By Jim Berkenstock, Artistic Director
I’ve been thinking about our final program which starts this Friday and ends with a flourish at our Labor Day Gala on the 7that Bjorklunden. It’s been on my mind because I love the music on it and the combination of pieces. It begins with a thoughtful and elegant Prelude and Fughetta by Laura Netzel, a late 19th century Swedish composer. It is good that it is somewhat contemplative because things change quickly after that. The Netzel is sort of that expectant moment of ignition just before the rocket takes off because it is followed by Paul Schoenfield’s Café Music. If you have heard this work, I don’t need to say any more. It is our most requested piece. If you don’t know it, you need to come and hear why it is our most requested piece. And that’s only the first half. The second half features the Brahms Piano Quartet in G Minor which is sometimes dubbed the “Hungarian” because of its fiery and mesmerizing last movement. If it weren’t for Café Music, the Brahms might be our most requested work.
As I have been thinking about, and anticipating this program, I have been pondering the juxtaposition of Schoenfield and Brahms. They seem, at first glance, to be so utterly different. And yet…. We all know something about Brahms since he is so famous. Born in Hamburg, he was an extremely talented pianist and young composer who made his way to the Schumann household as a young man and was taken in for instruction and support and ended up being Clara Schumann’s support after Robert died. Then he made his way to Vienna and became one of the most successful composers ever and even became quite comfortable financially.
Schoenfield seems like he couldn’t be different. Born in Detroit 50 years after Brahms, he was a brilliant mathematician and ended up, for a time, living on a kibbutz in Israel in order to better understand his Jewish roots. What a contrast! But as I thought about these two, I realized that, regardless of the outward differences, they surprisingly had some things in common that come out in their music.
Brahms was born into a poor household. His father was a free-lance musician in Hamburg and played several different instruments (double bass, violin, and horn) to try to make ends meet. Brahms’ mother was a seamstress and was 17 years older than her husband. Brahms had an older sister and a younger brother, and they all lived in a succession of cramped and rather run-down apartments in Hamburg, barely getting by.
Showing an early precociousness on the piano, Brahms’ father found him some work as a young teenager playing dance hall music at a brothel near the docks in Hamburg. He would play far into the night and got so good at it that he could eventually read a book on the piano music rack while he independently played the required dance-hall music. All the while, he was studying piano and writing his own music as a teen. His earliest piano teacher said, “he could be such a good player, but he will not stop his never-ending composing.” Nonetheless, he became a formidable pianist and escaped the dance hall to go on his first concert tour with a flamboyant Hungarian violinist, Ede Reményi, who introduced Brahms to the ‘gypsy style” of music that would show up later on, especially in his two sets of Hungarian Dances and in the finale of our Piano Quartet on this program.
Paul Schoenfield had a splendid background in classical music studying with a series of wonderful piano teachers ending up with the great pianist, Rudolph Serkin. However, Schoenfield also was attracted to other types of music and spent time playing café music in a steakhouse in Minneapolis. He also became very familiar with the Hasidic tradition in music, with Klezmer music, and other elements of Yiddish influence, especially during his time in Israel. Schoenfield saw source material in almost every kind of music with which he came into contact. He himself says the inspiration for Café Music comes from “early 20th century American, Viennese, light classical, Gypsy, and Broadway styles…”
We know that Brahms was friends with Johann Strauss, Jr., the Waltz King, and enjoyed spending time wandering around the Prater (amusement park) in Vienna where you could stroll, picnic, and hear various groups performing among the quaint amusement rides. It was a favorite place for Brahms to clear his mind and relax. We also know that Brahms, in addition to the Hungarian Dances, wrote two books of Liebeslieder Waltzes (Love-Song Waltzes) and a song cycle entitled Zigeunerlieder (Gypsy Songs). However, beside these collections, his other works like our Piano Quartet, are often infused with more subtle shadings from his broad background and experiences of all kinds of music. One thing that is often overlooked in Brahms’ music, especially given its frequent complexity and weight, is its underlying desire to dance. Regardless of the robust nature of the music, it often feels like it is born of a certain lightness that stems from his broad exposure to the many kinds of music of his day.
