2016 Chamberfest (Post 2): Wagner and Fauré

I went yesterday afternoon to Alice Tully Hall to hear the second Chamberfest performance I'll be attending this season.  Part of the Wednesdays at One series, the hour long recital featured music by Wagner and Fauré.

The first piece on the program was Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, WWV 103 (1869).  The ensemble that performed it consisted of  Hannah Cho, violin; Katherine Liu, violin; Molly Goldman, viola; Matthew Chen, cello; Sebastian Zinca, double bass; Olivia Staton, flute; Russell Hoffman, oboe; Ning Zhang, clarinet; Andrew O'Donnell, clarinet; Joseph Cannella, bassoon; Jasmine Lavariega, horn; Nathaniel Silberschlag, horn; and Maximilian Morel, trumpet.  They were coached by Raymond Mase and David Chan.  

The Idyll is perhaps Wagner's most atypical work.  In place of his usual heroic style he here adopted a much softer and more lyrical approach.  One hesitates to use the word "genial" in association with Wagner, but this was certainly as close as he ever came to meriting that description.   He even incorporated a German lullaby, Schlafe, Kindchen, schlaf, into the short work.  The occasion for its composition was the birthday of his much younger wife Cosima.  She left a moving account of the first performance in her journal:

"When I woke up I heard a sound, it grew ever louder, I could no longer imagine myself in a dream, music was sounding, and what music! After it had died away Richard came in to me with the five children and put into my hands the score of his Symphonic Birthday Greeting. I was in tears, but so, too, was the whole household; Richard had set up an orchestra on the stairs and thus consecrated our Tribschen forever! The Tribschen Idyll—thus the work is called!"

The composer took the work's theme from a sketch he had completed in 1864. the same year he had begun his affair with the then still married Cosima.   He adapted the same theme again in Siegfried, the third of the four operas that collectively make up the Ring cycle, whose final act he was then finalizing.

Wagner's music was exceptionally well played at yesterday's performance.  I have an excellent recording by the Vienna Philharmonic with von Karajan conducting, but the Juilliard musicians were in my opinion just as successful, if not more so, in infusing the piece with all the tenderness I'm sure the composer intended.

The second work on the program was Fauré's Piano Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 15 (1879, rev. 1883) performed by Kelly Talim, violin; Charles Galante, viola; Julia Henderson, cello; and Anna Han, piano.  Their coaches were Joseph Kalichstein and Sylvia Rosenberg.

If there was an immediate impetus for Fauré's interest in chamber music, it was the establishment in 1871 of the Société Nationale de Musique, an institute whose avowed purpose was to allow young composers to present their works to the public.  It was co-founded by Camille Saint-Saëns, Fauré's mentor and former teacher, and counted among its members such talents as César Franck, Vincent d'Indy and Jules Massenet.  Fauré himself later wrote:

"The fact of the matter is that before 1870 I would not have dreamt of composing a sonata or a quartet. At that time a young musician had no chance of getting such works performed. It was only after Saint-Saëns had founded the National Music Society in 1871, the chief function of which was to perform the works of young composers, that I set to work."

It was with this encouragement that in 1877 Fauré produced his violin sonata, the Op. 13, generally considered his first major work.  In 1876 Fauré set to work on the present quartet.  He completed it in 1879 but, heeding the advice of friends, rewrote the final movement in its entirety in 1883.  Even though the composer had experienced some heartbreak along the way - his fiancee Marianne Viardot, daughter of the famous singer Pauline Viardot, had broken off their engagement for reasons never explained - the work is lyrical and generally lighthearted with only a touch of wistfulness to be heard in the third movement adagio.  While yesterday's performance was skillfully done, the quartet itself is one of those pieces often described as "charming," a polite way of saying that while it may be pleasant enough to hear it possesses no great depth or character.