Kennedy Center Chamber Players: Fall Concert

Terrace Theater

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Program

Dayna Hepler, violin

Ricardo Cyncynates, violin

David Hardy, cello

Lambert Orkis, piano

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756 - 1791)

Piano Trio No. 4 in E major, K. 542

Allegro
Andante grazioso
Allegro

Dayna Hepler, violin
David Hardy, cello
Lambert Orkis, piano

Clara Schumann
(1819 - 1896)

Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17

Allegro moderato
Scherzo. Tempo di menuetto
Andante
Allegretto

Dayna Hepler, violin
David Hardy, cello
Lambert Orkis, piano

Intermission

César Auguste Franck
(1822 - 1890)

Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano, M.8

Allegretto ben moderato
Allegro
Recitativo - Fantasia
Allegretto poco mosso

Ricardo Cyncynates, violin
Lambert Orkis, piano

Meet the Artists

Program Notes

Piano Trio No. 4 in E major, K. 542 (1788)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg.
Died December 5, 1791 in Vienna.

Don Giovanni took Prague by storm when Mozart premiered it there on October 29, 1787. Though there were persistent calls for him to take up residence there, Mozart chose instead to return to Vienna so that Constanze could be near her family for the birth of their next child; Theresia Constanzia Adelheid Friederike Maria Anna, the couple’s only daughter and the apparent bearer of every significant family female name, was born in Vienna on December 12th. Those happy events, however, did little to alleviate the financial distress in which Mozart was increasingly mired in 1788. Given to modish clothes and extravagant entertaining, he was a spendthrift, and his income from concerts, publications and students during the preceding months, when the taste of the fickle Viennese public had drifted toward easier pleasures than his music of that time could provide, had fallen off precipitously. He pinned his hopes for some monetary relief on the local premiere of Don Giovanni, but Vienna received the opera listlessly when it was unveiled at the Burgtheater on May 7, 1788.

It was at that low point in Mozart’s fortunes, however, that one of music’s greatest miracles occurred. During that summer of 1788, in the space of only six weeks, he composed the three greatest symphonies of his life: No. 39, in E-flat (K. 543) was finished on June 26th, the G minor (No. 40, K. 550) on July 25th, and the C major, “Jupiter” (No. 41, K. 551) on August 10th. He prefaced that astounding achievement with his greatest work in the genre of the piano trio, and, surprisingly, one of his most halcyon creations — the Trio in E major (K. 542), completed on June 22nd, just four days before the E-flat Symphony was finished.

“For the E major Trio,” wrote A. Hyatt King in his survey of Mozart’s chamber music, “the prevailing mood seems to be one of vernal happiness. But the radiance is shot through with a sadness.” It is just such balancing of emotions that marks the greatest music of Mozart’s maturity. The opening Allegro is based on two exquisite themes that are invested with surprising depths of feeling as the movement’s sonata form unfolds. The elegant second movement — “poetic and pastoral, like a painting by Watteau,” according to Alfred Einstein — is a hybrid variations-sonata structure grown from a folk-like theme. Some tasteful episodes of piano and violin virtuosity are woven into the sun-bright sonata-rondo movement that closes this enchanting Trio.

Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17 (1846)

Clara Schumann
Born September 13, 1819 in Leipzig.
Died May 20, 1896 in Frankfurt.

Goethe called her “a noble phenomenon”; Franz Grillparzer, Austria’s greatest poet and a sensitive musician, was inspired to write a poem titled When She Played Beethoven’s F minor Sonata; the prestigious journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (“New Journal for Music”) ranked her as the third greatest pianist of the day, behind only Franz Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg. The object of these encomia was a teenage girl from Leipzig, a dazzling Wunderkind who possessed not only flawless keyboard technique but also extraordinary artistic sensitivity and unswerving dedication to the most elevated principles of the musical art — Clara Wieck. Clara’s father, Friedrich, a noted teacher of piano and voice, operator of a music-lending library and a piano store, and a former preacher, vowed even before the girl was born that he would develop her into a consummate artist, and he showed considerable restraint by not beginning her lessons until she was five. His instruction fell upon a fertile talent — Clara made her public debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on October 20, 1828 (she was nine-and-quarter years old), gave her first complete recital two years later, and made her debut international tour the following season. By 1835, she was acclaimed throughout Europe as a child prodigy.

In 1829, the nineteen-year-old Robert Schumann met Friedrich Wieck, and he was accepted by the pedagogue as a student; the following year, Robert moved into the Wieck household. He was at first amused by his teacher’s gifted daughter, but over the course of the following years, the couple’s relationship developed into true love (“Clara grows more charming, inwardly, outwardly, every day, every hour,” Robert wrote in 1835) and became one of the great romances of the 19th century. That story — Papa Wieck’s nearly irrational resistance to the union, the lovers’ court battle to receive legal permission to marry, their passionate devotion to each other during their sixteen years of wedded life, Robert’s mental collapse and untimely death in 1856 — is well-known and carefully chronicled. Clara put her domestic duties before her professional ambitions during those years (she gave birth to eight children between 1841 and 1854), concertizing only occasionally and composing just a piano trio and a handful of songs and solo piano pieces, including her Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann in 1853. Following her husband’s death in 1856, she resumed touring and teaching, but never composed again.

