By the time Felix Mendelssohn was born, in 1809, domestic music making was reaching a zenith in Europe. Sales of pianos boomed thanks to a surplus of highly skilled makers. This led to an increased demand for private lessons, as well as a market for printed music that advanced amateurs could play at home. A target demographic were young women, since fashionable society viewed mastery at the keyboard suitable for their development into sophisticated adults. We see glimpses of this in the literature of the time, as when Jane Austen writes about the excitement of a Broadwood piano being gifted in her novel from 1815, Emma.
Mendelssohn wrote the first of his Songs Without Words in 1829 and continued to write them throughout the rest of his short life, publishing them in sets of six. The name refers to the strong melodies foregrounded in the works, which sound like someone is singing. Some of them were dedicated to specific female friends and family, like Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny, and Clara Schumann. The woman at the heart of the Op. 38 set was Mendelssohn’s new wife, Cécile, as the works in this set were written during their courtship and marriage. No. 3 in E Major flows with rapturous strumming, as if accompanied by a harp, while No. 6 in A-flat Major is nicknamed “duet,” for the way it sounds like two voices singing together.
In early November 1847, Mendelssohn died of a stroke at just thirty-eight years old. The final two books of his Songs Without Words were not published until after his death. Among them is Op. 85, No. 4 in D Major, which is tinged with melancholy and expressive longing.
Many years before joining Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák as one of the three most renowned Czech composers in history, Leoš Janáček was an eleven-year-old being taken by his parents nearly a hundred miles from his hometown of Hukvaldy to live at the Augustinian Abbey in Brno. He had been accepted there as a choral scholar to receive both a solid academic education and musical training (and relieve some financial strain off his large family). Coming from a family of teachers, Janáček eventually followed the same path at age eighteen. Soon after, he embarked on a life and career that was continuously divided between teaching and music making. Ultimately, he would return to Brno, where he made an indelible contribution to the cultural life of the town, and experienced fame as a composer later in life.
Janáček began writing the first five pieces that would become On the Overgrown Path in 1901, as a musical autobiography of his childhood at home, before moving to the abbey. Then his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Olga, got sick with typhoid fever in 1902 and died the following year — his last living child, since their son had died many years earlier while still a toddler. It was not until 1908 that Janáček returned to On the Overgrown Path and added five more pieces, using it as a way to help process the grief of how the trajectory of his family life had changed. Among the new additions was Words Fail!, which features bell-like tolls interspersed with a wistful melodic theme.
Since 1973, the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtág has been writing hundreds of miniature works that range anywhere from mere seconds to a few minutes in length. Periodically, a group of them are gathered together and published, adding to the multivolume series called Játékok, or “games.”
Kurtág began writing these pieces as his contribution to pedagogical music. He was frustrated with the traditional works available for music students, which he felt overly emphasized rote acquisition of skills and mechanical repetition with a goal of perfection. Instead, Kurtág wanted to cultivate curiosity, and help students view music as an arena for expressive and playful exploration. Játékok would require, as Kurtág said, “a great deal of freedom and initiative from the performer.”
Quiet Talk with the Devil and Silence both come from Book Three of Játékok, which was published in 1979. At less than 90 seconds, Quiet Talk with the Devil succinctly conveys a breathtakingly suspenseful dialogue. It is full of outbursts and quietly expressed fragments of melody that trail off into the void. Silence is a brief homage to Kurtág’s fellow Hungarian composer Endre Szervánszky, and is warmly expressive despite its economy of notes. There is an inherent musicality to speech, with its rising and falling pitches and syllables peppering sentences with rhythms. Poetry taps into this capability, and the American composer Amy Beth Kirsten takes it further as a piece of theater between performer and instrument with (speak to me), a remarkably imaginative telling of the myth of Echo and Narcissus.
In mythology, Echo was a charming chatterbox who used conversation as a way to distract the goddess Juno while her husband Jupiter was pursuing his many affairs. We hear this in the first movement, Deceit, with the bewildering flurry of words uttered by the performer, often disintegrating into gibberish. The second movement, Curse, depicts Juno’s revenge, when she takes away Echo’s power to say anything other than the last words spoken to her. We hear both characters, Juno in deep, authoritative tones as her words are repeated by a distraught, breathless Echo. In the third movement, Longing, we hear only the piano. Echo sees the object of her affection, the handsome Narcissus, but she can only yearn for him, unable to call out freely and be heard.
In 1835, Robert Schumann found himself in love with Clara Wieck, a famous young concert pianist — and the daughter of his piano teacher. They fell deeply in love, but Clara’s father, Friedrich, opposed their relationship, forcing the couple into a period of separation the following year. During their time apart, Schumann began composing the Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17, embedding within it messages of love that Clara would understand. At the top of the score are lines by the poet Friedrich von Schlegel: “Among all the sounds in the earth’s many colored dream/One soft note calls to the secret listener.” Then, at the end of the tender first movement, a musical quotation of Beethoven’s song cycle To the Distant Beloved has been inserted, specifically where the lyrics say, “Take them, these songs that I sang to you.”
Schumann later decided to expand the Op. 17 into three movements. He hoped to contribute it toward an effort, spearheaded in part by Franz Liszt, to raise funds for a monument to Beethoven in his hometown of Bonn, in time for what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday (he had died in 1827). The second movement has a generous and vigorous spirit, while the finale sustains a quiet yet fervent atmosphere.
Robert and Clara finally married in 1840, growing together as musicians and expanding their family with eight children. In 1850 they moved from Dresden to Düsseldorf when the position of Municipal Director of Music was offered to Robert. It was a difficult transition, complicated by the ongoing mental and physical health challenges with which he contended. Things reached a breaking point on the night of February 27, 1854, when Robert left the house and plunged himself into the icy Rhine River. After being rescued, he was placed in sanatorium in Bonn, where he died three years later.
The music Robert was working on before walking out the door toward the river was the Variations on an Original Theme, published in 1939 as the “Ghost Variations,” because of his belief that the melody had been communicated to him by an angelic chorus; interestingly, a similar theme is heard in the slow movement of his 1853 violin concerto. It was the final composition of his life, a work that speaks to us of his yearning, reaching, and striving toward transforming complexity into astounding beauty, and releasing tension into easeful peace.
— Kathryn Bacasmot
