Juilliard Chamber Music: Schubert and Beethoven

On Sunday afternoon I went to Juilliard's Morse Hall to hear the first half of a chamber music recital featuring works by Schubert and Beethoven.

The recital opened with Schubert's Fantasie in F minor for Piano Four Hands, D. 940 (1828) performed by Chenchun Ma and Max YiLong Ma.  I've always thought Schubert the greatest composer for the piano, even more so than Beethoven, and this fantasie, along with the late sonatas one of his last works for the instrument, contains some of his most inspired writing.  There is something incredibly poignant in Schubert's final year of life.  He was fully conscious of his gifts, enough to recognize in himself the true successor to Beethoven, and yet he could only look back on a life filled with poverty and disappointment made all the more bitter by the hideous disease that was slowly killing him.  One wonders then at his state of mind when he dedicated the fantasie to his pupil Karoline Esterházy with whom he no doubt intended one day to perform the piece.  (In the event, Schubert eventually premiered the work with fellow composer Franz Lachner.)  It's after all well known that Schubert was infatuated with the youngest daughter of the aristocratic Esterházy family.  According to one source, Karoline once asked him why he did not dedicate one of his compositions to her. "What would be the use?" he said. "All that I do is dedicated to you."  If F minor is truly the key of hopeless love, it was never more so than here.  Not only was Schubert too poor and of too common birth to ever aspire to the hand of an aristocrat, but his terrible disease, whose name even today one hesitates to speak in polite society, put out of reach even the lowest born woman and effectively condemned him to die alone.  Fantasies are wonderful things if there is some hope, however remote, to keep them afloat, but for Schubert there wasn't even that.  The dedication is not so much wistful as ironic, a bitter acknowledgment by the composer that all that remained for him now was death.

The second work was Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 7 in C minor, Op. 30, No. 2 (1801-1802) performed by Julia Glenn, violin, and Angie Zhang, piano.  This is one of those pivotal works - like the B-flat major String Quartet, Op. 18, No. 6 - in which the composer can be seen readying himself for the move from his early Classical style to the Romanticism of his middle period.  Written at roughly the same time as  the famous Heiligenstadt Testament, the sonata clearly reflects the torments of a soul who through the impending loss of his hearing stands to lose everything that held any meaning for him.  As such, the work is filled with drama and is at times almost giddy in its violent mood swings.  This can be heard immediately in the opening movement whose tightly coiled first theme expresses both defiance and despair that in the second movement, marked adagio cantabile, turns into a prayer.  The brisk third movement scherzo seems to belong to another work altogether as if Beethoven had been so distracted by his emotions that he momentarily lost sight of what he was about.  Then in the final movement he recollects himself and returns with a vengeance to the dramatic passion of the first movement.  Throughout the sonata the piano is given as full a part as the violin and propels the music forward with restless energy.  Beethoven is here not only moving in a new direction but developing a new vocabulary with which to give voice to the works that were to come.