The program notes of the upcoming concert:
QUATOR DANEL
Tchaikovsky-Quartet No. 1:
Tchaikovsky was a late starter as a composer, having been slated for a career as a lawyer at the behest of his parents. At twenty, he resigned his post of the Ministry of Justice to eke out a marginal existence as a music teacher, working out of a small single room furnished only with a bed and a writing table. At age twenty-three, he began classes in composition at St. Petersburg’s conservatory, composing about a dozen chamber works as student exercises. In 1866 he took a post at Moscow Conservatory as Professor of Harmony. Here he found a fine resident string quartet. In January 1871 Nicholas Rubinstein, founder and head of the Conservatory, proposed an all-Tchaikovsky concert. The young composer responded by writing his Op. 11 quartet, completing it in time for the March 28 concert, which was a great success.
The first movement is the longest of the four, characterized by complex rhythms and a variegated development. It ends with an upbeat rush-a perfect setting for the beautiful, simple Andante cantabile second movement, probably the most popular thing Tchaikovsky ever wrote. He based this on a folk song he had heard two years earlier while visiting his sister in Kamenka. Although the words of the song were banal (“Vanya sat on the divan and smoked a pipe of tobacco”), the music stayed with him and remains popular to this day. The third movement is an energetic, bouncy Scherzo, reminiscent of Schumann or Beethoven, with a delightful trio that slows the pace before the first section returns to lead us to the quizzical end. The finale is energetic and features a dialog of cello and viola before the quartet ends in a brilliant coda. –Craig Leman, 1998
Janácek-Quartet “Kreutzer Sonata”:
At seventy, Janácek reworked and incorporated an earlier piano trio into this work in just a week. He subtitled it “Inspired by L.N. Tolstoy’s ‘Kreutzersonata’…. I had in mind the pitiable woman who is maltreated, beaten and murdered, such as is described by Tolstoy in his story.” As in most of his works in every genre, folk melodies abound from the two-bar theme that opens the adagio and soon gives way to a light dance tune. The adagio theme recurs in the finale. Janácek anticipated Bartok in his adaptation of folk idiom and rhythms.
Czech composers tend to have a dual orientation: toward the east (folk music of Moravia and Slovakia), and the west (the classic-romantic tradition). Smetana and Dvorak leaned west; Janácek plunged east. His feeling about folk music were almost mystical: “Folk song-I have lived in it since childhood….In folk song the entire man is enshrined…Therefore I believe that as soon as our art music originates from this popular source, we shall become brethren in the creation of that music; a community will thus arise encompassing all mankind. Folk song unites a people; it unites nations and mankind itself in one spirit of happiness and contentment.” Janácek might have enjoyed Woodstock. –Craig Leman, 1982
Beethoven-Op. 59 No. 1:
This quartet was the product of a 35-year-old Beethoven at the zenith of his creative powers. Count Andrei Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna, who played second violin in his own quartet, commissioned three string quartets from Beethoven, who used several themes from Russian folk songs to honor his patron. The ebullient, swinging, expansive opening theme returns in many guises throughout Beethoven’s ingenious development. Contrary to usual practice, each movement is in sonata form; the first is the longest and the broadest in range. The end of the movement is classic Beethoven: a tender questioning phrase, a transition, then a crashing resolution.
The cello’s rhythmic repetition of B-flat introduces a second movement unique among string quartets. Again, Beethoven builds a monument of sonata structure on a skeletal framework of monotone-in Tovey’s words, “a vision of dry bones.” If the first movement is a superb exercise of melody, the second movement is an apotheosis of rhythm.
The adagio is an introspective lament that matches the pathos of the slow movements of the late quartets of two decades later. After a complex development, Beethoven uses a long violin trill to lead us into the lively finale. The “theme russe” –long, discursive, and reminiscent of the great theme that introduced the first movement-was a Russian tune in a book of folk songs that Beethoven owned and annotated in his own hand. Although many commentators have caviled that the finale is on a slightly less exalted plane the rest of the quartet, others find the complex, brilliant development of this theme a powerful, dramatic and wholly satisfying conclusion to the work.
