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Louis Spohr
In their time, Spohr’s works were greatly admired by critics, the public and composers (among them Robert Schumann. Contemporaries compared him with the likes of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. But by the close of the century before last Spohr’s works had disappeared from concert halls and theatres in favour of the music of Wagner and Liszt.
Some of Spohr’s works remain popular even today, as do his unique innovations in performing practice – for example, it was he who first used a baton to conduct the orchestra. A dazzling violinist and brilliant conductor, once compared to Paganini himself, in his works Spohr combined the traditions of Viennese classicism and the new influences of Romantic music. Von Weber and Wagner both borrowed some of their own ideas about new concepts for the genre of opera from Spohr.
Johannes Brahms
Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano in A Minor, Op. 114
Johannes Brahms worked in the piano trio genre throughout his life. He wrote his first trio at the age of twenty, completing his Fifth Trio in A Minor in 1891 at the age of fifty-eight. This work stands apart for its unusual performing composition – instead of the violin, the solo instrument is the clarinet. Brahms chose this instrument as he had been inspired by the art of the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, a soloist with the Meininger Hofkapelle. Brahms awarded Mühlfeld with the soubriquet “Fraülein Klarinette” for his particularly soft sound, sensitivity and timid performing manner. In the four parts of the Trio the composer artlessly and naturally uses various genre models: a nocturne in the second part, a Viennese waltz in the third (apropos, Brahms was on a friendly footing with Johann Strauss Sohn) and elements of Hungarian dance music in the finale. Which is surprising in as much as the composer managed to retain his spontaneity and freshness of emotions in this late work.
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Joseph Haydn. String Quartet, Op. 76 No 2 in D Minor
Haydn composed the Quartets, Op. 76, at the height of his fame and magnificence as a composer. They were to become the crowning glory of the development of the composer, who was sixty-five years old when they were written. The second Quartet of the opus stands apart – it is they only work written in minor key. The Quartet’s tonality – D Minor – was especially significant to 18th century composers. It was in D Minor that Mozart wrote his gloomy and tragic fantaisie for piano, the pages of his Don Giovanni that convey the fear of death and, lastly, his famous Requiem. Even more obvious, it would appear, is the link between the Quartet and the more spiritual work in D Minor that Haydn composed at the same time as his seventy-sixth opus and which he ultimately named Missa in angustiis – (Mass for Troubled Times). These analogies explain the unexpected features of the music in the quartet – the perturbed and anxiously pulsating music of the first and third sections, the gloomy advance of the minuet and the bold tonal changes within the sections – all emblems of the impending 19th century.
Alfred Schnittke. String Quartet No 3
Schnittke’s music bears reflections of every cataclysm that affected 20th century art. Most of Schnittke’s works convey the idea of seeking some moral order, a spiritual renewal, which with increasing frequency the composer’s contemporaries saw in a religious light. Like many other contemporary composers, in his music Schnittke enters a dialogue with past eras. His Second String Quartet is almost entirely based on Old Russian church songs. In the Third Quartet themes from Orlande de Lassus’ Stabat Mater, Beethoven’s Große Fuge and Shostakovich’s renowned DSCH anagram are woven together to form elements of his own language.
Marina Iovleva
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