Growing up in the segregated Washington, DC, of the 1920s and ’30s, George Walker had few role models to follow as an aspiring Black classical composer and pianist. Precociously talented, he won a scholarship to Oberlin Conservatory at age 14, followed by studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Thereafter, his career was marked by a series of firsts: the first Black instrumentalist to play at New York’s storied Town Hall (he made his recital debut there in 1945); the first Black soloist to appear with The Philadelphia Orchestra (in 1946, performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3); the first Black person to earn a doctoral degree from the Eastman School of Music (in 1956); the first tenured Black professor on the Smith College faculty (1961); and the first Black composer to win a Pulitzer Prize (1996).
The first of Walker’s two string quartets dates from 1946, shortly after his graduation from Curtis. His early interest in chamber music may have reflected the limited opportunities for Black classical composers to achieve performances of larger-scale works. At the same time, it marked a bold departure from the piano solos and settings of spirituals that Walker had produced as a student. “There’s no way I can conceal my identity as a Black composer,” he once said. “I have a very strong feeling for the Negro spiritual and have also drawn from American folk songs, and popular and patriotic tunes, which I believe merit inclusion in serious compositions.” But while the Quartet No. 1 was one of several works performed at the recent dedication ceremony for the George Walker Center for Equity and Inclusion in Music at Eastman, it owes no apparent debt to Walker’s heritage. Instead, the music is steeped in the idiom of mid–20th-century modernism and merits comparison with the quartets of Bartók, Hindemith, and Shostakovich.
The opening Allegro is an extended essay in sonata form that reflects Walker’s tutelage under Rosario Scalero at Curtis and Nadia Boulanger in France. The principal theme immediately establishes the composer’s compellingly individual voice: muscular, neo-Romantic, mildly dissonant but essentially tonal, somber, serious, and, above all, astoundingly confident for an untested 24-year-old who freely admitted that he never learned to play a string instrument. The ensuing Molto adagio is an intensely lyrical threnody for Walker’s grandmother, who died while he was writing the quartet. (Walker later arranged the slow movement for string orchestra under the title Lyric for Strings.) The finale is another propulsive and intricately motivic Allegro, this time marked con fuoco (“with fire”). An urgent, crisply rhythmicized theme alternates, rondo-fashion, with passages of a more lyrical and relaxed character.
In early March 1824, a friend happened upon Schubert in his studio and reported that “he has now long been at work on an octet, with the greatest zeal. If you go to see him during the day, he says, ‘Hullo, how are you?—God!’ and goes on writing, whereupon you depart.” Schubert’s feverish distraction is understandable, for he had recently embarked on an ambitious project that he envisioned as the capstone of his career. The Octet for strings and winds was to be a kind of preparatory sketch for a symphony on the majestic scale of Beethoven’s Ninth. In a letter to his friend Leopold Kupelwieser in Rome, Schubert wrote that “I have tried my hand at several instrumental works, for I wrote two string quartets and an octet, and I want to write another quartet; in fact, I intend to pave the way toward a grand symphony in that manner. The latest in Vienna is that Beethoven is to give a concert at which he is to produce his new symphony, three movements from the new Mass, and a new overture. God willing, I too am thinking of giving a similar concert next year.” Schubert attended the premiere of the Ninth Symphony later that spring and made his debt to Beethoven clear in a series of works that paid homage to the older composer.
Although Schubert’s “grand symphony” was destined to remain on the drawing board, much of the chamber music he composed in the last four years of his life reveals a fundamentally symphonic conception in its expansive proportions, emotional complexity, and elaborate thematic development. Appropriately enough, Schubert modeled his Octet on Beethoven’s Septet, Op. 20, supplementing the ensemble of clarinet, bassoon, horn, and strings (violin, viola, cello, and bass) with a second violin to produce an even fuller orchestral sonority. But while Schubert was intent on plowing new ground and “striving after the highest in art,” Beethoven considered his Septet little more than a crowd pleaser. He had featured the work on a concert that he produced for his own benefit in Vienna in 1800 and joked about making an arrangement for the benefit of amateur flutists, who “would swarm around and feed on it like hungry insects.” The Septet’s popularity eventually came to grate on Beethoven’s nerves. In later years, a friend recalled that “he could not endure his Septet and grew angry because of the universal applause with which it was received.”
Schubert’s clarinet-playing friend Count Ferdinand Troyer, a member of Archduke Rudolf’s household staff, commissioned the Octet. (As Beethoven’s composition pupil, lifelong friend, and most magnanimous patron, the archduke provided one of several indirect links between the two composers.) Judging from the challenging part that Schubert wrote for Troyer, the count was a highly accomplished musician. His skills were displayed in the placid clarinet theme that opens the second movement. It is one of Schubert’s loveliest melodies, and he milks it for all it’s worth, parceling it out among the various instruments and briefly digressing to explore its darker implications before finally restating the tune in its pristine simplicity. The clarinet also features prominently in the Octet’s other slow movement, a genial and richly imaginative theme-and-variations (seven of them) based on a duet that Schubert wrote for one of his operas.
Like Beethoven’s Septet, the Octet has six movements in all, making it something of a throwback to the multipart divertimentos of the 18th century. Clocking in at a full hour, it is one of Schubert’s most expansive works and clearly reflects his expressed desire to work on an outsized, symphonic scale. Both the first and last movements are prefaced by slow, spacious introductions that inject an ominous note of mystery into the prevailingly sunny F-major tonality. The third and fifth movements share a more conventional two-part minuet-and-trio format but are strikingly dissimilar in character, the former a jaunty romp, the latter a stately dance. True to his symphonic aspirations, Schubert treats the winds and strings as separate but equal “choirs”; the endlessly varied and unpredictable instrumental combinations are one of the Octet’s chief delights.
History doesn’t record Count Ferdinand’s reaction to Schubert’s masterpiece, but it is known that he participated in the first performance of the Octet at his Vienna residence in the spring of 1824. The public premiere took place some three years later on a subscription concert series organized by the great violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh—who, as it happened, had taken part in the premiere of Beethoven’s Septet a quarter-century earlier. Vienna’s leading theatrical newspaper, the Theaterzeitung, described Schubert’s music as “luminous, agreeable and interesting,” but qualified its praise by adding that “too great a claim may have been made on the hearer’s attention by its long duration.” Modern listeners may beg to differ.
—Harry Haskell