25th July & 1st August 2021

25th July 2021

In these two programmes, we hear pieces by three composers connected to one famous violinist. That violinist is the Hungarian Joseph Joachim. Joachim was not only a violinist but was also a conductor, composer and teacher who made an international career, based in Hanover and Berlin. He was close collaborator of Johannes Brahms. So one of our composers is Brahms!

In 1843 Joachim was taken by his cousin, Fanny Figdor, who later married "a Leipzig merchant" named Wittgenstein, to live and study in Leipzig. In 1835, Felix Mendelssohn had become director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra and in 1843 Joachim became a protégé of Mendelssohn, who arranged for him to study theory and composition with Moritz Hauptmann and violin with Ferdinand David. So our second composer is Mendelssohn!

Our third composer is Beethoven! On 27 May 1844, Joachim, not quite 13 years old, performed Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the Philharmonic society – it had not yet become Royal – with Felix Mendelssohn conducting. The response was over whelming and the concerto became Joachim’s signature work and has been in the repertoire ever since.

Mendelssohn wrote to Joachim’s mother that the audience's “hands hurt from all the clapping and their throats were hoarse from shoutin!"

In 1845, Mendelssohn began a stay in Frankfurt. While he was there he taught the English pianist William Rockstro. Mendelssohn invited him, along with violinist Ferdinand David, to read through parts of his new piano trio - which he dedicated to Louis Spohr. This trio which is from the peak of Mendelssohn’s maturity uses as its theme one of his Songs Without Words. The second movement uses another song without words – one of the Venetian Boat Songs – and is a lovely idyllic affair with a swaying meter tinged with a strain of Victorian sentimentality. It’s the last movement that is most noteworthy – it has a great leap in the cello. Opening with a quotation from J.S. Bach's “Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ”, the tune is known in English as “Old Hundredth” from its association with the Psalm 100 and is usually sung to the lyrics "All people that on Earth do dwell.”

When Joachim played the Beethoven violin concerto in Hamburg in 1848, in the audience was the 14-year old pianist and aspiring composer Johannes Brahms. This concert on the 11^th March was to be one of the defining moments in Brahms life. The two young men became firm – in fact, best friends, and played many concerts together. In the next programme we’ll hear the concerto Brahms wrote for Joachim but for now we’ll talk about Symphony No. 3. Brahms wrote the work in the summer of 1883, though he had spent more than a year working on it.  Brahms had adopted a personal motto “Frei Aber Froi” which he had styled after Joseph Joachim’s motto, “Frei Aber Einsam”.  Musically this motto translates in to the notes F-Ab-F, and it is this motto that opens the symphony. At the time Brahms was a 50 year old bachelor to whom the motto “Free But Lonely” could easily apply.  This is followed by a quote from his friend Robert Schumann’s Third Symphony. Because of the pastoral nature of the work it may be that it brought back many happy memories of the time Brahms spent in the home of Robert and Clara Schumann. The third movement is a lovely C minor waltz, with a gorgeous melody, instead of the usual scherzo and is marked poco allegretto.

1st August 2021

As we covered last week, Joseph Joachim made Beethoven’s violin concerto his signature piece. When he played it in Hamburg in 1848 – at the ripe old age of 17 – a young Johannes Brahms was in the audience. Brahms himself was then 14 years old. Even at this young age, Brahms adored the music of Beethoven and had, since the age of 10, steeped himself in any Beethoven he could borrow, study or play. In his twenties he played Beethoven piano sonatas and one of his favourite pieces to play was the Triple Concerto. Joachim and Brahms became best friends and played many concerts together so, it’s no surprise that when Brahms decided to write a violin concerto he turned to Joachim for help in making the concerto playable. Joachim made several suggestions which Brahms took up and certainly followed his advice on the passage work. The work is difficult and Joachim said that it was violinistically very original but did not know if it would work in the concert hall. Joachim also gave Brahms tremendous help with the very practical problem of balancing the violin with the orchestra - which Brahms uses as a partner in the concerto rather than an accompanying background  to the violin.

The concerto was played on New Year’s day 1879 – Brahms conducted and Joahim played -  though he would later admit that it would take several performances for him to come to grips with the difficulty of the piece. There is great use made of the entire range of the violin – moving up and down in rapid succession and long passages of scales and arpeggi. This work requires great skill, discipline and concentration not only from the soloist but also from the orchestra. The slow movement opens with a long solo for the oboe – a really gorgeous solo. The Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate refused to play the concerto because he wouldn’t play a piece that required him to stand on stage whilst someone else gets the limelight. The last movement is a tour de force – a spirited rondo – very much in the style of Beethoven – who after all started the whole thing.

As I said last week, Joseph Joachim was closely associated with Felix Mendelssohn – until Mendelssohn’s death at the early age of 38. Mendelssohn brought a lot of music back to the public’s attention – Bach, who was almost forgotten, owes, in part, his resurgence to Mendelssohn. He also gave the first performance of Schubert’s Symphony No. 9. Ten years after Schubert's death, Robert Schumann visited Vienna and was shown the manuscript of the symphony at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde by Ferdinand Schubert. He took the copy that Ferdinand had given him back to Leipzig, where the entire work was performed publicly for the first time by Felix Mendelssohn at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 21 March 1839. There continues to be long-standing controversy regarding the numbering of this symphony, with some scholars (usually German-speaking) numbering it as Symphony No. 7 - but I’ll call it Symphony No. 9 as I always have! The nickname “Great” was added to differentiate between the Symphony No. 6 which is also in C major. It is an amazing work - Schubert who hardly heard a note of his music played – and therefore didn’t have the opportunity to revise and rework – created an undisputed masterpiece. It’s long – much longer than other symphonies of the time – it’s four movements usually cover between forty-five minutes and an hour in performance.

The symphony opens with a solo by the horn, the quintessential Romantic instrument, intoning a spacious, dignified melody. The movement grows and grows as Schubert’s themes accrue into a towering structure that integrates melodies, rhythms, and tonal progression in a way that rivals, more or less, contemporaneous symphonies by Beethoven. The second movement usually begins as a proud, even haughty march, entrusted first to the solo oboe and then to larger forces. Though it is the shortest movement, the richly scored Scherzo seems easily as expansive as anything else in this symphony, since its scope so far surpasses what a listener would have expected from a movement that traditionally served as something like a palate cleansing sorbet between courses. The finale is big, majestic and grand. It would have to be big to serve as a logical conclusion to a symphony of this scale, and Schubert uses its fifteen minutes to “wrap things up” in every possible way.

To finish, we’ll return to Joseph Joachim – this time as composer. Brahms held him in high esteem as a composer - but thought perhaps the music was just a little too conventional (which is code for dull!). We’ll hear his Elegiac Overture "In Memoriam Heinrich von Kleist", Op. 13.