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Sometimes dubbed the \u201cHungarian Brahms,\u201d Ernst von Dohn\u00e1nyi (1877-1960) dominated the Hungarian musical landscape between World War I and II. He served as chief conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic, music director of Hungarian Radio, and director of the Academy of Music, in addition to be a brilliant concert pianist. It is true that his musical language contains echoes of Brahms, but with a decidedly eclectic, idiosyncratic twist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Sextet, Op. 37, was Dohn\u00e1nyi\u2019s last substantial chamber music work, written while confined to bed for several months in 1935 with thrombosis. Cast in four substantial movements, it covers a broad range of moods and deftly exploits the expressive potential of the six instruments: piano, violin, viola, cello, clarinet, and horn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first movement, in sonata form, echoes and condenses the symphonic language of Gustav Mahler, spiced with some dazzling piano writing. The following intermezzo is more unusual, with a menacing, funereal march dominating its middle section. After more nostalgic reminiscences of Brahms and Mendelssohn in the lyrical third movement, Dohn\u00e1nyi ends the piece with a boisterous finale that pays homage to ragtime rhythms. Though the coda brings us back to the spirit of romanticism, Dohn\u00e1nyi suddenly upends the finale with a sly twist: a scamper into a remote key. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For all of Beethoven\u2019s reputation as a dour, temperamental firebrand, he also possessed a freewheeling sense of humor. Case in point: the Duet with two Obligato Eyeglasses for viola and cello in E-flat Major. Also known as the Eyeglass <\/em>Duo, <\/em>the title started as something of a joke between the composer and his patron, Baron Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz. A bureaucrat in the Hungarian chancellery, Zmeskall was someone Beethoven turned to when he needed things, from fresh manuscript paper to quill pens. He was also an accomplished amateur cellist, and this work was to be a duet between the two men. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Beethoven gave it the funny title after realizing that both he and his patron needed to wear glasses while playing. In one of his letters the composer teases Zmeskall for his short-sightedness, saying, \u201cI am most obliged for the weakness of your eyes.\u201d Two movements of the score survived, the first a buoyant Allegro and the second a minuet with a jovial trio. Likely intended for a purely domestic performance, together, the two movements reveal the young Beethoven at his most gracious and affable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Robert Schumann was clearly thinking of his wife, the brilliant pianist and composer Clara Schumann, when he wrote his Piano Quartet in 1842. But the piece is dedicated to another musician of the day: Count Mathieu Wielhorsky, a cellist and impresario from St. Petersburg who entertained the couple on their visit to Russia. Together, Clara Schumann and Wielhorsky premiered it in Leipzig alongside two heavy-hitters of the era: violinist Ferdinand David (the dedicatee of Mendelssohn\u2019s Violin Concerto) and violist Niels Gade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The quartet stems from a chamber music-filled summer that also yielded three string quartets, a piano quintet, and a piano trio. Yet for all of Schumann\u2019s productivity, he struggled emotionally, experiencing lengthy bouts of depression. Evenings spent looking over musical scores with Clara seemed to offer some solace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While Mozart invented the genre of piano quartet (violin, viola, cello and piano) Schumann revived it with a certain Beethovenian edge. He set his quartet in E-flat Major, a key linked to heroic landmarks such as Beethoven\u2019s Eroica<\/em> Symphony and Emperor<\/em> Concerto. Clara described the piece as \u201ca beautiful work, so youthful and fresh,\u201d as heard in the chorale-like introduction. This grows into the main theme of the exhilarating first movement, though in typical Schumann fashion, he brings the introductory material back at key points in the movement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The second movement is a scherzo recalling the effervescence of Mendelssohn\u2019s \u201cfairy music,\u201d the piano and strings echoing one another. In the third movement, a surging melody rises and falls in big, sighing gestures\u2014an expression of pure yearning\u2014though interrupted briefly by a chorale-like middle section. Using the final gestures of the third movement as a springboard, the brisk finale is a blaze of activity, with dense counterpoint building to a grand, richly layered coda. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014Brian Wise<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ernst von Dohn\u00e1nyiSextet in C Major Sometimes dubbed the \u201cHungarian Brahms,\u201d Ernst von Dohn\u00e1nyi (1877-1960) dominated the Hungarian musical landscape between World War I and II. He served as chief […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[386],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-program-notes"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradomusicfestival.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Robert Schumann, Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 47<\/h2>\n\n\n\n