“[…] As long as the first book has not been written yet, we own that freedom to begin that we can only experiment once in a lifetime; the first book defines you, while you are actually still far to be defined […]”
Italo Calvino,
from the Preface to The Path to the Nest of Spiders
Are not the paths that we follow, the thoughts that occur to us and the footprints of people we meet in our life just crossroads? Itineraries that sometimes might be surprising and unexpected, which throw us into far away places that we never expected to visit and which, thanks to Music – the highest Master of unpredictability – we can caress in an instant.
So, we can let ancient masterpieces, whose correspondence never touched each other before, resound in a tiny and bare church with a rich halo.
Crossing roads comes from an individual and musical journey inspired by multidisciplinary and intimate factors and came to the world during a hot summer, together with the salty sound of the sea and all the uncertanties that muddled my mood.
Thus a young nineteenth-century composer, called Clara Wieck-Schumann, inspired by the Italian Bel canto of V. Bellini and the personality of the fellow countryman, A. Von Henselt, can encounter the music of T. Döhler, a German composer who lived in Tuscany and who decided to pay homage to Henselt himself.
Lucrezia Liberati © 2024
Adolph Henselt is, in a manner of speaking, the pivotal figure around which all pieces of this Da Vinci Classics album revolve. He composed one of the works recorded here, and the other two are dedicated to him. It is therefore from him and his personality that our survey will begin.
Born in Schwabach, he remained there for just a few years; when he was only three, his family moved to Munich, and, at that same time, Adolph began displaying the first signs of musical talent. He was encouraged to play the violin; two years later he started playing the piano, which would, with time, become his favourite instrument. His teacher was acquainted with the King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, who provided the boy with a bursary: this permitted him to study under the guidance of Hummel, the chapel master of the Weimar Court. Henselt remained in Weimar for a mere six months, but, when they had elapsed, he demonstrated his by now acquired mastery of piano playing with a highly acclaimed concert (Nov. 29th, 1832). Notwithstanding this, Henselt felt the need for further education, and he undertook a period of studies in Vienna, with Simon Sechter. It was during that period that Henselt developed a unique system of his own for achieving unheard-of results in term of stretching his hands to play extremely large chords. The fact that he was, by then, able to perform them unaided by the pedal permitted him to preserve a great purity of sound, particularly in the case of contrapuntal textures.
His career as a piano soloist seemed, therefore, unstoppable; however, sadly, Henselt had many problems in mastering stage fright, and the stress of public playing led him to a nervous breakdown. He did recover from this, eventually, but he was never particularly fond of performing publicly. That sad incident, however, was not without his positive aspects, at least in Henselt’s eyes. He was advised to spend some time in the famous spa city of Carlsbad (1836), where – as was usual with thermal centres – many people of high social standing were also staying. He met there the fascinating wife of a court physician, Rosalie Vogel; he fell in love with her, and eventually Rosalie divorced her husband and married the pianist (in October 1837 in a Silesian city, now in the territory of Poland).
In Carlsbad, he also met another woman who was to be influential in his life, i.e. the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, one of the Tsar’s daughters. She was also an accomplished pianist who had studied, just as Henselt, with Hummel, and she helped Henselt to get a foothold in Russia. After some extremely successful concerts in St Petersburg (where Henselt played his two sets of twelve Etudes each, i.e. op. 2 and op. 5), the pianist was invited to stay there, becoming the Tsar’s court pianist and the founder of the legendary Russian piano school.
The term “Etudes de salon” by which Henselt’s second set is indicated points to their hybrid nature: not only as technical exercises, but rather as pieces intended for the cultivated and wealthy category of the aristocratic amateurs and connoisseurs, as well as of the higher layers of the rich bourgeoisie. These are works which should entertain, amuse, please, and move; their titles are intended as interpretive keys, suggesting the mood and/or the narrative involved. In Henselt’s earlier set of Etudes, each piece bore a motto (in French, and this made Schumann raise his brow, since he found the pieces distinctly “German”); here, titles in German and in Italian suggest an approach more inclined to narrativity than to poetry, to impressions from the outside world rather than to expressions of the inner self.
Issued as two volumes of six Etudes each and printed by Breitkopf in 1838, the set opens with a homage to Beethoven (“Eroica”) and to Schubert (whose Lied Die Krähe from Winterreise is veiledly alluded to). After a thoughtful beginning, it unfolds powerfully and thunderously.
The second Etude, on the technique of arpeggios played with stretched hand, is somewhat reminiscent of the opening Etude of Chopin’s op. 10, but it is also an anticipation of much that the Russian school would learn from Henselt himself.
No. 3 is a Witches’ Dance, whereby the hectic and frantic atmosphere of an infernal tourbillon is evoked by a whirlwind of notes; Henselt masterfully manages the piano’s technical possibilities in order to fill the texture with as dense a writing as possible.
Under many viewpoints, this Etude and the next one, no. 4, are at the antipodes: hell and heaven, unchained dancing and pure prayer, nightmare and enchantment. No. 4, in fact, is a contemplative piece based on the Catholic prayer of the Ave Maria. It is slightly suggestive of Chopin’s op. 10 no. 3, and its technical difficulty is found in the large intervals and in the legato writing.
