Halloween is only eight days away. On this week’s “Music from Marlboro” we’ll get into the spirit with some ghostly utterances by Beethoven and Henri Dutilleux.
Beethoven had already been dead for fifteen years at the time his star pupil, Carl Czerny, remarked that the slow movement of one of the piano trios reminded him of Banquo’s ghost. It turns out, Czerny may not have been all that far off the mark.
In 1808, while Beethoven was at work on his Piano Trio in D major, Op. 70, No.1, he was actually contemplating writing an opera on the subject of Macbeth. The words “Macbett” and “Ende” were scrawled near sketches for the Largo in one of his notebooks. Some scholars speculate that the composer may have been working out ideas for a projected scene with the three witches.
The mood is certainly ominous, heightened by eerie and mournful passages, sudden pauses and outbursts, and a kind of ghostly tremolo. Beethoven would abandon the opera, when his librettist, Heinrich Joseph von Collin (to whom he had dedicated the “Coriolan Overture”), begged off the project, thinking it too dark.
Allegedly, the “Ghost Trio” contains the slowest of all slow movements in Beethoven’s output. By some standards, it might also be said to be the most impressionistic. All the more appropriate, then, that we hear it coupled with Dutilleux’s “Ainsi la nuit” (“Thus the Night”).
Dutilleux’s seven-movement string quartet, meticulously crafted between 1973 and 1976, has often been described as Impressionist. However, subjectively speaking, it must be Impressionism by way of Guillermo del Toro. Let’s face it, folks, masterpiece or no, this “Night” can be a little creepy.
Dutilleux claimed he wrote the work after coming off intensive studies of the scores of Bartók, Webern, and yes, Beethoven. I think he may have been hitting the cheese plate a little too close to bed time.
We’ll hear a performance from the 2001 Marlboro Music Festival, with violinists Joseph Lin and Harumi Rhodes, violist Richard O’Neill, and cellist Marcy Rosen.
Beethoven’s “Ghost Trio” was performed in 2015, by pianist Dénes Várjon, violinist Michelle Ross, and cellist Brook Speltz, on tour in Washington, DC.
The first of this season’s Marlboro tours is already underway. Remaining performances will take place tonight, at the Perleman Theater in the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia; tomorrow, at the Freer Gallery’s Meyer Auditorium in D.C.; and Sunday, at Longy School of Music in Boston. On the program are works by Mozart, Beethoven and Brett Dean. For more information, visit marlboromusic.org.
Then join me for an hour of weird music and uncanny performances on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
