Berthold Goldschmidt: String Quartet; Piano Sonata; Clarinet Quartet

1992 ◽  
Vol 133 (1797) ◽  
pp. 588
Author(s):  
Eric Roseberry ◽  
Mandelring Quartet ◽  
Ib Hausmann ◽  
Kolja Lessing
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Piano Sonata

THE UNDISCOVERED FLIGHT PATHS OF THE ‘MUSICAL BEE’: NEW LIGHT ON HUMMEL’S MUSICAL QUOTATIONS

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROHAN STEWART-MACDONALD
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
String Quartets ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Performance Tradition ◽  
Explicit Reference ◽  
North Germany ◽  
Goldberg Variations ◽  
The Relationship

Hummel’s quoting of music by other composers has been mentioned briefly in a number of studies. While some of these quotations are explicit, others are a good deal more problematic. This article investigates explicit quotations that appear in two of Hummel’s string quartets dating from 1803–1804 and the finale of a piano sonata from 1807. The fourth movement of the String Quartet in G major, Op. 30 No. 2, twice quotes J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV988, the slow movement of Op. 30 No. 3 refers to Handel’s Messiah and the finale of the F minor piano sonata cultivates a complex relationship with the last movement of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. My objective is to demonstrate the sophistication and subtlety with which Hummel manipulates the quoted material in these three cases.Hummel’s obvious quotation of Bach and Handel in particular is related to a multi-faceted preoccupation with archaic styles and earlier works that had taken root in the later eighteenth century and that continued to expand into the nineteenth and beyond. Although England was the first nation to develop a performance tradition around the ‘ancient’ musical repertory, it was the accumulation of a didactic tradition around the keyboard works of J. S. Bach in north Germany and its steady migration to centres like Vienna that is of more direct relevance here. And when one surveys the (supposed) quotations by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Clementi of works by Bach and Handel and compares them with Hummel’s, Hummel’s remain outstanding in their exactness and also in their frequent lightheartedness of tone. Whereas many straightforward quotations or instances of modelling appear reverential or seek to exalt the basic idiom, Hummel’s either are humorous or seem calculated to reduce the potency of the original in order to assimilate the earlier idiom into the later one. The three pieces considered here illustrate the spectrum of techniques used by Hummel to manipulate quoted material in his works. The quotations in the two quartets have drawn very little comment; the references to Mozart’s ’Jupiter’ Symphony in the finale of Op. 20 have been remarked on more frequently, but the relationship between the two finales is a good deal more intricate than has previously been shown. The ‘contrapuntal deconstruction’ that takes place late in the third movement of Hummel’s Op. 20, between the most explicit reference to the ‘Jupiter’ finale and the coda, is lighthearted in character – amusing, even – and is in some ways the most ingenious and vibrant episode in the movement.

Genre, Romanticism and Female Authorship: Fanny Hensel's ‘Scottish’ Sonata in G Minor (1843)

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Head
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Northern Germany ◽  
Vital Force ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
Own Name

The year 1846 was a watershed for Fanny Hensel: in that year she published collections of music in her own name. Felix Mendelssohn, withholding personal approval of his sister's decision to go public, nonetheless acknowledged a change of status when he offered his ‘professional blessing upon your decision to enter our guild’. This much is well known, but the decision to publish was one of several signs that in the 1840s Hensel sought to set her life-long cultivation of composition on a more formal and professional footing. With her Piano Sonata in G minor (autumn 1843) she tackled a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany. The genre involved extended instrumental forms and Hensel was alternately confident and full of doubts about her abilities in this area. In a letter to her brother concerning her String Quartet, she pictured herself trapped in the ‘emotional and wrenching’ (‘rührend u. eindringlich’) style of late Beethoven. Countering her brother's criticisms of the quartet she asserted, ambivalently, that she did not lack ‘the compositional skill’ (‘die Schreibart’) to succeed so much as ‘a certain vital force’ (‘ein gewisses Lebensprinzip’) and the ‘strength to sustain my ideas and give them the necessary consistency’.

Schubert and the Construction of Memory: The String Quartet in A minor, D.804 (‘Rosamunde’)

2014 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedict Taylor
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Temporal Consciousness ◽  
A Minor

ABSTRACTAs well over a century of reception history attests, qualities of memory, reminiscence and nostalgia seem to constitute some of the most characteristic attributes of Schubert's music. Yet despite the undoubted allure of this subject and its popularity in recent years, the means by which music may suggest the actions of memory and temporal consciousness are often unclear or under-theorized in scholarship. This article examines how such nostalgic subjectivities are constructed in Schubert's music and the language used to describe it. Rather than overturning the now habitual associations between Schubert and memory, the article seeks to question more deeply how they are, and indeed might better be, supported. It looks principally at the String Quartet in A minor, D.804 (‘Rosamunde’), and draws further on such staples of the Schubertian memory discourse as the Quartet in G, D.887, and the Piano Sonata in B♭, D.960.

scholarly journals Elliott Carter's Analysis of his Piano Sonata (1945-46)

2021 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
Ira Braus
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Sonata Form ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Edgard Varese ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Sonata Theory ◽  
External Evidence