So, could it be that Schoenfield and Brahms are both products of something similar – their rich backgrounds in lighter and folk forms of music? They both were products of the dance hall and both share the influence of Eastern music (Klezmer and Gypsy) that perhaps even has similar roots. We have all heard the expression, “You are what you eat.” Perhaps we might also say that composers “Are what they hear.”
This can be conscious as in the Liebeslieder Waltzes, or it can be from the subconscious – those bygone dalliances with old musical flames. I find the latter the most interesting. I find myself listening to something and thinking, “where did that come from.” Having played all of the regularly performed Mozart operas numerous times during my career, I have often marveled at how much a few of the arias sound like Welsh folk songs. If you can remember it, think of Là ci darem la mano (“There we will give each other our hands”) from Don Giovanni. Can you hear the resemblance to the Welsh folk song, Ar Hyd y Nos (“All Through the Night”)? It isn’t that the notes are exactly the same, but there is a similarity, but more importantly, a kind of emotional kinship that is haunting to me. There are other similarities like this in Mozart. One of the things that makes Mozart’s music so rich stems from his travels, particularly to Italy. How else could he have written the best Italian operas of his day? However, he also travelled to England as a teenager and studied with J. C. Bach there. I can’t help but think that he heard Welsh folk songs during that time and carried those deep (maybe even subconscious) memories forward into Don Giovanni and other operas.
The thing is, we all carry a pretty substantial inner thesaurus of musical material in our deepest realms, and those collections correlate to a large extent with those of the many composers we encounter. That’s how they speak to us. We are what we hear.
But speaking of being what we eat, did I mention that there is going to be some delicious food at our Labor Day Gala? (See how smoothly I worked that in?). We start the afternoon at 3:00 with a preconcert reception in the Lake Room at Bjorklunden. At 4:00, we turn on our musical appetite and hear Netzel, Schoenfield, and Brahms in Vail Hall. Then, around 6:00 we have a lovely catered dinner and celebrate the end of the season in grand style in the Great Room overlooking the water.
I have attended just about all of these since we started our Labor Day Gala, and I always look forward to it. It is a splendid way to toast a wonderful season. For tickets or more information, please call 920-854-7088 or visit www.midsummersmusic.com. Come and have a great time, and be what you eat, and be what you hear, and have a great time doing it!
Here are the remaining performances in our season as of 8/31/26. You can actually still hear all three of our late season programs if you act quickly! See you soon.
POETRY OF PERRY/CHAUSSON
Wednesday, September 2, 7:00 pm., Bjorklunden, Baileys Harbor
DOHNANYI & TCHAIKOVSKY SOUVENIRS
Tuesday, September 1, 7:00 pm., Peninsula School of Art, Fish Creek
Thursday, September 3, 7;00 pm., Courtney/Reschka Residence, Sister Bay
Saturday, September 5, 3:00 pm., The Clearing, Ellison Bay
SCHOENFIELD/BRAHMS/GALA
Friday, September 4, 7:00 pm., MUSE, Sturgeon Bay
Sunday, September 6, 4:00 p., St. Luke’s, Sister Bay
Monday, September 7, 3:00 pm., LABOR DAY GALA, Bjorklunden, Baileys Harbor
(Pre-Concert Reception starts at 2:00)
If you want to hear the Mozart’s aria from Don Giovanni and compare it to All Through the Night, here are two links. Keep in mind that Mozart’s duet is secular (very secular), so he has transformed the essence of a Welsh folk song into something quite different. Yet, do you still hear a deep and distant kinship? Of course, the Mozart ends with a faster coda, so ignore that for our purpose, and the tempo of the Welsh song is slower, but still, there seems to be something of the same cloth in these two examples. At least to me. And this is just one example of a Welsh folk song. Others might yield a better comparison. It isn’t that Mozart copied a Welsh folk song but that he drew on the tradition and transported it into a very different vehicle. And if that’s true, it is probably because he was exposed to some Welsh music during his early trip to the British Isles (and never forgot it – it lingered in the back of his memory). Schoenfield and Brahms were equally capable of the same thing. JB
All Through the Night
La ci darem la mano:
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