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the muriel mcbrien kauffman master pianists series Jonathan Biss, Piano Friday, March 8 8 pm The Folly Theater SCHUMANN Fantasietücke, Op. 12 Des Abends Aufschwung Warum? Grillen In der Nacht Fabel Traumes-Wirren Ende vom Lied JANÁČEK Selections from On an Overgrown Path, JW VIII/17 MOZART Minuet in D Major, K. 355 MOZART Adagio in B minor K. 540 INTERMISSION SCHUMANN Davidsbündlertänzem, Op.6 1.Lebhaft 2.Innig 3.Mit Humor 4.Ungeduldig 5.Einfach 6.Sehr rasch 7.Nicht schnell 8.Frisch 9.Lebhaft 10.Balladenmäßig, Sehr rasch 11.Einfach 12.Mit Humor 13.Wild und lustig 14.Zart und singend 15.Frisch 16.Mit gutem Humor 17.Wie aus der Ferne 18.Nict schnell This concert is underwritten, in part, by Charles & Virginia Clark The Master Pianists Series is underwritten, in part, by the Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation This concert is supported, in part, by the ArtsKC Fund. This concert is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Financial assistance for this project has been provided, in part, by The Missouri Arts Council, a state agency. the friends of chamber music | the intimate voice of classical music program notes Jonathan Biss puts a good deal of thought into his recital repertoire, seeking provocative parallels as well as stylistic and psychological contrast. He frames this evening’s program with two great piano cycles by Robert Schumann, both from 1837. On the first half, however, he intersperses the movements of Fantasiestücke, Op. 12 (“Fantasy Pieces”) with movements by Moravia’s Leoš Janáček, whose quasi-autobiographical On the Overgrown Path (1900-11) constitutes a similarly diverse and introspective collection. quicksilver mood changes make these eight pieces vintage Schumann. Nearly all of them are in relatively simple ternary form. Pacing, texture, and tempo vary widely within the set, yet they complement one another because of Schumann’s instinctive gift for narrative and the flow of key centers from one piece to the next. Although he claimed to have added the names of the individual movements after he had written the music, each title furnishes a valuable clue to that movement’s character. Janáček’s intimate approach to the piano has clear ancestry in Schumann’s keyboard works. Mr. Biss’ pairing of German romantic music and early 20th-century Czech pieces is striking. On one level, the dimensions and moods are complementary. On another, each composer’s musical language is distinctive and individual. More than a few hundred kilometers and 70 years separate these two groups of pieces. Mr. Biss rounds out his recital with two short, introspective pieces by Mozart and Davidsbündlertänze, (“Dances of the League of David”) a series of dances at the heart of Schumann’s expressive art at the piano. The eminent American pianist and scholar Charles Rosen calls Davidsbündlertänze “the subtlest, most mysterious and most complex of all Schumann’s large works.” This evening, we have a rare opportunity to hear it performed in its entirety. Fantasiestücke, Op.12 Robert Schumann (1810-1856) The solo piano works of the 1830s display Robert Schumann’s genius at its most immediate and spontaneous. He was surely the greatest master of the romantic miniature, endowing smaller pieces in simple forms with layers of substance and expressivity. In the hands of a lesser composer, such pieces would have been merely salon music. Schumann elevated miniatures to the realm of the sublime. At his best, he compiled groups of them into cycles linked by musical motives, tonal relationships, and programmatic or autobiographical subtexts. The collective title for his Op. 12 probably came from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s early tales, Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (“Fantasy Pieces in the Manner of Callot”). Schumann returned to the term Fantasiestücke – or some variant of it – several times, first in the celebrated Fantasy in C Major, Op.17, then much later in other works, also called Fantasiestücke: for clarinet and piano, piano trio, and another late group of works for piano solo. The Fantasiestücke (“Fantasy Pieces”) of 1837 is one of the most successful such cycles. Idiomatic piano writing, the subtle weaving of inner voices, and the The opening Des Abends (“Evening”) sets the tone for the entire set. Dreamy and pleasant, its flowing melody evokes the floral smells and light breezes of a balmy Portrait of Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann 37th season 2012-13 79 program notes summer evening. Cross-rhythms, yearning moods, and shifting melodies in the inner voices, are all characteristic of Schumann’s style at its most effective. As Charles Rosen has observed: Melody is integrated into the general texture, accompaniment becomes intensely expressive. The inner voices (the thumbs above all) give life to the piece. Aufschwung (“Soaring”) opens with what seems like a catapult, or a high diver setting up the dive. The actual soaring begins with the rippling arpeggios in which Schumann has embedded in his second theme group. The music is almost as exhilarating to hear as it is to play. Warum? (“Why?”) asks its question in the opening gesture, exploring possible answers through a series of unexpected modulations. Grillen (“Whims” or “Caprices”) is jovial and forthright, tossing in occasional syncopations to disrupt the deceptive regularity of its pace. The cycle closes with Ende vom Lied (“End of the Song”), an unmistakably Schumannesque epilogue. Robert told Clara that he was thinking about marriage when he wrote it. The subdued, chordal coda suggests that he recognized he faced a long battle ahead in winning her hand. Schumann believed that In der Nacht (No. 5) and Traumes-Wirren (No. 7) were the only two of the Fantasiestücke suitable for public performance. Clara programmed those movements regularly on her concert tours. Perhaps reacting to the virtuoso-centered atmosphere of the day, Robert evidently thought the other Fantasiestücke too intimate and personal for concerts. Subsequent generations of pianists and audiences have proved him wrong. In der Nacht (“In the Night”) was Schumann’s favorite of the Fantasiestücke. In a letter to his future bride, Clara Wieck, on April 21, 1838, he outlined its program. After I had finished it I found, to my delight, that it contained the story of Hero and Leander . . . how Leander swam every night through the sea to his love, who awaited him at the beacon with a torch to light the way. When I am playing In der Nacht I cannot get the idea out of my head. First he throws himself into the sea; she calls him, he replies; he fights his way through the waves, reaching land safely. Then the cantilena [the slow middle section], when they are clasped in each other’s embrace, until they must part again. He cannot tear himself away, then night envelops everything in darkness again. The agitation of the outer sections does emulate waves. Others have heard terrifying nocturnal monsters in this virtuoso movement, suggesting bad dreams. Open pedal markings invite blurring, freeing the listener’s imagination further. In either scenario, most pianists find In der Nacht the most perilous of the set. Fabel alternates storybook manner with the mischief of elves as the fable unfolds: another example of the Eusebius/Florestan duality in Schumann’s musical personality (see sidebar). Traumes-Wirren (“Wild Dreams” and “Dream Jumble” are two options for translating this evocative title) is like a Chopin étude: lightning fast, technically demanding, and deliciously rich in its musical material. The Last Watch of Hero by Frederic Leighton the friends of chamber music | the intimate voice of classical music program notes Selections from On an Overgrown Path (1900-11) Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) from On an Overgrown Path come from the harmonium pieces. Janáček is certainly not among the first names that come to mind when one thinks about the virtuoso keyboard repertoire. The foremost Czech composer of the generation after Dvořák, Janáček personally valued his operas most highly. Nevertheless, it was his instrumental compositions that earned him his reputation. He was approaching 50 when he began On an Overgrown Path. Ironically, it is considered relatively early, because Janáček’s gifts flowered so richly in his later years. He begins with Naše večery (“Our Evenings”) following Schumann’s Des Abends (“In the Evening”), which opens in a similar mood. Janáček captures the atmosphere at dusk in Hukvaldy. The movement’s main theme has irregular phrases; brief twittering passages interrupt to imitate woodland birds, or possibly ground animals disturbed in the brush. Persistent accompaniment figures approach ostinato character: perhaps the narrator’s walking tempo. These piano pieces coincide with an artistic turning point for Janáček: the creation of the