Dowland was arguably the greatest songwriter of his time. A master lutenist, he served in that capacity at the court of Denmark, but—despite assiduous lobbying—failed to obtain a court position in his native England until he was nearly 50. The repeated rejections embittered the composer and may be one source of his famously melancholy disposition. (Playing on the Elizabethan pronunciation of his surname, contemporaries described him as semper dolens, Latin for “always grieving.”) In addition to dozens of solo songs, Dowland composed a wide assortment of dances, fantasies, and other pieces for solo lute and string consort. His best-known work—and one of the most famous of the 17th century—is “Lachrimae” (“Tears”), whose dolorously descending melodic line serves as a musical emblem of grief.
Many of Dowland’s songs draw on the conventional themes of Elizabethan verse: requited and unrequited love, the joys of springtime, and so on. But a significant number are much darker, even morbid in tone. “In darkness let me dwell,” which many consider his masterpiece, reflects a fixation on death in its searing dissonances and tragic introspection. The two songs that open tonight’s program—heard in modern arrangements for viola and piano—are only marginally less lugubrious. “Flow, my tears, fall from your springs” is one of several vocal and instrumental versions of the “Lachrimae” pavane; its text ends: “Happy, happy they that in hell / feel not the world’s despite.” The sweetly plaintive melody of “If my complaints could passions move” struggles to cast off the constraints of the regular three-part verse form.
Britten’s Lachrymae, subtitled “Reflections on a Song of Dowland,” is the fruit of his lifelong engagement with Britain’s cultural heritage. The original version for viola and piano dates from 1950, a period when the composer was not only adapting Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas for a revival by his English Opera Group, but also working on his own operatic masterpiece, Billy Budd, for Covent Garden. Britten composed Lachrymae in response to a commission from violist William Primrose and orchestrated it shortly before his death at the behest of another distinguished violist, Cecil Aronowitz. The score affords many opportunities for the soloist to display his or her virtuosity and has rightly come to be regarded as a cornerstone of the viola repertoire.
Lachrymae is a captivating synthesis—less adaptation than creative reworking. In Britten’s hands, the raw material of Dowland’s melancholic “If my complaints could passions move” is transmuted into something utterly new yet strangely familiar. The song’s opening bars are first intoned by the piano’s left hand, a spectral cantus firmus rising from murky depths. A series of 10 short variations ensues, in which snatches of Dowland appear in sundry guises, now buried deep within the musical fabric, now rising brightly to the surface. Only in the sixth variation does Britten allude to the eponymous song, the viola’s plangent cantilena soaring above the restless triplets of the piano. The haunting simplicity of the final variation, in which Dowland’s tune is magically reunited with its original harmonies, lingers in the memory.
Clarke’s music has undergone something of a renaissance in the four decades since her death. Trained at London’s Royal College of Music, she was abruptly thrown on her own resources when her abusive father kicked her out of the family house in 1910. This traumatic event proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it freed her to embark on a professional career as a violist and composer. As a pioneering “lady musician,” however, she eventually tired of bucking the male-dominated establishment and all but stopped composing in the 1950s. Clarke’s Viola Sonata of 1919 tied with Ernest Bloch’s Suite for viola and piano in a competition sponsored by American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Although Coolidge broke the tie in Bloch’s favor, Clarke treasured her consolation prize as “the one little whiff of success that I’ve had in my life.”
Expansive in scope and bold in expression, the Viola Sonata marked a departure from Clarke’s earlier works, mostly songs and short character pieces. Its idiom, while not aggressively modernist, is decidedly advanced and reflects Clarke’s interest in the music of composers like Franck, Debussy, and Bartók. She highlights the French influence by prefacing the score with a sensuous couplet by Alfred de Musset: “Poet, take up your lute; the wine of youth / is fermenting tonight in the veins of God.” The sonata itself seethes and ferments, starting with the viola’s vigorously rhapsodic, cadenza-like introduction in the opening Impetuoso. The virtuoso element is even more pronounced in the Vivace, with its elfin staccato theme and devil-may-care insouciance; the final Adagio comes full circle by reprising music from the first movement in an up-to-date display of cyclical form.
