delian::quartet: Adrian Pinzaru, Andreas Moscho,
Aida-Carmen Soanea & Romain Garioud
Igor Kamenz, piano
Only in its first season, the Delian Quartet is already
attracting attention. Widely acclaimed appearances at
major music festivals have already brought the ensemble
re-invitations; the coming season promises major
new concerts.
The German-French-Romanian quartet’s profile
includes regular cooperation with guest artists – it
has already performed with instrumentalists such
as Gérard Caussé, Dimitri Ashkenazy, Gilles Apap,
Andreas Frölich, Ralph Manno and Mihaela Ursuleasa.
The Delian Quartet already won a world star for
projects with narration: Armin Mueller-Stahl. On its
debut CD, the four young musicians also present a
guest – Igor Kamenz on piano in Schumann’s Piano
Quintett.
Adrian Pinzaru, violin
Andreas Moscho, violin
Aida-Carmen Soanea, viola
Romain Garioud, cello
Igor Kamenz, piano
Music and Poesy:
On Robert Schumann’s String
Quartet No. 1 and Piano Quintet
In the course of his development as a composer
[meant here is Robert Schumann], the
obvious influence of the intrusion of the Jewish
essence on our art, which I have previously
discussed, can easily be proven. Compare the
first and second halves of Robert Schumann’s
creative career: formerly a flexible drive to shaping
his material; later, blurry, pompous surfaces
that approach secretive triviality with no content.”
This is Richard Wagner’s commentary
on Robert Schumann in his Judaism in Music,
the first edition of which was published
in 1850.
Wagner was certain what the source of
Jewish influence on Schumann was: Felix
Mendelssohn
Bartholdy. In the same publication,
Wagner accuses Mendelssohn of
smooth artifice as well as a lack of depth and
“emotional sensitivity”. And nothing else
was meant by one of the Nazi era’s successful
critics, Otto Schumann, when he wrote
in 1940 in his History of German Music that
Mendelssohn’s
music is characterized by
“polished facileness”. As late as 1983, Otto
Schumann published an Extensive Guide to
Concert Repertoire in West Germany which
expresses a similar ideology – we read once
again about the Mendelssohnian smoothness
“that makes one uneasy”.
But let’s return to Wagner’s remarks on
Robert Schumann. Viewed superficially,
it was no great effort for Wagner to find
evidence for his thesis. On the one hand,
Schumann
himself revered Mendelssohn and
his works. On April 1, 1836, for example, he
wrote to his sister-in-law Therese that he had
always looked up to Mendelssohn “as though
to a lofty mountain peak”. We also see that the
three String Quartets op. 41 are dedicated to
Mendelssohn.
Just as the Piano Quintet op. 44, they
were written in 1842, a creative year for
chamber music that falls into the latter half
of Schumann’s
career about which Wagner
so disparagingly speaks. In these works,
Schumann
certainly approaches that “classicism”
he so highly praised in Mendelssohn. In
a review of Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio op. 49,
Schumann had called his idol the “Mozart
of the 19th century”. But despite this, things
are not that simple. In particular, the string
quartets associated with Mendelssohn reveal
a host of additional influences and ideas.
One example is the String Quartet No. 1
in A minor. The first movement begins with
a slow introduction that can hardly deny its
similarity to a liturgical prayer. The Adagio,
in turn, begins with an antecedent reminiscent
of the beginning of the slow movement
of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Finally, at the
end of the final movement’s development,
a motive consisting of two half-tone steps
separated by a third sounds clearly like the
motivic nucleus of Beethoven’s later String
Quartets op. 130–133.
But above all, Schumann continues
his own personal style – both in his String
Quartet No. 1 as well as in the famous Piano
Quintet in E-flat major – which could be
called “poetic music”. It is well known that
Schumann’s
intellectual world was suffused
with Jean Paul and his poetry-centered aesthetics.
And Schumann saw in poesy – as he
stated in a speech in September 1827 – an
“idealized world”. In a letter to Clara Wieck
from January 24, 1839, he says that the composer
has to be a poet.
And Schumann – in the sense of Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – understood the
poetic in music to be a “language of the soul”
and an expression of conviction that simultaneously
characterizes the romantic. For
Schumann,
“romantic” and “poetic” were synonymous.
Just this Piano Quintet, dedicated to
Clara Wieck, makes the extent of Schumann’s
aesthetic perspective clear.
The work’s core is its slow movement,
which is de facto a funeral march. In the second
movement of his “Eroica”, Beethoven had
first introduced the funeral march to the symphonic
genre. Mendelssohn also composed
such a piece in his Songs Without Words for
Piano op. 62/3 from 1841/44. Chopin’s Marche
funèbre, the third movement from his Piano
Sonata op. 35 from 1836/39 became famous.
This gesture of mourning became a central
genre in the romantic period. In the Agitato
section of the slow movement of the Piano
Quintet, the aria “Es ist vollbracht” from
Bach’s St. John Passion is also heard. In the
Finale, the funeral march is intertwined with
other themes from the work.
Here, at the latest, it is clear: “The Piano
Quintet impresses [the listener] with its great
density of events that make reflection on its
structure seem hardly necessary, one could
even say: not even meaningful,” according to
Martin Geck. It is just this density of events,
Schumann’s openness for the extra-musical
and his concept of a poetic music that pave
the way – at least to an extent – for Wagner’s
idea of Gesamtkunstwerk. Seen in this light,
Wagner’s comments about Schumann are so
disconcerting because he did himself such a
disservice with them.
Marco Frei
Translation: Elizabeth Gahbler