Prokofiev: Overture on Hebrew Themes, op. 34
Sergei Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes from 1920 originated primarily from an unexpected reunion that occurred halfway around the world. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the 26-year-old Prokofiev toured the United States as a virtuoso pianist and a promoter of his original works, both to escape artistic persecution in the burgeoning Soviet regime and to establish his reputation on an international scale. At the same time, the St. Petersburg-based Ensemble, the touring face of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, was also concertizing in the United States in hopes of raising sufficient funds to establish a Jewish music conservatory in Jerusalem.
Following their Carnegie Hall debut, the Zimro Ensemble crossed paths with Prokofiev in New York in the fall of 1919; their intersection was noteworthy as all members of the group were former classmates of Prokofiev’s at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The ensemble’s clarinetist Simeon Bellison, who went on to serve as the principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic, enlisted Prokofiev to compose a work for the sextet that highlighted their unique clarinet, piano, and string quartet configuration and expanded their Jewish-centered repertoire.
To assist the non-Jewish composer with the specific commission demands, Bellison provided Prokofiev with his own notebook of Jewish folk songs and other Hebraic-inspired melodies. After procuring two contrasting melodies from Bellison’s notebook, Prokofiev wrote the Overture in a mere two days. The piece had its premiere in February of 1920 in New York by the Zimro Ensemble with Prokofiev serving as guest pianist. While Prokofiev preferred the texture of the piece’s original six-instrument lineup, he begrudgingly arranged the Overture for chamber orchestra in 1934 to the delight of his publisher.
A one-movement work in sonata form, the Overture begins with a stomping, klezmer-infused melody introduced by the clarinet. The unidentified theme, possibly an original one by Bellson, is taken up by the strings and builds to a raucous peak before tapering off to introduce the second theme, an aching and impassioned Yiddish wedding song first presented by the cello. The Overture develops and recapitulates the themes in accordance with sonata form guidelines before racing to a feisty conclusion. The Overture was one of countless works in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that successfully integrated folk music into a “high art” medium without sacrificing the verve and flavor of its source material.
Schubert: String Quintet in C Major, D. 956
During his acceptance speech for receiving the Aspen Award in 1964, British composer Benjamin Britten stated: “…It is arguable that the richest and most productive eighteen months in our music history is the time when Beethoven had just died, when the other nineteenth-century giants, Wagner, Verdi and Brahms had not begun; I mean the period in which Franz Schubert wrote his Winterreise, the C major Symphony, his last three piano sonatas, the C major String Quintet, as well as a dozen other glorious pieces.”
Glorious is one of the many glowing adjectives used to describe Schubert’s String Quintet, completed in the fall of 1828 a mere six weeks before the composer’s untimely death at the age of 31. Quickly composed in and among the countless masterworks mentioned in Britten’s statement, the piece was rejected by a Leipzig publisher near the end of Schubert’s life and lay dormant for more than 20 years before the work had its premiere in Vienna in 1850 and was finally published in 1853.
The piece is sometimes called the “Cello Quintet” as Schubert chose a second cello (instead of the more common second viola) to supplement the standard string quartet. While not the first composer to incorporate two cellos in a string quintet (one can reference the dozens of two-cello string quintets by cellist-composer Luigi Boccherini), Schubert’s use of two cellos in the ensemble not only gave the first cellist room to showcase its higher register without forcing the ensemble to lose foundational harmonic support, but offered listeners a rare opportunity to hear two cellos singing together in parallel motion. The second theme of the piece’s first movement, a melody of near-perfect eloquence presented as a two-cello duet, is so beloved that some scholars have wondered if the entire piece and its unusual instrumentation was built around that single theme and the double-cello partnership that fulfilled its lyric potential.
The approximately 50-minute piece is a study in contrasts: shades of light and dark, calm and chaos, and profundity and lightheartedness coexist side-by-side throughout its four movements. The piece’s opening movement, an expansive sonata form in C major that lasts more than a third of the entire work’s duration, is most revered for its blissful second theme, first stated by the two cellos. Following a march-like third theme that completes the exposition, the movement’s development and recapitulation unfold with Schubert’s signature use of ambitious modulations to distant keys and a vast array of cascading emotions.
Time stands nearly still in the piece’s second movement, an E-major adagio in ABA form that casts an almost other-worldly sense of tranquility. The plucking of the second cello and the musical surges from the first violin keep the organ-like chorale, played by the middle three voices, from becoming static. Serenity turns to turbulence in the movement’s B section, played in the dark, distant key of F minor (a half-step higher than the E-major beginning). While peace prevails in the return of the A section, the second cello’s running notes underneath the larger calm remind listeners of the recent tumult that occurred in the movement’s stormy middle section.
As the piece’s first two movements are deeply profound, the latter two movements are comparatively lighthearted. The third movement, a rustic C-major scherzo, kicks off with big, open-stringed declarations from the five players that create a symphonic texture reminiscent of bagpipe drones and hunting horns. Like its previous movement, the scherzo features a contrasting middle section a half-step higher than its starting key; the hymn-like trio in D-flat major is as somber as the opening is exuberant.
The final movement, a sonata-rondo in C major bursting with Hungarian folk dance-inspired rhythms, is a mostly jolly closing, though not without plenty of harmonic shifts between major and minor tonalities to remind listeners of the overall piece’s depth and host of contrasts. Schubert, possibly hinting at a callback to the first movement’s second theme, penned another two-cello duet in the middle of this movement before instructing the five players to accelerate to the rousing finish. As the second and third movements featured entire key areas a half-step apart, the final two notes of the entire piece (D-flat then C in octaves by all five players) suggest the jarring half-step relationship existed on both a macro and micro level.
For some listeners, the final two notes sound like a wink or a smirk while others hear them as a sinister or haunted signal of Schubert’s imminent death. Some scholars are convinced the entire piece is an extended swansong while others, possibly Benjamin Britten included, see it as the crowning achievement of an incredibly prolific and ambitious man who was superlatively motivated to be the greatest composer of his era. Regardless of Schubert’s overarching motivation for composing his Quintet, the piece is a sublime masterwork that has earned its status as one of the cornerstones of the entire chamber music genre.