1895-1949 Miscellanous Chamber Music

Question 0

Name 3 American piano trio composers ca.1895-1949.

Answer 0

• Charles Ives: Piano Trio (1904–11)
• Leonard Bernstein: Piano Trio (1937)
• Amy Beach: 1 piano trio (1938)

Question 1

Aside from Shostakovich, name 3 composers of piano quintets ca.1895-1949.

Answer 1

Béla Bartók: Piano Quintet (1904)

Edward Elgar: Piano Quintet in a, Op.84 (1918)

Gabriel Fauré
Piano Quintet No. 1 in d Op.89 (1905)
Piano Quintet No. 2 in c, Op.115 (1921)

Question 2

Name 2 Russian piano trio composers ca.1895-1949.

Answer 2

Anton Arensky: 2 piano trios (1894, 1905)
Dmitri Shostakovich: 2 piano trios.
- Piano Trio No.1 in c, Op.8 (1923)
- Piano Trio No.2 in e, Op.67 (1944)

Question 3

Name 2 French piano trio composers ca.1895-1949.

Answer 3

Maurice Ravel: Piano Trio in a (1914)

Gabriel Fauré: Piano Trio in d, Op. 120 (1923)

Question 4

Name 6 miscellaneous chamber works ca.1895-1949.

Answer 4

1. Arnold Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht (or Transfigured Night), Op. 4 (1899)
2. Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire for flute (doubling on a piccolo), clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), violin (doubling on viola), cello, and piano, Op. 21 (1912)
3. Maurice Ravel: Piano Trio in a (1914)
4. Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in g, Op.57 (1940)
5. Olivier Messiaen: Quatour pour la fin du temps for Piano, Clarinet, Violin, and Cello (1941)
6. Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Trio No.2 in e, Op.67 (1944)

Question 5

Name 2 German string trio composers ca.1895-1949.

Answer 5

Paul Hindemith: 2 string trios (1924, 1933)
Anton Webern
- Satz for String Trio, Op. Posth. (1925)
- String Trio (1926-7): his first instrumental work using the twelve tone technique

Question 6

Name 2 duos for violin and cello ca.1895-1949.

Answer 6

Zoltán Kodály: Duo for Violin and Cello, Op.7 (1914)

Maurice Ravel: Sonata for violin and cello (1920-2)

Question 7

Name 1 Swiss piano trio composer ca.1895-1949.

Answer 7

Ernest Bloch: Three Nocturnes (1924), Piano Trio (1925)

Question 8

Name 1 Hungarian string trio composer ca.1895-1949.

Answer 8

Ernő Dohnányi: Serenade in C major for string trio, Op. 10 (1902)

Question 9

Piece: Ravel Piano Trio.

Answer 9

Maurice Ravel: Piano Trio in a (1914)

• Cellist Louis Feuillard premiered this piece.
• He liberally employed coloristic effects such as trills, tremolos, harmonics, glissandos, and arpeggios, thus demanding a high level of technical proficiency from all three musicians.
• Ravel was aware of how to achieve balance between the three instrumental voices – in particular, how to make that of the cello stand out from the others, which are more easily heard. To achieve clarity in texture and to secure instrumental balance, Ravel frequently spaced the violin and cello lines two octaves apart, with the right hand of the piano playing between them.
• The Trio follows the standard format for a four-movement classical work, with the outer movements in sonata form flanking a scherzo and trio and a slow movement.
• 1. Modéré: The movement is notated in 8/8 time, each bar being subdivided into a 3+2+3 rhythmic pattern. To avoid overuse of the tonic key, Ravel ends the movement in the relative key of C major. In the recapitulation, the appearance of the main theme in the piano is superimposed over a rhythmically modified version of the second theme in the strings.
• 2. Pantoum. Assez vif: This movement is based on a traditional scherzo and trio A-B-A form. The scherzo presents two themes: the piano opens with the spiky first theme in A minor, while the strings respond in double octaves with the smoother second theme in F-sharp minor. The F-major melody of the trio is in a completely different metre (4/2) from the scherzo (3/4). When the piano introduces it, the strings continue to play material derived from the scherzo in 3/4 time, and the two time signatures continue to coexist in the different parts until the return of the trio.
• 3. Passacaille. Très large: The third movement is a passacaglia based on the piano’s opening eight-bar bass line, which is derived from the first theme of the Pantoum.
• 4. Final. Animé: As in the first movement, irregular time signatures are again in use: the movement alternates between 5/4 and 7/4 time. As the most orchestral of the four movements, the Final exploits the resources of the three players to the utmost.