Clara’s Piano Trio in G minor, her only chamber work other than the Three Romances for Violin and Piano of 1853, dates from the summer of 1846, a stressful time in her life with Robert, who was then increasingly nervous, depressed, sleepless and suffering from unfounded fears and lapses of memory now thought to have been brought on by a standard 19th-century treatment of liquid mercury for a case of syphilis he had contracted long before their marriage. The piece was finished by September, just before their sixth wedding anniversary, and given a tryout at home on October 2, 1846. She played the Trio privately several times during the following years and finally gave its formal public premiere in Vienna on March 8, 1860, four years after Robert had died.

Clara seems to have distilled some of the melancholy of the time of its creation into her Piano Trio, though she drew from her feelings something gentle and wistful rather than brooding and tragic. The graceful main theme establishes the work’s lyrical character; the second theme is a quiet, chordal strain begun in the keyboard. The development section is built largely on the main theme. A full recapitulation of the exposition’s materials and a vigorous coda round out the movement. The outer sections of the Scherzo are occupied by a delightful dance tune for the violin; the leisurely central trio is led by the piano. The Andante is a lovely Romanza balanced by a more agitated central episode. The sonata-form finale takes a chromatically inflected motive as its main theme and a rising melody in a brighter key for its subsidiary subject. The development section includes some imitative passages derived from the main theme that demonstrate Clara’s skill in fugue. The Trio closes with a reprise of the earlier themes and a coda based on the opening motive.

Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano, M.8 (1886)

César Franck
Born December 10, 1822 in Liège, Belgium.
Died November 8, 1890 in Paris.

Franck first considered writing a violin sonata in 1859, when he offered to compose such a piece for Cosima von Bülow (née Liszt, later Wagner) in appreciation for some kind things she had said about his vocal music. He was, however, just then thoroughly absorbed with his new position as organist at Ste.-Clotilde and unable to compose anything that year except a short organ piece and a hymn. (His application to his duties had its reward — he occupied the prestigious post at Ste.-Clotilde until his death 31 years later.) No evidence of any work on the proposed sonata for Cosima has ever come to light, and it was not until twenty years later that he first entered the realm of chamber music with his Piano Quintet of 1879. Franck’s next foray into the chamber genres came seven years after the Quintet with his Sonata for Violin and Piano, which was composed as a wedding gift for his friend and Belgian compatriot, the dazzling virtuoso Eugene Ysaÿe, who had been living in Paris since 1883 and befriending most of the leading French musicians; Ysaÿe first played the piece privately at the marriage ceremony on September 28, 1886. The formal premiere was given by Ysaÿe and pianist Léontine Bordes-Pène at the Musée moderne de peinture in Brussels on December 16, 1886.

The Sonata opens in a mood of twilit tenderness with a main theme built largely from rising and falling thirds, an intervallic germ from which later thematic material is derived. The piano alone plays the second theme, a broad melody given above an arpeggiated accompaniment. The movement’s short central section, hardly a true development at all, consists only of a modified version of the main theme played in dialogue between violin and piano. The recapitulation of the principal and secondary subjects (dolcissima ... semper dolcissima ... molto dolcissima — “sweetly ... always sweetly ... very sweetly,” instructs the score) rounds out the form of the movement. The quick-tempo second movement fulfills the function of a scherzo, though its music is more in the nature of an impetuous intermezzo. Two strains alternate to produce the movement’s form: one (“scherzo”) is anxious and unsettled; the other (“trio”) is subdued and rhapsodic. The third movement (Recitativo — Fantasia) begins with a cyclical reference to the third-based germ motive that opened the Sonata. The violin’s long winding line in the Recitativo section is succeeded by the Grecian purity of the following Fantasia. The main theme of the finale is so richly lyrical that its rigorous treatment as a precise canon at the octave is charming rather than pedantic. When the piano and violin do eventually take off on their own paths, it is so that the keyboard may recall the chaste melody of the preceding Fantasia. Other reminiscences are woven into the movement — a hint of the third-based germ motive in one episode, another phrase from the Fantasia — which unfolds as a free rondo around the reiterations of its main theme. The Sonata is brought to a stirring climax by a grand motive that strides across the closing measures in heroic step-wise motion.

All events and artists subject to change without prior notice.

Staff

Staff for the Terrace Theater

Theater Manager Xiomara Mercado*

Head Usher Randy Howes

Production Manager Kate Roberts

Master Technicians Richard Haase and Susan Kelleher

Box Office Treasurer Ron Payne

*Represented by ATPAM, the Association of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers.

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The box office at the Kennedy Center is represented by I.A.T.S.E, Local #868.

Steinway Piano Gallery is the exclusive area representative of Steinway & Sons and Boston pianos, the official pianos of the Kennedy Center.

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The technicians at the Kennedy Center are represented by Local #22, Local #772, and Local #798 I.A.T.S.E., AFL-CIO-CLC, the professional union of theatrical technicians.