Bedřich Smetana (b. Litomyšl, Bohemia, March 2 , 1824; d. Prague, Bohemia, May 12, 1884)
Composed 1885/revised 1857; 29 minutes
The composer Bedřich Smetana came to prominence only after years of struggle and rejection. His life’s path led him through political turmoil, revolution, exile in Sweden and a return to his roots in Prague. Despite that turbulent history, Smetana became a principal standard-bearer for the emergence of so-called “nationalism” in nineteenth-century music. Indeed, he became known as “the father of Czech music” after the successes of his opera The Bartered Bride and the great symphonic work Má vlast [My Fatherland] drew international attention to Prague. In the orchestral portrait Má vlast, the section that evokes the spirit of Bohemia through its longest river, the “Vlatava”—known by its translated name as “The Moldau”—especially captured the essence of Smetana’s love for his origins, the landscape and its legends.
Revolutions, political turmoil, and eventual successes aside, Smetana reached an even more dramatic and tragic personal turning point during his early 30s. In quick succession, three of his four beloved daughters died in infancy, and his young wife succumbed to tuberculosis. Clearly his favorite daughter, the four-year-old “Fritzi” (his fond nickname for Bedřiška) had already shown extraordinary musical talents as a singer and a pianist. Her death from scarlet fever devastated the young father.
In his grief, Smetana managed to compose a masterful piano trio that has become a major example of nineteenth-century romanticism. He combined traditional structural principles—sonata form, development of thematic materials, contrapuntal writing, scherzo and trio (two trios, in this case)—with the verve and passion of Eastern European musical expression of “folk” cultures. The G-minor Piano Trio knits these elements into a complex cry of anguish and despair. The fact that the work concludes in G major in no way lightens the overall mood of intense mourning.
Leonard Bernstein (b. Lawrence, Massachusetts, August 25, 1918; d. Manhattan, October 14, 1990)
Composed 1937; 17 minutes
The piano trios surrounding Leonard Bernstein’s on this concert are both imbued with the two mature composers’ profound responses to intense grief. By contrast, the 1937 Piano Trio by Bernstein came from a high-spirited young man, a nineteen-year-old Harvard student of piano and composition, writing for his talented friend Mildred Spiegel and her Madison Trio. Annoyed with what he viewed as Harvard’s stuffy atmosphere and the boring restraints he felt from his theory studies with Walter Piston, and full of the vibrant energies that would characterize his entire career in music, Bernstein wrote the Piano Trio as an escape into his own extraordinary musical imagination.
His friendship with Mildred Spiegel began during high school—“Lenny” was 14, “Mil” was 16. She encouraged him to continue his piano studies with her renowned teacher, Heinrich Gebhard. The two teenagers shared inexpensive season tickets to the Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts (where Bernstein first encountered the work of its conductor Sergei Koussevitsky), and they entered into a long partnership as four-hand and two-piano partners. Bernstein eventually dedicated several of his relatively few piano compositions to his friend—the early Sonata, Music for the Dance No.II (“For Mildred on her 22nd Birthday in friendliest affection”), Non Troppo Presto (“To Mildred—with all my heart”), Music for Two Pianos (which they performed together) and this Piano Trio.
At the head of the Trio he inscribed: “To the Madison Trio: M.S., D.R., S.K.”—i.e., Mildred Spiegel, the violinist Dorothy Rosenberg and the cellist Sarah Kruskall. The Madison Trio premiered his new work at Harvard in 1937.
Nineteen years old at its composition, Bernstein created a three-movement work that was eventually published by Boosey & Hawkes. From that vantage point (1979) we hear the Trio’s essential characteristics of humor, jazz elements, idiosyncratic rhythms and harmonic quirks as pre-echoes of the works to come. Specifically, the Trio’s comical March appeared in his 1944 musical On the Town; generally, bits of the Trio’s melodies or turns of phrase strike the ear as predictive of the many Leonard Bernstein compositions that propelled him to fame.
Dmitri Shostakovich (b. St. Petersburg, Russia, September 12 , 1906; d. Moscow, USSR, August 9, 1975)
Composed 1944; 29 minutes
By the winter of 1944, with World War II still engulfing all of Europe, word of the Nazi death-camps had begun to circulate in the USSR. Amidst the war’s nastiness, Shostakovich had already begun writing this piano trio on February 11, 1944, when he learned of the unexpected death of his close friend Ivan Sollertinsky. A music professor at the Leningrad Conservatory and the artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Sollertinsky had died of a sudden heart attack. “I have no words with which to express the pain that racks my entire being,” Shostakovich wrote to his friend Isaak Glikman. The grief-stricken Shostakovich dedicated the work to Sollertinsky’s memory. The music expresses not only his despair over his friend’s premature passing, but more universally, his horror at the unspeakable human tortures being exposed on the Western front.
The cello alone begins the Trio with a lonely statement into the upper reaches of the instrument’s harmonics. It continues its eerie keening as the violin and piano begin to speak. In a quickened tempo, the piano introduces the main theme along with musical topics that they can all engage in. The conversation is moody, ranging from a folk-like merriness to simmering anger.
Shifting to F-sharp major, the second movement is one of those hurtling, relentlessly driving Allegros that Shostakovich mastered so cannily. This rude Scherzo, with its milder Trio section in G major, stops abruptly, throwing the listener directly into the path of eight dark piano chords, the beginning of the Largo, a funereal movement in B-flat minor. Shostakovich sets the anguished growl of these painful chords as a passacaglia base upon which the other instruments perform. The strings speak calmly, then urgently, while the piano continues the incessant tolling of its bleak thoughts. The movement exhausts itself as the strings drift away over the final dark chord.
The final movement, created from real and invented Jewish melodies, cries, mocks and flails about, alternately anxious and violent. The jaunty rhythms propel a rattling death dance. Hard upon the piano’s cascading arpeggios, the three instruments whimper to a pause. Fragments of the mocking dance appear briefly. The piano remembers its eight chords, and tries them out once again before all the voices die.
Shostakovich was the pianist for the work’s premiere in Leningrad on November 14, 1944. In August 1975, the Trio’s slow movement was played at the memorial services accorded Shostakovich when his body was laid out in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.