Forgotten Masterpiece Friday (Part 1): Laura Valborg Aulin, String Quartet No. 1

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

This will be one of two posts today, because I missed last week. Since this is Women's History Month, both posts will feature string quartets by women who were arguably more talented than their better-known brothers. And because it's also the week of Bach's birthday, it seems rather appropriate to start with a piece featuring a spectacular fugue in its final movement!

Laura Valborg Aulin (1860-1928), if she gets mentioned at all, is usually only recognized alongside her brother Tor Aulin, who was a well-known violin virtuoso in his time, a composer of show pieces for his instrument, and the founder of Scandinavia's first full-time professional string quartet. But Valborg (who went by her middle name) was probably the more talented composer of the two.

Both of Valborg Aulin's parents were musicians. Edla Aulin (née Holmberg), her mother, had been a promising opera singer in her youth but had her career cut short by poor health; Lars Aulin, her father, was a noted amateur violinist and a leading member of Stockholm's Mazer String Quartet Society, an amateur chamber music association that still exists today. In addition, her paternal grandmother was a highly-regarded piano teacher, and was responsible for her early musical education. She learned the violin as well, but apparently stopped playing violin after the Mazer Society denied her bid to become its first female member.

Aulin was admitted to the Royal Stockholm Conservatory in 1877, graduated in 1882, and subsequently won a scholarship to continue her composition studies abroad, with Niels Gade in Copenhagen in 1885-86 and Jules Massenet in Paris in 1886-87. While she was in Paris, her sister-in-law's diary reports that "[d]espite her total lack of outward charm, which Frenchmen are so highly appreciative of, she became popular due to her immense talent." (A hero to socially awkward people everywhere, perhaps?)

After returning to Stockholm, Aulin built a career as a concert pianist and piano teacher, often performing her own piano works. She frequently collaborated with the Aulin Quartet, her brother's newly-formed professional quartet; she actually appeared in the Aulin Quartet's debut concert, performing a Saint-Saëns piano quartet with three of the string quartet's members. In 1903, somewhat surprisingly, she moved to the inland town of Örebro to accept a position as a church organist there, and remained there for the rest of her life. A number of factors may have been responsible for this. Several of her champions in Stockholm music circles died in the preceding years, and the Aulin Quartet disbanded as Tor Aulin fell into a long depressive episode. The loss of performance opportunities for her compositions, along with her lack of close friends in Stockholm, may have made her position untenable in the Swedish capital's conservative musical environment.

All of Aulin's large-scale works were composed in her 20s and early 30s. After that period she continued to compose, but being discouraged by a lack of interest from performers other than herself and her brother, she limited herself to writing art songs and short piano pieces. Her two string quartets were composed in 1884 and 1889 respectively, and both were premiered by her brother's quartet. While both quartets received positive reviews from critics, and both were published, only the Aulin Quartet ever gave public performances during her lifetime. After the Aulin Quartet disbanded, the quartets were not performed again until 1991 when they were revived by the Tale Quartet as part of a series of recordings featuring unknown Swedish composers.

This is the first of Aulin's two quartets, composed the year before she left Sweden to continue her studies abroad. Very much a musician's quartet, it features every part almost equally and shows a real penchant for polyphony. Must-hear highlights include a quirky intermezzo (or scherzo) movement and a boisterous finale that combines a folk-like melody over a fugue on a completely different theme.

Movements:

I. Allegro con grazia
II. Intermezzo: Allegro con spirito e capriccioso (8:55)
III. Andante espressivo (12:22)
IV. Finale: Allegro vivace (19:11)

Watch on YouTube

Forgotten Masterpiece Friday (Part 2): Fanny Mendelssohn, String Quartet in E-Flat Major

It's still Forgotten Masterpiece Friday! (If nothing else, because I'm still awake.)

When most classical listeners are asked to name women composers, Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847) tends to be one of the first two names to come to mind, along with Clara Schumann. It's perhaps an unfortunate reflection of the classical music establishment's continuing biases that Fanny Mendelssohn is known mainly because of her relation to Felix Mendelssohn; but that doesn't take away from her own considerable ability. Felix Mendelssohn was himself one of the great child prodigies in music history, producing marvelously mature music in his mid-teens, and yet many visitors to the Mendelssohn home appear to have regarded Fanny as having equal or even greater talent.

Unfortunately, Fanny Mendelssohn saw little by way of family support. Her father shared the era's prevailing attitude toward women in music. He was at best tolerant of her passion for composing, and on one occasion wrote to her: "Music will perhaps become his [Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament." Felix's relationship with her composing was more complicated. He by all accounts encouraged Fanny to compose, and appears to have respected Fanny's advice on his own compositions. He also notably championed several other female composers, securing them funding and publications and conducting the premieres of their pieces. But at the same time, he strangely discouraged Fanny from having her music published under her own name, ostensibly for family reasons, and instead arranged for it to be published ambiguously under the name of "F. Mendelssohn," who was generally assumed to be Felix. (This led to an embarrassing incident when Felix met Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace. The queen mentioned her favorite of his songs, at which point Felix had to confess it was composed by his sister.) Fanny acquiesced to family pressure until she married the painter Wilhelm Hensel, who was the first to encourage her to take credit for her own work. She began to claim credit as composer at a series of private concerts held at the Hensel home in Berlin beginning in 1831. Still, it was not until 1846, the year before her death, that she finally approached a publisher on her own and had music published under her name. Perhaps she would have received her due credit had she lived longer -- in 1847 she died after suffering a stroke while rehearsing one of her brother's oratorios. (A series of strokes also claimed Felix's life six months later; their parents and paternal grandfather all died at relatively early ages of similar causes.)

Fanny Mendelssohn's only string quartet was composed in 1834, when her music was finally being performed under her own name. It is uncertain who performed or heard its premiere, but it was likely performed before a substantial audience even if the concert was private and by invitation only. The Hensels' concerts took place in a large enough space to accommodate a chamber orchestra and chorus, and guest lists were often quite long. Franz Liszt, Robert and Clara Schumann, and Charles Gounod attended regularly when they were in Berlin, as did a number of non-musical luminaries including Hans Christian Andersen. But it was not until 1989 that this quartet was finally published and recorded.

Interestingly, this quartet spends very little time in its nominal key of E-flat major; the first two movements instead appear to be centered around C minor, and there are frequent modulations to distant keys including an entire movement in a seemingly unrelated key. Aside from the key, there are other great departures from the traditional form for large-scale pieces. This quartet begins with a short slow movement -- albeit one that accelerates and becomes stormy in its middle. The second movement, marked Allegretto, brings to mind Felix's "fairy" scherzos, but with a rather darker cast. The third and longest movement is a dramatic, intensely emotional G minor Romanze. In light of the Mendelssohns' love for Mozart, it might be worth mention that G minor was Mozart's preferred key for expressing personal conflict. Finally, the quartet inverts the traditional form by ending (rather than beginning) with a brisk Allegro molto vivace in sonata form. With its daring yet entirely coherent structure, Fanny Mendelssohn's quartet may be one of the closest heirs to the late Beethoven quartets, in whose footsteps few composers dared to follow until decades later.

Since this is a live concert video, I've tried to place movements not where the music starts but where the members of the quartet begin to signal the tempo.

Movements:
I. Adagio ma non troppo (0:38)
II. Allegretto (4:43)
III. Romanze (8:47)
IV. Allegro molto vivace (15:48)

Watch on YouTube