December 8, 2009: 1919: a good year for the viola

Music from 1919 was the title of the Faculty Artist Series recital given last night by violist Jodi Levitz with her accompanist Keisuke Nakagoshi at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Recital Hall.  The year was particularly significant in the life of composer and violist Rebecca Clarke, as is clear from the following passage in her Wikipedia entry:

Having been kicked out of the house without funds by her abusive father for criticizing his extramarital affairs,[7] Clarke supported herself through her viola playing after leaving the Royal College [of Music in London], and moved to the United States in 1916 to perform. Her compositional career peaked in a brief period, beginning with the viola sonata she entered in a 1919 competition sponsored by patron of the arts Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Clarke's neighbor, tying for first prize in a field of 72 entrants with a piece by Ernest Bloch. (Coolidge later declared Bloch the winner. Two judges of the contest remarked to Coolidge that though they had favored Clarke, it was good that she did not win, to avoid the appearance of Coolidge favoring her neighbor and friend and destroying the reputation of the then-new contest.) It was speculated by reporters that "Rebecca Clarke" was only a pseudonym for Bloch himself, or at least that it could not have been Clarke who wrote these pieces,[1] as the idea that a woman could write such a work was nearly unheard of. The sonata was well received and had its first performance at the Berkshire music festival in 1919.

To provide musical substance for this passage, Levitz framed her recital by beginning with Clarke's sonata and concluding with Bloch's competition-winning suite.  Between these two "competitors," she programmed Paul Hindemith's 1919 sonata in F major, his Opus 11, Number 4, speculating that it, too, may have been entered in the Coolidge competition.  (All competitors were kept anonymous except for the two that tied for first prize.  According to a passage from Clarke's memoir that Levitz read, one of the judges declared that breaking the tie would require choosing between a philosopher and a poet.  Levitz joked that she had no idea which was which, but my own bet would be that Bloch was the poet.)

This was my first opportunity to hear Clarke's sonata performed in its entirety, although I had heard Elizabeth Prior Runnicles perform its first Impetuoso movement last September at Old First Church.  That movement alone might have led me to hypothesize that Clarke was the poet of the two competitors, but I would suggest that the philosopher emerges from the overall plan.  The Impetuoso is followed by two movements, Vivace and Adagio;  but each movement is its own microcosm of variations in both tempo and mood.  Thus the sonata is very much the work of a formalist exploring a new syntactic foundation for sonata structure and seeking out rhetorical devices through which the "sense of a sonata" would still prevail.  One could understand why that anonymous judge, who was probably well steeped in the traditions of sonata form, would have judged this composition to be the work of a philosopher.

From the performer's point of view, however, proper delivery of the rhetoric counts for far more than understanding the underlying syntax.  Levitz mastered the mood swings of each movement and thus tapped into the "voice" of the entire sonata.  As a student of Lionel Tertis, Clarke had clearly cultivated an intense love for the viola;  and that love was more than evident in Levitz' performance of her sonata.

Bloch's suite was composed in New York after he had settled in the United States.  Both the tempo markings and their organization are far more traditional.  However, Levitz disclosed a set of more "programmatic" titles that he had apparently considered for the four movements:

1. In the Jungle
2. Grimaces
3. Night in Java
4. In the Sun Country

The second of these is certainly consistent with the Allegro ironico tempo marking;  but these titles are suggestive of a poetic imagination that we find in many of Bloch's other compositions, even if there is no evidence that he was ever near a jungle in the Indonesian archipelago or anywhere else!  As Bloch's daughter Suzanne once made clear to one of my own music professors, the greatest hazard in performing his music is the risk of lapsing into sentimentality.  The music may be plain-spoken, even when it is "ironico;"  but it always speaks for itself.  Levitz understood this (perhaps because of her own experiences with Suzanne Bloch, who taught at Julliard);  and the result was one of the most satisfying performances of Bloch I have heard for some time.

Hindemith was still in Europe, playing viola in the Amar Quartet (which he had founded), when he composed his F major sonata.  This was a time when, aware of the work of other composers, such as Arnold Schoenberg, he was seeking out new directions of his own.  Those directions would eventually get him into trouble with the Nazis;  and he was publicly denounced by Joseph Goebbels as an "atonal noisemaker."  He left Germany for Switzerland in 1938 and came to the United States in 1940, where Yale University became his primary base of operations.  Around the time of his departure from Germany, he began to give as much attention to theory as to practice and is still known today for an elaborate system laid out in The Craft of Musical Composition, which departs from both the traditional practices of harmony and counterpoint and from the alternative approach being pursued by Schoenberg.  Unfortunately, his preoccupation with theory tended to blunt some of the sharper (and more interesting) edges of his earlier "raw" creativity.

The F major sonata comes from that "pre-theory" period.  With its primary focus on variations on a theme, it rests on a solid formal bedrock;  but it also has much of that intensity of rhetoric that Levitz teased our of the Clarke sonata.  Levitz' decision to pair these works before the intermission displayed them as an excellent pair of companions, both intensely serious about seeking new directions, both drawing upon rhetorical techniques to clarify those directions, but each proceeding in its own unique directions.  1919 was, indeed, a most impressive year in the history of the viola repertoire!

Levitz probably had her students in mind in selecting her encore.  Those students most likely know Hans Sitt for the challenges of his many etudes (100 of them in his Opus 32 and another fifteen for good measure in his Opus 116);  so there is a good chance that she wanted her students to know that he also composed music that was not strictly pedagogical.  She thus concluded the evening with a selection from his Opus 39 Album Leaves, believed to have been published around 1885.  One could take this as an example of the traditions from which those 1919 compositions had chosen to depart, presented in a manner through which we could understand both the value of those traditions and the efforts of a new generation to move on from them.