Fantasy Worlds
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Seven Variations on Mozart’s “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen”(WoO 46) was published in 1802, the same year as the pioneering variation works for piano op. 34 and op. 35. With these three works, the composer promised his publisher a “truly, entirely new style.” However, in the variations for violoncello and piano, unlike in the Eroica Variations op. 35, for example, Beethoven was not concerned about conquering new regions with far-reaching consequences for his own work.
The Variations Woo 46 are rather the homage to a great predecessor by a composer who is completely conscious of his own creative powers. It is Mozart, with a melody from the Magic Flute,who actually stands in the foreground here, not Beethoven. For, in that the Variations always allow Mozart’s theme to shine through clearly in spite of all embellishments and ornamental variations, it almost seems as if they want to say that further work on this already consummate, beautiful melody is not at all necessary. The only thing that may still be done is to musically celebrate this ideal creation. Beethoven thus developed from the theme a variety of different characters: a contrapuntal duet with at times brusque accents contrary to the meter (Var. I), brilliant, virtuoso passage work (Var. Var.II), warm-hearted cantilenas carried by a gentle accompaniment (Var. III), subdued, painful-passionate songs (Var. IV in minor), a sparkling, lively Scherzando (Var. V), a deeply felt Adagio of great breadth (Var. VI), and a short finale (Var. VII). Suddenly, C Minor breaks in, and in the Coda, which unmistakably anticipates the middle section of the finale of the Sinfonia Eroica,Beethoven very briefly shows his own, unmistakable face. Yet, as if nothing had happened, the original theme returns immediately afterwards in double tempo and flows directly into the broad cadential conclusion. Such elements of surprise ultimately point to a poetic idea: At the same time that Beethoven wanted to create in his Eroica a monument to Napoleon, the supposed liberator of humankind, in his Magic-Flute Variation she sang the praises of the Masonic ideal of humanity, conjugal love, and, indeed, general human kindness in the name of progress.
Almost a year after the German Revolution of 1848, and still during his Dresden period, Robert Schumann wrote the Fantasy Pieces (Phantasiestücke)op. 73 for clarinet or violoncello and piano in February 1849. Whereas another Dresden composer, namely Richard Wagner, fled into exile because of his participation in the May uprising and continued to conjure up the revolutionary spirit with writings and opera projects, Schumann, in view of the street fighting, preferred to retreat to the town of Kreischa in Saxony and devote himself to chamber music. Thus, whoever wishes to see political history depicted directly in the arts could be tempted to apply to the Fantasy Pieces Friedrich Nietzsche’s sarcastic remark that Schumann “fled into the ‘Saxon Switzerland’ of his soul.” [Translator’s note: Saxon Switzerland is a rugged mountainous area in south-eastern Germany.] Yet, this would be rash, and a judgement reached with the early Schumann, the esoteric Romantic and Davidite (Davidsbündler)in mind, not the later realist who was sincerely interested in the social questions of his time and who increasingly made an effort to establish a nearness to the listener. With their comprehensibility and catchiness, their songlike melodies, their clear structure almost entirely based on compound A-B-A forms, with their almost complete renunciation of polyphony, and, not least, with their vivid complete dramaturgy through which wafts a great pathos of progress and freedom, the Fantasy Pieces also have their share of realistic tendencies. The path from the dreamy, introverted first movement (Zart und mit Ausdruck [tender and with expression])through the middle piece, bubbling with energy but still somewhat reservedly optimistic (Lebhaft, leicht [lively, light]),to the extroverted, euphoric Finale (Rasch und mit Feuer [quick and with fire]),the brightening from minor to major, the exciting increase in tempo are designed as a continuous progression: It almost seems as if Schumann wanted to reenact in his music the upheaval in the artistic consciousness of the time, the path from the Romanticism to realism.
The Élégie for violoncello and piano was composed in 1874, as Franz Liszt was approaching his late period. It is a occasional composition written upon the death of Marie Moukhanoff, Liszt’s friend and patroness. The first performance took place on 22 May 1875 in Weimar at a memorial concert in honour of the deceased. The Élégie initially carried the somewhat mystical title Schlummerlied im Grabe (“Lullaby in the grave”), and with that gives evidence, along with other outstanding late works, of the composer’s unconventional relationship to Christianity.
