MOZART & SCHUBERT
Ella Taylor, Robin Ireland & Ensemble 360
Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Monday 20 May 2024, 2.30pm
Tickets
£21
£14 UC, DLA or PIP
£5 Under 35s & Students

MOZART Ach, ich fühl’s! (from The Magic Flute) (5’)
MOZART String Quintet No.4 in G minor K516 (36′)
TRAD. Se solen sjunker (Swedish folksong) (3′)
SCHUBERT Piano Trio No.2 in E flat (44′)
Music in the Round is delighted to welcome Robin Ireland back to the Crucible, a venue he knows so well from his years as violist with the Lindsay String Quartet.
Robin will join Ensemble 360 for one of Mozart’s finest chamber works, his String Quintet in G minor. It’s a work that’s rich in drama, the hallmark of one of the greatest opera composers, and a delicate aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute will lead straight into the Quintet.
Schubert’s Second Piano Trio was one of the final pieces he completed before his death at the young age of 31. It’s a work of incredible emotional depth, with its most famous melody, frequently used in soundtracks for film and television, inspired by a traditional Swedish folksong.
Note from Guest Curator, Steven Isserlis
“I love connections between songs and chamber works. ‘Ach ich fuhl’s’ from The Magic Flute is not thematically related to Mozart’s great G minor Quintet; but somehow it seems to me to be the perfect prelude to what may be Mozart’s most personal chamber work, the heart-rending introduction to the last movement reportedly composed after he heard of the death of his father. The immortal slow movement of Schubert’s Second Piano Trio, on the other hand, is actually based on the Swedish folksong that we will hear just before the trio. Its mournful refrain of a descending octave – ‘farewell; farewell’ – evidently captured Schubert’s imagination.”
Part of Sheffield Chamber Music Festival 2024.
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MOZART Amadeus, Ach, ich fühl’s!
In Act Two of Die Zauberflöte, The Magic Flute, Tamino’s flute has summoned Pamina, but he has taken a vow of silence so cannot talk to her. Fearing that he no longer loves her, Pamina sings this aria in which she wonders if her happiness has gone forever and that she will only find peace in death. Mozart sets these lamentations in a deceptively straightforward style, but also in a key – G minor – which he often reserved for expressing the deepest sadness and tragedy: in parts of the G minor String Quintet and the Symphony No. 40, and in this aria.
© Nigel Simeone
MOZART Amadeus, String Quintet in G minor K516
1. Allegro
2. Menuetto: Allegretto
3. Adagio ma non troppo
4. Adagio – Allegro
Mozart’s string quintets are all for the combination of two violins, two violas and cellos, with the two violas allowing for particularly rich inner parts. The Quintet in G minor K516 was completed on 16 May 1787, four weeks after his C major Quintet – and during the final illness of his father Leopold, who on 28 May. Though Mozart and his father had a strained relationship by this time, the composer was alarmed at Leopold’s illness and reacted with the now famous letter written on April 1787 in which he declared that ‘death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling!’
The G minor Quintet – written by an estranged son who knew that his father was dying – is probably the most tragic of all Mozart’s chamber works. W.W. Cobbett described it as a ‘struggle with destiny’ and found it ‘filled with the resignation of despair’ – though this is rather to overlook the major-key ebullience of the finale. The first movement is full of restrained pathos, both themes melancholy and understated – and all the more wrenching for that. The minuet is sombre and reflective while the slow movement was, for the great Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein, the desolate core of the work. He likened it to ‘the prayer of a lonely one surrounded on all sides by the walls of a deep chasm.’ The element of tragedy is still very apparent in the slow introduction to the finale; but finally Mozart unleashes a more joyous spirit. The French poet Henri Ghéon found an eloquent description for this turning point: ‘Mozart has had enough. He knew how to cry but he did not like to cry or to suffer for too long.’
NIGEL SIMEONE 2010
TRAD. Se solen sjunker (Swedish folksong)
This folk song (‘The sun is setting’) was sung by the Swedish tenor Isak Albert Berg at the Viennese home of the Fröhlich sisters, which Schubert visited in 1826 and again in 1827–8. According to Anna Fröhlich, ‘Schubert was so captivated by Berg’s singing that whenever we invited him to spend the evening with us, he always asked: “Is Berg coming? If so, you can absolutely count on my coming.”’ An early biographer noted that Schubert was ‘enchanted with these Swedish songs’, and asked Berg for a copy. He subsequently incorporated one of them into the slow movement of the Piano Trio in E flat, giving it a setting that perhaps sounds more Hungarian than Swedish, but there’s no mistaking the re-use of the tune itself.
© Nigel Simeone
SCHUBERT Franz, Piano Trio No.2 in E flat
1. Allegro
2. Andante con moto
3. Scherzando. Allegro moderato
4. Allegro moderato
Schubert composed the second of his piano trios in November 1827, the same month as he completed the great song-cycle Winterreise and nine months after the death of Beethoven in March 1827. This epic chamber work was, in fact, given one of its earliest performances at a concert by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna on 26 March on the anniversary of Beethoven’s death – one of the few occasions during Schubert’s lifetime when he enjoyed a major public success. Sadly this was not destined to last: the next known performance of the Trio was in January 1829, at a memorial concert for Schubert, who had died in November 1828. Just when Schubert’s music was at risk of slipping into neglect, it was Robert Schumann – an immensely perceptive critic as well as a composer of genius – who most regularly drew attention to the finest of Schubert’s chamber works. Schumann numbered this E flat Trio among the very greatest, describing it as his ‘last and most individual work of chamber music’ and comparing it with the more genial Trio in B flat major. Schumann wrote that the E flat Trio, which appeared in print just days before Schubert’s death, has travelled ‘across the ordinary musical life of the day like an angry thunderstorm … inspired by deep indignation and boundless longing … spirited, masculine and dramatic.’
In a letter to Heinrich Probst – the Leipzig publisher who had the foresight to publish the piece in 1828 – Schubert gave instructions for performances of the work: ‘Be sure to have it played for the first time by capable people, and particularly to maintain a continual uniformity of tempo at the changes of time signature in the last movement. The minuet at a moderate pace and piano throughout, the trio on the other hand vigorous except where p and pp are marked.’ The sheer scale of the work is extraordinary. Very few chamber works of the time unfold with such timeless nobility, but its length did attract some criticism at the time, and Schubert cut almost 100 bars from the finale before the first edition was issued.
NIGEL SIMEONE, 2010