CHAN 20280 – WORKS FOR HORN TRIO

Mozart / Schumann / Brahms / Ligeti: Works for Horn Trio

Mozart: Horn Quintet in E flat major, KV 407, arranged for horn trio

It was Brahms who with his glorious Op. 40 (1865) effectively created the medium of the horn trio. But there was already a noble tradition of chamber music with horn, or horns, stemming from the time of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791), and continuing through Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and hosts of more minor figures. It was also quite common in the late eighteenth century for publishers to issue music, originally composed for relatively unusual ensembles, in arrangements for other forces – it made practical sense, particularly if one wanted to extend the appeal amongst amateur musicians. Mozart’s KV 407, for instance, appeared early on in a version with a second cello substituted for the horn, and also in a still more radical adaptation for two each of clarinets, horns, and bassoons. In Mozart’s original, the string quartet is itself unusual: just one violin, but two violas, and cello. This means that the violin tends to work more as an individual in the texture, and a lot of the more intimate musical dialogue, so essential to chamber music of the classical era, takes place between the horn and the violin. So, an adaptation for Brahms’s trio line-up can be made without seriously compromising Mozart’s musical thoughts. Mozart himself would probably have approved, especially if he had lived to hear the skilful job done by Brahms’s friend the composer and arranger Ernst Naumann (1832 – 1910).

Mozart wrote his Horn Quintet in 1782 for an old friend, the horn player and cheesemonger Joseph Leutgeb (1732 – 1811). Leutgeb was clearly an excellent player: when it comes to agility the horn part is as challenging as anything in Mozart’s horn concertos, and Leutgeb would have to be fully proficient in the technique of hand-stopping – pushing the hand higher up the bell in order to produce notes other than the fundamental natural harmonics, and doing so without distorting the tone quality too much. For all the brilliance of the horn writing, this is chamber music, not a horn concerto for reduced forces. As noted above, there is a good deal of lively or subtle instrumental dialogue, right from the start, and not just between horn and violin, but involving the other strings as well, and the only hint of a virtuoso solo cadenza arrives at the high point of the finale. When it comes to melodic invention this is top-drawer Mozart, and one can see his ingenuity at work here, too: the finale’s infectiously high-spirited rondo theme is in fact a close reworking of the lyrical theme that begins the Andante; but the theme in the finale sounds so fresh that it is easy to miss Mozart’s deft craftsmanship here.

Schumann: Duet from ‘Phantasiestücke’, Op. 88, performed with horn

Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856) loved the horn, and he wrote beautifully for it, as can be heard in the deliciously romantic Adagio und Allegro for Horn and Piano, Op. 70, the oddly scored but very likeable Andante und Variationen for two pianos, two cellos, and horn (reworked as the piano duet, Op. 46), and most spectacularly in the thrilling Concertstück for four horns and orchestra, Op. 86. The Phantasiestücke, Op. 88 (1842), was composed for piano trio but, like the publishers of Mozart’s time, Schumann had realised that potential sales of chamber music could be considerably increased if adaptations for other instruments could be included in the score and parts. The slow third movement is headed ‘Duett’, and it is unmistakably a love-duet for ‘feminine’ violin and ‘masculine’ cello (Clara and Robert Schumann?), the piano providing a gently flowing accompaniment. Adapting the cello part for horn is easy enough, and it brings not only a beautifully contrasted voice to the exchanges, but a wealth of romantic, and particularly German romantic, associations. Again, it is not hard to imagine Schumann approving.

Brahms: Horn Trio in E flat major, Op. 40

But the work that, more than any other, distils the spirit of German romantic horn music is the Horn Trio by Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897). For German writers and composers, the horn was the voice of the forests – those huge, shadowy, elemental spaces in which life-transforming encounters occur in German opera, poetry, and in so many classic German folk-tales (think of Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel). Brahms was not often given to dropping hints about ‘meanings’ in his instrumental works – or at least not in public; but he said the gently strolling theme that opens the first movement came to him while walking through woodland, and the movement as a whole could have been composed to illustrate that wonderful German word Waldeinsamkeit – the sense of solitude that comes uniquely in the depths of a forest. Like his mentor Schumann, Brahms delights in the horn’s associations with hunting, explored here in the exuberant second movement, a splendid demonstration of the kind of lively, dancing three-in-bar scherzo motion that Brahms found it difficult to recreate in his symphonies.

