Dennis Bartel - KUSC

Beethoven's Diabelli Microcosmos

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Bartel - KUSC) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 08:29:00 +0000

Did Anton Diabelli get lucky despite or because of his overbearing nature? He set out in life with serious intent. Born in Mattsee, near Salzburg, he studied music as a boy with Joseph Haydn’s brother Michael, though his primary training was for the priesthood. At nineteen he moved north to Upper Bavaria to enter the Raitenhasslach monastery. Three years into his theological work political forces within the Hapsburg Empire secularized the Bavarian monasteries, converting them from ecclesiastical to civil entities, shutting them down for the purposes of spiritual introspection. It was a moment of crisis in Diabelli’s young life. He gave up his journey to the priesthood, moved to Vienna, and went into business, first giving lessons in piano and guitar and later joining the Steiner publishing firm as a music editor.

A decade passed; it was 1814. Beethoven had begun publishing some of his work with the Steiner firm, including in the next four years the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, the Op.95 String Quartet, and the best-selling “Wellington’s Victory” among others. Through Steiner, Beethoven first encountered Diabelli, whose nature by age thirty-three was no longer monk-like. Though it may tell us as much about Beethoven as it does about Diabelli, the Great Composer used to routinely refer to Diabelli in correspondence as “Generalprofoss und diabolus Diabelli.” Apparently this was funny to Beethoven because it was so true.

In his late thirties, Diabelli left Steiner and joined his colleague Peter Cappi in founding their own publishing firm, but while this new enterprise got off to a good start, after six years Diabelli was ready to move on again, and left Cappi to continue on his own with the firm Diabelli & Co. Among Diabelli & Co’s first actions was to request Beethoven to write a work, a certain seller, to help firm solidify its place in the marketplace, perhaps something like a “Wellington’s Victory” for the Biedermeier parlor, specifically a work for four-hand piano. Was it a bold affront to the genius and acknowledged master Beethoven, then deep into the metaphysical thicket of his late quartets, to write such drivel as this proposed parlor music? Whatever Beethoven’s response, if any, the project went unrealized.

Diabelli, as was his way, persisted. Upon learning that Beethoven was writing quartets, he commissioned the great man to write a string quartet. Beethoven appears to have cast off a fragment from his on-going quartet excursions to fulfill Diabelli’s commission, but set it aside without making delivery.

Then an idea descended upon Diabelli, The Idea which indirectly won him immortality. He asked several composers in the Hapsburg Empire to write a single variation on one of his own waltz themes, a silly tune, a noodle really. He would publish the collection. Beethoven was among those asked; he declined.

It is an interesting historical document, Diabelli’s famous collective work Vaterländischer Künstlerverein. The first variation, of more than two dozen, is by the young Franz Schubert, whose music Diabelli & Co. would one day champion. Among the other notable names in the history of pianism that are represented are Ignaz Moscheles, Carl Czerny, and a boy, age eleven, here publishing his first work, Franz Liszt.

The Viennese hubbub over Diabelli’s commercial project caught Beethoven’s attention. He began a set of variations on the silly waltz. Sometime during the ensuing two years that he worked on what would become his profound final statement for the piano Beethoven let it be known to Diabelli that he had been following through on the publisher’s initial request to write a waltz variation. One might imagine the chuckle this gave the Master.

Inevitably, Diabolus Diabelli began hounding Beethoven to finish the “variation” and send it to him forthwith. Upon one such entreaty, Beethoven incorporated his response to Diabelli into the work – Variation No.22, in which Beethoven quotes Leporello, servant to the demanding Don Giovanni, complaining of his lot, “Notte a giorno faticar” (Night and day I slave.) This was exactly the sort of thing that made Beethoven laugh.

Well, the rest, to coin a phrase, is history. Beethoven completed his stupendous masterpiece and it was published by Diabelli & Co. as Op.120, 33 Veränderungen (instead of Variationen, as a nod to Bach’s Aria mit 30 Veränderungen, “Goldberg") C-dur über einen Walzer von Anton Diabelli, which is known to us today as Diabelli Variations.

The immense complexity and transcendent sweep of Op.120 is too much for discussion here. Suffice it for now only to recall what Hans von Bülow called it: “The microcosmos of Beethoven’s genius.”

Diabelli postscript. Following Beethoven’s death four years later, Diabelli managed to acquire from the Master’s estate the string quartet fragment he’d written in response to the long ago commission, but set aside. Diabelli rushed it into print under the title “Beethoven’s Last Musical Thought” and had it arranged from string quartet to four-hand piano, perfect for parlor playing. Likely, Beethoven would not have found that amusing.

