Attending a Chamber Music Concert

Saturday evening I am taking some friends to see a chamber music concert with the Fine Arts Quartet. Here is the program:

Mozart: String Quartet No. 19

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 11

Debussy: String Quartet

I often go to these with a violinist friend, but on this occasion I am also taking another friend and her two children, aged eight and ten. So that will be a bit different. Usually I sit with a musician crony and we mutter to one another about how they are over-shaping the dynamics or  something. On one occasion three of us (myself, a violinist and a cellist) were listening to a bassoon trio play a piece that was not on the printed program, nor had they announced it. At the end we all looked at one another and said in unison: "Hummel!" You know, I think it actually was Hummel.

But at least three of the attendees on Saturday will be both less familiar with the repertoire and certainly a lot less catty! So I was thinking, what might I say to my friend and her kids about the music? While certainly cultured, I don't think she is a chamber music aficionado as when I said that the Fine Arts Quartet was playing she said, "oh, good, a fine arts quartet." No, I replied, the Fine Arts Quartet. Which sounds unutterably pompous, I know. But hey, I worked hard to get this pompous.

So, ok, time to put my musicology, or at least my teacher, hat on. Listening to this music is like taking a journey--not to a strange and unfamiliar land, but to a strange and unfamiliar mind and time. It is to enter into the inner person of someone who lived in a different place and time. Let's start with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who lived in the 18th century. He was one of the most unusual people who ever lived. Every time you hear something about a really gifted child today, someone who astonishes us with their ability, they are really following the example of Mozart. He is the first famous child prodigy in music history. We may marvel at a young singer who can sing opera arias at age twelve, but by age twelve, Mozart was already famous throughout Europe and had already written two operas! Oh yes, and many, many symphonies, piano sonatas and so on. He had to hurry as he was going to die quite young, at thirty-five. He started composing at five years old. He lived in Austria, first in Salzburg, a not very big town about the size of our town, where he worked for the Archbishop, a very powerful fellow. Then he moved to Vienna. He also traveled a lot with his father, to Germany, England, France and Italy where he was commissioned to write an opera for the big theater in Milan, La Scala. The string quartet we are going to hear, so famous it has a nickname, the "Dissonant" Quartet, was written when he was just short of his twenty-ninth birthday. It is called "dissonant" (meaning with notes that clash in the harmony) because of its very adventurous harmonies in the slow introduction. It is so unusual that when he sent it to an Italian publisher they wrote back and asked him to fix the "misprints"! Here is the Hagen Quartet, playing in Salzburg.

We go to an even stranger place with the second piece, the quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich. He lived his entire life in what was the Soviet Union, now Russia. Russia is a country with a very strong creative tradition in music, just think of composers like Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, but times were very difficult between the Revolution of 1917 and 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and became Russia once more. Much of Shostakovich's life was under the horrific rule of Joseph Stalin who persecuted, starved and executed millions upon millions of his own people. As music was so important to the Russian people, Stalin took a particular interest in the career of Shostakovich, who was the leading Soviet composer. Shostakovich's music was condemned on a couple of occasions which meant no performances and no commissions for quite a while. He lived in constant fear of being shipped off to a Siberian concentration camp. He had lost in-laws in that way and even had friends in the theatre world simply executed. For years he kept a packed suitcase by the door in case the secret police came for him in the middle of the night. His Quartet No. 11 was written in January 1966 which  puts it between two of the best albums from the Beatles: Rubber Soul and Revolver. What we hear in the string quartet is the experience of fear and paranoia somehow transcended through music and Shostakovich's unique sardonic humor. And we experience this from the inside! This is the Allegri Quartet.

The music of Claude Debussy is quite different. While Mozart is all elegance and charm and clarity and Shostakovich is all dark, threatening moods, Debussy's music is diaphanous (meaning delicate, airy, like translucent fabric), lustrous (meaning filled with light) and colorful. He uses the instruments to create landscapes of beauty. Debussy was French and lived in a world of aesthetic refinement when Paris was the artistic center of the world towards the end of the 19th century. His main struggle in life was against the ingrown conservatism of the French musical establishment, typified by the Conservatoire where students had to follow a formidably academic course of instruction. Once past that hurdle (he spend eleven years at the Conservatoire) he blossomed into a very fine composer, much loved by audiences ever since. This is the Esmé Quartet from South Korea playing in Norway.

