Classical Music

Greeting from Amazon.com Delivers Classical 101

Editors, Robert Levine and Ted Libbey

With Classical 101, Amazon.com's expert editors introduce
music fans to key composers and performers, important
stylistic movements, and milestone recordings in the history
of classical music. In this mailing, contributor Ted Libbey
introduces the genre of chamber music through one of its
supreme exponents, Franz Schubert (1797-1828), with
particular attention to his beloved "Trout" Quintet.

You can find key works by Schubert at
Classical

And you can access an audio tour and essay on Schubert's
"Trout" Quintet at
Classical

******

Prelude:
The Tradition of Chamber Music

Chamber music--music meant to be played in a room rather
than in a church, theater, or large public space--is the
bedrock of the classical repertory. As a genre it embraces
everything from simple pieces for solo instruments to
multimovement compositions for ensembles of a dozen or more,
easily forming the largest and most diverse segment of the
literature. The chamber inventory includes such standard
complements as the instrumental sonata (with or without
keyboard accompaniment), the piano trio, and the string
quartet and quintet, as well as all the ad hoc combinations
of instruments and voices that have struck composers'
fancies over the years.

Nearly every major composer from the 17th century to the
beginning of the 19th produced some chamber music. Many of
the most important chamber works of the 18th century were
the result of princely patronage. But as the 18th century
gave way to the 19th, composers wrote less and less for the
privileged few, more and more for the music-loving multitude.
Then as now, music was the most stimulating form of live
entertainment, and the enthusiasm of the bourgeois public
for opera and symphonic music carried over to chamber music
as well. Mozart and Beethoven, who preferred patronage when
they could get it, adjusted to the changing reality and
aimed much of their chamber music at the ticket-buying
public, which nonetheless contained plenty of connoisseurs.
Their finest efforts--the quintets of Mozart and the string
quartets of Beethoven--were, for all their refinement and
sophistication, decidedly public pieces.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Complete String Quintets
performed by the Grumiaux Trio with Eva Csako and Arpad Gerecz
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000410S/entertainmentsit>

Ludwig van Beethoven, Complete String Quartets
performed by the Emerson String Quartet
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000041KV/entertainmentsit>

Summer Friends:
Schubert's "Trout" Quintet

For Franz Schubert, making music in intimate surroundings
was as natural as breathing. During his youth, what he
enjoyed most were evenings with the family string quartet,
in which his father played the cello, his brothers Ignaz and
Ferdinand the violins, and Franz himself the viola. As an
adult, Schubert was happiest when he was either writing
chamber music or performing it with friends. These evenings
with friends came to be known as "Schubertiades," and
Schubert composed some of his greatest music for them.
Indeed, it is thanks to one of them that we have the most
popular of all Schubert's chamber pieces, the "Trout"
Quintet.

During the summer of 1819, which he spent in the picturesque
Austrian town of Steyr, Schubert enjoyed a number of musical
evenings at the home of Sylvester Paumgartner, an amateur
cellist and chamber-music enthusiast. For one of these
gatherings, Paumgartner commissioned Schubert to compose a
quintet, specifying only that the instrumentation be the
same as that of Johann Nepomuk Hummel's Quintet in E-flat,
Op. 87--for violin, viola, cello, string bass, and piano--
and that the new work contain a set of variations on
Schubert's song "Die Forelle" ("The Trout"), written in 1817
and apparently a great favorite of Paumgartner's.

Schubert responded with one of the most gracious and melodic
works he would ever write, and also one of the cleverest.
Having to compose for such an unusual grouping of
instruments was a real challenge, but the variety of sound
and texture he achieved in all five movements of the quintet
makes it one of the marvels of the chamber literature.

The "Trout" Quintet
performed by Emmanuel Ax, Pamela Frank, Rebecca Young, Yo-
Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000029N0/entertainmentsit>

The "Trout" Quintet
performed by Jaime Laredo, Julius Levine, Philipp Naegele,
Leslie Parnas, and Rudolf Serkin
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000275O/entertainmentsit>

"Death and the Maiden"

The most famous of Schubert's string quartets also gets its
nickname from one of his songs. The Quartet in D minor,
written in 1824, is known as "Death and the Maiden" because
its second movement is a set of variations on the song of
the same title, which Schubert composed in 1817. The music
of the quartet's other movements has a Beethovenian drive
and intensity, but in the variations, as in the song,
Schubert is almost seductive in his lyricism.

String Quartet No. 14 ("Death and the Maiden")
performed by the Emerson String Quartet
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000001G97/entertainmentsit>

Final Blooming

In any survey of Schubert's music, one rule tends to emerge:
the later, the greater. The music of Schubert's final years
(he died in 1828, at the age of 31) is extraordinarily
colorful and intense, surprisingly large in scope, and all
but unparalleled in its vitality, imagination, and
expressiveness. Among the great chamber pieces of this
period are the sonata for arpeggione (a kind of fretted
cello with six strings) and piano. Today, the "Arpeggione"
Sonata--the pairing on our Get Started in Classical "Trout"
disc--is played by violists and cellists, who are grateful
to have even one piece by Schubert in their repertoire,
especially when it's a virtuoso tour de force like this one.

The Piano Trios in B-flat and E-flat, written from 1827 to
1828, are warm, spacious works in which Schubert's melodic
gift is very much in evidence. And then, standing head and
shoulders above everything else, there's the Quintet in C
for two violins, viola, and two cellos--Schubert's last
instrumental work and one of the greatest pieces in the
chamber literature. Schubert's decision to use a second
cello, rather than the second viola characteristic of
Mozart's quintets, lends the piece a darker sound overall
and permits a wonderful exploration of sound and texture,
focusing on the extreme high and low ends of the spectrum.

"Arpeggione" Sonata
performed by Mstislav Rostropovich and Benjamin Britten
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000JXZ3/entertainmentsit>

String Quintet in C-major
performed by the Emerson String Quartet with Mstislav
Rostropovich
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000001GFA/entertainmentsit>

Complete Piano and String Trios
performed by the Beaux Arts Trio and the Grumiaux Trio
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000417B/entertainmentsit>

String Quintet in C-major
performed by the Melos Quartet with Mstislav Rostropovich
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000001G6G/entertainmentsit

******

You'll find more great music, articles, and interviews in
Amazon.com's Classical Music section at
Classical

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