Dear Musicians and Music Lovers:
On Monday – Saint Patrick’s Day Eve [oops! The eve of Ides. Just too eager for St. Pat's Day - Jim] – we’re excited to read the music of Gustav Holst (an Englishman despite his name), Franz Schubert and Franz Joseph Haydn.
The Trinity Chamber Players will start the evening with a reading of Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major, Op. 64 No. 5 "The Lark" aka “The Hornpipe” aka “The Peanut” aka “The Rhombus” aka “The Enforcer” – I confess, I made up the last three, but somebody besides Haydn also made up the first two, and they’ve stuck. Why do people do that?
Anyway, “The Enforcer” – oh, all right – “The Lark” is a wonderful quartet that shows Haydn’s intelligence, humor and playfulness. It is one of six quartets in Opus 64 that Haydn wrote between 1788 and 1790 for Johann Tost (how about “The Toast?”), a wealthy merchant who had been a violinist in Haydn’s orchestra at Esterhazy. Please note the temporal juxtaposition of “wealthy merchant” and “had been a violinist” (italics added).
Haydn managed to beat the odds and actually became a wealthy musician by the time he was about 60. His career was spent working for Austrian nobility until he was 58, most notably (and nobly) about 30 years for the wealthy and music-loving Esterhazy family, primarily at their estate which was located precisely several miles beyond the middle of nowhere, near the Hungarian border.
Haydn’s duties for the Esterhazy family as a performer and composer of symphonies, chamber music, solo music, operas, etc. – he composed at a breakneck pace – seem to have prepared him well for his late flowering as an entrepreneur. In 1790, when Haydn was 58, the musical Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy having died, and having been succeeded by a family member without a musical bone in his body, Haydn and the entire Esterhazy musical staff were dismissed. His fame had spread by that time, indeed he had been writing music to satisfy foreign commissions for some years, so Haydn was invited by the impresario Salomon to travel to London and present his music.
Haydn arrived in London in early January of 1791, and it was love at first hearing; his music was received most enthusiastically, and in fact his Opus 64 quartets were first published in London during his visit. Haydn had become adept at writing music that was extremely well-crafted, intellectually stimulating, witty, expressive and often downright fun. It was a formula that made him very popular and quite comfortably well-to-do in his later years. His successful visit to London in 1791-92 was followed by another in 1794-95, and in between these tours Haydn found time to teach a young pupil by the name of Beethoven.
The D Major quartet and its five siblings in Opus 64 are the last of 43 string quartets (not counting the quartet arrangements of his Seven Last Words of Christ) that Haydn wrote at Esterhazy. While he certainly was not the first to write music for two violins, a viola and a cello, Haydn’s works firmly established the string quartet as an expressive medium with which composers from his time to the present day must contend. His influence spawned a vast repertoire of works by lesser and greater composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Borodin, Dvorak, Debussy, Ravel, Verdi, Puccini, Bartok, Shostakovich, Carter, Ives, Stravinsky, Crumb, Reich, Glass, and the list continues to grow. Thanks, Franz!
The other Franz, Schubert, was introduced at some length in the Trinity Chamber Players e-mail prior to 2/21. If you want to read it again, click on http://trinitychamberplayers.blogspot.com/ and scroll down the page a bit.
But before you do that, let’s explore the St. Paul’s Suite of Gustav Holst. The flavor of Holst’s symphonic work The Planets is well known to fans of the original Star Wars movie, the score of which sincerely flatters Holst, especially in the opening sequence. Holst’s interest in the heavens was not that of a space traveler, however, but rather stemmed from his interest in his self-proclaimed “pet vice” – astrology.
He was born Gustav von Holst in England in 1874 (he dropped the “von” during WW1), studied composition at the Royal College of Music with Charles Villiers Stanford (as did Samuel Coleridge-Taylor whom we discussed a couple of weeks ago). Early on, Holst made his living as an opera orchestra trombonist and a teacher. He became the Music Director at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in London in 1905, and added a similar post at Morley College in 1907, keeping both appointments until the end of his life in 1934.
The St. Paul’s Suite was written in 1913 to celebrate the opening of a new music wing at the Girls’ School. Holst made arrangements including other instruments over time to allow more musicians to participate – the gesture of a true educator. The work draws its inspiration from British folk tunes and it is a wonderful romp through cheery melodies and jaunty rhythms for both musicians and listeners.
It’s going to be an evening of (roll your r, please) Gr-r-r-eat Music! Bring your instrument and/or strap on your ears and join us!
Let’s play!
Jim (the violist)
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