CHAMBER MUSIC PROGRAM NOTES
​by Judith Eckelmeyer

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The Cleveland Museum of Art
​Schotten-Collier Duo

Wednesday, March 29, 1989
​Gartner Auditorium

Yizhak Schotten, viola
Katherine Collier, piano

​Carol Webber, soprano 

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Program

Franz Schubert (1797-1828):​ Sonata in A minor for viola and piano, "Arpeggione"
   Allegro moderato
   Adagio
   Allegretto

​Charles Loeffler (1861-1959):​ Quatre pères, Op. 5 for soprano, viola, and piano
   La Cloche fêlée
   "Dansons la gigue!"
   "Le son du cor s'afflige vers les bois"
   Sérénade
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Note: Texts and translations are provided on pages 6 and 7 of the program PDF below

Ernest Bloch (1880-1959): Suite (1919) for viola and piano
   Lenta--Allegro--Moderato
   Allegro ironico
   Lento
   Molto vivo

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Program Notes by Judith Eckelmeyer

It is often the case that mainstream composers are remembered for a body of work which posterity has deemed "canonic" or "representative" of the best of their output. And it is often the case that among the "apocryphal" or "minor" works are those for unusual, perhaps "undignified" instruments--nay, even those doomed to extinction in the course of history for one reason or another. Such an instrument, for example, was the glass harmonica, for which no less a master than Mozart write several highly effective short pieces; unfortunately, most of the virtuosi on the instrument suffered severe nerve damage from the intense vibrations--a factor likely contributing to the disappearance of the instrument from the performance roster and to the complete evaporation of composers' interest in writing for it. There is also the case of Haydn's hurdy-gurdy concertos, or that of Mendelssohn's and Beethoven's use of the serpent, and Berlioz' use of the ophicleide--all of those once viable instruments rarely brought to mind and even more rarely heard in their contexts today. 

Schubert's "Arpeggione" Sonata falls into the category of works for now-rarely-used instruments. Written in 1824 for Vinzenz Schuster, an accomplished arpeggione performer, the sonata has lived principally in transcriptions for other modern string instruments, especially the viola, which easily covers the arpeggione's range. The arpeggione was also referred to in its time as the "bowed guitar" and the "guitar-violoncello" because of its construction as a hybrid of the guitar and cello; its inventor, the Viennese instrument maker Johann Georg Stauffer (1778-1853), called it the "guitar d'amour." Alfred Berner's notes for the Archiv recording of the sonata quote the description of the instrument that appeared in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung in 1823: "[the arpeggione is] similar in form to normal guitars but larger in compass, strung with covered and gut strings, which are not, however, plucked with the fingers but played with a bow. The beauty, richness, and attractiveness of its tone approach that of the oboe in its high and of the basset horn in its low register, while it is particularly well suited to the execution of chromatic passages, even in double stopping..."

Schubert wrote the sonata soon after the failure of Rosamunde, for which he had composed incidental music. He had recently recovered strength from his initial bout with syphilis, of which he would die some four years later. The sonata's A-minor tonality casts it in a troubled mood which is frequently superseded by a brighter major key.

The first of three movements, in common time, is in a predictable sonata structure having two distinct themes, the second in C major. Both themes are memorable and significant to the sonata as a whole, for they reappear as the substance of the third movement. The busyness of the second theme is employed in a volatile development section. The opening theme of the second movement, in E major, may have been suggested by the slow movement of Beethoven's first symphony. Schubert here builds an evocative rondo, following the lyrical first theme with a wonderfully shuddering second idea formed by strong dissonances in an eighth-note figure in the piano beneath an elegiac melody in the arpeggione part. By the end of the movement the low piano range will have been explored, allowing the arpeggione to sound its lowest note (E). This movement advances directly into the third, in A major, which opens with a placid, sunny variant on the first theme of the first movement. A contrasting theme appears abruptly, in D minor; this is a recasting of the second theme of the first movement. After a brief section featuring the piano with the arpeggione's pizzicato accompaniment and a return to the two main themes in contrasting ranges, the movement concludes in A major.

