By Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan is Assistant Professor of Music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She is the author of Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera, published by Harvard University Press.
Like any enduring art form, music contains its own archive: nestled within a given piece are ideas, allusions, and techniques drawn from the deep well of the past. These encounters with history can take many forms. A composer might quote directly from existing music (think: the snippets of hymns and folk tunes in Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England), write music in the style of a predecessor (Edvard Grieg’s faux-Baroque Holberg Suite), or simply conjure up an aesthetic atmosphere that sounds somehow familiar.
The works on this evening’s program might be thought of as musical palimpsests of three distinct varieties. Each work dives into the recent or distant past, layering something new atop an existing source. Beethoven’s quartet Op. 18, No. 1 seeks creative inspiration both within and beyond music. Its finale echoes the composer’s own earlier string trio, Op. 9, No. 3, while its beloved slow movement was inspired by the tomb scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Brahms also dug into his own past in his piano quintet: he originally composed the piece as a quintet for two violins, viola, and two cellos; it then morphed into a sonata for two pianos before assuming its final instrumentation, for string quartet plus piano. Stephen Hough’s Les Six Rencontres takes an allusive approach to its engagement with music of the group of early-twentieth-century French and Swiss composers known as Les Six, reanimating the ambience of their music without referencing it directly. As the composer has written, it “evokes a flavor more than a style”—perhaps an apt description for how a great deal of musical transmutation works, allowing us to listen to both the new and the old at once.
Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet in F Major, Op. 18, No. 1 (1801)
When Beethoven completed his string quartet in F major in June 1799, he mailed a copy to his friend Karl Amenda, accompanied by a note expressing appreciation for their friendship. Two years later, Amenda received another letter. This time, Beethoven asked Amenda not to show the quartet to anyone. He had revised the piece in its entirety, and he now regarded the first version as a draft at best, written before he really understood how to write quartets. Lucky for future scholars and listeners, Amenda saved the copy he had received; comparing the two versions offers fascinating insight into Beethoven’s technical development and creative process. The version of the quartet that was eventually published differs from the original in subtle but profound ways, particularly with respect to its dynamics, structure, and instrumentation. The writing is more concise, and the compositional voice is more assured.
The quartet’s first movement is oriented around a theme that is both strong and spare. Initially presented in unison by all four players, it blossoms into a remarkably complex array of melodic and rhythmic ideas. While this movement is notable for the intelligence of its construction, the next one is an emotional tour de force. Meant to portray a scene of Shakespearean tragedy, it is appropriately weighty, with a searching melody accompanied by somber, repeated notes. The first violin’s melodic line becomes progressively stormier, yet the movement never loses its sense of overarching gravitas. In the third movement, a scherzo replete with sharp sforzandos and ornamental trills, Beethoven returns to a more lighthearted mood. The finale’s exuberant theme is borrowed, almost exactly, from that of an earlier string trio. Its intricate design and compressed energy recall the quartet’s first movement, lending the piece a sense of full-circle completeness.
Stephen Hough, Les Six Rencontres (2021)
Austro-German composers tend to predominate in the realm of string quartets, yet the genre also lends itself to many other national styles. Prominent French composers including Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Henri Dutilleux each composed a single string quartet, and these works have become cornerstones of the repertory. With Les Six Rencontres, Stephen Hough pays homage not only to this tradition, but also to a particular era in the history of French music. The piece, composed for the Takács Quartet as a companion to quartets by Ravel and Dutilleux, recalls a group of composers who lived and worked in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris in the first part of the twentieth century: Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre. Rather than quoting directly from their work, though, the composer seeks to capture the spirit of their times. As he writes, the piece recalls “an aesthetic re-view of the world after the catastrophe of the Great War. Composers like Poulenc and Milhaud were able to discover poignance in the rough and tumble of daily human life.” Rather than imitating the “fastidiousness” of Ravel and Dutilleux, he uses the “burlesque lens” that was central to Les Six.
The result is a set of six musical vignettes, each named after a distinct location. “Au boulevard” is joyful yet angular, full of arpeggiated figures expressed in sharp rhythmic patterns; the composer calls it “Stravinskian.” “Au parc” sets a winding melody atop a consistent pizzicato accompaniment, then proceeds through a series of variations. A more serious tone pervades “À l’hôtel,” which ushers a brief subject through some fugal counterpoint and into a middle section swirling with intricate ornamentation. “Au théâtre” features a slinky melodic line and abundant “theatrical” instrumental effects: tremolo, trills, spiccato, and so on. By contrast, “À l’église” is sweet and lush, with muted instruments created a warm, full sound. The final vignette, “Au marché” is an elaborate collage, interspersing new, rustling figures alongside material from the previous movements.
Johannes Brahms, Quintet in F Minor for Piano and Strings, Op. 34 (1865)
Much as Beethoven revised his Op. 18, No. 1, Brahms created several ostensibly final versions of this work over a multiyear period. Yet although he was famously self-critical, in this case the impetus for change also came from his friends and confidantes. In 1861, he began work on a piece for string quartet plus cello, no doubt inspired by Schubert’s beloved work for that same instrumentation. Yet when he shared it with the violinist Joseph Joachim, a friend, he was met with some reservations: Joachim politely expressed his view that the piece lacked “charm” in its current state. Brahms tried again, this time crafting a sonata for two pianos. Clara Wieck Schumann wrote to him that while it was “splendid,” it seemed to require a more varied timbral palette. “Please remodel it once more!” she enthused. The third time was the charm. The conductor Hermann Levi deemed the piano-quintet version of the piece “beautiful beyond words,” telling Brahms that he had successfully transformed “a monotonous work for two pianos into a thing of great beauty.”
The quintet’s first movement (again, somewhat like Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 1) begins with a theme stated rather bluntly in octaves. But the similarities end there: whereas Beethoven’s music was charming and clever, Brahms opts for high drama. The movement’s main themes are all in minor, and although it is in a standard sonata form, the expected recapitulation appears only after an extended period of deep instability. The second movement is far more tranquil, with a rocking theme first presented in the piano’s middle register. While it begins in A flat major, its middle section is in the distant, brighter key of E major, giving the movement a sense of spacious grandeur. Next is a somewhat understated scherzo. It morphs abruptly (and repeatedly) into a major-key march before returning to its initial character. The quintet’s final movement begins with a slow, densely chromatic introduction. It culminates with an elegant rondo, capped off with a rapid-fire coda which brings the quintet to a close.