Program Notes: Zazofsky plays (the other) Mendelssohn
Featuring Muir Quartet violinist Peter Zazofsky
September 17 & 19, 2004
Our program this time consists entirely of music for bowed stringed instruments: no winds, no brass, no percussion. This is a sound world that has attracted many composers, even into our own time, as Lawrence Wolfe’s piece demonstrates, and has resulted in many wonderful scores.
Mendelssohn: Sinfonia No. 3 in E minor
Felix Mendelssohn was one of the very greatest of music’s child prodigies. Like Mozart, he began producing works of great polish and accomplishment before puberty. At the age of 12 he embarked on a series of symphonies for strings, writing over the next three years more than a dozen examples. (“More than a dozen” because he began a thirteenth but completed only a single movement of it.) The first six were completed in 1821. Each was in three movements; most of the later symphonies would be in four or even five movements and of considerably greater length. Two of the first half dozen works, including the one in today’s program, are in minor keys, and all but one of the remaining symphonies for strings would also be in the minor. Throughout his life Mendelssohn had a penchant for the minor keys. Both of his piano trios, for example, all three of his piano quartets, and six of his eight concertos would be in minor keys, including both the violin concertos, the earlier of which we’ll hear later in this concert. These early efforts of the boy Mendelssohn owe more to Mozart than to Beethoven, although Beethoven had by this time produced eight of his seminal nine symphonies. So one should not expect in this music the grandeur of scope and statement that one associates with the Symphony (with a capital S) as Beethoven conceived it. Rather these more modest pieces look back to the origin of the symphony as an operatic curtain-raiser.
Lawrence Wolfe: “Motives” (after Mozart K. 279)
Motives was originally going to be a set of variations on a theme of Mozart. I figured I would start by making my way through the Mozart Piano Sonatas, certain I would find what I needed: well, I did and I did not. I found one astounding theme after another, experimented here and there with some variations and settings but soon realized I could not in good conscience meddle with such grace and perfection.
There was, however, one movement that continually fascinated me: the slow movement of K. 279, and one day I told one of my BSO colleagues ‘there’s enough in that one movement for a symphony!’ When I heard myself say that, I realized I might be on to something and took another look at that movement not with the idea of variations on a theme, but with the idea of a ‘fantasia’ using various motives as starting points. In that movement one can find the same note approached in three different manners in three successive measures, countermelodies that are sufficiently strong to stand alone and countless other melodic and rhythmic moments that developed lives of their own.
The first four movements (Prelude-Allegro-Plaint-Scherzo) are to be played without pause, with a short pause before the closing Minuet.
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in D minor
One of Mendelssohn’s best loved compositions is his great Violin Concerto in E minor of 1844, but there is another, much less well known Violin Concerto written in 1822, just a year after the String Symphony presented earlier in this concert. Mendelssohn was only 13 at the time. He was in his early teens quite fascinated by the concerto form, for he wrote not only this piece but a piano concerto, also from 1822, one for piano and violin in the following year, and two concertos for two pianos by 1824. In the Violin Concerto again the influence was not primarily that of Beethoven, who had written all of his concertos well before 1822, but rather the French school as represented by such composers as Viotti and Rode. This is due to the influence of the work’s dedicatee, Eduard Rietz, who had been a pupil of Rode. Rietz was one of the musicians who were common guests at the Mendelssohn home in Berlin during the composer’s childhood and youth. Most of the boy’s music from these years was written to be performed privately at home by these guests, and much of it remained in obscurity until after the Second World War. The first modern performance of this concerto, for example, was not given until 1952, when it was played by Yehudi Menuhin.
Mozart: Divertimento in D major, K.136
Mendelssohn’s status as a child prodigy is not quite so well established in the public mind as Mozart’s (though I should think it has by this point in our concert been incontestably demonstrated) and most people would no doubt automatically assume Mozart was the greater Wunderkind of the two, but in one sense Mendelssohn did, I think, surpass him: at the age of 16, he wrote one of his greatest masterpieces, at one and the same time one of the greatest of all chamber works, the Octet. In his maturity Mendelssohn would go on to write many great scores, certainly, but the heights of the Octet were infrequently topped. By contrast, Mozart’s best works at 16, such as the motet “Exsultate, jubilate”, the splendid Divertimento with 4 horns (K.131), and no fewer than half a dozen fine symphonies (nos.16-21), though masterpieces in their own right, cannot be favorably compared with the greatest creations of his later years. The present divertimento for strings alone is the first of three Mozart wrote at the age of 16 in 1772. All are rich in melodic ideas and belong among the best works of this period in Mozart’s development. It has been suggested that Mozart devised these pieces as symphonies and intended to add wind parts later; he could have kept these scores handy so as to be able to produce symphonies at short notice should the need arise. Thus they have earned the sobriquet “Salzburg Symphonies”. On the other hand, they are also commonly presented nowadays as string quartets. The fact remains that the title Divertimento may not be Mozart’s own.
Dvorák: Serenade for Strings, Op.22
Antonín Dvorák wrote his ravishing Serenade in E major in May, 1875. Dvorák, too, was a great master of melody, and that fact is amply demonstrated in this work, which is one of his earliest true masterpieces. It is in five movements. The first is a leisurely Moderato that sets the scene for this relaxed and good-natured score. The middle section is a little more playful, even coquettish, but the mood is not substantively different from the first subject, which returns and leads to a gentle conclusion. For the second movement, Dvorák offers up a Tempo di Valse in C-sharp minor, but there is nothing of grief or tragedy here. The nature of the music belies the somber key signature. The tempo and manner are so easygoing as to suggest more a promenade, or even a dream, than a waltz. There is only one brief outburst of vigor toward the end of the central section. The pace picks up markedly in the third movement, a frothy fast Scherzo marked Vivace. This is all sunshine and jollity, with rapid figurations livening things up. Yet a return to a more sedate tempo seems an entirely natural outgrowth of all this energy, and for a time we are back in the world of the first movement. There are a couple of minor key episodes (treatments of the Vivace idea), but these cast only light and fleeting shadows before moving on, and once again we seem to be enjoying that untroubled walk in the park. This movement, like the previous two and the following Larghetto, is in ternary form, so the animated material comes back at the end. Next Dvorák proves that he can write a gorgeous slow movement with the best of them. Solo players emerge from the mass of strings from time to time to add their more intimate comments. The finale, Allegro vivace, starts with a rather dramatic declamation, but the main quality of this movement is airy and mercurial. Toward the end of the exposition, the Larghetto theme is quoted, and just before the end of the recapitulation — and of the movement and the piece as a whole — there is a longer quotation taken directly from the opening Moderato. But bustling energy is king here, and the excitement that holds sway through most of the movement also brings it to its blithe conclusion.
