1837, Vol. 2 If I Could Have Seen the World from the Perspective of Any

A Year in Classical Music: 1837, vol. 2

If I could have seen the world from the perspective of any one classical musician, if it were for the sake of being able to meet as many of Europe’s legendary musicians as possible, I think I’d choose Johann Nepomuk Hummel. A former child prodigy in piano and composition, he’d lived and studied with none other than Mozart from 1786 to 1788. After that, as Haydn’s activities declined at the Esterhazy palace after the turn of the 19th century, Hummel replaced him as music director and composer in residence there. Many considered him to be the best pianist of his time, even better than Beethoven, and Hummel was a pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral along with Franz Schubert. Schubert dedicated the great masterpieces that were his last three piano sonatas to Hummel (but both Hummel and Schubert were dead by the time of their publication, so the publisher rededicated them to Robert Schumann). The young Robert Schumann had approached Hummel for lessons, and during his later years Hummel kept a warm friendship with Frédéric Chopin. Hummel would have become piano teacher of the ten year old Franz Liszt, except that Liszt’s father was unable to afford Hummel’s fee, which was one of the highest in Vienna by that time. But Hummel’s students had included Czerny, Thalberg, von Henselt, and Mendelssohn, all of whom were leading pianist-composers by 1837. Yet for all his skill, Hummel seems to have been born just a little too early or a little too late to have written music to equal that of his famous peers. Just as he was coming of age at the end of the 1700’s, the high Classicism of his mentors Haydn and Mozart was becoming outdated, and Hummel didn’t possess the individualistic audacity that allowed Beethoven to build a new, avant-garde style all his own out of the old techniques of Classicism. Then as the Romantics took center stage, Hummel saw his style of post-Classicism become less and less relevant, farther and farther removed from the spirit of the times. By the 1830’s there was little demand for his music and Hummel found himself mostly out of work. In 1837, he composed one last piece of music, and then, toward the end of the year, he died at his home at Weimar. By then, Hummel had for some time been seen as the last surviving member of the old school of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. His death meant the passing of the last musician representing the old world of the Enlightenment, the old world of aristocratic, pre-industrial Europe. Mozart’s Requiem was performed at his funeral. Hummel’s last composition was the Ballet Music for “Das Zauberglöcken.” It’s orchestral ballet music, written as an extended finale for a special performance of an opera, La Clochette (or The Bell) by Ferdinand Hérold. Hérold was a French composer who’d written in a style much like Hummel’s, a post-Classicism that incorporated elements of the early Romantic style. Hummel’s ballet music for the opera is direct and colorful, fun to hear. With its grand, tongue in cheek theatrical gestures it made me think of Rossini. You can hear Hummel’s Ballet Music for “Das Zauberglöcken on an all-Hummel album by The London Mozart Players under Howard Shelley, recorded in the year 2000. It also includes performances of Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto and Mandolin Concerto.

In volume one I discussed Italian opera in 1837, with the work of Donizetti and Mercadante. I mentioned Paris as the epicenter of the arts in Europe, with Rossini and Cherubini having relocated to the French capital, and I touched on French grand opera with Meyerbeer and Les Hugenot. So we’ve seen the importance of Italian opera and French opera, but what of German opera? Soon all of Europe would know Wagner, who would change everything, but in 1837 German opera was only of local interest — not at all like fashionable and internationally popular Italian opera. German opera as a distinct nationalistic style had only recently gotten started, in 1821, with Weber’s Die Freischütz. Speaking of Wagner, he’d been born at Leipzig, in Saxony, in 1813 — only a few generations after Leipzig had been J.S. Bach’s town. The same year Wagner was born at Leipzig, The Battle of the Nations had been fought there; it’s also sometimes called The Battle of Leipzig. The Battle of the Nations was an important step toward to the eventual defeat of Napoleon, and was the largest military battle in European history before the First World War. It involved more than 600,000 soldiers, around 100,000 of whom died — twice as many as at Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle in the American Civil War. Napoleon was gradually being pushed back to France after his disastrous invasion of Russia. He had been attempting to reestablish his hold on German lands, but the Battle of the Nations ended French presence east of the Rhine from that time forward. In 1833, twenty years after Wagner’s birth and the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, the