Max Steiner, the Movie Composer Injected With Amphetamines

By Emily E. Hogstad

  

Max Steiner, hailed as the “father of film music,” is one of the most influential composers in the history of Hollywood.

Over the course of a career that spanned half a century, Steiner crafted some of the most iconic scores in cinematic history.

Steiner was no stranger to the world of classical music. In fact, he took massive inspiration from Richard Wagner, his tutor Gustav Mahler, and even his godfather, Richard Strauss.

Today, we’re looking at the life of Max Steiner and his impact on the world of cinema…including the taxing work assignment with a deadline so tight, it required twenty-hour workdays and amphetamines to meet.

Max Steiner

Max Steiner’s Family Background

Max Steiner was born on 10 May 1888 in Vienna.

His family’s roots in Viennese arts and culture ran deep. He was named after his grandfather Maximilian Steiner, the theater director who popularised Viennese operetta and convinced Johann Strauss II to write for the genre.

Later, Maximilian’s son Gábor followed in his father’s footsteps and became an impresario himself.

Gábor’s wife Marie was also a music-lover and was a dancer early in her career, before giving birth to her only child, Max.

Max’s godfather was none other than composer Richard Strauss!

A Musically Precocious Childhood

Max’s voracious love of music was obvious from an early age. By the age of six, he was taking multiple music lessons a week.

He also started improvising on the piano, and with his father’s encouragement, writing the improvisations down.

At twelve, again with the support of his father, he conducted a performance of composer Gustave Kerker’s operetta The Belle of New York.

Max Steiner’s Musical Education

In 1904, he began attending the Imperial Academy of Music. While there, he was tutored by Gustav Mahler.

He breezed through four years of curriculum in one, studying composition, harmony, counterpoint, and a veritable orchestra’s worth of instruments.

Around this time, he also composed his first operetta, The Beautiful Greek Girl. No doubt to his disappointment, his father passed on staging it, claiming it wasn’t up to his standards.

Max rebelled by offering Greek Girl to another impresario. To his satisfaction, it was a success, running for a year.

Max Steiner’s London Career

The success of The Beautiful Greek Girl led to a number of conducting opportunities abroad.

A British production invited him to conduct The Merry Widow, an operetta by his father’s former colleague Franz Lehár.

Steiner moved to London and stayed there for eight years, conducting The Merry Widow and other operettas.

Escape to New York

Max Steiner

However, the onset of World War I brought his career to a screeching halt. Britain declared war on Austria in August 1914. Steiner was twenty-six years old.

Because of his nationality, he was interned in Britain as an enemy alien. He was only released because of his friendship with the Duke of Westminster.

Despite that friendship, he was ultimately ejected from Britain and his scores compounded, ending up in New York City with just $32 to his name.

A Broadway Career, and a Start in Film

Steiner soon found work on Broadway, orchestrating, arranging, and conducting. He conducted works by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert, and others.

He began watching the development of the nascent movie industry with great interest, speaking to studio founders and directors about the potential of music to accompany silent films.

In 1927, he orchestrated and conducted a Broadway musical by composer Harry Tierney. When Tierney was hired by RKO Pictures, he urged the studio to hire Steiner, too.

At the time, the potential of movie music was yet to be fully understood. It was thought by studio heads that soundtracks should come from a library of cheap pre-recorded tracks, as opposed to being written for specific films (an idea that Steiner would push back hard against). Steiner was hired as the head of the music department at RKO, but only on a month-to-month contract.

He scored Dixiana, the Western Cimarron, and Symphony of Six Million. Symphony of Six Million, with its extensive score, was a landmark in cinema history, and it helped to convince film executives of the impact that a soundtrack could have on a movie. 

Max Steiner’s Hollywood Career

King Kong

Throughout the 1930s, Steiner was on the front lines of establishing the language of movie music, influenced by figures like Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.

He scored King Kong in 1933, finishing the iconic score in a jaw-dropping two weeks. It has often been called the most influential soundtrack of all time, demonstrating for executives, producers, and audiences once and for all what exactly a custom-written score could do for a movie.

