PROGRAM - Mondavi Center

Program Notes
String Quartet in E-flat Major, D. 87 (Op. 125, No. 1) (1813)
Franz Schubert
(Born January 31, 1797, in Vienna; died November 19, 1828, in Vienna)
“Although Schubert had already reached great artistic heights, he was
very modest, and the last to recognize the important position he occupied.
Simple and unpretentious, good-natured, somewhat neglectful of
his outward appearance and the enemy of affectation, he was happiest
in the company of his friends. Apparently phlegmatic, he had nevertheless
an enthusiastic temperament, and was not lacking in wit and
humor.” Thus was the young musician described by his friend Albert
Stadler in 1813, Schubert’s last term at the School of the Court Chapel
in Vienna, where he had begun his studies in 1808 at the age of 11.
In the autumn of 1813, Schubert had to face a decision about his
future. He had been tendered a scholarship to continue as a senior
chorister at the Chapel School after his voice broke (“Franz Schubert
crowed for the last time on July 26, 1812,” he scribbled into his stillpreserved
part of a Mass by Peter Winter), but his schoolmaster-father,
Franz, coerced him into matriculating at the St. Anna Normal School
to undertake training as a teacher beginning in December, not least
because teachers were exempt from military conscription. Among
Schubert’s projects during the brief hiatus in his education that fall was
the composition of the String Quartet in E-flat major in November for
one of the informal amateur musical soirées in which he participated
to maintain his school friendships after leaving the Royal Chapel. Like
the other works of his teenage years, the E-flat Quartet shows clearly
the influence of the Classical models that formed the basis of Schubert’s
musical education, while at the same time looking forward to some of
the qualities of the encroaching Romantic era. While it lacks the insight
and profundity of his subsequent realizations of the genre, there is
nothing immature or ill-considered about this endearing quartet. It is
bright, melodious and ingratiating, and almost too easy to love.
The quartet’s first movement follows a crystalline sonata form indebted
to the musical structures of Schubert’s most revered predecessor,
Wolfgang Mozart. (“O Mozart, immortal Mozart, what countless images
of a brighter and better world thou hast stamped upon our souls!”
he wrote in his diary in 1816.) The main theme is initiated by two
measures of quiet chordal harmony and acquires only a modest rhythmic
and emotional animation as it unfolds. The subsidiary theme is a
flowing melody entrusted to the first violin. The development section
is perfunctory and leads quickly to the recapitulation of the earlier
themes. The middle movements comprise a teasing Scherzo and an
effulgently lyrical Adagio in three-part form (A–B–A). The sonataform
finale is one of those vibrant, ceaselessly moving creations that
Schubert favored throughout his life for closing his large instrumental
compositions.
—Dr. Richard E. Rodda
Aristotle (World Premiere, April 2013 Mondavi Center)
Mark Adamo
(Born in 1962, in Philadelphia)
A piece for baritone and string quartet can, legitimately, be nothing
more—or nothing less—than a song group, or cycle, with the
strings standing in for the more usual piano. But if you’re awarded the
privilege of making music for a singing actor the caliber of Thomas
Hampson, and for young musicians of the caliber of the Jupiters, you
want—well, I wanted—to compose a piece that is both a substantial
monologue and a structurally rewarding string quartet at the same
time. Billy Collins’s pellucid “Aristotle” made that possible. His poem
is built in three long but continuous sections, each spinning numerous,
surprising variations on some necessary (to the philosopher) element
of drama—beginning, middle, end. The range of Collins’s images
nudged the string writing into new (for me) colors and registers while
demanding each movement retain its own character. However, while
Collins’s language was minutely expressive of his narrator’s observations,
it remained reticent about his emotions. How does the singer
experience, rather than merely list, “the letter A … the song of betrayal,
salted with revenge … the hat on a peg, and, outside the cabin, falling
leaves?” The poem doesn’t tell you, so the vocal line must: which made the
baritone’s music needful, urgent, dramatic rather than merely decorative.
“Aristotle” the poem is about drama. As well as a tribute to the artistry
of its performers, I intend Aristotle the score as a drama itself.
—Mark Adamo
Langsamer Satz (“Slow Movement”) for String Quartet (1905)
Anton Webern
(Born December 3, 1883, in Vienna; died September 15, 1945, in
Mittersill, Austria)
The genesis of the Langsamer Satz is revelatory of the state of Webern’s
creative and personal thinking in 1905, when he was 22 years
old. Three years earlier, on Easter 1902, he set eyes on his cousin
Wilhelmine Mörtl, then 16, for the first time. They immediately
became friends, and, during the following years, very much more. In
the spring of 1905, he and Wilhelmine went on a five-day walking
excursion in the Waldwinkel, a picturesque region in Lower Austria.
Webern reveled in the beauty of the springtime countryside and the
companionship of the woman who would become his wife six years
later. “The sky is brilliantly blue,” he confided to his diary. “To walk
forever like this among flowers, with my dearest one beside me, to feel
oneself so entirely at one with the universe, without care, free as the
lark in the sky above—O what splendor! We wandered through forests.
It was a fairyland!” In June, still suffused with the glory of the Austrian
countryside and the soaring emotions of his young love, he composed
his Langsamer Satz.
Webern’s Langsamer Satz occupies the same emotionally charged
expressive and stylistic sphere as Schoenberg’s programmatic string
sextet of 1899, Verklärte Nacht. Though firmly tonal (E-flat major) in
its harmonic idiom, the Langsamer Satz shows the sort of sophisticated
thematic manipulation (especially in the inversion of its theme)
that became an integral component of Webern’s later atonal and
serial music, though its lyricism and overt emotionalism find little
equivalent in his precise and pristine later works. The Langsamer Satz
is in traditional three-part form. The first (and last) section utilizes
two themes: a melody of broad arching phrases that broaches an
almost Brahmsian mixture of duple and triple rhythmic figurations;
and a complementary motive of greater chromaticism, begun by the
second violin, that climbs a step higher to begin each of its subsequent
phrases. The central portion of the work is based on a rhapsodic
theme in flowing triplet figurations that works itself up to a climax
of aggressive unisons to mark the mid-point of the movement. An
epilogue of quiet, floating harmonies (zögernd, “lingeringly,” Webern
wrote repeatedly in the score above these measures) closes this
touching souvenir of Webern’s youth, which Hans and Rosaleen
—continued on page 8
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