music by Clara & Robert Schumann and Wang Lu & Anthony Cheung
program
Anthony Cheung Flyway Detour
Claude Halter violin | Anne Lee cello
Mitchell Giambalvo piano
Wang Lu Like Clockwork
Alex Martin violin | Joel Gibbs viola | Lauren Posey cello
Kimi Kawashima piano | Eric Hopkins percussion
Clara Schumann Three Romances for Violin and Piano
Claude Halter violin | Frank Weinstock piano
Robert Schumann Liederkreis op. 39
Melissa Heath soprano | Frank Weinstock piano
program notes by Jeff Counts
Classical music history does not exactly overflow with composer power couples. The profession of composition was for too long an unwelcome space for women, too equivocal about their contributions to encourage many to take it up in earnest. This must have been especially true for those living in the shadow of a “great man”. It’s a sad fact, and when paired with the world’s previous inability to accept same-sex partnerships under any circumstance, it makes our study of Musical Marriages not just fascinating — it’s necessary. Because these unions did, and very much do, exist. We had Clara and Robert Schumann, of course, and we will discuss them directly. But there were also Alma and Gustav Mahler. Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti. Augusta Holmès and César Franck might have had something special if he weren’t already married (Saint-Saëns wanted to wed her too, by the way). The list might not “go on and on”, but at least we have one. Examples in our time include John Corigliano and Mark Adamo, Augusta Read Thomas and Bernard Rands, and the other featured couple on today’s program, Wang Lu and Anthony Cheung.
“The work is in three sections,” writes Anthony Cheung about his 2006 piece Flyway Detour, “each with its unique characteristics, and the overall journey through them takes its inspiration in the natural phenomenon of migration (a flyway is a bird’s particular migration route).” Cheung teaches composition with his wife Wang Lu at Brown University, but they rarely collaborate on projects. “Probably a good thing,” Wang has said in an interview with a smile. Cheung smiles, too. According to his bio, which, like his wife’s, is extravagantly descriptive, he creates music that “explores the senses, a wide palette of instrumental play and effect, improvisational traditions, reimagined musical artifacts, and multiple layers of textual meaning.” About Flyway Detour, Cheung continues, “Avian migratory patterns are often thought of as either genetically encoded after generations of evolution or learned directly by example, with the aid of the sun or the earth’s magnetic field. Yet sometimes migrations go awry, either from unexpected natural elements like wind and rain, or when the ‘programming’ works in reverse without explanation and the bird ends up in foreign lands. The ‘detour’ part of the title refers to this, and has its analogues in various musical directions the work takes.”
Composer Wang Lu’s bio states that she writes “music that reflects urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese music, and freely improvised practices.” Interestingly, her 2020 piece Like Clockwork was written during the pandemic, a time when city sounds and language contours were in short supply. Stuck at home with her husband, composer Anthony Cheung, Wang was curious about what it meant for musicians to “play together remotely and, eventually, for them to drive a piece forward without being physically together or constrained by a click track.” Like Clockwork, commissioned by the Seattle Modern Orchestra for its This Is Beethoven festival, uses this “iconic compositional figure” to bind the separated players together. “Several Beethoven quotes,” writes Wang, “were given to the musicians as references to inspire their improvisation, such as the Funeral March from Symphony No. 3 and the low, rumbling left hand from the 2nd movement of Piano Sonata No. 17, known as ‘The Tempest.’ At the climax of the piece, each musician selects a Beethoven quote of their own to play independently but simultaneously, while the percussionist serving as metronome resets the tempo faster and faster…”
Clara Schumann must be among the most contextualized people who ever lived a life in the arts. She persists in our memory mostly as Robert’s advisor, his caretaker and the keeper of his legacy. Or she is recalled as Johannes Brahms’ once great, but quite possibly never-indulged love. Clara is rarely allowed to just be Clara. Robert’s great musical friends were her friends, too, so she enjoyed rich collegial relationships with fellow performers like Joseph Joachim. It was for Joachim that Clara wrote her Three Romances for Violin and Piano in 1853, and they took them on tour right away. King George V of Hanover was in the audience for one of their performances, and he reportedly pronounced the Romances a “marvelous, heavenly pleasure.” There wasn’t much other heavenly pleasure for Clara during this period, since Robert’s failing health had him placed in a sanitorium after an attempted suicide in 1854. The Romances were among Clara’s last published works. Though she lived another forty-plus years, her creative energy after Robert’s death in 1856 was spent in service to his reputation, not hers.
In 1839, Clara Schumann told her soon-to-be-husband Robert that she was “seized by the desire to encourage you to write for orchestra.” She found the piano too limited for his immense imagination, and perhaps already understood how much comfort her nudges would provide in the coming years. He would tackle the orchestra soon enough, but 1840 was Robert’s “year of song”, a stretch of time during which he wrote some 120 of them, including the Liederkreis. It was a cycle of twelve songs based on love-sick poetry from Joseph von Eichendorff’s collection Intermezzo. Schumann described the set to Clara as “my most romantic music ever, with so much of you in it”, and the Liederkreis was certainly emblematic of the fruitful yet star-crossed period of their betrothal. Their marriage had been anything but a sure bet. To overcome her father’s strong objections to their union, Schumann had to prove to a judge that he could earn a living from his compositions. His lieder, with so much of Clara in it, sold well and made his case. The ensuing years, for Robert, contained symphonic treasures aplenty but also madness. In 1840, however, songs for his beloved were enough. “She is yours,” sing the nightingales in the last movement of Liederkreis, “she is yours!”