Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 3 – Chaconne by Johann Sebastian Bach, arranged by Johannes Brahms

This week’s theme is…Wittgenstein Wonders! Can you imagine losing your livelihood?  How about your artistic identity?  The Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein made a very promising public debut in 1913, only to lose his right arm to wounds sustained during combat in the First World War.  Undeterred, he resolved to continue his career as a concert pianist and summarily developed ingenious techniques to play convincingly and virtuosically with just his left hand.  He also collaborated with contemporary composers frequently, commissioning some significant works for piano left hand alone, which I wager you would never suspect simply from listening.  This week we explore works written for and championed by Paul Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 3 – Chaconne by Johann Sebastian Bach, arranged by Johannes Brahms

 

While Paul Wittgenstein is the most famous example of a dedicated pianist requiring a special repertoire to suit his peculiar physical condition, he is not the only example of this through history.  Nor are the works written especially for him the only examples of composers and arrangers doing the same, and for various reasons.  Here’s a rather comprehensive list of piano music composed or arranged to be played with just the left hand:

http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_Piano_works_for_the_left_hand

Camille Saint-Saens, a most intriguing figure to me (for more about him see this post), found himself at various points on the cycle of connoisseurial favor at different times in his life.  Significant to French musical history for his performing, teaching, editing, criticism and advocacy, as a composer he was extraordinarily gifted but unable, I fear, to convince many fellow musicians that his music was truly substantial and enduring.  He was at times subject to criticisms like “Bad music composed well” (ouch!), and toward the end of his life found himself unable to shake his association with light and trivial works like the famously ephemeral Wedding Cake Waltz, composed in 1886 as a gift to his near contemporary and piano duet partner Caroline de Serres née Montigny-Rémaury on the occasion of her second marriage.

Toward the end of her life she underwent a surgical operation which severely limited the functionality of her right hand and so approached Saint-Saens for a set of entertaining and challenging works which she could play with just her left.  Over the course of the resulting 6 Etudes, Opus 135, composed just before the outbreak of the First World War in which Wittgenstein suffered his own comparable personal tragedy, Saint-Saens explores every possible mood, texture and harmonic language, yielding a work of beauty and challenge for any pianist’s digital dexterity.  The fingers almost become their own singers, speaking and acting with utmost independence toward the aim of weaving intricate and convincing polyphonic textures that belie the single hand from which they are woven.  This set would provide important inspiration and education for Maurice Ravel as he set out to create a similarly convincing work for Paul Wittgenstein a mere decade and a half later (see this post).

But physical necessity is not the only reason that musicians have made arrangements at the piano for just one hand.  Another work that Wittgenstein championed came from the brilliant mind and artistry of Johannes Brahms arranging for the left hand not out of physical necessity, but in order to capture the spirit and astounding economy of means of a work from a previous century that fascinated and compelled him.

While the majority of Bach’s creative efforts were focused on the creation of a noble and varied collection of vocal works based on Lutheran Chorales (see this post), there was one short episode of his professional life which encouraged him to focus more extensively on instrumental music.  The Calvinist religious philosophy held by Prince Leopold, for whom Bach served as director of music during his tenure in Cothen from 1717 to 1723, considered elaborate music to be too sensual and distracting for worship, and so the Lutheran musical sensibilities Bach had been steadily developing lay largely dormant during this time, giving him the opportunity to create some of his best-loved instrumental music.  The orchestral suites, solo cello suites, first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier and Brandenburg Concertos all come from his time at Cothen, as do the six sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin.

Ever since their genesis, the sonatas and partitas for solo violin have stood out as supreme examples in the art of condensing thick, complex, harmonically complete, and spiritually profound music into as few strokes as possible for a single staff instrument.  The sonatas and partitas are challenging to listen to (I remember being a bit repulsed by their angular, sometimes harsh sound upon first hearing them as a high schooler), and even more so to play, with their dense polyphony, both implied and explicit, which demands such precision of bowing and fingering and superlative musicianship.  Violinists have used them to refine their technique and powers of interpretation for the last couple centuries.  Most of the movements are brief dances or instrumental genres lasting no more than a few minutes, but of the 30-odd movements of the set one in particular stands out for its length and depth, the Chaconne of the second partita.

