Beethoven cut his musical teeth in his native Bonn, a relatively small provincial capital whose cultural life offered limited scope for a prodigiously gifted and ambitious young musician. In late 1792, he burst onto the scene in cosmopolitan Vienna and spent the rest of the decade burnishing his reputation as a pianistic powerhouse; upon hearing him play, his fellow virtuoso Wenzel Tomaschek was so overwhelmed that he refused to touch his own instrument for several days. Boundlessly energetic and self-confident to a fault, the young tyro made no secret of his impatience to emerge from the deep shadow cast by his esteemed mentor, Joseph Haydn. By 1800, his 30th year, Beethoven had an impressive clutch of masterpieces to his credit, including his first symphony, three piano concertos, a septet for winds and strings, and six string quartets. Modesty was not Beethoven’s strong suit. Upon completing his Op. 18 quartets, he told a friend that he had “only just learned to write quartets properly,” implicitly setting them on a plane with the works of Haydn’s maturity.
Flaunting convention, Beethoven lays out the first of the Op. 102 cello sonatas in two very fast movements of contrasting characters, each preceded by a leisurely and somewhat meandering preamble. The tender 6/8 theme of the opening Andante is punctuated with tiny pauses and fluttering trills that create an aura of expectancy, a lull before the storm that erupts without warning in the first Allegro vivace in A minor. Listen for the rising four-note figure (long-short-short-long) that Beethoven inserts in the cello part just before the first-section repeat: It will return as an integral part of the main theme of the second Allegro vivace, the two instruments playfully batting it back and forth in a game of cat and mouse. In similar fashion, the brief passage that links the second slow-fast pair reprises the opening Andante.
Like Gustav Mahler, with whom he is often bracketed, Shostakovich was in the most literal sense a composer of extremes. Many of his works juxtapose jarringly disparate styles and elements. A case in point is the D-Minor Cello Sonata, which contains some of the most tenderly sublime and rumbustiously high-spirited chamber music the Russian composer ever wrote. It is in the reconciling of these opposing tendencies—the harmony he forged out of the discordant raw materials of human life and emotion—that much of the power and beauty of Shostakovich’s music lie.
Dating from 1934, the Op. 40 Sonata signaled Shostakovich’s return to purely instrumental composition after a protracted immersion in the writing of music for film and opera. (The first version of his controversial opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which would soon be officially condemned and banned in the Soviet Union, was staged in Leningrad that same year.) The score is dedicated to his friend Viktor Kubatsky, cellist of the Stradivarius Quartet and the Bolshoi Theatre, who joined Shostakovich in the first performance on Christmas Day. Not until 1959 would another Russian cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, inspire Shostakovich to further explore the instrument’s potential in the first of a pair of exuberantly virtuosic cello concertos.
The opening Allegro non troppo, a movement of majestic temporal and harmonic dimensions, exudes a graceful lyricism notable for its “classical” balance and restraint. Then, without warning, the music plunges into a demonic triple-time dance, characterized by foot-stomping accents, insistent ostinato passages, and ethereal glissandos in the cello’s upper register. Next comes a long-breathed Largo of searing poignancy, muted in spirit as well as timbre. (The cellist is instructed to play con sordino, a special effect that Shostakovich exploits to the fullest.) In the final Allegro, playfulness reasserts itself in the mincing, catlike tread of the opening theme—but Shostakovich’s manic energy is never far below the surface, and the sonata ends with a savage flourish that affirms the elusive D-minor tonality.
Although he is chiefly remembered today as Benjamin Britten’s teacher, Frank Bridge was a major figure in England’s musical life at the beginning of the 20th century. Born into a working-class family in Brighton, where his father played violin in a theater orchestra, Bridge showed sufficient promise as a string player to win a scholarship to London’s Royal College of Music. (On one occasion, he was even asked to substitute for the ailing violist of the renowned Joachim String Quartet.) His compositional talent emerged under the tutelage of Charles Villiers Stanford, whose conservatively Romantic style, strongly indebted to Brahms and Dvořák, is apparent in the works Bridge wrote before the First World War. Starting with the Cello Sonata of 1913–1917, however, he forged a leaner, more dissonant style somewhat akin to the contemporary atonal music of Schoenberg and Berg.
