March 2 & 3, 2025

March Concert

Elisabeth von Herzogenberg
Selections from 8 Klavierstücke

Johannes Brahms
String Quartet Op. 51 #1 in C minor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Quintet in G minor for Piano, Two Violins, Viola & Cello

with Sami Merdinian, violin

Sunday, March 2, 3 pm * First Congregational Church of Old Greenwich * 108 Sound Beach Avenue, Old Greenwich, CT
Monday, March 3, 7:30 pm * Greenwich Historical Society * 47 Strickland Road, Cos Cob

Program Notes

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Amy Cheney Beach have more in common than having been excellent musicians and composers. The dual last names of these women (and many others) suggest the same story: When they married, society and their families expected them to give up performing and composing to run their households, raise their children, and do what they could to support their husband’s career. (We’re talking to you, Mahler*).

Many of these women did manage to continue to compose, with or without their husband’s support, but sometimes a woman also acted as her husband’s mentor and advisor, critiquing his compositions. Or, in the case of the unmarried Johannes Brahms, several women. Brahms, whose personal motto was “Free, but happy,” had a disconcerting tendency to become infatuated with female musicians, then suddenly distancing himself before subsequently rekindling their friendship when they somehow were safe (typically after they married). The most important of these included Clara Wieck Schumann, Amanda Röntgen-Maier (those dual names again), and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg (1847-1892).

Elisabeth von Stockhausen, the daughter of a Hanoverian diplomat, began to study piano and voice after her family moved to Vienna in 1852. When she was sixteen, her piano teacher, Julius Epstein, decided she should study with Brahms. While Brahms needed the money, after a handful of lessons he sent Elisabeth back to study with Epstein. However, after Elisabeth married the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843-1900) in 1868 and moved with him to Leipzig, Brahms renewed his friendship (see above), staying at their home when he visited Leipzig, dedicating his Rhapsodies Op. 79 to Elisabeth, and corresponding with both Elisabeth and Heinrich with enough letters to fill a book (and you can read that book online). These letters provide a rare insight into Brahms’ life and work, with Elisabeth giving Brahms advice on works in progress. (E.g. for a passage in the Symphony No. 4 “…but the whole progression of the three upper parts…jars indescribably. Must it be, dear Friend?”).

In Leipzig, Elisabeth performed and composed for private events and even published a set of folksong arrangements. But after her death, her other music was lost - with one exception. Her husband decided to edit and publish a set of piano pieces she had written in 1882, sending them to friends such as Grieg, Joachim, and Brahms (who praised “these beautiful and affecting pages.”). While preparing the music for publication, Heinrich noticed that number 7 had a dedication to a family friend, Luise von Bezold-Engelmann. He decided to add dedications to other women from their personal and musical circle to the remaining movements, while reserving the dedication of his favorite movement (number 6) for himself, saying “The one dearest to me I have dedicated to myself, and since this did not occur earlier, I have set stars (***) on it here.” The dedicatees of the movements in this performance are (in order) Emma Engelmann-Brandes (yet more double names), ***, Helene Hauptmann, Lili Wach (Felix Mendelssohn’s daughter), and Clara Schumann.

While each movement has a dedicatee, the music is not a set of portraits as are Elgar’s Enigma Variations (although Heinrich did dedicate the virtuosic opening and closing movements to two piano virtuosos - Emma Engelmann-Brandes and Clara Schumann). Rather, they are romantic character pieces that reflect Elisabeth’s sensibilities as both a pianist and a singer.

*In a letter to Alma Mahler before they married, Gustav Mahler wrote “How do you imagine both wife and husband as composers? Do you have any idea how ridiculous and subsequently how much such an idiosyncratic rivalry must end up dragging us both down? How will it be if you happen to be just "in the mood" but have to look after the house for me, or get me something I happen to need, if you are to look after the trivialities of life for me?”

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) is remembered as a composer, a concert pianist, and a (musical, if sketchy) conductor. But Brahms was also a deeply committed musicologist. He contributed to the complete editions of Chopin, Handel, Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann, purchased the complete editions of Bach, Handel and Schütz, and personally copied hundreds of pieces by early composers who interested him. (Ever hear of the Swiss Renaissance composer Ludwig Senfl (1486?-1543)? Neither have I.)

Brahms’ interest in music of the past both helped and hindered him. Knowing the music of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, et al., informed Brahms’ own high standards of composition. (“It is not hard to compose but it is wonderfully hard to let the superfluous notes fall under the table.”) But Brahms’ awareness of the achievements of earlier composers, especially those of Beethoven, was a burden. (“To follow in Beethoven’s footsteps transcends one’s strength.”)