The Child is Father to the Papa

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Bartel - KUSC) — Thu, 12 May 2011 18:00:00 +0000

Beethoven, on his deathbed, was shown a painting of Franz Joseph Haydn’s birthplace in the village Rohrau. This market town was set down in the monotonous marshlands along the Leitha River in Lower Austria. (Rohrau is translated from the German for reedy meadow.) Every few years in spring the river flooded the low-lying countryside. In the dry season the townspeople were often fearful, for every summer a few thatched roofs would catch fire. When the mosquitoes rose from the swamps they were plentiful, and disease was never far behind. Rohrau also had a history haunted by invasions. The town was near the Hungarian border, so the military tug & pull of 18th century Central Europe often wrenched the lives of the modest burgers of Rohrau, folks recorded by history as honest Croatian rubes.

In 1732, born among them, there was baby Franciscus Josephus Haydn; and ninety-five years later, here was Beethoven, looking back through the intersecting planes of both their lives at the smoky clay cottage where his former teacher was born, and Beethoven is said to have said, “So great a man born in so poor a home.”

It is likely that Beethoven did not know how far the truth of his words reached into Haydn’s life. By the time Beethoven came to Haydn to study, in 1792, Haydn had already aged into “Papa,” a man so reticent and so forgiving that if he spoke of his battered and impoverished beginnings at all he did so with hardly a trace of regret.

Haydn’s father, Mathias, like his father before him, and his father before him, fixed wagon wheels for a living. Mathias also produced wine for a small profit, grew crops, and was entrusted by the townspeople with the duties of Marktrichter, which included overseeing maintenance of the local ditches, checking church attendance, and being watch dog over gamblers and adulterers. Mathias Haydn worked like a mule, as did his wife, Maria, who bore twelve children (six survived infancy), and kept her household scrupulously.

If this sounds like the wellspring of Haydn’s profound sense of industry and order, as Haydn himself spoke of it in his old age, the Marktrichter and his wife must have passed along their qualities of diligence genetically more than by strict example, for when their eldest son was six years old the Haydns sent him away to live.

The boy, nicknamed Sepperl, was fair-haired and inward-looking. From about age four he showed a pleasant aptitude for music (he could sing in tune). One soggy autumn day, into Rohrau for a visit came Johann Mathias Franck, a distant cousin of the Haydns by marriage. This man Franck was school rector in Hainburg, a castle town along the banks of the Danube. As rector he served as choir director for the town’s Catholic church. Franck was also overburdened, the sort of man who seems forever lunging from one unhappy chore to the next. In Hainburg he was responsible for the education of eighty children, and for keeping the church register, maintaining the town clock, and ringing the church bells for services and fires. For this, Franck had the help of two assistants, which he was required to pay himself.

Upon arriving in Rohrau, Franck was treated to one of the Haydn family’s after-dinner amusements – father played the harp, accompanying mother and her brood of girls and the boy in peasant tunes. Franck, hearing Sepperl’s clear, melodious voice, wasted no time proposing the boy be apprenticed to him in Hainburg. Under the guidance of a music master, said Franck, the boy might discover his fine gifts. The Haydns agreed, but told Franck they did not want their son to become a musician. They would have him one day take holy orders. Franck declared that as anyone knows a musical education is unfailingly useful to a priest. Yes yes, the Haydns knew that to be true as well. Soon they began making arrangements to relinquish their little Sepperl to Cousin Franck. The boy never again lived with his parents.

In Hainburg, within the town’s medieval gates, Franck soon revealed his predilection for caning. He took an inch-thick stick of polished wood and gave the back of the legs a hard snap. Evidence strongly suggests that Franck used to snap his cane off young Joseph’s legs (and back and shoulders) not merely for punishment, but to vent his frustration. He received a least one official admonishment from the Hainburg Council to refrain from pulling out the hair of his pupils.

Of course, seen from a different perspective, this came under the heading of Tough Taskmaster, and Papa Haydn years later gave credit to his first teacher for showing him the meaning of hard work. But as for musical training, though Franck dished out plenty, his standards must have been abysmal. He was satisfied if he could elicit from his meager choir anything that God, or the farmers of Hainburg, might recognize as music, and he seems to have known how to do that scarcely more than did his choirboys.

