On Tuesday evening the ACJW Ensemble gave a free recital at Juilliard that featured the work of three composers - Berg, Schoenberg and Beethoven - in an interesting mix that highlighted the changes in German music from the very beginning of the nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century.
The program opened with Berg's Adagio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano from the Kammerkonzert (Chamber Concerto). Although the Concerto itself was completed in 1925 - it was composed for Schoenberg's fiftieth birthday - the adagio was arranged by the composer in 1935 as a separate work in which the full Concerto's original 13 winds were reduced to a single clarinet. Surprisingly for a work so structurally complex (technically, the adagio is a palindrome, i.e., a work which reads the same in reverse as going forward), the short movement was extremely sensual and moody in the evocation of its Viennese setting.
The next work was Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Op. 10 (1908). Although the quartet was dedicated to the composer's wife, Mathilde (Zemlinsky's sister), she was not with him at the time he completed it but was instead living with Richard Gerstl for whom she had briefly forsaken her husband. Gerstl was a then unknown artist who only achieved posthumous fame for the use in his paintings of a pointillism that managed to bridge the gap between Expressionism and Impressionism. After Mathilde had returned to Schoenberg, Gerstl committed suicide at the age of 25 by both hanging and stabbing himself after having first burned his papers and drawings.
Although the first three movements of the quartet are tonal, the fourth movement has no key signature and represents Schoenberg's first known use of atonality. The work is also significant in that the final two movements are settings for poems by Stefan George respectively entitled Litanei (Litany) and Entrückung (Rapture). The quartet thus became the only example of its genre with which I'm familiar to incorporate a part for soprano. In 1937, Schoenberg wrote:
"I was inspired by poems of Stefan George, the German poet, to compose music to some of his poems and, surprisingly, without any expectation on my part, these songs showed a style quite different from everything I had written before."
What to me was most remarkable in the quartet was the quotation in the second movement of the popular Viennese song Oh du lieber Augustin. I once read a biography of Mahler that recounted the composer's famous meeting with Freud. According to the author, Freud regressed Mahler to his childhood and the composer then recalled a repressed memory in which he had fled an argument between his parents only to collide in the street with an organ grinder who was playing this very same song. Supposedly, it was due to this traumatic experience that Mahler could not help combining high and low forms of music in the composition of his symphonies and thus anticipated the concept of polystylism later formulated by Schnittke. This fascinating anecdote is also retold in an online NPR article:
"Freud got to the root of the problem. It seemed that Mahler's father had brutalized his mother. When Mahler was a young boy there had been a particularly violent encounter between them.. [sic] Mahler had run from. As he reached the street a hurdy-gurdy was cranking out 'Ach, Du lieber Augustin,' and ever since, in Mahler's mind, high emotion and light music been [sic] intertwined."
Since Schoenberg and Mahler knew one another very well and Mahler was in fact an early champion of Schoenberg's music, I wondered if the reference to this song was an indication that Schoenberg had originally intended the quartet as a tribute to Mahler only to change the dedication upon the return of the wayward Mathilde.
After intermission, the program closed with Beethoven's famous Septet in E-flat, Op. 20 (1800). Scored for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and bass, the six-movement work was written toward the end of the composer's early period only a short time before he began experiencing serious problems with his hearing. Although it does not show the full genius Beethoven was to display in subsequent works, the septet is still a very innovative composition and extremely enjoyable to hear. This youthful piece possesses a buoyancy and exuberance that is difficult to reconcile with the dour image of the older Beethoven. Perhaps because the work reminded the composer of a happier time in his life, he never quite forgave it the success it enjoyed and instead claimed its popularity distracted attention from his more important later works.
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