This Sonata, written in 1922 (revised in 1945) is a work that dazzles with clever instrumental writing, delightful variety of tone colors, shocking dissonances, humor and elegant wit, melodic appeal, and rhythmic verse, and also amazes with the composer's expert craftsmanship and deft handling of the musical material.

The episodic first movement opens with a little trumpet tune of folk like charm, which gives way in time to a cantabile melody in a slower tempo. A short, jolly third section, started by the horn at a faster tempo, is based on a rhythmic reworking of the first tune. Poulenc introduces still another melody played by the trumpet before a return of the opening melody leads to a joking, wrong note ending. The two principal lullaby like themes of the Andante are derived from the slow second theme of the first movement. The second theme's opening contour is essentially an inversion, a mirror image, of the shape of the first theme. The first theme returns to end the ternary form movement. The trumpet and horn in unison state the principal theme of the mercurial Rondeau, with its indecision between major and minor. Poulenc presents various short episodes between appearances of the theme in this lightweight movement, ending it all with wonderfully comic touches in the coda.

Poulenc's father, the head of a chemical firm, was an avid music lover and insisted that his son receive a good classical education. His mother, an accomplished pianist, constantly played for him music of Mozart, Schumann, and Chopin -- delightfully, as Poulenc later recalled. In 1918 Poulenc began his military service.

Before the First World War ended, Poulenc had met Eric Satie, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, and Germaine Tailleferre. These composers were very different from one another, but they had in common a horror of Germanic influence, and of the academic and conservative Schola Cantorum. Even such former heroes as Debussy and Ravel were now considered too rarefied. For inspiration, the young composers looked to popular dance music and jazz, to street music and to the Paris circus and music halls. Satie, their new musical hero, told them to forget about sacred cows and lampooned the establishment. In 1920 the music critic Henri Collet baptized the group "Les Six." Les Six wrote many pieces in the insouciant new Dadaist image, and other composers followed suit. Nostalgia and sentimentality -- even vulgarity and blather -- were their banners.

In the 1930's, Poulenc collaborated with the baritone singer Pierre Bernac. Poulenc was a splendid pianist, and the two musicians gave countless recitals together, becoming lifelong lovers and companions.

The March 1881 death of pianist Nicolai Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky's former teacher, director of the Moscow Conservatory and, despite periods of estrangement, longtime friend, filled the composer with deep remorse. Tchaikovsky paid tribute to Rubinstein with his piano trio, dedicated "to the memory of a great artist." The work was completed in 1882.

The Trio is cast in two lengthy movements, the first called Pezzo elegiaco, or "elegiac piece". Tchaikovsky, the supreme melodist, presents four appealing themes, each distinctive in style and mood. The opening theme, warm and with a uniquely melancholy aura, is announced at the outset by the cello. The tempo picks up for the more forceful second theme stated by the piano alone. Both the violin and cello, playing in octaves, sing out the following subject, one of Tchaikovsky's most perfectly realized, sweet but sad melodies. A final, highly expressive theme, originally heard in the violin, completes the exposition. While the very prominent -- and difficult -- piano part in the first movement is probably a tribute to Rubinstein's pianistic virtuosity, the folklike theme used for the theme and variations recognizes Rubinstein's love of folk music. It is thought to be associated with a day in May of 1873, when Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein went to the countryside for a picnic, and some peasants sang and danced for them.

Tchaikovsky's life was abundantly filled with paradoxes, unresolved conflicts, and contradictions. Born into a moderately wealthy family, Peter Ilyich early showed remarkable intelligence, but aside from a heightened sensitivity to music, neither his parents nor his piano teachers saw any evidence of exceptional musical talent. He was educated at the Saint Petersburg School of Jurisprudence and worked at the Ministry of Justice until he was twenty-one years old, when, with great misgiving, he left his post to start the serious study of music.

Although fully aware of his homosexuality, Tchaikovsky felt compelled to wed in 1877, a marriage that lasted a scant nine days, followed by a suicide attempt a few weeks later and a subsequent nervous breakdown. That same year Tchaikovsky began a thirteen-year relationship with a wealthy forty-six-year-old widow, Nadezhda Von Meck. Madame von Meck's generous and enthusiastic support was made dependent on the condition that they not meet -- a requirement that Tchaikovsky readily accepted. As a composer, Tchaikovsky considered himself a Russian nationalist, strongly influenced by folk melodies and rhythms of his native land.