Question 10

Piece: Schoenberg sextet.

Answer 10

Arnold Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht (or Transfigured Night), Op. 4 (1899)

• Schoenberg’s earliest important work.
• Composed in just three weeks
• The work was inspired by Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name, along with Schoenberg’s strong feelings upon meeting Mathilde von Zemlinsky (the sister of his teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky), whom he would later marry.
• The piece is one of the earliest examples of program music written for a chamber ensemble. It comprises five sections which correspond to the structure of the poem on which it is based, with themes in each section being direct musical metaphors for the narrative and discourse found in the poem. Dehmel’s poem describes a man and a woman walking through a dark forest on a moonlit night, wherein the woman shares a dark secret with her new lover: she bears the child of another man. The stages of Dehmel’s poem are reflected throughout the composition, beginning with the sadness of the woman’s confession, a neutral interlude wherein the man reflects upon the confession, and a finale which reflects the man’s bright acceptance (and forgiveness) of the woman.
• A few examples of the programmatic elements occur around a major structural point in the piece, The acceptance (and forgiveness) by the man is portrayed by a radiant shift to D major with the first cello presenting the primary thematic material. Just before this turn of events, the woman “looks up; the moon is racing along./Her dark gaze is drowned in light.” Schoenberg portrays this scene with pppp trio of both violins and viola 1 in a very high register. “A man’s voice speaks”: the second cello enters with a low B-flat. Then suddenly it is D major. Soon after this, “There’s a glow around everything;/You are floating with me on a cold ocean, but a special warmth flickers”: False harmonics, mutes, F-sharp major, rolled pizzicato chords, and running sextuplets accompany a stratospheric violin 1 romantic melody.
• The piece derives its stylistic lineage from German late-Romanticism. Like his teacher Zemlinsky, Schoenberg was influenced by both Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner and sought to combine the former’s structural logic with the latter’s harmonic language, evidenced in the work’s rich chromaticism (deriving from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde) and frequent use of musical phrases which serve to undermine the metrical boundaries.
• The work does indeed employ a richly chromatic language and often ventures far from the home key, though the work is clearly rooted in D minor.
• A particular point of controversy was the use of a single ‘nonexistent’ (that is, uncategorized and therefore unpermitted) inverted ninth chord, which resulted in its rejection by the Vienna Music Society. Schoenberg remarked “and thus (the work) cannot be performed since one cannot perform that which does not exist”.

Question 11

Piece: Schoenberg Pierrot.

Answer 11

Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire for flute (doubling on a piccolo), clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), violin (doubling on viola), cello, and piano, Op. 21 (1912)

• A melodrama; a setting of “Three Times Seven Poems” (21 total) from Otto Erich Hartleben’s German translation of Albert Giraud’s cycle of French poems of the same name.
• The work is free atonal and does not use the twelve-tone technique that Schoenberg would devise eight years later.
• The narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style. Sprechgesang, literally “speech-singing” in German, is a style in which the vocalist uses the specified rhythms and pitches, but does not sustain the pitches, allowing them to drop or rise, in the manner of speech.
• “Pierrot Lunaire” consists of three groups of seven poems. In the first group, Pierrot sings of love, sex and religion; in the second, of violence, crime, and blasphemy; and in the third of his return home to Bergamo, with his past haunting him.
• Schoenberg, who was fascinated by numerology, also makes great use of seven-note motifs throughout the work, while the ensemble (with conductor) comprises seven people. The piece is his opus 21, contains 21 poems, and was begun on March 12, 1912. Other key numbers in the work are three and 13: each poem consists of 13 lines (two four-line verses followed by a five-line verse), while the first line of each poem occurs three times (being repeated as lines seven and 13).
• Pierrot Lunaire uses a variety of classical forms and techniques, including canon, fugue, rondo, passacaglia and free counterpoint.
• The quintet of instruments used in Pierrot Lunaire became the core ensemble for many contemporary-music ensembles of the twentieth century.
• The instrumental combinations (including doublings) vary between most movements. The entire ensemble plays together only in the 11th, 14th and final 4 settings.
• Pierrot Lunaire is a work that contains many paradoxes: the instrumentalists, for example, are soloists and an orchestra at the same time; Pierrot is both the hero and the fool, acting in a drama that is also a concert piece, performing cabaret as high art and vice versa with song that is also speech; and his is a male role sung by a woman, who shifts between the first and third persons.

