Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897) Trio in E Flat Major for French horn, violin and piano, Op. 40 Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843 - 1900) Trio in D Major for...
Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)
Trio in E Flat Major for French horn, violin and piano, Op. 40
Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843 - 1900)
Trio in D Major for French horn, oboe and piano, Op. 61
Frederic Nicolas Duvernoy (1765- 1838) Trio No.1 for French
horn, violin and piano
Johannes Brahms was born on 7th May 1833 in the Gangeviertel
district of Hamburg, the son of a double-bass player and his wife, a seamstress seventeen
years her husband's senior. It was intended that the boy should follow his father's trade
and to this end he was taught the violin and cello, but his interest in the piano
prevailed, enabling him to supplement the family income by playing in dockside taverns,
while taking valuable lessons from Eduard Marxsen.
In 1853 Brahms embarked on a concert tour with the Hungarian
violinist Eduard Remenyi, during the course of which he visited Liszt in
Weimar, to no effect, and struck up a friendship with the violinist Joseph Joachim,
through whose agency he met the Schumanns, established now in Düsseldorf. The connection
was an important one. Schumann was impressed enough by the compositions of his own that
Brahms played him to hail the young composer as the long-awaited successor to Beethoven.
Schumann's subsequent break-down in February 1854 and ensuing insanity brought Brahms back
to Düsseldorf to help Clara Schumann and her young family. The relationship with Clara
Schumann, one of the most distinguished pianists of the time, lasted until her death in
1896.
It was not until 1862, after a happy period that had brought
him a temporary position at the court of Detmold as a conductor and piano teacher, that
Brahms visited Vienna, giving concerts there and meeting the important critic Eduard
Hanslick, who was to prove a doughty champion, pitting Brahms against Wagner and Liszt as
a composer of abstract music, as opposed to the music- drama of Wagner and the symphonic
poems of Liszt, with their extra-musical associations. Brahms finally took up permanent
residence in Vienna in 1869, greeted by many as the real successor to Beethoven,
particularly after his first symphony, and winning a similar position in popular esteem
and similar tolerance for his notorious lack of tact. He died in 1897.
The contribution of Brahms to chamber music was as significant
as his work as a symphonist, as a composer of songs and as a writer of music for the
piano. His Trio for French horn, violin and piano,
published with the optional replacement of the first instrument by a viola, was written
during the summer of 1865 at Lichtenthal, where Clara Schumann had bought a cottage. The
use of the horn, in this case originally the natural Waldhorn, an instrument gradually
being displaced at this period by the valve horn, is unusual, but adds a deeply romantic
texture to the music. The first movement, which, unusually, is not in the customary
sonata-form, has an air of gentle melancholy. The second movement, a Scherzo, with a
contrasting A flat minor Trio, makes use of the association of the horn with hunting,
after the emphatic opening of the movement. The deeply felt slow movement, its melancholy
suggesting sadness at the death of the composer's mother in the preceding year, leads to a
hunting finale, thematically related to material appearing towards the end of the Adagio.
In Vienna during the winter of 1863-64 Brahms had accepted as a
pupil Elisabeth von Stockhausen, third daughter of the Hanoverian ambassador in Vienna, a
girl whose musical gifts were matched by her beauty. In 1868 she married Heinrich von
Herzogenberg, grandson of a French nobleman who had taken refuge in Austria at the time of
the French Revolution, changing his name from Picot de Peccaduc. The Herzogenbergs proved
loyal friends of Brahms, entertaining him in their house in Leipzig, where they settled in
1872 and where Herzogenberg helped to found and lead the Bach-Verein. He was appointed
professor of composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik in 1885, a position from
which he finally retired in the year of his death, 1900.
The English composer Ethel Smythe became an intimate friend of
Elisabeth von Herzogenberg during the years she spent in Leipzig, although they were later
estranged, and took lessons from Herzogenberg, who had deplored the inadequate teaching at
the Conservatory and resolved now to take his first pupil. She writes in her Memoirs of
his Jesuit education and his family's original intention of putting their younger son into
the priesthood, a step that he had rejected in favour of music, an unusual choice for one
in his station. His contrapuntal ability was remarkable, a facility that Ethel Smythe
considered as useful as being able to tie oneself in knots or play twelve games of chess
at once, and he had the habit of devoting a certain number of hours each day to
composition, with results that she, at least, found often dry. His own claims, however,
were modest: he had perhaps nothing new to say, but hoped to hand on the good tradition.
In Herzogenberg's chamber music the influence of Brahms is
often evident. His Trio in D major for French horn,
oboe and piano, Op. 61, was written in 1889. While it may lack something of the
depth of feeling of Brahms, the Trio makes an attractive addition to wind and piano
repertoire, with overt reminiscences of the Horn Trio Brahms had written during
Herzogenberg's first year of musical study with Dessoff in Vienna, when he had first met
Brahms. Frederic-Nicolas Duvernoy, born in 1765 at Montbeliard, was one of the first important figures in the development of horn-playing in France,
an art in which he was self-taught. In 1788 he joined the orchestra of the Comedie
Italienne in Paris and in 1790 joined the band of the National Guard. In 1795 he became
professor of the horn at the newly established Conservatoire and was later principal
horn-player at the Opera. Napoleon held him in high esteem and his playing was praised by
leading critics. His brother was well known as a clarinettist and his son as a teacher of
Solfege at the Conservatoire. Frederic Duvernoy wrote important pedagogical works for
horn-players and a quantity of music, principally for the same instrument, in one
combination or another, making a technically significant addition to its concert
repertoire, as exemplified in the present brief Trio.
Jenoe Kevehazi
Jenoe Kevehazi was born in 1949 and since 1968 has served as
first horn-player in the Hungarian Radio Orchestra. He won first prize in 1979 at the
Colmar Competition for Wind-Players and in 1979 at the Premio di Ancona Competition. He is
a member of the Pro Brass Ensemble.
Jenoe Jando
The Hungarian pianist Jenoe Jando has won a number of piano
competitions in Hungary and abroad, including first prize in the 1973 Hungarian Piano
Concours and a first prize in the chamber music category at the Sydney International Piano
Competition in 1977. He has recorded for Naxos all the piano concertos and sonatas of
Mozart. Other recordings for the Naxos label include the concertos of Grieg and Schumann
as well as Rachmaninov's Second Concerto and
Paganini Rhapsody and Beethoven's complete
piano sonatas.
Ildiko Hegyi
The violinist Ildiko Hegyi was born in Budapest and studied
there at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music before continuing her studies in Leningrad (St.
Petersburg) under Borisz Gutnyikov. She was a member of the prize-winning Eder Quartet,
with which she toured the Far East, the United States of America and Western Europe, and
leader of the Budapest Chamber Ensemble. Since 1985 she has been leader and principal
soloist with the Concentus Hungaricus and since 1990 has been leader of the Hungarian
Radio Orchestra (Budapest Symphony Orchestra).
Jozsef Kiss
Jozsef Kiss was born in Satoraljaujhely in 1961 and studied in
Budapest, before joining the Budapest Symphony Orchestra in 1982. He remains a principal
oboist in the orchestra and assistant professor of oboe at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of
Music. In 1984 he won the bronze medal at the Toulon International Oboe Competition and
four years later the wind-players' prize of the Hungarian Radio.