Steiner relied on the Wagnerian idea of leitmotif, i.e., playing specific themes during the appearance of specific characters or ideas.

King Kong (1933) – Beauty Killed the Beast Scene  

He also composed for and conducted many of the Astaire/Rogers musicals.

In 1937, Steiner was hired by Warner Bros, where he continued his extremely productive output.

Scoring Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind

In 1939, Steiner was hired by Selznick International Pictures to score Gone With the Wind.

He composed the score to the nearly four-hour film in three months. At the same time, in the year 1939, he composed the score for twelve other films.

Producer David O. Selznick had concerns that Steiner wouldn’t be able to finish in time, so he hired Franz Waxman to write a backup score.

However, it wasn’t needed. Steiner ended up delivering by working twenty-hour days, aided by prescribed injected amphetamines. He also had the assistance of four orchestrators.

Today, it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest film scores of all time. 

Max Steiner’s Academy Awards

Gone With the Wind didn’t win an Academy Award for best score (it lost out to The Wizard of Oz), but over the course of his career, Steiner would win multiple Oscars.

In 1936, he won for his score to the thriller The Informer. In 1943, he won another for the drama Now, Voyager, and yet another in 1945 for the wartime drama Since You Went Away.

Other classics that he scored during this time include Casablanca, The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, and others.  

Max Steiner’s Late Career

During the 1950s, changing tastes in movie music meant that Steiner’s lush, operatic style began to fall out of fashion.

He had one last major triumph with the theme for A Summer Place in 1959, which spent nine weeks at number one in 1960. It beat out Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra at the Grammys for Record of the Year.   

Sadly, his health and vision began deteriorating later in life. He died of congestive heart failure in 1971 at the age of 83.

Max Steiner’s Innovations   

Steiner was one of the first composers to employ a measuring machine to guarantee exact timings in a score. Before him, most composers just used a stopwatch, but Steiner felt it was important to sync his score with the film more closely than a watch’s second hand would allow.

He was also among the first to embrace click tracks. A click track consists of a series of holes punched into soundtrack film, creating a metronomic effect. Headphones can then be used and instruments played along to an exact tempo.

Throughout his career, he was on the cutting edge of developing ideas and principles about what scenes should and shouldn’t have music in them, as well as how loud music should be relative to dialogue.

He was also fascinated by the power of diegetic music (i.e., music that is played within the scene, that the characters also hear). Think of the famous renditions of “La Marseillaise” or “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca.   

Max Steiner’s Modern Influence

Max Steiner conducting the score of King Kong

Steiner’s influence continues even today.

John Williams has cited him (as well as Steiner’s compatriot Erich Wolfgang Korngold) as a major influence, as has James Newton Howard, who scored the 2005 remake of King Kong.

He also pushed for film composers to earn residuals, helping to create an expectation that composers would be fairly compensated for their work.

It’s clear that for as long as movies exist, Max Steiner’s influence will continue to be felt.

10 Pieces of Classical Music About Childhood

by Emily E. Hogstad  

Classical music sometimes has a reputation of being solely for elderly people. If that’s true (spoiler alert: it’s not), it’s certainly strange how many pieces of classical music are about childhood and youth.

Today we’re looking at classical music inspired by childhood.

© soundgirls.org

Robert Schumann: Kinderszenen (1838) 

Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen (“Songs from Childhood”) is a set of thirteen pieces for solo piano about childhood.

Robert was twenty-eight at the time he wrote these pieces, and he was dating the nineteen-year-old piano superstar Clara Wieck.

For a variety of reasons, Clara had always been mature for her age, and at one point she observed that Robert was “like a child.” Robert, amused, decided to embrace his childlike nature, took her idea, and ran with it.

The pieces in this collection include Blind Man’s Buff, Knight of the Hobbyhorse, and, most famously, Dreaming (better-known by its German title, Träumerei). 

Teresa Carreño: Mi Teresita (ca 1885) 

Teresa Carreño was one of the most famous women composers of her generation, and Mi Teresita (“My Little Teresa”) is one of her most famous works.

