WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Piano Quartet in G Minor, K. 478
About the Composer
Mozart essentially invented the piano quartet as a chamber music genre by adding a viola to the already standardized trio ensemble of piano, violin, and cello. By the time he reached the age of 30, the composer—once a violinist of considerable virtuosity—preferred to play the viola, an instrument that allowed him to luxuriate in the rich center of his harmonies. But as Mozart was still Vienna’s leading keyboard virtuoso, he furnished elaborate piano parts for his two piano quartets, K. 478 in G minor (which we hear on this evening’s program) and K. 493 in E-flat major. Which instrument Mozart ultimately chose for himself in performances of the G-Minor Quartet we do not know, but he ensured that playing either part would give him a satisfying experience. So brilliant is the piano writing in the G-Minor Quartet—similar to the parts Mozart was then writing for his piano concertos—that it’s hard to believe he would have given it up to anyone else.
About the Work
Georg Nissen—who married Mozart’s widow, Constanze—reported that in 1785 the publisher Franz Hoffmeister had commissioned a set of three piano quartets from Mozart. According to Nissen’s story, when the G-Minor Quartet was delivered, Hoffmeister cancelled the order for the others because he felt the work was too complex for popular taste, and the four parts required more virtuosity than most amateurs could muster. Rather than courting public favor as he had done earlier in his Viennese career, Mozart was now pushing the envelope with nearly everything he wrote. Another publisher, Artaria, eventually published his E-flat Major Quartet, but a third piano quartet was never written.
The key of G minor was special for Mozart, and one he rarely used. It is the key of his two most turbulent symphonies, Symphony No. 25 (used to stunning effect at the beginning of the film Amadeus) and the great Symphony No. 40. For Mozart, who was highly attuned to the distinctive characters of each key, G minor was a dramatic key to be used for expressing very private and emotionally charged thoughts.
A Closer Listen
The G-Minor Quartet’s first movement—the only one actually in G minor—opens with a fierce motif proclaimed by the quartet in unison, what Mozart biographer Alfred Einstein has called “a wild command” and a “fate motif” in the manner of the famous four-note opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. And indeed it haunts this movement almost as much as Beethoven’s motif haunts his symphony. Nearly equally important is the piano’s answering leap and plummeting scale, which ambiguously seems both a protest and a pacifier. The strings also try to make peace. Although the fate motif dominates the exposition, the piano eventually leads off a development in quite a different mood, using a lovely new melody and looking ahead to the Romantic reveries of Chopin. But fate soon intrudes again. The development leads promptly to the recapitulation, which in Mozart’s mature practice was an imaginative further development of the exposition rather than a simple reprise. The coda vehemently hammers home the fate motif.
Though it moves to the relative major of B-flat, the second movement retains a sense of gravity and sadness in its flowing song. Touches of chromaticism in melody and harmony cast their shadows, and rippling scale passages continually passed from one instrument to another provide energy.
Gravity and fate are forgotten in the infectious Rondo finale in one of Mozart’s happiest keys, G major. Not only is the refrain (introduced by the piano) a winning tune, but Mozart has more equally attractive ones ready as well, including a winsomely sashaying dance in his first episode. The virtuosity of the piano part and its leadership in introducing all the sections of the Rondo tips the balance here away from chamber music toward the feeling of a piano concerto on a very intimate scale.
GABRIEL FAURÉ
Piano Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 15
About the Composer
Throughout most of the 19th century, chamber music languished in a France that was more interested in the five-act spectacles at the Paris Opéra than the modest intimacy of a few musicians playing together on a bare stage. In 1871, Camille Saint-Saëns and others founded the Société Nationale de Musique to promote new French music in all genres. Without this forum, the young Gabriel Fauré would probably never have attempted his First Violin Sonata; its success at its premiere in January 1877 prompted Fauré’s continued work on his First Piano Quartet in C Minor. Also premiered at the Société Nationale de Musique’s concerts on February 14, 1880, the C-Minor Quartet would become the most popular of Fauré’s chamber works.
About the Work
Written between 1876 and 1879, the C-Minor Quartet represented an artistically assisted recovery from the most serious emotional trauma of Fauré’s early life. In 1872, Saint-Saëns introduced his protégé Fauré into the brilliant salon of singer Pauline Viardot. More than a great singing actress, Viardot was an intelligent and mesmerizing woman who attracted an extraordinary ensemble of musical and literary stars into her web, including Liszt, Flaubert, George Sand, and Russian novelist Turgenev. The impressionable Fauré was accepted into this glittering world and became virtually a member of the Viardot family. He soon fell passionately in love with Viardot’s daughter Marianne, a gentle, emotionally fragile girl who was quite frightened by Fauré’s ardent attentions. In 1877, she reluctantly agreed to marry him, but then broke off the engagement after a few months. The composer was emotionally devastated, yet the rejection substantially deepened his musical art.
An outstanding performer on both the piano and organ, Fauré wrote the C-Minor Quartet’s piano part for himself to play, and though it demands exceptional virtuosity, the string trio is well-balanced against it. Fauré also clearly had taken inspiration from Brahms’s masterly three piano quartets, for one hears many echoes of Brahms’s power amid Fauré’s Gallic lightness and modal-inflected melodies.
