Our program features music that derives from a vocal impulse:
Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet is so named, as it pays homage—in its central movement of theme and variations– to his previously-written and highly popular song about a fish. Francine Trester’s new work is based on text by children and teachers at schools funded by Communities Without Borders in Zambia. And, in Robert Schumann’s 2nd piano trio, the composer bases the second theme of his first movement on one of his earlier love songs to his wife Clara.
Piano Quintet in A Major, D.667 (1819) Franz Schubert
Anselm Hüttenbrenner, one of Schubert’s regular drinking partners, loved to tell the story of the night he invited the composer over to share some bottles of Szekszárd, a Hungarian red wine he had received as a gift. They drained the wine to the last drop, he said, and then Schubert sat down and composed the wonderfully lovely song, Die Forelle [“The Trout”], from which this famous piano quintet takes its name. Schubert even dated the manuscript “at 12 o’clock at night,” to pinpoint the moment that yet another song poured forth as freely as wine. That was on Feb. 11, 1818. In fact, Schubert had composed Die Forelle early in 1817; he was merely writing it out from memory for his dear friend that night a year later, under the beneficial influence of the blood-red Kadarka grape, and he was probably far too giddy to worry about fraud. For many years, Schubert’s reputation rested on such anecdotes, which created an abiding image of him as a good sport who composed music quickly and without effort. Hüttenbrenner apparently was not even suspicious when Schubert appeared to compose Die Forelle off the top of his head, without once stopping to change a note, in handwriting as clean and legible as possible after several bottles of Szekszárd.
It has taken musicians some time to recognize that Schubert’s beguiling natural voice was the result of serious study, hard work, vision and the kind of inner struggle we associate with his Viennese contemporary, Beethoven. Even Robert Schumann, who understood the true depth of Schubert’s genius better than anyone else at the time, once described him as a “guileless child romping among giants.” Both the song Die Forelle, which reveals Schubert’s most playful side, and the great piano quintet, which treats the Forelle theme to a magnificent set of variations, have only perpetuated this image over the decades, for these two have long been among Schubert’s most popular works.
The song itself, a setting of a commonplace poem by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, is one of Schubert’s most felicitous creations. It was probably composed early in 1817 — Schubert was just 20 years old — although the exact timing can’t be determined because the first draft is lost. The years 1815 to 1817 are the heyday of Schubert’s songwriting; more than 300 songs can be dated to that three-year outpouring alone, and 1817, although responsible for fewer works than the previous two years, produced some of his greatest songs, including An die Musik and Der Tod und Das Mädchen [“Death and the Maiden”]. Die Forelle, a delightful song in three stanzas, with the third unexpectedly different from the first two, quickly became a favorite, and to meet the unusual demand, Schubert made several copies of the song, each time changing details ever so slightly. (He fussed in particular with how it begins and ends; the familiar opening piano figuration as we know it appears in only one version.) This was one of his best-loved songs almost from the start, and it remains so today.
Die Forelle, however, went on to even greater popularity once it became the anchor of a new piece of chamber music composed two years later. Schubert and his friend Josef Vogl spent the summer of 1819 in the town of Steyr, nestled in the “inconceivably lovely” countryside some 90 miles west of Vienna. There they met Sylvester Paumgartner, a rich merchant and enthusiastic cellist with more money than talent. His large home included a well-stocked music library, a music room on the first floor, and a grand performing salon upstairs. He told Schubert that he loved Die Forelle and commissioned him to write a chamber work that incorporated a set of variations on the tune.
Die Forelle is the basis for just a single movement of the quintet, yet the naturalness of its lyrical effusion and the pictorial quality of the accompanying figures — as well as the sheer joy it communicates about the very process of making music — has infected the entire composition. The Trout Quintet represents Schubert at his most natural, unaffected and carefree. In fact, this is truly music of Schubert’s innocence, before he contracted syphilis, probably late in 1822, and began to see life, and therefore music, in a darker and more complex light.
Schubert writes not four movements, as convention dictate, but five: an exploratory sonata-form movement, a songlike andante, a dazzling scherzo, and the requested set of variations on Die Forelle slipped in just before the rollicking finale. Schubert used to be faulted for writing sonata-form movements that were so different from those by Mozart or Beethoven — Schubert’s start developing things before the so-called development section and play fast and loose with the common key scheme. In time, he has been more rightly understood as one of the earliest and boldest of the great romantic innovators, breaking with classical procedures again and again in favor of brazen harmonic license and freedom of form.
