Samuel Barber’s popularity rests in part on his immediate accessibility; Barber resisted the modernist developments of many of his contemporaries, opting instead to stay within the boundaries of late Romanticism harmonically, and traditional forms structurally. His essential conservatism should not be taken as a lack of an original voice; his music is both personally distinctive and idiomatically definitive, “American” in its simplicity and directness but never derivative or heavy-handed. Barber enjoyed a brief career as a baritone, and his innate melodic gifts are evident in his many songs and in such works as the beautiful Adagio for Strings.

Barber was born in 1910 into a cultured, well-educated family resident in West Chester, Pennsylvania. His father was a doctor, his mother a pianist; an aunt was a contralto at the Metropolitan Opera, and an uncle was a composer of art songs. Barber wrote his first musical at the age of seven, and attempted an opera at ten. At fourteen he entered the Curtis Institute as a triple prodigy in voice, piano, and composition.

By his early twenties, Barber was recognized as one of the leading lights of American music. Compositions were commissioned or premiered by the top performers and conductors of the day, including Horowitz, Fischer-Dieskau, Toscanini, and Koussevitsky. Yet by the middle of the century Barber began to be dismissed by the more avant-garde critics. His opera Antony and Cleopatra (which opened the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966) was particularly savaged, sending Barber into a clinical depression. He spent the remaining years of his life in near isolation, before his death from cancer in New York in 1981.

The Cello Sonata Op.6 was written in 1932 while Barber was touring Europe. Although he was still finishing his studies at the Curtis Institute, the composition is far from a student work. It was premiered in 1933 in New York, with Barber himself at the piano and Orlando Cole on the cello. Cole collaborated closely with Barber as the work was being composed, playing through pages as Barber completed them. Cole enjoyed a distinguished career himself, teaching at the Curtis Institute for 75 years (he is now a vital 102 years old). His many students include some of the greatest cellists of our day, such as Lynn Harrell.

Robert Schumann was the very embodiment of the nineteenth-century Romantic artist. Fond of wearing all black, taken by some as a sort of religious aesthetic, Schumann lived a life ruled by passions and plagued by inner tragedies. His early ambition was to be a pianist, but as a young man he was stricken with a crippled hand which failed to improve despite the best medical advice of his day (such as soaking it in the entrails of freshly slaughtered animals), and thereafter he devoted himself to composition.

Schumann’s imagination, and his complicated inner life, found some of its expression in the fictitious society of the “Davidsbund,” populated by friends living, dead, and imagined and used to poke fun at and antagonize the “Philistines” of art. He also edited an influential music journal, and wrote under various noms de plume, especially Florestan (a hothead) and Eusebius (a dreamer), characters who also make appearances in various musical works. This divided personality is also manifested in the contrast between the introspective, luminous beauty of Schumann’s lieder and the extroverted exuberance of his four symphonies. The line between these constructed personalities and reality became increasingly blurred with the passage of time, and Schumann was essentially insane at his death. His great passions, as shown in the wooing of Clara Wieck (or, perhaps, the wooing of her father’s resolve) and in his tireless championing of the young Johannes Brahms, are fully revealed at the best moments of his output, resulting in music that lies at the core of Romanticism.

Certainly the last years of Schumann’s life were unhappy and ultimately tragic. He accepted the post of music director in Düsseldorf but, as he was not the best of conductors, this quickly became a period of professional disillusionment. Yet these years were almost unbelievably productive; he completed 50 works between 1850 and 1854—including two violin sonatas, written in 1851 within the span of two months. The first, which we shall hear today in a transcription for cello by Steven Isserlis, is a short work of fleeting impressions, recalling in many ways the greater vitality of his youthful works and drawing upon the poetics of his self-formed creative personalities.

Inner vitality did not, unfortunately, beget physical health. In February of 1854 Schumann began to be plagued by inner voices and noises, and within weeks he was committed to an asylum. He was not to see his beloved Clara again until July 27, 1856; two days later he was dead.

