Brahms: Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op.115 (1891)
Allegro
Adagio
Andantino – Presto non assai, ma con sentiment
Con moto
Is yet another disc of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet really needed? This was a question we had already asked of ourselves before embarking on our previous offering (with Alan Hacker, Decca, 1982), and we found three specific answers to justify going ahead at that time: first, the musical public – especially connoisseurs of wind playing – is surely entitled to an aural documentation of how the finest players have interpreted the great works of their respective repertoires; secondly, we had cut our own recording teeth on works which would have been unfamiliar or even unavailable on LP in the 1970s (quartets by Franck, Delius, Sibelius, Borodin No.1, most of the Shostakovich canon) and therefore felt we might have earned the right to venture into more familiar territory. But, finally, our attitude to this particular work – under Alan Hacker’s influence – had always involved the skipping of the most recent generations of performing tradition: Alan himself had been a pupil of Reginald Kell, thus continuing the line back via Haydn and Charles Draper to Richard Mühlfeld himself. Kell’s own recording with the Busch Quartet was surely one of the finest, and perhaps most idiomatic, ever made; so when studying their old 78s back in 1974, together with other recordings of that era and earlier (for example Charles Draper and the Léner Quartet), we were struck by how far most performances had since moved away from their approach: what had happened to the fire, the passion, the wildness, the sheer extremes of expression one hears in those renditions? Brahms may well have become old and tired, he may well have been so disillusioned and world-weary as to have resolved to give up composing after the G major string quintet (Op.111) in 1890. But if his juices were so capable of being stirred, roused, and ignited into action by the playing of a young clarinettist (Mühlfeld) then maybe the energetic youth trapped inside this supposedly ageing man (he was actually only 57) was still not ready to admit to having arrived at that “Autumnal” stage of life, which so many modern performances of his later chamber works seem to find enshrined therein. The expressive energy which Mühlfeld must have communicated via Weber’s music at Meiningen would appear to have struck a chord with Brahms who, no doubt further inspired by the highly dramatised frenzy of the Fantasia in the same composer’s Clarinet Quintet (Op.34), subsequently provided more phantasmagorisms for Mühlfeld’s virtuosity in the Adagio of his own quintet – with the Trio (Op.114) and the two Sonatas with piano (Op.120) in close attendance. He wrote to his beloved Clara Schumann, “To hear the clarinettist would be an experience for you, a gaudium. You would be enraptured, and I hope my music would not spoil the effect for you.”
But back to the present, and that same dilemma of conscience: is another recording of this quintet really justifiable? If those original answers were valid then, it has to be conceded that they are still valid now – but with extra dimensions: to begin with, the teacher-pupil lineage continues from Alan Hacker to Lesley Schatzberger and with it, it follows, a similar school of performance. But in the meantime Lesley had had a copy made of Mühlfeld’s own clarinet, and from her experience of this wonderful instrument we can learn still more about the piece and how it might have sounded. When playing with this instrument it is obviously appropriate for the quartet to make use of contemporary style bows and gut strings – as Robert Pascall underlines: “the difference in tone-quality between gut and metal strings is far from small, [even though] this may seem a small matter of instrument setting-up”. Hand-in-hand with this is the need to adhere to certain aspects of performance practice which we know to have been in favour at that time and in that place. So we have sought the advice of such authoritative Brahms scholars as Prof Pascall himself: his various papers and publications have provided invaluable insight, as well as reassuring evidence that for most of our own thirty-plus years of acquaintance with this amazing work we have been on something like the right track – thanks to Hacker, Schatzberger, Kell, Busch et al. We are reminded that “bow strokes were much as now, although the art of portato bowing has been largely lost, and the use of off-string bowing was not as favoured then as it is today. The normal way of playing….until the present [20th] century was without vibrato….used primarily as an ornament, for accented notes, and for sustained notes in impassioned and lyrical melodies. And secondly, players of Brahms’s time would all have used portamento, the gliding ornament so tellingly described by Carl Flesch as ‘the emotional connexion of two notes’”.
