Robert Schumann embodied the spirit of the Romantic era in his affinity for small-scale musical forms and lyrical utterances, his reliance on literary and other extramusical sources of inspiration, and his appreciation for emotional freedom and spontaneity. Although he wrote four symphonies, several concertos, and even a single opera, his impulsive genius found its most characteristic expression in art songs and piano pieces, including a small body of chamber music for keyboard and strings. Few composers have given more freely into their imagination than Schumann.
It’s no accident that Schumann repeatedly used the term fantasie to describe works that didn’t conform to any of the standard musical forms and genres. But to say that the Op. 73 Fantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces) are unconventional in expression is not to deny the time-tested durability of Schumann’s musical architecture. Written at the beginning of 1849, the year Schumann considered the most fruitful of his life, the Fantasiestücke were part of an outpouring of instrumental miniatures and other “minor” works. Hoping to earn greater fame (and no doubt a bit of real money), Schumann aimed to capture the widest possible market by designating the score “for clarinet or violin or cello and piano.” Horn players have taken the work up enthusiastically as well.
The three short pieces are unified in both tempo and character, being predominantly fast-paced and charged with youthful Sturm und Drang. Beyond these surface similarities, all are laid out in modified A-B-A form, allowing for maximum contrast within their highly compressed time spans. Harmonically, the Fantasiestücke are tightly constructed, hewing close to the A-minor / A-major axis. Schumann specifies that the three pieces are to be played without breaks, emphasizing the organic nature of their conception.
Composer-violinist Jessie Montgomery describes herself as a “hunter-gatherer”: Her music combines elements of the European concert-hall tradition with African American and other vernacular influences, including folk idioms, spirituals, and blues. A former member of the multicultural Silkroad Ensemble, she sees music as “a meeting place at which all people can converse about their unique differences and common stories.” Montgomery is also affiliated with the Sphinx Organization, a pioneer in the movement to promote diversity in the arts by advocating for Black and Latino classical musicians. Her ongoing musical exploration of the African American experience is reflected in such works as Five Freedom Songs, a nonet inspired by the Great Migration, and a “re-envisioning” of Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, scored for an ensemble of African and Western instruments.
Peace consists of a wistful, sustained cantilena set against livelier repetitive patterns in the piano—ripples and chords that convey a sense of slightly uneasy repose. The short piece was written in 2020 for violinist Elena Urioste. In a note written at the time, Montgomery explained: “I was going to call this ‘Melancholy’ instead of ‘Peace,’ but I didn’t want to be a downer for the people. I’m struggling during quarantine to define what actually brings me joy. And I’m at a stage of making peace with sadness as it comes and goes like any other emotion. I’m learning to observe sadness for the first time not as a negative emotion, but as a necessary dynamic to the human experience.”
Despite a sustained outpouring of creativity that produced such masterpieces as the A-Minor (“Rosamunde”) and D-Minor (“Death and the Maiden”) string quartets and the happy-go-lucky Octet for strings and winds, Schubert’s spirits were at a low ebb in the early months of 1824. Suffering from poor health and frequent bouts of depression, the 27-year-old composer confided morosely to his private notebook that “what I produce is due to my understanding of music and to my sorrows.” After recharging his batteries over the summer at the Esterházy family’s country estate in Hungary, he returned to Vienna in September bursting with energy and eager to continue laying the groundwork for his long-planned (and never-to-be-completed) “grand symphony.” A friend described him as “well and divinely frivolous, rejuvenated by delight and pain and a pleasant life.”
Composed in November 1824 for one Vincenz Schuster, the Sonata in A Minor was a lighthearted detour from Schubert’s tortuous symphonic path. Schuster was the leading—indeed, almost the sole—champion of the arpeggione, a hybrid instrument recently invented by Viennese guitar maker Johann Georg Stauffer. A cross between a cello and a guitar, the arpeggione had six strings tuned in fourths like a guitar, and a fretted fingerboard like a viol. Shaped like the bass viol, it was played with a bow and held between the player’s legs. The arpeggione enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1820s, before falling into obsolescence, leaving Schubert’s engaging sonata (which has also been arranged for viola, cello, violin, viola d’amore, and clarinet) as its only enduring monument.
The Allegretto moderato opens with a rather melancholy tune, introduced by the two instruments in turn. The clarinet then bursts forth with an extraverted display that features 16th-note arpeggios and runs in descending sequences. The middle section of the movement doesn’t so much develop these ideas as restate and elaborate on them, with the piano playing a decidedly subservient role. The luminous E-major Adagio is notable for its rapturous, long-breathed lyricism and typical Schubertian weaving between major and minor tonalities. A brief clarinet cadenza leads into a virtuosic finale that echoes the exuberant mood and thematic material of the first movement.
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.
The brooding intensity of the “Moonlight” Sonata has long made it one of Beethoven’s iconic works. The subtitle originated with poet-critic Ludwig Rellstab, who likened the music to “a barque in the moonlight in sight of the wild landscape of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.” Like the slightly later “Tempest” Sonata—whose characteristic arpeggios, fantasia-like episodes, and moodily atmospheric harmonies make it a natural pendant to the “Moonlight”—the C-sharp–Minor Sonata may reflect Beethoven’s near-suicidal despondency as he struggled to come to terms with his loss of hearing, a crisis that would prompt him to give literary expression to his anguish and faith in the moving Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802.