Beethoven (1770-1827) composed An die ferne Geliebte in the spring of 1816, at a time when his compositions revealed an increasing tendency toward introspection and experimentation with multimovement form. In fact, the collection is the first complete song cycle designated as such (Liederkreis) on its title page, and it consists of individually complete songs united by both textual subject and musical material. Beethoven transforms deceptively simple music into a unified cycle by means of "a continuously unfolding network of tonal and thematic relationships," touchingly "drawing out immediate musical details to encompass the immeasurable." The poignancy exists not only in the musical details but also in the poetry. Alois Isidor Jeitteles's cycle of poems begins with a physical and temporal distance between lover and beloved. This distance dissolves at the end of the cycle -- mitigated by songs the lover himself sings -- and ends on a happy note. The subject moved Beethoven and, indeed, autobiography may have motivated him to set the poetry to music. Some critics wonder whether "there is something more" in these songs "than the mere inspiration of poetry," for shortly after the composition of these songs, Beethoven declared in a letter to a friend that he had "found only one [woman], whom I shall doubtless never possess." The timing of Beethoven's remarks suggests that he turned inward to his own distant beloved for inspiration and further reinforces the personal meaning imbued in many his musical works of this time.

Many of the chamber works on today's program feature a variety of textural innovations and instrumental combinations. For example, Beethoven's song Adelaide (1794) often features the pianist and not the vocalist making textural changes and suggestions. The vocalist often introduces new motivic patterns in the name "Adelaide" based on the piano's triplet accompanying texture and frequent modulations. These subtle changes create an equal dialogue between the pianist and vocalist. The vocal repetitions of the name, alongside recognizable cadential patterns, provide melodic and thematic continuity throughout the piece. Meanwhile, Rivolgete by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was an aria for Così fan tutte (K. 588, premiered on 26 January 1790). After the premiere, believing it to be detrimental to the dramatic flow in its overpowering virtuosity, Mozart instead eliminated it and replaced it with a brief transitional scene.

The brass ensemble is a fitting rearrangement of the larger orchestral scoring for West Side Story, originally composed in 1957 by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990), because it reveals the adaptability of the music. Bernstein used a variety of sources for his musical numbers, including Afro-Caribbean dance styles, jazz, and melodies drawn from Tin Pan Alley. Latin American rhythms, such as the habanera bass pattern, appeared in examples before West Side Story, including Jelly Roll Morton's so-called "Latin tinge" and Dizzy Gillespie's interest in "cubop," or Afro-Cuban jazz. In addition, the mambo craze of the 1950s was underfoot in the United States, as represented by the popularity of big-band style Latin ensembles, such as those led by Dámaso Pérez Prado and Tito Puente. These Latin American influences also appeared in examples from composers including Georges Bizet, Claude Debussy, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Maurice Ravel. The potential for an amalgamation of musical sources fascinated Bernstein, whose senior thesis at Harvard was entitled “The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music.” In “West Side Story,” “America” is a combination of two Latin American traditions, the Mexican huapango, a dance featuring cross rhythms, fast tempos, and rapidly-changing meters, and the Puerto Rican seis, named after a six-string guitar and featuring a similar alternation of syllables and accompanying meters. The Latin dance influences easily coexist with others. For instance, “Somewhere” is part of a dance sequence, and the incorporation of dance into the staged musical setting derives from French ballet traditions of the eighteenth century.

Leonard Bernstein created one of the most memorable motifs of “West Side Story” with the “Maria” tune, comprised of three notes, C, F#, and G, appearing throughout in transpositions and transformations. The distance between C and F# creates an unstable and dissonant tritone interval, while the distance between C and G is a stable and consonant perfect fifth. Both intervals propel the dramatic action and symbolic meaning of the story. One might think of the tritone, equally dividing the musical octave, as a symbol of the divisive split between the gangs, the Sharks and the Jets, or as a harbinger of racial tension. Since this tension permeates the musical, even the happier moments (such as “Maria”) feature it. For example, the tritone appears in “Tonight,” a love song for the main characters Tony and Maria, although the tension in their statement resolves to musical consonance. The perfect fifth overcomes the tritone, and Tony and Maria are the only characters able to offer a solution—both musically and in their love for each other—to the dramatic unrest of the plot. Bernstein constructs the motif in such a way as to suggest that tragedy (for which he employs the tritone) and transcendent love (the perfect fifth resolution) are therefore related: tragedy is latent within the love interest. Bernstein’s juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements, ranging from the genres and styles he chooses to particular musical details, enhances the duality of the story that centers on love and war.

