Chamber Music +

Puccini By Arturo Rietti, 1906 Chrysanthemums , 1878 By Claude Monet In January 1890 Puccini received word of the death of his friend, Prince Amadeo di Savoia (Duca d’Aosta and King of Spain (1870–1873)). In a single evening he composed an elegy for string quartet in memory of his friend, titling it  Crisantemi  (“Chrysanthemums”), the name of the traditional Italian flower of mourning. Around the same time, possibly in 1890 as well, Puccini also wrote  Tre Minuetti  (“Three Minuets”) for string quartet. The first minuet was dedicated to Augusta Vittoria di Borbone, Princess of Capua; the second to “the distinguished violinist” Augusto Michelangeli; and the third to the conductor, Puccini’s lifelong friend, Paolo Carignani. While  Crisantemi  is by far the most programmed of Puccini’s quartet pieces, it is not often noted that it is intimately related to the lesser known  Tre Minuetti . Superficially, all four pieces are for string qu

Les drapeaux . Léon Cogniet (1794-1880) 'You may come this far,  and no farther; here your proud waves must stop.' Job 38:11 1. In the apartment above the Café Américain, Rick has just refused to sell 'letters of transit' in his possession to the fugitive Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo so that Laszlo and his wife Ilsa – Rick's former love – can escape Vichy-controlled Casablanca to America. From the cafe downstairs they hear a group of Nazi officers belting out the German patriotic march 'Die Wacht am Rhein' ('Watch on the Rhine'). Rick and Victor emerge and from the stairs look down on the scene in the cafe: the stomping, triumphalist, egomaniacal Nazis – the rest of the clientele dour, defeated, cowering, silently enduring the display. Suddenly, Victor Laszlo makes his move. And right here, in a few measures of music, is where Max Steiner's brilliant juxtaposition turns the movie on a dime, from despair in their pre

As Europe approached the twentieth century mark, the harmonic and rhythmic fabric of European music – woven during the 300 years that we call the 'common practice period' – was beginning to unravel. American musicologist Charles Seeger put it this way: Since sometime before the First World War there has been a general realization among both conservatives and radicals that the great romantic tradition of nineteenth-century Europe was in difficulties. It had become encrusted with so many bypaths that some sort of revision seemed inevitable, either to set it upon its feet again or to form from its honored remains a new style. ... Certainly a revolution began, but a gradual one – perhaps a series of small revolutions: first Satie, Debussy, Strauss; second Scriabin, Schönberg, and Stravinsky; then the deluge. In the midst of nascent revolutions in music, and before the deluge, there was just enough time left for one more genuine romantic voice. Antonín Dvořák was cert

Mountains in central Hokkaido Composer Toru Takemitsu begins his essay “Nature and Music”  [i] with these words: This summer [1962], walking through the fields of Hokkaido, I could not help thinking that my own thoughts have come to resemble the sidewalks of a city: rigid and calculated. This is a fascinating sentence. Like a “good theme” in music, [ii]  it holds a potential composition like a seed holds a potential plant. It’s tempting to take the first half of the sentence, This summer [1962], walking through the fields of Hokkaido, I could not help thinking ..., as colorful but superfluous – a kind of grace note attached to the  real  theme expressed in the rather gray analogy, ... my own thoughts have come to resemble the sidewalks of a city: rigid and calculated. But the seemingly superfluous “information” in the antecedent – season and location – actually offers a perspective helpful in understanding Takemitsu’s  genius  (in the ancient sense of “g

Märchen, noch so wunderbar, Dichterk ünste  machen  wahr. [Fables, so full of wonders / Made true by the poet's art.] –Goethe, Motto from  Balladen May 1810 – Spring in Vienna She had heard one of his sonatas which had overwhelmed her. She longs to meet the composer. Everybody tries to dissuade her. They say he is unapproachable; no one even knows where he lives. More than ever determined, she takes the risk. She finds the house; she enters. He is seated at  the  piano and does not see her. In 1810 Beethoven was forty. His increasing deafness notwithstanding, he had just composed the "Appasionata" and "Farewell" Sonatas, the "Harp" Quartet, and the "Emperor" Concerto. He was currently writing the overture and incidental music to Goethe's drama, Egmont . He was eager to meet and talk with Goethe face to face, but that was not to happen until the storie

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) "A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The pressures of mechanization and uniformity to which it is subject call for protest and the artist has only one means of expressing this, by music." 1942 – Bohuslav Martinů composed his First Piano Quartet. It would be nice if we could extend the line of tradition in a simple, straightforward way between Dvořák and Martinů – both came from peasant Czech origins; both studied in the organ school at the Prague Conservatory; Dvořák’s student Josef Suk was one of Martinů’s first teachers. But Europe’s musical map (let alone its socio-political map) had changed too much in the intervening years due in large part to the search for new melodic and harmonic resources that had begun in the romantic era.

Nikolai Kapustin Piano Quintet, Op. 89 Nikolai Kapustin (b. 1937) once wrote, "In the early '50s jazz was completely prohibited, and there were articles in our magazines that said it was typical capitalistic culture, so we have to throw it away and forget about it." With occasional respites, this situation lasted well beyond the Stalin years into the Krushchev and even Brezhnev regimes.

Image courtesy of Naxos Records Luciano Berio (1925–2003) Duetti for two violins It can happen that a violinist friend tells a composer one night that, other than those of Bartók, there are not enough violin duets today. And it can happen that the composer immediately sets himself to writing duets that night until dawn… and then more duets in moments of leisure, in different cities and hotels, between rehearsals, travelling, thinking of somebody, when looking for a present... This is what happened to me and I am grateful to that nocturnal violinist whose name [musicologist Leonardo Pinzauti (1926–2015)] is given to one of these   Duetti . [1] This is how Luciano Berio described the genesis of the 34 Duetti for two violins. With the exception of the first duet – a nod to those Bartók violin duos – each of the pieces is associated with one of his friends, inspired by "personal reasons and situations" and connected by "the fragile thread of daily occas