A comparatively late bloomer, Dvořák was in his early 30s when he first made his mark as a composer in his native Bohemia. Up to that point, his reputation had hardly reached beyond the city limits of Prague, where he earned a modest living as a piano teacher and church organist. A few of his songs and chamber works had been performed locally, and his Slavic-flavored comic opera King and Charcoal Burner had been well received at the city’s Czech opera house. (There was also a venue for German opera.) Dvořák’s career finally took off when the imperial Austrian government awarded him a prestigious stipend in 1875. In addition to providing a measure of financial security, the prize brought him to the attention of Brahms, a member of the award jury, who introduced the young Czech composer to his own publisher in Berlin as “a very talented man.” Thereafter, Dvořák lost no time in producing a string of highly accomplished works in sundry genres that were not only technically masterful, but also enormously popular. By the mid-1880s, his international reputation was spreading by leaps and bounds, with major publishers bidding for the privilege of advertising his newest works in their catalogues.
Dvořák’s early popularity both at home and abroad rested largely on works steeped in Czech folk music and lore, such the Slavonic Dances, Moravian Duets, and Gypsy Melodies. His opera Dimitrij, a grand historical epic in the vein of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, was successfully produced in Prague in 1882. But Brahms and other friends counseled him to adopt a more cosmopolitan (that is, Germanic) stance in order to get his music performed in Vienna, the cultural capital of eastern Europe, where anti-Czech sentiments ran strong. A proud nationalist, Dvořák was willing to go only so far in that direction, even with music intended largely for domestic consumption. The trio for two violins and viola that he wrote in early 1887 contains a healthy dollop of Bohemian flavor in its distinctive rhythms and atmospheric harmonies. When Dvořák pressed to have the work issued under a Czech title, however, his German publisher demurred, arguing that it would put off German customers. In the end, they compromised on the Italian title Terzetto.
As Dvořák gradually reasserted his identity as a Czech composer, melody came to play an ever more prominent role in his music. (Brahms, who found composing laborious, envied the younger man’s facility and melodic invention, observing that “he is never at a loss for an idea like the rest of us.”) The Terzetto is characteristically generous in its lyricism, one idea cascading after another in a display of seemingly effortless invention. The sinuous C-major serenity of the Introduzione is ruffled by urgent eruptions of dark-hued chromaticism; the first movement ends on a sequence of widely spaced, tonally enigmatic chords that segue seamlessly to a beatific and lulling essay in F-sharp major. Once again, the peace is disturbed by the jagged, energetic rhythms of the Larghetto’s midsection. Dvořák posits a similar dichotomy in the A-B-A form of the rollicking Scherzo before bringing the Terzetto to a close with a theme-and-variations finale characterized by sharp contrasts of mood, dynamics, and texture.
Kodály and Bartók are frequently bracketed together as Hungarian nationalists whose scholarly studies of folk music enriched their own cosmopolitan musical languages. But while Bartók’s strikingly innovative approach to harmony, rhythm, sonority, and musical structure made him a leading figure in the modernist movement, Kodály followed a more conservative path. As Bartók observed in 1921, Kodály’s music “is not of the kind described nowadays as modern. It has nothing to do with the new atonal, bitonal, and polytonal music—everything in it is based on the principle of tonal balance. His idiom is nevertheless new: He says things that have never been uttered before and demonstrates thereby that the tonal principle has not lost its raison d’être yet.”
The Duo for Violin and Cello, written at the outset of World War I, exemplifies Kodály’s carefully calibrated blend of tradition and innovation. The composer and his wife were vacationing in the Swiss Alps when war broke out in August 1914. Forced to leave their idyllic resort in Zermatt, they made their way to the village of Feldkirch on the Tyrolean border. “It was there the vision of the Duo suddenly appeared to me,” Kodály recalled later:
Never before had I thought of scoring for a combination such as this. I thought no one ever had done so before. (Later I became acquainted with Haydn’s [string duos] and I also read that it had been fairly frequent in the 18th century.) No music-paper was to be had in Feldkirch, and so the first movement, which I put on paper there, is written in a school music exercise book, practically without any change throughout. Whether others will ever find anything either of the indescribable grandeur of the gigantic mountains or the dim presentiment of a precipitate war in it, remains a great question.