Chamber Festival Concert

I attended the last concert of the chamber music festival last night--this is the 38th year it has been presented! This concert was the Shanghai Quartet (who are, oddly enough, based in New Jersey) and they played two pieces: the Mendelssohn F minor quartet and the Beethoven Quartet in A minor, op. 132. My violinist friend attended the concert the night before and was raving about how good their Haydn op. 20 no. 4 was. Wish I had gone! Anyway, I won't give a review of the concert, I just want to say that their playing of the slow movement (Molto adagio; Andante) of the Beethoven was as good as I have ever heard. This may be the best slow movement ever written and I say that having heard a lot of slow movements. We in the biz call this movement the "heiliger dankgesang" movement from the beginning of the lengthy title Beethoven places on it: "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart." And yes, it is in the Lydian mode, about the only piece I can think of!

So, let's just listen to the whole quartet. You will thank me later. This is the Alban Berg Quartet. If you just want to listen to the Heiliger Dankgesang, it is at the 17:45 mark. If you go to YouTube there is even a link you can click on. But you really need to listen to the whole piece. Then, if you wish, you may go back and just listen to the slow movement. You're welcome.

Parker Quartet at the Festival

A couple of weeks ago I put up a post on the Violin Sonata No. 1 by Charles Ives because the chamber music festival here was featuring a concert of all four of the violin sonatas by Ives by Jeremy Denk and Stefan Jackiw. Alas, Mr. Denk had to cancel which was rather disappointing as he was, in my opinion, the main draw of the festival. On short notice, the festival managed to book the Parker Quartet for the two evenings Jeremy Denk would have played. I missed the first one, but went with a friend to the one last night. There were only two pieces on the program: in the first half the Bartók Quartet No. 1 and in the second half, the Schubert Quartet No. 15 in G major.

I don't think I have ever heard the quartet before, but they are very fine players, highly skilled technically, with superb ensemble and a high degree of expressive intensity. There is a good-quality clip of them playing the third and last movement of the Bartók on YouTube:

There does not seem to be a clip of the Parker Quartet playing the Schubert on YouTube, but here is a fine performance by the Emerson Quartet:

Even at this fairly early stage of their career, the Parker Quartet seem to have established themselves at the highest ranks in the string quartet world. They are superbly accomplished and don't seem to fall prey to the latest fashions, meaning that they don't bore us with long talky introductions and they don't pander to us by playing tangos for encores. They even play Shostakovich, one of my favorite quartet composers. Here is a performance of the Quartet No. 9 at the Library of Congress three years ago. Notice that they have changed the seating since this concert. The viola is now on the far right.

The Problem with Violin Sonatas

Now, to be clear, I don't mean 20th or even 21st century violin sonatas, and not most 19th century sonatas, nor do I mean the solo sonatas and partitas by J. S. Bach. No, I just want to talk about the late-18th and early 19th century sonatas for violin and piano, primarily by Mozart and Beethoven.

The problem is, very succinctly, that they don't really belong in violin recitals, but they are never heard in piano recitals.

Why is this? These lovely pieces of chamber music were not written for violin with piano accompaniment, but rather for piano (fortepiano, actually, the predecessor to the modern steel-frame piano) with violin accompaniment. Both Mozart and Beethoven wrote them for themselves to play, the keyboard part, that is, with another musician playing the violin part. The greater weight is in the piano, which is why it would be nice to hear them in a piano recital. But, due to economics as much as anything else, we never hear them in piano recitals, but only in violin recitals.

I heard one last night, a violin recital that is, and the first item on the program was the Beethoven "Spring" Sonata for piano and violin. Here is how that goes:

I think you can hear the nature of the composition in the first 50 seconds, leading up to the first big cadence. There is a nice, charming statement of the basic theme in the violin, followed by a much more elaborate version of the theme for piano. Cadence. Last night, as you would hear it handled in most violin recitals (where the violinist is the star), we heard a nice charming theme, beautifully played, followed by a much longer section of accompaniment figures, also beautifully played, while slightly in the background the considerably less stellar pianist struggled with his more virtuoso part. You see the problem? This is not a violin sonata with piano accompaniment, it is, rather, a piano sonata with violin accompaniment. The pianist doesn't want to sound overbearing so he underplays the piano part. The result is unsatisfying.