Many musicians and listeners have seen fit to relate to the Chaconne as a standalone piece, a world unto itself even without the four other movements of the accompanying partita, such is its scale and gravitas.  Here it is performed on solo violin; you may want to listen to a few minutes of it just to get a taste of its original setting:

Interestingly, Bach may very well have been exercising his latent Lutheran chorale muscles in crafting the Chaconne.  A compelling theory has been asserted that he was in fact, and perhaps subconsciously, embedding numerous chorales from the Lutheran tradition into the monumental texture of the Chaconne as an epitaph to his recently deceased wife.  This performance makes a convincing case for this theory which, even if untrue (although that would be surprising given how well the chorales seem to fit), serves to amplify the haunting and sacred qualities of a musical work which already exhibits both qualities in abundance:

Bach’s great Chaconne has had countless admirers over its couple centuries of existence, all of whom are drawn to its stunning level of integration and economy, including some of the greatest musicians in history.  Johannes Brahms was one such devotee, and it is most probable that it inspired the significant use of variation forms in his own music – see this post.

“On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

Of course today, the very moment any of us would like to hear Bach’s Chaconne (or any other music), it is as easy as cuing up a video on YouTube over the speedy 4G network (by the way, John Philip Sousa was virulently opposed to the talking machines which began to pervade Western culture during his lifetime for just this reason – he saw the ease of consuming recordings as detrimental to society’s general musicianship and intellectual ambition and testified before congress to this end – for more about Sousa see this post), but Brahms did not have this luxury.  In order to experience the work it was necessary for him to be in the company of one of his favorite violinists, like Joseph Joachim for example.  Since this was a relative rarity (not only to be in his presence, but to be so as he was performing one of the most demanding works in the whole violin repertoire), Brahms did what was, in his mind, the best thing by transcribing it for the piano in a way that preserved much of the performing challenge of the original: he transcribed it for piano left hand, but an octave lower to take advantage of the piano’s deep and resonant bass range.

As a violinist myself, I have never developed sufficient technique to tackle the Chaconne (particularly the triple stop-heavy outer sections –  I have played that mellow, glowing middle section in certain contexts), but I have spent time with it at the piano and I can attest that playing it with two hands is quite a challenge, so I admire Brahms’ impulse to preserve the work’s original spirit.

Paul Wittgenstein had similar admiration for Brahms’ concept, and certainly appreciation for the precedent given his condition, but he also noted a perhaps excessive obsession on Brahms’ part to stay true to Bach’s “text” and therefore not to take certain liberties with the transcription that might have helped the work to speak better in its transplanted medium while still managing to stay true to the original vision.  Thus Wittgenstein deployed clever techniques to fill out the bass even more, providing yet greater sonorous depth to Brahms’ transcription:

While Wittgenstein is certainly the most famous pianist to commission and arrange piano music for one-handed performance, he was also able to draw from precedence in a considerable body of such examples left by some notable Western musicians of previous generations.  Wittgenstein’s ambition and drive to make a career for himself in spite of the injury which threatened him at such a young age motivated him to serve as inspiration for and collaborate in the creation of a notable and concentrated collection of works with which to fill his concert and recital programs.  But he was the culmination and summation of a prior tradition in which other important musicians had been working for reasons bearing varying similarity to his aims.

