Four Centuries of Great Music May 8, 2022 String Sextet

Today on Four Centuries of Great Music I am featuring music for string sextet.  Of course the string sextet is a composition written for six string instruments with most written for an ensemble consisting of two violins, two violas, and two cellos. 

Luigi Boccherini: Sextet No.4 for 2 Violins, 2 Violas & 2 Cellos In F Major Op.23

I am opening today’s show with one of the 6 string sextets by Luigi Boccherini as his op. 23.  These were written in 1776.  Boccherini wrote the six string sextets as part of his employment with the Spanish Infante Don Luis Antonio Jaime de Borbón y Farnesio  who was a brother of King Charles III of Spain.

Already in spring 1777 the Parisian music publisher Jean-Georges Sieber published them in parts. It was the Paris publisher who gave the series the opus number 23 and the name “Sestetti concertanti”. He arbitrarily changed the sequence of the different sextets. Only a few sources of the these sextets have survived, but among the available sources, an autograph score with corrections made by the author himself of the six sextets stands out, and can be regarded as the best edition of these works. This autograph edition is the order that most regard as the correct order of the 6 sextets.  

Johannes Brahms' String Sextet No. 2 in G major, Opus 36 was composed during the years of 1864–1865 (although it drew extensively from earlier material ) and published by the firm of Fritz Simrock. It was first performed in Boston, Massachusetts on October 11, 1866, with the European premiere following the next month in Zurich.[1] The work is scored for two violins, two violas, and two celli, and has four movements:   1. Allegro non troppo (G major);  2.  Scherzo – Allegro non troppo – Presto giocoso (G minor);  3. Adagio (E minor) and 4. Poco allegro

Brahms did most of the composition in the comfortable country surroundings of Lichtental, near Baden-Baden.

The work is characterized by the exotic-sounding opening of its first movement, by innovative chord structures, and by its many contrasts, both technical and melodic.   And According to Brahms' biographer Karl Geiringer, the first movement also conceals a reference to the first name of Agathe von Siebold with whom he was infatuated at the time.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Souvenir de Florence (Op. 70)

Although most commonly heard in the string orchestra version, the Souvenir de Florence (Op. 70) of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was originally written as a string sextet. The Souvenir de Florence  was composed in the summer of 1890 and Tchaikovsky dedicated the work to the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society in response to his becoming an Honorary Member. The work was titled "Souvenir de Florence" because the composer sketched one of the work's principal themes while visiting Florence, Italy, where he composed The Queen of Spades. The work was revised between December 1891 and January 1892, before being premiered in 1892. The work is in 4 movements Allegro con spirito. Adagio cantabile e con moto, Allegretto moderato and Allegro con brio e vivace.

The first movement is in sonata form and, without introduction, presents a rather violent yet melodic first theme in D minor. The second theme, in the dominant major key of A major, is much calmer; it flows from the first theme almost effortlessly and then proceeds into the development and recapitulation, which concludes with a quick coda.

The slow second movement, in D major, has a very innocent, romantic theme initially stated by the first violin with pizzicato accompaniment before being taken up by the cello. Following interruption by an interlude for all of the instruments, the theme returns for a repeat of the first section.

The last two movements, with their distinctly Russian and folk-like melodies and rhythms, greatly contrast with the previous ones.

Capriccio (1942), Richard Strauss’ last stage work, is an opera about opera, constructed as a series of elegant salon conversations dealing with a question that has bedevilled opera lovers for centuries: which is more important, the words or the music?

The opera begins with a lusciously scored string sextet that functions both as a prelude to the action and as the first topic of conversation in the on-stage drama. This is because halfway through the sextet, as the curtain rises and the stage lights up, it is revealed that the six string players are in fact performing a new work written by the Countess’ composer-suitor especially for her, in front of her, in the elegant Rococo drawing room that is the set for the first scene in the opera.

The musical style of the sextet, in keeping with the opera’s historical setting and its philosophical message, is certainly backward-looking, but not as far as the 18^th century in which the opera is set.  Richard Strauss goes back to his early career and the post-Wagnerian Late Romantic style with which he began his career in the 1880s and 1890s. This is a style of writing in which even the most remote key centres are made instantly accessible by means of smooth, but highly chromatic voice-leading practices, with the aim of bringing wondrously varied harmonic colourings to the surface of the music.  The result is a radiant brightness of tone, enhanced by Strauss’ skillful disposition of his six instruments in sonic space to produce the silken sheen that is the trademark of his string writing.

Unifying the score of this sextet is the recurring melodic motive announced by the 1st violin in the opening bars, a motive remarkably similar to the ear-worm phrase rippling endlessly through Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture. It is the gentle conversation between this and other gracious motives in the texture, elaborated over many endearing and nurturing points of imitation, that makes this sextet such an appropriate introduction to an opera that takes the discussion of music itself as its principal dramatic aim.