​Program Notes

By Laurie Shulman

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Sonata in F Major, Op. 10 No. 2

Ludwig van Beethoven

Born 16 December, 1770 in Bonn, Germany

Died 26 March, 1827 in Vienna, Austria

 

• In mid-1790s Vienna, Beethoven was better known as a pianist than as a composer

• Of his three Opus 10 sonatas, this one is the most lighthearted

• The structure is concise, omitting a true slow movement

• Wit, whimsy, and playfulness characterize the outer movements

 

The piano sonatas are the best reflector of Beethoven’s stylistic development. Even more than the string quartets, they show his evolution from classic to romantic, from extrovert virtuoso to introspective philosopher. Piano was, after all, Beethoven’s own instrument, and the thirty-two sonatas are as thorough a musical autobiography as any composer has left. The three sonatas of Opus 10 date from relatively early in Beethoven’s career, yet each one shows a very different facet of Beethoven’s complex personality.

 

The F major Sonata, Op. 10, No. 2, dates from 1796 and 1797, when Beethoven was at the height of his career as a performing pianist. One of a set of three published in 1798, it bears a dedication to Countess Anna Margarete von Browne, the wife of one of Beethoven’s patrons. The piece is in high classic style, reflecting the comic influence of Beethoven’s sometime teacher Joseph Haydn. The first movement, with its impatient, fitful starts and stops, surely prompted some smiles among Viennese audiences. Beethoven’s second movement is unusually striking, with its unison theme, mysterious F minor tonality, and lovely D-flat major trio whose principal melodic interest lies in the accompaniment. The ternary structure varies the texture with the repeat of the A-section. The finale is a curious throwback: to the lighthearted atmosphere of the first movement, and to the quasi-Baroque textures implied by Beethoven’s fugal theme. His treatment, which verges on the slapstick, serves to remind us that he was a composer with a rich and ready sense of humor.

 

 

Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 60                                                                                           
Johannes Brahms
Born 7 May, 1833 in Hamburg, Germany
Died 3 April, 1897 in Vienna, Austria

 

• Brahms worked on this quartet on and off for twenty years

• Stormy rhythms and brooding melancholy characterize the music

• The quartet was loosely inspired by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

• Listen for tempestuous passion combined with technical expertise and tight structure

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Imagine a man for whom nothing is left and who wishes to put an end to himself. 

 

Brahms penned these gloomy words to Hermann Deiters in 1868, describing the first movement of his C minor piano quartet. At that point he had already wrestled with the piece — then a single-movement work-in-progress — for well over a decade. Six years later, he was still struggling with the same recalcitrant, lugubrious movement. A letter to his friend Dr. Theodor Billroth dated 23 October, 1874 refers to it as “…a curiosity – an illustration for the last chapter in the life of the man in the blue coat and yellow vest.”

 

The allusion is to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the seminal work of the Sturm und Drang movement. The story concerns a sensitive, artistic young man torn by poetic fantasies and hopeless passions. In the final scene, dressed in a blue coat, a yellow vest, yellow hose, and top boots, Werther shoots himself with a pistol. Werther was particularly influential in the early romantic era, even precipitating a wave of suicides. (It also spawned a men’s fashion trend that stretched to Paris and London as well as the German-speaking countries.) The novel remained popular throughout the 19th century.

 

In his piano quartet’s first movement, Brahms clearly identified with Werther’s depressed and despairing emotional state. Werther was still on his mind nearly a year later, when he wrote to his publisher Fritz Simrock, who was readying the Opus 60 quartet for publication. The letter, which is filled with Brahms’s dark, self-deprecating humor, reports a good rehearsal of the quartet, then adds:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Despite its relatively high opus number and publication date of 1875, when Brahms was 42, the C minor Piano Quartet shares many characteristics with the works of Brahms' youth. As the letter quoted above implies (“half old, half new”), the quartet's origins are from the mid-1850s, a dreadful time when Robert Schumann was in the final stages of the illness that claimed his life in 1856. Brahms, then in his early 20s, was spending considerable time with Schumann's wife Clara, attempting to balance his sense of responsibility to the Schumann family, loyalty to his ailing mentor and friend Schumann, and his growing love for Clara. These conflicting emotions found expression in a torrent of anguished and troubled music, including parts of the First Symphony (also in C minor) and the First Piano Concerto. The first movement of this piano quartet is a representative example.

 

Brahms was an exacting critic of his own work. After setting aside the unsatisfactory quartet movement for two decades, he subjected it to extensive revisions. All told, he worked on Op. 60 for twenty years, from 1855 to 1875. The remaining three movements were added during the 1860s, accounting for subtle differences in texture. Whereas the first movement is athletically dominated by the keyboard, for example, the strings assume a more equitable balance in the latter three movements. Brahms’ final two movements are terse and compressed, making them more consistent with his mature instrumental style. 

