Plus, we get to have some fun with Weber's Oberon Overture
and Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music (than
which musical wonderfulness doesn't come any wonderfuller)
Given Brahms's reverance for the great masters who preceded him, and in particular one who had revolutionized the way composers could think about the piano, how could he not have been keenly aware of Chopin?"Johannes Brahms began his musical life studying the piano, and his earliest, truly great compositions were solo piano works, both presented here. The Scherzo in E-flat minor, Op. 4, is the earliest surviving composition by Brahms. He wrote it in November 1851 when he was 18 and published it as Op. 4, rather than Op. 1, because, he explained to a friend, “when one shows one's self for the first time, people must first see the head and not the feet.” Musical scholars feel that, despite the composer’s denial, it obviously shows a “dependence” on Chopin’s scherzi, and quotes from Heinrich Marschner’s Hans Heiling at bar 46 as well."
-- from an online note accompanying a listing for Yefim Bronfman's early recording of Op. 4 (the Scherzo) and Op. 5 (the F minor Piano Sonata)
SO, HERE AGAIN IS HOW BRAHMS'S SCHERZO GOES
(in two performances we haven't heard before and one we have)
BRAHMS: Scherzo for Piano in E-flat minor, Op. 4
Yefim Bronfman, piano. MusicMasters, recorded c1986
Julius Katchen, piano. Decca, recorded in Decca Studio No. 3, West Hampstead (London), 1964
Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), March 1958
I'll have something to say about the performances farther down. For now, I suggest keeping in mind the ages of the pianists at the time of recording -- roughly 28, 38, and 62. Turns out, it seems to matter.
by Ken
In a moment we're going to hear how a Chopin scherzo goes. But first let me say that it's been a good week for me, musically and in other ways as well, I guess. (Funny how the two often go together!) After a couple of years in which it was all but impossible for me to listen to music on my aging computer, which I imagined was suffering from some likely fatal hardware or at least heart-stoppingly expensive malady whose repair would likely cost almost as much as replacing the poor old computer, well --
Long story short (I actually started writing the whole story before just chucking it, since what interest could it have for anybody but me?), like magic I managed to solve all the problems, and then some, and suddenly I found myself with wonderful music pouring forth from both my computers. It used to be that even when I was most depressed about the purposelessness of these posts, the music revived me. So lately I've been allowing myself to wallow a bit in the pleasure of all this music, and later in this post we're going to allow it ourselves the luxury of some pleasurable musical wallowing.
NOW HERE'S HOW A CHOPIN SCHERZO GOES
(via a Czech, a Hungarian, and of course the Pole -- thrice over!)
CHOPIN: Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 31
Ivan Moravec, piano. Dorian, recorded in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Troy, NY, November 1989
Tamás Vásáry, piano. DG, recorded in the Herkulessaal, Munich, June 1963
Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA, recorded in Manhattan Center, Mar. 26, 1959
Arthur Rubinstein, piano. RCA, recorded in RCA Studios, Hollywood, June 28, 1949
Arthur Rubinstein, piano. HMV, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 3, Oct. 12-17, 1932
I love the effortless power and unfailingly precise coloration and nuance of Moravec's playing, and the clean-lined boldness and vigor of Vásáry's. And then there's Rubinstein. I couldn't resist the opportunity to hear him at 45, 62, and 72 -- where would one begin talking about the riches and glories of the 1959 performance? Maybe with the caressing, seductive beauty of the sound he produces? Or maybe the indefinable measure of keenly charged relaxability acquired in the decade since the 1949 version?
DO YOU HEAR A BRAHMS " 'DEPENDENCE' ON CHOPIN'S
SCHERZI"? (HEY, ISN'T IT SUPPOSED TO BE OBVIOUS?)
Even if we knew whose choice of the word "dependence" is being cited, I'd have to say I think he's grasping, and there's barely even a straw. I kind of like the word I used last time ("Let's take a moment to meet and greet Brahms the musical poet") when we observed the young Brahms trafficking in scherzos and ballades:
If these two forms, "scherzo" and "ballade," call to mind another great composer for the piano, one who may have brought to composition for the piano a higher-soaring poetic imagination than any other composer of the 19th -- or any other -- century, who happened to have wound up creating four each of these forms, scherzos and ballades, that's fine by me. It could be that this composer by sheerest chance happened also to have been in large measure a "discovery" of Robert Schumann, who was already providing Brahms with the inspiration of a composer centrally concerned with combining fluency in the Classical forms, with at the same time a grounding in the free flight of poetic imagination. Brahms would certainly have been keenly aware of this great predecessor, and all the music of his he laid hands on while the predecessor was still alive and composing up a storm until his always-fragile health gave way in 1849, when he was 39 and Brahms 16, achieving growing mastery of the piano and imagining himself as a composer."Brahms would certainly have been keenly aware [emphasis added] of this great predecessor." Keen awareness is something Brahms assuredly had as regards what composers who preceded him had done, and what composers all around him were doing. "Influence" would already be stretching it -- in terms of imaginative process, Schumann's E-flat minor Scherzo seems to me to have hardly anything in common with Chopin's. In Schumann's scherzo, and even more in the Op. 10 Ballades we heard last time, we see and hear landscapes and waterscapes, forests and streams, and the people and other creatures who inhabit them -- the stock-in-trade, in other words, of your working balladeer.