Now, this can be done well, of course, but the pianist needs to be very, very good and the violinist has to not think of themselves as the big (or only) soloist. Here are Hilary Hahn and Natalie Zhu showing us how it's done:

After Beethoven the changes in musical culture in the 19th century changed the character of the violin sonata and it became more a violin sonata with piano accompaniment. The parts became more equal and then the violin became more predominant. Let's listen to some Brahms for an example:

No question there that, at least in the first part, the violin gets all the tunes, occasionally joined by the piano, who mostly plays accompaniment figures.

The reason Mozart and Beethoven wrote their unusual piano sonatas with violin accompaniment was likely due to several things: first of all, chamber music was a popular pastime for a lot of amateur musicians and there was a ready market for the scores. There were a lot of amateur pianists and amateur violinists around and probably more competent players of the former. Also, as I said, both Mozart and Beethoven wrote these sonatas for themselves to play on the piano (though Mozart could have played either part). The other reason may have had to do with the sonority of the 18th century piano. Frankly, it did not have the long sustain, especially in the higher register, of the later piano. High notes tended to sound clunky and short. The violin could really help in this regard. You might be able to hear what I mean in this performance of a Mozart sonata on original instruments:

It would be great to hear these pieces in a piano recital but the current model for those was set by Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt and they are almost always a case of the romantic figure of the lone pianist sharing the stage with no-one.

There is another repertoire that shares this problem and that is the trios for violin, piano and cello by Joseph Haydn. Lovely pieces, but the cello is really there just to augment the bass line of the piano, though the violin gets a bit more to do. Again, the three instruments are not treated equally and the piano is very much the most important.

All of this repertoire fits awkwardly into our current recital models. The soloist pianists don't want to play it because they don't want to share the stage (or the fee), but at the same time it is not ideal for chamber music series either as our model for chamber music is that all the parts have to be democratically equal. Pieces where the piano is the lead, accompanied by one or two string instruments, just don't make any sense to us! Mind you, these sonatas do fulfill the minor function of being good opening pieces in a violin recital, soon to be followed by weightier ones. This was the function of the Beethoven sonata last night. But it resulted in me making the shocked remark that the best piece on the program was Tzigane by Ravel! And since when does Ravel beat out Beethoven?

Nothing wrong with these early sonatas for piano and violin, by the way. Lovely music. But as I say, perhaps better suited to a piano recital than a violin recital--not that we will ever hear them there.

Let's end with another one, this is the Mozart Sonata in E minor:

Incidentally, we can see the shift from the 18th century model to the 19th century one, where the violin takes on much more weight, as early as the Beethoven Kreutzer Sonata, that begins with a violin solo:

So there you have it. There is a lot of repertoire from the past that is really great music, but that does not fit well into our fundamentally 19th century recital formats. One thing that the Early Music movement has done is revive a lot of music that was not well known and provide a somewhat different context for some of it that we thought we knew.

Mozart's Divertimenti

All 18th century music, in the second half of the century at least, is usually meant to be diverting. This even extends to the church music of Haydn and Mozart, which is typically rather too bouncy and cheerful to be entirely suitable for religious meditation (Mozart's Requiem aside). But, interestingly, the pieces Mozart wrote titled "Divertimento" are often more substantial than the supposedly more serious chamber music titled "string quartet" or "sonata". Since we think of divertimenti as being rather trivial, they are often neglected. So let's have a look at some of Mozart's divertimenti. We will have lots of choose from as in the 170 CDs of his complete works, 41 discs are devoted to divertimenti.

Mozart's divertimenti often run up to forty minutes in length, i.e. longer than his symphonies or string quartets which run typically to 20 or 30 minutes. Many are of similar quality. So let's look at some. I have chosen three examples. The first is an early one for strings, the Divertimento in F major, K. 138 written in 1772 when Mozart was only fifteen or sixteen. He was in the employment of the Archbishop of Salzburg and had just returned from an extended journey to Italy with his father. Much of his musical training as a composer took place on this and other travels where he met composers like J. C. Bach in London and studied counterpoint with Giovanni Battista Martini in Bologna. We can hear some of the Italian influence in the limpidity and charming melodies of this divertimento. This and its two companion pieces are often called Salzburg Symphonies. Usually I like to look at the beginning of the first movement for a clue as to the character, but this piece has such a lovely Andante middle movement that I want to quote it. Measures 9 to 12 in the second phrase are very touching with their "Corelli seconds":

