The complete idiot's guide to classical music (18 page)

All together now, class: A quintet is a piece for five players. You’ll find some for strings only, usually with a second viola or cello added to the usual foursome. Beethoven and Mozart scored quintets for piano and four winds, while Schumann, Brahms, Franck, and Dvorak preferred to pit the keyboard against a string quartet. Interestingly, it was Schubert, aged 22, who first substituted a double bass for the second violin and produced what is arguably the most popular of all piano quintets, “The Trout.”

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
“The Trout” (“Die Forelle,” in German) actually began as a song, although Schubert almost tore up the manuscript when a friend pointed out that the leaping figurations in the piano accompaniment (representing the water in which the fish is swimming), resembled a passage in Beethoven’s
Coriolan
Overture. Fortunately, Schubert left the song intact, and when another friend urged him to convert it into a chamber piece, he used the tune, complete with that glistening accompaniment, as the “Theme and Variations” movement in his A Major Quintet.

There are many works where a single wind or brass instrument is juxtaposed with four strings—the gorgeous clarinet quintets of Mozart, Weber, and Brahms spring most readily to mind—but just as the string quartet ranked high in most composers’ favor, a huge repertoire of works has arisen for five wind instruments. The usual complement of such wind quintets is flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon, although other variations are occasionally encountered.

The blare of brasses is very different from the more sonorous strings or the leaner sounds of the winds, so the brass quintet (normally two trumpets, horn, trombone, and bass trombone or tuba) strides out with forceful power. Works for five brasses are in considerably shorter supply than those for winds or strings, so brass groups frequently use transcriptions of works for other instruments. On the other hand, virtuosity on brass instruments can be especially thrilling, which explains the worldwide popularity of ensembles like Canadian Brass, whose players, to quote the
Washington Post
, “have an agility that comes close to the phenomenal, achieving a wide dynamic range that fills their music with lights and shadows.” The ensemble’s incredible performing precision and delectable on-stage humor doesn’t hurt either.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
When the Canadian Brass toured China in 1977, their hosts tried to be as helpful and accommodating as possible. Whenever the players would leave discarded trash in a hotel room, it was dutifully collected, packed up, and forwarded to them at the next touring stop.

You can continue on up the numerical ladder and enjoy sextets (Brahms has two great ones for two each of violins, violas, and cellos), septets (Beethoven combined winds and strings in his septet; Saint-Saens added a trumpet to the ensemble; and Poulenc has a sparkler for piano and wind quintet), and octets (the two most famous are by Schubert and Mendelssohn). Nonets pop up occasionally, and Enesco actually wrote a piece for ten wind instruments that he called “Dixtuor.”

Beyond that, of course, you’re in the realm of the previously discussed chamber orchestra and the full-size symphony. The smaller combinations, by the way, can also be called into play as soloists with the orchestra. Poulenc, Mendelssohn, and Vaughan Williams are among the many composers who have written two-piano concertos; Vivaldi has one for two mandolins; Bach and Mozart each triple keyboard concertos; and there’s a wonderful Schumann concert piece for four horns and orchestra.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Some composers get all wrapped up in a particular instrument, especially if they played it themselves. For instance, Vivaldi wrote violin concertos by the dozen. The Brazilian master Heitor Villa-Lobos, who earned his living as a young man by playing the cello in cafés and restaurants, not only wrote cello sonatas and cello concertos, but scored his Bachianas Brasileiras no. 1 for an ensemble of eight cellos. He scored the more famous Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5 for eight cellos plus solo singer.

Pieces for contrasting instruments with orchestra are also high on the masterworks list: Think of Mozart’s
Sinfonie Concertante for Violin and Viola
or Haydn’s for oboe, bassoon, violin, and cello. The Double Concerto (for violin and cello) is among Brahms’ most popular works, and the Beethoven Triple Concerto (for violin, cello, and piano) is another frequent concert hall visitor. We even find pieces like Bartok’s
Concerto for Orchestra,
where all sorts of instruments within the ensemble take turns stepping out into the solo spotlight.

The instrumental garden, in short, continues to grow and flourish as the composers of each new generation plant tonal seeds unimagined by their predecessors. It’s yet another example of the vitality, energy, and endless fascination of classical music.

 

• The piano is a leading player in many duos and trios.
  
 

• A string quartet consists of two violins, a viola, and a cello.
  
 

• The instrumental garden can go even higher than quartet, including quintet, sextet, and so on.
  

Chapter 10
 
What About All the Other Instruments?

 

• The development of the piano
  
 

• Folk instruments
  
 

• The role of electronics in classical music
  

Before we get to some of the fascinating other instruments, let’s return to the piano, because a) it’s probably the most immediately recognizable instrument, b) a lot of us have played it, if only to bang out “Chopsticks,” and c) with its seven-plus octave range and enormous sonic potential, it’s practically an orchestra in itself.

When li’l David played his harp (in his pre-Goliath–slaying days) and the Biblical psalmists sang praises unto God with psaltery of 10 strings, they were just pianists a few millennia ahead of themselves. They were making music by setting strings to vibrating, and it was just a matter of time (i.e. centuries) before somebody figured out a way to have a machine pluck the strings.

Actually, there is record of a 3rd century B.C. Greek water organ that used crude levers, but the keyboard didn’t come into any real significance until the Middle Ages. Not that you’d recognize one if you saw it: The early keys were heavy levers, the player having to strike them with a clenched fist, usually protected by a leather glove. The idea of the keyboard was to have a continuous arrangement of available notes, making possible more rapid traversals of the scale and a better way to play chords. Its earliest usage, though, wasn’t to vibrate strings, but to vibrate the air flowing through organ pipes.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
“Chopsticks” was first published in England as “The Celebrated Chop Waltz” in the mid-19th century, and all sorts of great composers—including Liszt, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov—got together and actually wrote a whole series of variations on “Chopsticks.” The European version of the tune is a little different from ours, but we won’t tell if you won’t.

