PRESENTS
Fauré Quartet
Dirk Mommertz, piano
Sascha Frömbling, viola
Erika Geldsetzer, violin
Konstantin Heidrich, cello
Saturday, February 6, 2016
7:30 p.m.
Kathleen P. Westby Pavilion
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
Salon Concert
Piano Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 26
Allegro non troppo
Poco adagio
Scherzo: Poco allegro — Trio
Finale: Allegro
Johannes Brahms
(1833–1897)
The Fauré Quartet’s appearance is generously underwritten by the Charles and Marion Weber Foundation.
Chamber Music Tulsa’s concerts and educational outreaches are presented with the assistance of the Oklahoma Arts Council.
About the Program
by Jason S. Heilman, Ph.D., © 2016
fered a debilitating nervous breakdown and was subsequently confined to a sanitarium until his death in 1856.
But Brahms had a much longer and more intimate relationship with Schumann’s widow, Clara Wieck Schumann: when Robert entered the sanitarium, Brahms
moved into a room in the Schumanns’ house and served
as the surrogate head of the household. Clearly Brahms
was infatuated with Clara during this time, but she did
not seem to reciprocate his feelings. Certainly their relationship would have been complicated: Clara, some fourteen years older than Brahms, was one of the leading virtuoso pianists of the nineteenth century, plus she was
married to the most famous German composer of the era.
After Robert’s death, things cooled off between the two of
them. Brahms left Clara’s house and returned to Hamburg, while Clara resumed her concert career. Although
the two stayed close as friends, Brahms ultimately remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.
Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg (Germany)
Died April 3, 1897, in Vienna (Austria)
Piano Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 26
Composed in 1861; duration: 50 minutes
Johannes Brahms was certainly one of the most complex
figures in music history. Both he and his music seemed to
stand apart from the era in which he lived. But while
Brahms may have preferred the idea of living in the past
alongside his idols, Mozart and Beethoven, his music just
as often pointed the way to the future. The darling of
nineteenth-century Europe’s conservative musical establishment was subsequently held up as an exemplar for the
music of the future by Arnold Schoenberg and his iconoclastic Second Viennese School. As a person, Brahms was
equally contradictory. Possessed of strong opinions, he
was often brash in expressing them — and quick to make
enemies, as he did among the adherents of Liszt and
Wagner. Yet at the same time, Brahms’s deference to the
music of Beethoven bordered on a neurosis that nearly
halted his compositional career during a particularly
formative stage.
The years immediately after Brahms left Düsseldorf were
a low point in the young composer’s life. He quickly found
Robert Schumann’s glowing endorsement to be both a
blessing and a curse, as it invited intense criticism from
Schumann’s enemies. Brahms ended up retreating from
public view, taking a job as a choir director in the sleepy
German town of Detmold. During that time, Brahms’s
disdain for the music of his own time, particularly that of
Franz Liszt and his followers, drove him to idolize the
masterworks of the past. Yet his increasing reverence for
Beethoven led to a kind of paralysis: Brahms refused to
complete a symphony or a string quartet for decades out
of fear of being compared unflatteringly to the master
himself. Instead, he found new and unusual formats in
which to compose — and it was in these other formats
that Brahms ultimately found his own voice. Instead of a
symphony, which he would not complete until 1876, he
composed a pair of orchestral serenades in 1858 and
1859, which allowed him to practice his orchestration
without any lofty expectations. By the same token, in lieu
of a string quartet, Brahms wrote a string sextet in 1860
that would be hailed as his first mature chamber work.
He took another leap forward in the very next year by
completing two quartets for piano and strings — both of
which were inspired by the piano virtuosity of Clara
Schumann.
Born into an impoverished family in Hamburg, Brahms’s
first music teacher was his father, a struggling musician.
By the time he was a teenager, Brahms was already helping to support his family by playing piano in seedy
dockside bars. In 1853, at the age of twenty, he took a job
as the accompanist for a Hungarian violinist on a concert
tour of Germany. The tour, however, came to an abrupt
end at its stop in Weimar. There, Brahms met the leading
piano virtuoso of the day, Franz Liszt, and was thoroughly
unimpressed. He considered Liszt to be no more than a
hollow charlatan, possessing a showman’s talent without
any real substance to his music. Brahms parted company
with his violinist — a devoted Liszt fan — after he reportedly fell asleep during Liszt’s performance of his famous
B-minor Piano Sonata. Fortuitously, he met another rising Hungarian violinist in Weimar: Joseph Joachim, who
turned out to be as skeptical of Liszt as Brahms was. Just
a few years older than Brahms, Joachim already had numerous contacts in the German musical establishment.
Sensing a kindred spirit, he offered to help advance
Brahms’s career by writing him a letter of introduction to
another prominent composer: Robert Schumann, the
founder of German romanticism.
As a composer, Brahms was not one to revise a single
piece into perfection. Instead, whenever he grew dissatisfied with the direction a work was taking, he was more
likely to throw it out and start over then to rework it.