In 1948, Elliott Carter penned an analysis of his Piano Sonata for Edgard Varèse.  His analysis of the first movement, in particular, makes one ask why Carter did not subsume its recurrent two-tempo structure under “first group” of its sonata form.  Given Carter’s sophistication,  was he experiencing a moment of music historical “agnosia,” since two-tempo expositions inform  familiar Beethoven  works such as  Piano Sonata, op.31, no.2 and String Quartet in Bb, op.130. This paper explores Carter’s “agnosia” by way of internal and external evidence. Internally, it revisits the thematic chart he attached to the 1948 analysis and goes on to posit the idea that the work’s quintal neo-tonality so saturates its thematic network themes as to distort the composer’s analysis of the form, historical precedents irrespective.  Externally, the paper  compares three works by Beethoven to Carter’s Sonata as regards its two-tempo structure, using concepts borrowed from Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory (1999).  Finally, the author revisits  writings of Carter and his circle that may explain why his analysis downplayed historical precedents to the Piano Sonata.

scholarly journals Schubert’s Large-Scale Sentences

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin G. Martinkus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Franz Schubert ◽  
Common Type ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
String Quintet ◽  
Large Structures ◽  
Formal Expansion

In this article, I share findings from analysis of first-movement sonata forms composed by Franz Schubert from 1810 to 1828. This work builds on prior studies of nineteenth-century sentences (e.g., ".fn_cite($baileyshea_2002).", ".fn_cite($bivens_2018).", ".fn_cite($broman_2007).", ".fn_cite($vandemoortele_2011).", and ".fn_cite($krebs_2013)."), offering an in-depth investigation of Schubert’s use of expanded sentence forms. I theorize the typical qualities of Schubert’s large-scale sentences and highlight a particularly common type, in which the large-scale continuation phrase begins as a third statement of the large-scale basic idea (i.e., a dissolving third statement). I present four examples of this formal type as representative, drawn from the C Major Symphony (D. 944/i), the C Minor Piano Sonata (D. 958/i), the C Major String Quintet (D. 956/i), and the D Minor String Quartet (D. 810/i). My analytical examples invite the reader to contemplate the negotiation of surface-level paratactic repetitions with deeper hypotactic structures. These large structures invite new modes of listening; exemplify the nineteenth-century shift away from the relative brevity of Classical precursors in favor of expanded forms; and problematize facile distinctions between inter- and intrathematic functions. This formal type would eventually flourish over the course of the nineteenth century, underpinning many composers’ strategies for formal expansion.

Beethoven in B♭♭: Op. 130 and the Hammerklavier

2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 434-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sterling Lambert
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Piano Sonatas ◽  
Period Style ◽  
Significant Change ◽  
As If

Abstract Commentators have sometimes remarked on similarities between contemporaneous piano sonatas and quartets by Beethoven, as if the composer were developing ideas at the keyboard before transferring them to other genres. A particularly close connection can be seen, however, between two works in B♭♭ major that are separated by a greater distance in time: the Piano Sonata in B♭♭, op. 106 (Hammerklavier) and the String Quartet in B♭♭, op. 130. Correspondences between the respective first movements are particularly strong, and they suggest that the sonata may have served as something of model for the quartet. Yet the same elements that contribute to a highly integrated structure in the sonata seem to serve quite different purposes in a quartet characterized by a pointed disintegration of normative procedures. A comparison of the two works shows not only how Beethoven's style underwent significant change in the intervening time, but also how the quartet may serve as a critique of the sonata in an act of deliberate stylistic distancing. This brings into question the well established concept of a unified ““late”” or ““third-period”” style.

In the ‘Twilight Zone’: Beethoven's Unfinished Piano Trio in F Minor

2006 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-286
Author(s):  
Nicholas Marston
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
Twilight Zone ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Piano Trio ◽  
Principal Source

Although it has long been known that Beethoven began composing a piano trio in F minor in 1816, scholarly examination of the extant sources for this unfinished project has only recently progressed beyond Nottebohm's brief remarks in the 1880s. The present article reveals the existence of numerous new sources evidently unknown to Nottebohm, including a leaf which forms the continuation of the draft score (Concept) of the first movement, the principal source for the trio. (Transcriptions of this score, including the new continuation, and of a newly identified draft which preceded it, accompany the article.) The trio project is contextualized in relation to other compositions, in particular the String Quartet in F minor, op. 95, the ‘Archduke’ Trio and the Piano Sonata in A, op. 101, and an attempt is made to understand the failure of the trio project in relation to Beethoven's limited compositional activity at this much-discussed point in his career.

String quartets at the Wigmore Hall (October 2013): Arditti Quartet and Diotima Quartet

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (268) ◽  
pp. 82-83
Author(s):  
Stephen Graham
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
String Quartets ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The string quartet retains the pull of intimacy and the promise of prestige it has held for composers since the late eighteenth century. Unlike, say, the historically over-determined piano sonata, there is a degree of flexibility and adaptability in the form that has allowed a wide range of modern composers, from Xenakis to Shostakovich to Rihm, to make distinctive marks on it.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document