opera Jenůfa (1904). It was the first major work in which he delved into the rhythms and inflections of the Czech language. He once said, “When anyone speaks to me, I listen more to the tonal modulations in his voice than to what he is actually saying.” After Jenůfa, he constructed all his music from simple melodic motives. In the short piano pieces of On an Overgrown Path, he developed entire movements out of a single gesture. Asymmetry began to dominate his rhythms. Janáček’s intimate style reveals a spiritual affinity with Schumann’s miniatures, but the rhapsodic aura is entirely his own. In a 1908 letter to one of his publishers, Janáček described Lístek odvanutý (“A Blown-Away Leaf ”) as a love song and Dobrou noc! (“Good Night”) as a lovers’ parting. “A Blown-Away Leaf ” emulates the sound of the Hungarian cimbalom, a hammer-dulcimer used in Gypsy and popular music. Its free rhythms – 2/4 becomes 5/8, but ever so gracefully – and flexible tempo do seem conversational, surely reflecting the idiosyncrasies of the Czech language. “Good Night” derives its mystery from Lydian scales, sustained pedal tones, and gentle, inner voices. Frýdecká panna Maria (“The Madonna of Frydek”) refers to a church in the town of Frydek, in Silesian Moravia on the Polish border (today it is Frýdek-Místek, The cycle is an early example of the autobiographical twin cities bisected by the Ostravice River). Janáček works that became increasingly important in Janáček’s sought to evoke religious processions and the meditations music. The title refers to the countryside around his of pilgrims in church. Chorale-like chords suggest the home town of Hukvaldy, on the border between Moravia organ and the reverent occasion. The chordal passages and Silesia. The composer later commented that he was alternate with a melody above an oscillating tremolo “walking along an overgrown path of old memories.” accompaniment, again reminiscent of cimbalom. He These pieces are glimpses of childhood, in the 19thused the same melody in an Ave Maria shortly after century tradition of character pieces. The complete composing this movement. collection consists of fifteen short pieces. The first group Pojdte s námi! (“Come with us!”) starts as a polka. of ten was published in 1911 as Small Compositions for We can imagine children skipping along, perhaps en Piano. Poetic titles were added afterward. Publication route home from school. In one of his more enigmatic of the last five pieces was posthumous, in 1942, and clues, Janáček later described it as “a letter filed away without programmatic titles. once and for all.” (Did one of those skipping schoolgirls Some of Janáček’s pieces initially appeared as early as 1901 and 1902 as part of a periodical collection for harmonium called Slavic Melodies. The harmonium is a keyboard instrument related to the organ, powered by pedal-operated bellows. Harmonium music was fashionable in Moravia at the turn of the 20th century. That accounts in part for Janáček’s unusual approach to the piano. All but the last of Mr. Biss’s selections grow up to be his first heartbreak?) As in the other pieces, the structure here evolves out of brief motives, but it is Janáček’s harmony that startles most in ‘Come with us!’ – slipping effortlessly from D major to D-flat major, then back home to D for the adagio coda. 37th season 2012-13 81 program notes he wished to maximize the expressive aspect of this highly personal composition. At the same time, he cast the movement in a sonata form and softened the ending with a brief coda in B major. However emotional his Mozart’s solo keyboard works consist primarily of musical message, Mozart’s sense of structural balance and sonatas and variations sets. A few fantasias and rondos almost complete the list, but this Minuet and this Adagio good taste never fail him. are both one-of-a-kind. Minuet in D Major, K. 355 Adagio in B Minor K. 540 Wolfgang Amadè Mozart (1756-1791) Mozart composed the Minuet in Vienna, probably in 1786 or 1787, which makes it roughly contemporary with The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and the late piano concertos No. 23 in A Major, K. 488; No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491, and No. 25 in C Major, K. 503. The Köchel listing, K. 355, suggesting a much earlier work, is misleading; some recent scholars think the Minuet may be as late as 1789 or even 1790 because of its jarring, enigmatic dissonance and daring contrasts, placing