Theatre - Concert Hall Tanglewood

EIGHT CONCERTS OF CHAMBER MUSIC

Wednesday Evenings at 8:00

July 25

The Arts Quartet

This concert is Presented under the Auspices of the Fromm Music Foundation

BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA CHARLES MUNCH IMusic Director

BERKSHIRE FESTIVAL 1962 PROGRAM NOTES FIVE MOVEMENTS FOR STRING QUARTET, OP. 5 By Anton von Webern (1883-1945)

It is interesting to note that Webern's Five Pieces for String Quartet, composed in 1909, antedate the Third Quartet by Schoenberg which stands on this program by seventeen years. Webern was twenty-six when he wrote it; Schoenberg his master was thirty-five. The earlier work is in its way far more advanced than the later one. The disciple was more methodical, more consistent as an innovator. Schoenberg's Third Quartet uses the twelve-tone technique as did Webern seventeen years before, but Schoenberg sounds con- ventionally repetitious by comparison as he follows through with figure patterns. Reiteration, the very basis of classical music, is forsworn by Webern, where not so much as the exact repetition of a brief figure is to be found. It is music in the flux, presenting endless new phases in color, in melodic shape, cultivating transparency and delicate nuance. (These charac- teristics were further emphasized when Webern rescored the "Five Pieces" for string orchestra.) In contrast to this, Schoenberg's Second Quartet, with soprano voice, composed in the year previous, is outspoken romanticism, though to its own degree concentrated in style. Webern's concentration was far more thorough- going. It resulted in extreme brevity (the Five Pieces last eight minutes), in spare, open scores in which each note was unencumbered and neatly made its point. He shunned amplitude of dynamics or texture. His music is direct and rarefied, rigorously simple. It is also deliberate, studied, painstaking. While Schoenberg became a public figure and found himself the orig- inator of a movement which could be derided but not dismissed, Webern led a life as isolated as if he were composing in a laboratory. He was living in an obscure mountain resort near Salzburg when he was shot, a tragedy the circumstances of which have only recently been sought out and disclosed.* Since his death he has become a shining model for the serial movement. What Schoenberg had implanted but failed to carry through consistently, Webern had pursued with uncompromising logic to its conclusion—the ultimate in conciseness, clarity and point. Webern is now a name honored wherever is practiced. Even Stravinsky, long aloof from twelve- tonal ways, has paid Webern his respects, notably in his Agon.

STRING QUARTET (1958) By Arthur Berger (1912- ) Among Arthur Berger's works for orchestra, piano, and chamber com- binations, there is this String Quartet and an earlier one (of 1945) entitled "Three Pieces for String Quartet." The String Quartet of 1958 was first performed on April 14, I960, by the Boston Arts Quartet, and was later chosen to represent American chamber music at the International Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music which took place in June, I960, in Cologne, Germany.

George Perle wrote in the Musical Quarterly (Autumn, I960) : "First drawn to atonality thirty years ago, Berger found himself unable to separate the techniques of this language from an Expressionistic ethos he found uncongenial. Influenced by the works of Stravinsky's middle period, he turned to an intricate and curiously personal diatonicism, characterized by fragmentation of line and rhythm and by the extreme contrasts of registra- tion that one associates with Webern. . . . "In the quartet, as in Berger's earlier works, and as in most of the great

*Tbe Death of by Hans Moldenhauer, published in 1961 by the Philosophical Library FOURTH CONCERT OF THE CHAMBER MUSIC SERIES

The Boston Arts Quartet

Joseph Silverstein, Violin Eugene Lehner, Viola Harry Dickson, Violin Richard Kapuscinski, Cello

PROGRAM

WEBERN Five Quartet Pieces, Op. 5

I. Heftig bewegt; Ruhig

II. Sehr langsam

III. Sehr bewegt IV. Sehr langsam V. In zarten Bewegung

BERGER String Quartet (1958)

Toccata: Preciso; Cantabile; Leggiero e sotto voce Tranquillo; Intermezzo; Coda: Grave

INTERMISSION

SCHOENBERG String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30

I. Moderato

II. Adagio

III. Intermezzo : Allegro moderato

IV. Rondo : Molto moderato

concerts to follow: August 1 The New York Chamber Soloists August 8 Beaux Arts Trio of New York August 15 The Nova Arte Trio (with Gary Graffman, Piano, and Doriot Anthony Dwyer, Flute) August 22 The Kroll Quartet :

music of our Western heritage, timbre, texture, dynamics, rhythm, and form are elements of a musical language whose syntax and grammar are essentially derived from pitch relations. If these elements never seem specious and arbitrary, as they do with so many of the dodecaphonic productions that deluge us today from both the left and the right, it is precisely because of the authenticity and integrity of his musical thinking at the basic level. In the String Quartet 1958 Berger presents, above all, an original approach to the most perplexing problem of twelve- tone composition: the absence of any axiomatic harmonic assumptions on the one hand and the rigorous pre- compositional definitions of melodic relations on the other. His serial music today is as far removed from current fashionable trends as his diatonic music was a few years ago."

STRING QUARTET NO. 3, OP. 30 By (1874-1951) Schoenberg wrote the third of his four string quartets in 1926-1927. Since it precedes his Fourth by ten years and follows his Second by nineteen, it can be expected, and actually does, follow a middle course between the early and later Schoenberg. It retains a good deal of the Romantic melody and sonority of the preceding F sharp minor Quartet with soprano voice (1907- 1908), but the years of its writing were the years of Schoenberg's first full plunge into twelve-tonalism. The Quartet was shortly to be followed by the Orchestral Variations, Op. 31, a work still taken as a model for the serial plan. The Quartet is elusive of tonality, it cultivates unorthodox melodic intervals, reverses its themes, escapes exact repetition. And yet it has its tra- ditional outward features. The classical over-all structure is maintained with a first movement in general sonata form, a slow movement in a fairly ortho- dox progress of ornamental variations, an Intermezzo of light scherzo tex- ture with a middle section. The final rondo is another case of vestigial out- line and adventurous inner treatment. The Quartet has recapitulations and codas. The opening movement proceeds on the plan of two melodic themes with wide skips, and an ostinato accompaniment figure of short notes, re- peated in shifting shapes. The whole score retains a general plan of legato theme and light, often staccato accompaniment. "In this work," writes Egon Wellesz, contributing to Cobbett's Cyclo- pedic Survey of Chamber Music, "it is once more the principle of variations which is the essential feature of Schoenberg's constructive treatment—varia- tions almost in the medieval sense. According to this principle, the idea of any given melody must appear each time with changed intervals and rhythms, and this practically eliminates the principle of exact repetition." Mr. Walter Willson Cobbett, as editor of his valuable Cyclopedia, in 1930, makes a general observation on the character of Schoenberg's music which it is interesting to repeat after thirty-two years have passed "Arnold Schoenberg is at the head and front of this new school. His quartets contain some wonderful apocalyptic moments, and when in the Tristan vein (as in verklarte Nacht), he proves himself not insensible to the claims of sensuous beauty; but he appears to us amateurs to be mainly concerned with the expression of his intellectual aspirations. Now amateurs, without being hedonists, are still not anchorites, and I am afraid that they are apt to turn only too readily from his music to that of composers who combine lyric charm with masterly musicianship." Schoenberg composed his Third Quartet at the request of Mrs. Eliza- beth Sprague Coolidge. It was first performed on September 19, 1927, in Vienna, by the quartet of his brother-in-law, Rudolph Kolisch. J.N.B.