The woodwind quintet is one of the standard chamber ensembles, and despite an extensive and distinguished repertory, it has never quite enjoyed the popularity of the string quartet or piano trio. One reason may be the lack of music from the big three of the Classical era: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, a lack explained by the fashions of their times.
Both Haydn and Mozart wrote considerable quantities of music for winds without strings known as Harmoniemusik, written for ensembles of eight or more players (pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons), believed to have derived from military bands. Such bear such titles as Serenade, Divertimento, or Cassation, all indicating their primary use as music to accompany outdoor entertainments.
The eighteenth century was fascinated with mechanical gadgets of all kinds. The world’s first biomechanical automaton is thought to have been The Flute Player of 1737, an invention of the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson. The renowned chess-playing Turk, built by Wolfgang von Kempelen was a fraud, for it depended on a little person concealed within the base.
The organ was a frequent target for automatic playing, as its mechanism could easily be controlled by pins in a revolving barrel. Combined with a clock, such an instrument could be made to play each hour (or more often!), and the technology existed to permit such machines to play more than one tune.
It was for such an instrument that Mozart composed the Fantasie in F Minor, K.608, late in his life during the winter of 1790. In his own private worklist, he listed the piece as “Ein Orgelstück für eine Uhr,” that is to say, “an organ piece for a clock.” The circumstances were anything but exalted, evidence of Mozart’s oft-cited impecuniousness during his last years.
The Fantasie was commissioned by one Joseph, Count Deym von Stritetz, a Bohemian nobleman. After killing a man in a duel, he fled to Holland under the alias Müller, taking up the crafts of wax modelling and making plaster casts of classical sculptures.
He came to Vienna around 1780, establishing the first of a series of what he called “Art Galleries,” though they were more like the later Madame Tussaud’s in London.
In 1790, he conceived of a “Mausoleum erected in honour of the great Emperor Josef and Field-Marshal Laudon” who had died earlier in the year. To accompany it, he commissioned Mozart to write the F-Minor Fantasie later advertised in the Wiener Zeitung as follows:
Each hour, a suitable funeral music, especially written for the purpose by the unforgettable composer Mozart [who had, himself, just died], is to be heard, which lasts eight minutes and in precision and purity surpasses anything that was ever attempted to be suitably applied to this kind of artistic work.
The Fantasie is in three sections: two elaborately contrapuntal fugal sections in F minor marked Allegro frame a central Adagio in A-flat major.
The lack of wind music by Mozart led the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet’s flutist Michael Hasel to make a transcription of the Fantasie in F Minor. He observes, “Although we have steadfastly refused to play arrangements ... we make an exception for Mozart. [...] As the mechanical organ [is] not readily available for concert performances, I hope that my arrangement will make Mozart’s masterpiece more easily accessible for a larger audience.”
The absence of wind quintets by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven is somewhat ameliorated by the nine of Franz Danzi, seven years older than Beethoven.
Danzi was born when his father was serving as principal cellist of the famous orchestra at Mannheim, a post the son would succeed to in 1784, though the Court of the Elector Palatinate of the Rhine had by then moved to Munich. In 1807, he moved to Stuttgart as Kapellmeister to the King of Württemberg, and in 1812, he held the same position to the Grand Duke of Baden at Karlsruhe, where he remained until his death in 1826. During these fourteen years, his nine wind quintets were published.
Opus 68 contained three quintets: in A Major, F Major (heard this evening), and D Minor. The first movement is in an extended sonata form; the second a theme and variations. The third movement is a classical Minuet-and-Trio with Da Capo, and the finale, a rondo-sonata form.
Hungarian-born György Ligeti is perhaps still best known as the composer of the moon music in Stanley Kubrick”s futurist film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
The Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet date from 1953. The name bagatelle, of course, means a trifling thing. In music, it was first used by François Couperin, but the most famous examples are surely the three sets for piano by Beethoven.
