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Sonata for and in E-flat major, Op. 120, No. 2 (1833-1897) Composed in 1894.

As an unrepentant, life-long bachelor (he once vowed “never to undertake either a marriage or an opera”), Johannes Brahms depended heavily on his circle of friends for support, encouragement and advice. By word and example, Robert Schumann set him on the path of serious composition as a young man; Schumann’s wife, Clara, was Brahms’ chief critic and confidante throughout his life. The violinist Joseph Joachim was an indefatigable champion of Brahms’ , and provided him expert technical advice during the composition of the Concerto. Hans von Bülow, a musician of gargantuan talent celebrated as both a pianist and conductor, played Brahms’ music widely, and made it a mainstay in the repertory of the superb court at Meiningen during his tenure there as music director from 1880 to 1885. Soon after arriving to take up his post, Bülow invited Brahms to Meiningen to be received by the music-loving Duke Georg and his consort, Baroness von Heldburg, and Brahms was provided with a fine apartment and encouraged to visit the court whenever he wished. (The only obligation upon the comfort-loving composer was to don the much-despised evening dress for dinner.) Brahms returned frequently and happily to Meiningen to hear his works played by the orchestra and to take part in chamber ensembles. At a concert in March 1891, he heard a performance of Weber’s F minor by the orchestra’s principal player of that instrument, Richard Mühlfeld, and was overwhelmed. “It is impossible to play the clarinet better than Herr Mühlfeld does here,” he wrote to Clara. “He is absolutely the best I know.” So fluid and sweet was Mühlfeld’s playing that Brahms dubbed him “Fräulein Nightingale,” and flatly proclaimed him to be the best wind instrument player that he had ever heard. Indeed, so strong was the impact of the experience that Brahms was shaken out of a year-long creative lethargy — the (Op. 114) and the Clarinet (Op. 115) were composed without difficulty for Mühlfeld in May and June 1891. During his regular summer retreat at Bad Ischl in the Austrian Salzkammergut in 1894, Brahms was again inspired to write for clarinet. During July, he composed two Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano, and invited Mühlfeld to visit him in September to try out the new pieces. They then took the Sonatas to Frankfurt, and there played them for Clara Schumann four times in five days, but her hearing was so bad by that time that they sounded to her, she said, like little more than “chaos.” She read them at the piano, however (Clara was one of the 19th-century’s greatest keyboard virtuosos), and pronounced her love for these latest of Brahms’ creations. With this blessing, Mühlfeld and Brahms toured successfully with the Sonatas to several cities; the performance in Vienna on January 11, 1895 was Brahms’ last public appearance as a pianist. Simrock, Brahms’ publisher in Berlin, was eager to issue the scores, but the composer would not release them until late in the spring of 1895 so that Mühlfeld would have exclusive performance rights to them during the tour. Except for the Four Serious Songs and the set of inspired by the death of Clara in 1896, these Sonatas were the last music that Brahms wrote. The Clarinet Sonatas are works of Brahms’ fullest maturity: economical without being austere, tightly unified in motivic development, virtually seamless in texture yet structurally pellucid, harmonically rich, and, as always with his greatest music, filled with powerful and clear emotions trenchantly expressed. (“Who can resist an emotion strong enough to penetrate all that skillful elaboration?” asked the composer’s friend Elizabeth von Herzogenberg about the Fourth Symphony nine years earlier.) The autumnal opening movement of the E-flat major Sonata follows traditional sonata-form model. The first theme, suffused with cool sunlight, is an almost perfect example of melodic construction — rapturously lyrical in its initial phrases, growing more animated and wide-ranging as it progresses, and closing with a few short, quiet gestures. After a transition on the main subject followed by a brief moment of silence, the second theme, another gently flowing melodic inspiration, is intoned introspectively by the clarinet. The development section is compact and lyrical rather than prolix and dramatic, and leads to the balancing return of the earlier materials in the recapitulation. The Sonata’s greatest expressive urgency is contained in its second movement, a curious stylistic hybrid of folkish Austrian Ländler, sophisticated Viennese waltz and Classical scherzo. The movement’s principal, minor-mode formal section flanks a brighter central chapter that Brahms marked forte ma dolce e ben cantando — “strong but sweet and well sung.” For the finale of this, his last chamber composition, Brahms employed one of his most beloved structural Page 2 (1/31/20) procedures, the variation. The theme is presented by the clarinet with two echoing phrases from the piano alone. This spacious melody is the subject of five variations, the last of which, a sturdy strain in a portentous minor key, is largely entrusted to the piano. An animated coda brings this splendid and deeply satisfying Sonata to its glowing conclusion.

