What’s the score?

 

“What a diary is to others, in which their momentary emotions and so forth are recorded, so to Schubert was music paper, to which he entrusted all his moods. His thoroughly musical soul wrote notes where others used words.” So wrote Schumann.

Scribbles on paper that translate to expressive musical utterances when performed are the basic means of transport for the realisation of composers’ ideas. They are really interesting for performers to see (as long as they are available to see – many are not, or they have disappeared over the years) and often provide helpful information on the genesis of a musical work.

Brahms used his manuscripts as working documents, editing and re-editing his compositions, often over many years, which was the case with the op 51 string quartets, as it was with his 1st symphony, finished when he was forty-three after many years of careful refining.

Later in life, Brahms said: “Neither Schumann, Wagner nor I were properly schooled. Talent was the decisive factor. Each of us had to find his own way. Schumann took one way, Wagner another, and I a third. But none of us really learnt what is right.” This is an astonishing statement even if it is primarily to do with an idealistic aim to live up to the contrapuntal disciplines that were so superbly manifested in previous ages by such people as JS Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Although the first public performance of op 51 (1873) was given by Brahms’s close friend, the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim and his quartet, the music had undergone careful assessment and adjustment with the help of the Florentine Quartet who played the music to Brahms in private. The composer and performer relationship in the developing of ideas in western classical music was and remains indivisible.

There is one very indistinct sound recording of Brahms playing the piano but as yet there has been no discernible residue detected in the atmosphere of the musical vibrations resulting from Schubert’s peregrinations along the keyboard of his piano all those years ago. Maybe science will achieve this one day; one can live in hope that this will be achieved and we will be able to hear performances by Bach, Mozart, Paganini and others too.

Astor Piazzolla’s superb bandoneon playing has been well captured in numerous sound recordings. In a way, the manuscript score of the past has been taken over by recording as our way into the mind of the composer. This is a very topical subject which we will be considering in more depth in a future blog.

David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet who worked with Piazzolla has said: “When audiences and performers that hadn’t encountered Piazzolla before heard his music, they heard something new… an intensity that we’ve read about, but hadn’t experienced, when you grow up hearing about Beethoven and intensity. You can listen to Barton or the music of Thelonius Monk or John Coltrane or Jimi Hendrix and read about their intensity in books. These are people that tap into the fact that music is the root, a central part of the human experience. Some musicians reach a place that is inexplicable, but when you hear it, you recognise it. When you encounter Piazzolla, you realise he is part of that same conversation.”

And the Argentinian musicologist Maria Susana Azzi puts it very aptly and in a way that encompasses all three composers of our current programme: “Tango (and equally this could be the manuscript score of the earlier composers – ed.) is more than just notes…(with its) rhythm that is at once love and dream, pain and reality (and) its special qualities of freedom, passion and ecstasy… it is dance, poetry, song and gestures, ethos and a philosophy of life.”