23
23
Pure Historicism in Music
W. A Mozart - Allemande from Suite in C Major, K. 399/385I
The Suite in C Major, like Mozart's other original works in baroque style and his transcriptions of works by Bach and Handel, dates from the 1780s (see chap. 21), when he was actively assimilating and experimenting with early eighteenth-century polyphony. It was composed around 1782—less than ten years before the composer's untimely death in 1791.
Neither Bach nor Handel was especially well-known in Vienna at this time, but it should not be assumed that Mozart's keen interest in their music was merely a consequence of his desire to curry favor with Baron van Swieten and his antiquarian circle. Mozart was already a composer of surpassing taste and maturity, and this baroque suite unequivocally demonstrates his commitment to an historicist aesthetic that would continue to inform every aspect of his creative life, even in compositions that had no direct connection with the Baron. Such is the case in the fifth variation of the finale of the Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491, which Mozart completed in early 1786 for his own concerts (appendix 2, no. 5).
Score of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491, finale, var. 6
Mozart and his eighteenth-century contemporaries showed little evidence of "the anxiety of influence" that exacerbated the mal de siècle so prevalent in the lives and work of many modern artists. Indeed, Mozart prided himself on the versatility conferred by his ability to write fluently in the manner of other composers. In a letter of 7 February 1778, he confidently reminded his father, "As you know, I can more or less adopt or imitate any kind and any style of composition."
In an age when assimilative genius, demonstrable compositional skill, and tasteful elegance were held in far higher regard than they are today, mere novelties or diplomas would hardly have been sufficient to establish one's credibility as a composer. Karl Geiringer states that Johann Ernst, the prodigiously gifted son of Bach's own princely patron at Weimar, produced violin concerti of such outstanding quality that they were "granted the honor of being mistaken for compositions by Vivaldi."1 Three hundred years later, composers tend to smart at the least suggestion that their music sounds like it might have been composed by somebody else. Such is the psychological legacy of a modernism that largely succeeded in redefining originality as ex nihilo creation, when, in fact, "The originals are not original. There is imitation, model, and suggestion, to the very archangels, if we knew their history."2
Perhaps because the Suite in C Major has so often been subtitled "in the style of Handel," it has remained virtually unknown and has but rarely been performed in modern times. Tacitly branded as an atavistic oddity or curiosity by those reluctant to acknowledge that any serious composer could so flagrantly pay court to history, it has languished in an entirely undeserved obscurity.
Also working against it is the fact that the suite was evidently never finished, although the ouverture, allemande, and courante are entirely intact and comprise an attractive and compelling work in their own right. Ostensible incompleteness, however, should not be construed as indifference, for a number of Mozart's works—including the C Minor Piano Concerto—have come down to the twenty-first century with obvious lacunae.
Mozart, who was endowed with phenomenal mnemonic powers and prodigious keyboard virtuosity, did not always feel it was necessary to write down every note and rest in his manuscripts. It is not inconceivable that the "missing movements" of this suite were actually resident in the composer's memory, if they were not at one time fully recorded on manuscript paper and inadvertently lost. Mozart left behind six bars of a sarabande, but there is evidently no gigue other than that in G major, K. 574 (see chap. 21), which appears to have been conceived as an entirely independent composition.3
The absence of additional movements is problematic in another sense. The key of C major, established in the overture, is abandoned in favor of C minor in the succeeding allemande and E-flat major in the courante. The ouverture itself modulates to the dominant G major, and only with the Picardy third at the end of the allemande is there a sense of return to C major. But this is clearly not enough to reinforce C major as the tonal center. At least two more movements in C Major—the incomplete sarabande and a hypothetical gigue—would probably have been necessary to achieve the tonal consistency of a baroque keyboard suite.
The allemande (appendix 2, nos. 6a–6b) is divided into two repeated halves of twelve and fifteen measures each.
