Ries, Zemplinsky, Rota: Clarinet Trios

This Da Vinci Classics album collects three Clarinet Trios by three musicians who would deserve greater recognition and a more widespread appreciation. Indeed, the little that the average music-lover knows about them is frequently something rather tangential with respect to their life, personality, and works. For instance, Ries is best known as Beethoven’s pupil and first biographer; Zemlinsky, as the brother-in-law of Arnold Schönberg; Rota, as the composer of the music for Federico Fellini’s movies.
Of course, these elements are foundational for understanding the three protagonists of this recording. Ries was an affectionate pupil of Beethoven, and, as we will see, his own style is clearly and explicitly indebted to that of his teacher. Zemlinsky was in dialogue with the tormented musical and spiritual search enacted by the composers of the Second Vienna School, and his own music responds, in a personal fashion, to the challenges posed by the radical avant-garde of his time. Rota is more than simply a composer of film music, and yet the importance of his career as a composer of film scores must not be downplayed.
In fact, the red thread which can be found in the works of all three composers is the challenge of language, of its evolution (or involution?), and of how “the medium is the content”, of how language expresses content by its very form.
All three composers lived at times when political and philosophical turmoil was the rule. Ries lived between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, when Romanticism was blossoming, but was also shattering the certainties of the previous eras. The genius of Beethoven was dismantling the elegance, refinedness, and balance typical for the Classical style; and building, on the ruins of that porcelain world, the triumph of the self and of its expression which would characterize Romanticism.
Zemlinsky lived almost exactly a century later. During his lifetime, he could see the last splendours of Imperial Vienna, its inexorable decline, the loss of many values on which the previous generations had built their beliefs, the tragedy of World War I and the affirmation of Nazism in Germany. After the Anschluss, what remained of his beloved Austria was a place where he, as a Jew, could no longer live, and, before the onset of World War II, he left Europe, dying during the war in the US.
Rota saw World War I as a child, and World War II as a young man. The war’s aftermath deeply undermined the human beings’ faith in life, in beauty, in the existence of an order or a purpose to life. If human beings had been capable of causing the inferno of the two wars and of the Holocaust, what hope could survive? The answer of many of Rota’s contemporaries was an explicit rejection of all values and beliefs. Art either carried a message of despair, transmitted through the adoption of purposefully dissonant and “unpleasing” styles, or mocked all established conventions, claiming a nihilism which had become a religion itself.
Now, history is written by the winners, and this is a platitude. But this applies also to the bloodless “wars” of artistic aesthetics. The history of the arts is frequently seen as the struggle among conflicting aesthetical principles, and those who win the day tend to disparage those whose views seem to “lose”. But there is much more to art than this. No language dies when another is born. Both can coexist, and beautiful, meaningful things may be said in both.
Ferdinand Ries’ language demonstrates many aspects typical for the Classicist language: lightness, balance, elegance. Alexander Zemlinsky could not accept the destruction of tonality preached and practised by his brother-in-law, let alone adhere to the serialism proposed by Schoenberg. Nino Rota, who came at an even later date than Zemlinsky, was similarly against serialism, as well as against the harsh and “unsympathetic” experiments of the avant-gardes. All three composers sought a way to communicate with their audience, and they found it not in experimentalism for experimentalism’s sake, but rather in a shared musical ground whereby both composer and audience could understand the principles behind the language, and therefore the meaning expressed by it.
Ries was born in Bonn; his father had been Beethoven’s teacher, and Ferdinand followed in Beethoven’s footsteps, moving to Vienna to complete his musical education. He could already play the violin, the piano, and the cello; he had been taught the former two instruments by his father, and the cello by Bernhard Romberg. He studied with Beethoven and with another of Beethoven’s teachers, Albrechtsberger (who belonged in the circle of Johann Sebastian Bach’s devotees), and then became Beethoven’s right hand and his assistant. He later moved to London, marrying and English woman, an then went back to the Continent, finally settling in Frankfurt where he would die in 1838. This Clarinet Trio was written when the composer was approximately 25, and therefore represents a significant example of his early maturity. This work in four movements reflects Beethoven’s influence, for instance in the opening movement, with its brilliant openness and singing themes, perhaps reminiscent of Beethoven’s op. 11. The closest model, however, is clearly Beethoven’s Clarinet Trio op. 38, written a few years before Ries’. By way of contrast, the Scherzo is not yet a “Beethovenian” Scherzo: it does show the briskness and energy of Beethoven’s Scherzos, but still retains something of the Minuet’s elegance and composure. The slow movement, an Adagio, is full of lyricism: both in its melodic lines and in its refined ornamentation it is reminiscent of the vocal style and of coeval opera. The concluding Rondo is pleasant and pleasurable, with a playful style and a joyful serenity, thanks to its beautiful tunes and masterful handling of the form. This Trio was originally conceived for clarinet, cello, and piano, but, since the clarinet was not yet a very widespread instrument, the publisher asked Ries to adapt it also as a “traditional” piano Trio, with violin, cello, and piano, and so the work is playable in both versions.
In the case of Zemlinsky’s Trio, instead, the opposite transformation is observed. His D-minor Trio op. 3 was written in 1896 – thus Zemlinsky was approximately the same age as Ries when he had written his own clarinet trio. In Zemlinsky’s case, the stimulus for the work’s completion came from a competition promoted by the Vienna Tonkünstlerverein. Probably, the competition had been prompted by Johannes Brahms, who presided the Society at the time: his hand can be observed in the requirement that the chamber music works presented at the competition include at least one wind instrument. Brahms was particularly fond of the clarinet and of its sound. In order to be able to participate in the competition, Zemlinsky probably transformed a draft for a “traditional” piano trio (i.e. piano, violin, and cello) into a trio for piano, clarinet, and cello. His work obtained the third prize, and was recommended by Brahms to publisher Simrock for publication. Earlier on, Brahms had already admired the talent of Zemlinsky, but had been perplexed by some features of the budding composer’s personality. In this case, Zemlinsky evidently sought a more palatable style, which did not fail to impress the jury. If Ries’ Trio is clearly inspired by Beethoven’s, Zemlinsky’s is clearly inspired by Brahms’ op. 114. Other influences of the Hamburg composer regard, for instance, the use of micro formulae and their thorough development and combination. The first movement is very refined in its elaborate treatment of an abundant polyphony and of a rich contrapuntal texture; thematic conflict is reduced to a minimum, and the breadth of the lines is clearly intended. Similar to Ries’ Trio, here too the slow movement is opened by a long piano solo. At its core lies a contrasting, more animated and lively section. In the finale, the melodic ideas found in the first movement are transformed into the material for a rondo; here the opposition of light and darkness is more pronounced, but the eventual denouement is granted by the cyclic principle underlying the work.
If both Ries’ and Zemlinsky’s Trios were written by composers just entering manhood, Rota’s is one of the late works of its composer, who would die six years after its composition. Rota was particularly fond of the clarinet’s sound, and employed it frequently in his works. The first movement opens brilliantly and harshly at the same time, profusely employing f staccatos and chromatic elements; the second theme provides some lyrical respite and calms slightly the piece’s intense texture. In this case, the slow movement sees the clarinet and cello as its true protagonists, whilst the piano limits itself to the role of an accompanist; the high expressive potential of these two instruments is abundantly employed by the composer. Fellinesque atmospheres populate the third movement, Allegrissimo, which seems to evoke the circuses so frequently depicted by the Italian maestro of filmography. It is a witty movement, full of humour and of unexpected (and yet very much expected) surprises, closing with a smile our musical itinerary.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2022