It’s a waltz that was written for her third child, Teresita, who had been born in 1882. (As a bit of trivia, Carreño had six children in all: one by French violinist Émile Sauret, three by Italian baritone Giovanni Tagliapietra, and two more by German pianist Eugen d’Albert.)

Teresita would become a concert pianist like her mother.

Amy Beach: Children’s Carnival (1894) 

In 1894, twenty-seven-year-old American composer Amy Beach wrote six charming piano pieces for young players. She called the works Children’s Carnival.

The Carnival portrayed different stock characters often found in commedia dell’arte or pantomime, such as the meddling merchant Pantalon, the street-smart and gossipy maid Columbina, and her nimble, quick-thinking love interest, Harlequin.

Beach portrays each character with sweet and satisfying innocence.

Claude Debussy: Children’s Corner (1906-08) 

In January 1905, Claude Debussy’s married mistress Emma Bardac became pregnant. That spring, both Debussy and Bardac divorced from their respective spouses.

In October 1905, their little daughter Claude-Emma, whom they nicknamed Chouchou, was born. Debussy found Chouchou to be delightful beyond words.

Debussy with his daughter Chou-Chou

To celebrate his love for her, he wrote a six-movement suite of piano pieces called Children’s Corner. The work’s translated dedication reads, “To my dear little Chouchou, with tender apologies from her father for what follows.”

Children’s Corner portrays various scenes from childhood, including a serenade for a doll, a lullaby for an elephant, and a portrait of dancing snow.

John Alden Carpenter: Adventures in a Perambulator (1914)  

John Alden Carpenter was a composer born in Illinois in 1876. He studied music as a young man but chose not to make his living in music, instead joining the family shipping business as vice-president.

In 1914, he composed an orchestral portrait of his baby daughter Ginny’s day, perhaps taking inspiration from Richard Strauss, who, in 1903, had immortalized his own wife and baby in a tone poem called Symphonia Domestica.

Baby in Perambulator

Carpenter provided an incredibly detailed description of Ginny’s day from her perspective:

Every morning – after my second breakfast – if the wind and the sun are favorable, I go out. I should like to go alone, but my will is overborne…

Almost satiated with adventure, my Nurse firmly pushes me on, and almost before I recover my balance I am face to face with new sensation. The land comes to an end, and there at my feet is The Lake…

We pass on. Probably there is nothing more in the World. If there is, it is superfluous. There IS. It is Dogs!

Read more about Adventures in a Perambulator.

Florence Price: “To My Little Son” (ca 1915) 

Sometime around 1915, composer Florence Price set a melancholy poem by Julia Johnson Davis to music.

In your face I sometimes see
shadowings of the man to be
And eager dream of what my son shall be
in twenty years and one…

This was an especially poignant song for Price to set, as she lost a baby boy in infancy.

Edward Elgar: Nursery Suite (1931) 

Nursery Suite is one of the last pieces of music that Elgar ever wrote. In 1930, a 73-year-old Elgar told a friend that he’d recently found a box of music in manuscript dating from his youth.

His friend suggested that he work them up into something to celebrate the recent birth of Princess Margaret. He agreed, and by the following year he produced a sweet little orchestral suite with movement titles like “The Sad Doll” and “The Merry Doll.”

Elgar expanded the dedication: the final work was dedicated to Princess Margaret, Princess Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth II), and their mother, the Duchess of York.

Sergei Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf (1936) 

Peter and the Wolf was commissioned by the director of the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow. She wanted Prokofiev to write a special symphony for children.

Peter, the work’s protagonist, plays in a meadow, listening to a whole menagerie of animals symbolised by various instruments.

Peter’s grandfather warns him of a gray wolf who might come to attack him. On cue, the wolf makes an appearance. Luckily, with the help of his animal friends, Peter is able to catch it.

Hunters come out of the forest, ready to kill the wolf, but Peter convinces them to put the wolf in a cage and bring it to a zoo instead. They do so in triumphant formation. At the last minute, a quacking comes from the wolf’s stomach: he has eaten the duck whole!

The work has proven to be incredibly popular and enduring, and it is often used even today as an introduction to the orchestra and orchestral instruments.

