Program Notes

Joseph Haydn

Piano Trio in A Major, Hob. XV: 18

Beginning a brand-new season of all-repeat artists with a piano trio by Joseph Haydn that we’ve never before heard on the Series has a certain symmetry to it. Hoboken XV’s no. 18 is not the best-known of Haydn’s piano trios, but it is the first from his last major group of trios, published in the early 1790s in London. The thing to remember about Haydn’s piano trios is that they are very close to the mid-18th-century tradition of making a piano sonata for home use with supplemental parts for the house violinist and cellist. In this sense they differ from Haydn’s string quartets—which have a more equal distribution of responsibility among the players—and from the rest of the works on this program. Amateur music making at home was an important presence in the lives of Europeans of the rising middle class. The relatively new instrument at the center of the fashion was the piano, and piano sonatas were often published with optional violin parts.

Karl Geiringer, famous Haydn biographer, states that during the 1790s, when Hob. XV: 18-32 were published, the British stylistic trend was to keep “the violin part of these pieces rather simple, while the keyboard part was apparently meant for amateurs of greater technical abilities.” Still, these later works are weightier in all parts than Haydn’s earlier trios, in Geiringer’s estimation. On the other hand, liner note writer Alex Benjamin, annotating for the Gryphon Trio’s own CD of this work, finds a full measure of “playfulness” in the late trios, and reminds us of Haydn’s tendencies to work through traditional forms with so much motivic repetition that we must hear harmonic progress and not thematic repetition in order to keep our bearings.

I know we are up to it. The sweetly simple first movement’s sonata form explains itself mostly from the piano bench, with artfully interposed comments by the violin (maybe a word or two from the cello). This is the longest, most complex movement, exploring some darker keys in its graceful development. The minor harmonies of its development return to open the short second movement Andante. And the playfulness is in full swing by the time we reach the snippy last movement rondo—what’s better than Haydn dashing through this potentially trite, repetitious classical form with all his imagination, impishness, and mastery of compositional detail?

—Jeanne Belfy

Kelly-Marie Murphy

Give Me Phoenix Wings to Fly (1997)

In addition to the myth of the Phoenix, there are two poetic influences for this piece. The first is John Keats:

But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.

The second is Robert Graves:

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.

“I’ve always been intrigued by the myth of the Phoenix,” writes Murphy, “a bird that immolates in fire and then rises up again from its own ashes. It is such a powerful image, and one which is relevant to disaster. No matter how devastating any single event might be, you can still recover and begin again: a do-over. The success is in the attempt and the belief that it is possible to move forward.”

Kelly-Marie Murphy was born on a NATO base in Sardinia, Italy, in 1964, and grew up on Armed Forces based all across Canada. She began her studies in composition at the University of Calgary and later received a PhD in composition from the University of Leeds in England. After living in and working for many years in the Washington DC area, she is now based in Ottawa. She was awarded first prize and the People’s Choice Award at the CBC Young Composer’s Competition in 1994 (string quartet category), earned fifth place at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris in 1996 for her first orchestra piece, From the Drum Comes a Thundering Beat; and recently won first prize in the Centara Corporation New Music Festival Composers’ Competition for her harp concerto, And Then at Night I Paint the Stars. As a result of these and other successes, she has been the recipient of many commissions from Canada’s leading performers and ensembles, and her music has been performed worldwide.

—Gryphon Trio

Ludwig van Beethoven

Piano Trio No. 7 in B Major, Op. 97 “Archduke”

So who is this “Archduke?” You won’t find him in the music; the subtitle refers to the dedicatee of the last complete piano trio by Beethoven. Archduke Rudolph (1788-1832) was the younger brother of the Hapsburg Emperor of Austria. He had, in Beethoven’s time, developed into quite an accomplished pianist, mostly because his epilepsy prevented him from taking a place in the military. Lucky for Beethoven: as Beethoven’s piano pupil, Archduke Rudolph became a discriminating connoisseur who recognized the quality of the compositions dedicated to him [which, according to Alan Schwartzman, included such formidable works as the 4th and 5th piano concertos, his only opera Fidelio, and the Missa Solemnis, the latter to celebrate his installation as Archbishop of Olmutz], and took offense when a great work was dedicated to someone else.

Rudolph is further remembered as the patron whose brilliant idea it was to organize a yearly salary for Beethoven in order to keep him in Vienna. With several others, he underwrote Beethoven’s living expenses so that he would be free to compose as he wished. Rudolph kept up his part of the bargain, even after the others backed out in the face of the difficult circumstances created by Napoleon.

But this Trio of 1811 has no more to do with Rudolph than to remind us of the historical context in which it was written. Some of the piano part was said to have been too technically difficult for its dedicatee to have performed; in 1814 the composer gave it its first and second public performances in what were his last appearances as a pianist. In the words of composer and violinist Louis Spohr, who witnessed the event: “In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys till the strings jangled, and in the piano he played so softly that whole groups of notes were omitted, so that the music was unintelligible.”

Nevertheless, this piece was well-received, and has come to represent the grandest example of the genre to which Beethoven gave his first opus number, the piano trio. As one of the last works of Beethoven’s “middle period,” the “Archduke” Trio, according to Tovey, “has the enormous strength of someone who knows how to relax.” Its four large movements show the full scale of the symphony and ask the three players to participate equally. The piano leads the first movement sonata form, stating what is usually referred to by Alan Schwartzman as the “Olympian” first theme; the second theme is introduced in an unusual key, the submediant G major. The lighter second movement scherzo contains a gloomy contrapuntal trio that should be repeated fully and then partially in the coda; this and the slow third movement theme and variations are exceptionally long. Schwartzman reports that “movement 3 is the heart and soul of this trio--Beethoven’s spirit sings sublimely, as if an apotheosis to his own inward immortal beloved. It includes a set of four variations on a hymnlike melody which soars like a bird through the instruments before drawing to its serene close. Nowhere is the true spirit of Beethoven captured more perfectly than in this movement.” By the last movement, a sonata-rondo form, there hardly seems to be much left to say, so Beethoven keeps it short. Showing some colorful special effects in the cello and piano, the Finale dashes off to an amusing coda and fast finish.