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Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 4 – Variations on a Theme by Haydn by Johannes Brahms

This week’s theme is…Chaconnes and Passacaglias!  Chaconne and Passacaglia, frequently partners in music history studies, rose from mysterious origins during the recorded history of the sixteenth centuries.  Rumored to have originated in Peru, the two forms sprang up more or less simultaneously in Spain and Italy for different purposes, eventually assuming all but identical characteristics in European art music.  While they originally referred to dances with different features, they gradually grew to be essentially interchangeable.  Loved by Baroque composers, musicians of later eras looked at them as novelties to be used for anachronistic effect and exercises to develop their compositional technique.  This week we examine examples from across history.

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 4 – Variations on a Theme by Haydn by Johannes Brahms

In politics we often speak in terms of progressive and conservative.  While the words are always charged with moral dimensions of one kind or another, the policy positions to which they refer are fluid, depending on the time during which they are used.  All we can really boil their definitions down to, ultimately, is that progressives desire change beyond the status quo, and conservatives are either comfortable with the status quo or even desire to move back to a state which once was.  It is difficult to speak about this at all without embedding values into definitions!  For example, it would be easy to say that conservatives desire societal regression, but it’s not necessarily all that respectful of them or the positions they hold.  If you are beyond progressive, you may be labeled as either a radical, or perhaps even a revolutionary.  If you are beyond conservative you may be labeled as reactionary.  Again, all these definitions are fluid depending on their context, but generally those labels seem extreme and undesirable to most people.  But, again, who gets to decide the definition of “reasonable”?  I suppose we’re always flirting with the abyss of infinite regress…

While we generally apply those labels to political positions, they often have resonance in artistic contexts too.  Since styles shift and…develop (again, a value judgement), artistic currents can be seen to move in a forward direction, and various proponents and critics of different styles will exhibit various levels of comfort with this at any given time.  Some artists and critics will love new styles and trends, and so we would call them progressives, or even revolutionaries if they would like the styles to progress faster and more completely.  Other artists and critics will not like the change, preferring current or previous styles, and so they may be labeled conservatives or reactionaries, depending on the strength of their response.  In the simplest possible terms, we could call this the “damn kids!” effect.  Everyone hates their kids’ music, right?

We can observe this effect in all sorts of different ways throughout the history of Western music.  At many different times, critics and conservative composers could be found chafing against new, trendy stylistic currents through which more revolutionary musicians were attempting to infuse new life and interest into their creations.  It actually happens every hundred years or so, if you are content with a very general overview.  When opera came out, its monodic textures were quite progressive in comparison with the polyphony of the Renaissance.  Toward the end of the Baroque era, some composers persisted in created the thick, busy polyphony that characterized its peak style while many others started exploring the more fashionable homophonic textures and slower harmonic rhythm of the Rococo era, a brief bridge between the Baroque and Classical eras.  And in the early twentieth century many forward-looking composers began to write music that lacked a tonal center, resulting in sounds that, to many who first heard it, and many who now hear it, sound grating and difficult, while more conservative composers were still working in a late Romantic or post-Romantic tonal idiom, rich in lush chromatic harmony.

But this late Romantic idiom was once quite progressive, largely inspired by the musical language of Richard Wagner (for more about Wagner see this post).  Many listeners were drawn to his “music of the future”, while others were disgusted or left cold, preferring a quieter, saner music from a quainter time.  One such “reactionary” was Johannes Brahms, who always rode a current parallel to Wagner’s highly revolutionary vision.  Brahms seemed to look as far back as Wagner looked forward.  While Wagner worked in thick, cloudy, and continuous blankets of amorphous orchestral sonority which felt and sounded like nothing that had come before, Brahms preferred to stay within the clear forms and procedures handed down from the Germanic masters as old as Bach, but mixed with an equal measure of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn.  Where Wagner seemed to owe nothing to anyone, Brahms paid obvious homage to his inspirational forefathers as evidenced by his manner of composing original music, and also transcribing their music in a variety of different ways.

