The musical culture in Vienna around 1900 is widely renowned for its exceptional creativity and innovative capacity. This musical culture in fin-de-siècle Vienna was a complex phenomenon characterized by radical shifts as well as continuities with the past and even by contradictory tendencies.
The music from this "sunken world" of the late Habsburg empire was influenced by the different nationalities that came together in Vienna, the melting pot of the Habsburg empire at the turn of the century that provided for that big creative outburst in all the arts and sciences that made Vienna one of the most vibrant and attracting cities of the world at the time.
The first half of the concert features works by young composers, who were just at the beginning of their careers, but already delivering real master pieces. Erwin Schulhoff represents the Czech, also Jewish, influence, a real prodigy child who was predicted to become the Mozart of the 20th century, but later ended up being killed in Auschwitz.
Anton Webern, born in Vienna, who later was at the front of major disruptions in the way
composers worked as part of the second Viennese school started out with late romantic style
music like in 2 Stücke from 1899, Zoltan Kodaly from Hungary added Folk and Impressionistic
flavours and is regarded as one of the first ethno-musicologists together with Bela Bartok.
The second half is dedicated to the "mentor" or "teacher", maybe even father figure Johannes Brahms, who lived in Vienna and served both as a musical conservative force but also as the missing link between the classical masters like Mozart and Beethoven and the highly innovative and disruptive work of Arnold Schönberg and the second Viennese school.
Erwin Schulhoff Sonata for Cello and Piano
Schulhoff wrote his cello sonata in 1914. This piece could be heard as a charming pastiche of Max Reger, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, if it weren't so unrelentingly serious. Lush keening tones rise and descend, as the cello conveys intense yearning and nostalgia for late Romanticism. It is a well-executed academic piece by an impetuous 20-year old,eager to show the world he's mastered repeats, imitation, variation, and counterpoint. A hidden gem of the cello repertoire.
Anton Webern: 2 Stücke for Cello and Piano (1899)
The two pieces for cello and piano are Anton von Webern's first known works in musical
composition. The pieces are gentle soliloquies for the solo instrument, with the piano providing but a simple chordal accompaniment. Although in romantic style, the music, marked by quiet poise and restraint, is pure in line and free from sentimentality. He wrote his two pieces as a student in Klagenfurt for his parents, who played piano and cello.
Zoltan Kodaly: Sonata for Cello and Piano op.4
Kodály shares with Bartók the reputation for being one of the two greatest Hungarian composers of the twentieth century. Born just a year apart, they also shared during their lifetimes a deep common interest in music of their homeland, and conducted extensive scholarly research into music of the Hungarian gypsies and peasants in addition to that of surrounding countries. As such, they were among the first important ethnomusicologists.
Into the sonata op.4 Kodály poured the essence of his absorption with indigenous Hungarian folk music. To musicologist Harry Halbreich said: “The cello seems to speak Hungarian.”
Originally planned to be in three movements, Kodaly's op.4 Sonata in two movements was
premièred by Jeno Kerpely and Bartók in Budapest, 17th March 1910. Growing out of the same elemental ‘old Hungarian’ intervals that a few years later were to lend wing to Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, the opening F sharp minor Fantasia—an artful blend of rubato recitative, folk innuendo and Debussyian harmonies—epitomises Bartók’s view of Kodály as a composer of ‘rich melodic invention, and a perfect sense of form, with a certain predilection for melancholy and uncertainty, and striving for inner contemplation’ (July 1921).
Kodály claimed Beethoven to have inspired the stamping main theme of the second movement, but in its short-winded modal phrases, drone inflections and Háry János-like allusions, it’s nearer perhaps to peasant dance. The return of the Fantasia at the end establishes a neat cyclic unity.
Johannes Brahms: Sonata op.99 F-major (1886)
Brahms completed his Cello Sonata op. 99 during the productive summer of 1886. The first public performance took place in Vienna on 24th of November of the same year. Robert Hausmann played the cello part and the composer himself was his partner at the piano. Even though the work was generally received positively, it took some years until it was fully appreciated and gained its irrevocable place in the cello repertoire.
Brahms’s Sonata no. 2 unlike Beethoven’s early opus 5, no. 2, belongs to the composer’s mature, late period of composition. Written in 1886, around the time of Brahms’s Sonata no. 2 for Violin and Piano, op. 100 and Piano Trio no. 3 in C minor, op. 101, it is cast in a large-scale, fourmovement design. It begins on a grand note, in an almost orchestral manner with a continual tremolo in the piano part heard against sustained notes in the cello. Structured as an expansive, sonata allegro form, the first movement is technically and expressively demanding throughout for both players alike. The second movement, a poignant Adagio affetuoso, explores the remoteregion of the Neapolitan key, being cast in a remote and unusual F-sharp major tonality, with the cello’s delicate pizzicato melody heard against the supporting, chordal piano part. Toward the middle section, there is a moment of escalating anguish, albeit brief, dispelled with the soothing reprise of the opening music. The third movement, Allegro appassionato, exemplifies Brahmsian scherzo in the appassionato key of F minor, quite reminiscent in its angst and relentless drive to his earlier Sonatensatz in C minor for violin and piano. The contrasting F-major Trio subtly revisits the remote region of F-sharp Major before the Scherzo returns to round off the movement. Following all the great emotional drama of the preceding three movements, the Sonata rounds off
on a surprisingly anticlimactic, gentle and lighthearted, note with a Rondo in F Major – similar in its jovial mood to the Rondo that concludes Beethoven’s G-minor Sonata, opus 5, no. 2 – that propels the finale to its rejoicing conclusion.
Peter Hudler, Violoncello
Andreas Teufel, Klavier