it within a year or two of his death. (Two later editions of the Köchel catalogue assign it the numbers K.594a and K.576b, better indicators of the work’s maturity.) The Minuet’s intense chromaticism belies the simplicity of this single page of music. Albert Einstein, one of Mozart’s early 20th-century biographers, hypothesized that the Minuet may have been intended as the third movement to Mozart’s D Major Piano Sonata, K. 576. The autograph has not survived. The Viennese house of T. Mollo & Co. published it in 1801 with a trio by Abbé Maximilian Stadler. The B Minor Adagio, K. 540 is another unique work. Mozart rarely employed minor keys, and he composed no other keyboard work in B minor. The Adagio thus stands alone, occupying a similar position in the Mozart canon as the poignant Adagio of the Piano Concerto No. 23, K. 488, which is the only movement in F-sharp minor Mozart ever composed. The Adagio dates from March 1788, when his financial pressures and overwork had made for a difficult spring. That probably accounts for the dark character of the piece. Few Mozart works speak to us in such anguished tones. The Adagio is too lengthy to serve as the slow movement of a piano sonata (and perhaps too troubled). It is, again, heavily chromatic, highly emotional music, charged with the dramatic dissonance of suspensions and diminished seventh chords. Mozart indicated unusually detailed instructions for sudden dynamic changes and subtle phrasing nuances. Clearly Portrait of Mozart on the front of a postcard from 1906 Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6 Robert Schumann Clara Wieck and Robert Schumann had a tumultuous courtship. Schumann had come to Leipzig in 1830 to study piano with Clara’s father, the pedagogue Friedrich Wieck, and lived in the Wieck household. Robert was nine years older than Clara, who was only eleven when they met. Their relationship thus started as the friends of chamber music | the intimate voice of classical music program notes David playing the Harp by Jan de Bray, 1670 a playful and companionable friendship, though Robert recognized that Clara was an extraordinary musical talent. By the mid-1830s, as Clara developed from an adolescent into a young woman, friendship ripened into romance. Friedrich Wieck was fiercely opposed to this relationship. Although he acknowledged Schumann’s talent, he found the young man unstable and unreliable, and thought his financial prospects dubious. The idea of Schumann as a son-in-law collided with his plans to shepherd Clara’s promising career as a virtuoso pianist and composer. Wieck forbade the would-be lovers to see each other. Between 1835 and 1840, he went to extraordinary lengths to keep them apart, including legal action. In one of many secret letters exchanged with his beloved, Schumann proposed to Clara in the summer of 1837. Although their marriage would not take place for another three years, he was elated when she accepted, and began work immediately on the work that became the Davidsbündlertänze. It is closely linked to Clara. Its opening gesture quotes a Mazurka from her own composition Soirées musicales, Op. 6, which had been published in 1836. Clara was a gifted composer as well as one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century. By publishing the Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6, Robert surely thought to secure another secret link with her. How do we make sense of a work that comprises almost forty minutes of music? At the most basic level, Davidsbündlertänze consists of eighteen movements in dance forms. Most of the movements are two minutes or less; only two of them exceed four minutes. They share an improvisatory, spontaneous character, with dance rhythms pushed and pulled in surprising ways. Schumann’s pedaling instructions are adventurous. Echo effects and intentional blurring sometimes yield a 37th season 2012-13 83 program notes SCHUMANN AND THE DAVIDSBÜND The son of a bookseller, Robert Schumann was versed in law, literature, and the visual arts, as well as music. For much of his career, he was better known as a music critic than he was as a composer. He used his writings about music to champion the cause of progressive trends in Germany, and to combat the conservatism of what he regarded as musical Philistines. His metaphorical society embracing musical progressivism was the Davidsbünd, or The League of David. The name was a conscious reference to King David in the