A handful of his works are sets of variations on themes by previous composers, including Schumann, Haydn, Paganini, and Handel.  And then there is the transcription of Bach’s great d minor Chaconne for solo violin.  At times Brahms was positively obsessed with it:

“On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

Brahms was so enamored of Bach’s great Chaconne that he transcribed it for piano left hand:

 

Left hand is an interesting choice, considering that the original violin version is an octave higher, so the intuitive manner for a piano transcription would be, one might think, the right hand.  Apparently Brahms considered the dark, brooding quality of the left hand register to be congruent with the Chaconne’s voice.

Brahms was intrigued by this continuous variation form, so popular in the Baroque era, but unfashionable after that.  Only a pure traditionalist like Brahms would have put continuous variation form movements into his music at a time when the rest of Europe was drooling over Wagner’s progressive experiments.  And Brahms did it twice!  The noble finale of his Fourth Symphony is a very austere passacaglia.  But there is a lighter, more transparent passacaglia too, the final variation of an orchestral set he wrote on a theme by Haydn a little more than a decade prior to his final symphony.

The theme which forms the basis is Haydn’s St. Anthony Chorale:

 

Brahms puts this optimistic theme through its variation paces in an incredible variety of polyphonic and orchestrational ways, changing, it seems, as many different musical parameters between the variations as was humanly possible.  That is the craft of variation technique, after all.  You can listen to the complete 20 minute work here:

 

But, if you’re pressed for time (and who isn’t in this frenetic age?!) I recommend you get to know the finale.  I will disclaim that it is considerably more powerful and satisfying when it arrives at the end of the complete variations, but it’s good on its own too.  In a clever twist, Brahms includes, as the final variation, a rich passacaglia with a recurring 5-bar theme based on the St. Anthony Chorale which moves throughout the orchestra.  It’s a variation technique within a variation technique!

Talk about a conservative purist!  Wagner would never delight in such clever games for their own sake as Brahms does.  But it works musically too, doesn’t it?  The variations of the final passacaglia variation build seamlessly to a most satisfying orchestral climax which crowns both levels of variations:

“Conservative” and “Progressive” mean serious things in the moment, at any given time.  But with art, eventually the time passes and only the artifact remains, and in a way that political positions do not.  We can listen to Brahms and Wagner today, largely free of the labels they carried at their day of creation.  Now, we hear only Wagner’s intoxicating thickness and Brahms’ highly respectable clarity, each suited the satisfaction of different moods which may drive our listening tastes on any given day.

 

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Music for Going to Sleep, Day 4 – BONUS Double Post! Wiegenlieder by Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms

This week’s theme is…Music for going to sleep!  We undergo the nearly mystical process of going to sleep every single day, even though we never truly understand the experience.  In spite of recent scientific methods of illuminating the activity it remains incomprehensible to us.  This has made fertile ground for musicians who attempt to represent or otherwise comment on the mysterious transformation from waking to sleep.  This week we explore some of these works by composers who saw fit to represent our daily, universal journey across the veil of consciousness.

Music for Going to Sleep, Day 4 – BONUS Double Post!  Wiegenlieder by Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms

Everyone knows of Beethoven’s symphonies.  And if you haven’t, I’m sorry, but you must be living under the heaviest rock imaginable 😉  There are only nine of them, but taken together they form what is probably the most formative and deeply influential single body of music in, well the history of the West anyway.  Maybe beyond.  Again, just nine symphonies.  That’s a total of 36 movements.  And they all pack a punch.  The drama of his symphonies, and especially this one, single-handedly served to move the music of Europe from the square, stately elegance of Classical music to the turbulent, passionate, emotional drama of Romantic music.  It wasn’t just his symphonies; many of the genres in which he composed, including string quartets, piano sonatas, piano concertos, and choral masses demonstrate this transition.  But the symphonies are the most famous, and seem to sum up the process in a way that is accessible, clear, and, usually, enjoyable to audiences of all levels of sophistication.

