A conversation between Dr. Mark Ferraguto, Musicologist at Penn State University and Patrick Jordan (part 1)

Patrick Jordan: How did you stumble on Franz Weiss? What is so remarkable about him that has inspired you to dedicate so much time and energy to his Op. 8 quartets?

Mark Ferraguto: I had done a bit of research on the Beethoven Razumovsky quartets and published a couple of articles on how those quartets were written to appeal to Razumovsky’s particular sensibility. To give some context, Count Andrey Razumovsky was the Russian ambassador living in Vienna, who in 1803 had a magnificent palace constructed in a suburb of Vienna adjacent to the Danube canal. He hired the well-known violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh in 1805, and the violist Franz Weiss in 1807, and by 1808 he assembled what he called “the first string quartet of Europe”. It would ultimately become known as the Schuppanzigh Quartet and Beethoven worked with that group for 20 odd years. Weiss was an active part of that musical community, and served Razumovsky for ten years, living in quarters across the street from the palace. As a chamber musician, he would have played at ballroom dances, concerts, and possibly diplomatic events, and in 1814 he dedicated a set of quartets to Razumovsky as Beethoven had done in 1808 – those three of Op. 59 are the well-known ones. There were a couple of other composers who dedicated quartets to Razumovsky as well, including Louis Spohr and Franz Krommer. I got interested in Weiss and the palace and it struck me that nothing has been written about these pieces nor do they exist as a modern edition. As I delved into the score I thought, “Wow!! These are really interesting!” And unlike a lot of other music written at this time quite innovative and ambitious in their musical character.

PJ: Could you say a bit more about Count Razumovsky’s particular taste and how these quartets might reflect his sensibility?

MF: Razumovsky was born in Ukraine to a prominent family. His father was Hetman of Ukraine, something like the Prime Minister or head of state of Ukraine, although Ukraine was considered part of the Russian Empire at the time. While he had that Russian element to his character, in matters of taste he was thoroughly European. He spoke and communicated primarily in French, and his musical tastes were very up to date. In fact, he and his wife were on the list of subscribers to Beethoven’s Op. 1 Piano Trios, published in 1795. He was a connoisseur of music, very interested in the most modern and up-to-date composers and trends and travelled in Italy as well. He wrote back to the Russian court with reports about the musical scene, so was in some sense a music correspondent as well as diplomat. He sent back the latest scores and in one case he even sent back some Italian violin strings he had purchased in Vienna. I think his drive to assemble the best string quartet in Europe is a reflection of his cosmopolitan European tastes.

PJ: We performed the Finale of Weiss’ Op. 8 no. 2 recently, and I introduced the piece to the audience as “experimental music” given the period of its composition and publication. Would you agree with that characterization?

MF: Totally!! It’s very experimental as are the Beethoven Razumovsky quartets. Another thing about the Weiss quartets, and perhaps a reason why they didn’t sell very well is that they’re very challenging to play. It’s not the kind of music you would write for an amateur quartet, and there was a thriving domestic amateur quartet market – people would get together to do that on a regular basis, and there’s music intended for that audience. These have the stamp of having been written for Schuppanzigh Quartet and are in some sense mementos of that ensemble, and more to connoisseurs of the genre rather than the average amateur quartet.

PJ: So, in the category of “don’t try these at home, kids!”?

MF: (Laughs) Absolutely!

Franz Weiss, Part 2 - Sources

The process of making a modern edition has several steps. Among the first is finding out what the potential sources of sheet music are for the piece of music in question. An excellent place to start that process is a massive database called RISM or Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (Directory of International Music Sources) https://opac.rism.info/index.php?id=4 In the last twenty years the amount of music that is available in digitized form has grown astronomically, making it dramatically more widely available. As I alluded to in my earlier post, there’s no more crawling on your knees up a cold, wet, pebble-strewn stone staircase to a small door where a librarian, might let you in, and might let you lay your eyes upon some document. Or it’s much less frequent now…

In RISM we can find all the reported historical resources available for a work, be they in libraries, monasteries, wherever. From there one can begin to build a stemma, or tree of the sources for the work. The holy grail of this search is an autograph score or set of parts, that is, written in the composer’s hand. Even if a composer was meticulous about preserving their work, there is no guarantee that those documents would survive their demise or the dismantling of their estate. In the case of well-known composers, someone else might take on the work of preservation. (In the case of Wolfgang Mozart, his wife Constanza knew she was sitting on a goldmine and managed his works until her death.) When looking at 18th and early 19th century sheet music, we don’t often find autographs. It’s worth making clear the distinction here is that a “score” means a document that has all the parts in one place, lined up bar by bar; “set of parts” means, in the case of a string quartet, four separate documents, where the first violin, second violin, viola and ‘cello are all separate.

