[1/8/2012] At 22, Schubert knew just where he was aiming in the irresistible "Trout" Quintet (continued)

FIRST, LET'S LISTEN AGAIN TO "DIE FORELLE," THE SONG

SCHUBERT: "Die Forelle" ("The Trout"), D. 550

Across a clear brook gentle,
there shot in eager haste
the trout, so tempramental;
quite arrow-like it raced.
I on the shore was gazing
and watched the brook disclose
the merry fish's bathing
to me in sweet repose.

An angler's reel unrolled
from where he stood below.
He watched with blood most cold
the fish swim to and fro.
So long no stone or sod
stirred up the water pure
the trout from line and rod
would stay, I thought, secure.

At length the thief lost patience
and made the brook obscure
with crafty agitations,
and ere I could be sure
the rod had started curving;
the squirming fish was hooked.
With pounding blood observing,
at the betrayed, I looked.

-- German text by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart,
English translation by Walter Meyer

Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Hubert Giesen, piano. DG, recorded November 1965
Renée Fleming, soprano; Christoph Eschenbach, piano. Decca, recorded June 1996
Bryn Terfel, baritone; Malcolm Martineau, piano. DG, recorded February 1994

NOW LET'S MOVE ON TO THE TROUT QUINTET

Let me confess that I didn't sit down with these 15 recordings -- plus a number of others that wound up not being represented here -- and listen through them with fierce concentration, searching for the best, or most illustrative, performances of each movement. (Not at these rates.) What I did instead was to put together, where possible, some performances I interesting to listen to in close juxtaposition (then once the audio files were made, that's what I did), and then fill in what I thought might be some other interesting combinations. The thing is, then, that we're listening to and for different things in each of the five movements.

I have some observations to make about each movement, but as long as we're "doing" the piece, I couldn't resist sharing this really fine liner note I stumbled across in the course of my Trout wanderings. It's by David Johnson, who was for a time Columbia Masterworks's go-to annotator, and it comes from the original LP issue of our very first performance, the Horszowski-Budapest Quartet one.

There are things here I could quibble with, like the notion of William Mann's which Johnson imports with seeming approval that "Schubert takes the lazy way out," in preferring a high degree of variation over what Mann seems to think of as the morally superior, heavier-lifting approach of development. Schubert seems to me to have had a clear sense of the tone he wanted for this quintet -- and yes, it is, as Mann suggests, consistent with the "holiday" atmosphere in which it was conceived. Especially in a work of this undimmable brilliance, it seems to me curious to imagine that the composer wasn't making conscious aesthetic choices.

Also, when Johnson underlines the "extra" movement, it's in connection with the Finale, which of course isn't the "extra" movement, which is the "extra" slow movement. You may recall that when we poked at Schubert's Octet for winds and strings ("Schubert's Octet may stretch our endurance but also stretches our delights") in the company of its evident inspiration, Beethoven's Septet, one common feature we found was a pair of slow movements: both a theme-and-variations one and a "regular" one. For a composer of Schubert's probably never-matched lyrical genius (he was the answer to the admittedly unanswerable question "Who was the world's greatest tunesmith?" in a January 2009 post, "The case of Franz Schubert -- how did so much music of such beauty come from one mind, and in such a tragically short time?"), this doubling up was a no-brainer. I think it's fair to say that the idea worked.

That said, I think Johnson's piece does a splendid job of setting the stage for the piece and then leading us through it. What more can we ask from any annotator? The pieces of his piece are set off so you can dip into them as much or as little as you like.

THE START OF DAVID JOHNSON'S LINER NOTE

Neither Haydn, Mozart nor Beethoven ever wrote a "piano quintet"—that is, a composition for piano and string quartet. Schubert, in the Trout Quintet, came close to writing the first great piano quintet. But since the Trout is unorthodox in its instrumentation—employing a double bass and dropping the second violin—the honor was reserved for Robert Schumann. After Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák and Franck contributed grandly to the genre. Schubert's Trout is quite separate from this series in a deeper sense than its choice of instruments. Whereas they are often symphonic in approach and make use of the rather large chamber ensemble for weight and for the contrast of piano and strings, Schubert's principal concern is with color; each instrument is an obbligato voice, singing its own song with its own very distinctive timbre. Despite the bravura piano part, one is always delightedly aware of the cello or violin or double bass making its own distinct and independent contribution. Here, if ever, is a society of equals, cooperating to produce some of the most ravishingly light-hearted music ever conceived.