Bible, who was associated with the harp and music-making as well as his war against Goliath and the Philistines. Two of the most prominent characters in Schumann’s Davidsbünd were Florestan and Eusebius (pronounced Oy-ZAY-bee-us). They were frequently credited as ‘authors’ of articles in Schumann’s music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Florestan was rash and impulsive, the extrovert of the two. His personality had elements of the manic, often with a wicked sense of humor. Eusebius, by contrast, was an introspective dreamer, exploring the more intimate and melancholy musings of the human soul. Of course both characters are Schumann himself, and in today’s world, armed with a greater understanding of mental illness, we may perceive Florestan and Eusebius as the bipolar facets of Schumann’s personality: his alter egos. They are present in several of Schumann’s compositions; for example, Carnaval has a movement named for each, but their role is omnipresent in Davidsbündlertänze. In a letter to Clara dated March 17, 1838, he specified, “I think [the Davidsbündlertänze] are quite different from Carnaval, compared to which they are what a face is to a mask.” These eighteen dances are an expression of his romantic soul. – L.S. ©2012 proto-impressionist wash of sound. Listeners familiar with Carnaval (1834-35) may recognize a recurrent fivenote descending motive from Carnaval’s “Promenade” and “March of the Davidsbündler” against the Philistines’ movements. The motive recurs regularly in Davidsbündlertänze. The names Florestan and Eusebius appeared as the composers on the original title page of Davidsbündlertänze. They were imaginary Davidsbünd characters representing the extroverted/ impulsive Portrait of Clara Wieck and introspective/melancholy facets of Schumann’s personality (see sidebar). Schumann appended an “F” or “E” to each of its eighteen movements, identifying the “author” as Florestan or Eusebius; four of the movements share joint authorship, identified as “F. and E.” Those movements juxtapose short sections of contrasting character. The other movements – those ascribed to either Florestan or Eusebius – take their primary impetus from the traits associated with each author. Schumann tends to alternate the capricious, humorous, and energetic movements with the more thoughtful ones. His careful arrangement provides Eusebian moments of repose and reflection amid the roiling waters of the Florestan movements. He shows prodigious imagination in his approach to the piano, using syncopations and irregular phrase groups to create an unsettled, restless feeling, or the friends of chamber music | the intimate voice of classical music program notes weaving subtle interplay between superimposed duple and triple meter. Some of the big-chord dances in the second half look forward to the Intermezzi of Brahms. Structurally, the dances fall into two groups of nine that follow a subtle pattern of key changes. Schumann has an internal logic with a general center in B minor. That stated, both halves of nine conclude with a movement in C major – C for Clara. These bookend dances address Clara with their hopes, apprehension, and anticipation. In the first edition, Schumann added an inscription before No. 9: “Here Florestan kept silent, but his lips were quivering with emotion.” Similarly, before the graceful, wistful waltz of No.18: “Quite redundantly Eusebius added the following; but great happiness shone in his eyes all the while.” In the second edition, he deleted these epigraphs, but with Schumann the first inspiration was most often the purest and best expression of his genius. One of Robert’s letters to Clara provides a key to unlocking the marvels of this great romantic masterpiece: There are many bridal thoughts in the dances, which were suggested by the most delicious excitement that I ever remember . . . The whole story is a Polterabend. Robert and Clara Schumann Polterabend is a folk term for a wedding eve when hobgoblins and magical sprites play practical jokes on the bride. In this case, the groom’s sense of humor mingles with the tenderness he feels for his bride-to-be. As the movement and the cycle close, the clock chimes midnight on the piano’s low C. Surely Schumann was wishing his Clara sweet dreams. Davidsbündlertänze closes pianissimo, a private and serene epilogue to their romantic journey. Laurie Shulman © 2012 Jonathan Biss’ biography can be found on page 49. 37th season 2012-13 85