Season 26

Ernest Chausson (1855-1899)

Concert in D Major, Op. 21 for piano, violin & string quartet (1889-91) 
— Cuellar, Yamamoto, Ching, Fedkenheuer, Largess, Gindele

“Serious” music had a hard time in late 19^th and early 20^th century France. French musical culture centered around three great institutions: the Paris Conservatoire, the Paris Opéra, and the Paris Opéra-Comique. The Conservatoire existed primarily to train musicians to compose and perform opera, and the two opera theaters existed to present the fruits of all this labor to the public. Instrumental concerts as we know them today were quite a rarity in Paris, and the few concerts that were produced had programs filled with opera overtures, transcriptions, and paraphrases—in other words, “lite” fare. The government subsidized opera generously, but generally chose not to subsidize concert performances, for these were felt to compete with the national theaters.

After the death of Berlioz in 1869, only the great Belgian-turned-Parisian composer César Franck remained to uphold the value of “serious” concert music. Franck was a great admirer of Liszt, Wagner, and German music in general, and emulated many aspects of Germanic music. (As you will remember from my discussion of Vincent d’Indy, this was quite unusual for the time. The Franco-Prussian War of 1871 created a lot of anti-German sentiment in France.) He passed this enthusiasm and admiration on to his students, establishing what we now view as a “Franckist” school of composition. Among his many students, none carried the mantle of “Franckism” more fully, proudly, and successfully than Ernest Chausson.

Though he showed an early aptitude for music, Chausson was pressed by his family to pursue a legal career. After completing his law degree to satisfy his family, he turned to music, becoming one of Franck’s most devoted pupils. Luckily for Chausson, he was independently quite well-off and thus avoided the need to have to earn a living through composition. He used his time and wealth to write his own music and help his fellow composers. (He gave serious financial help to Debussy, for instance.)  In 1886 Chausson became the secretary of the Société National de Musique, an organization founded in 1871 by Saint-Saëns, Franck, Fauré, and others to promote “serious” French music. Created under the banner “Ars Gallica,” the Société intended to promote a revitalization of French concert music. Many of Chausson’s works received their first performances at meetings of the Société. 

Also in 1886, Chausson began writing his Wagnerian opera Le roi Arthus (King Arthur); it was not to be completed until 1895. In writing this opera, he developed an elevated style of expressive lyricism and an ease with Wagner’s chromatic harmony. Those developments spilled over into two of his most important compositions from the same time period, the Symphony in B-flat Major, Op. 20 (1889-90), and the Concert in D Major, Op. 21.

The Concert was premiered in Brussels in 1892, with the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe playing the demanding solo violin part. Chausson wrote in his diary, “Never have I had such a success! I can’t get over it…. Everyone seems to love the Concert…. It seems to me that I will work with greater confidence in the future.” Indeed, the Concert was his first critically-acclaimed work. It is a massive and magnificent piece in four movements, unique in its genre and instrumentation. To entitle the piece, Chausson used the French word concert—a very ambiguous word. Concert can mean “concerto” in the sense of a work for a soloist accompanied by an orchestra. But Concert is also the term used by French Baroque composers Couperin and Rameau to describe chamber compositions—trios, quartets, quintets. Pieces were also written en concert—various instruments playing together as more-or-less equals. Chausson’s Concert is all these things and none of them—truly sui generis, as Chausson himself hints at when he described the piano and violin as “projections against a quartet background.”

The first movement opens with a fortissimo three-note motive in the piano, echoed by the string quartet. After a brooding dialogue between the piano and the quartet, the solo violin enters with a glorious, long-spun melody, propelled forward by virtuosic passagework from the piano. The second movement, a Sicilienne, functions as the scherzo of the work. It is a beautiful lilting dance full of lyrical melody. The third movement, a deeply felt lament, has much of the dark and gloomy mood of Chausson’s Le roi Arthus. That mood is dispelled by the euphoric finale, a movement that has an infectious, almost primitive energy. Chausson’s Concert is a thrilling, memorable ride from beginning to end, and one of the glories of French chamber music.

YAP SHOWCASE
Reinhold Gliere (1875-1956)

Sextet, Op. 11, IV excerpt (1905) 
— “The Octaves”: Nellie Ingram, Sara Garcia Villar, violins; Christina Liu, Brian Echeveste, violas; Katherine Beebe, Sydney Rakowitz, cellos

Ernst von Dohnányi (1877-1960)
Sextet in C Major, Op. 37 for piano, violin, viola, cello, clarinet & horn (1935) 
  — Yanagitani, Sant’Ambrogio, Bryla-Weiss, Kostov, Shterenberg, Garza

Composer, pianist, conductor, and pedagogue Ernst von Dohnányi showed much aptitude for music as a child. At age 17, he enrolled in the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music. His piano professor had been a favorite pupil of Liszt; his composition teacher was a devotee of the music of Brahms. Small wonder that Dohnányi turned out to be a major piano virtuoso in the mold of Liszt with a compositional style that tends to follow the lead of Brahms. (Though Dohnányi was a strong supporter of the work of his compatriots and friends Bartók and Kodaly, his musical language is romantic in style, not based in Hungarian folksong like that of Bartók and Kodaly.) He became a dominating force in Hungarian musical circles, serving at various times as chief conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, the director of the Academy of Music, and the music director of the Hungarian Radio. Dohnányi was also an ardent defender of Jewish musicians during World War II; Zoltán Kodály reported that Dohnányi’s efforts saved hundreds of Jewish musicians during the war.

He was the first among world-famous pianists to perform chamber music regularly; he wrote his first published work, the Piano Quintet in C Minor, Op. 1, specifically to play in his own concerts. It’s not a surprise, then, that Dohnányi was a prolific composer of chamber music. His output includes two piano quintets, an unpublished but glorious piano quartet, three string quartets, a magnificent Serenade for string trio, and his last chamber work, the great Sextet in C Major, Op. 37. It was written in 1935, a period when he was suffering from a serious bout of thrombosis. How he could write such enthusiastic, optimistic, witty music while he was sick is a mystery. In the dedication to his Variations on a Nursery Song, Dohnányi had written, "To the enjoyment of lovers of humor, and to the annoyance of others"; the same dedication could well apply to the Sextet. Throughout the work, we can hear the influence of early jazz in the harmony and rhythm.

The first movement is big and turbulent; it begins in media res with a magnificent heroic melody played by the horn. But that heroism is tested; the overall mood of the movement is dark and ominous. The second movement, an Intermezzo, combines some atmospheric writing with a menacing slow march, heightening the tension. The third movement, a set of variations, lightens the mood. At the end of this movement, we hear the heroic melody of the first movement reappear, ushering us into the madcap finale. Marked giocoso (“playful”), the charm and wit hide the extreme sophistication of the writing. All in all, Dohnányi’s Sextet is a towering masterpiece, requiring six masterful musicians to pull it off.

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