Benjamin Britten: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1945) 

In the mid-1940s, composer Benjamin Britten was commissioned to score an educational documentary called Instruments of the Orchestra.

The main theme comes from another famous British composer: Henry Purcell‘s incidental music to Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer.

Each section shows off a different part of the orchestra, helping young listeners (of all ages!) to appreciate the uniqueness of each one.

Interestingly, there is a version with narration and another one without.

Samuel Barber: Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947) 

Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is for orchestra and soprano soloist. It is a nostalgic portrait of the narrator’s childhood.

The lyrics are from a 1938 prose poem by James Agee, describing the summer before his father died in a car accident:

On the rough, wet grass of the back yard, my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there….They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near…

Barber’s music beautifully captures the uneasy poignancy of Agee’s words.

Conclusion

So there you have it: ten pieces of classical music about childhood and youth.

Did you have a favorite piece of classical music as a child? Is it still a favorite now? Let us know!

Thus Spoke Friedrich Nietzsche: Piano Music

by Georg Predota, Interlude

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) is primarily known as a philosopher who published some groundbreaking books. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,” was published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885, and it spawned a number of philosophical and theological contemplations. Not to mention a gigantic tone poem by Richard Strauss!

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche at 21

Essentially, Nietzsche questioned the value and objectivity of truth, looking at God as a historical process and construct. Nietzsche wrote numerous texts on morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science. Interestingly, he never really trusted the written word. He wrote, “all communication through words is shameless. The word diminishes and makes stupid; the word depersonalises, the word makes what is uncommon common.”

It might come as a surprise, but music was actually Nietzsche’s true love. Descended from a family of pastors where music and theology went hand in hand, young Friedrich was an accomplished pianist and organist by the time he reached the age of seven. At that age, he already played several Beethoven sonatas, transcriptions of Haydn Symphonies, and he was skilled in the way of improvisation. A couple of recent recordings have engaged with Nietzsche’s piano compositions, so we decided to take a closer look.

Reminiscences on my Life

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Young Nietzsche initially improvised his own melodies, yet he soon moved on to sketch motets, symphonies, masses and oratorios, most of them unfinished. As he grew up, Nietzsche switched to smaller forms, particularly Lieder and piano pieces. As pianist Jeroen van Veen writes, “these pieces reflect the philosopher as a human being, vulnerable and desirous, but above all melancholic.”

At the age of 14, Nietzsche wrote his “Reminiscences on my Life.” He explained, “All qualities are united in music: it can lift us up, it can be capricious, it can cheer us up and delight us, nay, with its soft, melancholy tunes, it can even break the resistance of the toughest character.”

“Its main purpose, however, is to lead our thoughts upward so that it elevates us and even deeply moves us. All humans who despise it should be considered mindless, animal-like creatures. Let music, this most marvellous gift from God, remain forever my companion on the pathways of life.” 

Barbarous Frenzy

In his “Reminiscences on my Life,” Nietzsche carefully listed his writings and his compositions, and at age fourteen, he had 46 compositions to his name. The earliest Lieder settings of Klaus Groth, the Hungarian poet Sándor Petöfi, Pushkin and Hoffmann von Fallersleben, were all composed “in a kind of barbarous frenzy, as the demon of music took hold of me.”

Nietzsche never took composition lessons, as he was essentially self-taught. He described himself as “a wretched youth who tortured his piano to the point of drawing from it cries of despairs, who with his own hands heave up in front of himself the mire of the most dismal greyish-brown harmonies.” 

The Germania

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

At the age of 16, Nietzsche started on a Christmas oratorio that was never finished. However, he would develop several themes for later use in subsequent compositions. “I look for words for a melody that I have and for a melody for words that I have, and these two things I have don’t go together, even though they come from the same soul. But such is my fate.”

Nietzsche’s early piano music is frequently dedicated to family and friends. Together with two young friends, he founded a small society called “The Germania,” which was dedicated to the “development of the spirit.” They would send each other compositions and poems, lectures and articles. And Nietzsche loved to improvise. A fellow student listened to these improvisations and wrote, “I should have no difficulty in believing that even Beethoven did not play extempore in a more moving manner.” 