Part 1

• 1. Mondestrunken (‘Moondrunk’): flute, violin, piano; later cello.
• 2. Columbine: violin, piano; later flute, clarinet.
• 3. Der Dandy (‘The Dandy’): piccolo, clarinet, piano.
• 4. Eine blasse Wäscherin (‘An Ethereal Washerwoman’): flute, clarinet, violin.
• 5. Valse de Chopin (‘Chopin Waltz’): flute, clarinet, piano; later bass clarinet.
• 6. Madonna: flute, bass clarinet, cello; later violin, piano.
• 7. Der kranke Mond (‘The Sick Moon’): flute

Part Two

• 8. Nacht (‘Night’) (Passacaglia): bass clarinet, cello, piano.
• 9. Gebet an Pierrot (‘Prayer to Pierrot’): clarinet, piano.
• 10. Raub (‘Theft’): flute, clarinet, violin, cello; later piano.
• 11. Rote Messe (‘Red Mass’): piccolo, bass clarinet, viola, cello, piano.
• 12. Galgenlied (‘Gallows Song’): viola, cello; later piccolo.
• 13. Enthauptung (‘Beheading’): bass clarinet, viola, cello, piano; later flute, clarinet.
• 14. Die Kreuze (‘The Crosses’): piano; later flute, clarinet, violin, cello.

Part Three

• 15. Heimweh (‘Homesickness’): clarinet, violin, piano; later piccolo, cello.
• 16. Gemeinheit! (‘Vulgarity’): piccolo, clarinet, viola, piano; later flute.
• 17. Parodie (‘Parody’): piccolo, clarinet, viola, piano; later flute.
• 18. Der Mondfleck (‘The Moonspot’): piccolo, clarinet, violin, cello, piano.
• 19. Serenade: cello, piano; later flute, clarinet, violin.
• 20. Heimfahrt (‘Homeward Bound’) (Barcarole): flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano.
• 21. O Alter Duft (‘O Ancient Fragrance’): flute, clarinet, violin, cello piano; later piccolo, bass clarinet, viola.

Question 12

Piece: Messiaen quartet.

Answer 12

Olivier Messiaen: Quatour pour la fin du temps for Piano, Clarinet, Violin, and Cello (1941)

• Messiaen was captured by the German army in June 1940 and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp. The quartet was premiered at the camp, outdoors and in the rain.
• Messiaen wrote in the Preface to the score that the work was inspired by text from the Book of Revelation (Rev 10:1–2, 5–7)
• The work is in eight movements.
• I. “Crystal liturgy”: The opening movement begins with the solo clarinet imitating a blackbird’s song and the violin imitating a nightingale’s song. The underlying pulse is provided by the cello and piano: the cello cycles through the same five-note melody (using the pitches C, E, D, F-sharp, and B-flat) and a repeating pattern of 15 durations. The piano part consists of a 17-note rhythmic pattern permuted strictly through 29 chords.
• II. “Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time”
• III. “Abyss of birds”
• IV. “Interlude”
• V. “Praise to the eternity of Jesus”: For cello and piano. Marked “infinitely slow”, this movement’s melody stretches majestically into a kind of gentle, regal distance. Technically difficult due to long notes in a very slow tempo (extremely slow and long bows).
• VI. “Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets”: Rhythmically, the most characteristic piece of the series. The four instruments in unison imitate gongs and trumpets. Use of added values, of augmented or diminished rhythms, of non-retrogradable rhythms. Hear especially all the terrible fortissimo of the augmentation of the theme and changes of register of its different notes, towards the end of the piece. Toward the end of the movement the theme returns, fortissimo, in augmentation and with wide changes of register. Bar lines mark phrases, and are irregular with a wide range of lengths.
• VII. “Tangle of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time”: Recurring here are certain passages from the second movement.
• VIII. “Praise to the immortality of Jesus”: Large violin solo, counterpart to the violoncello solo of the 5th movement.

Question 13

Piece: Schoenberg Pierrot.