Schubert was lighthearted when he wrote the work in the summer of 1819. At twerity-two, he was already a master with an enormous body of compositions to his credit. He and his friend Johann Vogl, the remarkable baritone who gave the first performances of many of Schubert's songs, were visiting the picturesque town of Steyr, some ninety miles to the west of Vienna. There Schubert enjoyed the hospitality of Sylvester Paumgartner, a music enthusiast and amateur cellist, and presumably promised to write a work for him, one containing a prominent cello part. The cello does indeed have wonderful things to do in the Trout -- which was first performed in Paumgartner's drawing room in the winter of 1819-20 -- but not at the expense of the other instruments. Schubert, who presided at the piano, gave himself plenty to do and provided handsomely for the other instrumentalists as well. The only concession to Paumgartner was the inclusion of the double bass in the ensemble, thus freeing the cellist from the task of providing the bass foundation and allowing him to roam freely in the songful upper registers of his instrument. It is worth noting, however, that the use of the double bass in chamber ensembles was not uncommon in Schubert's day, and he had distinguished precedent in the septets of Beethoven and Hummel and a quintet by Hummel for the same combination of instruments as his own.

To pick up a bit on Johnson's well-explained point about the incorporation and role of the double bass in the Trout. Most ensembles seem content to let the bass toil away honorably at this thankless chore, except at those moments when Schubert brings it into the foreground, as in the glorious variation early in the development of the first movement when the bass gets an actual solo shot. Personally, I always enjoy a performance where the performers make more of the bass's unusual presence. Which is a roundabout way of saying that none of our recordings gives the bass as much prominence as I would like.

I remember attending a wonderful performance of Schubert's great C major String Quintet (a very different sort of piece from this one), which adds a second cello to the standard string quartet but assigns the second cello basically this same role of bass underpininng, in which Peter Wiley, then the distinguished cellist of the Beaux Arts Trio, before he replaced his teacher, David Soyer, as cellist of the Guarneri Quartet, guested with an excellent young string quartet and opened the piece up with an almost-thundering rendering of that bottom line. I loved it, and enjoy hearing the same sort of thing in the Trout when it comes. My recollection is that Peter Serkin's later recording, with his ensemble of the time, Tashi, one of two versions I had on cassette and used to listen to a lot (we'll come back to the other one, in talking about the fourth movement), had a wonderfully buzzy double-bass preference.

OKAY NOW, TIME TO GET DOWN TO IT!

SCHUBERT: Quintet for Piano and Strings in A, D. 667 (Trout)

i. Allegro vivace

I think the links among our three performances -- and I don't mean just the participation of double bassist Julius Levine -- will be clear enough. These are musicians who knew one another and had a lot in common in musical outlook. And of course in our second and third performances we have father-and-son pianists (Peter still quite young at the time), both surrounded by Marlboro Festival people. The Vanguard performance was part of its "Alexander Schneider Chamber Music Series," and Schneider himself, who was back with the Budapest Quartet at the time of its 1962 Trout recording, was the "left out" second violinist. Note that Peter Serkin's Trout recording -- if I recall the sequence correctly, actually made before his father's stereo version -- features half of the future Guarneri Quartet.

One performance issue we confront immediately is that of repeats. The Trout has a boatload of 'em -- and this in a piece that already contains, well, so much glorious repetition. I'm not sure I see the necessity of all those repeats, but on the other hand, if the music is performed well, I don't mind hearing it more. Nowadays it's hard for performers to get away without taking the long first-movement repeat. When you see a timing in the 9-minute range, you know you've got a repeatless performance, like the Horszowski-Budapest one. In the 13-minute range, like our others, you know you're getting the repeat. Finally, with regard to the tempo marking, Allegro vivace, see my note on the Scherzo.

DAVID JOHNSON: The first movement, Allegro vivace, brims over with melody -- there are three distinct themes and a codetta as distinctive as any of them. The first theme proper is preceded by some twenty-five bars of what might be called "introduction," although they are in tempo and contain, right from the first bar (the up-turning arpeggio in the piano), important thematic material. There is no doubt when Schubert really gets under way, however; we hear this lovely song from the violin:
The arpeggio figure enhances the pauses in this melody. The second theme is announced by the cello, with the violin echoing it an octave and a half above:
The third theme is easily recognized, since it is given out in full by the unaccompanied piano. Then follows the irresistible codetta, with the piano speeding along in sixteenth-note octaves at the bright top of its register while the strings interject a syncopated dotted figure which turns into a kind of miniature trumpet call as the section draws to a close. Having loaded us with riches in the exposition, Schubert is wisely frugal in the development, confining himself almost exclusively to the rather gray introductory material. But all the glorious tunes return, in proper sequence, in the recapitulation—"nothing is more welcome than a second bite at these irresistible cherries," as one commentator put it.