Trio Clarinet, Bassoon and Piano in B-flat major, Op. 11, “Gassenhauer” (1770-1827) Composed in 1798.

Beethoven first acquired his reputation as a pianist after arriving in Vienna in 1792, a flamboyant young man of untamed spirit particularly noted for the power and invention of his improvisations. It was with the premieres of his first two piano concertos in 1795 that his fame as a composer began to flourish. Some of the compositions from the years immediately following show his eagerness to stretch the boundaries of the conventional forms and modes of expression, but most of his music of the 1790s still pays eager obeisance to the traditions and taste of the time. Such a work is the Trio for Piano, Clarinet and , Op. 11, composed in 1798. Beethoven’s disciple Carl Czerny simply said, without specification, that the Trio was written for “a clarinetist,” the most likely candidate being Joseph Bähr, a virtuoso then attached to the musical establishment of the Prussian court chapel at Potsdam. Chamber pieces with winds were much in vogue at that time in Vienna, and Beethoven contributed nine works to the genre between 1792 and 1800. (The , Op. 20 of 1800 was his most popular piece during his lifetime; in 1805 he arranged it for clarinet, cello and piano as his Trio in E-flat major, Op. 38.) The Clarinet Trio was intended to please the drawing-room sensibilities of the Viennese public, and to help ensure its success Beethoven based the last movement on a well-known tune (Pria ch’io l’impegno — “Before beginning this awesome task, I need a snack”) from Joseph Weigl’s popular comic opera L’Amor Marinaro (“The Corsair in Love”), which had been unveiled at the Hoftheater in November 1797. (Such a tactic was then common — Hummel and Joseph Wölfl both composed variations on the melody shortly after Beethoven, and Paganini created a Grand Sonata and Variations for Violin and Orchestra on it as late as 1828. Beethoven’s work is sometimes called — though not by the composer — “Gassenhauer,” literally a “street song,” a sort of hit tune, after the popular theme of its variations.) Upon the score’s publication in 1798 (which was issued with a substitute violin part for the clarinet to boost its potential sales to Vienna’s home music-makers; bassoon replaces cello at this performance), Beethoven shrewdly dedicated the score to his patroness Countess Wilhelmine von Thun, who had also supported the creative efforts of Mozart, Haydn and Gluck. The review of the Clarinet Trio that appeared in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (“General Music Journal”) in 1799 is typical in its mixture of praise and caution of many that Beethoven received throughout his life: “This Trio is by no means easy, but it runs more flowingly than much of the composer’s other work, and produces an excellent ensemble effect. If the composer, with his unusual grasp of harmony, his love of the graver movements, would aim at natural rather than strained or recherché composition, he would set good work before the public, such as would throw into the shade the stale, hurdy-gurdy tunes of many a more talked-about musician.” Beethoven, of course, paid no attention to this advice, and went on to become, well, Beethoven, but this early Clarinet Trio, though fitted with a number of harmonic audacities, is music still well within the Classical mold, untroubled by the searching expression of his later works. The Trio’s sonata-form opening movement begins with a bold, striding phrase presented in unison as the first of several motives comprising the main theme group. The complementary themes are introduced following two loud chords, a silence and an unexpected harmonic sleight-of-hand. The movement’s development section is largely concerned with the striding motive of the main theme. The Adagio is based on a melody of Mozartian tenderness first sung by the cello before being shared with the clarinet. The finale is a straightforward set of nine variations and a finale on Weigl’s melody, a movement that Beethoven repeatedly promised Czerny he would replace with a more substantial one, but never did.