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Here is that movement. You hear those harmonic clashes first at the 36 second mark:

And here is the whole divertimento with Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. Total duration is only 14 minutes:

Mozart biographer Alfred Einstein said of the much later Divertimento in F major, K. 247 that it, along with its companion pieces, "belong to the purest, the liveliest, the most cheering, the most perfect compositions that ever assumed a musical form." Dating from 1776, when Mozart had turned 20, this is more typical of the genre with its six movements, including two minuets (with trios) enclosing an adagio. There is also a second slow movement in the form of an Andante grazioso theme and variations. Together with quicker opening and closing movements this makes up the usual divertimento layout. The total duration is about 31 minutes and it is scored for string quartet plus two horns. Here is the first page:

And here is a complete performance:

Honestly, has there ever been more delightful and diverting music?

Late in life, immediately after composing his two great string quintets Mozart wrote one more, final, divertimento. This piece, the Divertimento K. 563, benefits from all his experience in writing chamber music and is a distillation of his talents into the concentrated form of the string trio. Charles Rosen says that "no other composer of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries ever understood the demands of writing for three voices as Mozart did, except for Bach..." Rosen describes this piece as being far above all other works in the string trio form. It is also the only string trio he composed. Mozart manages to perfectly synthesize the demands of three-part counterpoint with those of a popular genre. Here is the opening:

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And here is a performance by the fairly stunning trio of Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman and Leonard Rose. The total duration is about 45 minutes:

UPDATE: I forgot to include the movements. As in K. 247, there are six movements laid out as follows (from Wikipedia):

1. Allegro (E-flat major, sonata form, 4/4)
2. Adagio (A-flat major, sonata form, 3/4)
3. Minuet - Trio (E-flat major, ternary form, 3/4)
4. Andante (B-flat major, theme and 4 variations, with the third variation in B-flat minor, 2/4)
5. Minuet - Trio I - Trio II (E-flat major, rondo form, with the first trio in A-flat major and the second one in B-flat major, 3/4)
6. Allegro (E-flat major, sonata rondo form, 6/8)

Masterpieces of Music: Mozart, Quintet in C major, K. 515

First of all, let me apologize for being absent from posting for four days. I was sick with a cold and at the same time, overwhelmed with work. But now I'm back!

I haven't put up a "Masterpieces of Music" post for a long time, but for this it seemed appropriate. In a lot of ways Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the three "greats" of the Classical Period in music (about 1770 to 1827), complement one another. They all wrote wonderful piano sonatas, for example, but there is no question that those of Beethoven are by far the most important. They also all wrote string quartets and, again, those of Beethoven are very important, but the sixty-eight by Haydn are likely equally important as they not only defined the genre, but they explored many things that no-one else did. They all wrote symphonies as well and in this area it is tempting to say that Haydn's 104 (or 106) are the equal of Beethoven's 9. Again, the sheer variety and quantity have to be taken into account even though the ones by Beethoven are pinnacles of the form. Where does Mozart fall into this picture? Where Haydn was mostly responsible for creating Classical style and defining the possibilities and Beethoven enlarged and deepened these possibilities, Mozart managed to find his own path that was quite different from either.

Mozart's life was unique, so much so that many biographers have been so impressed by it that they have not managed to tear themselves away to look at the music in itself. Mozart was likely the greatest child prodigy in music of all time. He started playing the piano, on his own initiative, at age four and by age five had already started composing. His first symphony was written when he was eight and his first opera by age eleven. No other composer I know of was this precocious. But in his early years he was very much an imitator and his father noted that he could copy any musical style. He was exposed to a lot of different music as a child because from age seven to ten he, with his sister and father, toured the capitals of Europe. On this trip he met and was influenced by Bach's son, J. C. Bach, resident in London. Here is a duet for two pianos by J. C. Bach, that I suppose he might have even played with young Mozart:

Neither the young Haydn, nor the young Beethoven was nearly as well-travelled. In both their cases, they pretty much moved from their place of birth to Vienna and that was it, Haydn spending summers on the Esterházy family estate in what is now Hungary. But Mozart did a lot of traveling when young and particularly receptive. Between 1769, when Mozart was thirteen, and 1773, he and his father traveled to Italy three times. Mozart was particularly appreciated by the Italians and had his first successes in opera there at the Teatro in Milan. Here, from the Wikipedia article on Mozart's Italian journeys, is a map of where he went on the first trip:

As you can see, their travels were extensive. Spending so much time in Italy, overflowing with music, in these formative adolescent years, made a real impression on Mozart's music. The grace, fluidity and sheer melodic invention of his music which sets it apart from that of Haydn and Beethoven, seems to me to be a reflection of his Italian experience. Neither Haydn nor Beethoven ever traveled to Italy. I think this influence also explains why Mozart was such a huge success as an opera composer when Haydn and Beethoven were not.