Ernö Dohnányi’s lifetime spanned the late Romantic period to the mid-20th century. His first published work, a piano quintet, earned the support of Brahms, and the great violinist Joseph Joachim (and friend of Schumann) aided him in obtaining a post at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Belá Bartók was a classmate at the Budapest Academy; many of the greatest Hungarian musicians of the second half of the 20th century were Dohnányi’s students, including conductor Sir Georg Solti. Dohnányi was an international piano soloist, conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, director of the Budapest Academy, and, of course, a composer.

Dohnányi was born in 1877 in what is now Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. His first teacher was his father, a mathematics professor and amateur cellist. After formal studies at the Budapest Academy, Dohnányi embarked on a successful career as a pianist, performing as a soloist in Berlin, Vienna, London, and other European cities. He made his American debut in 1898 with the St. Louis Symphony. His career was based in Budapest throughout the first half of the 20th century, before his emigration to the United States after the Second World War. (The conflict claimed the lives of Dohnányi’s two sons: one was killed in combat, and the other executed by the Nazis for his role in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Dohnányi himself became persona non grata with the Communist government in Hungary for his own activities protecting Jews during the war years.) Dohnányi ended his career teaching at Florida State University. He died in 1960 in New York City, shortly after completing a recording project of Beethoven’s piano sonatas.

Dohnányi’s compositional style is not in the same vein as the more “nationalistic” Hungarian composers Bartók and Kodály. Although folk elements are occasionally apparent, the influence of late Romantic composers, especially Brahms, is more noticeable. The Sonata in B-flat Minor, Op.8 is an early work, composed in 1899 when the composer was only twenty-two. It displays masterful construction and a strong sense of momentum and continuity, with the recurrence of several themes throughout the four movements, concluding with a set of variations.

Frédéric Chopin was born near the Polish capital, in Zelazola Wola. His father was a French émigré, his mother was Polish. By the age of five, he was playing the piano well; at eight his first composition was printed, a polonaise. Warsaw was by no means backwater (many of the greatest performers passed through on concert tours) though neither was it a hotbed of pedagogical activity. Chopin’s teacher, Joseph Elsner, was strictly a classicist, but he had the wisdom to allow his pupil’s unique talent to take its own path. By the time of Chopin’s arrival in Paris at the age of twenty-one, he was already a fully-formed musician—the foundation of his piano technique and his compositional style was complete.

As a virtuoso, Chopin was in a class by himself. Other pianists, chief among them Liszt, dazzled audiences with spectacular technical feats and thundering sound. Perhaps due to his diminutive size (he weighed 100 pounds at most), Chopin played entirely differently, using shades of pianissimo unknown and unavailable to the rest. In his hands the piano became a singing instrument, with colour and subtlety. His pianism established a style of playing that endured throughout the second half of the 19th century. Surprisingly, his reputation as a pianist rests on perhaps only 30 public concerts; after that, he restricted his playing strictly to the salons of upper-crust Paris.

Chopin took little interest in the music of others. He disliked nearly all the music of his day, and admired only Bach and Mozart. He was a musical nationalist in outward form, writing Polish mazurkas and polonaises, but in essence he was the first true Romantic composer, dispensing with classical forms and writing piano music that followed the dictates of idea over form.

Nearly all of Chopin’s music is for the piano. In fact, he wrote only four chamber works, all of which include the piano and, incidentally, the cello. For the record, the four works are the Piano Trio Op.8, the Introduction and Polonaise brillante and the Grand Duo (both for cello and piano) and the Sonata in G Minor, Op.65 which we shall hear today. This sonata was the last of Chopin’s works to be published during his lifetime. The last three movements of this sonata were performed by Chopin in 1847 in one of his last public performances; the cellist was the great Auguste Franchomme. Chopin’s health was failing rapidly—after a dismal trip to England and Scotland, Chopin returned to Paris, where he spent the last few months of his life gravely ill. (The famous mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot remarked cynically that “All the grand Parisian ladies considered it de rigueur to faint in his room.”) He died in October of 1849.

©2010 by Brian Mix, cellist of the Vancouver-based Pacific Rim String Quartet.