Lynn Harrell plays Franz Schubert’s “Arpeggione” sonata—an all-time favorite of chamber music lovers. Conceived for a now-extinct instrument of the same name, it’s played today generally on cello or viola, and is a showpiece for artists, in both the musical and technical arenas. Bill McGlaughlin talks with cellist Ann Franke about Harrell, and about Hans Kindler, a famous cellist and conductor who founded Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra and appeared here at the Library in our inaugural season. Plus a sweepingly Romantic performance by France’s Quatuor Ysaÿe: Saint-Saëns’ Quartet in E minor, Op. 112.
Download the Podcast for Program 8 (75 MB)
Performer Bios
Lynn Harrell: Soloist, chamber musician, recitalist, conductor, and teacher, Lynn Harrell is a frequent guest of many leading orchestras of Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, and the National Symphony; and in Europe, those of London, Munich, Berlin, Halle, and Israel. Recently, Harrell has particularly enjoyed performing with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist André Previn.
Quatuor Ysaÿe: Guillaume Sutre, violin; Luc-Marie Aguera, violin; Miguel Da Silva, viola; Yovan Markovitch, cello. In 1984 four students at the Paris Conservatoire formed a quartet, naming it after the violinist and composer Eugéne Ysaÿe (1858-1931). Since then, the quartet has performed internationally with regular appearances in the United States, Asia, and throughout Europe. Since 1994 the Ysaÿe Quartet has taught a string quartet class at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Paris.
Playlist/Repertoire
Franz Schubert: Sonata in A Minor (“Arpeggione”)
Lynn Harrell, cello; Victor Santiago-Asuncion, piano
Saint-Saëns: String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 112
Quatuor Ysaÿe
View the score
Program Notes
Franz Schubert: Sonata in A Minor (“Arpeggione”)
Sonata in A minor, D. 821 was “originally” conceived by Schubert with a different instrument in mind. It was written for the arpeggione, also known as bowed guitar and violoncello guitar, invented around 1814 by the Viennese guitar luthier Johann Georg Staufer. Composed in November 1824, it is the only significant work for the arpeggione, a fretted instrument with six strings tuned exactly like a classical guitar, and played with a bow while being held between the knees. Although short-lived (it became extinct within ten years of its appearance), the arpeggione had a small following of players and enthusiasts, among them Vincenz Schuster, for whom Schubert wrote the piece. By the time the Sonata was published posthumously in 1871, the instrument had long disappeared.
Schubert appears to have written the Sonata without any financial consideration but solely as a friendly gesture toward Schuster. However, Schubert obviously wanted to exploit the possibilities of the arpeggione’s extended range and the virtuosic opportunities offered by its six-string setup, particularly for arpeggiated passages. In form and structure the Sonata is typical of Schubert and like most of his late works; it reflects his volatile emotional state at the time of its composition.
The Sonata is played today almost exclusively on cello or viola. There are also versions for double bass, flute, guitar, and other instruments. Among stringed instruments, the cello incorporates the piece into its repertoire most successfully because of its proximity in size and range to the arpeggione. This is a likely reason why an alternative cello part—not by Schubert—was included in the first edition.
Saint-Saëns: String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 112
In his first string quartet composed in 1899, Saint-Saëns successfully combined the Classical and Romantic styles. The “last of the great geniuses”1 in the lineage of the Classical tradition, Saint-Saëns at this time was acknowledged as the greatest French composer. But by the second decade of the twentieth century, he had become “a temporal anomaly—a devoutly classical composer in a romantic age that was rapidly dismantling the conventions of the classical era and laying the groundwork for modern music.” Since his centenary in 1935, he has been relegated to the “scrap heap of second-raters, and regarded as a kind of quaint relic of a bygone musical age who has no contemporary relevance.”
Composed during a trip to Buenos Aires and the Canary Islands, the String Quartet no. 1 in E minor, op. 112, was premiered that year in Argentina’s capital with tremendous success. The work was written for, and dedicated to, the violin virtuoso Eugéne Ysaÿe, with whom Saint-Saëns concertized several times in Brussels and London. Like the rest of his chamber works, the Quartet has been sadly neglected. While it exemplifies the composer’s “technical mastery of counterpoint, his perception of delicate proportions, and his great competence in all matters of musical composition” it also shows “a lack of real inspiration in melodic writing, a certain sameness of style…and a paucity of profound feeling.”2 A different perspective is offered by the Medici String Quartet, who discovered “music of charm, grace, and enormous facility” which offered “emotional depth and sincere feeling…music of the very highest intellectual excellence in which we find reflected the composer’s own psyche, intelligence, and creativity.”3
Today, Saint-Saëns is known for a handful of works, including The Carnival of the Animals and the “Organ” Symphony (two of the most recorded works in the repertoire), the opera Samson et Dalila, the Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso for violin and orchestra, and shorter works such as Danse Macabre. Since the beginning of the new century, however, there has been renewed interest in his music. At the Newport Music Festival 2000, for instance, the cellist Steven Isserlis presented a “Homage to Saint-Saëns”—twenty-three performances of two hundred twenty-five works including all of the composer’s chamber music.
-Tomás Hernández
Music Divison, Library of Congress
1. The rest of this paragraph including the quotes is culled from Stephen Studd’s “Preface” to Kenneth Ring, Psychological Perspectives of Camille Saint-Saëns, 2002. (Return to text)
2. Homer Ulrich, Chamber Music, 2nd ed., 1966. (Return to text)
3. Liner notes for a recording of the string quartets of Saint-Saëns by the Medici String Quartet, Koch/Swann, 1997. (Return to text)
Last Updated: 04/05/2010