As contrasted to Bernstein’s stylistic variety, Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843–1900) used a more limited range of styles and influences. Like his fellow Berlin academics including Johannes Brahms and Eduard Hanslick, Herzogenberg had an interest in preserving traditional forms and genres. In fact, he shared a close friendship with Brahms evidenced by decades of extant correspondences, and he modeled much of his chamber music, including the Op. 43 Woodwind Quintet (1884), on Brahms’s style. Herzogenberg’s and Brahms’s aesthetics pitted them against the more radical tendencies of the members of the so-called “New German School”—Wagner, Berlioz, and Liszt—who sought out new forms and genres in favor of doing away with older models. In contrast, Herzogenberg and Brahms cultivated interest in early music, particularly that of Johann Sebastian Bach. Thus, for his Woodwind Quintet Op. 43, Herzogenberg turned to older models. For example, his choice of key (E-flat major), number of movements (four), and woodwind quartet (oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) with piano is modeled on Mozart’s K. 452 (1784) and Beethoven’s Op. 16 (1796). Although indebted to the music of the past, Herzogenberg nonetheless incorporates into his music nineteenth-century instrumental innovations not yet available to Mozart and Beethoven. The nineteenth-century advances in instrumental construction and changes in musical taste provided Herzogenberg with wider ranges of tonality, dynamics, and articulation: the oboe acquired an increased number of keys and extended range, and the clarinet could produce a new variety of tonal colors and had a new key system; improvements in the construction of the bassoon led to an extended range and increased volume, and valves facilitating the performance of chromatic passages (particularly in low ranges) became standard in the late nineteenth-century horn. The piano’s metal frame permitted a greater tension on the strings, thus allowing for an increased volume, and players enjoyed changes of articulation made possible with the addition of felt hammers, faster response with actions, and an extended range. Herzogenberg capitalizes on these developments in his quintet. Moreover, he looks not only to the past but also ahead in choosing the combination of woodwind quartet and the piano. This chamber ensemble was a rare choice even for Herzogenberg’s time—a surprising fact, given the enhanced expressive capability of the instruments that so many Romantic-period composers sought to capture.

Debussy (1862–1918) wrote his Piano Trio in G major in 1880. While Debussy had a similar distaste for the bombast in much of the music of the New German School, as Herzogenberg did, he was nonetheless fascinated by the potential for new musical resources that the New German School sought. After all, by the end of the nineteenth century, France had a rich chamber music repertoire that blended traditional forms and instrumental combinations with innovative timbres and musical resources. In particular, Debussy exhibits many of these features in the Piano Trio, including motives that undergo minor changes, unresolved dissonances, parallel sonorities, and contrasts of scale types. While he preferred sensibility and restraint in his music, he also valued the pleasure of simply listening. Of his music he said, “There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.” Further, he expressed his displeasure with rhythm and tonality in general, believing that “rhythms are stifling” and that “music is neither major nor minor.” The combination of diverse inspirations, along with new musical directions in tonality and timbre, lead many to view Debussy as one of the first influential twentieth-century composers, even though he composed many of his works in the nineteenth century. The freedom that Debussy championed offered new musical pathways for the twentieth century, as he advised his fellow composers to “Search for a discipline within freedom! Don’t let yourself be governed by formulae drawn from decadent philosophies. They are for the feeble-minded. Listen to no one’s advice except for that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind...”

Beethoven (1770-1827) wrote his Opus 11 in 1798 in Vienna, arranging the trio version in 1802-1803. Beethoven’s inspiration for the trio arose in large part out of admiration for the Bohemian clarinetist Joseph Beer. Along with the clarinet solos that Beethoven features, he equally spotlights the piano and violin. All three instruments participate in the texture that frequently incorporates the interchangeability of themes and motives.

