I Grandi Musicisti: Antonio Vivaldi, Giacomo Puccini, Johannes Brahms, Ludwig Van Beethoven

Antonio Vivaldi: Largo from “Winter” Op. 8 no. 1

The famous piece “the Four Seasons” written by the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi represents one of the most important pages in the history of music. It is an epitome of the love for beauty and the search for excellence, which have been the basis of Italian culture since the Roman Empire.

Vivaldi’s “The Four seasons” is to music what Mona Lisa is to visual arts: an icon of the extraordinary contribution which Italians have given to the world culture through the centuries. Listening to this music, one is dreamingly transported to “the land where the lemons blossom,” as the great poet Goethe defined Italy.

The reason for the success of this music resides in its harmony (a concept made famous by the Italian Renaissance painters) and also in its meaning. We can say that this is the first “Symphonic Poem” ever written, because the music tries to convey messages and recreate a visual representation in the mind of the listener. Vivaldi carefully composed the music based on written poems about the life in rural Italy in the XVIII century.

For this Winter Largo, the poetic texts and the magnificent music suggest an atmosphere of rest and cold. In a small village men and women are shivering for the cold weather, running from one place to another and making exercise to fight the cold. While a frosty wind whistles through the frozen branches of the trees, a young boy very happily skates on the frozen river.

Giacomo Puccini: Crisantemi

        

Giacomo Puccini himself acknowledged that his true talent lay "only in the theater," and so his non-operatic works are understandably few. But there are more of them than the average concertgoer might imagine. The string quartet was a medium for which Puccini had a certain undeniable affinity, and over the years he composed some five works or groups of pieces for it. All of these string quartet pieces have been virtually forgotten except for the elegy, Crisantemi ("Chrysanthemums"), that Puccini wrote in 1890 -- in a single night, he said -- as a response to the death of the Duke of Savoy.
Crisantemi is a single, dark-hued, continuous movement. Puccini found his two liquid melodic ideas worthy enough to re-use in the last act of his opera, Manon Lescaut, of 1893. Almost never heard in its original string quartet guise, Crisantemi frequented the music stands of the world's orchestras in an arrangement for string orchestra throughout the twentieth century.

Johannes Brahms: String Quartet Op. 51 no. 1 in C minor         

Brahms's music blends both classical and romantic elements, since he resisted the musical innovations of the New German School of Liszt and Wagner. His musical ability was recognized by Schumann, who declared him a genius; after Schumann's death, Brahms maintained a lifelong friendship with his widow, the talented pianist and composer Clara Schumann. 

An excellent pianist, Brahms toured as a performer, notably with his friend, the violin virtuoso Joachim, whose playing he had in mind when composing music for violins and notably the String Quartet in C minor.  The listener can thus appreciate the elegance and the possibility given to the performer, to add personal emphasis to the music played. This quartet echoes at times some ancient harmonies: in fact, being one of the first musicologists, Brahms studied early music, and as a conductor in Vienna introduced audiences to the great works of Bach and Handel, whose influence on this piece of music is undeniable.

However, Brahms’ accomplishment of transforming and varying this thematic material heralded the modernist techniques of the Second Viennese School, and prompted Schoenberg to write his essay "Brahms the Progressive". 

Ludwig Van Beethoven: String Quartet Op. 135 in F major

The Late Beethoven String Quartets, which group includes his last five quartets and the Grand Fugue, are the composer's last completed works. These works are widely considered to be among the greatest compositions ever written in the history of music: their uncompromising intellectual complexity and their apparent rejection of the romantic pathos which pervades Beethoven's middle period both ensure that they remain pieces appreciable by a minority of refined intellectuals and connoisseurs.

The String Quartet No. 16 in F major (Opus 135) was written in 1826, when the composer was completely deaf and was the last substantial work he finished. However, he thought that he could still produce some works, so at the time he stated: " I can only hope I can give to the world some great pieces of music, and then, like an old child, to end my earthly doings amongst decent people. It was premiered by the Schuppanzigh Quartet in March 1828.        The work is on a smaller scale than his other late quartets. Under the introductory slow chords in the last movement Beethoven wrote in the manuscript "Muß es sein?" (Must it be?) to which he responds, with the faster main theme of the movement, "Es muß sein!" (It must be!). The whole movement is headed "Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß" (The Difficult Decision).    Rivers of ink have been wasted in commenting these words, and we can only speculate on what Beethoven had in mind. The tragedy of a musician who cannot hear what he composes is only comparable to that of a painter who becomes blind; nevertheless the art becomes abstract in those conditions, reaching an almost spiritual state, which can be expressed in the only abstract art: mathematics. It has been said that the late works of Beethoven are as beautiful as a perfect mathematical theorem, as a perfect geometrical shape, as the rhythm of the power “which moves the Sun and the other Stars,” as Dante says: the power of Love.