Mendelssohn, Webern, Janáček: Eternal Beauty

Description

The recording project Eternal Beauty is the consequence of a musical elaboration and reflection on the theme of love, analyzed and discussed in the spheres of remembrance, idyll, and torment.
This programme does not focus on a well-defined temporal field, but rather presents the musical realization of three stories elaborated between nineteenth and twentieth century.
In spite of their different origins, all compositions share a powerful emotional impact, and the almost obsessive alternation between contrasting colours and feelings, which are typical for humankind, leading the listener from a state of frailness and impotence to a series of openings to light and hope.

“They played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata,” he continued. “Do you know the first presto? You do?” he cried. “Ugh! Ugh! It is a terrible thing, that sonata. And especially that part. And in general music is a dreadful thing! What is it? I don’t understand it. What is music? What does it do? And why does it do what it does? They say music exalts the soul. Nonsense, it is not true! It has an effect, and awful effect — I am speaking of myself — but not of an exalting kind. It has neither an exalting nor a debasing effect but it produces agitation. How can I put it? Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do”.
Janáček’s first string quartet, Kreutzer-Sonata, is a shining example of how a six-note fragment can represent a thread leading the listener throughout a piece. It is a motif leading the external ear without the risk of losing itself in the continuing changes of mood and in the stories of life, transformed into music by the protagonist of Tolstoy’s novel. The occasionally obsessive and spasmodic alternance between rhythmically contrasting elements and sound landscapes helps us to understand, firsthand, the most powerful emotions of human existence, which may be at times shady and irrational: love, obsession, fear, rage, dignity, shame and many others.
The instruments’ sound, at times dry and sour, or warm and sweet, is always in function of the emotion and of the text.
The scoring adopted by Janáček does not build the score on the classical processes of thematic elaboration, but rather on the repetition (continually varied, enriched, intertwined among the instruments) of an aphoristic and fragmentary melodic material, with a folklike character.
In the Con moto. Vivace. Andante, there is a quote from the theme of the second movement of Beethoven’s violin and piano Kreutzer Sonata. In Janáček, just as in Beethoven, the theme is entrusted to the violin, but it is contrasted by the frenzied “sul ponticello (on the bridge)” by the second violin and viola. It is a distorted, repeated motif, suggesting the story’s protagonist’s torment and jealousy, shortly before his killing of his wife.
This quartet is difficult to understand; all forms of superficial and distracted listening to it are made impossible and hardly enjoyable.

“To walk like this forever among the flowers, with my beloved beside me, to feel myself so utterly at one with the Universe, without a care, as free as a lark in the sky above – Oh, what splendor… WHen night fell (after the rain), the sky cried with bitter tears, but I walked with her on a path […] and a single cloak covered us both. Our love filled the air. We were two drunken souls”.
Langsamer Satz (“Slow Movement”) by Webern is unique in the Austrian musician’s large output in being a late-Romantic pearl, influenced by the music and the symphonic style of Brahms and Mahler.
Its long melodic lines are sustained by a clear tonality, by subtle and never vulgar sounds, even in the most passionate sections.
It is a declaration of love, whereby the four instruments’ voices blend with each other and fulfill it, giving light to a sound spectrum which is full and warm, and occasionally tender and reassuring.
A particular feature of this piece is certainly the respect and attention given to the principal theme by the composer; it is entrusted, in order, to all four instruments ,with different dynamics and accompaniments.
The sound is frequently altered by the use of effects such as tremolo (in the arpeggio passed from one voice to another after the fortissimo unison at the end of the first section), “con sordina” and pizzicato (accompaniments by the second violin in the central section, where cello and viola propose the theme in pianissimo, as if in a sottovoce memory).
Langsamer Satz is at times labelled as detached and unripe, with respect to Webern’s later output, but, if it is carefully analyzed, nothing in it is left to chance; indications are clear and detailed, from rubatos to the continuing tempo changes and modifications in intention.
Webern’s slow movement can be intended as the consequence of a world in a continuing state of ebullition, at the end of an epoch and at its rebirth from those ashes.

“I had never told her how much I loved her.
She was my sister.
We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always unnecessary.
I thought about waking her.
But it was unnecessary.
There would be other nights.
And how can you say I love you to someone you love?
I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her”
Mendelssohn’s Quartet no. 6 is a work in memory of his beloved sister Fanny, who died prematurely in May 1847. That pain is never relaxed or hidden throughout the work, which rather becomes the explicit expression of a creative impetus which is entirely new and unusual for Mendelssohn.
The main key of F minor, the tremolos punctuated by two fp by the cello and viola, and the violins’ initial hairpins suffice in order to classify Mendelssohn’s op. 80 as one of the most dramatic Quartets written in the nineteenth century.
The syncopations and the continuing changes in dynamics, accent and intensity – Schubert-like – characterize the three external movements and give the continuing feeling of pain and rejection with respect to the recent mourning, of inquietude, of the cool desperation for a tomorrow with no light.
A note of hope is found in the third movement, a lyrical and melancholic Adagio representing a sign of acceptance of the most intimate and tender memory, which is, however, broken by the sudden and agitated beginning of the Finale.
This movement, an Allegro Molto, maintains a continuing tension with exchanges, fragments of semiquavers intertwined among the parts, accents, syncopations, chromaticisms, and hairpins indicating an uncontrolled, frenzied and delirious music. The central cantabile theme’s incipit is submerged by a continuing movement of the voices, at times wavy. The climax and the run of homorhythmic triplets almost seems an unavoidable and desperate finale, like a cry toward heaven.