Not one of Schubert’s five movements is quite textbook standard, because Schubert was working with harmonic colors he loved — the very opening of the first movement slips unconventionally from A major to F major and back again — and developing long forms built as much on the narrative power of extended melody as on classical harmonic tension. Schubert is one of music’s greatest storytellers, and melody is his voice — unforgettable and innately compelling, drawing us in and leading us on, in a way known to few composers.
In the fourth-movement set of variations on “Die Forelle,” Schubert dissects his little song and finds in it a world of ideas to investigate. With his born sense of development — not in the strict classical meaning, but as a freewheeling process of exploration and invention — he manages to make great things of even the tiniest detail, such as the piano’s bubbling arpeggios, originally written to depict the darting fish and the sparkling waters in the poem by Schubart, whose name would soon no longer be confused with Schubert’s.
Notes by Phillip Huscher
“Sekelela (Rejoice)”, 2018 Francine Trester
“Sekelela (Rejoice)” and the five poems you have in today’s program are based on the writings of Zambian students and teachers who have benefited from the work of Communities Without Borders. I encountered their writing through “Sekelela Magazine,” “Living Hope Magazine,” and captions students had written to accompany photos they had taken of their teachers and peers. At turns funny, sad, and beautiful, these quotes had an immediacy that resonated deeply. They are specific to circumstance and universal at once, united by the common thread of hope.
The quotes are based on the writings of: Sarah Ngoma, Jennifer Lungu, Farai Mweetwa, Kaumbi Always, and Patrick Zulu along with students of the Living Hope Foundation – Francine Trester, 2019
I.
I saw a little girl
Who was trying to hold,
Trying to hold
A pencil
She was trying to read
Trying to read
And write
But she didn’t know how
For children to progress
They must know how
How to read
And write
How to hold a pencil
The alphabet
From A to Z…
I’ve been giving
Extra lessons
Vowels and phonetics
Correct pronunciation
And one thing…
One thing we do here
Is share the same love
Joy, peace
Care for all
How to hold a pencil
How to read and write
How to hold
How to hold
Hold…
II.
“Sometimes I feel
Like I should give up on school
Do other things…”
I told her
These things do happen
But they are not the end of the world
Sekelela will offer you
And your sisters
All you need in education
Bring them here
So they can be in class
From now on
You need to be free
Express yourself to me
Or your other teachers
Now she’s in 8th grade,
In 8th grade now
She became
Free
III.
What we need:
Electricity
Salaries
Five more classrooms
A library
Computers
Water
Books
Enough food
Proper kitchen
Water
Enough Water
Our bore hole dries up
Mostly after rain,
After the rainy season
For this reason
Our school
Has failed
To have a garden
IV.
This photo shows the style
Of a very real and assertive kid
Real and assertive
Look at two fingers
And the way they are pointing
At the camera
The lady’s eyes
And a smile
LOL…
V.
This photo reminds me of nature
And wherever I am
I am reminded of nature
I am reminded of God
The Creator
Of Heaven
And Earth
Piano Trio #2 in F Major, Op. 80 (1847) Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Although not as enigmatically idiosyncratic as his earlier piano music, Schumann’s chamber music—most of which dates from 1842—nevertheless bears the stamp of his highly original, emotionally- charged musical spirit. His first essay for piano trio, a set of four vignettes called Fantasy Pieces, Op. 88, was written during that year—but bears a higher opus number than the D minor and F Major trios, perhaps because of a later publication date. Although they are lovely and full of character, Schumann’s use of his instrumental resources is rather limited: he treats the strings more as doublings of the piano’s lines than as independent voices in their own right.
Of the three major works for this ensemble which followed, the first two were written in rapid succession: the Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 63, during the summer of 1847, perhaps stimulated competitively by the recent completion of his wife Clara’s Piano Trio in G minor; and the F Major Trio was soon to follow suit. Another factor that may have led to his interest in writing a piano trio at this time was his immersion, in 1845, in contrapuntal study, which gave him the confidence to write more vivid and intricate part-writing.
