Born in Venezuela, Reynaldo Hahn entered the Paris Conservatoire at age 11, where he distinguished himself as a precociously talented composer, singer, and pianist. While still a student, he wrote the first of the 100 or so mélodies on which his reputation rests, including the masterful “L’heure exquise” (Exquisite hour). By the end of his teens he had composed his first opera and was well on his way to stardom. He frequented the artistic salons of the Belle Epoque, at one of which he met the still unknown Marcel Proust in 1894. The two men became lovers and, later, lifelong friends; Proust’s first book of poems, Les plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days), included four piano pieces by the composer, and his unfinished autobiographical novel Jean Santeuil was partly based on their affair. Despite his early success, Hahn studiously underrated his gifts, modestly referring to himself as a “salon composer” and admitting that “the Himalayas, Michelangelo, and Beethoven are beyond my ken.”

As a pupil of three of France’s leading stage composers, Massenet, Gounod, and Saint-Saëns, Hahn gained a broad knowledge of the operatic repertory, as reflected in Variations chantantes sur un air ancient (Singing variations on an ancient air). The “old air” in question is a bass aria from the opera Xerse by the 17th-century Italian composer Francesco Cavalli. Dating from 1905, this short set of variations for cello and piano is one of a series of works evoking pre-Classical models that Hahn wrote around that time, inspired by the turn-of-the-century revival of interest in music of the “old masters.” (Hahn also participated in the early music revival as a conductor: in 1905, he led orchestral concerts of music by Lully and Rameau, some of it reconstructed from manuscript sources.) As the title implies, Variations chantantes privileges limpid lyricism over bravura display; apart from an extended sequence of cello trills, the variations are little more than simple elaborations of Cavalli’s stately melodic line.

© Harry Haskell, 2022

Fauré’s path to immortality was far from easy. Although he earned the respect of his teacher, Camille Saint-Saëns, the French musical establishment held him at arm’s length. Ambroise Thomas, the powerful director of the Paris Conservatoire, regarded him as a dangerous revolutionary, and even Franz Liszt, ordinarily the most open-minded of judges, rejected his Ballade for piano and orchestra as excessively difficult. Not until 1896, when he was 51 years old, did the Conservatoire bring him on board as professor of composition and, nine years later, director. Fauré forged a uniquely personal voice, free of the stultifying traditionalism and self-aggrandizing pomposity of the French academic style. His music, as epitomized by works like his famous Requiem and the Pavane for orchestra, is distinguished by its lucidity and refinement, its utter lack of bombast and pretension, and its mild-mannered unconventionality in matters of form, harmony, rhythm, and thematic development.

A case in point is the exquisite Cello Sonata in G minor. Written in 1921, when Fauré was 76, the work’s lush Romantic harmonies and muscular lyricism struck a decidedly retro note in a Parisian musical scene dominated by forward-looking, anti-establishment composers like Stravinsky, Ravel, and Satie. Vincent d’Indy, a fellow conservative, welcomed the Sonata as “music of a kind that seems to have been forgotten” amid the growing fashion for “rather unpleasant agglomerations of sound.” Fauré’s impeccable craftsmanship is manifest in the opening Allegro as the cello and piano circle each other in a canonic dance, its regular triple-time pulse offset by subtle syncopations. The Andante, by contrast, is a slow, somber dirge in C minor (it was originally conceived as a funeral march for a ceremony marking the centennial of Napoleon’s death, a potent symbol for a French Republic savoring its hard-fought victory in World War I). The finale, fast, flowing, and breathless, is energized by a recurring three-note motto (short-long-short). Like the preceding two movements, the Allegro vivo begins in the minor mode and finishes in radiant major.

© Harry Haskell, 2022

Fifty-one-year-old Thomas Adès has been hailed as the most gifted British composer of his generation. He rose to prominence in 1997 with his powerfully eloquent Asyla, written for Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Subsequent works run the gamut from small-scale chamber pieces to the Ivesian symphonic grandeur of America: A Prophecy, and from the soundtrack to the movie Colette to The Exterminating Angel, his acclaimed operatic takeoff on Luis Buñuel’s classic surrealist film. Adès’ voracious musical appetite makes him impossible to pigeonhole. The one aesthetic movement with which he openly associates himself is surrealism (perhaps not coincidentally, his mother’s specialty as an art historian). He once described the act of making music as “completely surreal. You are sort of sculpting in air, which gives you complete freedom to do what you want.”