After Beethoven’s symphonies numerous other Germanic composers felt compelled to carry the mantle of the legacy left by them, to varying degrees of success, and whether they liked or not.  And so we have the symphonies of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms.  All of them dealt with Beethoven’s imposing shadow in their own way, and all of them stirred a certain measure of classicism into their blend.  Well, some more than others.  Schumann was the least classically-oriented I would say.  The other three certainly exhibit the graceful and proportioned construction of Mozart and Haydn somehow, and each in their own way.

While the symphony, in a very real sense, serves as the public face of Romantic music, there is another face, a more private face.  It is intimate, and appeals more exclusively to connoisseurs than the symphony, but it is an inseparable component of Germany’s musical Romanticism, and to a lesser extent that other nations, becoming a significant expressive vehicle for all of Germany’s Romantic composers, as did the symphony, but in a much different way.  This is the lied, or art song, and it provided a fitting foil in almost every way to the grand symphony.

Where the symphony paints on a broad canvas of massive orchestral colors, the lied draws upon the intimate pairing of singer and piano.  Where the symphony is a most extroverted hero’s journey of varied feelings and images that plays out over a half hour, and often longer, the lied is an introspective exploration of one feeling that is long at five minutes.  And where the symphony is abstract, absolute and dense, the lied is text-based, programmatic and transparent.  The Germanic composers were variously comfortable with both the lied and the symphony, and both form a significant part of all of their outputs, in varying proportions and intensities.  In their Romantic manifestations, both the symphony and the lied represent the mature forms of older genres that began their development centuries prior, but ended up finding their fullest expression due to perfect storms blowing through the Romantic era.  For the symphony the storm’s particular recipe included the orchestras of the patronage system which allowed the instrumental portions of operas to break off and eventually find their own footing.  For the lied it was the expressive nature of Romantic poetry as written by authors like Goethe, and the sonic resources of the recently-invented piano, with which composers were able to reflect the text of said poems to unprecedented levels of shading and nuance.

Again, I’m willing to bet that you have heard Beethoven’s name in association with the symphony before.  But, do you have a similar association with the lied?  Unless you have a few credits of music history under your belt, or are otherwise familiar with the lay of the land through concert-going, listening, and reading – again, the lied is a connoisseur’s art – you probably don’t.  The lied found its greatest champion one composer after Beethoven in Franz Schubert.  If you know anything by Schubert, it’s probably his Eighth Symphony, of which he only completed two movements of the typical four, hence its moniker “The Unfinished”, and probably also his wonderfully melodic setting of “Ave Maria”, which is very much like a lied:

If you think about either of those works, especially if you consider the slow movement of the Unfinished Symphony, you may very well be struck by Schubert’s gift for natural melodic writing.  In fact, most musicians would agree his melody writing is one of his greatest gifts.  This gift, along with a superhuman knack for capturing the poetry of his texts and reflecting them with incredible nuance in the pianistic accompaniment, is what drove the more than 600 songs Schubert composed over the course of his tragically brief 31 years (so much is made of Mozart’s early death – Schubert actually died younger and left a greater number of extant musical works).  It is staggering to consider the range of human experience and feeling that populates a body of songs like that; after all, for each song there is a poem, about which Schubert must have reflected deeply in order to set as he did.  It is true maturity beyond years.  Think of the variety of psychological states he must have assumed to capture so many texts.  But four of the songs evoke a feeling we can all certainly relate to.  They are called wiegenlied, which literally means “cradle songs” and they are meant to evoke the sense of being rocked to sleep by one’s mother as she sings.  All are superb, but here is one of them, D. 498:

 

German

English

Schlafe, schlafe, holder, süßer Knabe, leise wiegt dich deiner Mutter Hand; sanfte Ruhe, milde Labe bringt dir schwebend dieses Wiegenband. Schlafe, schlafe in dem süßen Grabe, noch beschützt dich deiner Mutter Arm; alle Wünsche, alle Habe faßt sie liebend, alle liebewarm. Schlafe, schlafe in der Flaumen Schooße, noch umtönt dich lauter Liebeston; eine Lilie, eine Rose, nach dem Schlafe werd’ sie dir zum Lohn.