Franck’s wife, from accounts we have of her miserable life, was a bitter, slovenly woman with two toddling daughters and an infant son. Upon entering the home, young Joseph immediately became, in the eyes of Juliane Franck, household help – someone to scrub the front steps, empty the chamber pots, and so on. Predictably, the boy’s clothes were stained and needed mending. His hair grew lice-ridden and smelly. Juliane tossed a wig at him and told him to cover it. He grew scrawny. His skin, already deeply marked by childhood smallpox, took on a brownish tint that would never leave him. Years later even Haydn, dear generous Papa whose tempered memory did not allow for harshness, even Papa Haydn recalled that during his two years under Franck’s guardianship he “received more floggings than food.” He changed from a clear-eyed and melodious lad into “a regular little ragamuffin.”

Then there came to Hainburg on Johann Adam Karl Georg von Reutter, the young, rising, and newly appointed kappellmeister at the famous St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. Herr Reutter was a composer of recent note in the imperial city. His ambition made him bristle. Herr Reutter was combing the Austrian outback in search of fresh voices for his choir. The parish priest, who had often looked kindly upon the quiet Haydn boy, recommended that Herr Reutter hear the boy. “His is a weak but sweet voice,” said the priest.

At the house of the priest, Herr Reutter gave the boy a tune to sing on sight. Joseph stood before him and sang it with simple purity, with precision and smiling ease, and none of the brashness so common among boys his age. Herr Reutter’s eyes lit with delight.

“You do not trill,” said Herr Reutter. “What is the reason, Bubchen?” Joseph tried his best to explain that his cousin had never…his cousin did not know how…how could he be expected to trill?

“Come here,” said Herr Reutter, “I will teach you.” He took Joseph between his knees and showed him the simple exercise, agitating the palate to produce a quick succession of notes. Joseph picked it up on the first try. Herr Reutter was most pleased. By his side was a plateful of plump cherries. He reached a handful and stuffed them into Joseph’s coat pocket. Years later, Papa Haydn still treasured this memory, and said that on the rare occasion that he would trill he never failed to recall those plump cherries.

Herr Reutter sent word to Joseph’s parents. He wished that when the talented child became eight years of age, in a few months, he would come live in Vienna and be part of his Cantorei at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Herr Reutter even promised he would look after the boy personally. The answer came back: Yes.

Once in Vienna, Master Joseph must have been dumbfounded by the sight of St. Stephen’s four-hundred foot south tower, its high slender buttresses, its gargoyle dragons. Inside the cathedral there was a wondrous labyrinth of altars, nooks and passageways. But Joseph’s most startling discovery was that of a different Herr Reutter than the one who had filled his pockets with cherries. At St. Stephen’s the kappellmeister was far too absorbed in advancing his reputation as a composer to give more than a nod to the dozen or so choristers, one subcantor, one organist, and the many string players whose general education fell under his domain. Herr Reutter did push the boys in his Cantorei to practice their singing and their instruments (Joseph played violin and clavier), thereby assuring his compositions would receive adequate performances. But as for Latin and arithmetic and everything else Herr Reutter’s teaching principle was simple: the boys could figure it out for themselves.

In his nine years at St. Stephen’s Joseph received from Herr Reutter exactly two lessons in music theory. Once, as Joseph was trying his naïve hand at writing a Salve Regina, Herr Reutter walked in on him unexpectedly, startling them both. When he discovered that Joseph was trying to compose, in twelve parts no less, Herr Reutter mocked him. “Silly child,” he said, and tossed the music paper aside.

Worse was the deprivation. Back in the Franck household at least there was food. Not here. Not in this city of self-confidence and ceremony, not in this ravishing Baroque Vienna. St. Stephen’s did not provide Herr Reutter with enough money to care adequately for his pupils. So his pupils were crammed together in the Cantoreihaus, a filthy, unheated structure, and there was never much to eat. Years later Papa Haydn used to joke about how when the Cantorei performed in the houses of Viennese nobility he and his fellow choristers would stuff themselves with refreshments. Likewise, the choristers would often sing in the streets for a few kreuzer to buy bread and soup.

These turned into charming memories. But back then, in the absence of food, there was little to think of besides food. Papa had to sadly admit that didn’t seem charming at the time.

Then at seventeen, Joseph’s voice suffered the last ravages of puberty. As his singing slowly deteriorated, Kapellmeister Reutter began frowning each time he looked Joseph’s way. Herr Reutter was one of the court composers at Empress Maria Theresa’s newly erected castle of Schönbrunn. This meant that for funerals and feast days Herr Reutter would bring his choristers to sing with the court choir, and Joseph might be afforded a solo. But now the empress, who had so often enjoyed Joseph’s sweet soprano, was displeased. She commented that the fair-haired boy was “crowing like a cock.”