The Cello Sonata’s protracted gestation undoubtedly accounts for the striking difference in tone between the two movements. The disjunction may also have reflected Bridge’s reaction to contemporary events: According to a pianist who knew him, by the time he wrote the sonata’s second, slow movement, “he was in utter despair over the futility of war and the state of the world generally and would walk round Kensington in the early hours of the morning unable to get any rest or sleep.” Yet Bridge was already transitioning toward a more modernist style, and in any case he was skeptical about the possibility of turning over a new musical leaf. “It seems that I only possess one leaf,” he joked to a friend in 1919. “Now that I’m 40 it has become so used and thin than I can see through to the other side without the effort of turning it.”
In light of Bridge’s self-deprecating remark, it seems reasonable to regard the sonata’s disparate halves as two sides of the same coin, the second movement a logical outgrowth of the first. The turbulent lyricism of the opening Allegro ben moderato is steeped in the lush, late Romantic idiom of Bridge’s formative years, but both the work’s D-minor tonality and its aura of confidence and ardor give way, in the Adagio ma non troppo, to premonitions of the edgier, more harmonically and emotionally ambivalent music that he would compose in the 20s and 30s. Bridge emphasizes the continuity between the two movements by reprising themes from the Allegro at the end of the sonata, this time couched in nostalgic D major, exemplifying the rounded “arch” form that would characterize many of his later works.
A professed pacifist, gay man, and agnostic, Britten paradoxically came to be widely regarded as the most quintessentially English composer since Purcell. As a young man, he had little sympathy for the patriotic effusions of the older generation, preferring to align himself with mavericks like Frank Bridge, William Walton, and Lennox Berkeley. During the 1930s, work in a government film production unit brought Britten into contact with a cadre of left-wing writers and artists. When his friends W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood moved to New York in 1938, Britten and his partner—tenor Peter Pears—quickly decided to join them. Returning to England in 1942, Britten made his mark with Peter Grimes, the first in a series of masterpieces that revitalized British opera. In his last years, Britten turned increasingly inward, concentrating on the chamber music festival he founded in Aldeburgh in 1948.
The Cello Sonata in C Major is the first of eight works that Britten wrote for the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. The two men met in London in 1960 and forged a close bond—both personal and artistic—that lasted until the composer’s death in 1976. Rostropovich was a regular visitor to the Aldeburgh Festival, where the sonata was premiered on July 7, 1961. The cellist recalled his excitement when the freshly minted score arrived at his Moscow flat: “I was called to the telephone: a parcel with the music from Britain! I’m sure I broke all records for 880-yard hurdles for cellists. The hurdles were varied and many; the staircase and the acquaintances I dodged, barely saying hello. When I returned, I made a dash for my cello, locked myself in, and went at that sonata. It was a case of love at first sight. I was astounded; the music resembled no other piece of chamber music I knew.”
The sonata’s five movements are laid out like a suite, with pairs of restlessly dynamic outer movements framing a more sedate core. The opening Dialogo establishes the rules of engagement: the cello’s short, pithy utterances are punctuated by similarly terse piano chords; this halting “dialogue” then alternates with impassioned outbursts, setting up a balance between declamation and lyricism that Britten explores throughout the work. The Scherzo-Pizzicato is a technical tour de force, with the cello playing pizzicato throughout and the tautly wound theme ricocheting from one register and dynamic level to another. The elegiac slow movement—characterized by smoothly flowing lines and shimmering tremolos—strikes a lyrical note that contrasts sharply with the barely contained savagery of the Marcia. The final Moto perpetuo is built on a nervously twitching staccato motif that flies like the wind as the two players join hands in a frantic dash to the C-major finish line.
—Harry Haskell
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