Max Bruch is best known today for two concert-hall staples dating from early in his long career: the Violin Concerto in G minor of 1868, dedicated to the Hungarianvirtuoso Joseph Joachim, and Kol nidrei, written in 1880 for the eminent German cellist Robert Hausmann. (In 1887, Joachim and Hausmann would premiere Johannes Brahms’s great Double Concerto, a work that Bruch emulated in his 1911 Double Concerto for Clarinet and Viola.) The composer and cellist had recently struck up a friendship in Berlin, where Bruch conducted a choir that included singers from the city’s thriving Jewish community. One of these singers—or possibly the celebrated cantor Abraham Jacob Lichtenstein, whom Bruch had known since his student days—apparently introduced him to the two Jewish-theme tunes that he incorporated into his piece for solo cello and orchestra. Bruch took pains to emphasize that Kol nidrei was not a purely original work, insisting that the score be subtitled “Adagio on Hebrew Melodies.”

“Both melodies are first-class,” the composer explained to a friend. The opening prayer of Yom Kippur, “Kol nidrei” is chanted in the synagogue to a mournful tune that is repeated three times with mounting intensity. In Bruch’s version, the cello’s rhapsodic cantillation becomes increasingly impassioned and virtuosic; then a cadenza-like passage introduces the rapturous D-major theme, based on a setting of a text by Lord Byron from his collection of 30 poems Hebrew Melodies by the Australian composer Isaac Nathan. A Protestant himself, Bruch said that “as an artist I felt the extraordinary beauty of these melodies very deeply and have therefore been happy to disseminate them through my arrangements.”

© Harry Haskell, 2024

To listeners steeped in the genial Classicism of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Joseph Haydn, the muscular Romanticism of Beethoven’s so-called middle period seemed a strange and wondrously allusive language, almost, indeed, the “air of another planet” that bewildered audiences encountered a century later in the work of another musical revolutionary, Arnold Schoenberg. In an essay published in 1813, critic and novelist E.T.A. Hoffmann described Beethoven’s instrumental music in quasi-mystical terms: “Strange forms begin a joyous dance, as they gently fade toward a luminous point, then separate from each other flashing and sparkling, and hunt and pursue each other in myriad groupings. In the midst of the spirit kingdom thus revealed, the enraptured soul listens to the unknown language, and understands all the most secret allusions by which it has been aroused.”

Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano span the two decades in which he evolved from a young tyro to a mature master. The two Op. 5 Sonatas, written in 1796 for the French virtuoso Jean Louis Duport, are notable for their exuberant but understated brilliance. The two Op. 102 Sonatas of 1815 stand on the threshold between the “heroic” style of his middle period and the more introspective, complex language of his later works. The Op. 69 Sonata, composed in 1807 and 1808, falls squarely in the middle of this period of dynamic stylistic development. Roughly contemporary with such works as the “Pastoral” Symphony, the Violin Concerto, and the two Op. 70 Piano Trios, it shows the composer testing the limits of both cello technique and the duo sonata form. Although Beethoven had already composed nine of his 10 violin-piano sonatas, the relatively novel combination of cello and piano posed new challenges of ensemble and balance.

Only one of Beethoven’s five cello sonatas features a full-scale slow movement, suggesting that he had reservations about the cello’s ability to hold its own alongside the piano as a lyrical solo instrument. Indeed, the autograph score of the A-major Sonata shows that he was still experimenting with various ways of allocating thematic material between the two instruments. In this case, his solution to the problem was to exploit the full range of the cello’s sonority. The Allegro ma non tanto opens with a richly baritonal cello solo, but quickly climbs high as the music picks up momentum. Similar contrasts of register and tempo are explored in the sparkling A-minor Scherzo, with its halting, syncopated theme bandied back and forth between the two players. A meltingly beautiful but oddly truncated Adagio cantabile serves as a preamble to the finale, in which the piano and cello share equally in the bravura figuration.

© Harry Haskell, 2024

The Vocalise occupies a special place among the dozens of songs Rachmaninoff wrote before he emigrated from Russia in 1917. While most of the other Op. 34 songs feature lyrics by Russian Romantic poets, the Vocalise harks back to the 19th-century tradition of songs without words. One of the composer’s most popular creations, it has been transcribed for almost every conceivable vocal and instrumental combination. Rachmaninoff dedicated his miniature masterpiece to Antonina Nezhdanova, the soprano who created the title role in his opera Francesca da Rimini in 1906.

Consciously or not, Rachmaninoff chose the key of his ever-popular piano Prelude in C-sharp minor for this bewitching essay in wordless vocalism. That, at any rate, is where the Vocalise begins and ends. In between, Rachmaninoff explores many a chromatic byway as the sinuous melody ebbs and flows above a persistently throbbing accompaniment. In the second section of the piece, the music rises to an impassioned climax before subsiding in a tender coda. This is melody distilled to its essence; words would indeed be superfluous.

© Harry Haskell, 2024

The first of Brahms’s published duo sonatas, the Cello Sonata in E minor dates from the early 1860s. It was a period of upheaval in the composer’s life. Disappointed in his hope of winning a major conducting post in his native Hamburg, he decided to try his luck in Vienna. But it was also a time of growing recognition. In the spring of 1862, the critic Adolf Schubring hailed the 29-year-old Brahms as a worthy successor to Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert. In Vienna, Brahms told Schubring, he revered “the sacred memory of the great musicians of whose lives and work we are daily reminded. In the case of Schubert especially, one has the impression of his still being alive. Again and again one comes across new works, the existence of which was unknown and which are so untouched that one can scrape the very writing-sand off them.”

In highlighting the cello’s lower register, the E-minor Sonata evokes the burnished, baritonal sound world of Schubert’s great String Quintet in C major (scored for two cellos). Fittingly, the Sonata is dedicated to Joseph Gänsbacher, an Austrian voice teacher and cellist who was coeditor of Schubert’s collected works. In the summer of 1862, when he wrote the first two movements of the Sonata, Brahms was working on his own double-cello quintet (destined to be reincarnated as the Piano Quintet in F minor). Both works display the combination of lyricism and drama to which Schubring alluded when he wrote that Brahms “understands how to be Classic and Romantic, ideal and real—and after all, I believe he is appointed to blend both these eternal oppositions in art.”

The E-minor Sonata is cast in three movements, all in quick tempos, rather than the customary four. (Brahms composed a slow movement in 1862 but set it aside on the advice of friends; two decades later he recycled it in his Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major.) The opening Allegro non troppo is built around a warmly urgent eight-bar theme that surges from the depths of the cello’s C string against a simple, off-beat accompaniment. The piano part, spare-textured and unassertive at first, soars to a massive climax as the cello’s music becomes increasingly animated. But classical restraint soon reasserts itself, and the movement’s feverish energy subsides in a luminous E-major coda.

The Allegretto quasi minuetto is an oasis of calm between the turbulence of the outer movements. The piano and cello dance a delicate triple-time minuet, circling around each other in playful canonic imitation; its classical poise contrasts with the flowing romantic lines of the middle Trio section. Brahms, a diligent student of Baroque counterpoint, appended the driving, fugal-style Allegro to the first two movements in 1865. The subject announces itself with a dramatic downward leap of an octave, then scurries along in a typically Brahmsian blend of duple and triple meters. The Più presto coda propels the work to a restless finish.

© Harry Haskell, 2024