Although Adès has written a number of chamber works involving the cello, Lieux retrouvés (Rediscovered Places) is the only one that features the instrument alongside the piano in a solo role. He and Steven Isserlis premiered the work at the 2009 Aldeburgh Festival in England, where Adès served as music director from 1999 to 2008. The title Lieux retrouvés suggests a kind of musical travelogue whose four movements evoke the spirit of “the waters,” “the mountain,” “the fields,” and “the city.” But apart from some overtly pictorial effects—the rippling figurations in “Les eaux,” the jagged syncopations in “La montagne,” the Coplandesque sweep of “Les champs,” the jazzy flair of “La ville—cancan macabe”—the mode of rediscovery is more emotive than literal, more Proustian than painterly. Adès’ stylistic fingerprints are clearly audible in the work’s richly imaginative sonorities and complex, multilayered rhythms. On a deeper level, the music’s densely packed motivic structure recalls the sound world of Janáček and Bartók.

© Harry Haskell, 2022

Schumann embodied the spirit of the Romantic era in his affinity for small-scale musical forms and lyrical utterances, his reliance on literary and other extramusical sources of inspiration, and the supreme value he placed on emotional freedom and spontaneity. “I have never been busier or happier with my work,” the composer declared in September 1849. As he reviewed his accomplishments of the past year or so, Schumann had a great deal to be satisfied with. He had completed some 40 pieces and was earning more income than ever before in his career. The year had started off promisingly with the publication of his bestselling collection of easy piano pieces titled Album for the Young. Hungry for worldly success, Schumann proceeded to write a string of works tailored for the amateur Hausmusik market, along with more challenging fare. 

Conceived in February 1849, the Adagio and Allegro followed hard on the heels of the Album for the Young but was targeted at a different audience: the work’s arduous technical demands place it beyond the reach of all but professional-caliber players. Originally scored for the newfangled valved horn, Op. 70 anticipates Schumann’s incomparable Concertstück, Op. 86, for four horns and orchestra. (Both works were inspired by Joseph-Rudolf Lewy, the renowned hornist of the Dresden Court Orchestra.) With an eye on sheet-music sales, the composer authorized alternative versions of the work for both cello and violin. The Adagio section, marked “Langsam, mit innigen Ausdruck” (slowly, with tender feeling), is a broadly lyrical introduction that never strays far from the home key of A-flat major. A quiet cadence leads, after a momentary pause, to an Allegro of a markedly different character—“Rasch und feurig” (fast and fiery)—and tonal range. The Allegro is cast in rondo form, the vigorously athletic main theme alternating with episodes based on the gently arching melody of the Adagio.

© Harry Haskell, 2022

Throughout his life, Brahms worked to reconcile the essentially percussive nature of the modern piano with the sustained, singing voices of the violin, viola, and cello. This contrast in sound and character is central to many of his greatest chamber works, from the first version of the B-major Piano Trio, composed in 1854, to the two sonatas for clarinet (or viola) and piano of 1895. Late in life, having written a brace of masterpieces for keyboard and strings in sundry combinations, Brahms came to the conclusion that his beloved “Fräulein Klarinette” was “much better adapted to the piano than string instruments.” Yet there is no hint in either of his two cello sonatas that he had any qualms about the instrument’s ability to hold its own in consort with the piano. 

In 1886, Brahms spent the first of three consecutive summer holidays at a rented villa in the Swiss Alps. In that idyllic retreat, his creative juices stimulated by vigorous hikes, convivial company, voracious reading, and a copious supply of cigars and strong coffee, he produced no fewer than four chamber-music masterpieces: the Second and Third Violin Sonatas, the Third Piano Trio, and the Second Cello Sonata. The last was dedicated to Robert Hausmann, the cellist of the famous string quartet led by Brahms’s old friend Joseph Joachim. The Sonata opens with a heraldic two-note motto in the cello, characterized by its jagged rhythm and the interval of a rising fourth (C to F). Both it and the piano’s roiling tremolos resonate throughout the Allegro vivace, generating much of its atmosphere and thematic material. After straying down various tonal byways, the music circles home to F major for the recapitulation section. Next comes an achingly beautiful Adagio in F-sharp major, which Brahms originally wrote for his First Cello Sonata and happily retrieved from the cutting-room floor. The turbulent Allegro passionato in F minor, with a contrasting middle section in F major, is notable for its restlessly shifting harmonies and rhythms. The Sonata culminates in an exuberant Allegro molto, which blends limpid lyricism with percussive brilliance and striking pizzicato effects in the cello part.

© Harry Haskell, 2022