The second of Schumann’s two 1847 piano trios could hardly be more different from trio #1. As opposed to the tumultuous and impassioned D minor Trio, the F major Trio is ebullient and filled with confident energy. It is a work which, as the composer himself said, ‘makes a friendlier and more immediate impression’. Once again Schumann demonstrates his mastery of “Witz”: the principle at work in the novels of the contemporary German novelist Jean Paul Richter—the subliminal referents that bind seemingly disparate elements together, or the idea of unity in diversity. For example, the opening movement’s gentle second subject, although it sounds utterly new, is actually a rhythmically varied version of the highly energetic main theme. A staccato idea in the piano which follows it, with strategically -placed accents highlighting a sequence of descending thirds, will provide the basis for some intensely contrapuntal arguments in the development section; but before it can do so, Schumann introduces a broad new melody — an unmistakable self-quotation from his song Dein Bildnis wunderselig, from the Eichendorff Liederkreis, Op 39. The melody arises out of an important subsidiary motif which bridges the movement’s two main themes, and Schumann points up the relationship between the two ideas much later on, in the coda. Here, in its first appearance at the cusp between the exposition and development—a point of least dramatic tension– this melodic fragment serves as a moment outside of the time-frame of the piece—a memory, a dream or a love letter “in a bottle” to his beloved Clara, as he was wont to send to her in his music through symbolic reference to bits of his or her musical thoughts. It then serves as the basis for much of the development section’s contrapuntal activity, almost as a musical metaphor for the act of working psychically through his thoughts and feelings of her. Then, at the end of the piece, this tune resurfaces and through a remarkably inspired stroke, Schumann has the music enact a kind of break-through process. Vertiginous, metrically unhinged bits of theme, spin in a convolution of activity until the ‘Dein Bildnis’ theme emerges from the depths of inwardness, in a vibrant canon between piano and strings, for an ecstatic vision of Dream actually becoming Reality!
Leaving the first movement’s earthbound key of F Major to begin the slow movement in the remote key of D-flat Major enhances the dreamy, otherworldly atmosphere of this tender love song. The actual directionality of the melodic lines—violin wafting down; cello and piano striving upward—suggest viscerally a yearning and reaching toward each other. This sense of striving exists also on the harmonic plane: the only arrival on the home key is realized virtually toward the end– within the last few lines of the movement.
No less song-like than the opening movement’s Eichendorff quotation, and most likely inspired by its melodic profile, is the melody, first unfurled by the violin in the opening measures. The cello and the piano are nevertheless equally significant here, for they play a long-sustained canon with each other; furthermore, the chromatically rising phrase with which the canon begins, is one that will assume great importance in the future progress of the piece. Like Schumann’s idol, Beethoven, in his late works, and no doubt influenced by the novels of Jean Paul Richter, Schumann’s literary inspiration, here we have a remarkable musical journey inward. Schumann conjures different qualities and senses of time and memory, and dares to evoke the complex vagaries of psychic processes. An analysis of the craft here can easily illuminate the many motivic connections and obvious repetitions that abound; but, the aural experience is one of a deeply-felt organic process rather than an intellectual realization. The music asks a question early on in this movement, which remains unanswered until, finally, near the end, when the question returns, we sense that the musical elements are now patiently listening to each other, hearts open to each other, and the answer comes as a blessing.
The third movement is a kind of melancholy ländler based on the sighing, descending 5th interval identified by Robert in many of his pieces as the “Clara” motif. At the outset, Schumann artfully presents the theme as a canon in varied instrumental combinations: first, piano/cello, then violin/cello, and piano/ violin. According to the composer: “the best fugue will always be the one that the public takes for a Strauss waltz; in other words, where the artistic roots are covered as are those of a flower, so that we only perceive the blossom”. Here, the contrapuntal writing, conspiring with the minor mode and the sighing gesture, suggest unfulfilled yearning, as the voices reach toward each other, but are, sadly, out of sync with each other. The rising figuration of the more flowing and hopeful middle section is taken over into the first half of the reprise, before a coda binds the two parts of the piece together and gives a brief foreshadowing of the last movement.
The finale ushers us into a return of the opening movement’s ebullient, fun-loving, rhythmically robust and vivid character. The entire movement draws its material from the three main constituents of its opening theme: the sinuous legato phrases with which the piano launches the piece; the staccato idea with which the cello responds, and will provide the basis for some close-knit imitative writing later on, when troubling thoughts again emerge; and the first assertive phrase on the violin, which returns to form an important secondary theme. It is as if the music as protagonist, after the ruminations and sadness of the second and third movement, is now “trying on” the possibility of being “in the moment”—does it dare to be jovial and fun-loving again? We sense the alternation of confidence and self-doubt; and the working through of these contradictory states, finally gives rise and release to a hard-won, “over-the-top” exhilaration.
Notes by Lois Shapiro
