A strange thing happened to me in 1994 when Franz Schmidt's music was featured by Leo Black in BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week. At that time I had never heard a note of Schmidt's music. I was entranced by all of it, from the youthful energy and exuberance of the Organ Toccata to the wit and nostalgia of the orchestral Variations on a Hussar Song, all the way through to tragedy mingled with solace, movingly expressed in the B flat Quintet and in the great Fourth Symphony. Much later I met the full power, grandeur and complexity of Schmidt's final masterwork, the apocalyptic oratorio The Book with Seven Seals as recorded in a great performance by the Wiener Philharmoniker and Singverein, under Nikolaus Harnoncourt.
As my love affair with the B flat Quintet deepened it led to the strangest of musical and spiritual experiences. The first movement is an extended sonata form, lasting over 12 minutes even with the exposition repeat omitted, as in the otherwise wonderful recorded performance from Orfeo GMBH, which I bought and then listened to again and again (Cat. no. C 287921 A, still available as I write). Bit by bit, and against my better judgement, I was drawn into an unusual -- some would say quite crazy -- experiment. It concerned the subtleties and ineffabilities of large-scale musical form.
Beyond the obvious relation to the organic-change principle, large-scale musical form is, in my humble opinion, something whose functioning no-one fully understands. Like any other high art it is ultimately an affair of the unconscious. Classic attempts like those of Heinrich Schenker end up only highlighting the ever-increasing numbers of exceptions to the `rules' arrived at.
In the case of extended sonata forms, however, and other symphonic structures, it hardly needs saying that they involve what the late Robert Simpson, a powerful symphonist in his own right, called `real modulation'. He wrote*
"The development of the sonata principle in the eighteenth century saw a new acceleration in the muscular movement of music. Whereas in Bach's world a composition swings calmly from harmony to harmony, rarely hinting at more than a suggestion of other orbits, the music of the early symphonists is more overtly dramatic in its use of key. The first movement away from tonic harmony is not simply a move from one horse to the next on the same roundabout; it is a leap from one roundabout to another, so that the original sense of movement is entirely supplanted by one which, though it may be similar, is in a new environment. Such a phenomenon is a real modulation -- i.e. destroying the original tonic... and substituting a new one. The leap, or modulation, may be an abrupt jump" (though organic, I'd add) "or a smooth glide, but the result is the same in either case. There is a sense of travelling, and a new kind of musical movement is born... that would have made any composer of Bach's generation dizzy."
This is no more than a reminder that the large-scale scheme of modulation or key-change is crucial to the architecture of symphonic music, and a source of motive power to take us on long journeys. And it hardly needs adding that often, though not always, the same motive power seems to bring us safely back home. The sense of homecoming can be just as strong as the sense of journeying away. Familiar examples in which I feel this sense of homecoming especially strongly include the last movement of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, and the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica -- something like being in an aircraft that gracefully circles the home territory before landing. In the case of Schmidt's first movement and its strange landscape, the motion is gentler and the feeling more like a wanderer's journey on foot, now and again pausing near running water or cresting the skyline to reveal an enchanting new view, perhaps something like the Elysian fields.
But -- and here's the crazy part -- the music seemed to be telling me, more and more insistently, that it wanted its large-scale form to be rearranged so as to produce a stronger sense of outward journeying in the development section, and a stronger sense of homecoming in the coda. And -- to mix metaphors -- the movement as a whole seemed to want to `breathe' a little more freely. It seemed to be saying to me `I could be even more graceful, even more beautiful, and even more moving.' Truly this feeling was strange and singular, as well as challenging. None of the other Schmidt pieces I've heard have ever evoked such a feeling, nor any other symphonic classics with which I'm familiar.
We can never know whether Schmidt, had he been free from other pressures, would himself have made any remotely similar revisions in the way other great composers such as Sibelius are known to have done, often over many years. We need to remember not only Schmidt's tragic bereavement at the time, his failing health, and the pressure to complete his great oratorio The Book with Seven Seals, but also that this was Vienna in the mid-1930s. The Book with Seven Seals, a massive and complex choral-orchestral work, might have been Schmidt's response to his own mortality and to the then politics, the approaching Armageddon the worst of which, having died in February 1939, he didn't live to see. Who knows -- homecoming might have been the last thing he wanted to express.
Be that as it may, I still had to cope with my own feelings. What then was my response to the B flat Quintet's first movement? With great trepidation, I followed the music's promptings as far as I was able. The experiment went through very many stages, the last of which was to trim everything down to a strictly minimal version. It took me many years to see that this minimal version was the best I could do -- surely nowhere near what Schmidt could have done but nevertheless, I feel, of some interest as an experiment on large-scale form. By minimal I mean having the fewest possible additions and elaborations consistent with organic change. The duration is about five minutes longer (17' 36"), mainly because I've reinstated the exposition repeat -- an architectural improvement for free!
Should you be curious to hear the result, dear reader, it's available for download in the file schmidt-quintet-experiment-2013.mp3 (25 Mbyte). I would like to thank Orfeo GMBH for graciously permitting the experiment; and I strongly recommend Orfeo's catalogue number C 287921 A, the complete Quintet recording, as the best basis for comparison. I am grateful also to Dr Carmen Ottner of the Franz-Schmidt-Gesellschaft for her kindness in sharing information about Schmidt and in allowing me to take a photocopy of his original autograph score of the B Flat Quintet. This preserves the wonderfully sparse and delicate left-hand piano part used in the Orfeo recording -- vastly superior, in my view, to the published two-hands version. Some minor additions and elaborations were recorded by myself on violin and viola and by Antony Pay on clarinet, Jonathan Williams on cello, and Meiko Wakabayashi on piano, for whose kind assistance I am most grateful. Jeffrey Ginn gave expert and patient assistance with the recording and editing. There are a few remaining wrong notes, which fortunately don't much disturb the musical sense.
One of the wrong notes is conspicuous in the fifth bar from the outset, in the piano part. At least it's conspicuous if you have the score in front of you. It's a musically possible wrong note. The exposition repeat corrects it, but unfortunately introduces another wrong note! Again the musical sense isn't much disturbed -- an interesting fact in itself. Other small edits try to make details more audible here and there.
Although now entering the twilight of my life on this beautiful planet I've had the good fortune, unlike Franz Schmidt, to have a loving family still around me and to have stayed in excellent health so far. So -- anyone with comments on the above is most welcome to email me, M.E.McIntyre at-sign damtp.cam.ac.uk
