Notes for: July 17, 2018
Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s music may not be widely familiar today, but during his lifetime he was one of the brightest stars in Europe’s musical firmament – a virtuoso pianist whose fame rivaled Beethoven’s, and a celebrated composer who influenced a generation of Romantic composers. Hummel began attracting attention as a young child. When he was eight, Mozart heard him play and agreed to take him on as a pupil, free of charge. Two years later, at Mozart’s suggestion, he and his father began a grand tour of Europe that lasted four years and cemented his reputation as a prodigy. Back home in Vienna, he spent several years studying composition and vying with Beethoven for the title of Vienna’s greatest virtuoso and composer. Recalling those years, he later would tell his pupil Ferdinand Hiller, "It was a serious moment for me when Beethoven appeared. Should I have tried to walk in the footsteps of such a genius? For a while I didn’t know who I was." Nevertheless, Hummel and Beethoven managed to maintain a long, if stormy, friendship.
Hummel served as music director at various courts, including Esterházy (with Haydn’s blessing) and Weimar. He devoted much of his time to teaching Europe’s leading pianists, to concertizing, and to composing music that many considered comparable to Beethoven’s. He was Chopin’s early muse. Liszt admired him enormously and played two of Hummel’s concertos on his debut tour. Schubert planned to dedicate his last three piano sonatas to Hummel and wrote his “Trout” Quintet at the request of a patron who wanted a work with the same combination of instruments as Hummel’s Piano Quintet.
Hummel’s music was a bridge between Mozart’s Classicism and the emerging Romantic age. As you’ll hear in the Piano Quintet, his work is marked by melodiousness, lavish embellishments, interesting harmonic colors and sonorities, and pianistic fireworks, all wrapped up in Viennese charm and grace. The fun begins with the sonata-form Allegro, which opens with a declamatory four-note motif on which the entire first movement is built. There is a lyrical second theme, a stormy, harmonically adventurous development, and a recapitulation that introduces some new ideas. Throughout, Hummel creates washes of piano color with triplets, arpeggios, and rapid, irregularly grouped runs. The second-movement Menuetto – which is really more like a scherzo – is playfully gruff, with its bite softened by the violin’s whimsical turns and by a trio that is all scalar lightness. The piano is at its most lyrical in the brief Largo that serves as an introduction to a rousing Finale. A rondo, the Finale is an entertaining combination of mania and flowing song, as the piano drives the music at a breathless pace.