Sometimes this meant that Brahms would be working on
several drafts of pieces in the same genre at the same time
and, every now and then, this yielded two finished works
where only one was intended. Remarkably, when this
happened, the two resulting pieces contrasted markedly
from one another. This can be seen, for example, in
Brahms’s first two completed string quartets, which he
Arriving at Schumann’s home in Düsseldorf just a few
weeks later, Brahms must have made quite an impression, as shortly after their meeting, Schumann penned an
editorial for his magazine, the Neue Zeitshrift für Musik,
declaring Brahms to be a composer destined to “give ultimate expression to the era.” Schumann soon became a
valuable early mentor to Brahms, but that mentorship
would be short-lived. The very next year, Schumann suf2
published as his Opus 51 in 1873: one was harsher and
more Beethovenlike, while the other was almost Schubertian in its lyricism. Similarly, the two piano quartets
Brahms produced in 1861 complemented one another
particularly well. The G-minor Piano Quartet, Op. 25, has
a more extroverted character and a strong Hungarian accent, while the A-major Piano Quartet, Op. 26 — the piece
featured on this evening’s program — is at the same time
more introverted and more ambitious. Its grandiose
scope serves as a broad canvas for the full range of
Brahms’s compositional ingenuity.
zo movement. Rather than following a simple dance
form, Brahms uses its two gentle yet jocular themes as the
basis of a sonata-form movement in miniature, complete
with development and recapitulation. The trio section,
with its bold, imitative counterpoint, represents an extended interlude before the scherzo repeats wholesale.
Brahms is often remembered for his arching melodic
lines, yet his music often had a striking rhythmic inventiveness, as the finale demonstrates. The main theme of
this allegro movement has the character of a vigorous
peasant dance, only put slightly off-kilter by its syncopated accents. Expressive interludes provide contrast as the
movement builds to its animated conclusion.
As is typical for Brahms, the A-major Piano Quartet is
cast in four movements. The allegro non troppo first
movement opens with a gently undulating melody in the
piano. In its impassioned restatement, it becomes the
epic first theme in the movement’s sonata form and the
motivic kernel for much of the movement’s development.
This is soon contrasted by a lyric second theme, which
features Brahms’s characteristically clashing two-againstthree cross rhythms. The development of these two
themes builds to a stirring climax before they are restated
in their entirety to close the movement. The poco adagio
second movement is deeply atmospheric, exploring the
darker tones of the relative minor key. Brahms’s friend
Joachim was correct to praise its “ambiguous passion,”
which is heightened by the soaring main theme. Brahms’s
inventiveness is on full display in the poco allegro scher-
In 1862, Brahms played the piano part in the premiere of
this quartet, which took place on his first-ever visit to Vienna. The performance was a resounding success, such
that the otherwise sober Viennese musical press was
moved to name Brahms as Beethoven’s heir. Given that
reception, it is hardly surprising that Brahms would relocate to Vienna permanently just a few years later. In
1868, he would go on to his greatest public triumph with
his German Requiem. This success at last allowed his
anxiety to subside and, over the course of the next decade, he was able to complete his first string quartets as
well as his First Symphony. Finally, Brahms had emerged
from Beethoven’s shadow to make his mark on music history — in Beethoven’s own adopted hometown, no less.
Fauré Quartet
The demands have changed. Whoever wants to play
chamber music today can no longer be limited to the rules
from decades ago. The expectations regarding the diversity of repertoire have changed, which creates room for ensembles like the Fauré Quartet, which has established
itself as one of the world’s leading piano quartets within
just a few years. Dirk Mommertz (piano), Erika Geldsetzer (violin), Sascha Frömbling (viola) and Konstantin
Heidrich (cello) are taking advantage of the opportunities
arising from these developments. They are discovering
new soundscapes in chamber music and performing
compositions beyond the mainstream repertoire.
Competition, the German Record Critics Prize, the Duisburg Music Prize and the Schleswig-Holstein Brahms
Prize.
The musicians of the Fauré Quartet are pioneers in many
respects. After meeting at the beginning of their studies in
Karlsruhe in 1995, during the 150th anniversary year of
Gabriel Fauré, they quickly realized that this combination
allowed them to explore new repertoires. In 2006, they
signed a contract with Deutsche Grammophon, promoting them to the Champions League of the classical music
business. They made highly regarded benchmark recordings of works by Mozart, Brahms, and Mendelssohn, as
well as pop songs from Peter Gabriel and Steely Dan.
They are visionaries in their approach and highly regarded for their experiments and discoveries, whether they
are performances with the NDR Big Band, collaborations
with artists like Rufus Wainwright or Sven Helbig, appearances in clubs like the Berghain, Cocoon Club, or Le
Poisson Rouge in New York, or TV shows for KiKA or
“Rhapsody in School”, which get children excited about
chamber music. The release of their album “Popsongs” in
2009 created a great deal of buzz in the press and the
public. In the following year, the ensemble was honored
with an ECHO Klassik award for their “classical music
without boundaries”, their second award following their
recording of Brahms’ piano quartets (Chamber Music
Recording of the Year, 2008). Other prizes include the
German Music Competition, the ensemble prize from
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival and International
Worldwide tours have raised their profile abroad, and
have allowed them to pass on their skills to students in
international masterclasses. The members teach at the
universities of Berlin and Essen. They also serve as the
Artistic Directors of Festspielfrühling Rügen, and as
Quartet in Residence at the University of Music Karlsruhe. During their tours, the musicians appear in the
world’s most important chamber music venues, including
the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Alte Oper Frankfurt,
Berlin Philharmonie, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and
Wigmore Hall in London, where they appear virtually
every year. All these diverse artistic ingredients come together to form a unique profile for this unparalleled
chamber music ensemble.
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