Program Notes: A Romantic Serenade with The Borromeo String Quartet

Featuring the Borromeo String Quartet

Sunday, February 10, 2008 3 p.m.

• Tchaikovsky: “Andante cantabile” from Quartet No. 1 in D
  
• Brahms: “Romanze” from Quartet No. 1 in C minor
  
• Brahms: “Andantino (con sentimento)” from Clarinet Quintet in B minor
  
• Brahms: “Andante” from String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat
• Tchaikovsky: Serenade in C
  

P R O G R A M   N O T E S
By Doug Briscoe

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893): “Andante cantabile” from Quartet No. 1 in D, op. 11 (1871; transcribed for string orchestra by Steven Lipsitt)

Although Tchaikovsky’s reputation had begun to be established by the time he was thirty, he would not become financially secure until a few years later, when he found a patron in the person of Nadezhda von Meck.  Early in 1871, Tchaikovsky decided to give a concert of his own music in order to raise much needed funds.  To hire an orchestra would have wiped out any profits, so the composer planned a small concert that would include some of his piano works and songs (including the now famous “None but the lonely heart”).  In addition, though, he felt that a more substantial work was needed to form the concert’s centerpiece, and thus the idea for his first string quartet was born.  Tchaikovsky had written some inconsequential student pieces for the ensemble, as well as a more noteworthy movement in B-flat, but this was to be his first full-fledged string quartet, so the fact that it is one of his finest masterpieces is all the more remarkable.

He wrote it in short order, beginning it in mid-February 1871 and completing it in time for the concert on March 28.  From early on, the slow movement struck audiences with particular effect. Tchaikovsky was especially proud of the reaction of Leo Tolstoy, who at a later performance (1876) wept openly at the Andante cantabile.  (Another great Russian novelist, Ivan Turgenev, attended the 1871 concert, but reportedly arrived too late to hear the quartet.)  The other three movements are splendid, too, but the haunting beauty of the Andante has given it the same stature as the Nocturne from Borodin’s Second Quartet and the Adagio from the Quartet by Samuel Barber, namely, it is frequently heard on its own in adaptations for string orchestra.  Tchaikovsky himself made an arrangement for cello and strings in 1888, but the Andante is more commonly heard in a more straightforward and faithful transcription for string orchestra without soloist.

The haunting first subject is a quotation of a sad Ukrainian folk melody called “Vanya sat on the divan”, which Tchaikovsky encountered in 1869 while on a visit to his sister’s estate, Kamenka, where the composer passed some of his happiest hours.  The complementary second subject is Tchaikovsky’s own.  The strings play muted throughout, establishing and enhancing the sweet melancholy of the themes.

Besides the Tolstoy incident and the patronage of Madame von Meck, the year 1876 brought Tchaikovsky the happy news (from Hans von Bülow) that the quartet had been very well received in Boston when it was played there on January 13.

Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897): “Romanze” from Quartet No. 1 in C minor, op. 51 (1873)
 - The Borromeo String Quartet

Besides being two of the greatest composers of their (or any) century, Tchaikovsky and Brahms share a birthday:  both were born on May 7, Brahms in 1833 and Tchaikovsky in 1840.  Another coincidence is that both composers happen to have written three published string quartets, Brahms’s first two appearing together as his Op. 51 in 1873, when the composer was forty.  His hesitation in addressing the form publicly is due mostly to the intimidating example of Beethoven.  (I specify “publicly” because Brahms himself said, perhaps jokingly, that he had written twenty - ! - string quartets in his youth and destroyed them all.)  Beethoven had so commandingly expanded and mastered the form that, as with the symphony, Brahms was to some extent cowed from approaching those forms until his mature years.  Schumann and Mendelssohn had bravely continued the tradition, it is true, but none of their (or anyone’s!) quartets had firmly established itself in the repertoire by the 1870s.  Moreover, Brahms had the added burden of having been dubbed—by Schumann, no less—as the successor to Beethoven, and this was enough to keep Brahms mute in the string quartet and symphony genres for years.  He needn’t have worried.  It is perhaps noteworthy that Brahms’s first symphony and first published string quartet are both in the key of c-minor, well established as stormy Beethoven territory, as if Brahms was now defiantly declaring:  I’m ready!

The Romanze from the First Quartet does not have the notoriety of Tchaikovsky’s Andante cantabile, but possesses the same consistent serenity.  The late musicologist Erik Smith described the Romanze as “full of the richest scoring, a tissue of counterpoint…with a splendid harp effect at the end.”

Brahms: “Andantino (con sentimento)” from Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op. 115(1891)
- The Borromeo String Quartet & Steven Lipsitt, clarinet

Apart from a number of small vocal and keyboard pieces, Brahms had to all intents and purposes decided to retire from composing when, during a visit to Meiningen in 1891, he heard the playing of the orchestra’s principal clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld.  Brahms was so moved that he eventually produced four substantial masterpieces for the instrument:  a pair of sonatas (1894), a trio, and a quintet.  The trio was finished first, and was followed by what Brahms, with his typical self-deprecating wit, described as “a twin piece of even greater foolishness.”  This was the Clarinet Quintet.  (Unlike the humor of Beethoven or Haydn, however, Brahms’s rich sense of humor almost never found its way into his music.)   In his superb 1997 biography of the composer, Jan Swafford writes, “In the quintet even more than in other works, Brahms…demonstrates as well as any composer that the greatest art exists near the edge between sentiment and sentimentality, but has a fine sense of where that edge lies, and how to stay on the right side of it.”  The third movement Andantino is the least sentimental of the four, with its summery mood and quicker tempos—the central section is marked Presto, the quickest part of the whole score—yet sentiment is not abandoned, and the movement ends with a beautiful wistfulness.

