By Steven Ledbetter

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)

Clarinet Quintet in F-sharp minor, Opus 10

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was the son of an African father (a doctor from Sierra Leone) and an English mother. Born in London in 1875, he revealed an extraordinary musical talent at an early age; studies at the Royal College of Music began at the age of fifteen, and he completed his first significant composition, a Te Deum that year. In 1892 he began compositional studies with Charles Villiers Stanford, the leading academic composer of the day. In March 1893 he won a competition for an open scholarship for composers, and by October he produced an entire concert of his own chamber music. Within months of his graduation from the conservatory in 1897, he produced two major works—an orchestral Ballade for the Three Choirs Festival (he received the commission on the recommendation of Elgar) and a choral work with orchestra drawn from Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. This latter work, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, conducted by Stanford at the Royal College, became his most famous piece, and remains the work on which his reputation still largely rests.

With this very successful beginning, becoming fully established as a composer while still in his early twenties, Coleridge-Taylor became an international favorite in Great Britain and the United States, where he was hailed as the first internationally famous composer of color. Black American musicians were, naturally, enthusiastic, and he returned their interest by undertaking a devoted study of the spiritual and other aspects of African-American music (this is partly reflected in his 1905 set of 24 Negro Melodies arranged for piano solo). Convinced that he had a mission to help establish the dignity of his race, Coleridge-Taylor was much influenced by the leading figures of African-American cultural life at the beginning of the century, including the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (whose work he set to music), Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. DuBois.

Coleridge-Taylor’s imprint on music in the United States (to which he considered emigrating) was strong in his own day, but his early death (at thirty-seven) from pneumonia, probably in part as a result of overwork, prevented him from having a more lasting influence. Even so he left a substantial body of work, including about two dozen orchestral pieces, a dozen works for chorus and orchestra (three of which were drawn from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha), incidental music for plays, and a substantial body of music for solo piano and for various chamber groupings.

The Clarinet Quintet was published in 1895, when the composer was just twenty and still a student at the Royal College. It is a spacious work of late-romantic cast, evocative of the autumnal clarinet quintet of Brahms (which had been composed only four years earlier), though it is more assertive and youthful. Coleridge-Taylor’s music is richly tuneful, and it treats the five participants as individuals, giving each of them plenty to do. Like Brahms, Coleridge-Taylor finds wonderful ways to use the special color of the clarinet, whether intertwining with the strings individually or set against them (sometimes with the greatest delicacy, as in the opening of the slow movement). The Scherzo is driven in its energy, though it can turn light-hearted, too. The clarinet inaugurates the finale with a melody that seems about to declaim a heroic ballad, though this is only one of the varied moods that Coleridge-Taylor brings to bear.

 
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)

Quintet for clarinet and string quartet in B minor, Opus 115

Late in 1890, Brahms sent to his publisher a revision for the ending of the String Quintet No. 2, Opus 111, and added as a casual afterthought the comment, “With this note you can take leave of my music, because it is high time to stop.” Yet just three months after this intimation that he was through composing for good, and that no new works were to be expected from him, Brahms heard a clarinetist named Richard Mühlfeld, whose technique and expressive musicianship so inspired the aging and ailing composer that he created four chamber music masterpieces with him in mind: the Trio for clarinet, cello, and piano, Opus 114, the present quintet, Opus 115, and the two clarinet sonatas, Opus 120.

Brahms wrote to a friend on July 12, 1891, that the trio was ready for the copyist. The quintet must have poured out of him after that, since, already on July 24, he told the same friend that the trio was “twin to a much bigger lot of foolishness.” The following day Brahms wrote to the Baroness Hedburg, wife of the Duke of Meiningen, for whom Mühlfeld was the royal chamber musician and music director, an amusing letter, filled with a coy suggestiveness, announcing the new work:

I would like...in a most unobtrusive manner, to invite myself to Meiningen! This time it is not out of pure egoism. I am taking the liberty of telling you very confidentially how I have thought and worked for you. Your fondness (this is only between you and me) for the royal chamber musician and music director Mühlfeld has not escaped my eye; it pained me to see how very few opportunities there were for you to watch him play...but now I am bringing him to your chamber. He shall sit on your chair, you may turn the pages of his music, and fill in the rests, which I have granted him, with fond discourse. The rest doesn’t matter, but, just for the sake of making the story complete, I would like to add for this purpose that I have written a trio and a quintet in which he has a part, and which I am placing at your disposal—offering for your use. Besides, your Mühlfeld is the greatest artist there is on the clarinet, and for that reason I find that Meiningen is the only place they could be played.