Equally renowned as a violinist and composer, Enescu was something of a Romanian Bartók. Exact contemporaries, the two men were mutual admirers and occasionally concertized together. Moreover, they shared a keen interest in the vernacular music of their native lands, as well as a predilection for cyclical, organic forms. Like his Hungarian counterpart, Enesco followed a trajectory from late Romanticism and the folkish idiom of his two popular Romanian rhapsodies to the austere, increasingly pithy language of his late chamber music. Although he described himself as “essentially a polyphonist” who eschewed “pretty chord progressions,” he developed a sensitivity to musical line at an early age thanks to his studies under master lyricists Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire (where Ravel was a fellow student).
Written in wartime Bucharest in 1940, Impressions d’enfance (Impressions of Childhood) was inspired by memories of Enescu’s early years in rural Moldavia (now part of Romania) and dedicated to his first violin teacher. The movements of this virtuosic programmatic suite for violin and piano are clearly labeled in the score and played mostly without breaks. A free-wheeling imitation of a folk fiddler gives way to a depiction of an aged beggar, marked “raucously, but tender and sad.” The burbling jets of notes in the ensuing “Little Stream at the Bottom of the Garden” are to be played “with an aquatic sonority.” Enescu proceeds to evoke, among other things, a caged bird, wind whistling in a chimney, and a nocturnal squall. In the final “Sunrise” section, he told an interviewer, “All the themes of day and night come back, this time in the major, pacified and transformed.”
Born into a musical family in Liège, Ysaÿe was a protégé of Henryk Wieniawski and Henri Vieuxtemps, two of the foremost violinists of the day. In the early 1880s, he began touring with the great Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein, and by the end of the century he had taken Europe and America by storm. Violinist Carl Flesch considered Ysaÿe in a class by himself, “dominating all his contemporaries as if from the top of a tower,” while Dvořák praised the “tremendous power and incomparable purity” of the Belgian’s playing. Among the major works written for or dedicated to him are Debussy’s String Quartet, Chausson’s Poème, sonatas by Franck and Lekeu, the first string quartets of Saint-Saëns and d’Indy, and Fauré’s Piano Quintet No. 1.
Ysaÿe was inspired to write his six Op. 27 sonatas after hearing Joseph Szigeti play one of Bach’s suites for solo violin. Like Bach, Ysaÿe exploited the instrument’s expressive resources to the fullest, using special sound effects, double- and triple-stops, scintillating passagework, and simulated polyphonic passages. The “Ballade” Sonata’s single movement falls into three sections. The slow, meditative introduction is characterized by broad, romantic gestures and hollow-sounding intervals (sixths and fourths). Chains of finger-twisting double-stops, mounting in volume and intensity, lead to the main part of the sonata, a bravura showpiece built around a recurring rhythmic figure in a distinctive “snap” rhythm (short-long). After presenting the main theme, the violinist weaves a soft, rhythmically nebulous web of sound, out of which snatches of melody emerge with increasing definition.
In his music as in his life, Bartók straddled two starkly different worlds: the rich peasant culture of his native Hungary (where he conducted his pioneering ethnomusicological research at the beginning of the 20th century) and the violent, angst-ridden landscape described in W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety. Many of the composer’s early works are suffused with the melodies, rhythms, and colors of the Hungarian and Balkan folk music that he and his compatriot Zoltán Kodály collected in the field. In the 1920s, as Bartók’s international career as a concert pianist took off, he confronted a number of formal and stylistic issues that moved his music in a new direction, ultimately leading to his boldly expressionistic masterpieces of the 1930s and ’40s.
Bartók wrote his two folk-themed violin rhapsodies in 1928, the same year that produced the innovative sonorities and organic structure of his Fourth String Quartet. Rhapsody No. 2 is modeled on the traditional Hungarian soldiers’ dance, or verbunkos, with its leisurely, slightly fulsome warmup (lassú) followed by a faster frolic (friss). The first section is cast in A-B-A-C form, its three otherwise contrastive themes sharing the “snap” rhythmic pattern (short-long) typical of Hungarian folk music. In the longer second section, which follows without pause, no fewer than seven tunes are presented one after the other in a steadily accelerating tempo that generates mounting excitement and kinetic energy. Fiery rhythms, shifting accents, elaborate ornamentation, and modal scales and harmonies accentuate the music’s earthy, sometimes exotic vitality. Bartók combines virtuosic writing for the violin with simpler piano accompaniments that often imitate bagpipe drones or the tinkling of the Hungarian cimbalom (dulcimer).
—Harry Haskell
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