Slumber, slumber, O my darling baby, Gently rocked by Mother’s gentle hand; Softly rest and safely slumber, While she swings thee by this cradle-band. Slumber, slumber, all so sweetly buried, Guarded by thy mother’s loving arm; All her wishes, all possessions, And her love, shall shelter thee from harm. Slumber, slumber, warm thy nest and downy, Many a loving song for thee she’ll sing; Then a rosebud and a lily, When thou wakest, she to thee will bring.

 A quick note about the “D” number – Schubert did not catalogue his own music.  That was done later by a musicologist named Otto Erich Deutsch in 1951.  Since then, Schubert’s works are often referred to by their “Deutsche number” or simply “D”.  So, this lullaby is number 498 in Deutsche’s catalog, about halfway through.  You can see the complete catalog here.  The other wiegenlieder are D 304, 795, and 867.  If you would like to hear them, just type “Schubert D” and then the number into YouTube.  If you like the one you just heard, you won’t be disappointed by any of the others.  Incidentally, when a composer catalogues his own music, he usually uses opus numbers, and you can learn more about what that means here.

While Schubert is still the undisputed master of the German art song, all of his German successors wrote them too.  Schumann’s songs are probably the most significant after Schubert, but there are also lovely examples by Mendelssohn and Richard Strauss.  And Johannes Brahms.  In fact, he wrote about 200 of them, and they are shot through with his characteristically thick, solemn, and heady writing.  Brahms had a big job.  He was grappling with the gravity of the German tradition inherited from luminaries like Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn, and attempting to stay true to its mission as he understood it in reaction to other musicians, like Wagner, who seemed to take a different reading on the tradition.  That’s probably best left as a story for another day, but you could say Brahms was a bit of a purist, and tried to write as much like Bach, Beethoven and Schubert as possible, but in his own way.  His songs are lovely too, although the melodies don’t flow quite as gently as Schubert’s.  But here’s a melody I’m sure you’ve heard.  It’s from his own Wiegenlied, which I would wager you have heard of under a different name:

 

German	Literal English	Traditional English
Guten Abend, gute Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht, mit Näglein besteckt, schlupf′ unter die Deck! Morgen früh, wenn Gott will, wirst du wieder geweckt. Guten Abend, gute Nacht, von Englein bewacht, die zeigen im Traum dir Christkindleins Baum. Schlaf nun selig und süß, schau im Traum ‘s Paradies.	Good evening, good night, With roses covered, With cloves adorned, Slip under the covers. Tomorrow morning, if God wills, you will wake once again. Good evening, good night. By angels watched, Who show you in your dream the Christ-child’s tree. Sleep now blissfully and sweetly, see the paradise in your dream.	Lullaby and good night, With roses bedight, With lilies o’er spread Is baby’s wee bed. Lay thee down now and rest, May thy slumber be blessed. Lullaby and good night, Thy mother’s delight, Bright angels beside My darling abide. They will guard thee at rest, Thou shalt wake on my breast.

There’s a fair amount of interesting trivia about Brahms’ cradle song, but the one I’ll leave you with is the source of some of the text.  It’s a collection of German folk poetry called The Boy’s Magic Horn.  It was collected in the nineteenth century, largely under the nationalistic furor that was sweeping through so many European cultures.  Lots of musicians found inspiration and interesting texts to set in that collection, most notably Gustav Mahler, who used some of the poems, in both original and adapted versions, as texts for his own early songs.  Mahler, then, joined Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms in carrying on the legacy of the German lied, and would be succeeded himself by the songwriting of Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss, who were both writing lied from a much more Wagnerian point of view.  

While everyone knows symphonies, the lieder have long been at work, behind the scenes, probing the intimate depths of the Germanic soul in ways the extroverted orchestration of the symphony simply was simply unable touch.

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