Beethoven designated Op. 27, No. 2 a “sonata quasi una fantasia,” and indeed the work unfolds in a dreamy, almost improvisatory fashion, starting with its unconventional slow movement, a radical departure from the traditional first-movement sonata-form allegro. The quiet, persistently lapping triplets that open the Adagio sostenuto eventually make way for a plaintive, funereal melody that rises and falls like a drawn-out sigh. (Years later, Beethoven cryptically recalled that he “had improvised the Adagio in a black-lined room by the dead body of a friend.”) The first movement leads without a break to an unexpectedly lighthearted Allegretto in 3/4 time, after which the sonata concludes with a restless Presto agitato that is almost savage in its unrestrained fury.
As an African American woman in the field of classical music, Florence Price faced a double challenge. “I have two handicaps—those of sex and race,” she wrote matter-of-factly to conductor Serge Koussevitzky in 1943. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra had premiered the first of Price’s four symphonies 10 years earlier, and her vocal music was championed by the likes of Marian Anderson. Yet she was forced to eke out a living by composing popular songs under a pseudonym, teaching piano, and making choral and orchestral arrangements for a Chicago radio station. Price, who had moved to the Windy City in 1927 to escape the toxic racial environment of her native Arkansas, eventually compiled a catalog of some 300 works, nearly all of which remained unpublished for decades.
Adoration is an exception, having appeared in a magazine for church organists in 1951, two years before Price’s death. A short, shapely arioso, it’s among her most fetching and frequently performed pieces, both in its original version for organ and in numerous arrangements. The tenderly wistful G-major melody lends itself naturally to the clarinet: Set against a simple chordal accompaniment and enriched by double-stops, it rises higher and higher, eventually reaching an impassioned climax four bars before the end. Price’s conservatively tonal harmonic language, lightly spiced with chromaticism, discreetly limns the theme’s flowing contours. As music critic Alex Ross observes, Price’s music “seems to speak from an imaginary past, from an alternative history of an America that lived up to its stated ideals.”
James Lee III’s extensive catalog reveals an abiding interest in biblical themes and subject matter relating to African American history and culture. His career got off to an auspicious start in 2006 when the piece he had written for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan—Beyond Rivers of Vision, inspired by the Book of Revelation—was premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Some of Lee’s storylines are more explicit and even topical, as with the orchestral work Chuphshah!, in celebration of Harriet Tubman; and the cello solo Abraham’s Sons, a memorial for Trayvon Martin. He is perhaps best known for his colorful orchestral piece Sukkot Through Orion’s Nebula, which blends biblical imagery relating to his Seventh Day Adventist faith with the cosmic imagery of Holst’s The Planets.
Leonard Bernstein rocketed to fame when, as the New York Philharmonic’s 25-year-old assistant conductor, he stepped in for an indisposed Bruno Walter to lead the orchestra in a nationally broadcast concert on November 14, 1943. The success of his jazzy musical On the Town the following year transformed him into a Broadway celebrity as well. By 1958, when Bernstein became the Philharmonic’s first American-born music director, he was a household name throughout the United States and Europe. A musical magpie, he took compositional inspiration wherever he found it and delighted in knocking down cultural and stylistic barriers. In addition to four more Broadway shows, including West Side Story, he wrote three symphonies and a wide range of other music for the concert hall, as well as such hybrid works as the operetta Candide and the wildly eclectic Mass, a “theater piece” for singers, dancers, and instrumentalists.
Like virtually all of Bernstein’s chamber music, the Clarinet Sonata predates his storybook podium debut. Yet the 23-year-old composer and conductor had begun to attract attention well before he and clarinetist David Glazer premiered the sonata in Boston in the spring of 1942. Having distinguished himself as a conducting student at Tanglewood the preceding summer, Bernstein had landed a plum job as Serge Koussevitzky’s assistant for the following season. In the meantime, he treated himself to a brief vacation in Key West, Florida. There, courtesy of Radio Havana Cuba, he immersed himself in the Latino music that would leave its stamp on such works as the Clarinet Sonata, West Side Story, and Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs for clarinet and jazz ensemble, written for Benny Goodman in 1949.
The Clarinet Sonata is in two movements instead of the usual three or four, the first predominantly lyrical in character, the second buoyantly rhythmic. The winsome, gracefully arching theme of the opening Grazioso is prefaced by a four-note melodic curlicue that features prominently in the movement’s more animated middle section. The music slips nonchalantly between duple and triple time. This metrical fluidity is more pronounced in the second movement, which begins in a slow, deliberate 3/8 pulse, but soon breaks out in a fast, sharply accented 5/8 with a jazzy lilt that anticipates the rhythmic exuberance of Bernstein’s mature music. A second slow section harks back to the lyrical idiom of the Grazioso, and the sonata ends in a whirligig of shifting rhythmic patterns.
—Harry Haskell