BIG ARTS 2020-2021 Series

Thursday, February 18, 2021

JASPER J FREIVOGEL, KAREN KIM, violin ANDREW GONZALEZ, RACHEL HENDERSON FREIVOGEL,

JUPITER STRING QUARTET NELSON LEE, violin MEG FREIVOGEL, violin LIZ FREIVOGEL, viola DANIEL MCDONOUGH, cello

HAYDN String Quartet in D major, Op. 71, No. 2, H. III:70 (18’)

Adagio — Allegro Adagio cantabile Menuetto: Allegro Finale: Allegretto

JASPER STRING QUARTET

FANNY String Quartet in E-flat major (21’) MENDELSSOHN HENSEL Adagio ma non troppo Allegretto Romanze Allegro molto vivace

JUPITER STRING QUARTET

— INTERMISSION —

MENDELSSOHN for Four , Two and Two in E-flat major, Op. 20 (32’)

Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco Andante Scherzo: Allegro leggierissimo Presto

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Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

String Quartet in D major, Op. 71, No. 2, H. III:70 Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Composed in 1793.

Haydn’s first triumph in London ended in July 1792, and he promised the impresario Johann Peter Salomon that he would return several months hence for another series of concerts. Haydn spent the intervening time at home in Vienna, composing, teaching a few pupils (including Beethoven), recouping his strength after the rigors of the London trip, and attending to domestic matters, especially seeing to the demand of his shrewish wife (whom he referred to, privately, as the “House-Dragon”) for new living quarters. Anna Maria had discovered a house in the Viennese suburb of Gumpendorf that she thought would be perfect, she explained to her husband, when she was a widow. Haydn was understandably reluctant to see the place, but he found it pleasing and bought it the next year. It was the home in which, in 1809, a decade after Anna Maria, he died. One of the greatest successes of Haydn’s London venture was the performance of several of his string quartets by Salomon, whose abilities as an impresario were matched by his virtuosity on the violin. Such public presentations of chamber works were still novel at that time, and their enthusiastic reception made it easy for Salomon to convince Haydn to create a half-dozen additional quartets for his projected visit in 1794-1795. Though composed for Salomon’s concerts, the new quartets were formally commissioned by Count Anton Apponyi, who had come to know Haydn and his music when he married one of the scions of the Esterházy clan, the composer’s employer for a half-century. Apponyi was an active patron of the arts in Vienna (he was a subscriber to Beethoven’s Op. 1 Piano Trios), owner of a fine collection of paintings, a good violinist, and a founder and president of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the city’s principal concert-giving organization. The six Quartets, divided into two sets as Op. 71 and Op. 74 when they were published in London in 1795, were dedicated to Apponyi. Salomon had played them to great acclaim at his Hanover Square Rooms concerts the preceding year. The Quartets, Opp. 71 and 74 occupy an important niche in the history of as the first such works written expressly for public performance. Haydn, who was always sensitive to accommodating his audiences, made the Quartets suitable for the concert hall by fitting several of them with introductions (to set the mood and alert the listeners to the start of the music), providing them with ample dramatic contrasts, basing them on easily memorable thematic material, allowing a certain virtuosity to the first violinist in the fast movements (to show off Salomon’s considerable skills), and giving them an almost symphonic breadth of expression. (In her study of the composer, Rosemary Hughes noted, “It is as if Haydn were pushing open a door through which Beethoven was to pass.”) The D major Quartet, Op. 71, No. 2, begins with a brief slow introduction that juxtaposes explosive isolated chords with quiet phrases in a decorated chordal texture. The main body of the movement commences with a principal theme built from leaping octaves shared imitatively among the participants. The second subject, presented without fuss, is a short stuttering motive. Some delicately spun passages and a quiet reference to the octave-leap main theme close the exposition. The compact development section deals with permutations of the main and closing themes, and leads seamlessly to the full return of the earlier motives to round out the movement. The Adagio is a richly decorated instrumental song in free sonata form which explores distant harmonic areas that look forward to the heightened expressive style of the encroaching Romantic age. The Menuetto, more elegant than rustic, recalls the octave-leap motive of the first movement; a smoothly flowing trio occupies the center of the movement. The brilliant finale is a dashing rondo built on a theme of infectious jocularity.

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String Quartet in E-flat major Hensel (1805-1847)

Composed in 1834.