Here is a sample of Mozart's Italian style, the Divertimento in F major, K. 138, composed in Salzburg just a few weeks after returning from Italy in 1772:

This kind of sunny, graceful, lucid music sets Mozart a bit apart from both Haydn and Beethoven, who tend to be a bit heavier and more Germanic.

Mozart set himself apart not only in excelling in opera, the quintessential Italian musical genre, but in choosing genres for himself in which he could excel. The piano concerto is one of the most important. There were hosts of keyboard concertos since J. S. Bach, the father, invented the genre, modeled after Vivaldi's violin concertos. But even great composers like Haydn tended to write dull concertos. It was Mozart that made the piano concerto the great medium that was later developed by Beethoven and others. But I have written before about Mozart's piano concertos in many previous posts such as this one. Today I want to talk about a different medium in which Mozart is the acknowledged master: the string quintet.

The string quartet was the single-handed invention of Joseph Haydn and he wrote great ones throughout his life but I don't think I have ever even heard of a string quintet by him. The only string quintets by Beethoven are a couple of arrangements of other pieces. The quintet form was dominated by the Italian Boccherini, a cellist, who wrote for string quartet with added cello. While charming, the over one hundred examples are rather lightweight. Mozart developed an entirely new version of the string quintet by writing for two violas instead of two cellos. This gives a lot more weight to the inner voices, which was particularly a strength of Mozart. He wrote six fine examples of which the pair written in 1787, one in C major and one in G minor are outstanding. The next year he wrote another pair of great works in the same keys: the Symphonies Nos 40 and 41.

The Quintet in C major, K. 515, opens with the longest sonata form movement before Beethoven at around fifteen minutes duration. Just one of the extraordinary things about this movement is the opening theme, which is structured with three opening phrases, each five measures long! I'm sure you have heard many times about the balance and clarity of the Classical era and how the phrases are "typically" (that academic evasion) eight measures long. Mozart is famous for his irregular phrases which somehow always sound just right:

Notice how the three measures of the cello are answered with the two of the first violin. We can hear other examples of this kind of texture in one of Haydn's op. 33 quartets and one of Beethoven's Razumovsky quartets. But never more graceful than here. I am not going to go through and analyze the whole movement as that would take up entirely too much time and space. But a couple of things: immediately after those three phrases with the cello answered by the first violin, he reverses it and has the same material, but this time the violin has the rising line and the cello the turned response.  Also notice how very, very long he sticks to the tonic before finally going to the dominant and giving us three new themes. Here is a live performance of the whole quintet:

It was very largely as a response to Mozart's six quintets that so very many other fine quintets were written by Schubert, among others.

1, 2, 1-2-3-4!

Let me start by recycling one of my own jokes--but it's ok, because you haven't heard it before. Chatting with a music critic friend of mine, I made the remark that the difference between chamber and orchestral music is that in chamber music the ensemble is tighter: the players are usually within a sixteenth note of one another. He thought that quite funny.

I haven't done a post on scientific research into music in a while and I notice that Norman Lebrecht has something up about some new research into chamber music ensemble playing. The first link he has is to the abstract of the research. It is worth quoting, just for the flavor:

Control of relative timing is critical in ensemble music performance. We hypothesize that players respond to and correct asynchronies in tone onsets that arise from fluctuations in their individual tempos. We propose a first-order linear phase correction model and demonstrate that optimal performance that minimizes asynchrony variance predicts a specific value for the correction gain. In two separate case studies, two internationally recognized string quartets repeatedly performed a short excerpt from the fourth movement of Haydn's quartet Op. 74 no. 1, with intentional, but unrehearsed, expressive variations in timing. Time series analysis of successive tone onset asynchronies was used to estimate correction gains for all pairs of players. On average, both quartets exhibited near-optimal gain. However, individual gains revealed contrasting patterns of adjustment between some pairs of players. In one quartet, the first violinist exhibited less adjustment to the others compared with their adjustment to her. In the second quartet, the levels of correction by the first violinist matched those exhibited by the others. These correction patterns may be seen as reflecting contrasting strategies of first-violin-led autocracy versus democracy. The time series approach we propose affords a sensitive method for investigating subtle contrasts in music ensemble synchronization.

