Crisantemi
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)

Like many opera composers of the Romantic era, including Gaetano Donizetti, Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini rarely composed for instruments alone. He never attempted a major instrumental composition on the scale of Verdi’s String Quartet in E minor. Rather, Puccini’s instrumental compositions are modest and seldom performed.

Puccini composed Crisantemi in 1890 for string quartet, but it is frequently performed in an arrangement for string orchestra. It is a threnody composed in a hurry after the death of the Count of Savoy, a member of one of Italy’s oldest families. Shortly thereafter, Puccini reused the themes in his opera Manon Lescaut

Not surprisingly, Crisantemi is actually a da capo aria for strings. A solemn opening section with a murmuring ostinato accompaniment in the cello is followed by a more sentimental and slightly faster section. The piece ends with the return to the opening.

Piano Quintet in D minor
Frank Bridge (1879-1941)

The son of a printer and passionate amateur musician, English composer, conductor and violist Frank Bridge is remembered today primarily for the tremendous influence he had on his one and only composition student, Benjamin Britten.

Bridge’s own composition teacher at the Royal College of Music, Charles Villiers Stanford was notorious for his domineering and stifling pedagogy. Bridge’s early compositions, before World War I, were, therefore late Romantic in style, and although Bridge accrued awards and prizes at RCM, his creativity was attenuated until he was able to emerge from Stanford’s influence. Before World War I, he was known more as a brilliant conductor and chamber musician than as a composer. His oeuvre was dominated by chamber works.

In World War I, however, all sides of the conflict were traumatized and deflated by the unspeakable atrocities of the new trench warfare. Although because of his age, Bridge did not serve in the military, he was in such despair over the futility of the War that he would pace the streets in the early hours of the morning unable to sleep. His bitterness began to pervade his music, which became increasingly dissonant and atonal, and he became a lifelong pacifist; his feelings may have influenced Britten, also a pacifist, who fled England at the beginning of World War II.

In 1922, Bridge had the great fortune to meet Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, America’s grand patroness of music who established the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood. Her support enabled him to devote himself to composition for the rest of his life.

Composed in 1905 and extensively revised in 1912 to combine the slow movement with the scherzo into a twin, the Quintet is noted for its virtuoso pianism and its influence by Gabriel Fauré. A wistful second theme of the opening movement provides a unifying voice, recurring in both subsequent movements. The brooding mood of the first movement is followed by the Romantic adagio, which merges into a scherzo-like midsection, after which the adagio returns. The energetic finale brings back themes from the previous movements to create a cyclical structure, a technique popularized by Franz Liszt.

Octet for Strings in E-flat major, Op. 20
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

If ever there was a composer who did not fit the romantic picture of the struggling artist, unsure of where his next meal was coming from as he fought for acceptance of his new ideas, it was Felix Mendelssohn. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth and raised in affluence, he enjoyed encouragement and the nurturing of his precocious musical talent. His culturally sophisticated family was unusually enlightened in its support of his artistic aspirations – many other composers well into the twentieth century had to rebel and escape parents who wanted them to become doctors or lawyers. The Mendelssohn household was a Mecca for the intellectual elite of Germany, and the many family visitors fawned over the prodigy and his talented – but less promoted – sister Fanny. Fortunately for the development of his rare abilities, Felix’s carefully selected teachers, especially the formidable Carl Friedrich Zelter, were demanding and strict.

On Mendelssohn’s fifteenth birthday, February 3, 1824, Zelter, declared his pupil a “journeyman.” The use of the term is a telling one; in the medieval guild system, “apprentices” learned a trade under the strict supervision of a master, after which they became journeymen, quasi-independent students who traveled to the workshops of other masters to fill out their education. And according to Zelter, Felix could not yet call himself a master. Felix’s father, in fact, was encouraging his prodigiously gifted son to take up banking or the law with music as an avocation.

Although many of Felix’s teenage compositions remained undiscovered until the twentieth century, the Octet, composed in the fall of 1825, retains its status as the composer’s first masterpiece. Like all his early compositions, it was composed for a musicale in the spacious family home. Felix dedicated it to his friend and violin teacher, Eduard Rietz, who played first violin at the premiere.

The Octet is not a double quartet, in which two string quartets resemble antiphonal voicing of the polychoral music of the seventeenth century. Rather the layout of the score groups together all the violins, violas and cellos. The prominence of the first violin, especially in the first movement, is clearly a nod to Rietz. In the published score (1830), Mendelssohn acknowledged the symphonic character of the work with the instructions that "The Octet must be played by all instruments in symphonic orchestral style. Pianos and fortes must be strictly observed and more strongly emphasized than is common in pieces of this character." Consequently, performances by string orchestras are common.

The Octet has a frenetic quality, one that shows up in many of the composer’s works. It opens with a grand arpeggiated motive by the first violin above the tremolo of the other instruments. Continuing in the vein of some of his earlier works, Mendelssohn incorporates the arpeggio motive in the other instruments as occasional accompaniment to the movement’s other themes. The mood of the Andante is set by a short phrase from the lower strings. It is dream-like in character, relying for effect on short interlacing phrases rather than a single memorable theme.

The Scherzo was inspired by the Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis night) scene from Goethe's Faust, which describes the Witches' Sabbath held on the peak of Mount Brocken in the Harz Mountains and attended by Faust. It is constantly in motion, all pianissimo, evoking transient spirits, clouds and swirling mist. "At the end" Fanny Mendelssohn wrote, "the first violin soars feather-light aloft and all is blown away."

The Finale is a headlong rush without letup. It contains something of a contradiction: a light-hearted fugue (perhaps to satisfy his teacher, who relentlessly drilled Felix in fugue writing). In the middle, bits of the Scherzo are thrown in. Surprisingly, the ending is the least symphonic-sounding section of the work.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com

Mainstage Chamber Concert • Thursday, July 6, 2023 • 7:30pm • Arkell Pavilion, SVAC