Most important of all, perhaps, is a prerequisite embracing of Brahms’s attitude to rhythm, tempo, and rubato, and it is fascinating that many of Prof Pascall’s observations originate in accounts from contemporary musicians reporting on his own playing or conducting. For example, we learn that Sir Charles Villiers Stanford recalls that Brahms’s tempo was “very elastic”, the pianist Fanny Davies writes of his “expansive elasticity” – confirming awareness that “he used strong articulations between phrases, tempo modification and rubato – tempo modification was a recognised and established part of performance practice of the age, and that, provided always it is applied with discretion, it remains fully appropriate to the interpretation of Brahms’s music”. Indeed, it had been so for some time previously, to judge by similar remarks made on the subject by Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner, all of which lend weight to the argument. Brahms himself wrote to the violinist Joseph Joachim in January 1886, “ …I often cannot do enough pushing forward and holding back, so that passionate or calm expression is produced more or less as I want it” – alluding also to the conductor Hans Richter’s “uncomprehending stiffness”. Eugenie Schumann (youngest daughter of Robert and Clara) recounts that “When he came to passionate parts, it was as though a tempest were tossing clouds, scattering them in magnificent fury” – we could hardly fail to remember this striking illusion when approaching the surging semiquaver triplets in the first movement exposition, extended still more vehemently in the recapitulation (“…to be taken at a distinctly increased tempo” – Will Crutchfield). Of specific significance is a remark by Brahms’s pupil Walter Blume concerning the third symphony’s finale: “The semiquaver figures in the strings at [letter] O are played so that one dwells somewhat on the first semiquaver, quasi tenuto” – these groups are all marked with a “hairpin” decrescendo, exactly the same as the semiquaver groups in the opening bars of the quintet, where a similar expressive rubato has always seemed to us to be obligatory.
It has since been rewarding to be able to hear (at last) the recording made in 1941 by our mentor Sidney Griller, in which his quartet was joined by Frederick Thurston – in many ways even finer than Kell/Busch, but underlining yet again how far perceptions of the quintet have changed since those days. No less invaluable are Tully Potter’s own observations (in the accompanying notes) with regard to the handed-down performing traditions for the quintet – not only via Kell/Drapers but also from Adolf Busch back to his teacher Bram Elderling who, as leader of the Meiningen Quartet, had performed it frequently with Mühlfeld himself. In all these accounts we can hear clear evidence for Pascall’s painstaking researches.
It goes without saying that none of these factors will of themselves guarantee a successful or convincing performance, and it has to be accepted that to 21st century ears our current realisation may not be to all tastes, given the changing style of execution this piece has undergone over the past few decades. Undoubtedly what you will hear is more confrontational, red-blooded, wilder, at times angrier, less “mellow” than might have been expected, with generally faster tempi and more extreme dynamic contrasts. Not always comfortable listening, to be sure… But, as Robert Pascall concludes, “Knowledge about historically appropriate performance styles does not restrict so much as nourish interpretation”.
Much has been written about the impressively tight structure and thematic unity of this quintet, originating in Brahms’s painstaking studies of Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical forms (for example canon, fugue, and a wide range of dance idioms), together with the music of those composers he included in his own concert programmes as a pianist: Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann. So, whilst further analysis might be considered superfluous here, some thoughts on the Adagio could be appropriate, in the light of that movement’s profound influence on the work as a whole, allied to the demands it makes and the precedents it sets for an attempt at an “authentic” realisation in concert/recording. Alan Hacker always insisted – following his predecessors’ example – that its “gypsy clarinet and fiddle” must be the centrepiece of the entire work, forthrightly setting the tone of the whole interpretation, “with the other strings imitating the clangorous cimbalom”. The origin of Brahms’s writing of long notes with fast elaboration is identified by Pascall in the slow lassu (the slow part of a csárdás folk dance) sections in the Verbunkos (an 18th century Hungarian dance). Nothing cosy or “Autumnal” here… Certainly we can recognise the spirit of Weber and his powerful effect on the course of German Romanticism, but now unforgettably and unmistakably supplemented by Brahms’s own long-standing affinity with Zigeuner culture – no doubt underpinned by his friendship with the great Hungarian violinist Joachim. And so the stormier passages in the first movement, not to mention the high voltage of the finale’s second variation, can rightfully take their place in the overall scheme of things; indeed, these variations reveal themselves as a worthy summation of the quintet’s various moods and temperaments, such that we find the yearning B major sonorities of no.4 already to have been heard in the Adagio’s outer sections. Even the whimsical skittishness of variation 3 seems to look back to the preceding movement, where B minor is subtly combined with its relative major key in a fusion of genuine scherzo with the gentler, more pastoral replacement familiar from so many of his symphonies and chamber works.
Furthermore – to return to the Adagio – Robert Pascall has convincingly traced the origins of the outer sections of this movement back to the Sarabande und Gavotte for piano from 1854/5 – thereby demonstrating that, even in the most elegiac music of the quintet the element of dance is never far away (following the example of his great German predecessor J S Bach). Whilst the Sarabande’s journey to this Adagio was undertaken via the F major string quintet (Op.88) the Gavotte can be seen to have pursued a similar course, following a change of rhythm for the scherzo of the G major string sextet (Op.36), leading to its eventual arrival at the opening of the clarinet quintet itself. Extraordinary – yet perhaps not so unexpected – that this masterpiece from the culmination of its creator’s career should have originated from so near its beginning; if the clarinet quintet has always appeared to us all to draw from and summon up a lifetime of experience, then the origins of the material itself would appear to back up our impressions persuasively and aptly.
© Alan George
(adapted from booklet notes for Schatzberger/Fitzwilliam Linn recording)
