Notes on the Program by DR. RICHARD E. RODDA
Serenade for Two Violins and Viola, Op. 12
Zoltán Kodály
Born December 16, 1882 in Kecskemét, Hungary.
Died March 6, 1967 in Budapest.
Composed in 1919-20.
Duration: 20 minutes
It took a world war to destroy the millennium-old Habsburg Empire, but when the Viennese
government was finally dissolved in 1918, political changes in Eastern Europe came quickly. Despite
strong challenges over the years to their authority, the Habsburg emperors had ruled Hungary since the
early 16th century, and the Hungarians gladly threw off the ancient yoke at the end of the First World
War—the Hungarian Republic was declared on November 16, 1918. However, the communist fervor that
had erupted into revolution in Russia the year before quickly spread to Hungary, and Béla Kun
attempted to found a Hungarian Soviet Republic the following March. That effort also failed, and
Admiral Horthy brought back a form of monarchy under his own totalitarian rule in 1920. During the
short-lived 1918 Republic, Zoltán Kodály was appointed Deputy Director of the National Academy of
Music in Budapest, and he set about instituting major reforms in the school’s curriculum based on the
integration of native folk music and culture into the course of study. Amid the turbulent political
maneuvering, the violinist Jenö Hubay had been passed over for a substantial position and he retreated to
Switzerland. When the Republic collapsed, Hubay was recalled and named director of the academy.
Kodály became his target as a symbol of those who had held office under the brief revolutionary regime.
Kodály was charged with a variety of anti-Hungarian offenses, stripped of his administrative post, barred
from teaching, and subjected to no fewer than 12 hearings in the space of six months to determine the
nature of his patriotism. His international reputation, just then beginning to flourish, was stymied. It was
not until 1922 that his teaching post at the academy was restored. Understandably, creative work was
extremely difficult for him under the circumstances, and the Serenade for Two Violins and Viola is one
his few important works from 1919-20.
For the Serenade, Kodály borrowed his inspiration and models from the inexhaustible treasury of
Hungarian folk music that he had collected with Béla Bartók during the previous two decades, both to
acknowledge the fundamental indebtedness of his original compositions to that indigenous music and to
demonstrate his continuing allegiance to the study that had become his life’s work. Formally, the first
movement is a traditional sonata-allegro, the second a ternary structure (A–B–A, with a reference to the
first movement before the return of the main theme), and the finale a sectional form in the manner of a
vivacious dance. The composer’s biographer László Eösze wove a folk tale around the emotional
progression of the serenade: “At the start, we hear three musicians, playing a serenade beneath a
woman’s window. Then comes a song from the lover (its exceptionally expressive melody fulfilling all
the requirements of the contrasting theme of a sonata); while the alternation between the voices of the
musicians and the lover, heard now separately, now together, complies strictly with the rules of the
development and the reprise. The second movement opens with a dialogue between the lover (viola) and
his mistress (first violin), while the tremolos of the second violin suggest the atmosphere of night. To the
lover’s pleading, the woman replies with laughter, coyness gradually turning into passionate rejection. At
this point, the lover dismisses the musicians (this is where the principal theme of the first movement, the
serenade motif, is repeated); whereupon the woman relents, and it is now the man who laughs.... Lastly,
the third movement confirms the understanding between lover and mistress, the lighthearted banter
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between viola and violin developing into a song of satisfied love; and the tale is brought to an end with
an invigorating dance.”
Quintet in G major for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello, Op. 111
Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg.
Died April 3, 1897 in Vienna.
Composed in 1890.
Premiered on November 11, 1890 in Vienna by the Rosé Quartet (Arnold Rosé and August Siebert,
violins; Sigismund Bachrich, viola; Reinhold Hummer, cello) and violist Franz Jelinek.
Duration: 29 minutes
For many years, Brahms followed the sensible Viennese custom of taking to the countryside when the
summer heat made life in the city unpleasant. In 1880 he first visited the resort of Bad Ischl in the lovely
Salzkammergut region east of Salzburg, an area of mountains and lakes widely famed for its enchanting
scenery (and in more recent years the site of the filming of The Sound of Music). There he composed the
Academic Festival and Tragic Overtures and the Piano Trio, Op. 87, cantankerously telling his friends that
he was encouraged to such productivity because the miserable weather confined him constantly to his
villa. Two years later, however, he again chanced Ischl, again found the weather poor, and again
composed; the String Quintet, Op. 88 dates from the summer of 1882. Brahms then stayed away from Bad
Ischl until 1889, but thereafter it became his annual country retreat until his last summer seven years
later. It was at Ischl during the summer of 1890 that Brahms composed what his biographer Walter
Niemann called “the most passionate, the freshest, and the most deeply inspired by nature” of all his
works—the String Quintet in G major, Op. 111.