I love the devil-may-care synthesis of the latest in pseudo-Marxist cultural theory with scientific jargon. On the one hand, "asynchrony variance", (which I think might refer to when the guys aren't quite together) and on the other, "first-violin-led autocracy"! À bas le roi! Down with the hegemony of the first violin!

Ok, let's let the BBC explain all this to us.

A team from the Royal Academy of Music and the University of Birmingham found that analysing how individual musicians vary their timing to follow the rest of the group can indicate a hierarchy.

They say it shows some quartets have a clear leader to ensure perfect harmony.

However, in other "democratic" quartets the musicians all follow each other, playing an equal role.

I can see it all now: the Dean's office calls over to the folks in the science building. "Hey, you've got that big machine that goes 'beep' just sitting idle for most of next week? Why don't you do something cool with it? I understand string quartets are kind of cool right now, why don't you do something with them? And if you can blend in just a touch of class-warfare, so much the better!"

The article gives a bit more detail here:

In one of the quartets, they found that three of the musicians were constantly having to speed up or slow down to stay in sync. However, the fourth player did not budge, letting the others adjust to her.

"The first violin was quite clearly providing a leadership," explained Prof Wing.

"She wasn't correcting to the timing of the other players - the other players were correcting much more to her."

However, in the other quartet, all of the members altered their timing equally, suggesting a more democratic arrangement.

Prof Wing said: "There was no distinction between the first violin and the other players - they were all making equal corrections to each other."

OK, so it is also possible that the first violin in the first group was just having an off day and that is why the others had to keep adjusting to her. As for "all of the members altered their timing equally" in the other group, sorry, I would have to see the evidence before I believed that.

Let me explain how chamber music works. There are a host of musical and historic factors involved that create a context within which each performing quartet works. For example, the first violin part was often, especially in the 18th century, the most virtuosic which meant that the other three instruments had to play an accompanying role. Not all the time, but often enough.  But there are lots of passages where the second violin or the viola or the cello might have the most important musical line and therefore be the controlling voice. It is give and take according to musical context. I recall rehearsing with the marvellous violinist Paul Kling on one occasion when he said "I wait for you, why can't you wait for me?" Right!! Chamber music is always give and take between all the instruments based on the musical context.

This is obvious to musicians and probably quite evident to audiences as well, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. I particularly enjoyed this summing-up comment from the BBC article:

Adrian Bradbury, a co-author from the Royal Academy of Music in London, said: 'Live interaction between musicians on stage is often the most electrifying element of a performance, but remains one of the least well understood.

Uh-huh. "Least well understood" by whom? Just scientists, I suspect. What I notice as a common factor in all these scientific investigations is that they remain quite oblivious to the basic musical context. And let's not miss the delightfully clumsy ideology revealed in the headline:

Hidden hierarchy in string quartets revealed

You see, until we can dissect it with the big machine that goes 'beep', there is no truth. Isn't it interesting how science is just like Gnosticism, believing that until their lab-coat-clad priests reveal the Truth to us, all is hidden. Science: draining the magic from music with big machines that go 'beep'.

Let's end appropriately with the movement from the Haydn quartet that they used for the study: Op. 74, no. 1, fourth movement. I can't find just that movement on YouTube, so this is the complete quartet. The last movement, vivace, starts at the 17:15 mark:

Shostakovich: Trio in E minor, last movement

To finish off the Trio in E minor, we need to have a look at the last movement. There is quite a lot written about what sort of extra-musical significance this piece, and especially the last movement, might have, but I am going to completely avoid that sort of thing and just have a look at the music. If you want to read more, there is quite an interesting article by Patrick McCreless, "The cycle of structure and the cycle of meaning: the Piano Trio in E minor, Op. 67" in Shostakovich Studies, edited by David Fanning (Cambridge: 1995).