Mieczyslaw Horszowski, piano; Budapest Quartet members (Joseph Roisman, violin; Boris Kroyt, viola; Mischa Schneider, cello); Julius Levine, double bass. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded July 8-11, 1962
Rudolf Serkin, piano; Jaime Laredo, violin; Philipp Naegele, viola; Leslie Parnas, cello; Julius Levine, double bass. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Aug. 15, 1967
Peter Serkin, piano; Alexander Schneider, violin; Michael Tree, viola; David Soyer, cello; Julius Levine, double bass. Vanguard, recorded c1965


ii. Andante

Did it surprise you that a movement as dramatic as the first movement of the Trout came to such an undramatic end? Why, it sort of seemed just to stop. And then somehow the Andante always seems to me to being somehow in mid-conversation, and thematically too it seems somehow to spring from the Allegro vivace. (Actually, the Andante too seems to sort of trail off rather than make a point of ending.)

This Andante isn't one of the sublimely searching ones Schubert would turn out seemingly so effortlessly later on, but it is nevertheless a honey, and again precisely tuned to the level at which the composer wished this quintet to communicate. For Schubert at his lyrical best, it seemed only natural to think of the great Czechoslovak string players I'm so fond of, and that naturally suggested an opportunity to listen to two recordings made some 18 years apart by the Smetana Quartet. By the time of the second, their frequent pianistic collaborator Jan Panenka, had been sidelined by hand problems, but then, Josef Hála is a fine collaborator too. The performances seem to me more similar than different, the later one perhaps more tightly argued, though tightness of argument isn't necessarily the point of this music. Either way, while the Smetana, as I've said before, isn't really among my favorite string quartets, the decision to call on them for this movement seems to me well rewarded at the introduction of what David Johnson descrbes below as the "new melody, harmonized in thirds and sixths by the viola and cello," at 1:20 of the Panenka-Smetana recording ( 1:17 of the Hála-Smetana, 1:10 of the Matthews-Vienna Konzerthaus).

For contrast we have the still beautiful but noticeably less lingering performance by the British pianist Denis Matthews and his Viennese cohorts.

DAVID JOHNSON: The Andante is almost as richly endowed. In F major the piano sings a long melody of beatific innocence, each of its two halves repeated by the strings. Such simple devices as trills and decorative sextuplets serve to enhance this tune. Then, still quietly, the key shifts to a more intense F-sharp minor and piano and strings prepare the way for a new melody, harmonized in thirds and sixths by the viola and cello. This theme anticipates, by some ten years, the refrain of Schubert's own well-known "Serenade." One more theme may be noted, a dotted figure followed by descending sextuplets, which issues at last in a brief but exquisite coda tune beginning thus:
After this the entire Andante is repeated in new keys but essentially the same instrumental groupings.

Jan Panenka, piano; Smetana Quartet members (Jiří Novák, violin; Milan Škampa, viola; Antonín Kohout, cello); František Pošta, double bass. Supraphon/Crossroads, recorded c1965
Josef Hála, piano; Smetana Quartet members (Jiří Novák, violin; Milan Škampa, viola; Antonín Kohout, cello); František Pošta, double bass. Denon/Supraphon, recorded October 1983
Denis Matthews, piano; Vienna Konzerthaus Quartet members (Anton Kamper, violin; Erich Weiss, viola; Ludwig Beini, cello); Josef Herrmann, double bass. Vanguard, recorded c1958


iii. Scherzo: Presto

I thought the heavily straightforward, merely four-minute Scherzo would be the easiest of the five movements to deal with, and in fact devoted most of my concern for choosing musical illustrations to the other four movements. And then I found that we've got the wildest split of all in this little movement. In fact, if you're coming new to it, I would suggest skipping straight to our second performance, the one lovely one by the British pianist Frank Glazer and members of the Fine Arts Quartet, who seem to have no difficulty getting from one slow movement to the other. What could be simpler or more straightforward?