Both of the new compositions were performed privately in the home of Countess Hedburg on November 24. Joseph Joachim, who was the violinist in the quintet, was so enthusiastic that he programmed both works for a concert in Berlin on December 1, 1891. The quintet in particular was received with a storm of applause.

The only comparable masterwork to precede Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet is the one by Mozart. Both compositions were written late in their composers’ lives, and both exude an air of retrospection. The Brahms quintet, in particular, is singularly elegiac in character, marked from the very opening with sustained, lyrical, downward‑tending melodies.

The slow movement begins with another descending melody in the clarinet, echoed off the beat by the first violin over a subdued but uneasy accompaniment; clarinet and violin exchange parts as the phrase repeats and extends itself. The middle section of the movement is a wonderful evocation of gypsy music, which had fascinated Brahms from the earliest phase of his career. Here the swirling turns on the clarinet elaborate the strings as they hint at the main theme.

The last two movements both employ thematic transfiguration. The Andantino’s rocking melody becomes a lively Presto non assai. In the finale, the main theme appears in four different guises in a process of continuous development. At the very end of the work, Brahms brings back the opening of the first movement, once again emphasizing the autumnal mood of the entire piece.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

CLAUDE DEBUSSY,  Piano Trio in G

 Debussy had entered the Paris Conservatoire in the autumn of 1872 at the age of ten.  His parents had hopes of his becoming a piano virtuoso and removing them from the genteel poverty to which his father's mercurial temperament had committed them.  Although Debussy won a second prize for piano-playing in 1877, the first prize continued to elude him, and two years later, when he failed to win any sort of piano prize, they had to admit their dream would never be fulfilled

 But despite this setback, Debussy's piano teacher, Antoine Marmontel, took note of his first prize in score-reading in 1880; it prompted him to recommend Debussy to Tchaikovsky's patroness, Nadedjda von Meck, who was looking for a pianist to accompany her and her children on their travels.  Dvorak was engaged, and his duties included giving piano lessons to her children, accompanying her twenty-seven year old daughter Julia (a singer), and playing piano duets with Mme. Von Meck.  Their journey that summer took them throughout Europe, ending in Florence.  There, the family was joined by the cellist Danilchenko, who had just finished studying at the Moscow Conservatory, and the violinist Pachulsky.  The trio was required to perform every evening - presumably Beethoven and Schubert played a large part in their repertoire along with Russian music. 

 Perhaps it was as a result of this exposure that soon after, Debussy composed his Piano Trio in G.  The work cannot be said to be anything more than salon music, written to give immediate pleasure, and as such does not merit deep analysis.  Enough to note the features which, while here appearing sometimes as weaknesses, Debussy was later to transform into strengths: his penchant for four-bar phrases that sit down at the end of the last bar and wait for someone to do something, which in his mature work, were to be crucial in engendering a contemplative passivity; his reliance on pedal notes, throwing decorative elements into relief; and a tendency towards modal melodic patterns, here too often unintegrated with the surrounding material and with a slightly forced, fake black-and-white aroma, but which, handled with mastery over a decade later, would help lend Pelléas et Mélisande its distinctive atmosphere of far away and long ago.  And through it all, enough 'fantaisie' to keep everyone happy.

 
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH,  Piano Trio  No. 2 in E minor, Opus 67

Shostakovich had a greater fondness for color freedom than one expects from a neoromantic.  Here it provides a supportive dramaticism which is paramount to his black-ridged work.  The beginning, concerned with high cello harmonics (which continue for some time over the violin’s gamut), the mysterious dark entrance of the piano, the muting of the strings for the last half of the final movement (especially different when a fortissimo dynamic is used), the plentiful pizzicato in the last movement, and the individuality of col legno, all illustrate this composer’s unique, at times bizarre, touch.  Further, the monochromatic third movement, dynamic through its complete avoidance of special color, makes the spectral splashes used in the other sections more vivid.  There are Shostakovich’s usual grotesque folds in the music’s cloth, but principally this is music that is deeply felt.  It is dedicated to the memory of a close friend of the composer (Ivan Sollertinsky, a Soviet musicologist).

