Czech Chamber Music Society • Concert for the 10th anniversary of the Chamber Music Academy

Four composers and four centuries. Today’s programme offers “time travel” not only between centuries, but also between different periods of individual composers’ lives—from the juvenilia of a student at conservatoire to a late work by an 80-year-old master.

Do you know the operas of Richard Strauss (1864–1949)? Their orchestral introductions allow us to follow the development of the composer’s musical thinking—from the dramatic expression of Salome and Elektra to the orchestral brilliance of Der Rosenkavalier and the more intimate character of Ariadne auf Naxos. Despite the differences in their expressive content, all of these operas open with the use of the full orchestra. Strauss’s last opera Capriccio (1942) is also written for a large orchestra, but the composer conceived the “overture” differently, aptly titling it Einleitung (Streichsextett im Orchester), meaning Introduction (string sextet in the orchestra). The conductor comes out in front of the whole orchestra, but after his gesture, only six instruments are heard: two violins, two violas, and two cellos. As the rest of the orchestral players merely listen in silence, this Introduction creates the atmosphere of an 18th-century Parisian salon. In the score, the composer writes that the plot is set “at the time when Gluck had begun his operatic reform”. Symbolically, the intimate introduction announces a return to the fundamentals of musical drama, and it reminds us that here, Strauss (like Gluck) is contemplating the meaning of opera itself. In Capriccio, the aging master reflects personally and artistically on whether it is poetry that gets the last word in opera, or music. The lyricism of late Strauss with its gentle colours and masterful voice leading is an enticement for musicians to perform instrumental excerpts from opera separately. The most frequently performed excerpt is the Introduction for String Sextet.

The music of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) lives on mainly through his symphonies—monumental musical worlds in which “the whole man speaks” (Theodor W. Adorno). Their depth already has roots in his early attempts at writing chamber music, the best known of which is the fragment of a Piano Quartet in A minor (1876), the earliest preserved work by Mahler. He wrote it as a 16-year-old student at the Vienna Conservatoire, where he was seeking his own compositional language under the influence of Brahms, Wagner, and Liszt—balancing order and expressiveness. This rare surviving movement of a planned quartet exhibits intensity that goes far beyond the bounds of a mere student exercise. The layering of motifs, the lyrical melody interrupted by exclamations, the tension between intimacy and monumentality all reveal a composer who was already thinking symphonically in his youth. The lyrical parts offer a typically Mahlerian contrast, as tenderness and introversion alternate with sharp harmonic shifts like sudden fits of emotion. The work was not rediscovered until the 20th century, and it was first performed in 1962 in Klagenfurt. About the movement, the conductor Otto Klemperer said “In it, all of Mahler is slumbering—but quietly for now”.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was exceptional for, among other things, his extraordinary versatility, having composed for every kind of instrument and in all of the musical genres of his time. Besides operas, symphonies, concertos, sacred music, songs, dances, and occasional compositions, his legacy also includes chamber works of extraordinary originality. One such work is the Quintet in E flat major for piano, oboe, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon, KV 452, which Mozart completed on 30 March 1784. Parts that are now lost were quickly written out, and the premiere already took place on 1 April at Vienna’s Burgtheater with the composer at the piano. The 27-year-old Mozart mentioned it the following week in a letter to his father: “I wrote two big concertos and then a quintet, which enjoyed extraordinary success; I regard it as the best thing I have ever written in my life. […] If only you could have heard it! And it was played beautifully!” After the composer’s death, however, the work was disseminated in forms that differed considerably from the original—in fact, the first printed edition was for different instrumentation, calling for piano and strings. Even later editions did not offer a reliable musical text because for many years the autograph score was passing from one private collection to another before it became part of the Malherbe collection in Paris; today, it is kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Finally, in 1957 the critical edition of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe presented a musicologically authenticated version of the score, making it possible to hear the work in an authorised version after nearly two centuries. In the Quintet in E flat major, Mozart created one of his most daring and most mature chamber music works, a kind of “chamber symphony”. Instead of dominating, the piano is an equal partner with a wind quartet. The work can be understood as a model of balance and dialogue between the concerto, chamber, and symphonic idioms and as documentation of the mature Mozart’s ability to transform every musical genre into a realm of perfect interplay and aural beauty.

The Academy of Chamber Music regularly performs works by contemporary composers created in some cases directly at the academy’s initiative. This was the case with the composer Jan Ryant Dřízal (*1986), who was commissioned by Tomáš Jamník to write his Suite Mortale for the academy’s tenth anniversary. The virtuosic cello part was written especially for Jamník, the work’s dedicatee. The ancient motif of the Dance of Death (danse macabre), which the composition explores, is known from the Renaissance woodcuts of Hans Holbein the Younger as well as from the Baroque paintings of Michael Heinrich Rentz in the Kuks Hospital. The motif was one of the prominent symbols of European music, especially in the 19th century: in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique it appears as a grotesque funeral parody, Liszt (Totentanz) developed the motif as virtuosic variations on the Dies irae theme, Saint-Saëns in his Danse macabre transformed the waltz rhythm into an ironic evocation of death, and Dvořák’s symphonic poems based on Erben’s tales create a dramatic vision of guilt and revenge. Jan Ryant Dřízal also enters into this realm with his Suite Mortale, in which he has attempted to create “a brilliant dance suite, playing with elements of secular entertainment and the mystical horror of the finiteness of being”. The theme is treated as a grotesque and tragic parable on human mortality, which puts everyone on equal footing—an emperor, a pope, a solider, a beggar, and a child. The four dance movements (tarantella, tango, waltz, and galop) are linked by the leitmotiv Memento mori, which leads to the concluding catharsis.

In Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the spring of 1945, during the last weeks of the war, the 80-year-old Richard Strauss composed a work that was to become his musical last will and testament. The impulse was the news of the destruction of Munich and of the opera house there, a place to which his childhood and his entire career were linked. In his Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, he creates neither a requiem nor a heroic symphony, but rather a polyphonic stream of transformations in which tiny motifs are constantly reshaped, broken apart, and recombined. The fundamental thematic core is based on the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica, which appears in transformations from the very first bars, and which is quoted literally at the conclusion—in the score, the composer inscribed the words: “In memoriam!”. Here, Strauss is referencing Beethoven as the ideal of humanist Europe, which he by then regarded as having been lost. Metamorphosen is a quiet testimony to the loss of values that music is capable of evoking—without pathos, in a language of sorrow, but also of hope.