Central to those footsteps were Beethoven’s symphonies and string quartets. Indeed, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its choral finale, loomed so large in the consciousness of composers that Brahms antipode, Richard Wagner (1813-1883), allegedly wrote that Beethoven had exhausted the potential of instrumental music as the choral finale of the Ninth proved that music was “crying out for redemption in poetry” and needed to follow a new (and, of course, Wagnerian) path. Rejecting Wagner’s “Music of the Future,” Brahms struggled to find a way to follow and extend Beethoven’s legacy, saying “Since Haydn, a symphony is no longer a simple affair, but a matter of life and death.” It is no surprise then that Brahms took twenty-two years (1854-76) to complete his First Symphony. But it was a surprise that during that time Brahms wrote other large-scale instrumental compositions: Two Serenades, the Variations on a Theme of Haydn, and the First Piano Concerto.

Something similar happened when Brahms composed his string quartets. With the Platonic form of Beethoven’s string quartets looming over him, it took Brahms eight years (1865-1873) to complete his first string quartet after destroying twenty (yes, twenty) other attempts. Yet before 1873 he composed a cello sonata, two piano quartets, a piano quintet, a horn trio, and two string sextets.

So, when Brahms finally finished a string quartet, how did he follow and extend Beethoven’s paradigms in his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 51? In two ways: Brahms unified the music by using an almost maniacal transformation of basic motives à la Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. (You know – DA, DA, DA, DUM). And the quartet explored extensions of harmony that Arnold Schoenberg used as examples in his essay Brahms the Progressive to show that Brahms’ harmonic language “competes successfully with that of many a Wagnerian passage.”

The quartet is in C minor, a key that Beethoven reserved for some of his most dramatic, intense music. The blistering intensity of opening and closing movements bookend the second movement Romanze - Poco Adagio, containing some of Brahms most lyrical writing, and the third movement marked Allegretto molto moderato e comodo, with an emotional flow as complex as its tempo marking.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s (1875-1912) father, Daniel Taylor, met the Englishwoman Alice Martin when he came to Great Britian from Sierra Leone in 1869 to continue his education, ultimately studying medicine. The two never married, and Daniel returned to Africa to pursue his career not knowing Alice was pregnant. Naming her child Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (in honor of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Alice went to live with her father’s family and subsequently married George Evans, raising her mixed-race child in Croydon, a suburb of London.

Coleridge (as he was called) grew up in an environment that included professional musicians, taking violin lessons and singing in local church choirs. In 1890, his obvious talents gained the fifteen-year-old admission to the Royal College of Music (RCM) where he took an interest in composition, studying beside fellow students Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughn Williams.

As a composer, Coleridge-Taylor, following Dvorak’s and Grieg’s example of using folk music in their concert works, began exploring his African heritage and Pan-Africanism. The materials and themes he discovered appear in compositions such as The Song of Hiawatha,
Op. 30, Four African Dances, Op. 58, and Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op. 63. His music made Coleridge-Taylor an international figure. He toured the United States three times (during which he met Brooker T. Washington and President Theodore Roosevelt), was the youngest delegate at the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 (where he met W.E.B. De Bois and future collaborator, African American author Paul Dunbar), toured with Dvorak protégé baritone/composer Henry Thacker Burleigh, was dubbed the “African Mahler” by members of the New York Philharmonic, and was the inspiration for the 200-voice chorus of the Coleridge-Taylor Society in Washington D.C. Even schools were named in his honor. (The Historic Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Elementary School is alive and well in Baltimore). His importance as one of Britian’s most prominent composers was summed up by music patron Carl Stoeckel’s statement that “circumstances effectually prevent the appearance of Verdi, but we can get Coleridge-Taylor.”

But this exploration of Coleridge-Taylor’s roots only started in the late 1890s, when he was in his twenties. Coleridge was raised by his mother as an Englishman, through and through. As a boy, he sang for Presbyterian and Anglican services, and attended weekly religious services required by his school, literally named the British School.  At the RCM, the young composer received the best music education that England had to offer, that is, a thoroughly Germanic education, at the hands of Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), a friend and champion of Brahms. And, as a student, Coleridge-Taylor started to compose prolifically in traditional Germanic forms, writing a symphony, chamber music (a quartet, two quintets and a nonet), even giving his Op. 5 a German title - Fantasiestücke.

None of this minimizes the young Coleridge-Taylor’s accomplish- ments. While he entered the RCM as a precocious fifteen-year-old, he was an accomplished composer in the Conservatory’s dominant Teutonic style when he wrote his Piano Quintet, Op. 1 at the ripe old age of eighteen. Premiered in his hometown in October 1893 on an all Coleridge-Taylor concert, the reviewer for the Croydon Advertiser noted that “one could not help being pleasantly astonished at the work of a young man of but a few years' experience in the musical art, the minuet being full of beautiful melody.”

While the reviewer was praising the Quintet, he seriously underplayed its dramatic character. Its four movements have a dramatic sweep that grabs the audience’s attention from the first movement’s opening chords, through the passionate Larghetto and the propulsive Scherzo (not a minuet) before ending with a breathless finale marked Allegro Molto, which includes a driving fugue based on a “beautiful melody” used in the trio of the Scherzo.

© 2025 Ubaldo Valli