Takács Quartet at Caramoor

What you wrote to me about your musical occupations with reference to and in comparison with Felix was both rightly thought and expressed. Music will perhaps become his profession, whilst for you it can and must only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing. We may therefore pardon him some ambition and desire to be acknowledged in a pursuit which appears very important to him, because he feels a vocation for it, whilst it does you credit that you have always shown yourself good and sensible in these matters; and your very joy at the praise he earns proves that you might, in his place, have merited equal approval. Remain true to these sentiments and to this line of conduct; they are feminine, and only what is truly feminine is an ornament to your sex.

This extract from a letter Abraham Mendelssohn wrote to his then 14-year-old daughter Fanny exhibits the complexity of social restrictions that kept women from pursuing composition seriously in the 19th century. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was the eldest of four siblings. Alongside her younger brother Felix she received a thorough musical education that included initial piano lessons from their mother Lea. They studied composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, who shared his admiration for Fanny in a letter to the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “He has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of [Johann] Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special.” Their father started a Sunday concert series at their home in Berlin to encourage (and show off ) the musical accomplishments of his children (Fanny would eventually take over curatorial duties of these concerts in 1831). As Felix started to develop his career, Fanny was able to publish some of her songs in 1825 as part of his Op. 8 and Op. 9 collections. Queen Victoria counted Op. 8 No. 3, Italien, as one of her favorites and chose to sing it with Felix at the piano on one of his visits to her court; he was forced to reveal that the song was written by his sister and asked if she could sing one that he wrote. Despite the fact that she could not pursue a professional career as a composer, she felt the constant urge to write new works.

In the summer of 1829, months before her marriage to the painter Wilhelm Hensel, Fanny started work on a large- scale piano sonata in Eb Major. The work was left incomplete but in 1834 Fanny decided to use the material from the piano sonata to compose her String Quartet in Eb Major, H.277.

“Her quartet is an incredible piece. It really shows her command of quartet writing, and it's a lot of fun to play as it’s quite virtuosic,” explains Richard O’Neill, violist of the Takács Quartet. “We have paired it with her brother's Op. 80 quartet [on an album], because he wrote it in reaction to her death and their very complicated relationship. He loved her very much, but I think there was some regret. I think he wasn't particularly nice to her in some ways.”

Hensel’s work definitely pays homage to the quartet of Beethoven that she and her brother vociferously studied when they were younger. In some ways Hensel is also responding to her brother’s Op. 12 and 13 quartets written in 1827. The last movement of the quartet definitely has the influence of Bach that Zelter alluded to in a way that her brother channeled in his Octet.

The string quartet rose to its prime status as a genre mostly through the works of Franz Joseph Haydn who continually pushed its boundaries from his first works written in 1762 to his unfinished Op. 103 written in 1803. The works did not exist in a vacuum, however, and Haydn freely responded to works such as Mozart’s set of six quartets both as a sign of respect combined with a competitive sense of one-upmanship. By the time Prince Lobkowitz commissioned a set of six quartets from Haydn in 1799, he had also served as a teacher and mentor to a new young upstart in Vienna by the name of Ludwig van Beethoven. Lobkowitz concurrently commissioned a set of six quartets from Beethoven which would eventually become his Op. 18.

Haydn never fulfilled the Lobkowitz commission and only completed two of the requested six, published as Op. 77 No. 1 and No. 2. This was in part due to his being deluged with other commissions for large scale works including The Seasons. His health was also failing and he suffered from general fatigue, so much so that his visiting card that he shared with those inquiring about his health quoted four measures from his vocal quartet Der Greis that stated: “Fled forever is my strength, old and weak am I.”

Despite this, one can definitely hear in Haydn’s Op. 77 quartets allusions and responses to some of the youthful and energetic innovations that Beethoven was bringing forth in his music. “It's an amazing work, quite virtuosic exploring equality throughout all the voices,” shares O’Neill. “The most meaningful and most touching music can be found in the variation movement, which is so incredibly profound. The outer movements, I think, are very kinetic.”

Haydn’s sense of humor is something to always listen for. “I guess humor in music is always like real life,” O’Neill continues. “But I think Haydn is almost slapstick and vaudevillian sometimes when he wants to just be hilarious. The second movement alone is so hilarious with all the displaced beats, and how hokey it is. It sort of drifts out into the middle of nowhere in the middle section and then in the return [to the opening material]. We usually get chuckles. It's just hilarious, because the first violin poses this question: ‘Are we going back?’ And then the viola gives a stupid answer … the second violin is also insecure, and then the cello gets the final word. I live for that return. It's really a magical piece.”

Schubert wrote his String Quartet in G major, D 887 at the end of June 1826 in a mere ten days. The reception of his string quartets by violinist Ignaz Schupanzzigh, champion of new music at the time and instrumental in the premieres of Beethoven’s works, was reported to be tepid at best. He was reported as telling Schubert, “My dear fellow, this is no good, leave it alone; you stick to your songs!” O’Neill believes that Schupanzzigh probably “ran for the hills because [Schubert’s writing] was so hard, you know, and probably just so audacious.”

Schubert’s songs were indeed the only music the Viennese musical public (and publishers) truly appreciated. O’Neill’s first serious foray into Schubert’s music was through studying his songs. “One of my favorite projects prior to the quartet was recording Winterreise for viola and guitar … you really get a glimpse inside of Schubert when you study something like Winterreise because so much of him is in that music.”

Schubert’s larger scale works, especially for instrumental forces, were not as well received. Leipzig publisher Heinrich Probst wrote to Schubert in response to scores sent to the publisher for consideration that: “The public does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps now and then somewhat curious procedures of your mind’s creations.” His failure to get his works published as well as a lack of steady financial support from patrons either through commissions or court appointments caused Schubert to suffer from severe financial hardship. His symptoms from secondary syphilis, which had gone into remission for two years, started to return, adding to what O’Neill calls the “crucible of suffering.”

“There are a lot of sublime moments in his music where with the most simple of means he can just take you to heaven and back in a blink of an eye,” O’Neill continues. “I think the G Major quartet has so many of those. It's a monumentally big piece, but it travels so quickly … it's one of my favorite pieces to play.”

Schubert’s music is remarkable in the way that it uniquely stretches the boundaries of harmony, and in the G Major string quartet he blurs the lines between major and minor modes that leads to a feeling of instability. O’Neill admits, “I've been wanting to play the Schubert with the Takács since I started with them. It's really an incredible and audacious piece. Schubert infuses it with all his trademark things, the most simple, reflexive things, the major, minor, the tunefulness, the heavenly length, the harmonic areas which he visits.”

— by Daniel Doña