thirty-two year old Albert Lortzing had moved there. He worked as a singer and actor in stage productions at the Stadttheater there. But he was also a composer, and in 1835 he had written his first full-length comic opera, Die beiden Schützen, which means The Two Shooters. He had trouble getting it produced, though, because he was known only as an actor and singer, and this made it hard for him to get people to take him seriously as a professional composer. Lortzing finally managed to stage Die beiden Schützen in February of 1837. It was a success, and so he set to work right away writing his next opera, Zar und Zimmerman, which was first staged in December of ’37. Zar und Zimmerman means The Tsar and the Carpenter. (You’ll be interested to know that Donizetti had set the same story to music ten years earlier, in his opera Il Borgomastro di Saardam.) The plot is based on the biography of Tsar Peter the Great, who as a young man in the late 1600’s had gone to Holland in disguise, working anonymously as a commoner in a shipyard so he could learn how to build ships. In the opera, there are two Russians named Peter working in the shipyards: Tsar Peter, and Peter Ivanov. There’s been an uprising in Moscow since the Tsar left, and soldiers have come to town trying to find the Tsar. So they’re looking for a carpenter’s apprentice named Peter, which leads people to think that Peter Ivanov is the Tsar. While they’re looking for him the town is locked down and the port is closed, so that the real Tsar can’t leave for home. In the end, after the appropriate hijinks, Tsar Peter is able to leave for Moscow to take care of the rebellion, and the mistaken identity ends up allowing Peter Ivanov to marry his sweetheart, the young Marie. Zar und Zimmerman was indifferently received at its Leipzig premiere, but after a production in Berlin a couple of years later it became very popular and was performed all over Germany. Today it’s recognized as a masterpiece of German comic opera, and Lortzing’s finest work. I listened to two recordings of Zar und Zimmerman. The first, made in 1965, stars two great German singers as the two Peters: baritone Hermann Prey as the Tsar, and tenor Peter Schreier as Peter Ivanov. The second is from 1987, starring Wolfgang Brendel and Deon van der Walt as the Peters, and American soprano Barbara Bonney as Marie. For as much as I’m drawn to the singing of Prey and Schreier, the latter record, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Heinz Fricke, brings a dancelike energy to the score that I find more attractive. Besides that, Barbara Bonney gives a better musical portrayal of the very young woman in Marie, and Kurt Moll is fun to hear as the Burgomaster — in the spoken dialog his bass seems absolutely bottomless. But it’s the lighter and more dancelike feel that Fricke helps bring to the score that’s most important to my ears. Next to the Italian bel canto opera of the time, Lortzing’s German spieloper style sounds a little square. Hearing Lortzing’s Zar und Zimmerman alongside the operas by Donizetti and Mercadante I just covered in volume one, it’s not hard to understand why it was Italian opera, not German, that was all the rage internationally.

1837 was a hard year in Frédéric Chopin’s private life. The year before, in 1836, he had proposed marriage to Maria Wodziński, a beautiful, charming, intelligent young woman he’d met while traveling in Dresden. But her parents did not immediately consent, being concerned among other things about Chopin’s poor health — he was just 27 years old that year, but the tuberculosis that would kill him thirteen years later was already in its early stages. His hopes were dashed in the summer of 1837, when Maria’s mother wrote to Chopin to inform him their family had finally decided not to consent to the marriage. Chopin had been living in Paris since 1831 and was the toast of the great city; he’d led a charmed life there and had always seemed a superficial personality, joking and carefree. By the fall of ’37, though, beset with illness and heartbreak, he had changed quite a lot — he seemed thoughtful, serious, sad. These were the qualities that would endear him to Amantine Dupin, the novelist better known by her pseudonym, George Sand. They had met soon after Chopin returned from Dresden in ’36 and had not taken much of a liking to each other. But their paths would cross again in the spring of ’38, largely thanks to the prodding of Franz Liszt and his new wife, Marie. Chopin and Sand would immediately fall for each other the second time around, beginning the decade-long love affair that would dominate Chopin’s personal life and inspire so much of his music. Chopin was one of music’s true originals. He developed his distinctive voice and unmistakable style entirely on his own, taking inspiration from Polish folk music but not basing his scores on any of the standard models. Ever since Chopin, it’s seemed that the piano must have been designed especially for his music; other composers have done incredible things with the instrument, but none have captured