Program Notes
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble
Saturday, February 26, 2005

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

            Sextet in G major, op. 36 (composed 1864-1865)
                        Allegro non troppo
                        Scherzo:  Allegro non troppo
                        Poco adagio
                        Poco allegro

Johannes Brahms drew lifelong inspiration from Clara Schumann, composer, pianist, and widow of his mentor Robert Schumann.  It is widely believed that he also harbored a platonic love for Clara, fourteen years his senior.  Brahms, however, had serious relationships with several other women, and came close to actually marrying a few of them before choosing lonely creativity over domesticity.

In Autumn 1858, Brahms met Agathe von Siebold, the daughter of a professor in Göttingen, and they were for a time engaged.  At the point where marriage seemed inevitable, he wrote to her of his love but asserted that he was not prepared to “wear fetters.”  Understandably angry, Agathe broke off the engagement and refused to see him again.  "I have played the scoundrel toward Agathe," a remorseful Brahms confessed to another friend.  Several years after the breakup, he tried to assuage his guilt and say his final goodbye, immortalizing her by basing the second theme of the first movement of his Sextet in G major, op. 36, on the letters of her name.

The Sextet actually had its origins some years before Agathe and Brahms met.  The theme of the slow movement and an early piano solo version of the scherzo (a Gavotte in A minor, WoO.3 no.1, which was unearthed and published in 1979) both date from early 1855, when Brahms sent them, in February and March, respectively, to Clara Schumann for her comments.  Not quite a decade later, and five years after he had treated Agathe so shamefully, Brahms tried to redeem himself, braiding the letters A-G-A-H-E (“H” is B-natural in German musical nomenclature) into the first movement of this second sextet, and resurrecting the two older melodies in the second and third movements.  These three movements were completed in September 1864 while Brahms was visiting Clara and her family, and staying in the home of Anton Rubinstein, near Baden-Baden.  The finale dates from May 1865.

The first theme of the Allegro non troppo is a cleverly disguised transformation of the theme of the slow movement; the second is the “Agathe” theme, which uses not simply the letters but also the rhythmic pattern of the name.  The development is full of Baroque style counterpoint.  The “Agathe” rhythm recurs in the Scherzo, which has a boisterously contrasting trio section.  The slow movement, Poco adagio, is a theme with five variations and a coda, although the Austrian critic and Brahms backer, Eduard Hanslick famously characterized it as “variations on no theme.”  The first four variations grow increasingly animated; the calmer fifth gives rise to the coda.  The finale, Poco allegro, is sonata form with hints of rondo, and once again full of Baroque touches.  The place and date of the sextet’s first performance had long been a matter of dispute until recent scholarship determined that it took place on November 20, 1866, in Zürich.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

            Two Pieces for String Octet, op. 11 (composed 1924-1925)
                        Adagio
                        Allegro molto

Overshadowed in all the excitement surrounding Dmitri Shostakovich's first real success as a composer were a pair of movements for double string quartet that he wrote at the same time.  The Symphony no. 1, op. 10 was his graduation piece in composition at the Leningrad Conservatory and a sensation at its premiere on May 12, 1926.  But the brash, inventive, experimental flavor of his Two Pieces, op. 11 was even more in the spirit of the times.  Things were still pretty open in the young Soviet Union, with the works of many Western composers such as Alban Berg and Paul Hindemith being both performed and discussed.

In spite of their smaller scale, the Two Pieces have an orchestral feel.  Shostakovich actually interrupted work on the Symphony no. 1 in December 1924 to write the Prelude in D minor in memory of his friend, the young poet Volodya I. Kurchavov.  The Prelude, marked Adagio, has an appropriately mournful air, with a tragic opening, a passionate center, and grave conclusion.

The Scherzo in G minor dates from the same month he completed work on the symphony, July 1925.  One critic has called it the "wildest" single movement in the literature of the string octet.  Another likened its agitation to “crowds swirling crazily through the streets.”  The scurrying glissandi and Shostakovich's idiosyncratic take on canonic structure certainly make this Allegro molto memorable.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

            Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20 (composed 1825)
                        Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco
                        Andante
                        Scherzo (Allegro leggierissimo)
                        Presto  

Playwright and screenwriter John Guare has familiarized us with the "six degrees of separation" between any two human beings on the planet.  Sometimes, the trail is considerably shorter than that.  Consider Felix Mendelssohn, Protestant grandson of the great Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.  Born in Hamburg in 1809, Felix moved with his family from that French-occupied city to Berlin in 1812.  There in 1819, he began theory and composition studies at the Singakademie with its director, Carl Friedrich Zelter.

Soon, Mendelssohn was composing a torrent.  So impressed was his teacher that in 1821, Zelter took the twelve year old Felix to Weimar to meet the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  That launched a lifelong friendship that helped develop the poet's appreciation of music and the composer's sense of artistic mission.  Between then and Goethe's death in 1832, Mendelssohn paid five more extensive visits.

Until meeting Goethe, Mendelssohn had written mostly small-scale works.  Inspired by the poet's confidence in him, Mendelssohn took up larger works and his skills grew apace.  In the summer of 1825, the Mendelssohn family settled down in a new home that became a center of Berlin intellectual and artistic life.  The presence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the works of Shakespeare and Goethe were major influences.

The Octet, op. 20, composed in October of 1825 for the 23rd birthday of his close friend, the violinist Eduard Rietz, is probably Mendelssohn's first truly mature composition.  In one letter, he called it his favorite.  Given its wealth of melodies, its infectious rhythms, and its blend of baroque polyphony and classical structures, many have since agreed.

In a note to the first edition, Mendelssohn wrote, "This Octet must be played by all instruments in symphonic orchestral style.  Pianos and fortes must be strictly observed and more strongly emphasized than usual."  The composer's intention is tested quickly, as the first movement certainly has full-scale breadth.  The violin's opening arpeggio echoes throughout the work.  After the dramatic changes of the first section, the next feels relatively calm.  The development turns expectation on its head with a fall from intensity to quiet.

The mournful Andante sways gently but grows ever more restless; its midsection features an undulating cello.  A forerunner of the overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, which Mendelssohn would write a year later, the Scherzo enters another world.  It is the first of Mendelssohn's many so-called "fairy" scherzos, said to have been inspired by Goethe's Faust.  The fugal finale grows out of the spirit of the Scherzo, throws in what sounds like a quote from Handel's Messiah, and eventually reappropriates the Scherzo's theme as another bit of contrapuntal grist for Mendelssohn's inventive mill.

Program notes by Jay Weitz, Consulting Database Specialist for music, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio.  He is a contributing performing arts critic for the weekly alternative newspaper Alive:  Music, Art, and Culture in Columbus (http://www.columbusalive.com).

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