I wonder, are there really "musical scholars" who listen to, say, Brahms's Op. 10 Ballades and dismiss them with a groaning "Bah! Dependence on Chopin's scherzi"? We're going to come back to the Op. 10 Ballades, but one thought with regard to the Op. 4 Scherzo: Maybe those perception-deprived "musical scholars" had the misfortune of encountering only performances that didn't hear the magic. Yefim Bronfman recording's is an interesting case. As I mentioned, he was young when he made itm but not all that young -- about 28, I'm reckoning. Which is itself significantly older than Brahms was when he wrote the Scherzo and the F minor Sonata.
However, it rarely pays off to entrust youthful bursts of compositional genius to younger artists, given the unlikelihood that they have working for them the usable intuitive power that, say, a young Brahms was capable of. The result sounds to me pretty clunky -- and if we didn't know better, it would be a snap to blame the deficiency on the music. Julius Katchen was not only older, 38, but a significantly more mature artist when he made his recording, as part of his invaluable survey of the complete Brahms piano music; tragically, by 42 he would be dead of cancer, one of music's terrible losses. I don't think, though, that he got the measure of the music either, though. If we want to hear the magic, the utter bewitchment, of which the 20-ish Brahms was capable, it's to the 62-year-old Wilhelm Kempff we have to turn.
We still need to address the casualness with which the Op. 10 Ballades are routinely trivialized, which we're not going to get to in this post. However, we do need to deal with the matter of the apparent hanging offense Brahms committed with those "quotes from Heinrich Marschner’s Hans Heiling."
FIRST OF ALL, HANS WHO?
I suppose most operaphiles are familiar with at least the name of Heinrich Marschner and the two operas of his, Der Vampyr (1828) and Hans Heiling (1833), that in his lifetime held the boards. Wikipedia declares: "Heinrich August Marschner (16 August 1795 – 14 December 1861) was the most important composer of German opera between Weber and Wagner." Except that this doesn't actually say that Marschner was "an important composer of German opera."
For that matter, while I wouldn't want to denigrate the importance of Weber, just how important a composer of German opera was even he? Allowing for the fact that there is music of interest in both Euryanthe and Oberon, and every now and then a foolhardy impresario attempts to bring one or the other back to the stage, the results are almost invariably catastrophic, leaving a grand total of one opera, Der Freischütz, that most of us would agree is genuinely "important," and even it is hardly ever performed, for the reason that every production rediscovers. And I say this with love: At least outside Germany, theater audiences, while duly appreciative of the several scenes that are not only musically first-rate but dramatically viable, are bored silly by it.
It's certainly true that not only Weber's "big three" operas -- Freischütz, Euryanthe, and Oberon -- have genuinely great overtures, and several other Weber operas have really good ones. All of these are salable commodities on records and adornments to our concert life. Weber was a composer who mattered.
Maybe, though, he mattered not just for what he could do but for what he couldn't: create viable operas. As for Marschner, from what I know of Der Vampyr and Hans Heiling, while they're certainly not works of rank incompetence, the suffer from two crucial deficiencies:
(1) The librettos, which are mishmoshes of supernatural and everyday elements (hey, in their time this was a thing) of no imaginable interest to, well, much of anyone.
(2) The music, which are almost without reward for even the most venturesome listener. And I speak as someone who owns a spanking-new vocal score of Hans Heiling, which has remained almost-spanking-new -- allowing for the depradations of time upon paper -- over the decades I've owned it because it's done nothing but sit on the shelf. I was thrilled to have a reason finally to pluck it off.
So while I suppose it is categorically true that "in between Weber and Wagner, Marschner was," nowhere in this statement is there an answer to the question "So what?"
BUT WHAT, YOU WONDER, DOES HIS MUSIC SOUND LIKE?
Fair enough.
MARSCHNER: Hans Heiling: Overture
It's always pointed out, at least when the opera is discussed, that it begins unconventionally, with a Prologue that ends rather than begins with an Overture. In other words, the way the Met used to perform Verdi's Forza del destino: with an unintroduced opening scene (Leonora and Alvaro's thwarted elopement and the death of Leonora's father, the Marquis of Calatrava) followed by the great Overture, incidentally skipping over the whole of the Inn Scene so that it leads directly into Leonora's desperate and exhausted flight to and arrival at the monastery. One difference is that Forza is filled to the brim -- in both the scenes performed and those not performed back in those bad old days at the Met -- with glorious music dramatizing the lives of gripping characters. So let's hear the Hans Heiling Overture.
