Festival in Residence: Ann Arbor
Friday, June 13; 7:30PM
© Ty Bouque
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Tomorrow’s is the program titled Cornerstone, but tonight is the closest to a linchpin. The three composers on offer tonight are ferociously canon-bound, all, by different means but with no less sincerity, foundational to what came in their wake. Bach and Haydn are intuitive choices for the edifice of this thing we call classical music, although it is Shostakovich that tonight appears in his most canonized robes. And it is on such sedimented historical assurances we purchase a mode of listening tonight. This program, which shares no real thematic except good classical music, becomes an exercise in a brief material history. Tonight we use the assumption of good to ask more probing questions about how economic conditions encode themselves in scores, how creativity adapts to market forces, and how the establishment of canons themselves in turn become new conditions for creativity.
Much ink has been spilled about the timeline of Bach’s viola da gamba sonatas. For many years, the best musicological guesses placed them somewhere during his years in Köthen, where the court cellist Christian Ferdinand Abel (also a gifted gambist) was presumed as dedicatee. Abel, who was also behind the six suites for cello that have so impacted our musical world, seemed an obvious choice for a less-than-obvious score. And indeed that may still have been the case, but revisions to the timeline came on the discovery of the Trio Sonata for Two Flutes and Basso Continuo, identical in every way but itself bearing equal evidence of having been arranged from something else. That first instrumentation remains lost. And so the revised date and placement put the Sonata newly in Leipzig somewhere in the 1730s. There, Bach was serving as music director for a series of professional chamber music recitals—not unlike the one in which you’re currently sitting—at which a work demanding this technical proficiency would have been perfectly acceptable. In Köthen, where more amateur musicians (excepting Abel) were employed, it would have stuck out as an extreme and indulgent ask.
We tend to treat Bach now as holy, pure music flowing from the fount. But the Sonata is evidence of the working conditions of professional musicians in the 18th century and, as a result, betrays how the valuation of genius has changed our perception of the notion of work of art with time. This sonata is a copy of a copy; Bach is recycling old material to get a job done. Today we hear it with ears entrained by nostalgia and social cachet and so gasp at divine inspiration; the reality was of a father who, to pay bills, rewrote an old ditty for an instrument on the cusp of archaism because he was asked. The glorious art part was our
making, not his.
Haydn more clearly troubles the compositional economy. Tonight’s is the 25th installment in what would ultimately be 45 piano trios—a staggering number of works in a single genre. To that end, number 25 isn’t particularly remarkable, at least not any more so than the rest of the piano trios, or the rest of Haydn for that matter, who is himself generally remarkable. It is a good work but not groundbreaking—Mozart’s K.542 piano trios, written the same year, are the ones credited with actually redrawing the rules of the genre—and as such its listening is eminently pleasurable without being shattering. Such is the consequence of financial arrangements available to composers at the time: Haydn wrote the 25th while still music director at the wealthy house of Esterházy, where his responsibility was to provide continuous freshness. In such an isolated and continuous job, one can understand why simplicity and similarity became second nature.
But dig a little deeper, and the work turns up encoded histories otherwise invisible to the ear. The educational economy for performers in Haydn’s day was exceptionally stratified. Virtuoso pianists were in abundance, but the skills in string departments left much to be desired. Haydn can be here spotted writing to his players. The piano part (particularly crisp, having been written for the 18th century pianoforte’s less resonant attack) bears much of the musical brunt, with the violin tracing out its prominent lines and the cello supporting in the bass. Occasionally—as in the shuddering interjections in the third-movement rondo—the strings provide texture more than timbre, but on the whole they play relatively within the lines. Social priorities—the keyboard as the age’s most respectable instrument, worthy of lifelong study—embed themselves silently but certainly.
The circumstances of the Shostakovich Piano Quintet, meanwhile, bear witness to an age in which the canon of classical music is itself an active force in the compositional economy. Shostakovich was commissioned by a string quartet called the Beethoven Quartet to write a work in which, old-style, the composer could play the piano. History is, already, pregnant here. The result is a work of chamber music in homage to the very history of its form. The quintet practically bleeds reference—the very opening is a prelude and fugue with a knowing nod to Bach, while later, the intermezzo will quote Bach directly, alongside Purcell and Grieg. Much of its arresting thrill for the modern listener is in catching all the echoes of eras past as they refract through Shostakovich’s eye. The audible weight of history is by 1940 measurable as its own value system and paid out as such: the work won Shostakovich the Stalin Prize and 100,000 rubles, often cited as the highest cash award ever given for a work of chamber music.
All of which is to say that the historical edifice we treat as unshakable is itself only the product of a series of happenstances, intuitions, accidents, and invisible social forces well outside the “genius” of the creator. This thing we treat as canon and absolutely fixed could have, a hundred-thousand times before, turned out to be any other way. Too often we assume the m
conditions of material histories through which that value was purchased and renewed over time. We cannot take the preciousness of our classical cathedral for granted: that worth was accrued by circumstances and pressures well beyond the scale of what you or I can ever fully know.