A Closer Listen
Youthful energy and formal control combine in the very traditional first movement in sonata form. The three strings playing in unison introduce the warmly passionate principal theme, which is given rhythmic interest by the piano’s off-beat accents. This theme is layered in counterpoint between the instruments. A cascade of piano arpeggios and scales then usher in the gently oscillating second theme, begun by the viola. The rather lengthy development section is quieter and more introspective, ruminating mostly over the first theme in elegant counterpoint, but it ultimately builds to a dramatic climax that leads to the recapitulation.The second movement is a gossamer, witty Scherzo, containing two important musical elements—the strings’ rhythmic pizzicato chords and the piano’s fleet, feather-light scales—that are traded rapidly back and forth. Simultaneously, the meter shifts playfully between 6/8 and 2/4. The movement’s trio midsection is a fascinating sonic and rhythmic duel between the piano’s limpid arpeggios and the now-muted strings playing a suave but rhythmically conflicting melody in crooning close harmony. Debussy’s and Ravel’s later quartets would take inspiration from this brilliant movement.
Only in the beautiful Adagio movement in C minor does Fauré reveal something of his recent heartbreak. A noble melody—introduced by the cello but with the other strings gradually swelling its tone—yearns upward without being able to reach its goal. The atmosphere becomes darker and bleaker. But then the violin in high register offers a tenderly consoling melody. Later, when the yearning first theme returns, it is lifted by the piano’s glittering arpeggios and loses its sense of tragedy. Just before the end, the piano blesses this more optimistic resolution with a lovely return of the consoling theme.
The sweeping, energetic finale was completely rewritten in 1883, several years after Fauré’s trauma, and renounces all traces of despair. The principal theme also ascends, as did the Adagio’s, but now boldly and confidently. The second theme is a most appealing creation: a broad, smoothly soaring melody introduced by the viola and quickly taken up by the others. And in this sonata-form movement, it is this transcendent melody that finally carries the quartet to a rapturous C-major conclusion.
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81
About the Composer
When he composed his mature Piano Quintet in A Major in 1887, Antonín Dvořák was at the peak of his career, celebrated throughout Europe and besieged with demands for new works. Just 10 years earlier, he had been a relatively unknown Czech composer, struggling to support his family by teaching after he gave up his position as principal violist at Prague’s Provisional Theatre. In 1877, Johannes Brahms—serving on a jury to award stipends to gifted composers in the outlying provinces of the Austrian Empire—became impressed with the work Dvořák had submitted. Brahms immediately took action, recommending Dvořák to his own Berlin publisher, Simrock, and helping secure performances of the Bohemian composer’s music.
Brahms’s faith in Dvořák was amply justified. Now Dvořák not only could support his family solely through composing, but he had money enough for a modest extravagance for himself. The son of a butcher, the composer never let success spoil him, but always remained close to his peasant roots. Thus, he chose to build a small farm on his brother-in-law’s estate at Vysoká, a country village not far from Prague. It was here that Dvořák spent his summers and autumns playing gentleman farmer and composing. He loved the rural peace, unpretentious company of the villagers, and especially raising pigeons.
About the Work
Between August and October 1887, Dvořák composed his Piano Quintet in A Major at Vysoká. But this was not his first work in the form. He was then reviewing the many unpublished works created during his years of obscurity and revising some of them for Simrock. He began reworking another piano quintet, also in A major, from 1872, but soon grew dissatisfied. A fresh effort was needed, and it resulted in one of the very best of his more than 30 chamber works.
Since his background was as a violinist and violist, Dvořák always found writing for strings more congenial than writing for piano. But in the quintet, the strong and idiomatic piano part is fully an equal. The balance between all five instruments is superb, as is the balance between melodic inspiration and formal mastery. The quintet is also marked by an emotional mutability that, according to biographers, was characteristic of Dvořák’s personality. Moods shift rapidly throughout, with melancholy abruptly changing to fierce optimism, serenity to impatience.
A Closer Listen
The mood shifts begin immediately in the Allegro, ma non tanto first movement. We hear the principal theme presented in two dramatically contrasted versions: first as a softly lyrical, slightly melancholy melody for the cello over rippling piano arpeggios, and then as a vehement fortissimo statement led by the violins. In a Dvořákian trademark, the music begins shading away from A major toward the minor mode almost immediately. And the nervously winding second theme, introduced by the viola, moves decisively into C-sharp minor; in another mood change, it grows swiftly from gentleness to impatience, driven by the piano. The splendid development section explores both themes in moods by turns sorrowing and fiery. This closes in an exciting buildup that explodes into a dramatic recapitulation of the principal theme in yet another transformation, now dominated by the stentorian octaves of the piano.Dvořák loved the dumka, a lamenting song of Ukrainian origin. In the second movement, we hear one of his best. The hauntingly beautiful melody serves as a refrain, linking the sections of a spacious rondo form. Dvořák emphasizes its gentle sadness by giving it first to the plangent-toned viola. Accenting the melody is an exquisite miniature refrain of downward cascades in the piano. Over the course of the movement, everyone in the ensemble has a chance at both elements as Dvořák brings back his dumka theme in superbly varied arrangements; the brilliant middle episode in vivace tempo is actually a cleverly sped-up version of that theme.
Dvořák called his Scherzo movement a furiant. However, this Czech folk dance is usually characterized by an alternation of three-beat and two-beat measures; this one keeps whirling along in a waltz-like fashion. In compensation for the lack of rhythmic intrigue, the music emphasizes melody with three themes presented in quick succession in different instruments. Rhythmic conflict is used very subtly in the opening of the middle trio section, with the strings gently out of phase with the piano. This section is the movement’s jewel: music of enchanted rural peace that seems like a sound portrait of Vysoká.
The quintet closes with an impetuous whirlwind Finale. A fast, dotted rhythm propels nearly everything: It launches both of this sonata form’s principal themes (the second introduced by the first violin in high register) and animates the transitional passages. The development section ultimately turns the folk-fiddling principal theme into a dazzling fugato. After all this energy, Dvořák comes up with a wonderfully unexpected ending: yet another mood change into a quiet, becalmed reverie.
