LAST WORDS: L. Couperin & F. Schubert
The Four Nations Ensemble
Saturday, September 17th at 2:30 PM
Germantown, NY
THE ARTISTS
Krista Bennion Feeney, violin
Chloe Fedor, violin
Nicole Divall, viola
Keiran Campbell, cello
Loretta O'Sullivan, cello
Andrew Appel, harpsichord
THE PROGRAM
Pieces de Clavecin of Louis Couperin
Prélude--Allemande--Courante--Sarabande--Branle de Basque
Chaconne--Tombeau de Mons. Blancrocher
Quintet for strings in C major, D. 956 of Franz Schubert
Allegro ma non troppo
Adagio
Scherzo: Presto Trio Andante sostenuto
Finale: Allegretto
We listen with unique attention to the late works, the last works of composers we admire.
The 9th Symphony, the Jupiter, the Art of Fugue, Turandot…as we experience these works, we are aware that we are listening to final statements, enriched by a lifetime of evolution, of magnificent mastery. These works are testaments. Bach lays out monumental genius in counterpoint in his Art of Fugue. It is the culmination and full flowering of musical exploration and experiment and serves as a lexicon of complex and beguiling composition. Puccini is at his height of infectious melodic and vocal beauty balanced with impressive modernist orchestral interludes suggesting the direction to which Italian opera might have gone. Mozart combines old fugue and modern sonata to carve an abstract music, purely instrumental works rich in drama and idea. Beethoven, in his last symphony tells us that this form can no longer exist without the inclusion of poetry and singing. In his “close to death” hands, the symphony becomes philosophy and struggle, a plea for brotherhood—the goal of the revolution that formed his values as a young man.
Yet, most compelling and moving are the final works of composers who died too young; who had miniature spans to evolve and yet changed the course of music or charted a new direction that would have redrawn our musical world. Pergolesi, gone at 26, moved the operatic needle making the complexities of the human condition the point of opera, pathing the way to The Marriage of Figaro through the Serva Padrona. The overpowering expression in Mozart’s Requiem makes us weep…we weep because of the shared experience of loss and the immensity of death that inspired Mozart. We weep because the unfinished work trailing off in the Lacrimosa underlines the unfinished life of the 36-year-old master. His immense talent makes us forget that he never reached maturity. As the manuscript of the Requiem fades into silence, we wonder what would have filled that silence had Mozart lived to 65.
No composer suffering from an early demise has captured our hearts as much as Schubert.
In his 31 years he filled a library with songs, chamber works, symphonies and, yes, theater music and operas. His unfinished life is underlined by his most famous work, his Unfinished Symphony.
There are many reasons to admire and love Schubert. He was an outsider and a subversive young man. In an anti-Semitic world he set a psalm in Hebrew for a cantor friend. His homosexuality in early 19th century Vienna must have been a heavy cross to bear, yet his ability to dissolve the barriers in gender expression enriches his music and expands his reach. The Shepherd on the Rock, one of his last works, is the lament of a shepherd to be sung by a woman. Like Henry James who brings so much clarity and honesty to his heroines, Schubert is fluid. He is equally the heart of maiden or mensch.
In 1828, in the last year of his life, Schubert worked furiously at composing and left us some of the most beautiful, moving, and transcendent music in the European canon. Large scale songs, three powerful piano sonatas, and the String Quintet are united by his heroic effort to work when pain and weakness and delirium were constant. That heroism is felt and heard throughout these last works.
More important is his refusal to abandon beauty and to submit to his pain or disappointments. Other than his illness, he had received refusals from publishers for works we cherish today. Too hard to play or too long were their complaints. Yet, unlike Beethoven who enlists us into a torturous war with the world, with fate, with God, Schubert will not draft us in his grueling fight. Tears are there. The tears flow freely but they become vessels for and reflectors of shimmering, heavenly light and relentless beauty. In the most heartbreaking of moments we are overwhelmed with an exquisite world of melody, harmony, and instrumental sound.
His friends, his witnesses in those last months tell us that he alternated between delirium and industrious work. In his delirium he was always singing. Was his song that of the elegant and delightful life of Vienna, of the promenades through parks, and of the variety of music that entered everyone’s ears, from ballroom dances to the wild, emotional world of neighboring Hungary? The Quintet's Finale with its lyrical duets for violins or cellos, and its dancing spaciousness foreshadows, possibly overshadows Brahms.
There is really nothing the matter with me, only I am so exhausted I feel as if I were going to fall through the bed.
Is this exhaustion the inspiration for the Quintet’s adagio that halts all time? In listening to this movement that presents an almost motionless mist, do we not want to lay our weary bodies in comfort and allow the slow changes of harmony and color to enter and heal our spirits? In the midst of this so profoundly tragic music, where does Schubert find and offer the shimmering light that radiates from each measure? Is it, as it also inspired the painter Casper David Friedrich, a Catholic faith that assured him salvation even as he suffers delirium and the harsh recognition that he would soon leave the world? Bach gives us grace through strength in his Mass, his Dona Nobis Pacem. Does Schubert unveil the promise of paradise as he works through his physical purgatory? As we witness his sunset he composes music with radiance and quiet glory. His frailty and young, sick body fills us with regret, yet his unbroken spirit, no matter what our creeds, gives us hope and fills us with gratitude.
Louis Couperin witnessed the shocking accident that befell his lutenist friend, Charles Fleury, known as Mons. Blancrocher.
Fleury tumbled down a flight of stairs and was fatally wounded. He died in the arms of Johann Froberger. Four composers wrote elegies or tombeau to honor the musician and express their despair, their loss. Louis Couperin, who would die soon after at 35, wrote the most touching, most beautifully expressed of these honorific works. With an economy of means, a delicate and exquisite sense of harmony, and a sensitivity that is characteristic of all his music, Couperin’s Tombeau serves to express our own melancholy when considering the many composers who left before being able to fulfill their promise.
Louis Couperin’s works are found in a few manuscripts from the 17th century. He marks the beginning of the Couperin dynasty of musicians with harpsichord pieces that were the pride of his nephew Francois Couperin Le Grand. The fragile elegance of Louis’ melodic style define exquisite and precious and the contrasting vivid improvisatory imagination in his préludes non measurés (unmeasured preludes) set him aside as the greatest composer in this unique genre.
Andrew Appel
September 1, 2022
Craryville, NY