Chamber Feast

“I am now happily looking through my old sins from time to time, and I would gladly see the [Quintet] again after a long time,” wrote Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904) to his friend Ludevit Prochazka in March 1887. The composer was in the midst of revising some of his old works and needed the manuscript copy of his Piano Quintet in A Major, published posthumously as hisOp. 5 and composed during the summer of 1872. The composer reportedly tore up the original manuscript and threw it into the fire in a fit of frustration.Fortunately, Prochazka ensured that a copy was made. Dvořák spent almost five months revising the work, but could not get it to a place where he would feel confident presenting the work to his publisher, Simrock. In August 1887, he instead decided to start fresh and write a new work in the same key. Six weeks later, in October 1887, he completed the Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81. The work was an immediate success. About one month after it was premiered inJanuary 1888, Dvořák’s new quintet was included in an evening concert dedicatedto composer Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky celebrating his visit to Prague.Tchaikovsky later noted in his diary: “They played quartets by Smetana and Kovarovic, and the quintet by Dvořák. I found the latter very amiable and I very much liked his quintet.”

 “It's an epic piece,” shares cellist Alexander Hersh. “The first movement ending is one of the greatest in the whole chamber music repertoire. It's just so electric and gives you goosebumps. And it awakens a childlike spirit within me. I mean,I look very young anyways so that doesn't take much, but it's such an amazing work and I love every moment of it.”

“I just really think one of the amazing things about Dvořák is his ability to fuseCzech themes with Germanic tradition; [the quintet] is folksy but yet very structural,” adds Hersh. “And that fusion is just like part of the DNA of Dvořák and what makes him great. Some people find it a bit cheesy, but I don't share that belief at all. It's just amazing heartfelt music. Every movement can really stand on its own; there's not a weak moment in the piece.”

Dvořák dedicated the Piano Quintet to Bohdan Neureutter, a highly regarded pediatrician who championed
the younger generation of Czech musicians and the promotion of the Czech language and culture. The dedication may explain Dvořák’s addition of the titles Dumka to the second movement and Furiant to the third. The dumka, a Slavik musical lament tracing its origins back to Ukrainian folk music, was often used in Dvořák’s music, most famously in his Piano Trio in E Minor, Op. 90, “Dumky.”

SamuelColeridge-Taylor (1875 – 1912) held a lifelong fascination with Dvořák’s music, referring to the Bohemian composer as his compositional “god” when debating the merits of Dvořák’s music as compared to Brahms, Wagner, and other contemporaries during his student days at the Royal College of Music inLondon; Dvořák’s incorporation of folk styles into his music proved to be a lasting influence. Coleridge-Taylor was the son of Dr. Daniel Taylor, a wealth ymerchant from Sierra Leone who came to London to receive his medical training at Taunton and King’s College; and Alice Taylor, daughter of an artisan who worked shoeing horses. There is little documentary evidence about the irrelationship, but we do know that Dr. Taylor decided to return to Africa after finishing his studies and Alice decided not to follow him; unbeknownst to both was that she was pregnant with Samuel, who was born on August 15, 1875. It is likely that Alice decided to name her son after the poet Samuel TaylorColeridge.

Coleridge-Taylor was surrounded by music in his childhood. He studied violin and sang in church choirs from an early age. In 1890 he was admitted as a violin student to theRoyal College of Music, and in 1892 he started studying composition with SirCharles Villyers Stanford. His classmates included Gustav Holst and RalphVaughan Williams, who performed in some of the premieres of Coleridge- Taylor’s works.

Stanford was particularly pleased with Coleridge-Taylor’s chamber music. The ClarinetQuintet in F-sharp Minor, Op. 10, was composed in 1895 and was written as a response to Johannes Brahms’s quintet which was composed four years earlier in1891, although with a further challenge from Stanford who asked Coleridge-Taylor to avoid any overt references to the style of Brahms. When the work was submitted to Stanford, he remarked to Coleridge-Taylor “You’ve done it, my boy.” Stanford wrote to violinist Joseph Joachim, a close friend to both Brahms and Dvořák, singing the praises of the new work:

... a boy of 19 with a quite wonderful flow of invention and idea has written a clarinet quintet which I am going
to bring to you to see, and if you have time to try. I know you will be pleased by it ... His power of melodic invention reminds me a good deal of Dvořák. He is altogether the most remarkable thing in the younger generation that I have seen: and he knows his counterpoint.

WhenStanford traveled to Berlin in 1897, he followed through and presented the work to Joachim, who after reading the work was thoroughly impressed. He sent it to the publisher Breitkopf and Härtel who accepted it for publication, forecasting the international success that Coleridge- Taylor would find in his brief lifetime.

Clarinetist Anthony McGill first played the work when he was approached by the CatalystQuartet to record it as part of their Uncovered project, and has become a champion of the quintet. “I like that this work has a plot line and a shape.There’s a lot of what I like to call traveling music, it takes you on a specific journey. From the beginning to the end of the piece, you feel like you’ve moved through time or across land to a different place, or different little worlds in that space.”

He continued, “At the beginning I think we're just establishing where we are, so we could be out in the country somewhere. It goes from there to a more playful second movement, where there's a little bit of struggle. The third movement is the spiritual movement where you can imagine an old man singing ... There’s also a moment in that movement that sounds like Taps with the trumpet in the distance that comes and goes, or like some sort of distant requiem ... Then the last movement is triumphant and heroic ... We end up in this place of strength and dignity knowing that we are going to be victorious.”

The similarities between the slow movements of Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet and Coleridge-Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet are often commented on; the Dvořák was written in 1893 and Coleridge-Taylor likely used the work as a model. “The slow movement is the movement that speaks to me  the most,” remarked McGill. “Even though the composer was of Afro- British descent, it has a feeling that he’s singing spirituals from America. That’s what it feels like when I play it. I feel like it could have been melodies that were sung in America in those early years by BlackAmericans ... “It feels like home to me. The melodies are so natural. They are full of pain  and sorrow, and also the simplicity and beauty of those early folk songs or early spiritualsthat we are so familiar with and that Dvořák became familiar with when he came here.”

Coleridge-Taylor’s rising career was cut short when he died of pneumonia in 1912 at the young age of 37. The prominent civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who Coleridge-Taylor had befriended on his American concert tours, offered this in his eulogy for the composer:

He came to America with strange enthusiasm. To his own people — to the sad sweetness of their voices, their inborn sense of music, their broken, half-articulate voices — he leapt with new enthusiasm. From the fainter shadowings of his own life, he sensed instinctively the vaster tragedy of theirs. His soul yearned to give voice and being to this human thing. He turned to the sorrow songs.

McGill believes that we are on the verge of a Coleridge-Taylor renaissance. “He was a prolific composer and he was quite famous for a period of time. It’s kind of shocking that he’s not performed more ... There are treasure troves of his music that were never discovered and people are now finding in the homes of his relatives ... [These works] get buried over the years and it’s up to us to champion them, to play them, to reveal them, because audiences deserve to hear more diverse music and to hear all of the beautiful compositions and creativity that exists outside of the small group of composers that we grew up hearing.”

—Daniel Doña