Strings Tell Stories Side by Side



Edvard Grieg
1843-1907

Edvard Grieg
Holberg Suite, Op. 40 (From Holberg's Time)

The most successful and best-known of nineteenth century Scandinavian composers, Edvard Grieg was one of the great exponents of Romantic nationalism. He saw it as his role in life to bring Scandinavian musical and literary culture to the attention of the rest of Europe, and he succeeded in this endeavor. He was most comfortable with and excelled in the smaller musical forms, such as intimate songs and short piano pieces. As composer, pianist and conductor, he became a sought-after fixture in Europe’s music centers. His wife Nina was an accomplished singer, and the two traveled extensively together, popularizing his songs and piano works. In the process he helped bring the writings of Scandinavian poets – the best known being the playwright Henrik Ibsen– to the attention of the rest of Europe.

As an student he had been a failure. He quit school at 15 never to return. Under the sponsorship of Norwegian violinist Ole Bull he was granted a scholarship to the Conservatory in Leipzig but hated his teachers there and never forgave them their conservatism and pedantry. Understandably, he was not too happy with the constraints of the classical sonata type, and of all his surviving output only eight works fall into this category: a youthful symphony, the famous piano concerto, a string quartet, a piano sonata, the three violin sonatas and the cello sonata. In all his other compositions he insisted on the freedom of form so dear to the Romantic tradition.

Grieg composed the Suite From Holberg’s Time in 1884 to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of the Norwegian dramatist Ludvig Holberg. Originally written for the piano, he orchestrated the Suite a year later. In the Suite Grieg tried to recreate past musical styles, especially the suites of the French Baroque keyboard masters, Jean-Philippe Rameau and François Couperin, who were Holberg’s contemporaries.

The Suite comprises four Baroque dances of French origin preceded by a Prelude. However, the style of Domenico Scarlatti and J.S. Bach, born a year after Holberg, can be heard respectively in the toccata-like figuration of the Prelude

and the ornamental melody in the Air.

Listeners of a certain age may recall the Sarabande as the theme music from the television show of the 50s I Remember Mama, about the life of a Norwegian immigrant family in San Francisco.

The Gavotte is probably the most French-sounding of the movements

and the Rigaudon provides a sprightly, although rather inconsequential conclusion.

Throughout the Suite, one never quite loses sight of the fact that it is the work of a nineteenth century composer.



Morten Lauridsen
b. 1943

Morten Lauridsen
O Magnum Mysterium

Transcribed for String Octet by Jameson Platte. There are no audio examples for this work

A recipient of the National medal of Arts and a professor of composition at the University of Southern California for over 30 years, Morten Lauridsen has composed dozens of vocal works, mostly choral, which have become extremely popular, causing him to be named in 2006 “An American Choral Master”. Musicologist and conductor Nick Strimple describes Lauridsen as "the only American composer in history who can be called a mystic, (whose) probing, serene work contains an elusive and indefinable ingredient which leaves the impression that all the questions have been answered...”

Lauridsen composed the a cappella motet O Magnum Mysterium in 1994. He writes: “For centuries, composers have been inspired by the beautiful O Magnum Mysterium text depicting the birth of the newborn King amongst the lowly animals and shepherds. This affirmation of God's grace to the meek and the adoration of the Blessed Virgin are celebrated in my setting through a quiet song of profound inner joy.”

Lauridsen’s setting employs the polyphonic style of the sixteenth century, creating the contemplative atmosphere of a church or monastic chapel.



Richard Strauss
1864-1949

Richard Strauss
Metamorphosen

One of the greatest supporters and benefactors of composers in the twentieth century was conductor and philanthropist Paul Sacher (1906-1999) of Basle, Switzerland. In 1926 he founded the Basle Chamber Orchestra, which specialized in pre-classical and contemporary music (He considered there were enough ensembles performing the Classical and Romantic repertoire.) A few years later he added a chorus to his ensemble. Then, in 1934, he married Maja Stehlin, the wealthy widow of Emmanuel Hoffmann, the son of the founder of Hoffmann-La Roche. Together they commissioned, and he premiered, over 200 works from such composers as Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Arthur Honegger, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten, Pierre Boulez and Richard Strauss.

In July 1944, as Nazi Germany was reaching its apocalypse, Sacher approached the 80-year-old Strauss and commissioned him to write a work for string orchestra for the Zurich Collegium musicum that Sacher had been conducting since 1941. Strauss, isolated under virtual house arrest in his villa in Bavaria, was depressed and despondent over the devastation around him. He was especially appalled by the destruction of the opera houses in Munich and Dresden where he had spent much of his operatic conducting career and where he premiered his own operas. Moreover, he was penniless and the commission was a lifeline. It was the kind of stimulus Strauss needed to write a major composition that he suspected would be his last. He immediately set to work and finished the score in April 1945. Metamorphosen was premiered in Zurich in January 1946.

Strauss scored the work for 23 string instruments – ten violins, five each of violas and cellos and 3 double basses. Each instrument has an independent melodic line, although occasionally instruments are doubled for emphasis. Strauss’s frame of mind can be guessed from thematic references to the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony that permeate the score.

The theme evolves gradually, most of the time as short motivic fragments and rhythmic hints.

Since the title of the work means “transformations,” it is reasonable to ask what is being transformed. Certainly the Beethoven quotation undergoes a transformation, although Strauss himself spoke of it later as “escaping” from his pen before he recognized it for what it was. The quotation, in fact, is nothing more than a brief, but crucial, fragment of Beethoven’s theme. Appended to this motive is a more expansive and lyrical motive that also recurs throughout the work in free variation, and these two elements form the basic thematic structure of the entire work.

On the margins of one of the manuscript pages is a notation: “Trauer um München” (Mourning for Munich) and on the last page where Beethoven ’s theme appears complete in the cellos and double bass, “IN MEMORIAM.”

In addition, there are fragments of musical ideas borrowed from, or recalling, other Beethoven works, such as this motive from the main theme of the adagio sixth movement of String Quartet, Op. 131 that appears at the very beginning of the piece.

Despite the pall of despair, however, there occurs in this long work musical evidence of something emotionally uplifting. Strauss introduces this vision around a quarter of the way through the work, after which it struggles to affirm the transcendence of the German idealism exemplified by Beethoven and Goethe.

In the most profound sense, it is the struggle between idealism and despair that constitutes the musical transformations.

Strauss’s biographer, Norman del Mar has also noted that during the worst years of the war, Strauss immersed himself in rereading the complete works of Goethe, a long quotation from whose self-analytical late poem, “Niemand wird sich Selber kennen,” (no one can really know himself), Strauss copied into the manuscript of Metamorphosen. Yet another metamorphosis, of course, is that of the icons of German culture, polluted by the Nazis and destroyed by Allied bombers. Strauss’ letters during the composition of Metamorphosen attest to his despair at each new wave of destruction.

Metamorphosen was not Strauss’s last orchestral work. In the summer of 1945, an exile in Switzerland, he met oboist John de Lancie, at the time an American GI, who found the courage to suggest to the famous composer that he write an oboe concerto. "I asked him if, in view of the numerous beautiful, lyric solos for oboe in almost all of his works, he had ever considered writing a concerto for oboe," de Lancie recalled later. "He answered no, and there was no more conversation on the subject." But a year later the Oboe Concerto was ready and was premiered in Zürich. De Lancie went on to become principal oboist with the Philadelphia Orchestra and then Director of the Curtis Institute.