At 3 p.m. this Saturday, March 5, 2016, in the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Public Library Central Branch, the stellar musicians of the Santa Barbara Music Club will offer another of their remarkable free concerts for the entertainment and education of anyone who can manage to be there.
As usual, the program contains about an hour of music. First, a quintet comprising bassoonist Paul Mori, violinists Isaac Kay and Andrea Lárez, violist Erik Fauss and cellist Wynston Hamann will perform Edward Elgar’s Romance for Bassoon and Strings, Op. 62 (1911) and Shinji Eshima’s Krapp’s Endgame (2009).
Then violinist Nicole Mckenzie and pianist Betty Oberacker will play Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin & Piano Sonata No. 9 in A-Major, Op. 47 , also know as the “Kreutzer” Sonata.
If there was ever a composer whose music required nothing in the way of exegesis, that composer is Edward Elgar. Some of his stuff — quite a bit of it, actually — can speak to us very subtly and deeply, but the notes themselves are transparent down to the bottom.
Consider his Romance. I rest my case.
Elgar loved human beings as creators, and as children of God, but socially, he thought dogs made better friends.
I haven’t heard Krapp’s Endgame yet, but the other pieces by Eshima (who is an American, by the way) that I have managed to hear certainly suggest he is well-qualified to translate the world of Samuel Beckett into musical terms.
He also has something of Beckett’s gift for cryptic utterance.
“I grew up in Berkeley,” he told one interviewer. “My grandmother taught Japanese and calligraphy. I remember hearing temple bells. My grandmother had an obutsudan and would offer rice and chant. I helped her make pickles.”
The title of this piece, as you may have sussed, is a conflation of two plays by Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame, both from 1957.
In the former, the eponymous Krapp celebrates his birthday by playing the tape recordings of monologues he made on previous birthdays.
The latter has four characters, who may be related to each other and who may be the last humans left alive on Earth: Hamm, who is seated throughout in a chair on casters, apparently unable to stand; Clov, who spends the entire play on his feet, apparently unable to sit; Nag and Nell, an elderly couple in separate garbage cans, buried to their necks in sand. A lot of the play is slapstick, and quite funny; the rest of it is high tragic poetry.
HAMM: We’re not beginning to… to… mean something?
CLOV: Mean something? You and I, mean something?
(brief laugh) Ah, that’s a good one!
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame
Betty Oberacker’s program notes for this concert give a very lucid account of how this greatest of all of Beethoven’s violin-piano sonatas came to bear the name of a man — French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer — who had nothing to do with its composition, who refused to play the piece and who thought it “outrageously unintelligible.”
If it had ended there, it would have been more immortality than Kreutzer deserved, but in 1889, Tolstoy wrote a short novel in which a man and a woman — married, but not to each other — play the “Kreutzer” Sonata and embark upon a passionate, adulterous affair.
The book was banned in Russia and became a veritable best-seller in the rest of Europe. The European intelligentsia were electrified.
Adultery was their great theme at the time, and Toltoy’s novella, called The Kreutzer Sonata, joined Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary at the top of their hit parade.
After that, references to “Kreutzer” are mostly to Tolstoy, not Beethoven. Decades later, Janáček was in the middle of a December-May adulterous affair when he wrote his first string quartet, which he dubbed, the “Kreutzer.”
If there is an afterlife that is able to monitor the present’s doings, I’ll bet Kreutzer’s having a good laugh.
More than one of Beethoven’s quarrels had powerful reverberations, of course — such as the one that led him to call his Third Symphony the “Eroica,” instead of “Buonoparte.”
For additional information about this or other Santa Barbara Music Club programs and performing artists, visit its website at www.sbmusicclub.org or email ChrisDavis.music@gmail.com.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.