MAX BRUCH
Born in Cologne, Germany, 1838
Died in Berlin, 1920
Kol Nidrei, Op. 47 (1880)
By the age of 20, Max Bruch was captivating German audiences as a budding opera composer, and over the next 60 years he built a sterling reputation on his many works for chorus and solo voice. But modern audiences tend not to know of Bruch’s vocal roots, given the outsize influence of a handful of scores he wrote for instrumental soloists and orchestra, including the Violin Concerto No. 1 and Kol Nidrei, originally written for cello and orchestra, from 1880. Bruch’s publisher released the orchestral score and this reduction with piano accompaniment in 1881, and both versions have remained staples of the cello repertoire ever since.
As a Protestant, Bruch did not approach his self-styled “Adagio on Hebrew Melodies” as a religious statement, but rather as an embrace of the Jewish folk melodies that he had encountered through friends, just as Scottish folk tunes had inspired his Scottish Fantasy, composed the same year. The title comes from the first theme quoted by the cello, taken from a traditional recitation on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born in Bonn, Germany, 1770
Died in Vienna, 1827
Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 3 in A Major, Op. 69 (1808)
During a concert tour in 1796, Ludwig van Beethoven visited Berlin to play for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia. The king was an avid cellist, and Beethoven delighted him by writing two sonatas featuring his instrument. A Vienna publisher printed the two sonatas the next year as Beethoven’s Opus 5, advertising them as “two grand sonatas for harpsichord or piano, with an obbligato cello” — exactly the sort of user-friendly music, constructed to work well enough even with a shaky cellist, that amateurs would likely purchase to play in their own living rooms.
Beethoven was a different man in 1808 when he completed the Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major commissioned by another amateur cellist, this one a German baron. Hearing loss had forced Beethoven to curtail his performing, and yet he was enjoying a stronger financial footing and new opportunities to present music on the grandest stages, including the trailblazing symphonies that he completed and conducted in 1808, the Fifth and Sixth.
Like those symphonies, the Third Cello Sonata exemplifies the uncompromising, elemental style of Beethoven’s “middle” period. At the beginning, the cello’s unaccompanied arrival gives the impression of a slow introduction, but in this case the slow phrasing and pauses mask the underlying tempo, until the piano shifts the cello’s initial theme from A-major to A-minor, jolting the music into its true pace. A scherzo comes next, reveling in Beethoven’s sharp-elbowed style of humor, and then a singing slow movement cuts itself short to make way for a good-natured finale.
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Born in Oneg, Russia, 1873
Died in Beverly Hills, California, 1943
Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14 (1915)
Sergei Rachmaninoff graduated from the piano program at the Moscow Conservatory with honors in 1891, and he capped his composition studies the next year by earning a rare “Great Gold Medal” and attracting his first publishing contract. The early part of his career saw him balancing his talents as a composer of large scores (starting with his debut piano concerto as his Opus 1) and small works (including songs, piano albums, and other salon music), while also conducting and performing as a pianist. It was only in his later years of exile in the West that his legendary keyboard skills came to overshadow his other talents — meaning that endless concert tours crowded out his composing time.
By 1915, when Rachmaninoff published a set of songs for voice and piano as 14 Romances, he had composed nearly all of the small-scale scores he ever would. He added one last selection to that cycle before it was published, a wordless melody that proceeds mostly in smooth steps over a patient bass line, combining the elegance of a Baroque aria with the heightened emotion of Rachmaninoff’s own late-Romantic language. The French term for vocal music without words is Vocalise, the name by which this melody has become a timeless classic heard in countless transcriptions, including this version in which the cello delivers the vocal line.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born in Hamburg, 1833
Died in Vienna, 1897
Sonata for Piano and Cello No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 38 (1862-65)
Brahms spent most of his 20s in the orbit of the Schumann family, and he struggled to live up to Robert Schumann’s prediction that, “When once [Brahms] lowers his magic wand over the massed resources of chorus and orchestra, we shall have in store for us wonderful insights into the secret of the spiritual world.” Brahms did go on to compose legendary symphonies, but the first didn’t emerge until his early 40s. Instead, he made his first great strides in the intimate genre of chamber music — a tradition that might have faded into oblivion without the efforts of Schumann and his circle — starting with a series of seven magnificent scores composed between 1860 and 1865.
In his first attempt at a full sonata for piano and another instrument, Brahms drafted several movements of the Cello Sonata No. 1 in E Minor in 1862, and then he returned to it in 1865, replacing the slow movement and adding a fugal finale. Brahms styled the title as Sonata for Piano and Cello, which speaks to his grounding in the history of a form in which the piano was often the predominant voice, or in Beethoven’s updated model, an equal partner. To start the first movement, the cello and piano each take a turn presenting the main theme, built in sturdy leaps and steps that recall Bach’s serpentine subjects in The Art of Fugue and elsewhere. The Bach connection is even more explicit in the finale, showing how well Brahms integrated the nearly extinct art of fugue into his modern language, including his signature 3-over-2 rhythms that propel phrases across the bar lines.
© 2024 Aaron Grad