Score of Mozart's Allemande (second movement), K. 399, p. 1
Score of Mozart's Allemande (second movement), K. 399, p. 2
Listen to Mozart's Allemande (second movement), K. 399 (.mid file)
Only the second half makes use of first and second endings. The tonal architecture is typical of such baroque suite movements in the minor key, with the expected modulation to the dominant at the end of the first half and return to the tonic by the conclusion of the second half. All of the essential features of the baroque keyboard allemande are present: the short distinctive upbeat signaling the beginning of each half; the flowing sixteenth-note movement in moderate duple meter (4/4); the freely varied polyphonic texture (in this case usually three to four voices), augmented here and there (e.g., at cadences) by additional sonorities.
This movement and its companions are among the great benchmarks of pure musical historicism in the late eighteenth century. When performed on a harpsichord, with or without additional ornamentation, they are likely to strike even the most musically educated ear as the work of an early eighteenth-century composer of the Bach-Handel generation. Mozart's achievement is all the more remarkable considering that he had but limited access to scores of keyboard music composed from 1700 to 1730, to which period the movements of this suite would likely be assigned were their authorship entirely unknown.
Johannes Brahms - Gigue in B Minor, WoO4, no. 2
Brahms composed his Zwei Giguen (WoO4) in January of 1855 around the same time as his Zwei Sarabanden (WoO5, the first of which was written in November of the preceding year). The sarabandes were published posthumously in 1917, approximately twenty years after the composer's death, but the gigues did not appear in print until 1927.
All four of these works attest to the composer's early interest in the music of the Baroque and are probably but a few of numerous such historicist compositions that are no longer extant. In his preface to the 1927 Breitkopf & Härtel edition, Eusebius Mandyczewski refers to the gigues and sarabandes as "compositional exercises of a sort the youthful Brahms surely wrote quite often," the preservation of which he attributes to the good graces of Clara Schumann. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss these works as mere student pieces, since by 1855 Brahms was already an established composer with an impressive number of publications to his credit:
In an article appearing in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on 28 October 1853, Schumann had already heaped such high praises on the young Brahms that he certainly must have felt enormous pressure to live up to the musical world's great expectations. Although hardly an international celebrity by the age of twenty, Brahms had already achieved far more than many composers do in a lifetime, and his reputation was suddenly in the ascendant.
It has been noted in chap. 22 that Brahms liked his first sarabande well enough to reuse it in the "Grave ed appassionato" movement of his String Quintet, op. 88 (1883). According to Mandyczewski, the composer thought well enough of the first gigue to note in his manuscript "worth while practicing." The second gigue, however, was "lightly crossed out in pencil," suggesting that Brahms may have planned further revisions.
Both gigues are polyphonic movements in 12/8 time of similar structure and length, and tend to remain closer stylistically to the Baroque than the two sarabandes. Since they share the key signatures of A minor and B minor with the latter, however, it seems likely that Brahms intended them to serve as the final movements of two baroque suites.
The B Minor gigue consists of two parts of eighteen and twenty-one measures respectively, with the first half repeated and supplied with a second ending (appendix 2, nos. 7a–7b).
Score of Brahms's Gigue in B Minor, p. 1
This gigue's modulatory scheme follows a common baroque prototype, moving to the dominant at the end of the first part and returning to the tonic by the conclusion. Normally, the second section of a baroque gigue is repeated as well, but the g'' in the soprano of m. 19—a continuation of the second ending of the first part—would have seemed irrelevant the second time around, and its elimination would have required some notational irregularity. What is more, Brahms began the second section in the subdominant key of E minor instead of the more typical dominant, and may not have been comfortable returning to the beginning of that section from the final tonic chord.
The movement opens with a fugal subject presented successively in the soprano (mm. 1–2), bass (mm. 3–4), and middle voice (mm. 7–9), much after the manner of the stylized French gigue favored by Bach and Handel. Additional entries of the subject occur in mm. 10–12 (abridged), mm. 12–13 (modified), and mm. 16–17 (soprano), and much of the contextual musical material is directy derived from it (e.g., the "false" entry in the bass at mm. 9–11).