The reflectiveness of the first movement is not forgotten, however: as well as looking back, the Scherzo’s slower, minor-key central section also prepares the ground emotionally for the wonderful slow movement, Adagio mesto, ‘Slow and sad’ – unlike Schumann, Brahms rarely gives such a direct expressive steer in his tempo headings. But even without that, it would be clear enough that this is a profoundly personal lament: according to Brahms’s biographer Max Kalbeck, Brahms composed it as a memorial to his mother, who had died only a few months before he began work on the Horn Trio, and with whom Brahms had had an intense, if somewhat complicated relationship. At its heart comes a moment of captivating stillness, in which horn and violin foreshadow the jovial, galloping theme of the Finale, but in very different emotional terms.

Various German folksongs have been suggested as more or less plausible sources for this theme, as well as others in the Horn Trio. But do they add much meaning or significance to what is, in itself, a remarkably suggestive piece of music poetry – apart, of course, from the inevitable suggestion of a mother singing to her child? Grief and zest for life are plain for all to hear, as well as an understanding of and a love for the horn, an instrument which Brahms had learned from childhood, and apparently played particularly well in his youth. (So, another possible childhood association.) But it was the old, valveless ‘hand horn’ which Brahms mastered – the instrument which Germans, suggestively, sometimes call the Waldhorn (forest horn) – not the new instrument with valves which had proved so imaginatively liberating for Schumann in his Concertstück. Where Schumann was thrilled by the possibilities of the new horn, his protégé Johannes Brahms always viewed it with suspicion, preferring the old instrument’s mellower voice – the modern horn, he said, sounded like a Blechbratsche, a ‘brass viola’, and he recommended using its venerable ancestor in performances of the Horn Trio. A good modern player, however, can capture a good deal of what Brahms thought lost, without having to dampen the tone to reach notes beyond those of the fundamental series.

Ligeti: Horn Trio ‘Hommage à Brahms’

It is a measure of how beautifully, how archetypally Brahms’s Horn Trio captures the soul of the German romantic horn that the pianist Eckart Besch had only to mention it to the Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923 – 2006) to set his imagination working instantly.

As soon as he pronounced the word ‘horn’, somewhere inside my head I heard the sound of a horn as if coming from a distant forest in a fairytale, just as in a poem by Eichendorff,

Ligeti recalled. Besch was hoping that Ligeti would compose a companion piece for Brahms’s Trio. He did, and in the process he freed himself from a period of near creative paralysis which had followed the completion of his opera Le Grand Macabre, in 1977. The Trio, subtitled Hommage à Brahms, opened up a new phase in his development which, Ligeti asserted, should be described neither as modernist nor postmodernist. Its half-magical, half-desolate poetry may remind some literary listeners of the novelist Jorge Luis Borges’s only half-playful suggestion (part inspiration for Le Grand Macabre) that the end of the world has already happened, and that we are living (if that is the word) in a bizarre echo-world beyond the end of history.

Whatever one’s interpretation, the basic musical terms of Ligeti’s Horn Trio are fairly clear. Dominating the first and (more subtly) the final movement of this four-movement structure is a theme of a kind often described as a ‘horn call’, though it is introduced by the violin, not the horn. Beethoven uses just such a theme to spell out his motto ‘Le-be-wohl’, ‘Farewell’, in his Piano Sonata, Op. 81a, Les Adieux, but in Ligeti’s Trio the harmonies are slightly distorted, which adds poignancy to music already marked dolcissimo (very sweetly) and con tenerezza (with tenderness). Metrically complex rhythms, discovered and developed from Bulgarian folk music by Ligeti’s great compatriot Béla Bartók, dominate the increasingly crazed dance-like second movement. The basic pattern is eight rapid notes divided into a recurring 3 + 3 + 2, but Ligeti’s writing is anything but constrained by this; in fact the cross-rhythms become ever more complicated and dizzying, and as they do so the horn introduces some of the weirder-sounding higher ‘partials’ of the harmonic series, as though the music were being heard through an increasingly distorting filter. A savage, dislocating off-beat ‘march’ follows, then hush descends for the final movement, headed Lamento – though as in the case of Brahms’s mesto, the mood speaks for itself. This time, in contrast to the Trio by Brahms, here grief does not yield ultimately to the exuberant love of life. As the climax builds, the melancholic ‘Farewell’ of the original horn-call theme is transformed into almost hysterical keening figures. As for the ending, the marking morendo al niente – dying away to nothing – has never been more chillingly apt.