Canons, fugues, rounds, and lots and lots of imitation. Carpe Diem String Quartet along with Michelle Schumann performs Shostakovich Piano Quintet, Beethoven Grosse Fugue, and Franck Piano Quintet.

Synchronism Friday, September 10, 7:30 PM at First Unitarian Church, Tickets: $25

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Grosse Fuge for String Quartet, Opus 33 (1826)

Beethoven had used fugal techniques within sonata-form movements throughout his career. Fugatos appear in Op. 18, No. 2; Op. 59, No. 1; and in the slow movement of Op. 95. There are powerful fugues within the first two movements of the “Eroica” Symphony. But to write a full-fledged fugue as a thing in itself, rather than as a developmental resource within a sonata movement, was not much in style during the later Classical period, except in oratorios or as self-conscious evocations of a bygone era. The Große Fuge is a Janus-like monolith that looks back to the past, but at the same time, in texture, sonic extremes, and the scope of its expressive agenda, blazes a startling vision of the future. Indeed, the Große Fuge smashes all preconceptions about melody, harmony, and structure. The theme of the fugue isn’t at all melodic; it’s a series of huge, vaulting leaps with jagged rhythmic contours. The fragmentation of melody hinted at in the previous movements of Op. 130, the Danza tedesca and the Cavatina, irrevocably changes the musical landscape in a piece that transcends its historical context.

Beethoven composed the Grosse Fuge between 1825 and 1826. Spanning from Beethoven’s early Classical roots, through the triumphant middle of his life, to the hermetic mysteries of deafness in his waning years, the string quartets delight, shock and console with ceaseless originality and intimacy. At the furthest extreme of the genre lies the Grosse Fuge, premiered a year before his death. As the critic Alex Ross aptly wrote, it is “more than a piece; it’s a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications. It is the most radical work by the most formidable composer in history.”

Like the mythical Hydra, with many heads on a serpent’s body, the Grosse Fuge is a kinetic tangle of ideas and identities. The introductory overture (a surprising element borrowed from theater music) announces the unsettled mood immediately with an angular opening line, declaimed in stark octaves and straining toward the very edges of tonality until it breaks off suddenly after a trill. On the first page of the score alone, there are three different key signatures and meters, as well as five held pauses, all before the first fugue even begins. That initial course of counterpoint is an unrelenting assault of pounding rhythms, daring leaps and full-throttle volume. A sweet response follows, reusing some of the same themes in a flowing section marked sempre pianissimo (“always very quiet”). Each new section shows another face, a lively dance in triple meter, a hushed chorale, a series of hovering trills, but the distinct music from the fugue binds everything together, like the blood circulating through this strange but singular creature.

-Aaron Grad

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Piano Quintet in G minor, Op.57 (1940)

From the opening measures of the Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57 we realize that we are listening to a grand chamber work by a facile and mature composer. But the Quintet is actually an early chamber music work by Shostakovich. Completed in 1940 after the First String Quartet, Op.49 (1938), several film scores and the Sixth Symphony, Op.54 (1939), the Piano Quintet is the fourth work in the composer’s chamber music catalog. Fourteen more string quartets (out of a projected 24), a piano trio, a violin sonata, and a viola sonata follow it. In 1940 most of Europe had already plunged into war. The Soviet Union, though ostensibly protected by a non-aggression pact signed by both Stalin and Hitler, was already beginning to face the certainty of conflict, though no one could imagine the actual brutality of the Great Patriotic War which was to come. Yet the country was quiet, like the proverbial calm before the storm. The Red Terror of the early years after the revolution of 1917 had passed. The collectivization of the peasants in 1929 and 1930 had been completed (albeit at the cost of famine and starvation and the death of millions). The purge trials of 1935 and 1936 and the mass arrests that engulfed the entire country in 1937 and 1938 were complete. Shostakovich himself had almost succumbed to personal political terror in January of 1936 when Stalin and his minions walked out of a performance of the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District. After an article entitled “Muddle Instead of Music” was published in Pravda (“things could end very badly for this young man”), Shostakovich withdrew public performances of his work. The Fifth Symphony, Op.47 (1937) rehabilitated him in the stern eyes of the regime, i.e.: Josef Stalin, or “Uncle Joe” as FDR and Churchill referred to him.

As with much of Shostakovich’s music, the Piano Quintet is an historical reflection of its time. It is a gravely serene piece marked by a simplicity of texture, especially in the piano writing: lines are doubled two octaves below, and there is little complex inter-part composition. All of this provides clarity, and an ample accessibility reflected in the popularity of the work immediately after its premiere. Rostislav Dubinsky, original first violinist of the Borodin Quartet recalls in his book, Not By Music Alone: “For a time the Quintet overshadowed even such events as the football matches between the main teams. The Quintet was discussed in trams, people tried to sing in the streets the second defiant theme of the finale. War that soon started completely changed the life of the country as well as the consciousness of the people. If previously there was the faint hope of a better life, and the hope that the ‘sacrifices’ of the revolution were not in vain, this hope was never to return. The Quintet remained in the consciousness of the people as the last ray of light before the future sank into a dark gloom.”