Ligeti’s six tiny works seem so naturally suited to winds that it is difficult to believe they are transcribed from music originally composed for piano: Musica Ricercata of 1951. Each is a remarkable example of Ligeti’s lifelong fascination with obtaining the greatest possible musical expression from the most limited of means. (Musica Ricercata consisted of a set of twelve pieces, the first of which was created from only one pitch; the second of two pitches; and so on, until the last piece contained all twelve tones of the chromatic scale.)
The Six Bagatelles takes the form of a miniature suite, like its Baroque models presenting a succession of contrasting highly individualistic movements. About the style, Ligeti reportedly remarked “Bartók with a little Stravinsky.”
The opening Allegro con spirito is a complete musical expression though created from only four pitches. The second movement — Rubato: Lamentoso — embodies typical elements of Hungarian folksong, in a manner strongly reminiscent of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos for piano. The lyrical third movement — Allegro grazioso — contrasts rapidly moving arpeggios in clarinet and bassoon with longer strands of melody in the other instruments in a manner highly reminiscent of Stravinsky.
The Presto ruvido (ruvido = “harsh”) is highly syncopated, exploring the extremes of range, and utilizing canons of various kinds to create a complex melodic texture. The brief but expressive Adagio: Mesto is explicitly dedicated to the memory of Béla Bartók. The concluding Molto vivace: Capriccioso is strongly reminiscent of Stravinsky’s Octet for Winds, partly an hommage, and partly a satire. Though, towards the end, it is marked wie verrückt (“as if crazy”), it concludes with a soft muted solo for the horn.
opus number zoo was originally composed in 1950 for speaker, two clarinets, and two horns; it was first revised the following year, at which time it was re-scored for woodwind quintet. The work underwent a second revision in 1970, when it was dedicated and presented as a gift to Aaron Copland on his seventieth birthday.
Unusually, the texts (by stage director Rhoda Levine) are spoken by the performers themselves, not an independent narrator. They are reminiscent of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, though darker for their O. Henry-esque twists of fate. The music is in the neo-classical vein of Stravinsky’s Octet and A Soldier’s Tale.
The Danish composer Carl Nielsen is little known in the United States. Devotées of the woodwind quintet repertory are particularly fond of his Wind Quintet in A Major, Opus 43, completed in 1922, and generally conceded to be a masterpiece.
The circumstances surrounding its composition are as charming as the music. One evening in the fall of 1921, Danish pianist Christian Christiansen was rehearsing Mozart’s sublime Quintet in E-flat Major for Piano and Winds, K.452, with members of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. The telephone rang: it was the pianist’s friend Carl Neilsen, inquiring whether he might drop by to listen, as Mozart was his favorite composer. Impressed with the virtuosity of the players, Nielsen determined to compose a quintet for them. During the course of its composition, Nielsen became close friends with each of the musicians, and the score is said to reflect each of their personalities.
The Quintet was first performed at a private concert at the end of April, 1922; the first public performance was given in Copenhagen the following October, by the Copenhagen Wind Quintet.
The opening Allegro ben moderato is pastoral in nature. The lyrical theme first heard in the bassoon generates the material for the remainder of the movement. The comical Menuet contrasts pairs of duets (clarinet and bassoon, flute and oboe) with a contrapuntal Trio of greater density.
The third movement opens with a Praeludium of somber mien (in the remote key of C minor), whose dark color is enhanced through use of the English Horn. It is followed by an original chorale theme (composed by Nielsen for the Lutheran hymn My Jesus, Make My Heart to Love Thee) and eleven variations of remarkably diverse characters. At the very end of the work, the bassoonist is instructed by Nielsen to play a low A-natural, one-half step below the bottom of the bassoon’s normal compass. This is sometimes accomplished with a specially-made bell joint, and sometimes by simply inserting a rolled-up piece of paper into the bell.
— © 2007 Nathan A. Randall