Joseph Haydn

Piano Trio No.39 in G Major, Hob.XV:25 'Gypsy'

I. Andante

II. Poco adagio, cantabile

III. Rondo all'Ongarese: Presto

In 1791, at the age of 58, Haydn was invited to London by a commercial concert promoter Johann Peter Salomon. During his 18-month stay, he composed and conducted for Salomon’s concerts six of his most successful symphonies – numbers 93 through 98. The British response was overwhelming: Haydn was generously compensated, lionized in England’s salons, honored at court, and awarded an honorary degree at Oxford.

Shortly after arriving in London, Haydn received a letter from Rebecca Schroeter, a wealthy widow in her early 40s, who wished to take music lessons from him. Their teacher-student relationship quickly blossomed into one of mutual affection. She wrote him 22 emotional letters, which Haydn copied into his notebook. She also expressed her feelings by sending him presents, buying tickets for his concerts, and copying music for him. Clearly, Haydn reciprocated her affections. When he returned to London in 1794 for his even more successful second visit, he took rooms near Mrs. Schroeter’s house, and dedicated to her three of his finest piano trios, including the one we hear this evening. He told his first biographer, “Though I was 60 years old, she was loving and amiable, and I probably would have married her if I had been single.”

Altogether Haydn wrote more than 30 piano trios, but they were nowhere near as venturesome as his 104 symphonies and 70 string quartets. In Haydn’s day the piano – or its predecessor, the harpsichord – was the most prestigious instrument for family music-making. Therefore, chamber combinations with the piano were lighter than other instrumental music. Further, the piano was the center of attention, and piano trios were commonly designated “sonatas for pianoforte with the accompaniment of a violin and violin cello.”

In general, Haydn followed the piano trio format of the period with the piano dominant. As he gained experience in trio writing, he emancipated the violin to some extent, using its singing power to reinforce the piano’s sustained melodies. However, he continued to limit the cello to doubling the bass line of the piano – a holdover from its continuo role in Baroque music. Haydn’s piano trios are full of fresh and inventive music, particularly in their brilliant writing for the keyboard. Because they are salon pieces, they tend to be more informal than the quartets in spirit and content. For example, a set of variations often replaces the more rigorous sonata form as the first movement, and a dance movement is used to wind things up.

This evening’s trio is the second of the three that Haydn dedicated to Mrs. Schroeter. It begins with a lovely theme and variations in the basic G major, a repetition from the violin in the third variation, then presenting the melodic line in the minor variation. The violin is featured again in the simple and prayer-like E-major slow movement. The trio closes with one of Haydn’s best-known movements – a high-spirited rondo captioned by Haydn “in the gypsy style,” that resembles Hungarian music.

- Willard J. Hertz

Zoltán Kodály

Zoltán Kodály is a seminal figure in the history of modern Hungary. Not only a composer, he was also a linguist who received a PhD for his thesis, “The Verse Structure of Hungarian Folksong.” With his friend and colleague Béla Bartók, he would regularly make expeditions into the Hungarian countryside to record and transcribe folksongs. Jointly, they published several collections of authentic folksongs as well as arrangements. With the parallel work of Cecil Sharp in rural Britain and Appalachia, these expeditions mark some of the earliest research in the discipline of ethnomusicology. Folk material also found its way into their compositions, with the melodic interest of this repertoire exerting particular influence on Kodály. Bartók wrote in 1921 of Kodály’s aesthetic, “His compositions are characterized in the main by rich melodic invention, a perfect sense of form, a certain predilection for melancholy and uncertainty... he strives for inner contemplation.” Kodály was, additionally, committed to education and the elevation of the Hungarian people through musical education, in particular. He posited that, “Our age of mechanization leads along a road ending with man himself as a machine; only the spirit of singing can save us from this fate.” He produced singing exercises and, in the 1930s, launched the Singing Youth movement. Indeed, his educational vision was felt on a national scale, and, in his lifetime alone, his principles for daily music education were introduced in more than a hundred elementary schools.

With the emphasis Kodály placed on melody and singing, it is only natural that he would devote much of his compositional energies to choral music. Today, his best-known works include his Psalmus hungaricus and Missa brevis—both large-scale, choral pieces of popular orientation. Aside from these is the opera, Háry János, though better known, outside of Hungary at least, through orchestral excerpts. All of these are later works, written after World War I, if not World War II as is the case for the Missa brevis. Prior to the First World War, however, Kodály had begun to cultivate an international reputation for demanding chamber music of which his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 2 and Sonata, Op. 4 for cello and piano make striking examples. The Quartet was heard in Zürich, and several piano pieces had been well-received in Paris. Neither the Duo, Op. 7 for violin and cello, composed in 1914, nor the Sonata, Op. 8 for solo cello of 1915 were accorded the same recognition. These works lack not in artistic merit; rather, their timing was unfortunate, both with the war abroad and with press controversies surrounding Kodály’s music at home. Nevertheless, Kodály would write little further chamber music after the success of Psalmus hungaricus in 1923, finding his niche, it could be said, in choral music. In some sense, then, these early chamber works—the products of a mature technique and fully- formed aesthetic—represent a high point all their own. Certainly, chamber musicians appreciate and perform them, even if they remain unknown to many classical listeners.

