Ravinia 2019, Issue 4, Week 8

his career in Vienna. Unfortunately, the Ham- burg position was offered to Julius Stockhausen, a young singer and conductor. This rejection deeply shook Brahms, who withdrew to a sub- urb of Vienna to concentrate on the composi- tion of his cantata Rinaldo . His newly established Viennese connections be- came more important after the disappointment in Hamburg. In 1863, Brahms was elected direc- tor of the Vienna Singakademie, an organization that performed a cappella choral works. There he was exposed to the music of earlier periods for the first time, particularly the works of Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach. This discov- ery would later exert a profound influence on his compositional style. The following year, Brahms organized a concert to introduce his own music to a wider public. These early years in Vienna brought a renewed vigor to his creative activity, and he produced a number of important pieces for instrumental and choral ensembles. He re- sumed work on the cello sonata in 1865. Brahms’s conception of the Cello Sonata No. 1 changed radically during the three-year hiatus. Of the original three movements, he retained only two—the Adagio he eliminated from this piece was incorporated into the Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major, op. 99 (1886). In addition, he added a fugal finale to the earlier two move- ments in 1865. The choice of a fugue illustrates the influence of Bach’s music. Brahms dedicated the completed three-movement sonata to Josef Gänsbacher, an amateur cellist and professor of voice at the Vienna Conservatory. He wrote in jest to Gänsbacher, “Do not be alarmed or an- noyed if I put your name on the cello sonata that I am about to send you.” Simrock published the score as op. 38 in 1866. The first performance took place in Leipzig on a program of chamber music at the Gewandhaus by cellist Emil Hegar and pianist Carl Reinecke on January 14, 1871. This sonata begins with an expansive move- ment. A simple chordal piano accompaniment supports the quiet, expressive cello theme. The louder second theme is derived from an arpeggiated chord. Brahms constructs the Al- legretto quasi Menuetto in typical minuet form; the trio possesses some qualities of music by Robert Schumann, his mentor. The fugal finale is marked Allegro . Several scholars have noticed melodic similarities between the subject and one in Bach’s Art of Fugue . JEAN SIBELIUS (1865–1957) Malinconia , op. 20 The Finnish conductor and composer Armas Järnefelt invited Jean Sibelius, his classmate at the Helsinki Music Institute, to visit his family home in 1888. Seated across the dinner table from the handsome Sibelius was Armas’s young- er sister Aino, the “prettiest girl in all of Fin- land.” Jean and Aino became secretly engaged during the summer of 1890, in the short period between his study abroad with Albert Becker in Berlin and Karl Goldmark and Robert Fuchs in Vienna. While Sibelius was in Vienna, rumors spread that he had a rival for Aino’s hand in the novelist Juhani Aho. Nothing romantic came of the writer’s infatuation, though Aho allegedly portrayed his unrequited love in the scandal- ously erotic novella Yksin ( Alone , 1890), whose main female character he named “Anna.” Jean and Aino married on June 10, 1892, at the Järnefelt house. Following their honeymoon (combined with folksong collecting) in Karel- ia, the wedded couple began a life together in a small wooden house in the Wladimirinkatu district of Helsinki, which provided ready access to teaching and performance opportunities. The Sibelius family grew rapidly with the birth of the first two of their six daughters: Eva (1893) and Ruth (1894). A third daughter, Kirsti Marie Si- belius, followed on November 14, 1898. By that time, Sibelius had begun to establish himself in- ternationally as a symphonic composer, initially through tone poems on Finnish legends—the cycle of choral tone poems titled Kullervo , En Saga, the four legends from the Kalevala com- prising Lemminkäinen , and Finlandia —and lat- er with his first full-scale symphony. Realizing the need for a quiet rural setting in order to compose, Sibelius settled onto the Mattila farm in Kerava, a small inland town 17 miles north of Helsinki, where the family lived from mid-1899 until 1902. Within months, a ty- phoid outbreak reached Kerava, and little Kirsti fell victim to the disease on February 13, 1900. Aino whisked the two older girls away to Lohja, where her mother Elisabeth and brother Arvid lived. (An admirer of Leo Tolstoy, Arvid had abandoned a legal career to become a farmer and author.) Remaining at Mattila after Kirsti’s death, Si- belius sank into despair, which he poured into a dramatic work for cello and piano— Malin- conia , op. 20. Originally titled a fantasy, this score follows the path of emotion rather than observing a typical compositional form. Some sources claim that Sibelius produced this music in a three-hour outpouring of grief in March 1900. In the opening measures, the solo cello builds three-note chromatic motives into a long, anguished soliloquy. The piano erupts in a cas- cade of rapid arpeggios. The turbulent exchange continues until the cello settles into a folk-like, minor-key melody over a syncopated, chordal piano accompaniment. Sibelius inverted this melody to create his third thematic idea: a gently falling cello line. The “fantasy” continues with coloristic explorations of this trio of motives. DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–75) Cello Sonata in D minor, op. 40 Critics almost unanimously praised the first productions of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Mac- beth of the Mtsensk District in 1934. This success, however, proved momentary. On January 28, 1936, Pravda published a scathing attack in an article entitled “Confusion Instead of Music,” which asserted, “The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a pet- ty-bourgeois, ‘formalist’ attempt to create orig- inality through cheap clowning. It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.” The whole controversy, and the subsequent meetings Photograph of Johannes Brahms by Fritz Luckhardt Jean Sibelius Aino Sibelius with daughter Kirsti JULY 22 – JULY 28, 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 91