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Charles Loeffler and Ernest Bloch represent a facet of American composition rich in multi-national influences and European heritages. Born in Alsace, Loeffler came to the United States in the summer of 1881, having liven in Russia, Hungary, Switzerland, Berlin, and Paris; he was strongly attuned to the impressionist techniques and associations of Debussy. Bloch, born in Geneva, Switzerland, arrived in the United States in 1916 after thorough training in performances, composition, and conducting by Ysaÿe in Brussels and at the Frankfort Conservatory; he nonetheless retained strong vestiges of his Jewish musical traditions. In addition, both composers' American careers intersected with one of this country's most influential patrons of the arts--Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who worked principally through the Foundation created in her name in 1925. The funds she left in the trust of the Library of Congress supported music festivals, concerts, composition contests and awards, and musicological research; through her and the Foundation, Loeffler and Block were aided financially in the country.

Loeffler's training as a violinist with Kreutzer's pupil Massart and his activities in the circle of Joachim gave him access to a performance career at the first desk of the Boston Symphony Orchestra until 1903, when he retired to a farm in Medfield, Massachusetts. Although he had already composed several works and heard them performed, the published corpus and bulk of his output stems from the post-performance years. Among the best known of his music are the Pagan Poem of 1901, later revised for large orchestra and piano; La More de Tintagiles of 1905, after Maeterlinck; the Canticum Fratis Solis, commissioned by the Library of Congress under the Coolidge Foundation; and Evocation for orchestra, women's chorus, and speaking voice, written for The Cleveland Orchestra and first performed here in 1931.

Loeffler was an avid scholar and reader of major works from Greek and Roman authors to Poe and the symbolisms. His affinity for French cultured language and his antipathy toward German culture had to do in part with his father's execution by the Germans and also with his own fascination with the mystical symbolist view of life so evident in the writings of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Maeterlinck, and their followers. It is not surprising that Debussy's music became a principal influence on style, nor that he was clearly recognized as an impressionist, even in his new country and his own time. His setting of poems by Baudelaire and Verlaine in Opus 5 dates from 1904, the first year of his retirement into composition. They bear the harmonic and textural essences of impressionism, even to the details of the viola's "sul ponticello" and other such evocative devices.

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Ernest Bloch's United States career began on a 1916 tour with a small orchestra playing for a featured dancer; the tour evidently bogged down in Ohio, and Block was stranded here. He was "rescued" the following year by a call to join the faculty of the David Mannes School. He returned to Ohio as director of The Cleveland Institute of Music from 1920 to 1925, and was head of the San Francisco Conservatory from 1925 until his retirement, teaching composition in the summer at the University of California at Berkeley. His students included American composers Douglas Moore, Ernst Bacon, Herbert Elwell, Randall Thompson, and Roger Sessions.

By the time he composed the Suite for viola and Piano in 1919, Bloch had already written a lyric drama, Macbeth (1910), the well-known Schelomo Rhapsody for cello and orchestra (1915), three Psalms for voice and orchestra (1914), Trois poèmes juifs (1913), and the Israel Symphony (1916). The Suite was written for a composition contest sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. The literature about this work (Howard and Bellows' Music in America, for example) typically remarks that it "was awarded first prize in the Berkshire Chamber Music Festival Competition in September 1919," but the story is a little more complex than that. Ann M. Woodward writes in the introduction to the DaCapo Press 1986 reprint of the 1921 edition of Rebecca Clarke's Sonata for Viola (or Cello) and Piano: "In the competition, the remarkable number of seventy-two manuscripts were (sic) entered anonymously. In the end, the judges were deadlocked in their decision between two pieces. Mrs. Coolidge had previously invited the judges and perhaps a few others to a private hearing of the prize-winning composition scheduled a month before the festival. It was she who then broke the tie, proclaiming as the winner the Suite of Ernest Bloch. Much to everyone's amazement, the tying composition was the Sonata of an unknown young [English] woman, Rebecca Clark."