I surmise that the then-young musicians of our first performance, pianist Zoltán Kocsis and the Takács Quartet, fixed on that tempo marking, presto. That should be, like really fast, no? And in general Schubert's tempo markings for the three "fast" movements -- Allegro vivace, Presto, and Allegro giusto -- suggest a notably lickety-splitter piece than we generally encounter. This performance of the Scherzo suggests why: There can be a whopping difference between an idea and an actual execution. Why, even the very opening upbeat isn't in the same tempo as the following repetitions that form the basis of this little phrase -- it's noticeably slower, as it frequently is when this phrase is repeated. I don't think the performers themselves believe in their tempo, or maybe they just can't execute it.

Our final performance goes in the opposite direction: more discursive, searching. I'm not sure, though, that there's much to "search out" here. Again, I think Schubert has been very careful about the "tone" level the Trout Quintet is pitched at.

DAVID JOHNSON: A Beethoven scherzo, marked Presto, ensues. The vigorous yet simple rhythm (an almost unvarying three quarter notes to the bar) contrasts with the preceding movements and the one to follow. The trio features threefold antiphony—we hear first the two upper strings, then the piano, then the two lower strings. This, too, is a procedure favored by Beethoven.

Zoltán Kocsis, piano; Takács Quartet members (Gábor Takács-Nagy, violin; Gábor Ormai, viola; András Fejér, cello); Ferenc Csontos, double bass. Hungaroton, recorded c1982
Frank Glazer, piano; Fine Arts Quartet members (Leonard Sorkin, violin; Irving Ilmer, viola; George Sopkin, cello); Harold Siegel, double bass). Concert-Disc, recorded c1960
Sviatoslav Richter, piano; Borodin Quartet members (Mikhail Kopelman, violin; Dmitiri Shebalin, viola; Valentin Berlinsky, cello); Georg Hörtnagel, double bass. EMI, recorded June 18, 1980


iv. Theme and Variations: Andantino; Allegretto

There are a lot of ways we could have gone with what is probably the Trout Quintet's best-known movement. Most obviously we could have looked for variety in our performances. However, I thought this might be a good place to put together three performances by the Amadeus Quartet, with three very different pianists. As someone who relishes luscious string tone I shouldn't be an Amadeus fan, with its characteristically more straight-up sound, and in my early listening years I wasn't. But as I've mentioned before, I was gradually won over, and I love the way they combined musical rectitude with deep feeling.

I'm not sure I can be objective about the Amadeus's EMI version with Hephzibah Menuhin (Yehudi's sister), which was the other cassette edition I owned and used to listene to a lot. Really, though, I think the reason I was so comfortable listening to it so much is that it's such a lovely, loving, and lovable performance. Menuhin's playing exudes gentleness and amiability. Rehearing it, I was, well, seduced, by the seductive loveliness and ease of her trills, and the Amadeus players are on the same wavelength. (For the record, the first movement is repeatless. Doesn't bother me -- they play it quite beautifully enough once through.)

I'm not sure what that treasurable pianist Clifford Curzon, a frequent Amadeus collaborator, had in mind in the early part of the movement, which seems almost defiantly unsentimental -- note that his trills sound weaponlike. Later on he's more his expectably winning self. And then comes the chamleonlike Emil Gilels, who as I've noted could adopt so many and such varied musical personalities. I wouldn't say that he's channeling Hephzibah Menuhin here, but they seem to me to come to pretty much the same result. Which is a good thing. It's amazing how fresh the string players sound after playing the music as often as they must have by then. But there may be just a hint that the way has become a shade too familiar, and not absolutely as revealing as it was when they were still charting their way through. Or that could just be my old comfort level with the EMI recording.

DAVID JOHNSON: Now comes the famous movement that gives this quintet its name -- variations on Schubert's song, "The Trout." A.J.B. Hutchings remarked about this movement, "Schoolboys love the variations in which the tune can always be heard with such slight but delicious alteration, and old boys who do not love them are advancing in sin as well as in years." The original song has a marvelous accompaniment in which the piano describes the trout flashing through the water, but Schubert seems (we mistakenly think) only interested in the melody sung by the voice. This melody, played (Andantino) by the strings alone, serves as the theme of the variations:
Variation 1: the piano takes over the tune, the strings buoying it up with broken triads and high trills. Variation 2: lower strings and piano alternate in the theme against a graceful running counterpoint in the violin. Variation 3: the melody is carried by double bass and cello while the piano rushes along in vigorous thirty-second notes. Variation 4: a mock-heroic variation beginning in stormy D minor but changing to a more serene and contrapuntal F major in its second half. Variation 5: a meltingly lovely variant for Herr Paumgartner's cello, even more beautiful than the original tune. But the greatest delight of all is the final variation, or coda, which is in fact the original song, pure and simple, with the strings taking the part of the voice and the piano playing the 'til-now suppressed accompaniment as the trout once more leaps and frolics through the water.

