Revolution and Romanticism

Thursday, June 20 | 7:00 p.m.

St. Hugo of the Hills
Sponsored by Nancy Duffy

Artists | Alessio Bax, Paul Watkins, Michael Collins, Hesper Quartet

PROGRAM NOTES | © Ty Bouque 2024

Chicken and the egg, these two. Whether the Romantic spirit manifests in the aftermath of national uprisings in France and America at the end of the 18th century or whether revolutionary tendencies are a natural byproduct of the emergent prioritization of the emotional subject that Romanticism ushered in is a hard knot to parse. In either case, it is impossible to speak of Romanticism without the cannon fire that heralded its century, and the pair have the uncanny ability to conjure up Victor- Hugo-esque images of confident and hotblooded youth leading from the heart with the flag of liberation draped over their shoulders. Romanticism, it seems, always announces itself with a fight.

By that criterion, then, it would appear as if we’ve chosen the wrong Beethoven sonatas for this program. (Tonight is the second of four concerts exploring that five- part cycle.) With a title like Revolution and Romanticism, the third sonata—central to Beethoven’s middle-aged “Heroic” period, full of brash and ostentatious displays of power and thrill, totally devoid of a slow movement, and virtuosic to a fault—would be the obvious assignment. But if we refocus our understanding of those two words away from models of muscularity and assurance and towards the murky depths of the unknown and the unstable, Sonatas 4 and 5 will seep into our field of vision—they tend to be slippery as it is.

Revolution is an act of utopic thinking. The refusal to settle for the confines of the present and instead commit, without promise of return, to the horizonal possibilities of what might be is a gesture of projection beyond the limits of the known. That guiding principle—of longing for a not-yet-here despite overwhelming instabilities—elides revolution with Romanticism, the latter’s depthless excavation of subjective selfhood itself a reaching towards the ineffable and inexplicable. Rationalism, the Classical dictum against which the 18th century rebelled, was defined by hard boundaries and clear-cut lines in the sand. Romanticism turned instead to dark corners and the nebulousness of being: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, often characterized as the pinnacle of that epoch, is first and foremost about what cannot be touched and what is always known too late.

The pair of cello sonatas that comprise Beethoven’s Opus 102 singlehandedly inaugurate the composer’s late period, marked by extreme experimentation at the limits of form, chromatic instability, and a cloudy ambivalence and emotional unsettledness that permeates even the bright spots. Several of Beethoven’s original reviewers were dismayed at the inscrutability of these new works: the crowd-pleasing fanfare of his “Heroic” years seemed to have given way to an uncompromisingly mature sensibility that demanded more intellectual rigor, more confusion of their audience. The composer—nearly deaf, aging fast, and fiercely independent—seemed not to care. The project had become an entirely personal one and, from this point on, Beethoven would write music almost exclusively for himself.

This becomes evident in the fourth sonata when we examine pace and rate. In the opening introduction, for instance, almost nothing happens. The music spins and weaves about itself quite a bit, but formally it goes nowhere. Beethoven is maddeningly patient, willing to stretch into impossibly long—minutes long—phrases. As listeners we are accustomed to change taking place often enough that we can discern a structure. Beethoven does the opposite. This music obeys no dictate to ever move on. Instead, it searches into finer and finer grains of itself, leaving material only after it has fleshed out every detail of what can be known about its behavior in the environment. This temporal revolution—as in the spinning or the turning of the clock— is glacial, so as to allow true Romanticism the space to stake its searching claim.

Beethoven’s fifth and final cello sonata is uncommon as the only one of its breed with a true slow movement. Following on from an unbearably stark, almost tersely formal first movement—the melody there built on scalar bare bones—the prolonged melancholy of this central movement spins an endless thread like molten silver from the belly of the instrument that offers no contrast as an escape. This, as well as the exhaustive fugue that ends the work, amounts to a refusal to coddle or comfort the listener, to “give the people what they want.” Instead, each phrase sinks deeper into the mind of its creator, a grey glow pulsing low in an impenetrable cave.

We tend to associate Romanticism with a kind of Mahlerian catharsis—organs, drums, chorus, and the opening of the heavens—but the reality is far more frequently occluded and evasive. Truly Romantic music would be so personal, so idiosyncratic, so rigorously interior that it would remain inscrutable to anyone but its author; Beethoven, in this most revolutionary gesture, comes damn near close to achieving that result.

After intermission we’ll end the program with a work written in the twilight of Romanticism’s sun. In 1895, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a student of composition at the Royal College of Music, where he was studying under the prominent Irishman Charles Villiers Stanford. For a class on chamber music, the students were invited to attend a performance of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, and after the final cadence, Stanford issued the following challenge: “no composer now could write such a composition without escaping the influence of Brahms.” Three months later, Coleridge-Taylor put a double bar-line on his response. This—our second in a series devoted to the clarinet quintet—is thus a conscious act of revolt, and a successful one at that. Coleridge-Taylor manages to sidestep all the pitfalls of luscious texture and soloistic primus inter pares that made the Brahms so popular, and instead pulls off a sprightly and uncommonly dexterous work whose real maturity is measured by its reserve.

The defining hallmark of Romanticism is a prioritization of the individual above all else. Which is why love is such a potent theme among these artists: few experiences reveal the Self with more profound clarity than the shadowy presence of the Other who can never truly be known. The Romantic tendency towards subjective interiority is thus often undertaken in proximity to some Othering object, against which the self can more clearly measure the movements of its soul.

For Coleridge-Taylor, that Other here is Brahms. It is by explicit negation that he comes into his own, by not being Brahms that his own musical subjectivity is unveiled. That the quintet is among the earliest mature works in Coleridge-Taylor’s short output is no accident: it is in the dawning awareness of not being the Beloved that we come to understand what selfhood truly means. By forcing himself to revolutionize the habits of the clarinet quintet away from a work he admires, the solutions become deeply personal and idiosyncratic and, more than revealing something about the medium, reveal his extreme capacity for nuance, subtlety, and a kind of floating beauty that Brahms would never have dared imagine.

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We have not solved the chicken/egg dilemma. But tonight we will, I hope, get a glimpse into the terrain that Revolution and Romanticism both occupy, where investment in the unknown, a turn towards interiority, and a love that pushes away in the same gesture as the embrace are the searchlights for humanity’s most inarticulable experiences. © Ty Bouque 2024