Vienna Philharmonic, Christian Thielemann, cond. DG, recorded in the Grosser Saal of the Musikverein, November 2002
Um, yeah, okay. Now we've heard it. Not at all unpleasant. It does give me the feeling, though, that it's setting us up for some hoo-ha-type musical ideas, and I don't get any.
OH WAIT, YOU HEARD THE HANS HEILING "QUOTES," RIGHT?
MARSCHNER: the opening of the overture --
BRAHMS: the continuation of the Scherzo in E-flat minor --
I certainly don't hear "quotes," but if you want to call that "dum, da-da dum dum" a quote, then yeah, okay, I guess. Only Brahms has taken something that was pretty much nothing -- something that might conceivably be thought of as "something that, you know, people have been known to say" -- and made of it something powerful and driving and urgent.
WHICH FURTHER RAISES THE QUESTION: CAN YOU
STEAL SOMETHING THAT IS ITSELF A BLATANT RIPOFF?
You remember that opening horn call of the Hans Heiling Overture, right?
MARSCHNER: Hans Heiling: Overture - opening
Vienna Philharmonic, Christian Thielemann, cond. DG, recorded in the Grosser Saal of the Musikverein, November 2002
From the same record as the Hans Heiling Overture we have our first performance, and then another we've heard before, from the Capitol LP of overtures conducted by Erich Leinsdorf which was so important to me when I was of such an impressionable age, and which I still like better -- so naturally and effectively focused and forward-moving. And when it comes to wallowable wonderfulness, while Oberon the opera may be an irredeemable mess, Oberon the overture -- well, does wonderfulness come any wonderfuller?
WEBER: Oberon: Overture
Vienna Philharmonic, Christian Thielemann, cond. DG, recorded in the Grosser Saal of the Musikverein, November 2002
Philharmonia Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. Capitol-EMI, recorded c1958
WE MIGHT NOTE THAT THE DREADFUL HANS HEILING
LIBRETTO WAS WRITTEN FOR FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Mendelssohn is supposed to have taken a pass on the libretto on the ground that its supernatural elements were too reminiscent of Der Freischütz. I think we might also allow for the possibility that he thought it was, you know, crap. However . . .
As long as we're thinking about Mendelssohn, and bearing in mind Brahms's keen awareness of the composers who preceded him, which included a healthy reverance for Mendelssohn, not least for his stalart stewardship of Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra, can we maybe hear in Brahms's Scherzo some healthy inspiration a great Scherzo of Mendelssohn's? Not a dependance, mind you, but a healthy dose of inspiration.
Now, we've heard this Mendelssohn Scherzo before, but never, as I discovered when I ventured into the SC Archive, by itself. And I took to thinking, if we take this as an excuse to luxuriate in Mendelssohn's magical Midsummer Night's Dream Overture and incidental music (again, when it comes to stretching musical wonderfulness to the absolute wonderfullest, is this not a working definition of the MSND music? does it matter that Mendelssohn was only 17 when he wrote the Overture?), why don't we listen to the MSND Scherzo again the way we did before --
• first, in George Szell's Concertgebouw recording of the standard four-movement MSND "suite," noting, with all we've heard lately of Szell in his closely held Cleveland fiefdom, that -- as we heard in the Brahms D minor Piano Concerto he recorded with Clifford Curzon in London -- he slipped back into a slightly more expansive mindset when he returned to Europe to conduct;
• and then in some selections I pulled out of a wonderful broadcast performance of Otto Klemperer and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra -- a combination that could produce earthy and exhilarating results -- performing MSND excerpts, of which I pulled out a selection. (One thing I especially love is Brigitte Fassbaender's lusty rendering of the alto Second Fairy's stanza of "Ye spotted snakes.")
MENDELSSOHN: A Midsummer Night's Dream: Overture, Op. 21, and suite from the incidental music, Op. 61:
i. Overture; ii. Scherzo; iii. Nocturne; iv. Wedding March
[i., iv.-vi.] Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), George Szell, cond. Decca, recorded in the Concertgebouw, Dec. 2-4, 1957
i. Overture
ii. Scherzo; iii. "Bunte Schlangen, zweigezüngt" ("Ye spotted snakes")*; iv. Intermezzo; v. Nocturne; vi. Wedding March
*Edith Mathis, soprano; *Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano; *Bavarian Radio Chorus, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Broadcast performance, May 23,
LOOKING AHEAD
As noted, we still need to spend a little more time with the Brahms Ballades, to get a better feel for the way Brahms was flexing his creative muscles, and then hear how that process was being carried forward in sonata-type forms to set the stage for, first, the D minor Concerto that was on its way to becoming his first symphony and ultimately to the actual First Symphony itself.
And I know I've got to go back and properly update the in-progress "Brahms box." It's just such awful picky work. Still, it has to be done.
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