No more solos for Joseph.

Herr Reutter faced two options: 1. Remove Joseph from the choir and place him among the violins (where the boy was a little suspect) until his voice matured into the fine tenor it might become. 2. Expel him from the Cantorei.

Herr Reutter chose a third option. He recommended castration to save his voice. The young Joseph shuddered, and from far away in rustic Rohrau came word from father, Mathias Haydn, that he didn’t think a musician’s life would be worth such a barbarous operation. No castration.

Herr Reutter quickly cast the young man out. He used the excuse of a small practical joke by Joseph. Playing with a new pair of scissors, he cut the pigtail off the wig of a fellow chorister. When Herr Reutter learned of this he summoned Joseph and berated him, finally spelling out his punishment, “You will be caned on the hands!”

Mustering up all his defiance, the young Joseph Haydn spoke to Herr Reutter in his breaking voice, “I would rather leave the Cantorei than be caned.”

“Of course you will be expelled,” said Herr Reutter with venom enough to leave an indelible stain on Haydn’s memory, “after you have been caned.” And this he did.

One day years later, Beethoven would kneel before Haydn and press those hands to his lips in gratitude.

It was an afternoon in November, 1749. Master Joseph Haydn carried with him nothing more than three wear worn shirts and a coat that needed mending. Commanded to lave the Gothic confines of St. Stephen’s, the young man found himself on the stone streets of Vienna. He had no place to stay. He had no money. He knew he was not nearly good enough a musician to eke out an existence performing. Besides, Herr Reutter had made sure the worthless delinquent understood he would have no recommendation. The young man was without prospects – not even the skills of a cartwright.

Above the bare nut-trees, the great gargoyled south tower of St. Stephen’s rang out the hour, and Haydn listened in stupefied despair. It was two o’clock and getting cold.

For the next eight years, the young man pieces together a livelihood mostly by giving lessons, or even accompanying lessons. It was, said Papa Haydn in a brief autobiographical sketch prepared near the end of his life, “a wretched existence.” But the text blames no one – not Herr Reutter, not Franck, not his father. By then, Papa Haydn had long since set blame aside and found his autodidactic way to greatness. That greatness was so widely acknowledged that not only did the music world bestow on Haydn its highest honors and erect to him its most magnificent monuments, but even the Croatian country folk of his heritage paid him splendid tribute with a homily that has remained to his day: “As good a marksman and fisherman as Haydn.”

Ravel Photo Essay

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Bartel - KUSC) — Tue, 10 May 2011 09:20:00 +0000

Ravel's family heritage can be traced to the Collogessous-Saleve, a village in France's Haute-Savoie, home to Ravel's grandfather Aime Ravel. Aime moved his family to Versoix, outside of Geneva, and became a Swiss citizen. Ravel's father, Pierre Joseph Ravel, was born there in 1832, one of five children. He pursued a career as an engineer, and would eventually play a role in France's developing automobile industry. He also maintained an interest in music.

Ravel's mother, Marie Delouart, was of Basque descent. She spoke French well, but never learned to write it. Ravel was her first child, born when she was thirty-five. Her second and final child was Edouard, and it was no secret in the Ravel home that Maurice was his mother's favorite. She is said to have sung Spanish folk melodies to him in his cradle, and mother and child were very close all their life together. Three years after her death, when Ravel was thirty-nine, he wrote to a friend, "My despair increases daily. I'm thinking about it even more, since I have resumed work, that I no longer have this dear silent presence enveloping me with her infinite tenderness, which was, I see it now more than ever, my only reason for living."

At a time and place when school attendance was not mandatory, Ravel did not attend school until he entered the Paris Conservatory at age fourteen. In matters of literature, history, science, etc., he was home-schooled. But his parents are said to have been sensitive, devoted and intelligent people, and Ravel grew up with a keen curiosity for a wide range of interests.

His fourteen years at the Conservatory have been described as "largely marked by one academic failure after another, but nonetheless a time of immense growth." As a pianist Ravel played a wide variety of 19th-century piano music, including works by Mendelssohn, Franck, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev and Borodin, and analyzed the standard works of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods, notably the music of Mozart.

Ravel's lifelong friend the pianist Marguerite Long once asked and answered the question, "What place had Ravel for love? It seemed that there as none. One day I said to him: 'Maurice, you ought to marry. Nobody understands and loves children as you do. Get rid of your hermit life and have a real home.' Ravel replied: 'Love never rises above the licentious.'