Such flexibility is especially apparent in the variations form that he uses for the third and final movement. As an example, the piano’s solo arpeggios in the first variation contrast to a lyrical duet between the clarinet and the cello in the second, before Beethoven turns to a full texture for the start of the third variation. The theme itself of the variations comes from a popular aria written by one of Beethoven’s contemporaries, Joseph Weigl. The aria is entitled “Pria ch’io l’impegno” (“Before I begin work”) and appeared in the comic opera L’amor marinaro (The Corsair), first performed in Vienna in 1797. Clearly its popularity influenced Beethoven, who wasted no time incorporating it into his own chamber work. For that matter, many other composers also borrowed the tune, including Joseph Eybler, Johann Hummel, Josef Gelinek, and Nicolò Paganini.

More generally, Beethoven blends characteristics of many genres in this trio that become customary in subsequent compositions. For instance, the trio begins on dominant, not the more conventional tonic, a move that Beethoven also uses in his Symphony No. 1 (1801). Further, the texture of the piano, while not overpoweringly virtuosic, nonetheless recalls the stormy and impetuous character—often exhibited in the lower ranges of the piano, or in rapid arpeggiation—of many of his piano sonatas, such as in the third movement of the “Quasi una fantasia” No. 31 (1801).

Similar to the way that Beethoven incorporated an aria into a chamber setting, Franz Schubert (1797-1828) composed Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (D. 965, 1828) for the operatic soprano Anna Milder-Hauptmann. She was a devotee of Schubert’s works and had previously performed Erlkönig on tour. Three years before the composition of this Lied, Milder-Hauptmann asked Schubert to compose an aria that would showcase her virtuosic technique, and she received the score for this work after Schubert’s death in November 1828. Der Hirt auf dem Felsen features the addition of the clarinet, a colorful deviation from the standard voice and piano setting that Schubert chose for most of his other Lieder. Schubert also uses a multi-sectional arrangement, a compositional strategy more common for a cantata than for a Lied.

Wilhelm Müller wrote the poem, and at Schubert’s request, Wilhelmine von Chézy adjusted some of the text in the middle of the poem. In his Lieder, Schubert envisioned music and words on an equal plane and believed that both could be adjusted accordingly to fit each other. Moreover, he believed that musical aspects such as melody, harmony, and form could personify, encapsulate, and convey emotion as well as words could. In this setting, Schubert evokes a variety of emotions, including joy, melancholy, and meditation. For example, he depicts the pastoral quality of the text through an echo between the voice and the clarinet, similar to the echo heard by the poet, who stands alone in the valley. The solitary poet is a quintessential Romantic subject, engulfed by nature and his surroundings. His contemplative musings capture the eternal promise of spring—not merely a giddy excitement at the coming of spring, but an overwhelming need for the solace of spring, as though no other force but nature could bring more happiness.

It is fitting to close today’s program with Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), who composed his Opus 34 F minor piano quintet in Vienna in 1862, finishing it in its present form in 1865. After all, Brahms blends elements of both Beethoven and Schubert in the quintet. As Michael Musgrave describes, the piece is “Beethovenian in its intensity” and “Schubertian in its lyrical moments.” The piece originated as a string quintet with two cellos, two violins, and viola, and it also existed as a two-piano sonata.

The quintet is full of harmonic and melodic details that determine the overall structure. Brahms presents motives and uses them as kernels for expansion and transformation, often by means of chromatic relationships. For instance, the calm opening expands from a germinal figure containing the notes F, G and A flat that Brahms also features at the beginning of the last movement. As another example of small-scale details affecting large-scale form, Brahms transposes the half step between G and A flat to a D flat-C motive in the Scherzo. For that matter, the Scherzo also features an A flat to G descent over a tonic pedal and ends with a relentless repetition of D flat to C, a process Brahms continues in the Finale. These kinds of chromatic details that Brahms highlights in individual movements turn out to be essential in the integration of the four-movement cycle.

Altogether, many believe the quintet is the pinnacle of Brahms’s chamber music style. As one example, Clara Wieck Schumann spoke in excitement about the copying of parts and the first run-through of the work, saying that all involved “were riveted to their seats” in anticipation of the first performance. Among Brahms’s twenty-four chamber works, the F minor quintet provides a seemingly endless variety of moods, colors, thematic and formal procedures, and characteristics working together as a coherent whole, lending itself well to the kind of unity in variety that Brahms’s admirers—both past and present—find so inspiring.

Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) composed Canticle III in memory of the Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood, whose recent suicide was a shock to the musical world. Joined by Peter Pears, tenor, and Dennis Brain, horn, Britten first performed the work on 28 January 1955 in Wigmore Hall in London. The work received favorable reviews, most notably by the New York Times, praising Britten for his “overpowering inspiration” and composing “at the height of his creative powers.” In addition, Edith Sitwell, the poet of the Canticle III text, was delighted with Britten’s setting.

The full title of the canticle is “Still Falls the Rain—The Raids, 1940, Night and Dawn,” implying not only the traditional connection between hymn and scripture which defines a canticle, but also a direct reference to wartime. Stark, unadorned, and freely set in an irregular meter, the text is at once an allegory of Christ’s passion (“still falls the rain . . . Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the cross”) and a war poem (“dark as the world of man, black as our loss”). The rain is a metaphor for nature, war, and the sufferings of Christ. Yet the text is not merely a lament. As the critic Katherine Anne Porter suggests, Sitwell’s focus optimistically centers upon the “destiny of Man . . . to learn the nature of love and to seek spiritual rebirth.”

Britten’s musical interpretation of the free verse in the text alternates between a declamatory syllabic recitative in the voice and a theme and variations setting in the instruments. In addition, he weaves recurring musical cues into the fabric of the melody, harmony, and rhythm as a response to the themes in the text. These include the descending chromatic figure that he uses in the third verse to highlight important words, a frequently limited melodic range, the transparent accompaniment that draws attention to the text, and shifting rhythmic and metrical patterns. Finally, Britten often relies upon centric rather than functional tonality, meaning that he suggests a note or harmony (all of the variations, for example, end on the note B flat) without relying on standard harmonic progressions. Further, in Canticle III he uses a 10-note atonal series of notes as a basis for melodic construction, revealing the influence of contemporaries such as Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, composers who sought to emancipate tonality from conventional harmonic formulas in favor of developing a new musical language.

Britten’s flexible approach to tonality also applies to his formal arrangements, as one finds in the Phantasy Quartet, Opus 2, written in 1932 to qualify for the Cobbett Chamber Music Prize and dedicated to the oboist Leon Goossens, who premiered the work in London on a radio broadcast with members of the International String Quartet in 1933. Britten arranged the three movements into an architectonic and expanded version of sonata form. Typically, the components of sonata form are in a single movement: modulating expository material, followed by development of the original material, and a restatement or recapitulation of the exposition in a stable key. Britten expands this arrangement into the three movements of the quartet, exposing the thematic material in the first movement, developing in the second, and restating it in the third. As was the case with the Canticle III, Britten suggests rather than asserts his tonalities. The piece begins and ends with an oboe melody, effectively fading into and out of the texture and complementing the harmonic ambiguities throughout the piece.

Alongside the general musical characteristics, the Phantasy is particularly remarkable in that it was one of Britten’s first works to be performed outside of England. He was nineteen when he wrote the piece, and it was so well received that it appeared on a 1934 festival program at the International Society of Contemporary Music in Florence. Although one might be tempted to think of Britten primarily as a composer of vocal music, the Phantasy represents a tendency in his early years to turn to larger instrumental works; eighteen out of his first twenty-five works were for instruments alone.

The flexible approach to form and tonality seen in these works reflect a general trend in composers of the twentieth century and a challenge to traditions of the past. As with the Sitwell canticle text, Britten was often motivated to set poems or texts with modernist themes, and he found his subject in Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. As one author describes, Rimbaud’s poem focus on the “theatricality of life, the chaos of big cities, and the tragic, painful aspect of beauty.” Britten was particularly moved by Rimbaud’s “key to the savage parade” and correspondingly chose it as the motto for his song cycle, completed in 1939. Like the other works on today’s program, Les Illuminations features a conflict of tonalities, often in parallel key signatures set in opposition to each other. To bring out the vivid and often shocking imagery in the text, Britten infuses the music with a rhythmic busyness and bustling texture, often accompanied by harmonies that “collide” into one another, examples of his musical key to the themes of modernity that he pondered and reflected upon in so many of his compositions.