Shostakovich is most sardonic in his Scherzo movements, favoring drum rhythms which are tickled with dissonance.  In this Scherzo (movement two) there is little musical hysteria, merely a heavy motive, hammered out in fast tempo against which the simplest type of scale lines move up and down in various rhythms.  The Trio (in the same speed) is a mock waltz squarely ensconced in G major in which the composer’s barbed tongue is only a bit softened.

The fact that the piano trio was written during the war years explains the sorrow-filled third movement.  This part is based on a chordal ground bass stated alone and then repeated five times without change of any sort (an exceedingly rare treatment) over which the strings move contrapuntally.  The mood and pace are static, the writing of fastidious order.  Shostakovich is decidedly serious as he sings his threnody, reminding one that the trio’s jocosity is tinged with the bitter, since he returns to the ground-bass motive at the very end of the last movement, followed by a gentle reminder of the final part’s theme.

The march and dance-driven concluding movement are jam-packed with pulsatile action; but there is no basic change in the music’s total resoluteness, although the measures include many metrical shifts.  Counterpoint is not considered; the instrumentation is lean, securing a perfect clarification for all essentials.  It is within this finale that typical Russian-Jewish dance-music character appears.  The use is not snide but constitutes a further threnodic element.  It is thus that Shostakovich pictured the horrible forced dance of Jews before they were machine-gunned to death by the Nazis.

With the exception of some slight contrapunctal action (canonic means), the first movement combines lyrical character with rhythmic framework and thinly dispersed scoring.  The theme of the movement’s introduction is somewhat reshaped and then utilized in faster tempo and varied in turn.

JOHANNES BRAHMS,  Piano Trio in B Major, Opus 8  

In April 1853, the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms set out from his native Hamburg for a concert tour of Germany with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi.  The following month in Hanover they met the violinist Joseph Joachim, and that summer, Brahms and Joachim spent eight weeks together at Göttingen, discussing music, studying scores, playing chamber works, and setting the foundation for a creative friendship that lasted for almost a half a century.  Joachim learned of Brahms’ desire to take a walking tour through the Rhine Valley, and he arranged a joint recital to raise enough money to finance the trip.  Along with the proceeds of the gate, Joachim gave Brahms as a parting gift several letters of introduction, including one to Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf.  On the last day of September 1853, Brahms met the Schumanns for the first time.  “Here is one of those who comes as if sent straight from God,” Clara recorded in her diary.  The friendship was immediate and unstinting.  Schumann hailed Brahms as “the new Orpheus” in his editorial for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in October, making the young composer a celebrity in the German musical community almost overnight.

Filled with zeal and ideas by his soaring fortunes of 1853, Brahms visited Joachim in Hanover to celebrate the New Year, and there he began the B Major Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello.  When Clara and Robert arrived in town for some concert engagements at the end of January, Brahms said that that week consisted of “high festival days, which make you really live.”  The Trio was completed soon after the Schumanns went home to Düsseldorf.  It was soon after that Robert tried to commit suicide and was eventually committed to an asylum, where he died about 2 years later. 

The B Major Piano Trio was the first chamber work of Brahms to appear in print (it was published in 1854),  and though it was well received, its formal premiere took place, surprisingly, in New York City in 1855.  In its original form, the Trio is perhaps Brahms’ most unabashedly Romantic creation.  Half a life later, in l889, Brahms re-evaluated the piece for the upcoming publication of a complete edition of his works, and found that it no longer pleased him, so he undertook a complete renovation of the score.  Simrock issued the revision in February 1891, but Brahms did not formally withdraw the original, allowing both versions to exist.   

It is the second version that is heard in today’s performance.  A broad and stately piano melody opens the work.  The cello and then the violin are drawn into the unfolding of this lyrical inspiration, which mounts to an almost orchestral climax before quieting to make way for the second theme, given in unison by the strings.  A triplet motive, introduced as the transition linking the exposition’s two themes, serves as the underpinning for much of the development section.  A truncated recapitulation of the earlier thematic material rounds out the movement.  The second movement is shadowy and mysterious and sometimes dramatic; a central Trio in warm, close harmonies provides contrast.  The Adagio uses a hymnal dialogue between piano and strings as the main material of the outer sections of the movement, while the middle region is more intense and animated in expression and more complex in counterpoint.  The finale juxtaposes a somber main theme, begun by the cello above the agitated accompaniment of the piano, with a brighter subsidiary subject, played by the piano while the cello contributes little off-beat punctuations.  It is the unsettled, B minor main theme rather than the more optimistic second subject that draws the work to its restless close.