Assessment

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s Hungarian March

However, assessment from professional sources was less encouraging. Nietzsche sent Hans von Bülow, son-in-law of Richard Wagner, his “Manfred Meditation” for evaluation. Bülow was not impressed and wrote, “this music is the most extreme in fantastic extravagance and the most unsatisfying and most anti-musical composition I have seen in a long time. Is this a joke that deliberately mocks all rules of tonal harmony, of the higher syntax as well as of ordinary orthography?”

“In musical terms, this piece is the equivalent to a crime in the moral world, with which the musical muse, Euterpe, was raped. If you would allow me to give you some good advice, just in case you are actually serious with your aberration into the area of composition, stick with composing vocal music, since the word can lead the way on the wild sea of tones. I apologize, esteemed Herr Professor, of having thrown such an enlightened mind as yours, into such regrettable piano cramps.” 

Lou Salomé

Lou Salomé

Nietzsche’s “Hymn to Life” is based on a text by Lou Salomé, a Russian-born psychoanalyst, well-travelled author, narrator, and essayist. At a literary salon in the city, Salomé met the author Paul Rée, who instantly proposed to her. Salomé declined and suggested setting up an academic commune, which was joined by Nietzsche in April 1882. He instantly fell in love with her as well, but she rejected him twice. Instead, Salomé, Rée, and Nietzsche travelled in search of setting up their commune in an abandoned monastery, but as no suitable location was found, the plan came to naught.

We do find an interesting assessment of Nietzsche by Salomé, which reads, “The higher he rose as a philosopher in his exaltation of life, the more deeply he suffered, as a human being, from his own teachings about life. This battle within his soul, the true source of the philosophy of his last years, is only imperfectly represented in his words and books, but it sounds perhaps most profoundly through his music to my poem Hymn to Life.” 

Sabbatical

After completing the “Hymn of Life” and receiving Bülow’s devastating letter, Nietzsche wrote, “As for my music, I only know that it allows me to master a mood that unsatisfied, would perhaps produce even more damage. If music serves only as a diversion or a kind of vain ostentation, it is sinful and harmful. Yet this fault is very frequent; all of modern music is filled with it.”

After receiving this letter, Nietzsche did not touch his piano for a while, but in the end, “his awareness of being an amateur was overshadowed by his urge to become a better person, through music,” writes Vrouwkje Tuinman. As Nietzsche frequently proclaimed, “Emotions, morals, the world: the only way to (maybe) grasp the essence of being is surrendering to the highest of art forms,” he writes again and again. “Without music, life would be a mistake.” 

The Affair Wagner

Richard Wagner

During his time as Professor of Philosophy at Basel University, Nietzsche became a close personal friend of Cosima and Richard Wagner, then living in Swiss exile. He was a regular house guest and even had his own room at Tribschen. We know that Nietzsche fell in love with Cosima Wagner, and he certainly composed some music for her.

Nietzsche dedicated his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy” to Wagner, proclaiming Wagner’s music the modern rebirth. The first part of the book was developed from long conversations between Cosima, Wagner and Nietzsche, roughly around the same time that Wagner began to develop the story of what eventually would become the “Ring Cycle.” 

Postlude

Cosima Wagner

Nietzsche offered Richard and Cosima his “Reminiscence of a New Year’s Eve,” but they basically ignored it. In turn, Nietzsche started to object to Wagner’s “endless melody,” suggesting that listening to Wagner’s music made his whole body feel discomfort. He called it “a music without a future,” and that the effects of Wagner’s music are “for idiots and the masses.”

Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown at the age of 44, from which he never recovered. For the last eleven years of his life, he was no longer able to speak or write, but he continued to play the piano. Listening, performing and composing music became an unconscious philosophical activity for Nietzsche, who had suggested earlier that “sound allowed me to say certain things that words were incapable of expressing.”

