O N    O F F E R :  a program of juxtaposition from two of music’s most creative composers, writing in two styles more than a century apart. 

       First comes a poignant quintet, written by Mozart in 1789 — a difficult and unhappy year for him — yet filled with sweet and warm music that brings comfort, fresh perspective, and hope.  Here is Mozart bringing order to, and despite his disordered life, through music.  For this In Focus performance, principal clarinet Afendi Yusuf joins Cleveland Orchestra colleagues in this extraordinary work.

       For Alban Berg, writing more than a century after Mozart, the process of musical creation was an intensely-driven search for innovative answers using old materials in new ways — to shake up the old order into newly disordered beauty.  In his Three Pieces from Lyric Suite, he creates solace and splendor in contrasting string voices, buzzing and interacting with hard-edged vitality, passionate ardor, and poetic grace.
   

CLARINET QUINTET in A major, K.581
by Wolfgang Amadè Mozart (1756-1791)

Composed:  1789

Scored for:  string quartet with clarinet

Duration:  almost 35 minutes

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A N T O N   S T A D L E R  has earned immortality for inspiring Mozart to write a series of great clarinet works. Stadler and his brother Johann, also a clarinetist, were employed in the Imperial wind band in Vienna, and their skillful playing and adventurous attitude to the instrument awakened Mozart's curiosity and, thus, to help reveal its great potential.

       The clarinet was then a new-fangled invention, still the subject of experimentation and debate. Its great versatility and range allowed it to function well in many different sizes, and no international agreement governed its use (it still doesn't; clarinetists even today must equip themselves with two almost identical instruments, since no one has yet decided whether it should be built in A or in B-flat).

       Anton Stadler was particularly proficient in the clarinet’s fruity lower register, and he had one constructed with four extra notes at the bottom, now known as a "basset clarinet." It was for this instrument, with its low extension, that Mozart originally composed both his Clarinet Quintet in 1789 and his Clarinet Concerto in 1791.  Both works were published some years after his death in adaptations for the regular A-clarinet then in wide use.

       Stadler must have been a wonderfully sensitive player, for Mozart wrote each of these works with such affection and exquisite care.  For many — players and audience members alike — he seems to have penetrated to the very soul of the instrument.  (It can be instructive to compare Mozart’s clarinet works with his flute concertos, which are lively pieces indeed, but nowhere approaching the same variety of color and texture. In truth, Mozart admitted that he detested the flute as a solo instrument, but the opposite was clearly the case for the clarinet.)

       In the Quintet, a string quartet acts as accompaniment to the clarinet, yet at several moments each of the four players have richly independent parts.  The opening theme belongs serenely to the strings alone.  And in the develpment section of the first movement, everyone vies with one other — clarinet and string players alike — in showing off their ability and skill.  The dexterity and wide range of the clarinet are much in evidence throughout, even though the gurgling, watery sounds that are so appealing in the Clarinet Concerto are not much used here.

       The slow movement displays the clarinet's singing voice to perfection; the pulse and character of this music are not unlike the ravishingly beautiful middle movement of the concerto.  Here the clarinetist almost takes on the role of a soloist, either leading the melody or indulging in runs or leaps without ever disturbing the serenity of the movement.

        The minuet movement is notable for its two Trio sections, the first of which is given to the strings alone in minor key. The resumption of the Menuetto in major is particularly touching, and the second Trio is a more comfortable exercise in dialogue between clarinet and violin.

       For his finale, Mozart provided a theme and variations on a bright staccato melody, which in many ways recalls the opening theme of the first movement. The variations do not stray far from their model, with the fourth variation even offering the theme itself as accompaniment to the clarinet's energetic arpeggios. There follows a slow variation, giving us a last moment of reflection before the closing pages and the kind of burst of brilliant energy we fully expect for a very satisfying finish.

—program note by Hugh Macdonald © 2021
    

M O Z A R T  was baptized as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus
Mozart.  His first two baptismal names, Johannes Chrysostomus, represent his saints’ names, following the custom of the Roman Catholic Church at the time.  
In practice, his family called him Wolfgang.  Theophilus comes from Greek and
can be rendered as “lover of God” or “loved by God.”  Amadeus is a Latin version
of this same name.  Mozart most often signed his name as “Wolfgang Amadè Mozart,” saving Amadeus only as an occasional joke.  At the time of his death, scholars in all fields of learning were quite enamored of Latin naming and conventions (this is the period of the classification and cataloging of life on earth into king-dom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, etc.) and successfully “changed” his name to Amadeus.  Only in recent years have we started remembering the Amadè middle name he actually preferred.

—Eric Sellen
   

THREE PIECES FROM LYRIC SUITE
(for string orchestra)
by Alban Berg (1885-1935)

Composed:  Lyric Suite created 1925-26 as six movements (I-II-III-IV-V-VI) for string quartet; three movements (II-III-IV) arranged by Berg in 1928 for string orchestra

First performances:  original version, January 8, 1927, Vienna, by the New Viennese String Quartet; Three Pieces (II-III-IV) first presented on January 31, 1929, Berlin, conducted by Jascha Horenstein

Duration:  Three Pieces (II-III-IV) together run about 15 minutes

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B E H I N D   T H E   S C E N E S, Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite is a source of wonder on three levels: biographical, symbolic, and technical.  In addition, it is music of intense emotion, which can be a moving experience even without knowledge of the many layers of coded meaning woven into the score.