Gradually, the keys became easier to press, more user-friendly, and could be adapted to small instruments like the portative (translation: portable) organ. Those early medieval keyboards had only “natural” keys—the white ones on our modern piano—but gradually the five black notes were added and the chromatic scale of 12 notes to the octave was finally at hand.

The actual ancestors of the piano can be pinpointed as soft-toned keyboard instruments such as the clavichord, spinet, and virginals. Romantics like to think that the virginals were so named because they were considered most suitable for young maidens, but more likely the derivation is the Latin word “virga,” meaning rod or jack and referring to the mechanism that connects the key to the quill plucking the strings. Reality is sometimes disappointing, but what can you do? Other early musicologists claimed that the virginals were named for Queen Elizabeth (“the Virgin Queen”) because she liked to play them, but because the instrument was in use before she was born, that theory seems slightly flawed.

The most advanced, and best known, pre-piano instrument of this sort was the harpsichord, which evolved from the virginals and ruled the keyboard roost from about 1500 until nearly the end of 18th century. Bach conceived many of his keyboard pieces for the harpsichord, and while the instrument went into severe eclipse once the piano pushed it out of favor, the harpsichord story has a happy ending: The instrument has had a nifty 20th century revival thanks to such dynamic performing personalities as the Polish virtuoso Wanda Landowska. More and more 20th century composers (Francis Poulenc in France, Manuel de Falla in Spain, and America’s own Elliott Carter) are also discovering that the harpsichord’s spiky tones could add a fascinating dash of antique color to their modern scores.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Even though the harpsichord was clearly the king of keyboard instruments in the 17th and 18th centuries (at the time of the French Revolution the King’s Library at Versailles included no less than 23 of them), all sorts of improvements were attempted. The clavicytherium tried to save space by standing a harpsichord on its end, and the
cembalo angelico
(Italian for angelic harpsichord) attempted to create a more mellow sound by replacing the standard quill plectra with velvet-covered leather ones). Other harpsichords were built with knee levers to change the tone quality, and a Polish instrument-maker seems to have been the first to fit out his harpsichords with foot pedals to accomplish the same thing.

The main problem with the harpsichord is that no matter whether you put your finger gently on a key or bang it with all your might, the strings are plucked with exactly the same force. That fatal flaw led to the invention of the instrument that would sweep the harpsichord from its throne forever.

Although an Italian instrument-maker named Paliarino tinkered with a contraption he called the “Piano e Forte” (i.e., soft and loud) before 1600, the invention of the piano had to wait another century, with credit going to another Italian, Bartolommeo Cristofori. (Note that his name is not likely to come up in conversation, but for the record, it’s pronounced Cris-TO-fori.) He was a harpsichord maker, responsible for the care and feeding of the 40 or so instruments belonging to Prince Ferdinand de Medici, but in his spare time he too was fooling about with a way to make a keyboard instrument that could produce gradations of sound. The one he produced in 1709 was dubbed the
gravicembalo col piano e forte
, which is a kind of Florentine dialect for “harpsichord with soft and loud.” He achieved the desired result by changing the mechanism so that leather hammers struck the strings instead of plucking them, and two or three strings produced each note instead of just one.

By 1726, Cristofori had built about 20 of the new instruments, incorporating sundry other improvements, including a “soft” pedal that moved the whole keyboard sideways so that the hammers struck one string fewer than usual. There were still many technical problems left to solve—piano makers would struggle with them for the next 200 years—but such technical details need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that the pianos Bach heard and Mozart wrote for were altogether different in sound and appearance from our modern grands. If you’re really burning with curiosity about the specifics of piano construction over the last 200 years, head for the library and pull out any one of a number of illustrated books on the subject. Two good volumes to start with are David S. Grover’s
The Piano
, for a complete chronology of the development of keyboard instruments, and Ronald Ratcliffe’s
Steinway
, a colorfully anecdotal history of the most famous piano—and piano family—in the world.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Among the attempted innovations that didn’t work was a contraption that its French maker called a “fortepiano a cordes de verre,” since it had glass strings, and a “fortepiano clavier” that attempted to combine features of the piano and harpsichord. Later on, two Viennese instrument makers almost came to blows over which of them could claim the honor of having invented a weird sort of upright that, because of its odd shape, was called a giraffe piano. If you think that’s funny, wait till you hear the German name for it: “Giraffenflugel.”

In 1732, the first music for piano was published in Florence—a set of 12 Sonatas for “soft and loud harpsichord” by Ludovico Giustini—and in 1768, a chip off the old Bach, Johann Sebastian’s son Johann Christian, sounded the early death knell for the harpsichord when he gave what seems to be the first-ever piano recital in London.

Not that the harpsichord gave up the ghost without a struggle. Twenty years later, there were still 19 harpsichord makers working in Paris alone, and it was not before the turn of the 19th century that the piano would displace the harpsichord once and for all as the keyboard instrument of choice. Meanwhile, Cristofori’s piano-forte designation got switched around to fortepiano in common usage, so it was the fortepiano for which Haydn and Mozart wrote many of their keyboard sonatas.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Haydn and Mozart were the first composers to put the newfangled piano to extensive use, although even they found it hard to keep up with the ongoing improvements to the instrument’s range, power, and dexterity. In 1777, Mozart gave a ringing endorsement to the fortepianos built by Johann Andreas Stein, writing to his father that same year in delight that “whatever way I touch the keys, the tone is always even. It never jars, it is never strong or weaker or entirely absent.” Needless to say, from that point on, all of Mozart’s keyboard works were intended for the fortepiano.