Sonata No. 1 in f minor: "Andante" - Johannes Brahms
Sonate: "Molto Allegro" - Camille Saint-Saens
Hymns: #524 St. Thomas, #440 Liebster Jesu,
#517 Brother James' Air, #632 Munich
The music today centers around the clarinet. Throughout the
course of the service we will follow the literature of the instrument starting
with Mozart followed by Brahms and ending with Saint-Saens. Each of these
composers wrote pieces that have become part of the standard canon of
literature for the instrument. The clarinet got its start as the shepherd’s
chalumeau, a simple reed pipe which probably looked like a recorder and sounded
like the lowest octave of the clarinet. The “modern” clarinet existed as far
back as 1740 and was invented by the Nuremberg instrument builder C.H. Denner
by 1750 both Handel and Vivaldi had used them in compositions. By 1760 the
Mannheim orchestra included two clarinets in its budget. As time went on the
instrument acquired more and more keys and in 1839 the Boehm system became the standard
system of fingering and keys for the instrument.
The Clarinet Concerto in A was written just weeks before
Mozart’s death for his friend Anton Stadler. Stadler was a noted basset horn
and clarinet player that was praised for his beautiful tone. Mozart wrote this
concerto as well as the clarinet quintet for him. The piece was actually
written for an instrument that doesn’t exist. Stadler had designed a clarinet
with an extended low range which he called a basset clarinet. Neither the
instrument nor the manuscript for the piece survive but a version for the
basset horn was adapted by the publishers Breitkopf and Hartel where all of the
notes outside the instrument’s range had been taken out and the piece was
transposed from G to A. The second movement, “Adagio” is in rounded binary form
and has a short cadenza in the middle. The piece was featured in the Oscar
winning film Out of Africa (a
personal favorite of mine.)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) wrote two clarinet sonatas. The “Andante”
from the Sonata No. 1 in f minor was
written in 1894 and dedicated to the clarinetist Richard Muhlfield(1856-1907).
Muhlfield, like Stadler served as a source of inspiration to composers to write
for the clarinet. Brahms even wrote letters to his longtime friend, Clara
Schumann about the sound of the clarinetist. This movement is a dialogue
between the piano and the clarinet traveling through various keys with the
accompaniment varying from eighth notes to sixteenth notes and then triplets
with interludes for the piano in between.
Camille Saint-Saens’ (1835-1921) clarinet sonata is one of
three sonatas for solo woodwind and piano that was written in 1921 (the last
year of his life.) This piece sounds and feels like Saint-Saens. It is filled
with beautiful and expressive melodies. In the fourth movement the piano begins
with low soft tremolos, the clarinet then burst in with fast sixteenth notes
that are traded back and forth with the piano. As with the other two pieces,
the pianist is not merely an accompanist, but a full-fledged collaborator which
interjects its own ideas in the dialogue. The piece closes with a repeat of the
melody from the first movement in an expressive 12/8 over triplets in the piano
drawing the piece to a peaceful close.
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