Miró Quartet

MIRÓ QUARTET
Daniel Ching, William Fedkenheuer, violin • John Largess, viola • Joshua Gindele, cello

GEORGE WALKER (1922–2018)
Lyric for Strings (Molto adagio from String Quartet No. 1)

KEVIN PUTS (b. 1972)
Home

— Intermission —

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat Major, Op. 130 with Grosse Fuge, Op. 133

1. 1. Adagio, ma non troppo – Allegro
   2. Presto
   3. Poco scherzoso. Andante con moto ma non troppo
   4. Alla danza tedesca. Allegro assai
   5. Cavatina. Adagio molto espressivo
   6. Grosse Fuge, Op. 133

PROGRAM NOTES

GEORGE WALKER
Lyric for Strings (Molto adagio from String Quartet No. 1) (1946)

George Walker is one of the most distinguished American composers and pianists of the twentieth century. Born in Washington, D.C., Walker took to the piano from the age of five, at his mother’s encouragement. A stellar student who graduated from high school age 14, he did not follow, as many expected he might, in the footsteps of his father—a physician who had emigrated to the United States from Jamaica. Rather, he went directly to Oberlin Conservatory to pursue piano and organ studies, and proceeded from there to the Curtis Institute, obtaining further diplomas in piano and composition. 

The trajectory of Walker’s career was shaped on the one hand by pervasive racism which closed doors to him that were available to classmates and colleagues—a topic Walker addressed candidly in interviews throughout his life—and on the other hand by his success and determination in breaking through many such barriers. Walker’s early achievements as a concert pianist, including acclaimed appearances as a soloist with several American orchestras and several European tours, proved short-lived; “a Black pianist playing classical music,” he recalled his agent warning him, “we can’t sell you.” Walker found greater stability, it turned out, as a composer. He obtained a doctorate from the Eastman School and held academic positions at institutions including the New School, Smith College (where he became the first Black tenured professor), and ultimately Rutgers, where he was on the faculty from 1969 until 1992.

He was at once prolific and meticulous, engaging diverse modernist interlocutors from Berg and Stravinsky to Copland and Barber, alongside (often discreetly embedded) homages to Black American music—spirituals, blues, Ellington. In 1996, Walker became the first Black composer to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, in recognition of his Whitman settings titled Lilacs; as he reflected, “It’s always nice to be known as the first doing anything, but what’s more important is the recognition that this work has quality.” Lyric for Strings, his most enduringly popular work (often performed in its arrangement for string orchestra), was written half a century prior, at the beginning of Walker’s career, conceived originally as the second movement of his first string quartet and dedicated to the memory of his grandmother.

KEVIN PUTS
Home (2019)

Keven Puts has provided the following note to accompany Home:

I had the idea for the opening of Home before I knew fully what it was about. Strangely, I thought of this rather warm and calming music while walking to an appointment on a busy street in Manhattan. It reminded me of an idealized depiction of home, and then the recent heartbreaking images and stories of uprooted refugees from Syria and elsewhere flooded through me. I thought of bathing the listener in the comfort of this first idea which is essentially in C major, and then gradually letting the music become unmoored, utterly devoid of tonal stability. And then I would find a way back to the opening idea only to find it wasn’t the same anymore. It was from a place of great privilege that I wrote this music, and working on it was a reminder of this privilege and the desperation of those who fight daily to attain it.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat Major, Op. 130 with Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 (1826)

The five “late” string quartets to which Beethoven devoted most of his energies in the two-and-a-half years between completion of the Ninth Symphony and his death have surely given rise to more commentary, and of a wider variety—analytical, exegetical, philosophical, psychoanalytical—than any other corpus of chamber music. What is it about the late quartets that stimulates so much discourse? 

It stems, at least in part, from the desire to understand music that subverted the conventions of its time. Beethoven was certainly not the first composer to flout convention; but where such abandon might have led other composers to be dismissed as inept (and plenty of critics dismissed Beethoven at the time), posterity has come to revere Beethoven’s enigmatic late quartets as a sort of holy grail of music appreciation. In this way, history’s fascination with the late quartets reflects the gradual shift in listening practices that took place in the early-to mid-nineteenth century: “serious” music came to be heard less as “mere” courtly entertainment, and increasingly as the subjective expression of the composer’s inner voice. Accordingly, it became incumbent upon the listening public to grasp and comprehend that voice, however impenetrable it might initially appear—giving rise to the development of intellectual accoutrements like music analysis and guided listening (program notes!). Musicologist Mark Evan Bonds has gone so far as to characterize this shift in how we relate to music—which has persisted in the cultures of composition and performance to this day—as “Beethoven syndrome.”

Of the five “late quartets,” the case of Op. 130 illustrates this state of affairs particularly well. Flouting conventions is putting it mildly: Beethoven’s six-movement design, interpolated with character pieces and an aria-like “Cavatina,” was capped off with a twenty-minute long “Great Fugue,” combining the labyrinthine counterpoint of a chromatic subject and several countersubjects with the unfolding drama of a quasi-symphonic form. The premiere performance of the quartet was not wholly unsuccessful—the audience solicited encores of the second and fourth movements. The “Great Fugue,” however, was met with bafflement, and the sheer difficulty of the movement likely did not help here, despite the skillful and gutsy Schuppanzigh Quartet’s best efforts. Beethoven’s publisher thus entreated the composer to replace the Fugue with a more congenial Finale, offering to publish the Grosse Fuge as a separate, standalone work—hence the two opus numbers on this evening’s program—illustrating at once the shifting notion of what “serious” music should provide (or demand of) its listeners, and listeners’ resistance to that shift. As a result, performers face a choose-your-own-adventure opportunity. While the sprightly replacement Finale remained the standard repertory choice for the first century or so following Beethoven’s death, it has been rivaled in the second century by the Grosse Fuge as audiences and ensembles have become more interested in the composer’s original designs—and as audiences are more accustomed to, and perhaps even relish, “challenges” of listening.

And yet, despite the tremendous amount of commentary seeking to prepare and accompany listeners through the “challenges” of the late quartets and of the Grosse Fuge in particular, the best approach, in this commentator’s opinion, is to forget momentarily about listening to the troubled “late Beethoven” and absorb with greater immediacy the energy emanating from the performers on the stage. Few ensembles in the world today will reward you for doing so more than the Miró Quartet.

Program Notes by Peter Asimov

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