 

Among the quartet's unusual features is the lyrical second subject in the opening Allegro non troppo, where Brahms incorporates variation elements into a sonata-form. The scherzo smoothly interjects several meter switches between 6/8 and 9/8, and the slow movement is a glorious melodic foray for the cello in its higher register. Musicologist Ivor Keys has written of the closing Allegro comodo:

 

 

 

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Summa (1977; arr.1990-91 for string orchestra)
Arvo Pärt
Born 11 September 1935 in Paide, Järva County, Estonia
Currently residing in  Laulasmaa, west of Tallinn, Estonia

 

• Pärt is usually described as a mystic

• Summa originated as a choral work, setting the Latin Credo from the Mass

• The piece is an example of his tintinnabuli style, related to bell sonorities

• He considered Summa one of his strictest compositions in its structure

 

Estonia’s Arvo Pärt (pronounced PAYRT) left the Soviet Union for the West in 1980. He lived for two years in Vienna, then settled in Berlin for three decades. He returned to his native Estonia in 2010. During his time in the West, his music became far better known, and a different picture emerged of this fascinating composer who bridges so much of Eastern and Western cultures. Pärt went through a serialist phase, writing music with a strong emphasis on contrapuntal technique. He has since abandoned that approach. In recent decades, Pärt has composed music that shares traits with minimalism: he emphasizes tonality and employs repetitive patterns. Sometimes his long melodic lines approach the soothing monotony of medieval chant. The compelling effect of his compositions has led to the labels "musical mystic" and "mystic minimalist."

 

Pärt is a colorist, which in broad musical terms means that he takes full advantage of the different qualities of timbre available from within the orchestra. Even limiting his resources to strings, he shows us ways of treating tone color that are descended from Renaissance polyphony. He reveals his palette slowly, allowing time for each timbral change to be thoroughly perceived.

 

Pärt draws his inspiration from a number of sources: mysticism, Renaissance harmony, chant-like melodies, and the works of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, which clearly made a strong imprint upon him during his youth. He refers to his style as tintinnabuli. The term comes from the complex overtone series that arise when bells peal. Pärt uses it in a more philosophical way. He has written:

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Summa is a brief movement, barely five minutes in length. Scored for strings alone, it takes its title from the Latin superlative for superus, meaning "from the highest realm" or, more abstractly, the summit of life experience. Summa originated as a four-part a cappella choral setting of the Latin Credo. In the 1970s, it was a discreet protest against the Soviet Union’s official stance rejecting organized religion. Pärt has described it as the "most strict and enigmatic work" exemplifying his compositional system: a sixteen-note melody with 15 variant repetitions. To the listener, it comes across as smooth, serene, and mellifluous. As with several of his other works, most notably Fratres (1977), Summa exists in other versions:  for voices and instruments (1980), the string orchestra version we hear (1991), and string quartet (1991). The polyphony of wordless strings retains the timeless tranquility of Renaissance sacred music.    

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Piano Concerto No.14 in E-flat, K.449
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Born 27 January 1756 in Salzburg, Austria
Died 5 December 1791 in Vienna

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• Mozart’s finest keyboard writing is in his piano concertos

• He composed most of them for himself - but this one was for a gifted student

• Mozart allowed for a reduced orchestra of strings for a more intimate performance

• The finale is indebted to Mozart’s opera buffa style

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As a body of musical literature, the Mozart piano concertos are one of the great creative miracles of history. Equivalent in import to the Bach cantatas, Schubert songs, and Beethoven string quartets, they astonish and delight us whether on first acquaintance or repeated hearings. The concerto fascinated Mozart from his childhood through to his full maturity. A study of his piano concertos provides a rewarding and comprehensive overview of the growth and development of his genius.

 

The idea of a keyboard virtuoso meant something very different in the late 18th century from what it means today. To be sure, Mozart's piano concertos demand an extremely accomplished player with great technical and musical skill, if not the bravura force of, for example, the Brahms or Rachmaninoff piano concertos. Mozart composed for fortepiano, a significantly smaller instrument than the modern 88-key piano, with only five octaves on its keyboard and a more delicate, intimate sound. The qualities prized mostly highly by 18th-century listeners were expressive line, good taste in ornamentation, and evenness of touch. 

 

Mozart composed the E-flat concerto, K.449 in 1784. He was at the height of his popularity as a concert soloist in Vienna, and four of the six piano concertos he composed that year were exclusively for his own use. Two of them, however, he wrote for a gifted pupil named Barbara [Babette] Ployer, whose father was a tax collector and lumber merchant in Upper Austria. At the time she studied with Mozart, she was living with her uncle, an agent of the Salozburg court in Vienna. She must have been an excellent player, for Mozart also performed his Sonata for Two Pianos in public with her. 

 

We know that he also performed K.449 himself, but it is clear that he had Fraülein Ployer in mind in composing the concerto, both from his letters and from some unusual details of the work.

 

On 26 May, 1784, Wolfgang wrote to Leopold: 

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Mozart indicated that the wind parts – oboe and two horns – could be eliminated altogether. He espoused the performance of K.449 for string quartet plus piano. In this form, his gifted student could perform it in her drawing room with four string players, without employing the full resources of an orchestra. That rendering, as we hear it, makes for a fascinating forerunner to Schumann's "invention" of the piano quintet. The reduced forces highlight the work’s graceful proportions and delicate intimacy, fusing chamber music with concerto style. It was the last time Mozart was to employ such modest forces in a concerto. 

 

All three movements overflow with the bounty of Mozart's fertile melodic imagination. The cadenza to the first movement is Mozart's own. (It was his custom to write out cadenzas only when he intended that others should perform his concertos. When he played them himself, he improvised the cadenzas.) This one is a fine example of the exquisite taste that must have characterized his spontaneous creations.

 

Mozart’s Andantino is lovely and richly textured, with some surprising modulations that look forward to Schubert. The concerto's crowning glory, however, is its finale: a brilliant rondo in opera buffa style whose theme is ingeniously altered at every entrance. The switch to 6/8 meter at the end – heralded by another brief solo cadenza –  is one of those exquisite, flawless strokes that make Mozart so beloved to us.

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Program Notes by Laurie Shulman ©2026

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