During his earlier Weimar years, Liszt – like Schumann, continually driven by the search for the “poetical” in music had still pursued the goal of combining music and world literature. In 1865 he took the minor orders of the church, being ordained an Abbé, although in his old age he gradually turned from a realist into an esoteric, into an introspective dreamer who increasingly regarded religious feeling to be the essence of music. What remains truly astonishing, however, is the courage with which Liszt created a completely new music for his inner visions. Many characteristics of his late work are present already in the Élégie: an almost complete renunciation of virtuosity, rigorous thinning out of the texture, undreamed-of extension of the harmony in conjunction with a great richness of invention of new, ingenious tonal effects and a marked predilection for the delicate, floating, wafting. For example, although an unambiguous A-flat Major is soon reached after the harmonically completely open introduction of the Élégie, the feeling of a home key asserts itself only slowly. And, to be sure, the melody of the main section has a four-bar period, yet in such a way that at the end of a four-bar phrase there is always a suspension, not a resolution, as a result of which the individual phrases always “close” with an upbeat. Long before the musical revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, Liszt was an inexhaustible experimenter who in his break with the conventions was also not afraid of that which at times is an obstacle for the listener: strangeness.
Leos. Janácek was inspired to compose his Fairytale (Pohádka) of 1910 by a poem by the Russian poet V.A.Zhukovsky: The Story of Czar Berendejrelates a young czar’s adventures with a beautiful sorceress-princess, which after many a complication leads to a good conclusion in happiness and contentment. An admirer of Russia such as Janácek must have been immediately touched by the traditional tone of this magical fairytale and its glorification of the czardom. However, the open-minded listener does not even need to know the exact narrative of Zhukovsky’s story in order to understand Janácek's Pohádka. Even the division into three movements (Con moto / Con moto – Adagio / Allegro)is in no way predetermined by the poem, but rather is reminiscent of genre traditions of the violoncello sonata. And the few places where it is at all possible to sense the parallels between Janácek and Zhukovsky are absolutely unimportant within the context of the whole. It is much more important to see which basic structural ideas connect the two works with one another. Particularly the form of the fairytale corresponds in many aspects to Janácek's manner of composing. There is no logical sequence of sensible actions, but a colourful jumble of wondrous events. Yet, what remains Janácek's actual secret is how a musically sensible whole emerges from the isolated components in spite of his collage-like process in which the individual blocks are placed close to one another. The composer obviously succeeded in establishing in his music a mysterious analogy to human thinking, and indeed not to causal, but to a dreamy thinking.
Claude Debussy wrote the Sonata for violoncello and piano in 1915 as the first part of a cycle of six chamber music sonatas that was to remain unfinished. In this late work, the composer is on a very independent path of Modernism. He lets his first sonata begin in a mood of unreality, with a gesture reminiscent of French Baroque music, but in such a way that this evocation of the “old style” is immediately recognizable as a quote. Here, tradition is only one component among other musical elements out of which very complicated structures are formed. Among the most prominent features of such textures in late Debussy is the quick succession of the most varied characters and the frequent self-reference, especially audible, for example, in the first climax of the first movement, where the tonal world of “La cathédrale engloutie” (“The Engulfed Cathedral”) from the first volume of the Préludes for piano celebrates a resurrection. The principle of contrast of character is carried even further in the second movement, landing completely in the realm of the grotesque and bizarre. Here, in direct proximity to Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire,blossoms an imaginary world of Commedia dell’arte, an inner, purely musical theatre. With the heading “Finale” for the third movement, on the other hand, a development is suggested that has to surprise the attentive listener. Although the toccata-like beginning unmistakably takes up the “old style” of the first movement, something absolutely different now joins the work’s many, in any case almost heterogeneous materials: In the great final intensification, a sudden change takes place from the previous collage-like contrast and cutting technique to a developmental thinking with an unambiguous tendency toward exalted final effect.
Whereas Debussy at first intended, in the middle of World War I, to create a sort of monument to French culture within the intime genre of chamber music, for the desired final effect of his Cello Sonata, which was not to be attained through the foregoing patchwork technique, he had to take recourse to the stylistic principles of German Romantic tradition.
