Notes for: July 31, 2007
In 1963, Rochberg stunned musical circles when, as a leading American composer and chairman of the prestigious music department at the University of Pennsylvania, he turned his back on the Schoenberg twelve-tone system and returned to tonality. (Under the system, traditional keys are abandoned and all twelve notes in the chromatic scale are treated as equals.) A convert to the twelve-tone system in 1950, Rochberg deserted it after his son died and he found it limiting in emotion and inadequate to express his grief and rage.
Rochberg added to the uproar in 1972 when his String Quartet No. 3, with evocations of late Beethoven and Mahler, won a prestigious Naumburg Chamber Music Award. His use of tonality and quotations from past composers in this and other compositions caused critics and musicologists to classify him as a “neo-romantic” composer like Benjamin Britten and Samuel Barber. His reputation was then enhanced by a collection of his writings, The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music, in which he reviewed his search for an appropriate musical path and argued for a balance between structure and feeling, tonality and atonality.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Rochberg attended the Mannes College of Music, where one of his teachers was the conductor George Szell. After military service in World War II, he studied at the Curtis Institute, where his teachers included Gian Carlo Menotti, and at the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the faculty at Curtis in 1948, and then returned to Pennsylvania in 1954 as a teacher and composer.
Rochberg’s early compositions were influenced by Stravinsky and Bartók. In 1950, while on a Fulbright fellowship in Rome, he became interested in the Schoenberg system because, he felt, it would have a liberating effect on his imagination. Until his epiphany in 1963, he exploited twelve-tone devices extensively, particularly in his lauded Symphony No. 2, Second String Quartet and First Piano Trio.
This trio for clarinet, horn and piano was composed initially in 1947, before Rochberg’s Schoenbergian period, and then revised in 1980 after his return to tonality. Its harmonic language is therefore quite conservative, and the music embodies both forward- and backward-looking elements.
The first movement, tagged “freely and with much expression,” features busy counterpoint and the repeated use of leaping intervals of the fourth. The horn opens with a long cadenza introduction, and the clarinet then presents as a main theme a jaunty treatment of the introduction. Piano thumping ushers in a march-like second theme. After development of this material with increasing intensity, a clarinet cadenza leads to the close.
The second movement, adagio, begins with a haunting pianissimo passage of two-part harmony between the clarinet and muted horn. This passage is developed by the solo piano and then by all three instruments with considerable imagination and freedom, almost improvisatory in spirit.
The third movement opens with another adagio, starting with a fanfare-like passage and then structured in a series of separate rhythmic cells. Eventually, this gives way to an animated dance, marked allegro giocosamente (playfully).