A countersubject, first heard in the soprano in mm. 3–4, also provides material for subsequent development. It appears, for example, in augmentation at mm. 14–15 (bass), as an inverted fragment in m. 23 (bass), and again as a motivic fragment in the last measure (uppermost voice).
At the beginning of the second section, the subject is inverted, appearing first in the middle voice (mm. 19–20), then in the bass (mm 21–23) and soprano (mm. 25–26). The subject recurs in its original form in mm. 33–34 as a stretto for soprano and bass, and makes one final appearance in mm. 37–38, thus imparting a "rounded" form to the movement. In this section the French gigue style is rather more pronounced, owing to Brahms's conspicuous use of wide leaps (mm. 28–32). There is no appearance, however, of the dotted rhythms often found in keyboard gigues of the period between 1650 and 1750 (cf. the gigues in Bach's English Suite No. 1 in A Major, BWV 806, and Handel's Suite No. 7 in B-flat Major, HWV 440).
That this work is baroque in form, technique, and general character is self-evident. That it also seems to reveal something of the nineteenth century is equally true. The expressive opening subject, for example, possesses a peculiarly modal quality because of its emphasis of A-natural instead of the leading tone A-sharp, a quality accentuated by the dramatic upward leap of a minor sixth to a'' on beats 7 and 8 of m. 2.
Taken out of context, measures 13–15 seem to have the melodic and rhythmic character of a romantic scherzo. This scherzo character becomes even more pronounced in the second section, particularly with the syncopated interplay of treble and bass in mm. 28–29. Such are the ambiguities of this gigue that it is admittedly not so clear, as it seems to be in the sarabandes, whether Brahms was adapting the Baroque to the nineteenth century or actually trying to create music of a purely historicist nature. (Both sarabandes are provided with dynamics, whereas these are conspicuously absent in the gigues.)
What is certain is that Brahms was an ardent champion of the music of the past and emphatically opposed the "music of the future." Some five years after he composed his gigues and sarabandes, he would sign a manifesto against the Neue Zeitschrift for its advocacy of the aesthetic views of Liszt and his proponents, leaving no doubt about his allegiance to tradition and his antipathy towards contemporary trends. In his later capacity as conductor of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, he would find a practical vehicle through which he could explore the music of the Baroque, an exploration that would culminate in his edition of the complete works of Couperin.
In 1896 the agnostic but moralistic Brahms, who as a young man had earned his living performing in seedy taverns frequented by denizens of the demimonde, composed a series of eleven chorale preludes for the organ (published posthumously as op. 122). Deeply introspective works, they would honor and sustain a compositional tradition Brahms inherited from J. S. Bach with unqualified gratitude and affection.
Easley Blackwood - Cello Sonata, op. 31
Easley Blackwood (b. 1933) is a pioneering figure among the growing number of composers who in recent years have turned to the historical past for renewed inspiration. Blackwood's case is especially significant, in that he spent the better part of his professional life as a composer of decidedly modern atonal music.
A pupil of Nadia Boulanger, Paul Hindemith, and Olivier Messiaen, Blackwood earned both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Yale University. Still in his twenties, he himself joined the ranks of musical Academe at the University of Chicago (1958–97), where he became a full professor and eventually Professor Emeritus, taught courses in traditional harmony, and performed as a virtuoso pianist.
