Longing for Song - September 25, 2022

Amy Beach
(Born in Henniker, New Hampshire in 1867; died in New York City in 1944)

String Quartet, Op. 89
In one movement: Grave – Più animato – Allegro molto (Grave)

Amy Beach grew up in the Boston area in a well-to-do family. Like New York City, Boston was a cultural center for the United States at the time, and a great deal of excellent music was happening there. In that environment, Beach quickly became known as an astounding prodigy. At age four, for example, she began to compose small pieces in her head, without a piano, and to play them from memory whenever a piano became available. Around age seven she was giving piano recitals featuring works of Handel and Beethoven, as well as her own compositions. Soon, she was encouraged to go on an international tour. Her parents wisely declined that advice, but young Beach was reportedly tyrannical about deciding what music could be played in the house.

As Beach matured, she became a musician of many “firsts.” As the first American woman to write an acclaimed mass (Mass in E-flat, Op. 5, in 1892), she soon followed that success as the first American woman to write a successful symphony (her well-loved Gaelic Symphony in 1896). This led to her inclusion, again a first, in the “Boston Six” circle of composers, which boasted the likes of Horatio Parker (the original “dean of American composers” before Aaron Copland) and Edward MacDowell, who created the influential MacDowell Colony, a musicians’ retreat in New Hampshire.

MacDowell began his retreat (now known simply as “MacDowell”) so American musicians and artists could work in collaboration and in a “nest of ideas.” At Beach’s first summer there, in 1921, she came across the “Indianist” movement in American music that would inform our concert’s string quartet. The Indianists championed Native American songs, in part to capture the essence of American nationalist musical expression, and its proponents often gathered at MacDowell. Specifically, too, MacDowell himself had taught at Columbia University where he collaborated with the famous anthropologist/ethnomusicologist Franz Boas, who had collected Alaskan Inuit songs in his book, The Central Eskimo.

Beach used three songs from Boas’s book for our concert’s string quartet: Summer Song, Playing at Ball, and Ititaujang’s Song. She put the final touches on the quartet in 1929 and it found almost instant acclaim, being heralded as “uniquely beautiful.” What is especially wonderful about her use of these three songs is the way she integrated them, not only as straight-out melodies but using parts of them as countermelodies and harmonies. This was an imaginatively effective method of combining folk music with art music.

The opening is slow and filled with a wandering pensiveness that seems both austere and dignified. The music is mildly dissonant, and indeed, unresolved motives and melodies play a big role throughout the work. The reason for this, likely, is that the Inuit songs themselves don’t generally adhere to the same rules of harmony as Western European music — their scales are different and the endings of their musical phrases often feel unresolved.

The first song, Summer Song, appears as a viola solo at about 1:30 minutes into the work. Contrasting with the gravitas of the introduction, this first song is pleasant and glad sounding. Boas’s translated lyrics (the only one of the songs known to be translated) describe how lovely it is to be outside in the long hours of light in summer and when the reindeer return and food is plentiful. Beach deftly captures its lilting simplicity.

The second song, Playing at Ball, appears around 30 seconds later, when the rest of the quartet joins the viola. The tune is light-hearted and filled with repeated notes. Beach then presents the two songs in such a way as to complement each other, as though they were organically related — listen for bits of them as they appear and fade into the tapestry of Beach’s musical fabric.

The third song, Ititaujang’s Song, begins with a quick introduction of loud and short unison chords. The full tune is heard soon after in the second violin. After Beach presents this song, she carries all the songs together in some impressive counterpoint, leading up to a brief and frisky fugue.

The long, final bars of Beach’s String Quartet mimic the slow opening of the work. The energy winds down, and the strings creep increasingly higher into the stratosphere. The final chord brings to us, at last, a very solid harmonic resolution and then fades into the darkness of a cold Northern night.

Franz Schubert
(Born in Vienna in 1797; died in Vienna in 1828)

String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, (Death and the Maiden), D. 810

Allegro
Andante con moto
Scherzo: Allegro molto — Trio
Presto — Prestissimo

In 1824, Franz Schubert was beginning to suffer deeply from the illness that would fell him a few years later: syphilis. He wrote an achingly depressed letter to a friend:

I find myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, … I might as well sing every day now, for upon retiring to bed each night I hope that I may not wake again, and each morning only recalls yesterday’s grief.

Death was clearly on Schubert’s mind. And yet, for the next four years until he died, Schubert had one of the most exceptionally creative periods of his life. As his letters and manuscripts from those last years show, his mind was aflame with musical inspiration. And in 1824, he wrote one of his great masterpieces, his String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, which has become a cherished cornerstone of the quartet genre.

This string quartet’s nickname, Death and the Maiden, came from the musical introduction that begins the quartet’s second movement. Schubert took those first 24 bars from the opening to a song he had written in 1817, based on a poem by the German poet Matthias Claudius (1740–1815) also titled Death and the Maiden. The poem and Schubert’s song portray the moment when a personified Death entreats a young woman (the “Maiden”) at a ball. The Maiden bids Death to leave her at peace in life, but he cajoles her with comforting words:

Give me your hand, you fair and tender form!

I am a friend and do not come to punish.

Be of good cheer! I am not fierce,

You shall sleep softly in my arms!

Scholars debate whether Schubert intended String Quartet No. 14 as a rumination on his own death, but inspiration from this earlier song clearly informs the work. The quartet is, indeed, filled with gravitas and poignancy. The first movement begins with one of Schubert’s most memorable moments, emotionally charged, angry and pained. All four instruments begin at fortissimo, scored in double-stops (two notes played simultaneously on one instrument), with a short declamatory motive ending with a triplet figure. This immediately grabs our attention and grips us with pathos. Aurally, it approaches the sound of an entire orchestra of strings. The triplet motive will permeate almost every bar of the movement, as well as each of the quartet’s other movements. Listen especially, just after the declamatory introduction, as the instrumentalists pass the triplet around to each other like a foursome juggling flaming torches.

The second movement begins with a searching and solemn progression of chords, a funeral march that Schubert borrowed from the opening of his Death and the Maiden song. From this statement of 24 bars (or longer, if Schubert’s section repeats are observed) spring five exceptional variations, each increasingly charged with emotion. The fifth and last variation — beginning with the cello playing octave triplets, followed by the first violin playing quick and repeated notes — especially evokes a sense of time running short; of something frightening looming.

The third movement is a scherzo, and here, too, Schubert again borrowed from himself for the first theme: a ländler (a rustic Austrian waltz), from the sixth dance of his 12 German Dances, D. 790, of 1823. This cascading theme crackles with a clear sense of urgency. Balance comes in its contrasting middle section (Trio) with a bittersweet tenderness; listen for the rhapsodic singing of the first violin here. But the “borrowed” theme returns to push the quartet toward its final movement.

The finale’s structure is a tarantella — an old Italian dance whose frenetic pace was claimed to be a folk remedy to ward off madness and death caused by a poisonous spider bite. Schubert surely captures freneticism here. Pure quicksilver, the finale begins in a hush but hurls along with fervor. True virtuosic playing is demanded in this section. Listen for the ways Schubert plays with big contrasts: loud and soft, silence and sound, pulse and stutters, and all the while, the first movement’s triplet figure is almost constantly in the musical fabric, propelling the music manically forward. And the final section of this masterful work does not disappoint — marked prestissimo (very fast), it is spectacularly exciting.