Nostalgia for a lost home or homeland is expressed by the chordal writing of no. 5, whose passages in octaves are both challenging and brilliant. Another prayer is found in no. 6, which is an anthem of thanksgiving after escaping a storm. The chorale symbolizing the hymn is juxtaposed to, and integrated with, the rapid passageworks which depict the tempest.
And no. 7 is yet another dance of fantastic creatures, in this case Elves – rehearsing a trope much beloved by the Romantics. Its extremely demanding writing makes it a prototype of Henselt’s virtuosity. In turn, no. 8 presents once again the four-part writing which displays Henselt’s mastery of counterpoint, in a chorus-like refrain which weaves itself throughout the Etude’s length.
No. 9 is characterized by a cascade of notes played rapidly by both hands, while the following Etude, no. 10, is written in broken chords and arpeggios and suggests the nostalgia and regret felt by someone whose happiness is lost. It shows Henselt’s brilliant imagination of new technical patterns, building up over already-known schemes, but infusing a novel creativity within them.
The penultimate Etude looks back to another of Henselt’s pieces, found in op. 2 (no. 4); in both cases the main subject is polyphony, a field in which he excelled both as a pianist and as a composer. The final Etude is yet another homage to the Romantic love for fantasy and the supernatural. Here, a “Nightly ghost-ride” is depicted, with a combination of different techniques among which that of broken chords features prominently.
An ample array of technical challenges is also found in the Variations written by a teenager Clara Wieck (who was not yet Mrs Schumann, although she and Robert had been in love with each other for a long time). Dedicated to Henselt and issued in 1837, this work typifies the genre of the set of brilliant variations on operatic themes: a genre much beloved in the nineteenth century, and somewhat frowned upon by critics of more recent times. It should be pointed out, however, that sheer virtuosity as that found here was not conceived merely as a display of mechanical proficiency and agility; virtuosity and virtuousness were considered as deeply related, and the capability to master difficulty was seen as a sign of transcendence, of otherworldly beauty. In 1832, i.e. six years before the creation of these Variations, Clara had visited Paris for the first time, and had heard one of the French premieres of Bellini’s opera Il pirata. When she issued the composition, the only review it got (by Maurice Bourges) remarked that her choice of a musical theme for her variations was not original. He wrote that she had been “rather bold in taking a theme so well worn, so exhausted by the embraces of so many composers” (!), but that she had succeeded, “through the elegance of the details, to rejuvenate the old age of a frame so often refilled”. Among the others who had taken the famous cavatina as their theme were Herz (in 1832) and Kalkbrenner (1829). The critic Bourges praised highly the result of Clara’s labours, stating that they were “truly worthy of being heard and enjoyed by an audience of music lovers. Beneath the notes before our eyes there are, we sense, many hidden bravos and the seeds of many ovations”. Several technical solutions devised by Henselt recur here, for instance in the performance of the melody in octaves, while playing arpeggios divided between the two hands. Typically Henselt’s is also the idea of intertwining the melody with its ornamentation, so that decoration and tune form a unity. There is, however, much more to these variations than utter virtuosity; Clara was also renowned for her beautiful sound and she managed to highlight it in the cantabile passages, in the opening introduction, and in the legato cantabile passages. She also shows her command of counterpoint in the fascinating polyphonic passages.
This album is completed by a Nocturne based on a melody by Mikhail Glinka, the first important composer in the “classical” Russian tradition (i.e. outside church music and folk music). Döhler, of German descent, was born in Italy where he would also die; his father had been a preceptor to a Bourbon prince in Lucca. The Duke who employed him was interested in his son’s music studies, and would later send the youth to Vienna where he studied with Carl Czerny and Simon Sechter (Henselt’s teacher). Döhler quickly attracted the Viennese public’s interest and began a flashy career as a virtuoso. In the following years, he would play all over Europe, befriending and playing with other great musicians such as pianists Moscheles and Liszt, violinists Bazzini and Sivori and cellist Piatti.
During a Russian tour (St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Peterhof) he got acquainted with a Princess, with whom he fell in love; of course, she would never marry a commoner, and therefore Döhler’s patron, the Duke of Lucca, was able to obtain a patent of nobility for him. With a wife and a title of Baron, Döhler returned to Italy, and, after a while, he decided to relinquish his tours as a virtuoso and to focus on composition. Among his other endeavours, he wrote an opera by the title of Tancreda, which sadly did not get performances during its composer’s life. From 1847 to his death, in 1856, Döhler’s health deteriorated, in spite of his attempts to get better at various spas.
The Nocturne recorded here belongs in a series of three Russian melodies: its tune comes from Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, the second is based on a very famous song by Alyabyev, The Nightingale, and the third is a “Romance variée” by Wielhorski. The piece’s slow, enchanted beginning in the fashion of the Nocturnes by Field of Chopin soon gives way to a sequence of technical challenges, which decorate the piece with a full palette of virtuoso ideas.
Together, the pieces of these three composers provide us with an insight on their world, where dazzling virtuosity cohabited with touching inspiration and profound poetry.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2024