Tonight, Janine Jansen and her international music friends present a colourful programme of music from the first decades of the 20th century. Works by Richard Strauss, Alban Berg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold sometimes still sound surprisingly romantic, but are also already full of innovative, expressive sounds.
Intimate music by Richard Strauss
The versatile German composer Richard Strauss is best known for his melodious operas such as Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier and his colourful symphonic poems such as Ein Heldenleben and Don Juan. Yet in addition, he wrote quite a few sonatas, songs and chamber music works, especially early in his career. His 1887 Sonata in E-flat major for violin and piano refers back to the romantic violin repertoire of the nineteenth century, but at times sounds experimental. Strauss conjures with timbres and free rhythms, and the virtuoso piano part full of polyphonic chords gives the sonata a symphonic character, except for the enchanting and intimate middle movement.
After numerous orchestral works and operas, Strauss would again write a few works for smaller ensembles towards the end of his life, such as the profound and intense 1944 piece Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings. The Sextet for strings from four years earlier is much more accessible. It was originally intended as an overture for Strauss’s last opera Capriccio: a theatre piece about the importance of the arts and the difference between the word and music. Is it now ‘prima la musica, e poi le parole’ (first the music and then the words) or the other way around? In the story, a musician and a poet compete for honour and for the hand of a rich widow, who at the end cannot choose between the two art forms nor between the two gentlemen.
The first violinist sets a striking and compelling melody and then engages in a busy conversation with his five colleagues. A conversation without words, although in the original opera version, voices do sound at the end of the sextet: instead of ‘music first or word first’, the musician and the poet conclude that ‘music and word’ are like ‘brother and sister’. However, the sextet seems to prove otherwise, because even without words and without knowledge of the libretto, this music sounds very appealing and you don’t miss the spoken word.
Berg versus Korngold
Around 1930, Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold were considered the most important Austrian composers.
Musically, they were opposites. Whereas Schoenberg promoted the twelve-tone technique, Korngold remained a romantic. Even in his Suite, written in 1930, he looks longingly back to the
nineteenth century. The music of their younger colleague Alban Berg seems to be the perfect symbiosis between the style of Korngold and Schoenberg. Berg wrote his Vier Stücke for clarinet and piano
in 1913 at the beginning of his career. He complained bitterly in a letter to a friend about his failed attempt to find a publisher: ‘Once again at my own expense! I had to pay for it with a few pieces of antique furniture from my flat'. The four concise and imaginative miniatures are excellent examples of the new genre of ‘small pieces’, which his teacher Schoenberg was also to experiment with.
Korngold wrote his remarkable Suite for Paul Wittgenstein (the two-year older brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein), having previously written a piano concerto for him. The famous pianist had lost his right arm in the violence of World War I, but refused to give up his career. He got great composers such as Maurice Ravel and Sergei Prokofiev to write works for him, and he subsequently caused a furore with his brilliant left-hand technique. Korngold was also commissioned by Wittgenstein and wrote a highly original work for two violins, cello and piano left hand. The piano part is so virtuosic that it is almost unnoticeable that the pianist is playing with only one hand. Other features of this unique Suite are the special timbres, the surprising harmonies and the alternation between sweet, lyrical melodies and compelling rhythmic passages. That Korngold would become famous in Hollywood a few years later with his attractive film music is at times already clearly audible in this five-movement composition. For instance, his evocative music evokes associations with nostalgic impressions of a Viennese ballroom of earlier times in the second movement or with exciting adventures of a merry hero in the third movement.