The Fantasy Piece (Phantasiestück)op. 8, no. 2, from 1917, numbers among Paul Hindemith’s little-known early works. It is hard to believe that this impassioned composition in B Major is by the subsequent iconoclast of the 1920s or by the new classicist of the late 1930s. Yet, the young Hindemith still stood, as the Fantasy Piece unmistakably shows, completely under the spell of the musical tradition, of the music of the turn of the century that called itself modern. The composer grew up with its sound in the elated, almost effusive atmosphere of the Lebensreformmovement, the Sezession(lit. Disaffiliation; a school of art and architecture), andart nouveau. This modern age, the epoch of the pre-war period, lives in an entirely authentic manner in the vital energy of the Fantasy Piece. Thus, in spite of a pronounced connection to tradition, the twenty year old Hindemith was absolutely up to date. He mastered the most advanced level of tonal harmony just as naturally as he preserved the legacy of song like melodic writing. At the same time, his music always makes a refreshingly unschematic effect, for example, in his characteristic widesweeping, endless melodies that arise through continual modulation of small motivic sequences, or in the original formal plan (A-B-C-B-A). With that the music-historical position of the Fantasy Pieces an entirely different one than those of the Cello Sonata and the Fairytale,which were composed at that same time. If Debussy and Janácek sought with a rather experimental musical language a new style of national music, Hindemith remained consistent, almost naively isolated in the tradition of the musical modern as the last survivor of the great German music. Only the end of the World War, with the German capitulation in 1918, put an abrupt end to the illusions, also to Hindemith’s, of the turn of the century. Jens-Peter Schütte (translation: Howard Weiner)
Rafael Rosenfeld, violoncello
Rafael Rosenfeld was born in 1973 at Lucerne, Switzerland, into a family of musicians. At the age of five he began to take cello lessons, and soon thereafter to gather chamber music experience. From 1988 he studied with Walter Grimmer at the Zurich College of Music and in 1992 he entered the master class of Prof. David Geringas in Lübeck. Encounters with artists such as Sándor Végh, György Kurtág, András Schiff, Radu Lupu, Steven Isserlis, and Bernard Greenhouse additionally influenced his musical development.
Rafael Rosenfeld has won various prizes at national and international competitions; among others things, he was a finalist at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition in 1994 and a prizewinner at the 1996 International ARD Competition in Munich. In December 2000 he won first prize at the Geneva International Music Competition. As a result, he was invited to perform in Milan, Stuttgart, Geneva, Lucerne, Berne, Rotterdam, Amsterdam (Concertgebouw), and Zurich, with orchestras such as the SWR Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart and the Rotterdam Philharmonic.
Rafael Rosenfeld became solo cellist of Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra already at the age of twenty-two, with which he was at that time the orchestra’s youngest member. Meanwhile, he holds this position on a part-time basis and divides his time between soloistic, chamber-music, and orchestral duties.
As a chamber musician, Rafael Rosenfeld has appeared at many festivals, including the Ittingen Whitsun Concerts, the Davos “Young Concert Artists,” the Lucerne Festival, the Menuhin Festival Gstaad, the Open Chamber Music Festival Prussia Cove, and the Leicester International Music Festival. He has been the chamber music partner of András Schiff, Heinz Holliger, Joshua Bell, Gábor Tákacs- Nagy, and Daniel Phillips, among others. In 2002 he was co-founder of the Merel String Quartet.
From autumn 2005 he is leading a class for students and soloists at the Hochschule für Musik in Basel.
Dénes Várjon, piano
The Hungarian pianist Dénes Várjon studied from 1984 to 1991 at Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy of Music with Ferenc Rados, György Kurtág, and Sándor Devich. Already as a youth, he participated annually in international master classes with András Schiff. He completed his studies in 1991 with a concert diploma, and has been assistant professor at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest since 1994. In 1997 the Hungarian government awarded him the Liszt Prize.
In 1991 Dénes Várjon was the uncontested and until then youngest first-prize winner at the Concours Géza Anda in Zurich, after having been awarded first prize at the Budapest Leo Weiner Chamber Music Competition and the special prize at the piano competition of the Hungarian Radio in 1985.
Dénes Várjon is meanwhile considered one of the most important Hungarian musical personalities of his generation and has made a name for himself in the past years performing in numerous international musical centres. At the age of twenty-five, he made his début as a soloist with the Camerata Academica, under the baton of Sándor Végh, at the Salzburg Festival . Further appearances followed at important international festivals. As a soloist he has performed with renowned orchestras under the direction of famous conductors. Chamber music occupies an especially important role in Dénes Várjon’s musical life.
Besides numerous radio and television productions, Dénes Várjon has a formidable discography on Naxos, Capriccio and Hungaroton, and a recording for Sony Classical (live recording at the Davos Festival) to show for himself. Among his internationally acclaimed recordings are a production with András Schiff, Heinz Holliger, and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which was released on TELDEC (Sándor Veress, Homage à Paul Klee) and his recent solo CD Homage à Géza Anda, released in November 2001 on Pan Classics.
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