Bloch's early works were influenced not only by elements of Jewish chant and melody and nineteenth-century styles of Wagner and Mussorgsky, but also, later, by developments of atonality and quarter-tone and twelve-tone techniques. His own analysis of the Suite in 1919 (quoted in the notes provided by European American Music Distribution Corporation for the CRI recording) suggests the breadth of influences on that work relatively early in his career:

First of all, my SUITE does not belong to my so-called "Jewish works," although perhaps, in spite of myself, one may perceive here and there in a few places a certain Jewish inspiration. It is rather a vision of the Far East that inspired me: Java, Sumatra, Borneo--those wonderful countries I so often dreamed of, though never was fortunate enough to visit in any other way than through my imagination. I first intended to give more explicit--or picturesque--titles to the four movements of the work, as: (1) In the Jungle; (2) Grotesques; (3) Nocturne; (4) The Land of the Sun. But those titles seemed rather incomplete and unsatisfactory to me. Therefore, I prefer to leave the imagination of the hearer completely unfettered, rather than tie it to a definite program.

The following, however, is what I believe that I myself saw in the music:

1) Lenta--Alegro--Moderato
The first movement, the most complicated in inspiration and form, aims to give the impression of a very wild and primitive Nature. The introduction, Lento, begins with a kind of savage cry, like that of a fierce bird of prey, followed immediately by a deep silence, misterioso, and the meditation of the viola. Other motives follow, and a small embryonic theme that later assumes very great importance. All these motives will be recalled later, either in the first movement or in the following ones, with more or less transformation.

The following Allegro brings a motive of joyful and perhaps exotic character which is answered by the viola. There is a new motive for the viola, and there are transformations of earlier material. The second part of the Allegro begins with a new idea--perhaps a little Jewish, in my sense. There is a climax worked out from the most important themes. Then follows a decrescendo that leads to the conclusion of the Allegro--again in the silence and in slumbering mood. Like a sun rising out of clouds, the mystery of Primitive Nature, one of the earlier viola motives arises in a broader shape, Largamente, and the movement ends, as it began, with the mediation of the viola. 

2) Allegro ironico
The second movement is rather difficult to define. It is a curious mixture of grotesque and fantastic characters, of sardonic and mysterious moods. Are these men or animals, or grinning shadows? And what kind of sorrowful and bitter parody of humanity is dancing before us--sometimes giggling, sometimes serious? I myself do not know, and cannot explain. But I find traces of this kind of humor in parts of my former works: in the Scherzo of my first Symphony (1902), in the Witches of my opera Macbeth (1904-19070, in the Scherzo of my String Quartet (1916). But here, of course, it has a different color and significance.

The musical form follows closely the expression in its alternating moods. It is a sort of rondo-form...The first group of motives (Allegro) is made up of short fragments. The following section is based on quite a different motive (Grave).

3) Lento
This very simple page expresses the mystery of tropical nights. I remembered the wonderful account of a dear friend who lived once in Java--his travels during the night...arrival at small villages in the darkness...the distant sounds of curious, soft, wooden instruments with strange rhythms...dances, too...Many years have passed since my friend told me all this; but the beauty and vividness of his impressions I could never forget--they haunted me; and almost unconsciously I had to express them in music.

There is first a dreamy melody in the solo viola, above dark chords; then a second and a third motive; and, as if from far away, reminiscences of motives from the first movement.

4) Molto vivo
The last movement is probably the most cheerful thing I ever wrote. The form is extremely sinple--an obvious A-B-A, the middle part being a more lyrical episode, built from the other movements treated in a broad and passionate mood.

The first motives are constructed on a pentatonic scale. A later motive, more lyrical, seems to be a transformation of the first. The middle part (Moderato assai) uses subjects from the first and third movements. A Presto leads to a Largamente, where a subject from the first movement is triumphantly recalled. The solo viola remembers the motive of the meditation from the first movement. A short and cheerful Allegro vivace concludes the work.

Judith Eckelmeyer © 1989

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As the Schotten-Collier Duo performance is not available on YouTube, please enjoy these performances:

Schubert's Sonata in A minor for viola and piano, "Arpeggione"
Maxim Rysanov, viola | José Gallardo, piano

Loeffler's Quatre poèmes, Op. 5 for soprano, viola, and piano
Emanuela Pascu, Mezzo-Soprano | Arianna Smith, Viola | Federico Tibone, Piano

Bloch's Suite for Viola and Piano (1919)
Yizhak Schotten, viola | Katherine Collier, piano

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Complete Program PDF

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