Editors of Nietzsche considered his compositions “amateurish and lacking in originality.” However, composing for Nietzsche meant experimentation and therapy, as he famously wrote, “we have art so not to die from the truth.” His piano music continues to be explored, and scholars write that “these piano miniatures present a fascinating window into the creative mind of a still-lofty figure in Western thought.” To me, his piano music, an elaboration of the conflicted world of Schumann, sounds hesitant and even unguarded, and the occasional ray of optimism is quickly cast aside by all-pervasive melancholy.

10 More Dazzling and Awe-Inspiring Piano Quartets

by Hermione Lai, Interlude

A couple of years ago, Interlude published a blog on the 10 most beautiful piano quartets. Once again, featuring just 10 works in that particular genre is simply not enough. So, we decided to present a follow-up, highlighting 10 more dazzling and awe-inspiring piano quartets.

As a quick recap, you get a piano quartet when you add a piano to a string trio. The standard instrument lineup for this type of chamber music pairs the violin, viola, and cello with the piano. In its development, the piano quartet had to wait for technical advances of the piano, as it had to match the strings in power and expression.

© serenademagazine.com

Piano quartets are always special because the scoring allows for a wealth of tone colour, occasionally even a symphonic richness. The combined resources of all four instruments are not easy to handle, and the number of works in the genre is not especially large. However, a good many of the extant piano quartets are very personal and passionate statements. 

When talking about chamber music, and specifically chamber music with piano, it is difficult to avoid Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). Lucky for us, Brahms wrote three piano quartets, and his Op. 60 took its inspiration from his intense relationship with Clara Schumann. However, it took Brahms almost twenty years to complete the work. The origins date back to around 1855 when Brahms was wrestling with his first piano concerto.

Brahms put this particular piano quartet aside and only showed it to his first biographer in the 1860s with the words, “Imagine a man who is just going to shoot himself, for there is nothing else to do.” Thirteen years later, Brahms took up the work and radically revised it. He probably wrote a new “Andante” and also a new “Finale.” In the end, the work finally premiered on 18 November 1875 with Brahms at the piano and the famous David Popper on cello.

Brahms and the Schumanns

The emotional distress of his relationship with Clara is presented in a mood of darkness and melancholy. A solitary chord in the piano initiates the opening movement, with the string presenting a theme built from a striking two-note phrase. Some commentators have suggested that Brahms is musically speaking the name “Clara” in this two-note phrase. The second theme is highly lyrical but quickly develops towards the dark mood of the opening. The “Scherzo” is also in the minor key, and the deeply felt slow movement is a declaration of love for Clara. The dark opening returns in the final movement, and while the development presents some relief, the work still ends on a note of resignation, albeit in the major key.

Heinrich von Herzogenberg: Piano Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 95

Heinrich von Herzogenberg

The intensely emotional and meticulously crafted compositions by Brahms served as models for a number of composers, among them Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843-1900). As he writes, “Brahms helped me, by the mere fact of his existence, to my development, my inward looking up to him, and with his artistic and human energy.” While Brahms respected Herzogenberg’s technical craftsmanship and musical knowledge, he never really had anything to say.

Herzogenberg was undeterred and never stopped composing. In 1897, he wrote to Brahms, “There are two things that I cannot get used not to doing: That I always compose, and that when I am composing I ask myself, the same as thirty-four years ago, ‘What will He say about it?’ To be sure, for many years, you have not said anything about it, which is something that I can interpret as I wish.”

A few days before Brahms’ death, Herzogenberg presented him with his probably best and most mature work, the Piano Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 95. The gripping “Allegro” is full of unmistakably Brahmsian character, constructed with compositional economy. An introductory chord develops into the motific core of the entire movement. The “Adagio is full of dreamy intimacy, while the capricious “Scherzo” eventually transports us into a pastoral idyll. Three themes, including a folkloric principle theme, combine in a spirited and temperamental “Finale.” 

When Richard Strauss (1864-1949) left college and moved to Berlin to study music at the age of 19, he suddenly discovered a new model in Johannes Brahms. Strauss would meet his current idol personally at the premiere of Brahms’ 4th Symphony in 1885. Under the influence of Brahms, the teenaged Strauss completed his Piano Quartet in C minor in 1884, and a good many commentators believe it to be Strauss’ “greatest chamber work.”

