For the convenience of concertgoers 

the Garden Cafe remains open until 6:oo pm.

The use of cameras or recording equipment during the 

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones,

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Please note that late entry or reentry of

the West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

Mailing address

2000b South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

www.nga.gov

The Sixty-sixth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,657th Concert

Hugo Wolf Quartet

Sebastian Gurtler and Regis Bringolf, violin

Gertrud Weinmeister, viola

Florian Berner, cello

February 3, 2008

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

String Quartet in E-flat Major, D. 87 (1813)

Allegro moderato

Scherzo: Prestissimo

Adagio 

Allegro

Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)

Italienische Serenade (1887)

INTERMISSION

Schubert

String Quartet in G Major, D. 887 (1826)

Allegro molto moderato

Andante un poco moto

Scherzo: Allegro vivace con Trio: Allegretto

Allegretto; allegro assai
The Musicians

Founded in 1993, when its members were students at The Vienna Hochschule

fur Musik, the Hugo WolfQuartet won the Fifth International String Competition in Cremona and took first prize at the Forty-fifth International G. B.

Viotti Chamber Music Competition. The ensemble went on to win the Vienna 

Philharmonic Orchestra Special Prize and the European Cultural Award for 

Chamber Music. Since its critically acclaimed debut at the Vienna Konzerthaus,

the Quartet has concertized in such prominent venues as Carnegie Hall, the

Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Herkulessal in Munich, the Mozarteum in

Salzburg, the Musikverein in Vienna, Philharmonie Berlin, Philharmonie

Cologne, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Bmssels, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Symphony Hall in Birmingham, and Wigmore Hall in London. The Quartet has

been featured in festivals such as Carinthian Summer, the Colmar Festival,

the Edinburgh Festival, and the Schubertiade Feldkirch.

For its tenth anniversary in 2003, the Quartet established a cycle of

concerts at the Konzerthaus in Vienna. Composers Zbigniew Bargielski,

Friedrich Cerha, and Erich Urbanner wrote and dedicated works especially

for this occasion. The Quartet has performed a number of other world

premieres to high critical acclaim.

The ensemble has recorded for the Atlantis Art, Extraplatte, and Gramola

labels and has appeared on numerous radio and television productions,

including the bbc and Radio Berlin. It was granted permission to use the

name ofthe late romantic composer Hugo Wolfby the International Hugo

Wolf Society ofVienna. The Quartet uses a violin by Gioffredo Cappa, a viola

by P. Mantegazza, and a cello by Niccolo Gagliano, all generously loaned

by the Fazenda Ipiranga of Brazil.

The Hugo Wolf Quartet appears at the National Gallery by arrangement

with Marianne Schmocker Artists, Ltd., of Houston, Texas.

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Program Notes

In 1813 a fifteen-year-old Franz Schubert left the Royal City College ofVienna,

where his teachers included Antonio Salieri, to enroll in a teacher-training

school, in deference to the strong wishes of his father. Salieris renowned

skill as a teacher is audible in the work Schubert completed in November

ofthat year, the String Quartet in E-flat Major, D. 87. It shows remarkable

maturity and skill on the part ofthe young composer.

The two three-measure phrases that introduce the main theme ofthe first

movement (Allegro moderato) show flexibility oftiming and a kind ofhumor

not readily apparent in Schubert’s other early works. After repeating the initial 

twelve-bar thematic idea, Schubert moves on to offer a transition passage of

such breadth and reluctance to leave the tonic key that it almost functions as

a second main theme. The actual second main theme, however, follows the

transition and makes clever use ofsyncopated accents in the melody and rapid

dotted-note accompaniment without losing its graceful sweetness.

Schubert moves away from classical models with the second movement

(Scherzo: Prestissimo), which he puts as the second rather than as the third of

four. The third movement (Adagio) can be likened to a spinning wheel as it 

moves steadily forward in a calm 6/8 meter. The lower instruments suggest

the motion ofthe wheel, while a series ofserene melodies in the first violin 

provides the thread. The finale (Allegro) reintroduces in its second theme a

bouncing three-eighth note gesture that was heard at the opening ofthe first

movement. The accompaniment moves between electrifying sixteenth notes

and slightly more aristocratic triplets, occasionally breathing more deeply 

in chorale-like phrases. In this movement, Schubert seems to recall the best

of his many fond impressions ofthe music of Vienna’s recently departed

musical hero, Joseph Haydn (1732-1809).

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Hugo Wolf completed his Italienische Serenade between May 2 and 4,

1887, when he was largely preoccupied with creating vocal settings of poems

by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788-1857). Indeed, the serenade

relates quite closely to one ofthese vocal settings, Der Soldat I, dated March

7,1887. It also has an element in common with another Eichendorffsetting,

Das Standchen: both that lied and the serenade begin with some preliminary

strummings on open fifths with repeated notes, as ifthe musicians are

tuning their instruments.

Given the bittersweet texts ofthe related lieder, it is surprising to find

Wolfin a comical mood as he writes this serenade. The first amusing feature

is the mock tuning at the beginning. The music presents the tonic key of

G major, but each passage ends with “wrong” repeated E-flats. The inner

voices (second violin and viola) rectify matters in a pizzicato passage that

restores the correct key, but the jocularity continues. The first movement

plays itself out in rondo form and climaxes with a bold outburst in 6/8 time.

In the development section, elaborate new countermelodies in the second

violin and a recitative for the cello are answered at first mockingly, then

more compliantly, by the other instruments. After some dance-like digressions and a return ofthe rondo theme, the serenade ends as it began, amid

the thrumming ofimaginary guitars.

