A great pianist as well as a distinguished composer, Clara Schumann led the stressful double life that was the common lot of gifted women in her day. Equally devoted to her family and her music, she managed to rear eight children even as her brilliant but increasingly erratic husband succumbed to mental illness. Robert encouraged her work as a composer on the tacit understanding that his career took precedence over hers. After his death in a sanatorium in 1856, Clara all but stopped composing and loyally tended his memory, performing his music throughout Europe and editing it for publication. She remained active as a highly sought-after teacher until her death in 1896.
Schumann’s interest in vocal music had deep roots. In addition to her early training as a pianist, she studied with the renowned tenor and singing teacher Johann Aloys Miksch, and her love of lieder—she published her first art song at age 15—helped cement the bond with her future husband. Notwithstanding her father’s implacable opposition, she married Robert in 1840 and presented “Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen” to him that Christmas. The song was belatedly published in 1859 as the first of Schumann’s Six Lieder, Op. 13.
In the latter stages of their covert courtship, Clara and Robert lived far apart, communicating mainly by letters and thinly disguised billets-doux that he sent her in the form of compositions. Their situation must have felt similar to that of the lovers described in Heinrich Heine’s “Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen” (“I stand in dark dreams”), with the man gazing longingly at a portrait of his absent sweetheart. In this arrangement by Karen Ouzounian, cellist of the Aizuri Quartet, his wordless poetic musings merge with the piano’s gently throbbing prelude and postlude.
About the Composer
Bartók was born in Transylvania in 1881 and died in New York City 64 years later. In a manner of speaking, he was exiled twice—first from his homeland and later from his time. Although his music is rooted in Middle European folk traditions and late–19th-century Impressionism, it was forged in the harsh crucible of the early 20th century. The six string quartets he composed between 1908 and 1939 chart a course from the colorfully impassioned Romanticism of his early period to the bleak pessimism of his late works. Befitting their status as modern classics, the quartets have been subjected to microscopic analysis that touches on every aspect of the composer’s musical language, from the finest points of pitch structure to large-scale formal organization. For the average listener, however, the most immediately striking aspect of Bartók’s highly distinctive sound world may well be his prodigious inventiveness in the rhythmic sphere and the captivating sonorities he coaxes from the four instruments.
Bartók wrote his Third and Fourth quartets in 1927 and 1928, respectively. He had recently heard a performance of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite and fallen under the spell of its richly coloristic atmosphere. At the same time, he was searching for new formal structures with which to present his innovative musical ideas. He had long been interested in organic musical processes, whereby the various movements of a work were unified by the recurring use of short rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic motifs. This concept underpins the Fourth Quartet, for which Bartók devised a variant of the arch, or bridge, design that he had employed in a number of earlier works. Its five movements are related both structurally and thematically, as the composer pointed out in a preface to the published score: “The slow movement is the nucleus of the piece; the other movements are, as it were, arranged in layers around it. The fourth movement is a free variation of the second one, and the first and fifth movements have the same thematic material. Metaphorically speaking, the third movement is the kernel, movements one and five are the outer shell, and movements two and four are, as it were, the inner shell.” That Bartók—or perhaps his publisher—felt compelled to offer such an outline as a guide to performers says something about how difficult the quartet was perceived to be at the time.
Although structural analysis provides a convenient framework for playing and listening to the Fourth Quartet, it doesn’t tell us much about the inner life of Bartók’s powerfully expressive music. For instance, Bartók’s observation that the first movement is in tripartite sonata form (with a more or less traditional exposition, development, and recapitulation) hardly begins to describe the multifarious activity of the emphatic six-note motif, rising and falling (and vice versa), that binds the heterogeneous musical fabric together. Nor does it do justice to the wondrous strangeness of Bartók’s swooping glissandos and shuddering tremolos; the amorphous skittering of the second movement; the impassioned, rhapsodic declamations of the third movement; the slithering, metallic pizzicatos of the fourth movement; or the sheer visceral impact of the finale’s stomping dance rhythms. As American composer-critic Virgil Thomson wrote shortly after the composer’s death, “The despair in his quartets is no personal maladjustment. It is a realistic facing of the human condition ... No other musician of our century has faced its horrors quite so frankly.”
Singer-songwriter Tanya Tagaq was born and raised in Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory. As a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, she discovered an aptitude for traditional Inuit throat singing and eventually parlayed that talent into a highly successful international career, working closely with such boundary-crossing musicians as Björk and Kronos Quartet. Tagaq’s own music—often created in collaboration with classically trained composers—combines the guttural timbres of throat singing with a wide range of influences from contemporary pop music. The string quartet Sivunittinni was commissioned by Kronos in 2015.
Sivunittinni, or “the future ones,” comes from a part of a poem I wrote for my album and is the perfect title for this piece. My hope is to bring a little bit of the land to future musicians through this piece. There’s a disconnect in the human condition—a disconnect from nature—and it has caused a great deal of social anxiety and fear, as well as a lack of true meaning of health, and a lack of a relationship with what life is, so maybe this piece can be a little bit of a wake-up.
—Tanya Tagaq
About the Composer
As a young man, Haydn was employed as a music teacher to the children of Baron Karl Joseph von Fürnberg in Vienna. As much as he often disliked the job, it had its perks. Haydn’s biographer Georg August Griesinger reports that the Baron “had an estate in Weinzierl, several stages from Vienna; from time to time, he invited his parish priest, his estate manager, and Albrechtsberger (a brother of the well-known contrapuntist) in order to have a little music. Fürnberg asked Haydn to compose something that could be played by these four friends of the art. Haydn, who was then 18, accepted the proposal, and so originated his first quartet, which, immediately upon its appearance, received such uncommon applause as to encourage him to continue in this genre.”
Over the next five decades, Haydn went on to write a total of 68 quartets, as well as a number of quartet arrangements. In the process, he virtually created the genre of the string quartet, which would occupy a central place in 19th-century European music and musical life. Haydn’s six Op. 76 quartets were composed in 1797—three years before his pupil Beethoven made his auspicious debut with his six Op. 18 quartets—and have long been audience favorites. As 18th-century chronicler Charles Burney observed, the Op. 76 quartets are “full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects.”
The “Sunrise” Quartet takes its name from the magically luminous opening of the Allegro con spirito; the first violin traces a limpid arc of melody over quietly sustained chords in the lower voices. As the “sun” surmounts the hazy horizon, a sparkling array of 16th notes breaks out in the treble, gathering brilliance and momentum in its passage down the chain from one instrument to another. The Adagio opens with two short questioning figures cadencing first on E-flat major and then on F major. Although E-flat is quickly established as the new home key, the initial ambiguity never disappears, and the rest of the movement is as notable for its tonal elasticity as it is for its lacy violinistic filigree. The vigorous Menuetto, with its chugging triple meter and playfully syncopated trio section, brings us firmly back down to earth. In the rollicking Finale, Haydn uses all the tricks of his trade—chirping grace notes, trills, echo effects, acrobatic leaps, pregnant pauses, and unpredictable twists and turns—to keep the listener delightfully off balance until the very end.
—Harry Haskell