Sonata for and Piano in F major, Op. 17 Page 3 (1/31/20)

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Composed in 1800. Premiered on April 18, 1800 in Vienna’s Court Theater by hornist Giovanni Punto and the composer as pianist.

Giovanni Punto was one of the most colorful musical characters in Enlightenment Europe. Born in 1748 as Jan Václav Stich into a family of Czech serfs on the estate of Count Joseph von Thun, he showed such talent as a horn player that he was sent by the Count to , and for study with the best hornists of the day. He returned to the service of Count Thun, but was dissatisfied with life as a serf and, in 1768, bolted. The Count sent his soldiers after him with orders to knock out all of his teeth, but Stich escaped unharmed to Germany, where he played with court in Hechingen and . After the popular fashion of the day (and perhaps to avoid the emissaries of Count Thun), he Italianized his name to Giovanni Punto. His reputation as a hornist spread quickly: he toured throughout Europe as a soloist (playing concertos of his own composition) and held positions with several important court orchestras. He met Mozart in Paris in 1778, and the young composer was so inspired by Punto’s playing that he composed for him the Sinfonia Concertante for Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn and Strings, K. 297b. Along with his reportedly peerless skill as a hornist, Punto was also an excellent violinist and conductor, which duties he was performing, during the Revolutionary decade after 1789, for the Théâtre des Variétés Amusantes in Paris when the announcement was made of the opening of the Conservatoire in that city. Miffed that he was not appointed to the school’s faculty, he left Paris and went first to Munich and then to Vienna. Soon after he arrived in the imperial city early in 1800, he met one of the town’s brightest musical lights, a young lion of a pianist from Bonn who was also gaining a reputation as a composer of considerable, if decidedly progressive, talent — Ludwig van Beethoven. Punto scheduled a public concert for April 18, 1800 in Vienna’s Court Theater, and invited Beethoven to compose a horn and piano sonata specially for the occasion; Beethoven agreed to write the piece and join Punto for the program. (The use of the auditorium may have been partly paid for, or at least acknowledged, by Beethoven’s dedication of the score to Josefina von Braun, wife of the Deputy Director of the Court Theater. Beethoven was pretty slick about such matters, and his dedications consistently show real political acumen.) Beethoven put off writing the piece, however, and Ferdinand Ries, his pupil and eventual biographer, reported that it was just “the day before the performance that Beethoven began to work on the Sonata, but it was ready for the concert.” (Such compositional celerity is not quite as surprising as it at first seems. For several of his premieres, Beethoven wrote out just the parts for the other instrumentalists and supplied himself with only a few scrawled notes to jog his memory of the piano part, later completing the score in full. Such was probably the case for Punto’s concert.) The correspondent for Leipzig’s Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung wrote that the new Sonata “was so outstanding and pleasing that, despite the new rule forbidding encores and loud applause in the Court Theater, the virtuosi were compelled by very loud applause ... to play it again.” A similar acclaim greeted the new Sonata when the pair presented it in Pest three weeks later. Despite its success, however, it was to be, along with the popular Op. 20 Septet, the last of Beethoven’s chamber works calling for wind instruments. With the dawn of the new century, and the unveiling of his First Symphony only two weeks before the premiere of the Horn Sonata, Beethoven gave proof that his vision had expanded beyond the limited potential of the wind instruments then available to him, and his subsequent chamber music was confined to works for strings and piano. The instrument for which Beethoven wrote his Op. 17 Sonata was the valveless natural horn, which required agile hand-stopping to produce most of its chromatic notes. Punto was said to have had a great influence on the natural horn’s development of an extended technique, and Beethoven paid a fine tribute to the mastery of his playing in this music. The Horn Sonata is in three movements, the second being little more than a slow- preface to the finale. The opening movement is in a compact initiated by a solo fanfare from the horn, and the finale is a joyful rondo filled with wide melodic leaps and dashing figurations.

Quintet for Piano, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon and Horn in E-flat major, K. 452 (1756-1791) Page 4 (1/31/20)

Composed in 1784. Premiered on April 1, 1784 in Vienna.