The combination of violin and cello was both unusual (Ravel’s famous duo sonata was not composed until after the war) and economical. Kodály compensated for the limitations of the string duet medium by emphasizing extreme contrasts of register and a richly imaginative variety of tone colors and textures, accentuated by percussive pizzicatos, airy harmonics, and droning bagpipe effects. Like Bartók, he uses repeated rhythmic and melodic patterns—often with an exotic, folk-like flavor—as building blocks. Each of the three movements is unified thematically, despite the music’s seemingly free-flowing, episodic structure and Kodály’s equally flexible treatment of the basic D-major tonality. The exuberant virtuosity of the string writing is tempered by a pervasive mood of wistful melancholy, just as the specter of war deflated the composer’s congenital high spirits.
For all Tchaikovsky’s heart-on-sleeve Romanticism and intimately revealing correspondence with his patron and confidante, Nadezhda von Meck, much about the man and his music remains shrouded in enigma. The composer’s characteristically ecstatic effusions masked an inner life racked by anguish and self-doubt. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, he produced a string of sunny and extroverted works, including the brilliant Violin Concerto, the tub-thumping 1812 Overture, and the incandescent Serenade for Strings. Yet the same period saw the composition of the Fourth Symphony, with its portentous “fate” motif, and the opera Eugene Onegin, whose tragic overtones mirrored the conflict at the heart of the homosexual Tchaikovsky’s unhappy marriage. By the time he traveled to the United States in the spring of 1891—among other engagements, he appeared at the opening of Carnegie Hall—he was one of the most celebrated musicians in the world. Two years later, shortly after conducting the premiere of his “Pathétique” Symphony, he died in St. Petersburg under mysterious circumstances.
Although chamber music doesn’t figure prominently in Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre, his comparatively few mature works for chamber ensembles are of exceptionally high quality. In addition to three string quartets written between 1871 and 1877, they include the elegiac Piano Trio of 1882 and the string sextet in D major titled Souvenir de Florence. The latter was composed in the summer of 1890, hard on the heels of his opera The Queen of Spades and some six months after the St. Petersburg premiere of The Sleeping Beauty. Whereas the ballet had a somewhat difficult
gestation, Tchaikovsky dashed off the sketches for The Queen of Spades in a mere six weeks during a working vacation in Florence. This flood of creative energy evidently buoyed his troubled spirits: Souvenir de Florence is suffused with a hot-blooded passion singularly free of the angst that bedeviled the composer for much of his adult life. What prompted him to write for the rather unusual combination of six strings (violins, violas, and cellos in pairs) is unclear. He may have been inspired by the sextets of his friends Brahms, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov; or perhaps he simply wanted to flex his creative muscles with a small-scale work before applying himself to the arduous task of orchestrating his new opera.
Notwithstanding its descriptive title, Souvenir de Florence is programmatic only in the sense that it—like virtually all of Tchaikovsky’s music—has an implicit emotional storyline. However restorative his holiday in the city of Dante and Michelangelo may have been, the composer made no apparent effort to evoke Italian music or atmosphere in the sextet. Even the punchy folk dance that serves as the principal theme of the concluding Allegro vivace sounds decidedly Slavic rather than Mediterranean. Both the plush sonorities and intricate motivic construction of Souvenir de Florence bespeak a fundamentally symphonic conception. The opening Allegro con spirito, by turns urgent and dreamy, blends drama and lyricism in a grand manner. The second movement, marked Adagio cantabile e con moto (“songlike and with movement”), features a quasi-operatic aria for the first violin (later taken up by the first cello) with pizzicato accompaniment. The lilting, sharply accented theme of the ensuing Allegretto moderato paves the way for the exuberant finale.
—Harry Haskell
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