The great musicologist and Schubert scholar Otto Deutsch (1883-1967)

compiled a catalogue of Schubert’s works, which he rarely dated in his

manuscripts. Deutsch’s catalogue comes as close as is humanly possible to

a chronological ordering ofthe composer’s output. “Deutsch numbers,”

abbreviated with a capital D, have become the standard not only for identifying Schubert’s works in concert programs but also for noting which works

were most likely written close to one another in time.

Theologian M. Frank Ruppert, who has made a lifetime study ofthe

music of Schubert, proposes a theory regarding Schubert’s creative process

in his forthcoming book, Franz Schubert and the Rose-Cross Mystery. Like

most German-speaking intellectuals ofthe early romantic period, Schubert

was deeply affected by and involved with the poetry of his contemporaries as

well as the philosophy and theology that lay behind it. Particularly influential

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at the time was a neo-gnostic worldview that had its roots in the writings

ofJohann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), Georg Friedrich Wilhelm

Hegel (1770-1831), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and Friedrich Schiller

(1759_1^°5)- Essential to this worldview was the concept that an ideal world

exists beyond the present day-to-day grim reality, and that world can be 

reached only by way of a journey through a mysterious region, which most

writers identified as death. Adherents to this world view saw themselves

as seekers oftrue wisdom, which was often characterized as a woman ofideal

beauty (known to the ancient Greeks as Sofia), who could guide the wanderer

through his difficult but necessary journey. Ruppert maintains that Schubert’s

relationship with this philosophy, as presented in the poetry ofhis contemporaries, was so close and so intense that some poems remained with him and

shaped his creative activity even after he had finished setting them to music.

In his analysis of Schubert’s symphonies, string quartets, and other chamber

works, Ruppert finds again and again that the mood and sequence ofmusical

ideas in an instrumental movement correspond to the mood and sequence

ofideas in the text of a lied that, according to its “Deutsch number,” was 

contemporary with the instrumental work.

As Schubert began his last string quartet, the Quartet in G Major, D. 887,

he was suffering from syphilis and was preoccupied with thoughts of death.

He would readily have recalled a text he set to music as D. 842, “Totengrabers

Heimweh” (Homesickness ofthe Gravedigger), by Jacob Nicolaus Freiherr von

Craigher de Jachelutta (1797-1855). The cosmic question with which the poem

begins—“O mankind, O life! For what purpose?”—is echoed by Schubert’s

introduction, which is symphonic in scope and structure yet contemplative. 

The fugue that follows the introduction has a jagged, desperate theme, as the

poem continues: “Dig out, scrape in! Day and night, no peace! This pushing

and shoving, where does it get you? To the grave, the grave deep under!”

The second movement (Andante un poco moto) is more lyrical and somewhat darker in character. Schubert, who suffered bitter disappointment in love,

often turned to poetry that concerned the pain ofseparation from the beloved.

He may have been recalling “Lied der Mignon,” a poem by Goethe that he had

7
set to music as D. 877, just a few weeks before beginning to write this quartet

movement: “Only one who knows longing knows what I suffer! Alone and cut

offfrom all joy, I look into the firmament. Ah! He who loves and knows me is

far away. I am reeling, my stomach is burning. Only one who knows longing

knows what I suffer!’’

In the third movement (Scherzo: Allegro vivace con Trio: Allegretto), Schubert

finds a vision oflove and beauty that transforms the dark thoughts he has

explored thus far. He expresses this vision in music ofinexorable drive and

energy. Yet even in the midst ofthis blissful thought, Schubert recalls that love

involves both happiness and suffering. Another poem that he had recently set 

to music, “Mondenschein,” by Franz Schober (1798-1882), also expresses this

transformation and this dilemma, and it may well have been in Schubert’s

thoughts as he wrote the Scherzo: “The magic flower ofthe moon smiles and

soulfully invites the paradise oflove to enter our dusky night world.... Look

there! The fields have changed! The old earth is gone; I see a garden ofsilver,

with perfumed scents, bathed in golden mist and magical light.... But the song

ofthe nightingale reminds the tender heart ofthe real world, where even the

most blissful sound awakens the deep pain oflove.”

The final movement (Allegretto; allegro assai), with its frenetic triplets, its

rapid changes in dynamics, and its sudden shifts from the minor to the major

mode and back, could well have been inspired by the text of Schubert’s Tiefes

Leid (Deep Grief), D. 876, a poem by Ernst Schulze (1789-1817):

I have been parted from all rest and drift about on a wild flood;

In one place only do I find peace—that is the place where

everything rests.

And even when the wind howls eerily, and the rain comes

falling down cold,

I would much rather dwell there than in this fickle world.

For just as dreams pass without leaving any trace,

and one drives away the next, my mad life plays with itself.

False hope is never willing to give way;

Dread and toil are never prepared to leave with hope!

Only those beings who are eternally silent, eternally pale,

never promise anything and never fail.

I do not awaken them with my steps in their dark solitude.

They do not know what I have suffered, and none ofthem is

disturbed by my deep grief.

My soul can lament more freely near the one whom I truly

loved;

Certainly that cold stone will not tell me—Ah! —that my pain

saddens her too!

Program notes by Stephen Ackert
Next Week at the National Gallery ofArt

Orchestra of New Spain

Grover Wilkins, conductor

Music ofthe Spanish Court in the Eighteenth Century

February 10, 2008

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

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