When Mozart returned to Vienna in November 1783 from his visit to Salzburg to try (vainly) to convince his father of the wisdom of his recent marriage and the suitably of his new wife, his head was full of plans for an opera buffa on a libretto by Abbé G.B. Varesco. Mozart sketched only eight numbers before abandoning L’oca del Cairo (“The Goose of Cairo”) because, he informed Papa Leopold in Salzburg, “I have works which at the moment are bringing in money.” The money was to come from a series of subscription concerts he scheduled for the Lenten season, when the Church proscription of opera and theater performances made Vienna’s halls available for instrumental programs. Mozart’s personal happiness and public popularity were at their zeniths in 1784. He shared a comfortable apartment with Constanze, and they were looking forward to the birth of a baby in September. He had been settled in Vienna for nearly three years, and had acquired a reputation as the finest pianist in town as well as a talented composer. So great was the demand for his performances in the city’s concert halls and the houses of the aristocracy that he played 22 concerts between February 26th and April 3rd. This hectic schedule alone would be enough to fully occupy any solo performer, but the Viennese audience also expected that “I must play some new works and therefore I must compose,” he wrote. In addition, many of his mornings were given over to teaching, with the remaining cracks in his schedule devoted to carrying on a quite merry social life. “Have I not enough to do? I do not think I can get rusty at this rate,” he wrote in a letter to Leopold with which he proudly enclosed a list of his performances. For his program of April 1st at the , which also included the Concertos Nos. 15 and 16 (K. 450 and K. 451) and Symphonies No. 35 (“Haffner”) and No. 36 (“Linz”), Mozart composed a Quintet for Piano and Winds (K. 452), completing it just the night before the concert. The composer played the piano part himself, but the names of the other performers are unrecorded. It is possible that the horn player was Mozart’s old Salzburg pal Joseph Leutgeb, who had settled in Vienna two years earlier; the earliest of the four concertos for Leutgeb dates from that year. The clarinettist was perhaps , for whom Mozart later wrote the Clarinet Concerto and , and who had performed Mozart’s B-flat Serenade (K. 361) at the Burgtheater just a week earlier. The premiere of the new Quintet went well. “It had the greatest applause,” Mozart reported to his father on April 10th. “I myself consider it the best thing I have written in my life. I wish you could have heard it, and how beautifully it was performed, though to tell the truth I grew rather tired from all the playing by the end. It reflects no small credit on me that my audience did not in any degree share the fatigue.” John N. Burk noted of this extraordinary epistle, “Mozart until this moment had never in his letters spoken of the quality of a new work, but only of its acceptability and its success, duly reported for his father’s satisfaction. Now for the first time he shows pride in what he has done.” Though it is a quality too infrequently remarked, Mozart was a superb orchestrator, thoroughly familiar with the technical possibilities and unique character of each instrument. His mastery of orchestration is seen nowhere better than in his writing for winds, where he was careful to make the individual parts both suitable and challenging while constructing the phrases to allow for the necessary frequent recoveries of lip and lung — the E-flat Quintet is a virtual textbook of the best 18th-century wind instrument scoring. In the Quintet, the winds (oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn) are usually treated as an ensemble, though each player is given an occasional solo turn. The piano is placed against this block of wind sonority as an equal partner, sustaining the music’s flow, acting as harmonic support for the winds or engaging in dialogue with them, but rarely simply doubling their lines. This careful orchestration creates a wide range of instrumental colors, and it is possible that it was precisely this technique which prompted Mozart’s high praise for the piece to his father: in 1784, there was not another musician anywhere, not even Haydn, who could have written a work of comparable instrumental felicity. Beethoven so admired the piece that he modeled his Quintet, Op. 16 (1796-1797), almost slavishly upon it. The Quintet’s opening movement, bursting with melody, begins with a slow introduction followed by a sonata-form essay with a tiny development section. (One- or two-keyed 18th-century wind instruments were limited in their chromatic possibilities, and did not lend themselves to the harmonic peregrinations of Mozart’s more elaborate thematic developments.) The Larghetto, also in sonata form, is Page 5 (1/31/20) sweet and limpid. The finale is a perky rondo with a written-out cadenza near the end marked by entrances in close imitation. ©2020 Dr. Richard E. Rodda