Hall.  Yesterday afternoon's program consisted of two well known works by Strauss and Beethoven.

The first piece was Strauss' Metamorphosen in an arrangement for string septet by Rudolf Leopold.  This work, composed in 1945, is one of the greatest and certainly most beautiful of Strauss' late period.  Inscribed "In Memoriam" on the score and citing near its end the Funeral March from Beethoven's Eroica, it is also one of the most controversial.  There has always been a question of what exactly Strauss was mourning in this work, with a consensus holding that it was the destruction of Germany by Allied bombing at the end of World War II for which he felt such sorrow.  I believe the answer can better be found in Strauss' own life. He was born in 1864 in a country that was then the center of Europe's cultural life, most especially as far as music was concerned.  Strauss himself participated in this rich heritage from the very beginning as his own father was principal horn at the Court Opera in Munich. At the same time as Germany's importance as a musical center grew even further under the influence of Wagner's operas, Strauss became that country's foremost composer and conductor.  His entire universe came crashing down, of course, in 1914 when Strauss was exactly fifty years old.  He never wrote another tone poem after that nor any other works in the style of his younger years.  Instead, he spent the remainder of his life staring horrified at the abyss into which Germany had fallen and composing meditative works which had little to do with heroic themes.  Strauss witnessed first hand the disappearance of an entire way of life to the savagery of war, and I think it was this loss of the civilization he had known and of which he had been a part that he truly mourned most in his work.

When I saw the piece listed on the program, I worried that the reduction from 23 strings to a septet would ruin a work whose hallmark was its dense texture.  But that was not the case. All the deep feeling and pathos found in the original survived intact.  I later learned that Strauss' original sketches for the piece, only discovered in 1990, were also for a septet, so there definitely was a legitimate basis for this arrangement.

The second work was Beethoven's Piano Trio in D, Op. 70, No. 1, nicknamed the "Ghost" for the eerie music found in the slow second movement.  Next to the "Archduke" Trio, this is the most famous piece Beethoven composed in this genre.  Yesterday's performance was coached by pianist Joseph Kalichstein along with Sylvia Rosenberg.  Coincidentally, I had attended a student recital last season of Schubert's Trio in E flat that had also been coached by Kalichstein and had been very impressed by it.