the essence of its voice quite like Chopin did. By the middle 1830’s, Chopin had come to see himself as a composer, not a performer. He rarely played in public, because his light touch at the keyboard made him poorly suited for playing large halls, and because his chronic illness made the life of a traveling performer difficult for him. So he earned a comfortable living from teaching and from the sale of his compositions, instead. Chopin completed 13 compositions in 1837. (Actually, depending on the exact dating of the mazurkas, it may only have been 9, or conceivably even just 5. We’ll get to the mazurkas, eight of which I’ll claim for 1837.) Except for one vocal piece (a song), all of Chopin’s compositions from 1837 are for solo piano, and this is typical of him — he composed very little music other than solo piano pieces. Chopin’s 13 compositions from 1837, if played consecutively, make for about 45 minutes of music. With one exception, these 13 pieces are short miniatures, the longest of them taking around 5 minutes to play in a typical performance. We’ll start with the Impromptu in A-flat, op. 29. Chopin wrote four improvisatory pieces titled “impromptus” in his career. The first of these, the Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp Minor, was written in 1834 but wasn’t published in Chopin’s lifetime, so the op. 29 in A-flat got the name Impromptu no. 1. The piece has the feel of a quick dance — too fast to actually dance to, probably, but still like a dance. It’s an impressive technical achievement in music composition, as well: even though most of it is written in two voices — just two notes at a time — those two voices imply complex harmonies. Listen to the Impromptu in A-flat as performed by Russian pianist Mikhail Pletnev, on his fantastic all-Chopin recital album recorded in 1996. The two larger works that bookend the recital are the Fantasy in F Minor, op. 49, and the Piano Sonata no. 3. During the Classical era of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, composers tended to be most concerned with abstract concert pieces: symphonies, concertos, and sonatas were amongst the most important forms. As we continue through our study of classical music in 1837, you’ll note how important vocal music had become by the early Romantic era. Composers still occasionally wrote symphonies, concertos, sonatas, string quartets, but opera and songs had come to dominate their work, in place of the abstract forms. Solo piano pieces followed after this trend, too, many of them composed as opera arias without words, or “songs without words,” as Mendelssohn would actually name a series of his own piano pieces. At the start of the 1800’s, a “nocturne” had been a kind of song, a vocal piece. The term “nocturne” means “night music.” A nocturne can serve either as a gentle lullaby, on the one hand, or, on the other, as a musical depiction of more troubling nighttime thoughts: loneliness, fear of what might be hidden in the darkness, that sort of thing. Irish composer John Field, who died in 1837, had begun to write solo piano pieces called nocturnes in the 1810’s and Chopin followed, composing his first in 1829. In 1837 Chopin composed his Two Nocturnes, op. 32. Both are in major keys, with a sunnier and more contented atmosphere than many of his other nocturnes: more of the lullaby side of the nocturne, then. This is not virtuoso music. Much of Chopin’s music is not difficult to play, by professional standards. The nocturnes give some of the best examples of this: their virtue lies in their poetry, and in the singing, vocal quality Chopin captures in his piano writing. The first Chopin album I ever owned was a complete set of the nocturnes, played by Arthur Rubinstein. I’ll always love that album, but even better is Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires’s 1996 recording. Pires uses more rubato than other interpreters, varying her delivery to bring an improvisatory feel to this music, and an emotional intensity where other pianists are more about polite prettiness or understatement. Speaking of opera arias and songs, this is a good place to introduce Chopin’s one vocal piece from 1837, Moja pieszczotka, which is Polish for “my darling.” Moja pieszczotka is a poem by Poland’s great Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, which says that when his darling starts talking he just wants to listen, but then, after a while, he doesn’t want to listen anymore but wants to kiss her instead. Now Chopin’s songs weren’t as aesthetically ambitious as those of the German lieder tradition. They were a light entertainment next to the canon of serious Romantic art song, and it’s of interest as well to note that Chopin, perhaps the greatest composer of all time for the piano, gives the instrument little to do in the accompaniments to his songs. But Moja pieszczotka draws on both the mazurka and the waltz, and is charming. Listen to the 1999 performance by mezzo-soprano Urszula Kryger and pianist Charles Spencer, on the Hyperion label. Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein thought that Chopin’s mazurkas were his most original creations. Mazurka is a category word for any of three different peasant folk dances from rural central Poland. In his own compositions, though, Chopin did not intend to present mazurkas as peasant music, in an literal, musicological fashion; rather, he elaborated upon the mazurka as a form in the abstract, constructing a series of tone poems that make for some of his most conceptually advanced music. So even if, for Polish culture, mazurkas were a simple, rustic cousin to the polonaise — which was Poland’s sophisticated urban dance — this was certainly not the case in Chopin’s music. My sources conflict as to which set of mazurkas Chopin composed in 1837. According to the Grove Encyclopedia, the op. 30 set was completed in ’37, and the op. 33 set in ’38, but Chopin’s biographer Adam Zamoyski lists op. 30 as completed in ’36, and op. 33 in ’37. So that means it’s possible that either one, or both, or neither of the two sets was actually finished in 1837. My solution is: I’m claiming both of them for 1837, because I want to have some mazurkas to listen to and talk about. The op. 30 and op. 33 sets each contain four mazurkas, and you’ll want to get to know both sets of them in any case. The op. 33 set is one of the sunniest and simplest of Chopin’s mazurka sets. When it comes to the mazurkas, if you’re going to listen just to one interpreter, it has to be Rubinstein. Like Rudolf Firkušný playing Janačék’s piano music, or Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic of the ’50s playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Arthur Rubinstein’s readings of the Chopin mazurkas are amongst the many cases in which a great performer, born and raised in the same culture as the composer he’s performing, is able to render the music with an insight and understanding and passion that no one else can match. Rubinstein made complete-set recordings of Chopin’s 58 mazurkas three separate times in his career: once in the 1930’s, once in the ’50s, and once in the ’60s. The first set, from the ’30s, is fueled by a youthful energy that reminds you of Glenn Gould’s first recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The tempos are considerably faster than in Rubinstein’s later recordings, and there’s more attention to detail, to inner voices and nuances. There’s some tape hiss, some snap, crackle, and pop to the old 1930’s recording, of course, but after ten seconds of Rubinstein’s intoxicating playing you’ll stop noticing it. The last of his mazurka sets, form the ’60s, shows the restraint and understatement that came as Rubinstein aged; the middle set, recorded in the ’50s, is a middle ground, balancing the effects of the sets from the ’30s and ’60s. If I could only have one of the three, I’d take the first set from the ’30s. But lucky for all of us, that’s not how this game works. We can have our cake and eat it too; we can listen to all three of Rubinstein’s Chopin mazurka sets. This leaves one more 1837 composition by Chopin: the well-known Scherzo no. 2 in B-flat Minor, op. 31. It’s the one larger-scale piece he composed that year; it takes around ten or twelve minutes to play. When Chopin left Warsaw in 1830, to move to Paris, his portfolio contained mostly short dances and lyrical pieces. So to add some weight to that portfolio he decided to start composing some lengthier, more extended and substantial pieces: his four scherzi, his ballads, and his fantasies. These compositions mark Chopin’s second, middle stylistic period, and the bloom of his artistic maturity. The scherzo, which means “joke,” had been Beethoven’s invention, but Chopin developed the form in ways that advanced and departed from what it had been in Beethoven’s music. The Germanic composers had been concerned with carefully balanced thematic architecture, but in Chopin’s scherzi the form became a venue for experimental, improvisational freedom. Chopin’s four scherzi — especially the first three — have a dark, frenzied energy and couldn’t sound less like musical jokes. The Scherzo no. 2 is the best known and most often performed of Chopin’s four scherzi. Robert Schumann was so impressed with it as to say it deserved comparison to Byron’s poems, and in its expression of the diabolical it reminded me of Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor. It’s a good virtuoso vehicle, so it’s attracted a number of virtuoso performers in addition to the Chopin specialists. Sviatoslav Richter and Martha Argerich have cut fine recordings of the piece, as has Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski in his recording of all four Chopin scherzi. Rubinstein outdoes all of them in his recording from the ’30s, which comes on the same album with his 1932 recordings of the mazurkas. But the best reading of all is by Filipina pianist Cicile Licad. Her performance of the Scherzo in B-flat Minor is captivating, spellbinding in its dramatic intensity. It captures both the poetry of Chopin and, thanks at least in part to the close-up microphones, the muscular pianism you might associate more with Liszt.