Download The following notes are copyright Susan Halpern 2012. String

 The following notes are copyright Susan Halpern 2012.
String Quintet in G minor, K. 516 . . . Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart's four mature string quintets, which he composed between 1787 and 1791, must
be counted among his greatest works. In them, Mozart often writes for different
combinations of three of the instruments he uses in his quintets: there are frequent
passages for two violins and viola or for two violas and cello, for example. In the former,
the viola becomes a high bass instrument, while in the latter it is a low-voiced
lead-instrument.
Early in April 1788, Mozart placed three advertisements in a Vienna newspaper offering
copies of the Quintets K. 406, 515 and 516 for sale by advance subscription, “beautifully
and correctly copied,” to be delivered on July 1st. In June, Mozart still hoped to earn an
important sum from them, but he was so short of money that he wrote to his Masonic
brother who was handling the business arrangements of the subscription sale, asking for a
loan against the expected income. The project was not a success. He had so few
subscribers that he had to extend the offering to January 1789.
The G-minor Quintet is a work of passion and pathos that almost demands to be linked
with the great Symphony, K. 550, in G minor that Mozart was to write little more than a
year later. The quintet has even been called Mozart's Pathetique, and although
Tchaikovsky's reverence for Mozart is not readily apparent in much of his music, he once
wrote of the slow movement of this quintet, “No one else has ever known so well how to
interpret so exquisitely in music the sense of resigned and disconsolate sorrow.” The
sonority that Mozart harnessed here is tied to his understanding of the quintet, and it
represents an increase in tonal mass of the whole work. Because of the possibilities that
the five instruments allow him, Mozart is able to produce the anguish of this quintet in a
way in which the quartet body did not provide.
From the very opening of the Allegro first movement, this is music of troubled passion
and bitter tension, the anguish of its themes intensified both by chromatics and by a
persistent eighth-note rhythm. Charles Rosen comments that Mozart’s concentration on
the “tonic area” makes “possible an opening page of a chromatic bitterness and insistence
that can still shock by the naked force of its anguish. It is an opening that was unique for
the last quarter of the 18th century in presenting directly so deeply troubled an emotion,
reaching a point of tension by the twentieth measure that all other works hold in reserve
until much later.” The Menuetto, Allegretto, has an extraordinary rhythmic fluidity.
Accents and harmonically strong chords shift their positions within the measure and
create so marked an instability that even the irregularities of the trio section seem strong
and stable in contrast. The sad strength of the extraordinary, muted Adagio non troppo
movement is also without equal anywhere else in the works of Mozart or his predecessors
and would be challenged only in the late works of Beethoven. After the barely breathed
ending of the slow movement, Adagio ma non troppo, Mozart does not go directly into
the fast major-key main section of the finale. Instead, first he constructs a long, slow
introduction, Adagio, a kind of plaintive aria or arioso for the first violin with a sighing
and sobbing accompaniment that lessens the shock of contrast in moving on to the final
Allegro. Although the rhythm is cheerful, the feeling of joy is heard in contrast to what
came before and it delivers an overlay of resignation and acceptance rather than
triumphant success.
Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet . . . Amy Beach
(Born September 5, 1867 in Henniker, New Hampshire; died December 27, 1944 in New
York)
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was the first American woman to succeed as a composer of
large-scale art music. She was celebrated during her lifetime as the foremost woman
composer of the United States. Her mother was said to be a gifted pianist and singer and
she provided Amy's first exposure to piano. Amy's early feats included improvising
duets before the age of two, playing by ear in full harmony at four, and giving public
recitals at seven. She taught herself composition by studying the great masters, and as an
outstanding pianist, her solo and concerto debuts in Boston were enthusiastically
received. She learned orchestration and fugue by translating the treatises written by
Berlioz and François-Auguste Gevaert. Miss Cheney’s first published work was The
Rainy Day (1880), a setting of a poem by Longfellow. In 1885 she made her piano debut
with the Boston Symphony.
At eighteen she married H.H.A.Beach, a distinguished Boston surgeon and Harvard
professor, slightly older than her father. Following the mores of Victorian society, he
restricted her concert appearances, but encouraged her composing. Partly because of his
encouragement of her writing, she completed over 300 works, including the Gaelic
Symphony, a Piano Concerto, a large scale Mass, and numerous songs and choral works.
She gathered numerous honors and was twice received at the White House. Many of her
works were granted premières by major orchestras and were the first occasions on which
many musical organizations performed music by a female composer. After her
husband’s death she traveled to Germany, where she toured as a virtuoso pianist, playing
and accompanying her own works to critical acclaim. In 1914, she returned to the United
States, where she maintained an active schedule of winter touring and summer
composing for many years.
Many of her works show the influence of American late Romantic composers such as
Horatio Parker, Edward MacDowell, Arthur Foote and George Chadwick, but her writing
was also indebted to the music of Brahms and Debussy. The majority of her
compositions, however, distinctly display her own idiomatic style and display her gift for
melody. She was best known for her songs, her symphony and her piano pieces and was
also recognized for her early contribution to the preservation, documentation and
transcription of American birdsong.
Theme and Variations, which sounds a bit like early 20th century French impressionistic
music harmonically and in its subtle use of sonorities, begins with a slow and very
expressive statement of the theme followed by six variations, each quite brief except for
the last two. (The penultimate is around eight minutes long while the last one is about
four minutes long.) The first variation is in the same tempo as the first and then the
variations alternate between fast and slow. The carefully crafted variations are
contrasting in mood as well as length, going from serious to humorous, many with
intricate detail.
Writing in the New York Times, Donald Henahan commented, “This is a prevailingly
dark and sensuous work based on a sad and mooning theme that has hints of Araby in it.
One hears reminders of several post-romantics -- Fauré and Tchaikovsky, among others - but a certain moody individuality is felt throughout as well.”
String Quintet in C Major, Op. 29 (Storm Quintet) . . .Ludwig van Beethoven
(Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna)
The string quintet has never had a grasp on composers in the way the string quartet,
which is the medium of so much of the world's greatest music, has had. In the generation
before Beethoven, Joseph Haydn wrote some eighty quartets but not a single quintet. He
said he had not written a quintet only “because no one ever asked me to.” His brother,
Michael Haydn, wrote a number of interesting quintets that may have served as models
for the masterpieces of his young Salzburg colleague, Mozart. Beethoven wrote only this
one string quintet, although the medium was by then a relatively popular one. There are
quintet arrangements of some of his other works.
He wrote the Op. 29 Quintet in 1800 and 1801, shortly after he had completed his first
group of quartets, Op. 18, and just before the “Moonlight” Sonata. It was probably
composed on commission of Count Moritz von Fries, a wealthy banker and art collector
to whom he also dedicated two violin sonatas in 1801. Beethoven's usual business
arrangement gave exclusive use of the commissioned work to the person who had
commissioned it for a limited period of time, after which he, as the composer, was at
liberty to sell publication rights wherever he could get the best price. Someone, probably
Fries, let a publisher have this quintet before Beethoven had satisfactorily concluded his
own arrangements for its publication, resulting in an enormous tangle of accusations and
lawsuits. Eventually, everything was all straightened out, and in 1816, Beethoven
dedicated his Symphony No. 7 to Fries.
The music of the quintet is plain, open and direct, as are several of his other works in C
Major. In the first movement, Allegro, the musical ideas flow with calm dignity through
the classic sonata-form mold. The slow, three-part second movement, Adagio molto
espressivo, has an elegant and passionate lyricism that Robert Schumann and the other
later Romantics greatly admired. The third movement is a Scherzo, Allegro, based
principally on a three-note figure that Beethoven uses in a tight texture, pressing
constantly forward, but the tension is released in the colorful, contrasting central trio
section. The Presto finale is a complex contrapuntal movement whose rushing
restlessness once gave the entire work the nickname: the Storm Quintet.