Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Five Contradances, K. 609/610 (1791)
Mozart’s 36th, last, year was richly productive, as it saw the birth
of the opera “The Magic Flute,” the “Ave Verum Corpus” chorus and
the “Requiem.” Interspersed among these and other major masterpieces
lie these miniature ones, composed during carnival season to fulfill
the requirements of Mozart’s one permanent (if ridiculously
overqualified) appointment as Imperial composer, charged with
providing dance music for the entertainment of the general population
of Vienna before the onset of Lent. – The title is a prevalent
German mistranslation of English “Country Dances.” (And the obligatory
“K.” refers to the man who first catalogued Mozart’s works in
chronological order.)
Jacques Ibert
Capriccio (1937)
The French, of course, are the masters of designer clothing and of
puff pastry. Ibert’s “Capriccio” is as French as you can get – elegant
in its shape and in the cut of its tunes, with harmonies that melt
in the mouth. The aggressively energetic opening moment turns out
to be but a foil for the jazzy nonchalance of the main idea. A
middle section delves deeper, kaleidoscopic chords in the harp
serving as underlay to tenderly aching melodies. The return of the
‘cool’ section is interrupted by a breakdown of formal order – the
capriciousness implied by the title – as harp, cello and violin in
turn have solo ‘riffs’, before a short reminder of where we were
before the interruption rushes the piece out the door and onto the
Champs Élysées.
Richard Wagner
Siegfried Idyll (1870)
With typical megalomania, Richard Wagner named his firstborn son
after the hero of his epic cycle of mythologic operas, The Ring of
the Nibelungen. Although the “Idyll” repeatedly quotes the third
of those four operas, Siegfried, it is at a polar remove from its
grandiosity, being an intimate serenade to be played as a surprise
Christmas present for the composer’s wife, Cosima, by 13 players
crammed into the foyer of their country villa on the shores of
Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne. (I’ve been there several times, and can
only figure some of the players stood in the staircase.)
Paul Hindemith
Kammermusik Nr. 1, Op. 24 (1921)
This is a work with attitude to spare! Its composer was a 26 -year-old
of prodigious technical facility, devoid of any respect for the
aesthetics of his recent predecessors, in particular those who had
transformed Wagner’s ardent genius into laborious sentimentality.
There was no room for sentiment in the vision of this soldier who
had served in the First World War amid all its horrors, and was
living in the free-for-all free- fall of postwar Germany. The finale
of this “Chamber Concerto” is actually titled “1921,” and is built
around a pop tune of the day (clearly stated by the trumpet at its
first entrance). The three prior movements are, in order, a first
to be played “Wild and Fast”; a more stately second movement that
parodies the Baroque gestures of Handel; and a third, slow, movement
for the wind instruments and a chime alone, that exemplifies beauty
freed from emotion. There is an irony in that this composition, for
all its nose-thumbing piling dissonant keys on top of each other,
is traditional in the sophistication of its architecture.
Notes by Michel Singher