There are other species of sheet music, thankfully. Chamber music publishing, printed from engraved plates, exploded in Europe in the 18th century largely to satisfy the demand for household music making. The most popular works were often printed by more than one publishing house (“pirated” might be a more accurate term in some cases). In the case of unpublished music there might only be hand-written parts. In the case of published parts, it is possible for all extant copies to have been lost. And despite the abundance of publishing at the time, a great deal of music continued to circulate in manuscript, or hand-written parts. Even parts that had been engraved and published were often subsequently copied out by hand (no photocopiers, no scanner/printer). Sorting out precisely what one is looking at can be a challenge: is this set of parts derived from one of the published editions? Was it possibly copied from autograph parts or a score? Sometimes there are clues in the form of obvious mistakes that are reproduced from a published set. There is even a subset of interest in identifying by their handwriting the actual copyists who were working in various places at various times, which can point to the sources.

In the case of Franz Weiss’ Op. 8 quartets, the stemma so far as we know is a very simple matter. We have only the set of parts published in 1814 by Steiner in Vienna. If it is a tree, then this one is Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, with one scraggly stem! That might make one think “Great! Only one source to have to decipher!” However, when the parts are as contradictory and error-laden as Steiner’s edition of Weiss’ quartets, one begins to wish there were another place to look…

-Patrick Jordan

Franz Weiss is making a comeback!

One of the Eybler Quartet’s reasons for existing is to give voice to lesser-known composers from the 18th and 19th centuries. We have often asked ourselves the somewhat rhetorical question “who will speak for Asplmayr?!” Much of the music we’ve performed and recorded has not been heard in living memory – which is why we sometimes call those performances and recordings “premieres”.

As part of the Evolution:Quartet summer program at Banff, we share concerts with the other two faculty quartets, the fantastic Parker Quartet and the astonishing JACK Quartet. Some years ago, after a concert that featured the Eyblers playing early quartets by Franz Asplmayr and Johann Baptist Vanhal, the Parkers playing Leoš Janáček’s 2nd String Quartet and the JACK playing Iannis Xenakis’ Tetras, Austin Wulliman, one of the violinists in JACK remarked “Everyone’s heard Janáček and Tetras – you guys are playing the real new music!”

Putting aside the philosophical question of what’s “new” vs. what’s “novel”, the Eyblers’ process for finding unfamiliar repertoire follows several different routes. Sometimes one of us will have heard an unfamiliar composer and wonder if they happened to write some chamber music. Sometimes a name just keeps coming up in different contexts and curiosity is sparked. Regardless of where the idea comes from, the detective work usually falls to me since I almost certainly spend more time than is healthy rummaging around in the dustbin of history. The explosion of digital resources available in the last fifteen years has made that detective work considerably easier and faster.

Occasionally, we are approached with a repertoire idea by an audience member or “concerned listener” as I sometimes think of them. Last spring, I got an email from Dr. Mark Ferraguto, Associate Professor of Music at Penn State University asking if the group might have an interest in what he called “the other Razumovsky quartets.” My interest was immediately piqued. Of course, the “famous” Razumovsky quartets are the three works of Op. 59 by Beethoven, dedicated to Count Andrey Razumovsky. Mark was at that point in the late stages of preparing a modern scholarly edition of two string quartets by Beethoven's contemporary Franz Weiss (1778–1830). Weiss was a virtuoso violist and member of the Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s quartet, the ensemble that premiered many of Beethoven’s string quartets. (Nerd alert – when I read Franz Weiss’ name I immediately wondered if he was talking about the violist in Schuppanzigh’s quartet – Mark had written to the right person, it would seem.)

Step one for us was to read through the pieces. I must sadly report that the percentage of works that we read that actually make the cut to be performed or recorded is not particularly high. Sometimes they’re just not all that interesting, sometimes they’re perfectly interesting but overlong for the musical ideas. In any event, taking on a new work or set of works represents a considerable investment of the Eybler Quartet’s limited time and energy, so we have to be picky! Weiss’ pieces are quite extraordinary in several respects and they are officially on the list!

-Patrick Jordan

Welcome to the new Eybler Quartet blog

Welcome to our new blog! We will be posting new entries about once a month, featuring updates on what we're up to, thoughts about how we work and anything else that might be of interest. Look here for more detailed programme notes for upcoming concerts, generally about two weeks in advance of the show itself.