The last movement echoes classical form in that it is like a rondo and like a dance, both qualities suitable for a classical finale. Here is how it begins:

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Even though the key signature is E major, the F naturals give the melody an Eastern European folk inflection. There are moments when the melody sounds a bit like one that Bartók might have collected. The quality of the melodies is usually connected with Jewish folk music, which Shostakovich was interested in at the time and also connects with the dedicatee, the Jewish Ivan Sollertinsky. The bare, almost rudimentary opening slowly gains weight and complexity:

Here the piano is playing a new theme, an expansion of the first theme, in Lydian mode on C, while the strings accompany with C minor harmony for a very exotic effect. Later a new, contrasting theme in 5/8 is introduced in the cello:

Another contrasting section with piano arpeggios is presented in E minor:

This leads to a restatement of the main themes from the movement:

Finally, on the last page of the piece, the texture liquidates (a term from Schoenberg, meaning that the texture is thinned down to almost nothing) and, under harmonics that recall the first movement opening, the piano states the chord progression of the passacaglia. Then, after one last statement of the initial theme, the movement ends with simple E major chords.

Honestly, you don't have to beef up the piece with extra-musical references: there is plenty of musical beef here already. Now, let's listen to a performance of the movement. The Argerich, Kremer, Maisky version of the last movement is broken up into two parts, so let's listen to some other Russians. Here are  Dmitri Vinnik (piano), Sviatoslav Moroz (violin), and Natalia Gutman (cello), with all of the last movement of the Piano Trio, Op. 67, by Shostakovich:

Shostakovich: Trio in E minor, third movement

One of the things that Shostakovich is famous for is his use of the passacaglia form. As Wikipedia tells us this originated in 17th century Spain (on the guitar as a matter of fact) as a simple chord progression used to accompany, as the name tells us, a procession down the street. It soon became a favorite of Baroque composers in the form of a set of variations over a repeated bass line or chord progression.

There are a number of famous passacaglias by Shostakovich, who tended to use it to create powerful laments. This one is an expressive duet for the violin and cello over a set of chords in the piano that repeat six times. Here is that progression:

This progression outlines two tetrachords (groups of four notes). The first is in the tonic key of B flat minor and has the notes B flat, F, G natural and A natural. The A natural would normally lead us back to the tonic B flat, but Shostakovich follows it with a second tetrachord F#, G natural, A natural, B natural which suggests a modal E minor, the key of the first movement and the work as a whole.

Incidentally, the B natural that the progression ends on is in a Neapolitan relationship with the tonic: a semitone higher (which we would easily see if it were spelled C flat). Where else have we seen a Neapolitan relationship? Oh yes, in the second movement scherzo where the contrasting middle section was in G major, a Neapolitan relation to the tonic F# major. A very famous use of this kind of relationship is in the transition from the first to the second movement of Beethoven's late C# minor quartet. The first movement is in C# minor and the second in D major, the Neapolitan.

Here is the melody as it first appears in the violin. It is quite a long one, 45 seconds long, so requires three lines:

Some features: it begins with an upbeat fifth to tonic leap, just as the scherzo did. From there it mostly moves by step and features a mournful turn figure that comes three times. The movement unfolds with variations on this melody in both violin and cello and ends with a B natural pedal and outlining the chord of E minor.

Let's listen to that performance by Argerich, Kremer and Maisky:

Shostakovich: Trio in E minor: 2nd movement

Continuing the series of posts on Shostakovich's Trio, op, 67, we take up the second movement. This is a short movement, a scherzo in Beethovenesque style. The key is mostly F# major with a section in the Neapolitan, G major. Rhythmically it is not as inventive as Beethoven often was in his trios, but Shostakovich makes up for that with the acerbic harmonies and wayward melodic inflections.

