Re: "Elegiac Reaction" |
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I've just read "Elegiac Reaction", an interesting and entertaining article by Paul Groh where he questions whether the viola repertoire really needs another elegy. This article is the first to appear on a new website that I've just launched called www.contemporaryviola.com | ||||||||
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| This is a good question, since so much viola music is indeed of an elegiac nature. Its timbre and register certainly encourage many composers to adopt this attitude to the instrument, including one of the instrument's greatest exponents, Paul Hindemith.This is, however, primarily a 19th-20th. century viewpoint. If we look at one of the earliest solo viola works, the Telemann concerto, for instance, while not ignoring these characteristics, Telemann does not make any great feature of them. As in the Baroque, likewise in the Stil Galant, where we find Stamitz treating the instrument with the same variety as would be expected in a concerto for violin or 'cello of the time. Dittersdorf in his Eflat major Sonata does the same.
Mozart, too, does not overplay the elegiac characteristics of it in the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola. In the Clarinet Trio, the viola writing is sometimes on the grumpy side, whilst in the Clarinet Quintet its treatment is very free, with a rather wistful, quasi-zigeunerisch treatment in its variation in the finale. In the following century Arthur Honegger avoids it totally in, e.g' "La Parisienne." There is an elegaic quality to both Brahms sonatas, but that is just as apparent in the clarinet versions: here the quality is musical rather than instrument dependent. As a composer who plays viola your comment caused me to look at my own work for the instrument. An early "Rhapsody" for viola and piano is rather redolent of the post-Baxian "Celtic twilight" still (in 1957) lingering among Scottish composers at that time, but much nearer to the wistful treatment mentioned in the Mozart Quintet than to the truly elegiac feelings of Hindemith's "Trauermusik". Nine years later I wrote my Quartet in one movement for Piano, Violin, Viola and 'Cello. The central section is elegiac, built on an inversion of the first theme. It opens with the 'cello stating the theme accompanied by the piano in full elegiac flight. This is then taken up by violin and viola, but the unusual feature here is that the viola is playing an ocatave above the violin - the area of the fingerboard that my viola professor would have referred to as "up among the rosin". This creates a much more intense feeling than would be the case if I had used the obvious octave doubling, simply because the viola has to work harder. What the writing will be like in a current project, a quartet for Cor Anglais, Bass Clarinet, Viola and 'Cello is only beginning to emerge. I shall report back to the Forum later, and maybe you people out there can judge. I hope these few illustrations will add some fuel to the question asked. My own answer would be why not? - so long as its a good piece of music for performer and listener. To other composers I would suggest that we shouldn't saddle any instument with our personal preconceptions, but use them to convey our message and feelings in a way that is gratifying to the performer and of interest to those who hear it played. | ||||||||
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| Edited by Frederick Frayling - Kelly on August 14, 2008 @ 11:38 am | | |||||||
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