A Beethoven Warm-Up Lap and Cycling With Mozart - Community Music Monday, May 23, 2011

Dear Musicians and Music Lovers:

It’s time to work out again on Monday! Musically, that is – although being a professional musician these days is very much an athletic career. We’ll play the String Trio in G major, Opus 9 No. 1 by Beethoven, the String Quartet in A Major, K. 464 by Mozart, and read movements of Mozart’s String Quartet in D Major, K. 499 with our Community Musicians.

Beethoven took some warm-up laps with his three Opus 9 string trios, composed in 1798, which immediately preceded the composition of his six Opus 18 string quartets. He had composed his Opus 3 string trio in 1794 (which we played three weeks ago, on May 2^nd), three piano trios in 1795, for violin, cello and piano, and a good deal of music for various combinations of winds and strings during the 1790s, but since about 1783 the bar for string quartets in Vienna (and everywhere for eternity) had been set quite high and gained a lot of altitude over the subsequent fifteen years thanks to the musical tag team of Haydn and Mozart (of course Haydn flew solo in the final half of that span) . It took real chutzpah for Beethoven to dive into the genre.

The three Opus 9 trios are works that stand on their own; they aren’t sketches of Beethoven’s first quartets, and really have more in common thematically with his later symphonic writing. I suspect he already had ideas for the trios quite apart from any he might have been contemplating for the quartets, and immersed himself in composing for strings either to sharpen his string-writing skills or just to get these works out of the way prior to digging into the quartet genre.

The Opus 9 trios hew to the four-movement format of string quartets established by Haydn and Mozart, whereas Beethoven’s earlier Opus 3 trio with its six movements was more of a serenade. Beethoven begins the G Major trio with an Adagio introduction leading into an Allegro that comprises the first movement – very Haydn-y of him. That ‘s followed by the usual Adagio for the second movement, but the expected Minuet third movement is replaced by a Scherzo, in which Beethoven gave himself more latitude for exploration and digressions than he would have had in the more strict minuet format (Beethoven and Schubert treated the Scherzo, which term denotes playfulness, as the Minuet on steroids). The last movement is the expected rousing finale marked Presto, and it certainly will take some magic to read it at that speed.

To celebrate the arrival of our violinist Amy, who has a late work commitment on Monday, we will read the String Quartet in A Major, K. 464 by Mozart. With this reading, we will complete our cycle (thus the pun-ish title above) of the ten Great string quartets by Mozart: the six quartets dedicated to Haydn, the D Major quartet written for (or at least to be published by) Franz Anton Hoffmeister, and the three Prussian quartets written for  Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and noted Cellist.

In the A major quartet, one of the six dedicated to Haydn, Mozart flirts with chromaticism (which he later embraces with no holds barred in the introduction to the following C Major quartet). The third movement of this quartet is particularly interesting; it is a theme-and-variations Andante that presages the andante variation movement in his Divertimento for string trio of 1788 (which we played on May 2) and it is echoed in the variation movement of Beethoven’s Opus 18 No. 5 string quartet.

We invite our Community Musicians to join us for a reading of the first three movements of Mozart’s Hoffmeister quartet in D Major K. 499. The Adagio is gorgeous, and a fitting way to close out the evening.

This will be the final Community Music Monday at the Manhattan Youth Downtown Community Center until next September.  On behalf of everyone who has participated this season, I thank Trinity Wall Street and Manhattan Youth for joining together to make these sessions possible. Since September, we’ve played together on 29 Monday evenings, reading 95 works of 35 composers (you can see a listing on http://trinitychamberplayers.blogspost.com/ ).

It’s been a great pleasure for me to explore these works with you, and I look forward to sharing great music with you again in the fall.

Let’s Play!

Jim (the violist)