       When Berg was writing the original Suite, he was in the grip of passion for a woman named Hanna, whose husband, Hubert Fuchs-Robettin, was a Prague businessman.  At the time, the social circle of Viennese music was often like a game of musical chairs in terms of the heart and bedroom.  Some affairs were carried on with great discretion, while others were acknowledged openly.

       Hanna was the sister of Franz Werfel, who was married to Gustav Mahler’s former wife, Alma.  (Between Mahler and Werfel, Alma was married to architect Walter Gropius).  Two decades earlier, before Mahler, Alma had a passionate affair with composer Alexander Zemlinsky, who is worth noting because his music shows up in the coded messaging that Berg embedded within the Lyric Suite.

       Hanna and Berg’s paths crossed directly at least twice, once when the suite drawn from Berg's opera Wozzeck was played in Prague, and a second time when Berg was the Fuchs-Robettins' guest as he journeyed from Vienna to Berlin for the stage premiere of the same opera.

       How far did Berg and Hanna’s passion carry them?  Only since the death of the composer’s widow, Helene Berg, in 1976, has the apparent constancy of their marriage shown cracks from moments of infidelity.  From this, the idea of Hanna Fuchs-Robettin being Alban Berg’s lover, in fact as well as merely in infatuation, helps explain the depth and details about her in the musical texture of the Lyric Suite. 

       Berg wrote his Lyric Suite in 1925-26 as a six-movement piece for string quartet.   Soon thereafter, he arranged three of the movements for string orchestra.  These have come to be known in English as the Three Pieces from Lyric Suite, and correspond to movements II, III, and IV of the Suite.

       While audiences are not likely to notice or understand the underlying coded symbols in the music without some explanation, Berg embedded similar ideas in many of his works.  (The idea of weaving private messages in public music has a long and captivating history, with J.S. Bach among the many composers whose fascination for musical codes and ciphers was both legendary, and today adds great poignancy to the study of such scores.)

       Where to begin in unraveling the layers of secret meaning within this score?

       The tempo markings used to name all six of the movements in Lyric Suite give us an immediate indication of the music’s subject matter:  amorous, mysterious, ecstatic, passionate (II-III-IV) in the Three Pieces and jovial, delirious, and desolate in the other three movements (I-V-VI) for string quartet.

       More specifically, how does the music and its structure comment on this tempestuous affair?

       Two quotations in the Lyric Suite’s fourth (IV) are taken from Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, and refer to settings of the words "Du bist mein Eigen, mein Eigen" ["You are my own"], as if sung once by Berg (viola), and then by Hanna (second violin).  In the last movement (VI) of the complete Lyric Suite, a quotation from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde needs little annotation as the greatest of all lovesongs, and even more clearly informs and underlines Berg’s messaging.

       Most directly, a symbolic rendering of Berg and Hanna’s love affair is entwined in this music with the initials AB and HF carved into the score, using German notation for the standard musical scale, in two pairs of notes:  A – B-flat (for Berg) and B-natural – F (for Hanna).  Together as a four-note chord, these recur throughout the Lyric Suite, often at moments of crucial structural importance.

       Each two-note motif — Berg's is a half-step on the musical scale, while Hanna's is a leap of a tritone or diminished fifth — also features significantly in the “tone-rows” (or twelve-tone serial scales) from which sections of the Suite are constructed in movements I, III, and VI.  Hanna's daughter Dorothea also appears, signified as two notes of C (Do – Do) in the second movement (II).

       In addition, the lovers are represented by private symbolic numbers:  10 for Hanna and 23 for Berg (a number he referred to throughout his life).  Also, every metronome marking in the work is expressed as a multiple of 23 or 10, and every movement contains a count of bars (68, 150, 460, 138, etc.) derived from this underlying numerology, with each section — and subsection, too — mathematically calculated.

       Furthermore, the swift opening section of the third movement (III), marked “Allegro misterioso,” is reversed note for note later the movement, after the Trio section.  And, significantly, a single chord (of A – B – B-flat – F, Berg and Hanna together again, as if intertwined) is inserted at the only point where the resulting musical palindrome is broken.

        In more obvious ways, the third movement (III) acts as a traditional symphonic scherzo, breaking the momentum and pace between the previous movement and the next.  And the fourth (IV) is a deepening adagio, able to bring the Three Pieces to a suitably enigmatic ending.  Throughout, the resourcefulness of the string writing is astonishing and still modern nearly a century later, with the emotional burden of every line deeply felt.

       Some technical complexity in the work springs from Berg's use of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique (at the time very new), which appears in the Three Pieces in movement III (as well as in movements I and VI of the original complete Suite).  And, adding yet another layer of meaning and connection, each movement makes reference to material in the preceding movement, with, for example, the reappearance of the "Trio Estatico" in the fourth movement.

       Of course, without a careful look at the score and/or some commentary from someone in-the-know, most listeners will be unaware of all this (and more) that lies behind — and between — the notes.  Nevertheless, many will easily hear the work as Berg also intended it, as a passionately argued musical journey whose movements pass from intense emotional expression to rapid and bizarre experimental sonorities.  Here, indeed, we find the flux of feelings common to so much Romantic music.

—program note by Hugh Macdonald and Eric Sellen © 2021