This program features a range of music we classify as Romantic. The countries of origin are England, America, Russia, and Germany. Each featured composer was well schooled in the classical structures that came before, but took that knowledge in their own unique direction.
Rebecca Clarke was born in 1886 in England, daughter of an American father and a German mother. The family members were avid chamber musicians. Rebecca began playing the violin at eight years old and entered the Royal Academy of Music in 1902. After a bit of a brouhaha (her teacher proposed marriage!) she left the school and enrolled as a composition student at the Royal College of Music, where she studied with Sir Charles Villars Stanford. While there, she switched from playing the violin to studying the viola with Lionel Tertis (the dedicatee of the York Bowen Sonata performed in week 1).
Clarke began a distinguished performing career concentrated on chamber music. In 1917, performances took her to the US where she met the famous music patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge while visiting friends in Pittsfield, MA. Two years later Coolidge persuaded Clark to submit her Viola Sonata (anonymously) to the Berkshire Festival Competition. She tied for first prize.
Through the 1920’s Clarke toured extensively with cellist May Mukle. Destinations included India, China, and Japan. She wrote little after the late 20’s until she found herself in New York at the outbreak of WWII and unable to return home to Europe. She began composing again and had a couple of fruitful years before marrying and settling down with pianist James Friskin, whom she had known in college.
Clarke composed the Two Pieces with the intention of performing them with her colleague, cellist May Mukle. Clarke’s music characteristically combines a blend of humor, melancholy, and depth. The first piece, Lullaby, is a simple lyrical melody artfully woven between the viola and cello. The second, Grotesque, is a whirlwind of energy and humor, replete with abrupt changes in dynamics and rhythm.
George Templeton Strong was born in 1856 into a musical household. Both of his parents were amateur musicians, and his father served on the board of directors of the New York Philharmonic Society. Strong showed great musical talent early, and he was provided with lessons in piano, oboe, and violin.
The teenage Strong fervently embraced the “new” music of his day, particularly works of Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt. He championed the idea that art, whether painting, music, or other aesthetic media, only transcended craft if it carried the express intent of the creator to provide the observer or listener with a spiritual experience. This romantic ideal was at the core of his future work.
In 1879 Strong entered Leipzig Conservatory in Germany. He moved to Wiesbaden in 1886, where he became close friends with American composer Edward MacDowell. He composed several large-scale symphonic pieces during these years.
In 1891 Strong returned to the United States and took a position teaching counterpoint at the New England Conservatory. He did not enjoy the work, and declining health spurred him to move back to Vevey, Switzerland on Lake Geneva. There he took up the study of watercolor painting and began a second career as a professional painter. In 1912 he moved to Geneva, where he remained for the rest of his life.
The Sonata for viola and cello was written in 1916. It is a sweeping, passionate dialog between the two instruments. The contrast between the concise writing of Rebecca Clarke and Strong’s extended rambling style clearly illustrate two parallel streams in classical music in the early 20th Century.
Anton Arensky was born in 1861 into an affluent, music-loving family. By age nine he had already written a number of songs and piano pieces. In 1879 his family moved to St. Petersburg so he could enroll in the St. Petersburg Conservatory to study with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. After graduating in 1882, he took a teaching position at the Moscow Conservatory. There he befriended and became a close colleague of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whose style of classically grounded romanticism he found more aligned with his own sensibilities than the nationalistic style of Rimsky-Korsakov.
Arensky taught at the Moscow Conservatory for 12 years. Among his notable students were Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Glière. In 1895 he returned to St. Petersburg to become the director of the Imperial Choir. He retired from this position in 1901 with a significant pension that allowed him to spend his remaining years conducting, composing, and performing as a pianist.
Arensky’s Second String Quartet was composed in 1894 as a tribute to Tchaikovsky, who had died the previous year. Arensky quotes sources both sacred and secular in his tribute. The first movement is framed by a psalm tune. Frequent changes of pace, melodic outbursts, and solo declarations keep the main body of the movement shifting between feelings of grief and hope.
The second movement is a set of seven variations on a song by Tchaikovsky, “Legend,” from 16 Songs for Children, Op. 54. This melody first appears in the violin accompanied by plucking strings. Arensky‘s variations take the sad theme through an exploration of varying stages of grief. The final movement starts by quoting a psalm melody. Arensky then writes a fugue based on a famous Russian folk melody used by Modest Mussorgsky in the coronation scene from his opera Boris Godunov. The unusual configuration of the quartet allows a depth of tonal color that enhances the vocal chant quality of the music.
Clara Schumann (née Wieck) is an extraordinary figure in 19th century music circles. She had an extraordinarily long career as a touring artist, starting in her pre-teen years and extending into her 70’s. She performed some 1500 concerts as a soloist and collaborator. Her last public concert was in Frankfurt on March 12, 1891, at which she performed a two-piano version of Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn.
Clara Schumann’s domestic life was tumultuous. Her parents, both pianists, divorced when she was just six years old. She was a musical prodigy, and her father took charge of both her training and performing career. She was concertizing by age nine and touring by age 11. Robert Schumann, nine years her senior, secretly courted Clara when she was just 16. The two became engaged just before Clara turned 18, but they were forbidden to marry by her father. Clara went to live with her mother. After successfully petitioning the Court of Appeals to marry without parental consent, she and Robert were wed on September 12, 1840, one day before her 21st birthday.
The couple settled into a married life full of children (8) and music. They had been married for 14 years when Robert’s fragile mental state collapsed. After a suicide attempt in February 1854, he was committed to an asylum from which he never emerged. Within seven months of his commitment, Clara was touring again, having become the sole breadwinner of a large household.
Clara Schumann’s compositions focused primarily on music for the piano; solo pieces, concertos with orchestra, and many arrangements of her husband’s and other’s symphonic works. She wrote two pieces of chamber music: the trio we offer tonight, in 1846, and Three Romances for violin and piano, in 1853.
The Piano Trio in G minor, opus 17 is considered Clara’s greatest work. At the premier in January 1847 the trio received very positive reviews, one critic noting, “The work is clear, something rarely seen; it demonstrates a calm mastery of the formal artistic medium that we would not have expected of a woman composer.”
Clara, an extensive journal keeper, wrote (after the first full rehearsal with violin and cello), “There is nothing greater than the joy of composing something oneself, and then listening to it.” She had planned to dedicate the piece to her friend Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, but Fanny died before the score was prepared for publication.
The first movement demonstrates why the chauvinistic reviewer, cited above, noted the clarity of Clara’s writing. Each instrument rises to the fore in the beautifully balanced texture to take a solo turn. The second movement, Scherzo, is gentle and playful. The slow movement begins with the piano presenting a luscious melody, soon taken over by the violin and joined by the cello. An intense dotted rhythm section offers a contrasting upbeat shift in mood. The final Allegretto contains a masterful fugue.