Schulhoff, Hindemith and Brahms
Erwin Schulhoff
Born in Prague of Jewish-German origin, Schulhoff was one of the brightest figures in a generation of European musicians whose successful careers were prematurely terminated by the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. The contributions made by many of these musicians, including Schulhoff, have largely languished in obscurity ever since, despite their pivotal importance to the development of classical music during the early 20th century. In his youth, Schulhoff studied composition and piano in Prague, Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne. He began to embrace the avant-garde influences of jazz and Dadaism in his performance and writing after World War I. He was one of the first classical composers in Europe to find inspiration in the rhythms of jazz music. Schulhoff was a celebrated keyboard virtuoso and made extensive tours of Germany while also venturing farther afield to France and England. In the 1930s, Schulhoff ran into mounting personal and professional difficulties. Because of his Jewish descent and his radical politics, he and his work were blacklisted as degenerate by the Nazi regime. He could no longer give recitals in Germany, nor could his works be publicly performed. His Communist sympathies, which became increasingly visible in his works, also brought him trouble in Czechoslovakia. In 1932 he created a music version of The Communist Manifesto (Op. 82). Taking refuge in Prague, he found employment as a radio pianist but earned barely enough to cover the cost of everyday essentials. When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, he had to resort to performing under a pseudonym. In 1941, the Soviet Union approved his petition for citizenship, but he was arrested and imprisoned before he could leave Czechoslovakia. In June 1941, Schulhoff was deported to the Wülzburg concentration camp in Bavaria. He died on August 18, 1942 from tuberculosis.
Paul Hindemith
Between 1935, the year in which he left his native country in consequence of his run-ins with the Nazi authorities, and 1940, the year he began his residency in the United States, Hindemith, having written several earlier sonatas for the expected instruments--violin, viola, cello, etc.--undertook an ambitious plan to compose at least one sonata for every instrument in general use. He would compose still more sonatas for still more instruments after settling in America, but the European portion of this project was a very productive one: in the single year 1939 he produced no fewer than six sonatas, among them this one for clarinet and piano, which he wrote in just eight days. In this work, as in all his sonatas, Hindemith understood the various instruments on an exceptional level, and he brought to his sonata project a thorough re-exploration of each as he wrote for it, probing anew its character, its background, its expressive capacities. It has been said of his Clarinet Sonata that it has not become as popular as its substance deserves, because it is "a great work that requires more in the way of musical intelligence than of mere technique." Hindemith himself was on very sure ground in both respects.
The work is in four movements which add up to a little more than a quarter-hour in performance. The opening one, Mässig bewegt ("Moderately") is built on related motifs, one of which provides some of the substance of the remaining movements. The second movement, Lebhaft ("Lively"), is a very brief, scherzo-like piece, in which a syncopated figure is introduced by the piano and passed to the clarinet. The third movement, Sehr langsam ("Very slowly"), which accounts for nearly half the running time of the entire work, reverts to the opening movement for the basic material on which a canon is built; the end of this movement represents the composer at his most effortlessly and persuasively eloquent, an uncontrived gesture of serenity and assurance. The final movement’s character is made clear in its heading, Kleines Rondo, gemächlich ("Little Rondo, leisurely"). Its good-natured, unpretentious theme generates a colorful dialogue between the two instruments, and then the piece simply "coasts" to a quick and undemonstrative conclusion.
Mozart, in his last years, became acquainted with the brilliant artistry of the clarinetist Anton Stadler, and composed for him a matchless concerto (K. 622) and two chamber music masterworks: the Clarinet Quintet, K. 581, and the Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, K. 498. Brahms had a similar experience late in his life, when his attention was called to the playing of Richard Mühlfeld, the principal clarinetist of the Meiningen Orchestra. With all his symphonies and concertos behind him, Brahms had composed nothing in more than a year, and had in fact just completed the details of his will, when the conductor Fritz Steinbach arranged for Mühlfeld to play for him in March 1891. He had never written for the clarinet in his chamber music, but his reaction to Mühlfeld was an immediate restoration of his creative drive and by the end of that year, in Berlin, the clarinetist gave the premieres of the first two works Brahms composed for him: the Trio and the more celebrated Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, Op. 115. Brahms himself was at the piano in the premiere of the Trio; Mühlfeld was partnered by the Joachim Quartet in the Quintet. Three years later came the two sonatas for clarinet and piano Op. 120, the last Brahms composed for any instruments.
The clarinet, of course, had become a favorite among Romantic composers for its expressive qualities. After Mozart, Carl Maria von Weber composed several concerted works and chamber music for the instrument, and he gave it special attention in the scores of his operas and his two symphonies. Schubert made conspicuous use of the clarinet in his own chamber and orchestral works, and even included a part for the clarinet in one of his most striking (and most extended) songs, Der Hirt auf dem Felsen.For Brahms, the clarinet's mellow coloring lent itself splendidly to the ruminative and sometimes melancholy nature of his music. His use of the cello in his Op. 114 Trio, in contradistinction to the viola in Mozart's K. 498, provides an overall darker coloring that is in keeping with the "autumnal" character that one hears even in Brahms's early music and which deepened over the years.
Not that Brahms was a pervasively melancholy sort, and especially not after he became acquainted with Mühlfeld, whom he addressed sometimes as "Fraülein Klarinette" or "Fraülein Nachtigall." Brahms's friend Eusebius Mandyczewski, a respected musical scholar, caught the spirit, writing of the Clarinet Trio in a letter to the composer, "It is as though the instruments were in love with each other."
And perhaps that is all that needs saying about the work. The Trio's four movements, in contrast to the expansiveness of the contemporaneous Clarinet Quintet, are concise in their proportions and tend to be somewhat understated in respect to expressiveness, suggesting perhaps a level of comfortable resignation, cushioned by sunlit reminiscence as well as sunset acceptance. Brahms's biographer Karl Geiringer, among others, called attention to the introduction of the second theme in the first movement as a canon in inversion; as was a device found in the scores of Haydn and other earlier composers whom Brahms revered, it has been suggested that his use of it here constituted an acknowledgement of the old masters as he neared his life's end.
[Brahms By Richard Freed © 2004]
