Smetana Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15 (1855)
Mozart Piano Quartet No 2 in E Flat Major, KV 493 (1786)
SMETANA AND MOZART
Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style that became closely identified with his people’s aspirations to a cultural and political “revival.” He has been regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. The prime inspiration for the Piano Trio was personal tragedy. The Smetanas had already lost one daughter to tuberculosis. And now, eight months later, Bedriska died from scarlet fever. Smetana wrote in his diary: ‘Nothing can replace Fritzi, the angel whom death has stolen from us.’ His reaction to the loss was to throw himself into his music, producing at the age of thirty-one the first work to reveal his full power as a composer, the Piano Trio in G minor. It may not be so directly autobiographical as his late string quartet ‘From my Life’, but Smetana himself acknowledged the inspiration of the Trio in a letter: “The loss of my eldest daughter, that extraordinarily gifted child, inspired me to write the Trio in G minor in 1855.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Born in Salzburg, in the Holy Roman Empire, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his early death at the age of 35. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s piano quartets do not make any reference to any tradition; Mozart was among the first to explore the genre. He did not see the piano quartet in the same light as a string quartet with one instrument being replaced, but rather as a kind of sonata enriched with additional voices. The Piano Quartet was written with another idea in mind, beginning with a triumphant principal theme. This gracious theme plays a minor role in the first movement: in both the development and the coda the secondary theme prevails. The second movement is notable for the refined harmony and the capricious ornamental figurations of the piano. The finale opens with a deceptively simple theme, but the subsequent development is so intense that the piece grows like the finale of a piano concerto.
August 13, 2022, 4:00 PM TO 5:30 PM
LOCATION
Chestnut Center for the Arts
208 S Chestnut Ave
Marshfield, WI 54449
United States
PURCHASE TICKETS: FREE ADMISSION
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