Brahms: “Andante” from String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat, op, 16 (1858)
- The Borromeo String Quartet with Kenneth Stalberg (viola) & Mark Simcox
   (cello)

The two great sextets of Brahms date from many years earlier than his other works on this program - the first of them from 1859-60, when the composer, slim and unbearded, was still in his mid-twenties.  Just as he had re-channeled his symphonic impulses into a piano concerto and two serenades, the young Brahms evaded the treacherous terrain of the post-Beethoven string quartet by first composing a work for six stringed instruments.  Another sextet followed a few years later.  Both are masterpieces, but even this accomplishment was not enough to quell Brahms’s fears about approaching the string quartet for years to come.  Certainly Brahms thought highly of this music, for he himself established the first sextet’s Andante as a separate entity when he transcribed it, not for a larger body of strings, but as a piano reduction, in which form it is still a favorite with many pianists today.  The main theme, which remains clearly detectable throughout, has more drama to it than any of the music we’ve heard on the program thus far; there is even an air of the tragic or funereal about it.  One imagines the wind blowing in from the North Sea over the flat lands surrounding Brahms’s native Hamburg.  This is followed by a set of six variations, in the first of which, to continue the seascape metaphor, the first cello offers up a barcarolle, as of a boat being bounced upon the waves.  In the second variation, the winds alternate between picking up in vigor and dying down to a sweet gentleness.  In the third, the wind metaphor seems even more apt, with the lower instruments ascending and descending in blustery scales, and our little boat struggles to stay afloat.  The fourth variation brings us to harbor, a restful D-major after the turmoil of d-minor.  Here the theme manifests most obviously the folksong or chorale feeling inherent in its rather four-square melody.  It’s as if the bells are calling Peter Grimes to church.  Or, as Ginette Keller puts it, “It is in this variation that the spirit of the chorale is most noticeable and the last phrase rises up like an act of grace.”  The fifth variation remains in D-major and has a childlike purity to it.  For the most part the music remains in the upper and middle registers and conjures up the sound of a musette or hurdy-gurdy.  D-minor returns with a simple restatement of the theme in the abbreviated last variation, which leads to a pious coda.  It is up to the listener to decide whether the boat has made port with any survivors.

Tchaikovsky: Serenade in C, op.48 (1880)

Tchaikovsky wrote his Serenade almost a full decade after the First Quartet, in the autumn of 1880; this was contemporaneous with the ubiquitous “1812 Overture”.  (Tchaikovsky thought the Serenade much the finer score.)

At the outset we have a slow introduction to the main body of the first movement, a device that is more at home in a symphony than in a serenade.  (Mozart’s serenades frequently begin with such slow introductions, but 19th century serenades almost never do.  In fact, Tchaikovsky expressly stated that this movement was a tribute to and imitation of Mozart.)  After this Andante non troppo introduction, the Allegro moderato is ushered in with a sweeping figure that, again, might have come from a symphony, or might be reminiscent of the grand gestures of the ballet, for that style also infuses this work to a considerable extent.  The second subject is a scurrying idea whose industrious mood dominates the remainder of the movement, although at the end the material of the slow introduction recurs.

In the second movement, Tchaikovsky makes use of his beloved waltz form, a dance type that so often inspired the composer to his most felicitous invention.  With this movement the connection to the ballet is most overt.  This waltz, like the Andante cantabile of the First Quartet, is so popular that it is commonly played as a stand-alone piece. The third movement begins with an elegiac passage (Tchaikovsky specifically titles the whole movement “élégie”) that sounds to my ears like a harbinger of the resplendent music for strings that has been so important a trend in British music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (beginning perhaps with Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, heard earlier this season).  When the main melody begins, we find ourselves again in the world of ballet.  This section is marked by a loving tenderness and grace less elegiac than sweetly romantic.  Later the “English” material comes back and leads into a passage marked by abrupt chords that sounds much like operatic recitative, and then we come to a beautiful segment that is quintessential Tchaikovsky, expressive of deep tragedy and stamped with his individual and inimitable hand print.  A quiet restatement of the opening theme concludes the elegy. Moving directly from this music to the buoyancy of the finale might have been too jarring, so Tchaikovsky precedes the cheerful finale with a quiet, dulcet introduction.  The final descending chords of this Andante section, repeated slowly, are a foretaste of the quick theme of the Allegro con spirito, which combines the spirit of a children’s song with the flavor of a Russian folk song—perhaps it is both.  Certainly the sound of massed Russian balalaikas is evoked in the pizzicatos that follow.  The second subject is more broadly lyrical, but it isn’t long before the Russian children come skipping back, and their chatter pervades the rest of the movement up to the point where the dramatic statement from the very beginning of the Serenade makes another appearance; but even that very grown-up music is caught up in the children’s revelry, and it is they who have the last word.

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