Hephzibah Menuhin, piano; Amadeus Quartet members (Norbert Brainin, violin; Peter Schidlof, viola; Martin Lovett, cello); J. Edward Merrett, double bass. EMI, recorded Oct. 15-17, 1958
Clifford Curzon, piano; Amadeus Quartet members (Norbert Brainin, violin; Peter Schidlof, viola; Martin Lovett, cello); J. Edward Merrett, double bass. BBC Music, recorded live, July 17, 1971 (mono)
Emil Gilels, piano; Amadeus Quartet members (Norbert Brainin, violin; Peter Schidlof, viola; Martin Lovett, cello); Rainer Zepperitz, double bass. DG, recorded 1975


v. Finale: Allegro giusto

That wonderful, naturally propulsive Nash Ensemble performance isn't the same one used on Waiting for God, but a more relaxed later recording, with the same violinist, cellist, and bassist. In the TV performance, which certainly sounds like the Nash's earlier recording, for CRD. It's been on CD, with just the original LP filler, the Notturno for piano trio, for filler, making for a 50-minute CD. Still, if you happen to see it, I recommend it heartily. In that performance the music moves as if energized from within. Again, I'm not sure it was a great idea to go looking for "more" content.

I like the Festival Quartet seems to me more like it, and the Frager-Bartók Quartet performance even more so. (The outstanding Bartók Quartet, by the way, doesn't seem to me ever to have received its due. The group produced a number of memorable recordings, including one of the great Beethoven quartet cycles, which I'm pleased to see made it to CD in 2002.)

DAVID JOHNSON: For bountiful measure, Schubert adds a fifth movement, thus emphasizing the festive and divertimento-like character of the quintet. This finale, Allegro giusto, is neither sonata-form nor rondo but something between the two. Its deliciously indolent first subject and lively second subject (actually two themes played simultaneously by strings and piano) are thoroughly discussed during the course of the movement, but not in an orthodox development section. "If Schubert takes the lazy way out," remarks William Mann, "we may remember that he was on holiday, and that the holiday relaxation of the Trout Quintet has always been its most engaging feature, the inspiration of some of Schubert's most generously captivating melodies."

Nash Ensemble: Ian Brown, piano; Marcia Crayford, violin; Roger Chase, viola; Christopher Van Kampen, cello; Rodney Slatford, double bass. Carlton Classics, published 1987
Festival Quartet (Victor Babin, piano; Szymon Goldberg, violin; William Primrose, viola; Nikolai Graudan, cello); Stuart Sankey, double bass. RCA, recorded c1960
Malcolm Frager, piano; Bartók Quartet members (Péter Komlós, violin; Géza Németh, viola; Károly Botvay, cello); Zoltán Tibay, double bass. Hungaroton, recorded mid-late 1960s?

MAYBE THIS WOULD BE A GOOD TIME TO LISTEN
TO THE QUINTET ONCE AGAIN STRAIGHT THROUGH

In Friday night's preview, after intending to offer just the song version of "Die Forelle" and the variations movement from the Trout Quintet based on it, I couldn't resist tacking on the complete quintet in the same performance from which we heard the Theme and Variations movement, knowing that we weren't going to be returning to it today. Well, today we've wound up juggling 15 performances, and at the end I thought we might bring back that highly satisfying performance by pianist Georges Pludermacher, the Trio à cordes Français, and double bassist Jacques Cazauran, which strikes a plausible and coherent tone for the strange and wonderful assortment of musics contained.

SCHUBERT: Quintet for Piano and Strings in A, D. 667 (Trout):
i. Allegro vivace
ii. Andante
iii. Scherzo: Presto
iv. Theme and Variations: Andantino; Allegretto
v. Finale: Allegro giusto

Georges Pludermacher, piano; Trio à cordes Français; Jacques Cazauran, double bass. EMI, recorded April 1974


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