Beethoven’s innovations were too much for some of his contemporaries. The cellist in Razumovsky’s Quartet found his part so complicated that he gave up, threw it on the floor and declared it unplayable. We do not know just how Count Razumovsky resolved this little labor dispute. That was one hundred eighty years ago. The work was a landmark, even for Beethoven. –Craig Leman, 1987
Tchaikovsky was a late starter as a composer, having been slated for a career as a lawyer at the behest of his parents. At twenty, he resigned his post of the Ministry of Justice to eke out a marginal existence as a music teacher, working out of a small single room furnished only with a bed and a writing table. At age twenty-three, he began classes in composition at St. Petersburg’s conservatory, composing about a dozen chamber works as student exercises. In 1866 he took a post at Moscow Conservatory as Professor of Harmony. Here he found a fine resident string quartet. In January 1871 Nicholas Rubinstein, founder and head of the Conservatory, proposed an all-Tchaikovsky concert. The young composer responded by writing his Op. 11 quartet, completing it in time for the March 28 concert, which was a great success.
The first movement is the longest of the four, characterized by complex rhythms and a variegated development. It ends with an upbeat rush-a perfect setting for the beautiful, simple Andante cantabile second movement, probably the most popular thing Tchaikovsky ever wrote. He based this on a folk song he had heard two years earlier while visiting his sister in Kamenka. Although the words of the song were banal (“Vanya sat on the divan and smoked a pipe of tobacco”), the music stayed with him and remains popular to this day. The third movement is an energetic, bouncy Scherzo, reminiscent of Schumann or Beethoven, with a delightful trio that slows the pace before the first section returns to lead us to the quizzical end. The finale is energetic and features a dialog of cello and viola before the quartet ends in a brilliant coda. –Craig Leman, 1998
Janácek-Quartet “Kreutzer Sonata”:
At seventy, Janácek reworked and incorporated an earlier piano trio into this work in just a week. He subtitled it “Inspired by L.N. Tolstoy’s ‘Kreutzersonata’…. I had in mind the pitiable woman who is maltreated, beaten and murdered, such as is described by Tolstoy in his story.” As in most of his works in every genre, folk melodies abound from the two-bar theme that opens the adagio and soon gives way to a light dance tune. The adagio theme recurs in the finale. Janácek anticipated Bartok in his adaptation of folk idiom and rhythms.
Czech composers tend to have a dual orientation: toward the east (folk music of Moravia and Slovakia), and the west (the classic-romantic tradition). Smetana and Dvorak leaned west; Janácek plunged east. His feeling about folk music were almost mystical: “Folk song-I have lived in it since childhood….In folk song the entire man is enshrined…Therefore I believe that as soon as our art music originates from this popular source, we shall become brethren in the creation of that music; a community will thus arise encompassing all mankind. Folk song unites a people; it unites nations and mankind itself in one spirit of happiness and contentment.” Janácek might have enjoyed Woodstock. –Craig Leman, 1982
Beethoven-Op. 59 No. 1:
This quartet was the product of a 35-year-old Beethoven at the zenith of his creative powers. Count Andrei Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna, who played second violin in his own quartet, commissioned three string quartets from Beethoven, who used several themes from Russian folk songs to honor his patron. The ebullient, swinging, expansive opening theme returns in many guises throughout Beethoven’s ingenious development. Contrary to usual practice, each movement is in sonata form; the first is the longest and the broadest in range. The end of the movement is classic Beethoven: a tender questioning phrase, a transition, then a crashing resolution.
The cello’s rhythmic repetition of B-flat introduces a second movement unique among string quartets. Again, Beethoven builds a monument of sonata structure on a skeletal framework of monotone-in Tovey’s words, “a vision of dry bones.” If the first movement is a superb exercise of melody, the second movement is an apotheosis of rhythm.
The adagio is an introspective lament that matches the pathos of the slow movements of the late quartets of two decades later. After a complex development, Beethoven uses a long violin trill to lead us into the lively finale. The “theme russe” –long, discursive, and reminiscent of the great theme that introduced the first movement-was a Russian tune in a book of folk songs that Beethoven owned and annotated in his own hand. Although many commentators have caviled that the finale is on a slightly less exalted plane the rest of the quartet, others find the complex, brilliant development of this theme a powerful, dramatic and wholly satisfying conclusion to the work.
Beethoven’s innovations were too much for some of his contemporaries. The cellist in Razumovsky’s Quartet found his part so complicated that he gave up, threw it on the floor and declared it unplayable. We do not know just how Count Razumovsky resolved this little labor dispute. That was one hundred eighty years ago. The work was a landmark, even for Beethoven. –Craig Leman, 1987
Chamber Music Corvallis receives support from the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the State of Oregon.