Richard Strauss

Op. 13 is a large work fusing “the sobriety and grandeur of Brahms with the fire and impetuous virtuosity of the young Strauss.” The work opens quietly, and the deceptively simple motif returns in various disguises. However, the music quickly explodes with superheated energy, and its dark sonorities and dramatic scope drive it to a virtually symphonic close.

Finally, the “Andante” introduces a measure of calm, with the piano sounding a florid melodic strain that gives way to a lyrical second subject in the viola. Both themes are gracefully extended while bathing in a delicate and charmed atmosphere. The concluding “Vivace” returns to the mood of the opening movement, and the rondo design also features a serious refrain and a spiky fugato. The work won a prize from the Berlin Tonkünstler, Strauss, however, would say goodbye to chamber music and explore orchestral virtuosity in his great tone poems. 

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) seems another surprising entry into a blog on the piano quartet. However, a single movement from his student days at the Vienna Conservatory does survive. Mahler took piano lessons from Julius Epstein and studied composition and harmony under Robert Fuchs and Franz Krenn. Mahler left the Conservatory in 1878 with a diploma but without the coveted and prestigious silver medal given for outstanding achievement.

Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet

Although he claimed to have written hundreds of songs, several theatrical works, and various chamber music compositions, only a single movement for a Piano Quartet in A minor survived the ravages of time. Composed in 1876 and awarded the Conservatory Prize, it is strongly influenced by the musical styles of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms.

Conveying a sense of passion and longing, Mahler presents three contrasting themes within a strict formal design. The opening theme possesses an ominous and foreboding character, while the contrasting second—still in the tonic key—is passionately rhapsodic. To compensate for this tonal stagnation, the third theme undergoes a series of modulations. Thickly textured and relying on excessive motivic manipulation, this movement nevertheless provides insight into the creative processes of the 16-year-old Mahler. 

Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904) is another composer who, for a time, took his bearings from Johannes Brahms’s music. Dvorák had always been strongly drawn to chamber music, as his first published works are a string quartet Op. 1 and a string quintet Op. 2.

Dvořák in New York, 1893

Apparently, he composed his D-Major piano quartet in a mere eighteen days in 1875. It premiered five years later, on 16 December 1880. Surprisingly, this piano quartet has only three movements, as the composer combines a scherzo and Allegro agitato in alternation in the Finale. The opening “Allegro” sounds like a rather characteristic Czech melody, initiated by the cello and continued by the violin. By the time the piano takes up the theme, the tonality has shifted to B Major.

The melody of the slow movement, a theme followed by five variations, is introduced by the violin. Dvorák skillfully presents fragments of the theme in various meters and textures. The cello, accompanied by the piano, takes the lead in the final “Allegretto.” After the violin has taken up the theme, the piano takes us into the finale proper.

Béla Bartók: Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 20

Béla Bartók

To his contemporaries and critics, Johannes Brahms looked like a bastion of musical conservatism. Surprisingly, it was Arnold Schoenberg, in his celebrated Radio address entitled “Brahms the Progressive”, who suggested that Brahms was “a great innovator in the realm of musical language and that his chamber music prepared the way for the radical changes in musical conception at the turn of the 20th century.”

Just one year after Brahms’ death, the teenage Béla Bartók (1881-1945) embarked on the composition of a four-movement piano quartet. For years, this score was believed to have been lost, but it was rediscovered by a member of the “Notos Quartet,” who also prepared the edition following the composer’s autograph score. What is more, they also presented a world premiere recording in 2007.

The opening “Allegro” immediately evokes the harmonic and sensuous soundscape of Johannes Brahms. And like his model, Bartók’s musical prose does not follow a predictable pattern as the boundaries and distinctions of theme and development are blurred. Brahms’ rhythmic shapes are the topic of a blazing “Scherzo,” with the “Trio” sounding a sombre lyrical contrast. The “Adagio” sounds like a declaration of love for Brahms, while the “Finale” brims with spicy Hungarian flavours. 