Sonata for Cello and Piano Op.4 in G Major

I. Fantasia – Allegro di molto

II. Allegro con spirito 

Originally in three movements, the Op. 4 Sonata (December 1909 - February 1910) was premièred by Jenö Kerpely and Bartók in Budapest, 17th March 1910. Growing out of the same elemental "old Hungarian" intervals that a few years later were to lend wing to Sibelius's Fifth symphony, the opening F sharp minor Fantasia - an artful blend of rubato recitative, folk innuendo (the piano references, alla Liszt, to undamped cimbalom sound) and Debussyian harmonies - epitomizes Bartók's view of Kodály as a composer of "rich melodic invention, [and] a perfect sense of form, [with] a certain predilection for melancholy and uncertainty ... [striving] for inner contemplation" July 1921). Kodály claimed Beethoven to have inspired the stamping main theme of the second movement, but in its short-winded modal phrases, drone inflections - like allusions it's nearer perhaps to peasant dance. The return of the Fantasia at the end (the final cello F sharp cutting through the piano's distinctive G major triadic spacing) establishes a neat cyclic unity.

- Ateş Orga

Sonata for Violin & Cello, Op.7

I. Allegro serioso, non troppo

II. Adagio - Andante

III. Maestoso e largamente, ma non troppo lento - Presto

Kodály’s Duo for violin and cello is in three movements, each of relatively equal length. The first, marked Allegro serioso, non troppo, is of a rhapsodic character with various themes and gestures recurring throughout its ten-minute span. Texture, for this reason, is often a better determinant of the musical narrative than the recognition of singable melodies. Instead, the significant melodic dimension is characterized by a continuing sense of line throughout the movement where one theme or gesture evolves into the next. An introductory section begins the work in a manner reminiscent of folk music where the players seem to still be warming up and discussing with each other before the first theme is launched by the violin over a pizzicato texture in the cello. The cello promptly answers as the violin switches to pizzicato. Structurally, there are traces of sonata form here, but more realistically we might describe the form as merely ternary: after numerous extemporizations, familiar material at last returns, first with the theme and then with a section reminiscent of the introduction in its improvisatory feel. Throughout, timbral elements like pizzicati, multiple stopping, and glissandi enrich the sound world of the two solo string instruments.

The second movement is marked Adagio. Andante. It maintains the free, rhapsodic character of the first 4 movement while extending the expressive element through tremolo, insistent repeated notes, quick dynamic turns, and the use of extreme registers. The melodic writing is reminiscent of centuries-old singing traditions through its flexibility of meter, sustained drones, and often melismatic character. There is something lonely and melancholic about the mood this movement evokes. The third movement is marked Maestoso e largamente, ma non troppo lento. This movement comes closer than the others to the familiar Hungarian-Gypsy idiom that another Hungarian composer, Franz Liszt, had exploited in his Hungarian Rhapsodies and which is still well-known to contemporary listeners. The virtuosic showiness and improvisatory nature of the instruments’ interchanges capture this, but so does the structural layout of the movement. Specifically, there is a slow section followed by a more extensive fast one. This format relates to the verbunkos, or the dance traditionally used by the Hungarian military to recruit young men as soldiers, where these formal divisions are called the lassú and friss, respectively. An engaging and innovative composition, the Duo, Op. 7, nonetheless, had to wait a full ten years for its premiere which finally occurred in 1924 in Salzburg at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music.

- Jackson Harmeyer

Johannes Brahms

Hungarian Dances for Piano Four-hands

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in North Germany, and his ambition for many years was to return to his native city to occupy some substantial position in the musical establishment. His childhood had been spent in poverty, and it was natural that he should wish to be seen to have succeeded in the eyes of his fellow-citizens. This particular triumph, however, eluded him, and he was finally to settle in Vienna, where he became a dominant figure in the musical life of the imperial capital.

Hamburg is, of course, a world away from Hungary, which formed part of the Hapsburg Empire. In 1850, however, Brahms met the Hungarian violinist Remenyi, who introduced him to something to the music of Hungary, and particularly to the music of the Hungarian gypsies. Brahms and Remenyi toured together in 1853, but the latter, with an eye to his career, was disappointed by the reaction of Brahms to the great Hungarian composer Liszt, who held court in Weimar and had been gracious enough to receive them. The two parted company, and Brahms took advantage of an invitation from another Hungarian violinist, Joseph Joachim, who was to continue as a friend and mentor for years.

Brahms continued to show an interest in Hungarian gypsy music, failing, by and large, to distinguish the gypsy from the Magyar. His fascination was shown as early as 1853, the year of his meeting with Robert Schumann, when he wrote a set of variations on a Hungarian theme. His Violin Concerto has a Hungarian gypsy turn to its Finale, and he was to set, in 1887, a series of translations from Hungarian in his Gypsy Songs for vocal quartet and piano. The most popular of all works that he wrote in Hungarian style, however, were the Hungarian Dances, composed originally for piano duet, and appearing in four sets, the first two issued in 1869 and the second pair in 1880.

The Hungarian Dances were to win immediate popularity. The piano duet was, in any case, a form much in use, providing a useful element in domestic entertainment, as well as serving a more professional purpose as a means of performing transcribed orchestra works. The Hungarian Dances were subject to the contrary process, and Brahms himself orchestrated the first, third and tenth in 1885. The Czech composer Antonin Dvořák, to whom Brahms had given early encouragement, orchestrated the last five, and did the same for his own piano duet Slavonic Dances.

The dances themselves make use of gypsy melodies, although there are three original compositions by Brahms, Nos. 11, 14 and 16. In general the later sets issued in 1880 have about them more of Brahms than of Hungary, and, perhaps as a consequence, were to prove slightly less popular. Within the prevailing idiom the dances have considerable variety and marked rhythmic interest.