It would be difficult to find a more illustrative example of the genteel social engineering of the 19th century than Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, older sister of the renowned . Fanny was only six (Felix was one) when the family was forced by the Napoleonic juggernaut to abandon their native Hamburg for Berlin, but she had already been endowed with good genes and disciplined piano instruction by her talented mother, Lea, a student of the noted German theorist and pedagogue Johann Philipp Kirnberger, himself a pupil of Johann Sebastian Bach. (Lea’s sister, Sara Levy, was a gifted harpsichordist and a patron of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. It was through that association that a copy of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion descended to Felix, who revived the work in 1829.) Felix and Fanny were given equal privilege in the family’s cultured life — the best tutors, intensive musical study with outstanding teachers, travel, elaborate concerts for invited guests at which they displayed their talents as composers and performers, access to the finest strata of German artists and literati. Brother and sister blossomed — in an 1825 letter to Felix, Goethe asks his young friend to “give my regards to your equally talented sister.” That same year Felix went off to university while Fanny attended Humboldt’s lectures on physical geography and Holtei’s talks on experimental physics in Berlin, but thereafter their lives — but not their loving devotion to each other and their mutual respect — went different ways. Felix became one of the most highly regarded musical figures of his day, while Fanny stayed at home, taking part in the family’s Sunday musicales but otherwise discouraged by both her brother and her father from pursuing the life of a professional musician. “You must prepare earnestly for your real calling, the only calling for a young woman — I mean the state of a housewife,” pronounced Papa Abraham. “Music should be an accomplishment, and never a career for women.” In 1829, Fanny married Wilhelm Hensel, a painter at the Prussian court, who urged her to continue composing, which she did, though with little public recognition. The Berlin publisher Schlesinger issued one of her songs in an album for voice and piano in 1837; one volume of Lieder and another of piano pieces were published in 1846. (Felix published two other of Fanny’s songs in a collection of his own works. When Queen Victoria expressed special pleasure at one of them, Felix quickly admitted that it was not his.) Fanny’s only formal concert appearance was as pianist in her brother’s G minor Concerto in 1838. While leading a rehearsal of Felix’s on May 14, 1847, she suffered a massive stroke and died later that day; she was 42. Felix, already ill and exhausted from punishing overwork, was prostrated by her death; he died six months later. Fanny composed some 400 works in the conservative style that also informs much of her brother’s music, mostly songs and piano pieces, but also cantatas, a string quartet, a piano trio, a piano quartet, two organ preludes, and the Overture in C major for orchestra. Fanny composed the String Quartet in E-flat major between August and October 1834; she never attempted to publish the score (it was not issued until 1988) and there is no record of a performance during her lifetime. She did, however, send a copy to her brother in January, and he responded that he had “just played through it [on the piano — he was one of his generation’s foremost virtuosos] and thank you with all my heart,” but then went on to offer some negative comments about the work’s form and harmonic choices. She replied in kind when he shared with her his new cantata Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein (“Oh God, Look Down from Heaven”), and both then concluded that their critical faculties had perhaps been too highly sharpened by their intimate knowledge of the late works of Beethoven. The opening movement of Fanny’s only String Quartet is not the expected sonata structure in quick tempo but rather a serious, lyrical piece without strong formal demarcations that is mostly in the dark tonality of C minor rather than the work’s nominal E-flat major, which does not settle in until the very last measures and then only tentatively. The careful integration of the voices, the harmonic adventuresomeness and the striving toward expressive passion of this music are evident throughout the entire work. The second movement, the Quartet’s scherzo, apparently proves that the distinctive elfin grace with which Felix

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treated such music was a inherited trait. The Romanze, with its lamenting mood, ambiguous harmonic implications and restless thematic working-out, contains the Quartet’s deepest sentiments. Expressive contrast and a brilliant close are provided by the finale, a sonata form with a skittering main theme, a smooth second subject and a long development section that uses both motives.

Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20 Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Composed in 1825. Premiered in October 1825 in Berlin.

It was with the Octet for Strings, composed in 1825 at the tender age of sixteen, a full year before the Overture to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that the stature of Mendelssohn’s genius was first fully revealed. He wrote the work as a birthday offering for his violin and viola teacher, Eduard Rietz, and premiered it during one of the household musicales in October of that year that the Mendelssohns organized to showcase young Felix’s budding gifts; Rietz participated in the performance and young Felix is thought to have played one of the viola parts. (Rietz and his family remained close to Mendelssohn. Eduard’s brother, Julius, succeeded Mendelssohn as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts upon the composer’s death in 1847 and edited his complete works for publication in the 1870s.) The scoring of the Octet calls for a double string quartet, though, unlike the work written in 1823 for the same instrumentation by (a friend of the Mendelssohns and a regular visitor to their family programs), which divides the eight players into two antiphonal groups, Mendelssohn treated his forces as a single integrated ensemble, a veritable miniature orchestra of strings. Even allowing that Mendelssohn, by age sixteen, was already a veteran musician with a decade of experience and a sizeable catalog of music to his credit, the Octet’s brilliance and originality are phenomenal. The Octet is splendidly launched by a wide-ranging main theme that takes the first violin quickly through its entire tonal range; the lyrical second theme is given in sweet, close harmonies. The development section, largely concerned with the subsidiary subject, is relatively brief, and culminates in a swirling unison passage that serves as the bridge to the recapitulation of the earlier melodic materials. The following Andante, like many slow movements in Mozart’s instrumental compositions, was created not so much as the fulfillment of some particular formal model, but as an ever-unfolding realization of its own unique melodic materials and world of sonorities. The movement is tinged with the delicious, bittersweet melancholy that represents the expressive extreme of the musical language of Mendelssohn. The composer’s sister Fanny noted that the featherstitched Scherzo was inspired by gossamer verses from Goethe’s Faust, to which Mendelssohn’s fey music is the perfect complement:

Floating cloud and trailing mist, O’er us brightening hover: The rushes shake, winds stir the brake: Soon all their pomp is over.

The closing movement, a dazzling moto perpetuo with fugal episodes, recalls Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony (No. 41, C major, K. 551) in its rhythmic vitality and contrapuntal display, simultaneously whipping together as many as three themes from the finale and a motive from the Scherzo during one climatic episode in the closing pages. ©2020 Dr. Richard E. Rodda