Schubert

You might not know that (as far as I know, which is not a lot) both 'Schubert' and 'Schumann' mean 'Cobbler,' in German. It makes very little sense for me to bring that up, because very few of you younger people have had any experience with cobblers at all!

A few years ago, there was a hole in the sole of my shoe.  It was a pair of Clarks—or another make, equally good—and just on Market Street, a block and a half from my apartment, was a shoe repairman, or to call him by the traditional name of his profession, a cobbler.  To make a long story short, he said—from his point of view—the shoe was good enough to repair.  (A cheap pair would be thrown out and replaced, you see.)  It cost about $40, which I cheerfully paid.  A new pair would have been outside my budget.

By the time Schubert was born, the literal meaning of his family name would have had nothing to do with the occupation of the family, so the little anecdote is quite irrelevant.

Schubert composed lots of fabulous music, but the best known work is probably the famous  Unfinished Symphony, or Symphony no. 8 in B minor. 

The first item on my agenda is to get you listening to this symphony!  Schubert wrote lovely, melodic sonatas and songs, and piano pieces.  I'm ashamed to say that I'm not familiar at all with them!  But my parents—mostly my Dad—would put on the Unfinished, when I was in elementary school, and the tunes stuck with me. In fact, one time he participated in producing a play, about Elijah and the priests of Baal, and they used the Unfinished as incidental music.  Furthermore, our family music box was an old HMV phonograph, and the records were what are called '78s' these days; and only held about 10 minutes of music!  So Dad did a lot of changing discs.  (These were platters made of Bakelite, a very early kind of plastic.  Very soon, once LPs were invented, they (the LPs) were made out of Vinyl.)

Now, I don't know a lot about what was going on with Schubert while he was writing this Symphony; those sorts of details help many people to relate to a piece.  I'm just going to describe my own reactions to the first movement. 

It begins with the main theme played quietly—and ominously—deep in the bass.  Then some woodwinds (flutes, oboes, clarinets) enter, and things seem to be going swimmingly, until it's all Interrupted by some loud, full orchestra chords.

Don't get me wrong; the alternation of quiet passages and the loud chords is very musical; I can't describe it better than that.  In some works, it almost seems as if the loud interruptions are there solely for their shock value.  I don't think this is true ĥere.  It's almost as if Schubert had to have these loud punctuations exactly where he put them.  There's a lot of drama in the movement.  Maybe someone was teasing him about not being able to compose a dramatic Symphony!  Well, he certainly showed them.  The music sounds almost angry at times, and really serene at other times.  The serene parts are just fabulously lovely; perhaps they would not be as lovely if not for the contrast with the loud and noisy parts.  Stormy is the one word that describes this movement.  It ends with three huge crashing, angry, almost despairing chords. 

The second movement opens as though it was the sun rising after a huge thunderstorm.  (You can easily see why my dad and his friends chose this Symphony for their play!  For those not in the know, there was a weather competition, where stormy weather was involved.)  I'm going to stop there; you don't need Cliff Notes for this second movement.  This might not be good news, but: there are only two movements.  Most symphonies have four movements, this is why this work was nicknamed The Unfinished.  Lots of people agree, though, that it's perfectly fine the way it is.  So listen to it on your own, and take ownership of this wonderful, tuneful Symphony.

Maurice Ravel: Couperin Suite for Piano

Marice Ravel is one of my favorite composers.  I'm not so crazy about his works as to love every one of them.  (Bach is a favorite, too, but I don't love every piece by him, either; the same with Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Debussy, Wagner, and so on.  But with Ravel, I've liked everything from him I've heard so far.)

One of the earliest pieces of Ŕavel's that I learned to like was Pour le tombeau de Couperin, a collection of orchestral pieces, in celebration of the French composer Francois Couperin.  I have heard hardly any music by this older composer, but evidently Ravel admired him. 

The Tombeau that Ravel wrote, though, was fabulous.  In contrast to the music of Bach and Wagner that I liked as a teenager, that was filled with the exalted German harmony that was easy to love, Ravel's music was light, and full of fairy filigree!  You could imagine tiny fairy people dancing, skipping to this music. 

I then learned that the few orchestral pieces in the orchestral  Tombeau were an arrangement of an earlier piano work by Ravel, and that early version had more movements. 

That did make sense, because Couperin was a composer of keyboard works, harpsichord, and maybe piano.  I recently heard this piano (original) version, and I fell in love all over again. 

I urge my readers to listen to this work for themselves; skip over the movements that aren't to your liking.  There's nothing that says you have to like every movement of a multi-movement work.  Here's a link to the piece I was listening to:

Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin

Mendelssohn's Octet for Strings

I featured the Scherzo from this work in the radio show Archie's Archives.  This afternoon, though I got a desire to hear the whole thing—four movements—in its entirety.  Somehow I had a CD of it in our car, so we could listen to it on long journeys.  I must have listened to this CD, because I was familiar with both the first movement and the third movement (the Scherzo, which is especially famous).

Mendelssohn is a composer whom I especially like; very possibly because of he having written this very Octet.  Musicologists note that octet that had been written by other composers, before this one, were actually two quartets, seated across from one another, playing antiphonally.  (I'll explain that another time.)  Most importantly, Mendelssohn is said to have instructed that this octet was to be played not antiphonally, but as if all the players constituted a tiny orchestra.

Mendelssohn wrote a lot of chamber music,  that is, Trios, Quartets, Quintets, Duets, etc.  Every weekend, they had a concert night in the Mendelssohn household, which is a huge incentive for the young folk to compose their own music to be performed at these musical evenings.  (The Octet was composed when Mendelssohn was 18.)  Felix and his sister, Fanny, were both accomplished instrumentalists.  In fact, Fanny was also a composer.  Felix's string quartets are among the best known string quartets we have, together with this of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.  (Shortly after Haydn's time, lots of composers began writing String quartets.  The reason being that any group of friends, two of whom could play violin, and one play the viola, and one play the cello, could form a string quartet, and frequently did.  All these amateur String quartets were on the lookout for music to play, and anyone who composed a string quartet was reasonably sure of getting it performed fairly promptly.  It's no fun writing a String quartet if nobody plays it, I can tell you.)

One of the important aspects of a String quartet is: counterpoint.  This is a hard property of a piece to describe, but it makes a piece so much more interesting to listen to!  And Mendelssohn was a master of introducing just enough counterpoint to make his music interesting. 

[Bach, writing music some decades before, was a master of counterpoint.  Audiences of the late 1700s found so much counterpoint difficult to tolerate, and Mendelssohn found just the right degree of counterpoint that was pleasing to audiences of his time, and even our time.]

In the recording I own, the First Movement was the longest, about 15 minutes long; each of the others were about 6 minutes long.