Let's start with an excellent performance by Argerich, Kremer and Maisky:

This is a fairly short movement, just over three minutes. Just because scherzos are quick doesn't mean they have to be brief--there are lots of examples by Beethoven that are twice as long as this. Where this music departs significantly from the Beethoven model is that while 18th and 19th century scherzos had a great deal of repetition, this one does not. Themes are repeated, of course, but they are being continually transformed. Here is that opening theme in the violin:

Very classical in its adherence to outlining triads. The opening leap of a fourth followed by a fifth is probably a bit inelegant for Haydn or even Beethoven, but the rest is rather traditional in character. The piano accompanies this with harmonies that quickly wander from traditional norms, however. The opening tonic is followed by a Neapolitan, then a G# major harmony! Rhythmically the typical kinds of patterns one would find in a 3/4 scherzo all seem just a bit "off" as witnessed by this maniacal little passage for the cello. The frenetic character is only heightened by its being in a very high register:

Instead of a contrasting trio in perhaps the dominant as would be found in a Beethoven scherzo, we have a waltz-like section in G major, the key of the Neapolitan. Here is how it starts:

And the continuation with a theme in the cello:

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A couple of things to notice about the style: the accompaniment is quite conventional, but the the cello manages to wander into G minor briefly, which gives an uneasy feeling to the passage. Shostakovich had a particular gift for both using traditional forms and harmonies, but at the same time subverting them in subtle and unsubtle ways.

After this contrasting section, the piece returns to the key and themes of the beginning, but in varied form. For example, the repeat of the opening begins with the same music, but this time the theme is in the piano, accompanied by the strings:

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(It is an exact repeat, I just left off the upbeat melody note because it was in the previous line.)

Another thing to notice about the movement is how terribly Russian it is in its wild, heavy, and slightly drunken mood. This is achieved by a hundred little details: the sometimes clumsy phrases (intentionally so, of course) that just seem to land slightly off-balance, the odd spacings, the strange twists of the melody and the woozy glissandi.

Let's listen to the movement again. Here is a slightly brisker performance by the Mosa Trio from the Netherlands:

Shostakovich: Trio in E minor, 1st movement

The Wikipedia article on this trio is very rudimentary, but has the basic information. You probably shouldn't put too much credence in the comments on the structure. For example, the comment on the first movement says it is "highly dissonant" which it certainly is not. I often wonder when people use technical musical terms like "dissonant" or "legato" if they actually know what the words mean, or if they just think they are a sort of metaphor for "good" or "groovy".

Let's have a listen to the first movement. Here is an excellent recording by Gilels, Kogan and Rostropovich made in 1959. The first movement goes to the 7:38 mark:

Here is a site where you can download a pdf of the score. The first movement begins with a fugal texture, but with the cello stating the theme in extremely high harmonics:

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Then the violin comes in with the theme as the cello continues:

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When the piano enters with the theme it is in the low bass in octaves:

As you can see, this is not dissonant, far less dissonant than late 19th century music! The cello statement of the theme is on A or rather the Aeolian mode. When the violin enters, though following the same basic intervals, it is in G major. Then the entry of the piano is in Phrygian mode on B. Though the texture is that of a fugue with the three instruments each stating the theme, harmonically this is very unlike a traditional fugue in which the voices would typically enter on the tonic, dominant and then tonic again. Here they enter on A, G and B with a modal structure.

The fugal opening serves as an introduction to a movement in sonata form, moderato, that begins just after the 3 minute mark in the clip above. This begins in E minor with the piano stating another version of that opening fugue theme. At the 5 minute mark a new section begins, marked Poco più mosso with a new theme in G major:

You might notice that even though the details of the harmony are not traditional (there are cross-relations between F sharp and F natural, for example, at the beginning) the broad outlines are what you would expect: a movement in E minor is quite likely to have a second theme in G major in the Classical period. Of course there are some strange twists and modulations--just before this section is a brief passage in E flat and E flat minor that would not be found in a Classical piece.

After the stating of these two themes, the exposition of a sonata form, there is a development section:

And recapitulation of both themes. Here is the beginning of the recapitulation of the opening E minor theme:

What is different about the way Shostakovich handles Classical forms is in the details: the avoidance of standard cadences, odd modulations and melodic inflections and most of all, the mood or atmosphere which he creates with these details.

As an example of how he might alter a cadence, here is how the first movement ends:

There are some elements of a typical cadence: the D sharp leading tone in the bass which together with the B and F sharp in the upper voices gives a full dominant triad. But no seventh and traditionally, an authentic cadence requires the dominant to be in root position, not first inversion. But then the D sharp is contradicted by a D natural in the next measure and the tonic chord is rendered rather doleful by the reiterated F natural decoration for four measures! The E minor cadence is essentially combined with a Phrygian cadence.

Let's listen to this first movement again in a different performance. Here is the trio of Piano: Martha Argerich, Violin: Gidon Kremer, Violoncello: Mischa Maisky: