Download Program Notes – Tesla Quartet Sunday Concert, Feb 17, 2013

Program Notes – Tesla Quartet Sunday Concert, Feb 17, 2013
Copyright © 2012 by Jason S. Heilman, Ph.D.
Quartet in D Major, K. 575, “Prussian”
composed in 1789 – duration: 23 minutes
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Even though he only spent ten years of his short life
there, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is as closely associated
with the city of Vienna as he is with his own birthplace.
Indeed, after dramatically breaking his commitments in
provincial Salzburg at age twenty-five, Mozart initially
thought he had found the greener pastures sought in the
cosmopolitan imperial capital. His performances initially
drew rave reviews, and he quickly found a loyal and devoted circle of friends and colleagues, but over the course
of the 1780s, Mozart’s fortunes began to deteriorate. His
early Viennese triumphs gave way to failures—
particularly his operas Le nozze di Figaro and La
Clemenza di Tito. Austria’s protracted war with Turkey
diverted great amounts of imperial funding and led to
hard economic times at home, making it even more difficult for an independent composer like Mozart to find
steady income. Indeed, if we could ask Mozart what he
thought of Vienna in the late 1780s, we would likely receive a less than ringing endorsement.
In a way, we can tell what Mozart thought about his
adopted hometown from his later compositions, which
were increasingly written for foreign audiences. A flop at
home, Figaro was a huge success in Prague, which led to
Mozart premiering both Don Giovanni and La Clemenza
di Tito there, along with one of his late symphonies. In
1789, Mozart traveled to Berlin, where he received a
commission to write a set of six string quartets for King
Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, the heir to Frederick the
Great. Unfortunately, Mozart was able to finish only
three of these quartets before illness—first his family’s,
then his own—became too great a distraction, and the
unfulfilled commission was never paid. These three
works would ultimately be Mozart’s final contributions
to the string quartet genre.
The three so-called “Prussian” quartets are famous for
the way in which Mozart moderately expanded the role
of the cello, Friedrich Wilhelm’s own instrument. The
first of these quartets—Mozart’s twenty-first string quartet overall—is set in the bright key of D major, and gracefully avoids extremes of tempo or technique in a manner
well suited to amateur musicians. Yet the quartet is
hardly a trifle; by reconsidering the cello, Mozart was
able to bring balance to the four voices in a way that was
revolutionary at the time. The piece begins with a cheery
allegretto movement that illustrates the newly democratic nature of Mozart’s quartet writing, as the opening
theme is passed freely from the violin to the viola and
back. The andante second movement is a gentle nocturne typical of Mozart’s slow movements, propelled by
the first violin and the cello; this is followed by a jaunty
minuet and trio. The main theme of the allegretto finale
is introduced by the cello in its upper range. Though the
violin remains prominent, all four instruments share the
workload fairly equally in this movement, making this
piece for amateurs an important step towards the virtuosic quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven and his successors.
Love Letters
composed in 2001 – duration: 20 minutes
Carter Pann (b. 1972)
For nearly two decades, Carter Pann’s music has become
known for its blend of popular idioms, subtle humor,
and haunting melodic writing. A native of the Chicago
area, Pann studied composition and piano at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Michigan; his
composition teachers included Samuel Adler, William
Bolcom, Joseph Schwantner, and Bright Sheng. Pann’s
music has been performed by major orchestras, wind
ensembles, chamber groups, and soloists throughout the
world. His clarinet concerto Rags to Richard, commissioned for Richard Stoltzman, was recorded by the Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz, while his widelyperformed work SLALOM was featured by the London
Symphony under Daniel Harding in 2001 and was later
showcased on NPR’s Performance Today. Pann’s compositions have garnered numerous awards, including a
prize in the Polish Kazimierz Serocki Competition for his
First Piano Concerto (premiered by the Polish Radio
Symphony in 1998), a Charles Ives Scholarship from the
Academy of Arts and Letters, and five ASCAP composer
awards. The recording of his Piano Concerto was also
nominated for a 2001 Grammy award for Best Classical
Composition. For more on Pann’s music, visit his website at www.carterpann.com.
Pann’s Love Letters (String Quartet No. 1) was commissioned by the Ying Quartet as part of their “LifeMusic”
project through a grant from the American Music Institute. The piece takes its inspiration from Leoš Janáček’s
Second String Quartet, subtitled “Intimate Letters”,
which itself was inspired by the emotions the composer
experienced while carrying out a love affair in prose.
Pann’s quartet, which combines a neo-romantic aesthetic with modern popular music influences, follows the
emotional trajectory of a love affair in four titled movements. It opens with the nervous yet lyrical Prayer, followed by the lush Debussyesque Serenade, which waxes
and wanes in intensity. The brief Limbo acts as a kind of
pause before the finale, the driving Passions movement,
which builds to a cleverly ambiguous coda.
Six Bagatelles, Op. 9
composed in 1913 – duration: 5 minutes
Anton Webern (1883–1945)
Considered the intellectual successors to Haydn, Mozart,
and Beethoven, the Second Viennese School consisted of
three twentieth-century composers: Arnold Schoenberg
and his two students Alban Berg and Anton Webern.
Though they shared a common purpose—pushing the
limits of tonality beyond the breaking point, which eventually led to twelve-tone music—their compositional
styles were very different from one another. Webern in
particular stood apart from his colleagues: where
Schoenberg and Berg hung on to elements of Romanticism, Webern’s music was stripped to its barest essentials. Prior to his tragic death, when he was mistakenly
gunned down by an American G.I. during the post-World
War II occupation of Austria, Webern amassed a small
catalogue of short, sparsely textured works—an oeuvre
held up as a model for the future by subsequent composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
“Bagatelle” is a catch-all term for short compositions in
no specific form; possibly the most famous bagatelle is
Beethoven’s little piano piece known as Für Elise. The
bagatelle was a particularly well-suited receptacle for the
miniaturist style that preoccupied Webern immediately
before the First World War. Inspired by Schoenberg’s Six
Little Pieces for Piano, Op. 19, Webern thought he could
do more to shape a collection of miniatures into a cohesive set, full of drama and contrast yet on a very small
scale. A whole series of compositions followed suit, with
perhaps the most extreme example being his Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9. Though rigorously composed, the six movements, which range in length from
twenty seconds to just over a minute, seem to defy conventional explanation. Rather than individual movements, they should be considered as a series of passing
moods, or a psychological drama in miniature.
Quartet in G minor, Op. 10
composed in 1893 – duration: 25 minutes
Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
Claude Debussy lived through a pivotal era in French
music. The French composers of the generation before
his own (including Gabriel Fauré, Ernest Chausson, and
Vincent d’Indy, as well as the Belgian César Franck),
were entirely under the spell of Richard Wagner and imitated Wagner’s sumptuous instrumental textures and
seemingly endless melodies. Debussy, it could be said,
had mixed feelings about Wagner. On the one hand, he
publically called Wagner’s distinct musical style “a beautiful sunset mistaken for a dawn.” Yet he grudgingly admired Wagner’s music and coveted the liberating potential of Wagnerism, with its forsaking of the rules of tonal
music in favor of free expression. Certainly the young
Debussy aspired to the same musical freedom Wagner
enjoyed; he just wanted it on his own terms—and free
from Germanic influence.
Instead of German hegemony, Debussy looked for inspiration in more exotic sounds. When he was just starting
his career in the early 1880s, Debussy spent three summers in Russia as the music instructor for Madame
Nadezhda von Meck, who would later become famous as
Tchaikovsky’s mysterious benefactor. There he had the
opportunity to absorb the music of the Russian nationalists Borodin and Mussorgsky. Back in Paris, Debussy
heard gamelan music from Java for the first time at the
1889 Exposition Universelle; its unusual tonality and
trancelike rhythms had a profound influence on Debussy’s harmonic language throughout the course of his career. Possibly the most unusual source Debussy found
inspiration in was the music of the past; during the
1890s, he took a brief interest in the old church modes—
the scales used by medieval and renaissance composers
before the rise of major and minor keys. All of these
sources can be heard in one of Debussy’s most important
early works: his only String Quartet.
Rather conventionally for Debussy, his quartet is set in
four movements: the first (Animé et très decide) opens
not exactly in the indicated key of G minor, but more
specifically in the closely related church mode of G
Phrygian, giving this movement its unique tonal color
right from the outset, a color that is amplified by the
movement’s thick textures and deep timbres. Note well
the opening theme of this movement: elements from it
can be heard throughout the entire quartet. The second
movement (Assez vif et bien rythmé) functions as a muted scherzo; its pizzicato effects can be traced back to Debussy’s recent Russian influence, while the harmonies
reflect his exposure to Javanese gamelan music. The
plaintive theme of the andantino third movement recalls
the music of César Franck, whose cyclical compositions
influenced the structural layout of this quartet. According to Debussy’s letters, it was the last movement that
gave him the most trouble compositionally. The finale
begins with a moderately-paced introduction (Très modéré) that at times feels like an operatic recitative, but it
soon accelerates to a tensely imitative main section (Très
mouvemente) culminating in a triumphant reference to
the opening movement theme, thus ending the quartet
where it began.