Prior to the 1950s, and throughout most of the 1960s and 1970s, Blackwood's own work reflected the "radical modernism" that dominated higher education and musical culture for much of the twentieth century. By 1981, however, he began to take an increasingly historicist approach to composition which he sees as an extension of a body of work he created in the 1950s (e.g., the First Symphony, 1955) characterized by the cyclical recurrence of thematic material, strong contrasts between adjacent regions of harmony and dissonance, unusual seventh-chord progressions, and the use of traditional forms. For his Fifth Symphony (1990), Blackwood imagined what might have come about if Vaughan-Williams or Sibelius had taken an interest in modernism around the year 1915.4
This major stylistic reorientation was a consequence of his study and teaching of traditional harmony as well as his groundbreaking research in microtonality that led to publication of The Structure of Recognizable Diatonic Tunings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) and the creation of a number of fascinating, highly accessible new works, including the Twelve Microtonal Etudes (cf. Vicentino's rediscovery of the ancient Greek chromatic and enharmonic genera in the mid sixteenth century).5
More importantly, Blackwood's historicism stemmed from a gradual realization that it was not really possible to emulate the powerful sense of harmonic progression and textural transition of tonal music through the atonal polyrhythmic means he had employed in such works as his Third and Fourth Symphonies. He was especially drawn to the poetic qualities of tonal composition, which he contrasts with the more prosaic experience of writing music atonally.6
Because of his high standing in the musical world and academic community, Blackwood was harshly censured for his apostasy. He suggests that certain contemporary critics, many of whom harbor Marxian ideals about the historical inevitability of modernism (cf. Popper's remarks in chap. 2), would probably not disapprove of his music if they did not know in advance when it was actually composed. Thus, he suggests, his detractors are not only intellectually dishonest but have used their positions to advocate a political agenda intended to bend music history to their own ideological will. For his part, Blackwood is convinced that the potential of atonal polyrhythmic music has essentially reached its limits, particularly in the field of orchestral music, in which insurmountable difficulties of performance have not been successfully resolved by even the most professional symphonic ensembles.7
Among the most important works resulting from what he describes as his "ultraconservative" or "reactionary" style is the remarkable Sonata for Cello and Piano, op. 31 (1986), composed in a manner Blackwood thinks "Schubert would have discovered if he had lived until 1845."8 A large-scale composition in four movements lasting over forty minutes, the sonata was inspired by some of the greatest masterpieces of Schubert's last few years: the String Quartet No. 15 in D Major, D. 887 (c. 1826); the Piano Sonata No. 19 in C Minor, D. 958 (c. 1828); the Piano Sonata No. 20 in A Major, D. 959 (c. 1828); the Piano Sonata No. 20 in B-flat Major, D. 960 (c. 1828); the Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat Major, D. 929 (c. 1827); the Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major, D. 898 (c. 1827); and the Symphony No. 9 in C Major ("Great"), D. 944 (c. 1825–28). Blackwood also cites the influence of the slow introductions of several of Beethoven's cello sonatas on his introductory "Grave": Sonata No. 1 in F Major for Cello and Piano, op. 5, no. 1; Sonata No. 2 in G Minor for Cello and Piano, op. 5, no. 2; and Sonata No. 4 in C Major for Cello and Piano, op. 102, no. 1.9
The overall structure of the sonata follows the scheme shown below:
The scherzo opens with an agitated figure in the piano over the dominant pedal in D minor, but shortly thereafter begins exploring various other key areas in rapid succession, ultimately reaching the parallel major.
Off-site link to audio excerpt from Scherzo of Blackwood's Sonata for Cello and Piano, op. 31.
Both piano and cello are almost constantly active, making for a decidedly homogeneous instrumental texture throughout, although the cello is generally given the greater share of melodic material. Modulations are often playfully abrupt, resulting in colorful swings of mood that convey the scherzando character of the movement as whole.
The quieter, intensely lyrical trio is cast in the rather unusual key of F-sharp major—but Schubert himself was fond of modulating by the interval of a third. Indeed, intermittent movement up or down by that interval is responsible for much of the trio's ingratiating harmonic character.
Since completing the Cello Sonata, Blackwood has composed a number of outstanding new historicist works, including the Clarinet Sonata in A minor, op. 37 (1994); the Sonatina in F major for Piccolo Clarinet, op. 38 (1994); the Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor, op. 40 (1996); and the String Quartet No. 3 (1998).
