Wednesday I had the pleasure of meeting a new cellist. As a violist, I feel I can never have too many cellists in my circle of acquaintance: the music you can play without a cellist is quite limited. This cellist was a good player, a nice person, and, as a bonus, lives in my town. A real find!
We started off with the Mozart "Dissonance" Quartet, K465, the last of the six quartets dedicated to Haydn. The dedication is rather touching, I think: it seems to show a side of Mozart that we don't often think of:
- To my dear friend Haydn,
- A father who had resolved to send his children out into the great world took it to be his duty to confide them to the protection and guidance of a very celebrated Man, especially when the latter by good fortune was at the same time his best Friend. Here they are then, O great Man and dearest Friend, these six children of mine. They are, it is true, the fruit of a long and laborious endeavor, yet the hope inspired in me by several Friends that it may be at least partly compensated encourages me, and I flatter myself that this offspring will serve to afford me solace one day. You, yourself, dearest friend, told me of your satisfaction with them during your last Visit to this Capital. It is this indulgence above all which urges me to commend them to you and encourages me to hope that they will not seem to you altogether unworthy of your favour. May it therefore please you to receive them kindly and to be their Father, Guide and Friend! From this moment I resign to you all my rights in them, begging you however to look indulgently upon the defects which the partiality of a Father’s eye may have concealed from me, and in spite of them to continue in your generous Friendship for him who so greatly values it, in expectation of which I am, with all of my Heart, my dearest Friend, your most Sincere Friend,
- W.A. Mozart
The quartet gets its name from the slow introduction to the first movement, with its harmonies so strange for the time that some of the early editions tried to "correct" them. Haydn said, “If Mozart wrote it so he must have had a good reason for it.”
This reading went very well, I thought, even though the first violinist had practiced the wrong piece. She did so well that I think I'm going to keep telling her the wrong pieces to practice. :-)
The other quartet we played that evening is the Mendelssohn Op. 44 No. 1 in D major. Readers of the blog will know that I particularly enjoy Mendelssohn. I have an idea for a project (now that the Haydn quartet project is nearly over) to play all of the Mendelssohn string quartets in one day. There are eight of them, plus twelve short fugues he wrote as a child: I think it's doable. With lots of breaks. And perhaps lots of coffee. :-)
The Mendelssohn D major quartet was great fun. On top of just being beautiful music, I got to play a bunch of open B sharps, something which always tickles me.
The new cellist remarked that the chord three from the end in the first movement was strange: she played a G sharp, which is not in the key of D major. I've included an excerpt from the score (please forgive my inexpert cut-and-paste job).
Internet research reminded me that this is called a "secondary dominant", in this case V7/V. Looking for explanations of this led me to discover a wonderful set of YouTube videos by David Newman, who teaches voice and ear training at James Madison University. I can't decide which is my favorite: they're all absolutely amazing. If you have any interest in music theory at all, you have to listen to them!
This reading went very well, I thought, even though the first violinist had practiced the wrong piece. She did so well that I think I'm going to keep telling her the wrong pieces to practice. :-)
The other quartet we played that evening is the Mendelssohn Op. 44 No. 1 in D major. Readers of the blog will know that I particularly enjoy Mendelssohn. I have an idea for a project (now that the Haydn quartet project is nearly over) to play all of the Mendelssohn string quartets in one day. There are eight of them, plus twelve short fugues he wrote as a child: I think it's doable. With lots of breaks. And perhaps lots of coffee. :-)
The Mendelssohn D major quartet was great fun. On top of just being beautiful music, I got to play a bunch of open B sharps, something which always tickles me.
The new cellist remarked that the chord three from the end in the first movement was strange: she played a G sharp, which is not in the key of D major. I've included an excerpt from the score (please forgive my inexpert cut-and-paste job).
Internet research reminded me that this is called a "secondary dominant", in this case V7/V. Looking for explanations of this led me to discover a wonderful set of YouTube videos by David Newman, who teaches voice and ear training at James Madison University. I can't decide which is my favorite: they're all absolutely amazing. If you have any interest in music theory at all, you have to listen to them!
The "Dissonance" quartet is quite pleasant to listen to (if that's not an oxymoron,) but it does seem to be a bit ahead of its time. I'm not very knowledgeable about string quartets, but while I wouldn't be surprised to hear something like it from Beethoven, it is unusual for Mozart.
ReplyDeleteIt's only the slow introduction to the first movement that's remarkably out of the ordinary for Mozart, and even so, it's not "dissonant" in the way we commonly use the term. It's more that the dissonances don't resolve in standard ways, which was more startling to eighteenth century listeners than to us. But it's funny you mention Beethoven. I'm working on Op. 59, No. 3, for a chamber music workshop, so you'll be reading a lot about it, and that has a slow introduction clearly modeled on this one of Mozart's. But Beethoven goes Mozart one better, and starts with a diminished seventh chord, one of the most dissonant and ambiguous chords in use at the time.
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