In January 1891, Brahms made an extended visit to Meiningen, where his friend and ardent champion Hans von Bülow conducted the renowned court orchestra. The 57-year-old composer was gradually withdrawing from public life; the Op. 111 String Quintet, composed in the fall of 1890, was meant to be his swan song. In Meiningen, however, Brahms found himself unexpectedly bowled over by the playing of the orchestra’s principal clarinetist, Richard Mühlfeld. It is to Mühlfeld’s virtuosity that we owe the late flowering of Brahms’s interest in the clarinet as expressed in the Op. 114 Trio; the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, Op. 115; and the two Sonatas for Clarinet (or Viola) and Piano, Op. 120.
The trio and quintet were both composed in the Upper Austria spa town of Bad Ischl, Brahms’s beloved warm-weather retreat, in the spring and summer of 1891. “Your Mühlfeld is a master of his instrument,” the composer wrote to the Duke of Meiningen’s wife that July, “and I cannot think of any other place more suitable to the performance of these two works than Meiningen.” Brahms’s friend Joseph Joachim caught wind of his plans and promptly invited himself to the rehearsals. At the end of November, the violinist and members of his quartet joined Mühlfeld, Brahms, and cellist Robert Hausmann in a private reading of the trio and quintet at the duke’s home, soon followed by a public performance in Berlin.
With Brahms’s blessing, violists have enthusiastically laid claim to both works as well. His affinity for the viola, whose dark, velvety timbre had always seemed ideally attuned to his muse, was matched by his late-life love affair with “Fräulein Klarinette.” The sinuous, languid quality of the clarinet/viola writing in the trio often contrasts with the more muscular and assertive character of the piano part. Despite its “autumnal” hues, the trio is singularly free of sentimentality. Nor does it sound in the least like the work of a man who is composing the final chapter of his career. The opening Allegro, prefaced by a wistfully arching melody in the solo cello, is a typically Brahmsian blend of muscularity and tenderness. Brahms modulates to D major for the warmly introspective Adagio; to A major for the waltzing Andantino grazioso; and back to A minor for the propulsive finale, energized by the interplay of flowing triple and angular duple rhythms.
Before World War I, it was a toss-up whether Paul Hindemith would become better known as a violinist or a composer. Precociously talented and driven to excel by his domineering father, he took up the violin as a young boy. By age 19, he was playing in the Frankfurt Opera House orchestra while composing works in a late-Romantic idiom on the side. In 1917, he succeeded his teacher, Adolf Rebner, as the orchestra’s concertmaster, but his induction into the German army at the end of that year put his career on hold. After the war, he struck off in a new direction, abandoning the violin in favor of the viola and producing a pair of boldly expressionistic one-act operas—Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, the Hope of Women) and Das Nusch-Nuschi, with its controversially salacious quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—that marked him out as an enfant terrible.
Despite his reputation as a musical firebrand, Hindemith’s bark was considerably worse than his bite. Beneath his impulse to shock the stolid burghers of Weimar Germany lay a deep-seated devotion to compositional craft and a conviction that music should do more than merely titillate the senses. While earning a living as an orchestral musician, he indulged his passion for chamber music by performing with a succession of string quartets. In summer 1921, frustrated by the hidebound repertoire of his current ensemble, he broke away and started a new foursome devoted to contemporary music. The Amar Quartet made its bow at that year’s chamber music festival in Donaueschingen, with Hindemith on viola and his brother Rudolf on cello. The vehicle for their acclaimed debut was Hindemith’s own Op. 16 Quartet. The following year the group chose the same venue to introduce Hindemith’s Op. 22, sometimes identified as his third string quartet, although it was in fact his fourth essay in the genre.
Audiences encountering Hindemith’s music for the first time in 1922 were surely struck by its radical departure from the plush textures and long-breathed phrases that characterized the overripe Romanticism of the prewar years. The Quartet No. 4 opens with a slow, wistful fugue, a foretaste of the spare linear polyphony that pervades the work. The music builds steadily in speed, intensity, and volume before subsiding into a quiet reminiscence of the initial theme, this time punctuated by the cello’s plucked “walking” bass line. The second movement evokes the fugal subject in a more agitated setting, sandwiched between rollicking outbursts of irregular, Hungarian-inspired rhythms. Hindemith was constantly urging performers of his music to worry less about the beauty of the sound than about the overall effect. The Amar Quartet’s vigorous, devil-may-care performance of Op. 22—as heard on a recording made in 1927—takes full measure of the contrast between the work’s impetuous muscularity and its bittersweet lyricism. Hindemith further explores this dichotomy in the remaining three movements (the last two of which are played without a break). Relentlessly chromatic throughout, the quartet unpredictably comes to rest on an emphatic unison F-sharp.
A child prodigy, Erich Korngold was already an international celebrity by the time he composed his first set of songs in his early teens. The runaway success of his sumptuously scored opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) in Germany in 1920 brought him to the attention of the stage director Max Reinhardt, who lured him to Hollywood in 1934 to arrange Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music for a film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Korngold went on to become the John Williams of his day, composing a string of richly symphonic scores for such Warner Bros. classics as The Green Pastures, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Kings Row, and Deception. A Hollywood legend with two Academy Awards under his belt, Korngold attempted a comeback as a concert composer after World War II, only to find that the world had passed him by. Richard Strauss, another late Romantic who outlived his time, once said of him: “This assurance of style, this mastery of form, this characteristic expressiveness, this bold harmony, are truly astonishing!”
Like Die tote Stadt, Korngold’s 1921 Piano Quintet took shape against the backdrop of his protracted romance with Luise (Luzi) von Sonnenthal. The two teenagers had met and fallen in love four years earlier to the intense displeasure of Korngold’s father, a prominent Viennese music critic who sought to micromanage young Erich’s love life in the same way he had organized his education and career. Father and son collaborated on the libretto for Die tote Stadt, a Symbolist psychodrama about a man who is transfixed by a dancer’s resemblance to his deceased wife. (The story, filtered through a later French roman policier, would provide Alfred Hitchcock with the plot of his thriller Vertigo.) Korngold responded to a parentally mandated period of separation from Sonnenthal by composing a cycle of songs titled Lieder des Abschieds (Songs of Farewell), one of which served as the basis for the slow movement of the Piano Quintet. The lovers were finally married in 1924, a year after the work’s premiere in Hamburg with the composer at the keyboard.
The warm-blooded lyricism and sense of drama that Korngold perfected in his works for the operatic stage are on display throughout the Piano Quintet. The first movement lunges out of the starting gate with a dance-like melody in E major that justifies the expressive marking mit schwungvoll blühendem Ausdruck (“with a lively, blooming expression”). Korngold’s exuberantly idiosyncratic vein of Romanticism is further illustrated by a later passage characterized by chains of nervously buzzing trills, marked “fantastical.” (The frequency and specificity of Korngold’s performance instructions in the score suggest that the tendency to micromanage ran in the family.) The Adagio—a set of nine tenderly lyrical variations on Korngold’s song “Mond, so gehst du wieder auf” (“Moon, so you rise again”)—lamenting the pain of lovers’ separation—contrasts with the free-wheeling, boisterous Finale, with its mock-serious violin cadenzas and miniature, not-quite fugues; sharply accented rhythms; and playfully swirling scales.
—Harry Haskell