This 'licentiousness' he was willing, within moderation, to allow to some street-walking Venus; what remained beyond that would have turned his life upside-down and he did not find the idea an encouraging one. One evening Ravel, as timid men sometimes do, asked a woman he had known for a long time to marry him. She burst out laughing and said to all and sundry: 'Ravel is crazy; he wants to marry me.' From that time he abandoned all idea of disrupting his solitude."

Ravel explained his reluctance to marry this way: "You see, an artist has to be very careful when he wants to marry someone, because an artist never realizes his capacity for making his companion miserable. He's obsessed by his creative work and by the problems it poses. He lives a bit like a daydreamer and it's no joke for the woman he lives with. One always has to think of that when one wants to get married."

Hermit life is not entirely accurate. From age 46 until his death at 62, Ravel lived at his villa Le Belvédère Montfort l'Amaury, with ten cats to which he spoke "cat language."

Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat, Op.130

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis Bartel - KUSC) — Tue, 10 May 2011 00:04:00 +0000

The commission Beethoven received in 1822 from the posterity-conscious Prince Nikolaus Galitzin of St. Petersburg could hardly have been more generous: Beethoven was to compose a set of two or three quartets, to take as much time as he needed, and to name his own price. But work on the first two of these “late” quartets (Opp.127, 132) was perilous, for Beethoven suffered from ill health and had to literally rise from his sick bed to compose. This is not to say the composer’s poor health was responsible for the pall that hovers over much of the music in these quartets, but we can happily acknowledge that the next quartet, Op.130, written when Beethoven was, if not healthy, at least relatively free of illness, is a sunnier work than its immediate predecessors. Op.130 also contains some of the densest and most labyrinthine music Beethoven ever wrote.

Dense and labyrinthine. That would be the Grosse Fuge, yes? But weeks before Beethoven arrived at that inconceivably rich contrapuntal monument, he wrote the first movement of Op.130, which abruptly changes tempo and mood, leaps and hurries forward only to interrupt itself with one-bar outbursts, grants absolute independence to each instrument to engage in elaborate conversational exchanges and create simultaneous patterns, and generally carries on in a manner as complex as any quartet writing until Bartok, a century later, picked up the Viennese master’s gauntlet.

Op.130 is, or as reputation has it, a Gordian knot of a quartet. However, its complexity does not go unrelieved. The brief and breathless second movement Presto is transparent as a good-natured joke. The Andante was called by Schumann “an intermezzo” (a comic interlude played between the acts of a serious opera). And the fourth movement, Alla danza tedesca (in the style of a German dance), enjoys a relaxed, natural momentum, where witty chatter mimics some of what has gone before. Indeed, the progression of the quartet’s six movements has a “divertimento” quality, harkening back to musically simpler summer afternoons in the eighteenth century.

Then comes the Cavatina. If the Andante is an intermezzo, the Cavatina, with its operatic title, is a preghiera (an aria in which the character pleads for divine assistance). On the manuscript, over one of the passages in the Cavatina, Beethoven scribbled “anguished.” He told a violinist of the quartet which premiered Op.130 that the mere memory of the Cavatina brought tears to his eyes. The basis of the Cavatina is only a three-part song, but its external simplicity can hardly mask the movement’s intricately organized harmony and tortured, sob-broken melody. A Beethoven scholar says, “It opens sotto voce, plunging the listener so immediately into a highly-charged emotional atmosphere that he has the sensation of having suddenly opened a door and intruded on a scene not meant for his ears.” As Beethoven considered the Cavatina one of his greatest achievements, so history has agreed.

The finale Beethoven wrote to follow the Cavatina was so rhythmically violent and ruthlessly dense in thought and texture it reduced its first audiences to confusion. Beethoven’s friendly and publisher pleased with the composer to replace the finale of Op.130 with something else, something they could understand. Beethoven, who clearly loved the quartet as he wrote it, finally agreed to include an alternate finale (a Rondo that manages only to be an anticlimax to the Cavatina), on the condition that the original finale be published separately as Grosse Fuge, Op.133.

Ironically, the fundamental structure of the Grosse Fugue is a highly lucid, well-behaved, traditional sonata form, consisting of an overture, a single variation, and a fugue unfolding slowly, uncompromisingly, and exhaustively, until it has surpassed the classical fugue by an immense distance. “It is not difficult to write a fugue,” said Beethoven, “I wrote dozens of them when I was a student. But imagination also must have its due, and today another spirit, truly poetic, must enter into the ancient form.”