Serenade in C for String Trio, Op.10
Marcia: Allegro
Romanza: Adagio non troppo, quasi andante
Scherzo: Vivace
Tema con Variazione: Andante con moto
Rondo (Finale): Allegro vivace
Ernst von Dohnányi was one of those composers who seemed to outlive themselves. Born, like his contemporaries Martinu, Bartók and Korngold, into the cosmopolitan Habsburg Monarchy, he was displaced, like them, by the political and artistic turmoil of 20th century central Europe. He died in New York aged 82, but, as he told an interviewer at the 1956 Edinburgh Festival, he was already well used to people being surprised to find him still alive. Dohnányi was very much a product of fin-de-siècle Budapest, where his first Symphony had been premièred in 1897 and from where he had gone on to build a worldwide reputation as a pianist, composer, conductor and educator in the years before the First World War. His early Piano Quintet (1895) and First String Quartet (1899) enjoyed an immediate success; and he was acclaimed as the soloist in his grandiose first Piano Concerto (1897), but, like Korngold, he was gifted with a sense of humour which, with a dash of Hungarian colour, meant that some of his less ambitious works turned out to be amongst his finest. Such orchestral works as the witty Variations on a Nursery Tune (1914) with its parodies of Mahler and Brahms, and the glorious Suite in F sharp (1909) belong to this lighter vein, as does the Serenade in C for String Trio (1902). Dohnányi stayed with this style – Straussian orchestration, Brahmsian harmony, his own wit and a distinctive (but not overpowering) Hungarian flavour - throughout his later career, in which fascists and then communists progressively drove him out of Hungarian musical life and finally forced him into exile in the USA in 1949. His grandson Christoph has continued the family tradition there as a distinguished conductor.
Dohnányi was 25 when he wrote the Serenade in C but was already a veteran in the field of string chamber music, with his Piano Quintet and A minor String Quartet already in print. In choosing the five-movement Serenade form, and the small-scale medium of the String Trio he was signalling his intention to relax – and as was so often the way in his music, this enabled his natural inspiration to flow effortlessly. Delightfully inventive and perfectly crafted, the Serenade has long been a work that string players have enjoyed amongst themselves; Heifetz, Primrose and Feuermann made a famous recording of it together in 1941. Its relative neglect in public performance can only be attributed to the relative infrequency of string trio concerts in general.
The Serenade opens with a March in two halves; the first part brisk and smart, the second consisting of a sinuous, unmistakably Magyar theme played over an earthy drone-bass and then turned upside down. The Romanza is equally straightforward in form; a serene viola melody is presented in lovely simplicity and later returns with a whispered semiquaver accompaniment. Between the two sections comes a passionate gypsy outburst for the violin and cello over viola arpeggios. The brilliant, fugal Scherzo prefigures Bartók, tempered by a Brahmsian central interlude, and in the Tema con Variazione, a hymn-like melody is developed in increasingly intricate variations. Dohnányi’s sense of instrumental colour is at its most refined in the tranquil closing variation, a rhapsodic passage which evokes the Hungarian "night music" mood which would be so magically explored years later by Bartók and Kodály. In the Rondo (Finale) the spirit of Haydn visits a Budapest coffee-shop as all of Dohnányi’s wit and craftsmanship comes into play. The tempo gradually broadens as a familiar rhythm appears amidst the semiquavers; finally the Magyar melody from the opening March sweeps in and the Serenade ends with Hungarian colours flying proudly.
R.G.Bratby, 2001
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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