The quintet’s opening Allegro is one of Brahms’ typically masterful sonata forms, broad in scale and
gesture yet enormously subtle and integrated in detail. The cello is entrusted with announcing the main
theme through a dense but glowing curtain of accompanimental rustlings from the upper strings. The
complementary melody, almost Schubertian in its warm lyricism, is presented in duet by the violas. The
development incorporates much of the thematic material from the exposition, but keeps returning, almost
like a refrain, to the rustling figurations of the movement’s opening. The earlier themes are recapitulated
in heightened settings to round out the movement. When Max Kalbeck, the composer’s friend and
eventual biographer, said that this music reminded him of the Prater, Vienna’s amusement park, Brahms
replied, “You’ve guessed it! And the delightful girls there.” The Adagio is a set of three free variations
based on a touching theme whose most characteristic gesture is the ornamental turn in its opening
phrase. The following Allegretto serves as the quintet’s scherzo, though in spirit it is indebted to the
popular waltzes of his adopted Vienna that Brahms so loved. The finale combines elements of sonata and
rondo, a formal procedure, perhaps borrowed from Haydn, that Brahms employed in several other of his
important works.
Quintet in E-flat major for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello, Op. 97
Antonín Dvořák
Born September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia.
Died May 1, 1904 in Prague.
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Composed in 1893.
Premiered on New Year’s Day, 1894 in Boston by the Kneisel Quartet and violist M. Zach.
Duration: 32 minutes
On June 3, 1893, Antonín Dvořák left his apartment at 327 East 17th Street in New York City and
journeyed via Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago to Calmar, Iowa. An hour after arriving at Calmar, a
carriage deposited him, his wife, their six children, a maid, and the composer’s secretary at the doorstep
of a sturdy two-story brick house in Spillville, a settlement of a few hundred souls founded some 40 years
before by a “Bavarian-German” named Spielmann. It was not the Germans, however, who followed
Spielmann to the open spaces of Iowa, but the Czechs and the Bohemians, Dvořák’s countrymen, among
whom were members of his secretary’s family, the clan Kovařík. Though Dvořák was certainly not
uncomfortable in his position as Director of the National Conservatory in New York (he boasted in a
letter to one friend about his $15,000 salary, an enormous sum in the 1890s), he missed Prague, and
hearing Czech spoken in the streets, and his pigeons, and the traditional songs, and so was easily
persuaded by Papa Kovařík, Spillville’s school teacher and choirmaster, to spend the summer of 1893 in
the little slice of his homeland that had dropped onto the Midwestern prairie. In his Reminiscences,
Kovařík recorded the following information: “The Master’s day in Spillville was more or less as follows:
He got up about four o’clock and went for a walk—to the stream or river—and returned at five. After his
walk, he worked; at seven he was sitting at the organ in church, then he chatted a little, went home,
worked again, and then went for another walk.... Almost every afternoon he spent in the company of
some of the old settlers. He got them to tell him about their bitter and difficult beginnings in America....
He liked being there.” Though there was little musical stimulation for him there (considerable energy had
to be expended just to find a piano for his rooms), Dvořák’s creativity blossomed in Spillville. Just three
weeks after he arrived, he completed the F major Quartet (Op. 96, known since it was new as the
“American”), and immediately began a quintet for two violins, two violas, and cello which was
completed on August 1st, just before he left for a week to participate in a “Czech Day” at the Chicago
World’s Fair. In mid-September, before returning to New York, Dvořák wrote to Dr. Emil Kozánek in
Kromĕříž, “The three months spent here in Spillville will remain a happy memory for the rest of our
lives. We enjoyed being here and were very happy, though we found the three months of heat rather
trying. It was made up to us, however, by being among our own people, our Czech countrymen, and that
gave us great joy.” Both the quintet and the quartet were officially unveiled by the Kneisel Quartet in
Boston on New Year’s Day, 1894; the performance was repeated 12 days later at Carnegie Hall in New
York.
The opening movement of the E-flat major String Quintet grows from a pentatonic theme previewed
in a shimmering setting that serves as an introduction. The music becomes more animated for the formal
presentation of the main theme. The dotted-rhythm complementary subject, introduced by the second
violin above the cello’s pizzicato, bears a folkish quality that recalls passages from the “New World”
Symphony, composed just a year before this quintet. The development section includes permutations of
both themes, and leads to their heightened restatements in the recapitulation. The following Allegro, the
quintet’s scherzo, begins with a mock drum-beat from the viola, and continues with another pentatonic
melody of simple construction. The central section is given over to a long, minor-mode melody initiated
by the viola. The third movement is a set of five variations on a two-part theme (minor, then major) that
Dvořák sketched in December 1892, the first scrap of music he wrote after arriving in America. (He is said
to have considered for a time composing a new national anthem utilizing the second half of this melody
for the text “My country, ’tis of thee.”) The finale is an invigorating blend of rondo and sonata elements,
much of which is based on the skipping rhythms of the opening measures.
©2014 Dr. Richard E. Rodda