Answer 13

Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire for flute (doubling on a piccolo), clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), violin (doubling on viola), cello, and piano, Op. 21 (1912)

• A melodrama; a setting of “Three Times Seven Poems” (21 total) from Otto Erich Hartleben’s German translation of Albert Giraud’s cycle of French poems of the same name.
• The work is free atonal and does not use the twelve-tone technique that Schoenberg would devise eight years later.
• The narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style. Sprechgesang, literally “speech-singing” in German, is a style in which the vocalist uses the specified rhythms and pitches, but does not sustain the pitches, allowing them to drop or rise, in the manner of speech.
• “Pierrot Lunaire” consists of three groups of seven poems. In the first group, Pierrot sings of love, sex and religion; in the second, a nightmare world of violence, crime, and blasphemy; and in the third of his return home to Bergamo, with his past haunting him.
• Schoenberg, who was fascinated by numerology, also makes great use of seven-note motifs throughout the work, while the ensemble (with conductor) comprises seven people. The piece is his opus 12, contains 21 poems, and was begun on March 12, 1912. Other key numbers in the work are three and 13: each poem consists of 13 lines (two four-line verses followed by a five-line verse), while the first line of each poem occurs three times (being repeated as lines 7 and 13). The performing ensemble, made up of conductor, vocalist, and five instrumentalists, totals seven members, and the seven-note Pierrot motif (G#, E, C, D, Bb, C#, G—one note for each letter in Pierrot’s name) is omnipresent throughout the music.
• Pierrot Lunaire uses a variety of classical forms and techniques, including canon, fugue, rondo, passacaglia and free counterpoint.
• The quintet of instruments used in Pierrot Lunaire became the core ensemble for many contemporary-music ensembles of the twentieth century.
• The instrumental combinations (including doublings) vary between most movements. The entire ensemble plays together only in the 11th, 14th and final 4 settings. This facilitates an amazing variety of sounds.
• Pierrot Lunaire is a work that contains many paradoxes: the instrumentalists, for example, are soloists and an orchestra at the same time; Pierrot is both the hero and the fool, acting in a drama that is also a concert piece, performing cabaret as high art and vice versa with song that is also speech; and his is a male role sung by a woman, who shifts between the first and third persons.
• Although a bundle of contradictions, Pierrot lunaire’s confusion expresses a fundamental connection made by the unconscious between feelings that are normally poles apart: desire and cruelty, pleasure and pain, ecstasy and melancholy. If such sensations invoked exultation among nineteenth-century Romantics, later artists tended to project sarcasm through the pathetic clown who mocks the poet’s image, parodies his heroics, and derides his achievements. Yet it was through the soul of the clown that irony could once again assert itself and grant the artist both self-vindication and a vision of a new spiritual abode.

Part 1

• 1. Mondestrunken (‘Moondrunk’): flute, violin, piano; later cello.
• 2. Columbine: violin, piano; later flute, clarinet.
• 3. Der Dandy (‘The Dandy’): piccolo, clarinet, piano.
• 4. Eine blasse Wäscherin (‘An Ethereal Washerwoman’): flute, clarinet, violin.
• 5. Valse de Chopin (‘Chopin Waltz’): flute, clarinet, piano; later bass clarinet.
• 6. Madonna: flute, bass clarinet, cello; later violin, piano.
• 7. Der kranke Mond (‘The Sick Moon’): flute

Part Two

• 8. Nacht (‘Night’) (Passacaglia): bass clarinet, cello, piano. “black, giant butterflies descend upon the hearts of men.”
• 9. Gebet an Pierrot (‘Prayer to Pierrot’): clarinet, piano.
• 10. Raub (‘Theft’): flute, clarinet, violin, cello; later piano.
• 11. Rote Messe (‘Red Mass’): piccolo, bass clarinet, viola, cello, piano.
• 12. Galgenlied (‘Gallows Song’): viola, cello; later piccolo.
• 13. Enthauptung (‘Beheading’): bass clarinet, viola, cello, piano; later flute, clarinet. free, non-repetitive counterpoint
• 14. Die Kreuze (‘The Crosses’): piano; later flute, clarinet, violin, cello.

Part Three

• 15. Heimweh (‘Homesickness’): clarinet, violin, piano; later piccolo, cello.
• 16. Gemeinheit! (‘Vulgarity’): piccolo, clarinet, viola, piano; later flute.
• 17. Parodie (‘Parody’): piccolo, clarinet, viola, piano; later flute.
• 18. Der Mondfleck (‘The Moonspot’): piccolo, clarinet, violin, cello, piano. A tightly controlled canon and fugue.
• 19. Serenade: cello, piano; later flute, clarinet, violin.
• 20. Heimfahrt (‘Homeward Bound’) (Barcarole): flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano.
• 21. O Alter Duft (‘O Ancient Fragrance’): flute, clarinet, violin, cello piano; later piccolo, bass clarinet, viola.

Question 14

How many piano trios did Shostakovich write? Name them.

