~ Stevie Wonder ~
What makes chamber music so much fun is that behind a host of boring names lies some of the most beautiful music. A name like “Octet in F” sounds academic and boring. But tell a chamber music fan that the Seattle Chamber Music Society is programming this octet, and his eyes will bug out while he sprints to the ticket office at Benaroya Hall. Works for larger chamber ensembles aren’t performed all that often because you have a pay a larger group of musicians. So when pieces like the Mendelssohn Octet, the Schubert Octet and the Beethoven Septet are programmed, it’s a real treat.
One day in 1824, the 27 year old Franz Schubert was approached by a minor nobleman, Ferdinard Troyer, a bureaucrat and gifted clarinettist, to write “something like the Beethoven Septet, but different.” Frannie was always keen for commissions, but I suspect he may have frowned inwardly at this request.
The man who had mentored Schubert from his boyhood at the Vienna Choirboys School onward was the headmaster, Antonio Salieri. Yes, that Salieri. Frannie was one of the few boys talented enough to be allowed to study with the head honcho. Tony ran a musical gym for Frannie where he handed the boy various pieces of opera libretti and said, “Set it to music.” There was one piece set to music by Schubert that sounded so much like Pamina’s first aria from Mozart’s “Magic Flute” that Salieri told him never to do that again. Was Tony ticked at the plagiarism, or the fact that Frannie was plagiarizing Mozart?
Tony believed that everything Beethoven had written after his Second Symphony was a waste of music paper. He would yell “Grotesque!” whenever the subject of Beethoven’s mature works came up. This colored Frannie’s perception of Beethoven. The boy felt guilty about loving the Seventh Symphony, whose dactylic rhythm in the second movement so influenced his later songs. It wasn’t until Salieri’s death in 1825 that Schubert dived headfirst into Beethoven’s output, which was responsible for the amazing music of the last three years of his life. (Frannie died in 1828 at age 31 from a combination of typhoid and secondary syphilis. He was bisexual.) So for Troyer to ask for something like Beethoven, but not Beethoven, would have rankled a bit in 1824.
Schubert used Beethoven’s Septet as a model, but added an additional violin. It’s scored for two violins, viola, cello, string bass, clarinet, bassoon and (French) horn. This is the horn without valves, the so-called “natural” or hunting horn, which could be dangerously unreliable in pitch at critical moments. The octet is in the six-movement serenade format: sonata, slow ternary, scherzo, theme-and-variations, minuet and finale. What is incontrovertible is that Schubert surpassed Beethoven in this serenade.
The first movement begins with a slow introduction marked “adagio”. It sets the table and shows that Schubert is pacing you for a long, long ride. (The entire piece runs about an hour.) Stravinsky once said that it doesn’t matter if you fall asleep during a Schubert piece because when you awaken, you’re still in heaven. Frannie moves around the major and minor modes before settling you gently into the tonic key of F Major.
The opening theme, marked simply “allegro”, is sunny and uncomplicated, but at 2:50 Frannie uses a cloudy D minor bridge passage to lead into the second subject in C Major. At 5:35, the exposition repeats.
At 9:00, the short development begins, and it turns dark with the second subject worked out in the minor. It turns sunnier with a turn to the major, but most development is still concerned with the second subject.
At 11:58, the recap begins with all the subjects in the traditional tonic key, F Major. Note that in the second subject, the former clarinet passage goes to the bassoon. A short coda leads to a quick and happy end.