The work is cast in five movements. The Prelude opens in the style of a Bach prelude, and foreshadows the remarkable preludes that Shostakovich was to write in the Preludes and Fugues for Piano, Op.87 (1950-51). The stirring entry of the piano is answered by the quartet, after which the mood changes and a related idea is developed until the opening reasserts itself. The Fugue begins gently and slowly and builds to a furor of lyricism. The Scherzo returns to Shostakovich’s irrepressible sense of irony and humor, and is utterly brilliant. This side of the composer’s personality is never restrained; there are dazzling and profound scherzos scattered throughout his work. This one is reminiscent of the Polka from the Age of Gold, or moments from the Cello Sonata, Op.40 (1934). The Intermezzo, tinged with regret and tranquility, leads to a finale in which triumph is flung in direct opposition to darkness. This is the theme that Dubinsky recalls, and it appears before and after a thunderous, descending group of onrushing chords on the piano, the emotional core of the work. The Quintet finishes with wit and whimsy, contrary to the opening, in which the music spins off to a quiet conclusion.

Shostakovich and the Beethoven Quartet premiered the Quintet on November 23, 1940 at the Moscow Academy of Music. Shostakovich was an accomplished pianist and performed the piece many times with the Beethoven and later, the Borodin Quartet. Incidentally, Dmitri Dmitreyvich was an anxious performer and his resulting fast tempi are recognizable in recordings of his performances. Valentin Berlinsky, cellist of the Borodin Quartet, recalls in Elizabeth Wilson’s book, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered that the composer would say “Let’s play it fast, otherwise the audience will get bored.” He would particularly rush the fast movements. The player’s would beg him to slow down, saying “but your metronome mark is such and such!” The composer replied, “Well, you see my metronome at home is out of order, so pay no attention to what I wrote.”

-Richard Gylgayton

Cesar Franck (1822-1890)

Quintet for Piano and Strings (1879)

Franck was 57 when he completed his Piano Quintet. It was the first piece of chamber music he had written in 30 years, and its tempestuous, hyper-romantic mood contrasted markedly with Franck’s earlier work, which had been mostly sacred. The choice of medium is explained by the recent launching of the Société Nationale de Musique, which set as its goal to promote chamber music, long neglected in France. As for the mood, the likely explanation is Franck’s infatuation with his student Augusta Holmès, a beautiful and gifted woman 25 years his junior.

The novelties of the work were not lost on the audience of the first performance. “The lovers of the classics [were] shocked by the expressive force and violence of the Quintet,” writes Léon Vallas in his 1951 biography. Others, on the contrary, appreciated “the glowing beauty of the new score,” sensitive to the “unexpected and overwhelming display of a musical passion hitherto unsuspected.” The premiere left some unpleasant memories: the piano part was played by Camille Saint-Saëns, who was Franck’s rival and had little affinity for the emotional intensity of the piece. When the performance was finished, Saint-Saëns left the stage rather abruptly, leaving the manuscript (which had been dedicated to him) on the piano with a gesture everyone interpreted as very ill-mannered. Another person who was appalled by the new work was Franck’s wife, Félicité, who had no doubts about the inspiration behind it.

Franck based nearly all of his mature works on musical ideas that recur in all the movements, a technique he had learned primarily from Franz Liszt, though he developed it in an entirely personal manner. In the Quintet, the recurrent theme is first heard as the secondary subject of the first movement; there, it is played tenero ma con passione (“tenderly but with passion”). At the end of the movement, this theme becomes much more animated. Halfway through the second movement, the piano plays it in a dreamy, lyrical fashion. Finally, it plays a crucial role in the third movement, just before the end.

In each of the three movements, this motto is preceded by other, contrasting materials. The slow introduction to the first movement presents two opposite characters: a powerful dramatic statement in the strings, and a gently undulating melody in the piano. When the tempo increases to Allegro, all five players begin to share the same music, a passionate motif in dotted rhythm derived from the earlier string theme. The first appearance of what will be the recurrent melody is a response to that motif, a resolution of the conflict, as it were. One of the most striking features of this melody is its extensive use of chromatic half-steps, and Franck develops this aspect thoroughly. The pervasive chromaticism undermines tonal stability and creates a great deal of additional tension that is present even in the subdued final measures of the Allegro.

The second movement is intimately lyrical throughout. The appearance of the motto theme in the middle functions as a bridge between the two main sections of the movement. The second of these sections contains a triple-fortissimo outburst that, however, quickly dissipates into the extremely tender music of the final measures.

The main melody of the fiery finale emerges only gradually from the background of an excited accompaniment figure. The four string instruments play this melody in unison, rising from piano to fortissimo. A second and later a third theme are added and developed as sonata form requires. The defining moment, however, arrives when the motto returns one final time to crown the entire composition, ushering in the vigorous and extremely tense concluding measures.

-Peter Laki