Camille Saint-Säens introduced Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) to Pauline Viardot in 1872. Her youngest daughter, Marianne, immediately stole his heart, and Fauré courted her for four painful years. In July 1877, she finally agreed, and the engagement was announced. However, the relationship only lasted until the late autumn of 1877, when Marianne suddenly broke off the engagement.

Pauline Viardot

The exact reasons remain unclear, and Fauré was deeply distressed, with friends reporting that his “sunny disposition took a dark turn.” He started to suffer from bouts of depression, and the Clerc family helped him to recover. At this point, Fauré composed the masterpieces of his youth, among them the piano quartet in C minor.

It might well be considered an early work, however, the composer was already over forty. The opening “Allegro” is pervaded by a sense of optimism, urged on by a strong rhythmical gesture. The E-flat Major “Scherzo” opens with plucked strings and the piano making a light-hearted contribution. The sombre character of the “Adagio” provides an unexpected contrast, and that mood is taken over in the “Finale.” The asymmetrical piano accompaniment continues throughout and brings the work to an emphatic conclusion in the major key.

Théodore Dubois: Piano Quartet in A minor

Théodore Dubois in 1905

Théodore Dubois (1837-1924) was highly influential on the French musical scene. Early on, he was known as a composer-organist with a large oeuvre of sacred music to his name. As a pedagogue, he is still famous as the author of the most common music theory textbooks, and as an administrator, he gained notoriety by denying the famed Rome prize to Maurice Ravel on multiple occasions.

Once Dubois retired from the directorship of the Conservatoire, he worked on a chamber music project. A scholar writes, “If they are not progressive works of genius, we can still enjoy their faultless design and beauty of sonority as documents to help us understand the world and spirit in Paris before, around and after 1900.”

Dubois’ piano quartet in A minor appeared in 1907 and features a conventional four-movement design. The opening “Allegro” begins with a cautious drama but quickly transitions to a lyrical melody. The sense of melodic dominance is taken over in the “Andante,” followed by an “Allegro” replacing a scherzo. Essentially a character piece in the style of Mendelssohn, it is followed by a “Finale” of sophistication and balance.

Mélanie Bonis: Piano Quartet No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 69

Mélanie Bonis, 1908

Mélanie Bonis (1858-1937) was born into a Parisian lower-middle-class family and initially discouraged from pursuing music. Undeterred, she taught herself how to play the piano, and only at the urging of a family friend and with help from César Franck was she admitted to the Paris Conservatoire.

To conceal her gender during a time when compositions by women were not taken seriously, she shortened her first name to “Mel.” A good many of her late compositions have still not been published, and as she wrote to her daughter, “My great sorrow is that I never get to hear my music.”

Her first piano quartet was written between 1900 and 1905, and stylistically, it is cast in a post-Romantic tradition. Bonis explores the various possibilities of harmony and rhythm, infused with a dash of Impressionism. A good many passages show the influence of César Franck with long developments and rigorous counterpoint. At the work’s first performance, a surprised Camille Sain-Saëns declared, “I would never have believed a woman capable of writing that. She knows all the tricks of the trade.” 

Joaquín Turina (1882-1949), together with his friend Manuel de Falla, helped to promote the national character of 20th-century Spanish music. At first, influenced and inspired by Debussy, Turina soon developed a distinctly Spanish style, “incorporating Iberian lyricism and rhythms with impressionistic timbres and harmonies.”

Jacinto Higueras Cátedra: Bust of the composer Joaquín Turina, 1971 (Madrid: Escuela Superior de Canto)

While his Op. 1 Piano Quintet in G minor emerged from his study with Vincent d’Indy, the Op. 67 piano quartet in A minor is “music without the slightest need of any explanations.” The three-movement work is carefully constructed in cyclical form, and “the juxtaposition of contrasting themes give the overall shape a rhapsodic structure.”

The fundamental musical idea is introduced in the opening movement and transformed and modified throughout the work. Of particular lively interest is the central “Lento,” where Turina transformed Andalusian elements without abandoning the gestures, temperament and uniqueness of his native lands. I hope you have enjoyed this further excursion into the realm of the piano quartet, and I can already promise one more article on the subject with music by Mozart, Taneyev, Hahn, Brahms, Copland and others.