Answer 14

Shostakovich wrote 2 piano trios.

• Piano Trio No.1 in c, Op.8 (1923)
• Piano Trio No.2 in e, Op.67 (1944)

Question 15

Piece: Shostakovich piano trio, 2.

Answer 15

Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Trio No.2 in e, Op.67 (1944)

• 1. Andante: Highly dissonant, it begins with an incredibly difficult passage in the cello, all harmonics. The rest of the movement starts with a fugue, but than develops into a sonata form, requiring incredible amounts of technical prowess from all three instruments.
• 2. Allegro con brio: A frenzied dance that never finds a settling place
• 3. Largo: Against a repeated background of piano chords, the violin and cello trade off dark, slow, and somber melodic lines. It fades into the last movement with hardly a break.
• 4. Allegretto: Staccato repeated notes begin this “Dance of Death” movement, which introduces a Jewish-style melody, and revisits the thematic content of the previous three movements. It ends in a tortured E Major chord, almost inaudibly. The Jewish melody from the last movement was quoted again in Shostakovich’s famous String Quartet No. 8.

Question 17

Piece: Shostakovich piano quintet.

Answer 17

Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in g, Op.57 (1940)

• It was written with himself and the Beethoven Quartet in mind for the premiere. After the mixed reception accorded his Sixth Symphony the previous December, the success of the Piano Quintet was widespread and lasting. On 16th March 1941 it was awarded the Stalin Prize, and was for many years regarded more highly in the West than any of the symphonies. The five-movement form was subsequently pursued in the Eighth Symphony and Third String Quartet of 1943 and 1946 respectively.
• 1. Prelude. Lento: The Prelude opens with a deliberate chord of G minor, the piano’s declamatory theme provoking an impassioned response from the strings. The piano leads off with a flowing melody over a stepwise accompaniment, with a sequence of counter-melodies on solo strings. At length, the initial tempo and expression are restored and a modified version of the initial theme invites intensive dialogue, with which the movement ends.
• 2. Fugue. Adagio: A brief pause and the Fugue opens with the theme on first violin. The remaining strings enter in stages, building up an elegiac web of sound, to which the piano adds a bass line. This continues unaccompanied, the strings re-entering as the dialogue intensifies, culminating in a modified recall of the work’s initial gesture. The music quietens, and the elegiac mood from the outset resumes, moving inevitably into a resigned coda.
• 3. Scherzo. Allegretto: The Scherzo is launched over a chugging accompaniment, the piano conjuring up a witty theme which interacts teasingly with the strings. The first trio section has a flighty, gypsy-like air; the second involves playful pizzicato. The main theme concludes the movement in boisterous humour.
• 4. Intermezzo. Lento: The Intermezzo opens with a plaintive violin melody over a ‘walking bass’ accompaniment on cello, the remaining strings entering in bitter-sweet counterpoint. The piano continues this mood, underpinning an intensifying string commentary, and reaching a brief but heartfelt apex, before falling back into the wistful mood with which it began.
• 5. Finale:. Allegretto: Without pause, the Finale begins with a ruminative theme on the piano, taken on by the strings as the discourse picks up. Over an animated accompaniment, the piano introduces a livelier theme, the strings responding in robust accord. The mood quietens, and a reminder of the work’s impassioned beginning intercedes suddenly on strings. Yet this cannot undermine the movement’s composure, and, with a brief recall of the second theme, the work proceeds to a quiet and contented close.

Question 18

Briefly describe the origins of the character Pierrot.

Answer 18

• Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and Commedia dell’Arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne. His character in postmodern popular culture is that of the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse with large buttons and wide white pantaloons. The defining characteristic of Pierrot is his naïveté: he is seen as a fool, often the butt of pranks, yet nonetheless trusting.

Question 19

What miscellaneous chamber work did Prokofiev compose which includes the clarinet?

Answer 19

Sergei Prokofiev: Overture on Hebrew Themes in c for piano, clarinet, and string quartet, Op.34 (1919)

Question 20

Who was Louis R. Feuillard?

Answer 20

Louis R. Feuillard (1872-1941)

• Best known for his Daily Exercises for solo cello (ca.1920).
• Teacher at the Paris Conservatoire. His most famous student was Paul Tortelier.
• Premiered Ravel’s Piano Trio in a (1914) along with Alfredo Casella (piano) and Gabriel Willaume (violin).

Question 21

Name 2 of Ravel’s cellists.

Answer 21

Louis R. Feuillard

Maurice Maréchal