Yes, There Is Music Today!

Dear Musicians and Music Lovers:

Well, I thought the week before last week was busy, but I hadn't seen anything yet. It seems Uncle Sam insists we all become accountants.

But now that all of that is over, let's play some music!

Tonight, we'll read the penultimate Mozart quartet, the eighteenth quartet of Gaetano Donizetti (yes, that Donizetti) and music of Sibelius and whoever else tickles our fancy.

Donizetti? But he’s an opera composer, for Pete’s sake! He’s by no means an obscure footnote of an opera composer, either: L’elisir d’amore, Lucia de Lammermoor, La fille du regiment, Don Pasquale, Lucrezia Borgia, and the list goes on and on – Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is even featured on the Met’s opening night gala this year. He composed somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 operas, plus 16 symphonies, 18 or 19 string quartets (depending on whom you believe), 3 oratorios, 28 cantatas, etc., etc. Another working musician’s working musician.

One would think he would have needed to be a centenarian to complete such a body of work, but in fact he died at age 51 from complication of syphilis, which had rendered him insane in his last few years. He was born into a poor family in Bergamo, Italy in 1797. He came to the attention of the German opera composer Simon Mayr, who had accepted a music director job in a Bergamo church, when Gaetano was five or six.

The young boy was admitted to a choir school founded by Mayr when he was nine, where he learned composition, orchestration and counterpoint, and from which he wrote his first operas. By the time he reached his early twenties, he was writing operas for companies in Naples, Milan and Rome with some success. His Ana Bolena from 1830 cemented his career, and he became celebrated throughout Europe.

The String Quartet in E minor was composed in 1836, following Donizetti’s very successful debut of Lucia de Lammermoor. Donizetti does not take up the challenge of the late Beethoven quartets. Period. Perhaps quite understandably, Donizetti is more concerned with musical melodrama of an operatic nature. Haydn and Mozart, both opera composers, certainly wove melodramatic threads into their quartets as well, but a look at the E minor quartet’s score tells me we are in for a sumptuous feast of melodrama.

Mozart's quartet in B-flat Major, K 589 is one of the three "cello quartets" which are his last foray into this genre. I've written before that these are groundbreaking works, in which Mozart begins to move beyond the Haydnesque quartet into a new and sophisticated realm of musical writing.

The music is less concerto-like, and focused more on developing musical ideas and motifs across the ensemble. This leads Mozart to treat the instruments more as equals rather than using the first violin as a solo instrument to be accompanied by the three others.

Of course, Haydn came by this solo/accompaniment arrangement for his early quartets honestly, as Luigi Tomasini, the court violinist at Esterhazy, seems to have been the most accomplished string player for miles around.  Haydn naturally wrote for him the most challenging music in the ensemble, and even in Haydn’s late quartets, written long after his tenure at Esterhazy had ended, the first violinist hauls the most musical freight.

You may recall that Mozart wrote these three last quartets for the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm II, who was a cellist, and who probably expected NOT to be in a subservient role, thank you very much. Perhaps that’s why Mozart threw convention out the window and treated all four instruments more equally.

The first of these three quartets is the most conventional, the last is a lively, jazzy contrapuntal tour de force, and this B-flat Major quartet is often overlooked, sandwiched as it is between two more immediately accessible siblings. For me, it is sonic liquid, it is a breath held in wonder and expectation, it is Mozart giving us a look ahead at the path he would have traveled, if only he had lived to make the journey.

We’ll wind up the evening with an Andante Festivo by Jean Sibelius, and if we have any more time we will delve into our bag of music and see what else comes up. As always, we’ll have fun, so please join us!

Let’s play!

Jim (the violist)