Romantic Chamber Music between late Beethoven and late Schumann (1830-1855)

[matesic]

Heresy against the idea that deep emotion stimulates (demands?) "passionate" music. A certain detachment is surely necessary to produce any piece of craftsmanship, so the grief has to be in a sense simulated. As of course with "Death and the Maiden", which is the other "first romantic string quartet"!

[eschiss1]

Oh, no argument there at all, actually. (The story behind the making of the work doesn't hold water - in detail - to a person who knows about composing. I still find it, along with his D major quartet and 2nd string quintet, to be among his very best works anycase )

[arpeggio]

Thalberg's op.79 piano trio is not bad at all, and he mostly keeps his virtuoso tendencies in check. The Marco Polo Alkan chamber music disc is warmly recommended, and the middle movement of the Grand Duo Concertant is quite remarkable. Only Alkan could have written it.

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Think you mean Op. 69 - for the Piano Trio in A major? A too twitchy finger on the keyboard here. Yes, the work is certainly "not bad at all", but you sound grudging in your admiration for it. Heavens, if I told my wife that the meal she put on the table last night was 'not bad at all' I'd have been promptly dispatched to the doghouse (and without the CD player for company).

[arpeggio]

Think you mean Op. 69 - for the Piano Trio in A major? A too twitchy finger on the keyboard here. Yes, the work is certainly "not bad at all", but you sound grudging in your admiration for it. Heavens, if I told my wife that the meal she put on the table last night was 'not bad at all' I'd have been promptly dispatched to the doghouse (and without the CD player for company).

Umm, I do indeed! A bit grudging, perhaps - in the sense I find it hard to argue it's a masterpiece, but it clearly has merit. The Alkan I quoted, for example, is surely better - certainly more "interesting".

[matesic]

On reflection I find Balapoel's list up above very revealing - just 25 names from a whole generation and a whole continent. Fast forward 50 years to 1880 and it would be easy to find 100, probably a lot more. Focusing down to string quartets, out of 21 who contributed to the medium only 14 I think are either commercially recorded or represented on IMSLP. England was of course a backwater, but Macfarren seems to be the only one to have actually had a quartet published before 1850. I think what we're seeing is a combination of stunned silence after Beethoven, and a feeling that chamber music isn't a naturally "romantic" medium.

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Indeed - I've been mulling over Balapoel's illuminating list ever since he contributed it. Many of my most treasured works here, and if I can't go on listening to them if and when I get to heaven then I declare immortality to be a real swizz.

I emit a squeal of protest over Balapoel's inclusion of Franz Lachner, but failing to add Ignaz (7 utterly marvellous string quartets plus 6 piano trios and at least 1 string trio) and perhaps also Vinzenz (with his 1 string quartet).

I have a high regard for Dussek's 3 Op. 60 quartets, and even more so for Reicha. The more I discover about Reicha the more I think him an extraordinarily gifted and innovative composer. The recent Toccata disc is a wonder... and it is heralded as 'Volume 1'. More treats coming up methinks. More evidence of Reicha's innovations in chamber music is provided in three MDG discs of works written for a variety of wind instruments and string quartet. However both composers are maybe just a little too early for this particular thread - Reicha died in 1836.

Wonder if we'll ever get more of John Lodge Ellerton? That was a wholly new name to me. I've also got a suspicion that - contra Matesic - there may well be a considerable amount of British chamber music composed in the period and that, at the time, it got squeezed out by chamber music composed in Germany and is now overlain by dust. (Would involve a lot of grubbing about to establish this, but it seems to me very plausible).

A more general point: I'm a little puzzled by Matesic's observation (in two posts) that chamber music might not be a naturally 'romantic' medium. I don't get that one at all. Relative to what conception of 'romantic'? If a typically romantic work places premium on 'feeling', then surely most of the works mentioned in Balapoel's list and elsewhere in the thread are paradigm manifestations of romanticism?

[matesic]

Although it's believed that a lot more chamber music was composed in Britain during the early 1800's, largely under the auspices of the Society of British Musicians, practically none of it was published and the manuscripts all appear to have been lost (my source for this is Christina Bashford of the University of Illinois. Also Nicholas Temperley). Four of Macfarren's unpublished quartets do survive, but they don't show any influence of first generation romantics like Schumann and Berlioz (some Mendelssohn to be sure, but rather stiff and unfeeling). Ellerton was a rich amateur who was able to fund himself. I've seen more than 30 of his quartets (played most of them too - 3 are on IMSP along with Macfarren's), and although not lacking in charm they all come out of the same "classical" mould with only the faintest of hints that he was writing 50 and more years after Mozart.

Of course the argument as to how to define "romantic" music is hopelessly subjective. One of my favourite criteria (although not a necessary or sufficient one) is departure from the "classical" forms derived from Haydn and Mozart but which were only codified into what we call "sonata form" structure much later. I believe Czerny takes some of the blame for that. Whoever the culprit, the rules were slavishly followed in Britain and elsewhere to the extent that any deviation was practically forbidden. So (excepting Bennett and Field and probably a few others) free-thinking romanticism hardly seems to have raised its head in Britain before the Parry/Stanford generation.

[John H White]

Much of Louis Spohr's  chamber output seems to fit into this period. I would particularly recommend the odd number piano trios. Beethoven complained that Spohr's music was too chromatic so he must in that respect to be rather more avant garde than Beethoven, putting him well into the romantic camp. Leaving aside the six  3 movement quartoirs Brilliant, where the other three instruments form a sort of "backing group" for the first violin, in the remaining quartets  scherzos and  minuets occur in roughly equal numbers. So Spohr might be regarded as a rather "conservative" romantic.
       Franz Lachner's younger brother Ignaz wrote in a rather more conservative style and, in general, I tend to find his string quartets rather more melodious. I'm especially partial to his six piano trios, in which a viola takes the place of the more usual cello.

[eschiss1]

btw, looked into the statement I made about "the story about the making of.." re Mendelssohn's quartet in F minor. Not a matter of unsung music, but I don't want to allow a (fairly seriously, it seems) false statement of mine to stand, either; it seems to have been true, at least in chronological detail. R. Larry Todd in Mendelssohn, A Life in Music gives the chronology as more or less begun July 9 1847 (scherzo sketched), finished September 1847; Fanny had died only a few months before, for some of which time Mendelssohn hadn't been able to compose at all.

[Balapoel]

I emit a squeal of protest over Balapoel's inclusion of Franz Lachner, but failing to add Ignaz (7 utterly marvellous string quartets plus 6 piano trios and at least 1 string trio) and perhaps also Vinzenz (with his 1 string quartet).

Well, to be fair, most of Ignaz Lachner's music falls outside the bounds:
Piano Trios 2-6 (published after 1855)
Except for possibly String Quartet No. 1, all the others are later as well

For Vinzenz Lachner, he only has a few, and most are after the period in question, except for Piano Quartet in g minor and string quintet in C. But I could have included him:
-pieces for cello and piano (op 16, 65, 4 pieces caracteristiques (1844)
-piano quartet
-2 string quartets, and variations for same
-moderato for solo violin
-piece for violin and piano