Florence Beatrice Price is widely cited as one of the first African-American classical composers to win national attention, and she was unquestionably the first black woman to be so recognized when Frederick Stock, the German-born music director of the Chicago Symphony, programmed her Symphony No. 1 in 1933. Yet until relatively recently, not many of her 300 or so works were known. Price herself, in a 1943 letter to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, acknowledged: “To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” (In an earlier, unrelated document, Price had described her maternal ancestry as “French, Indian and Spanish,” and her paternal lineage as “Negro, Indian and English.”) Despite plainly seeing these factors as obstacles to her career, Price told Koussevitzky: “I have an unwavering and compelling faith that a national music very beautiful and very American can come from the melting pot just as the nation itself has done . . . Will you examine one of my scores?” Unfortunately, despite his frequent championing of avant-guard works,  Koussevitzky declined to program any of Price’s pieces.

Price died in 1953, leaving many of her books, scores, and personal papers in her summer home in St. Anne, Illinois, about seventy miles south of Chicago. Over the next decades, the fall of a tree pierced a hole in the roof, and the building was also vandalized. But in 2009, during a renovation of the structure, Vicki and Darrell Gatwood discovered Price’s materials in a relatively untouched section of the house. Looking up her name on the internet, they saw that she had been a composer of some stature, so contacted the librarians at the University of Arkansas, which already had some papers of Little Rock’s best-known musical daughter. The late musicologists Barbara Garvey Jackson and Rae Linda Brown had laid the foundations for Price research (including Brown’s life-and-works study of Price, The Heart of a Woman). The fluke discovery of the scores in St. Anne, which had become widely publicized by 2018, led to the publication of several dozen of her works (including the string quartet movements heard in today’s program) and recordings of a number of others.  When the Black Lives Matter movement, which had been founded in 2013, surged in the wake of the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, Price’s music took on attraction. Already in 2018, Alex Ross had written in The New Yorker:

In progressive musicological circles these days, you hear much talk about the canon and about the bad assumptions that underpin it. Classical music, perhaps more than any other field, suffers from what the acidulous critic-composer Virgil Thompson liked to call the “masterpiece cult.” He complained about the idea of an “unbridgeable chasm between the ‘great work’ and the rest of production . . . a distinction as radical as that recognized in theology between the elect and the damned.” The adulation of the master, the genius, the divinely gifted creator all too easily lapses into a cult of the white-male hero, to whom such traits are almost unthinkingly attached. I feel some ambivalence about the anti-masterpiece line. Having grown up with the notion of musical genius, I am reluctant to let it go entirely. What I value most as a listener is the sense of a singular creative personality coalescing from anonymous sounds. I wonder whether the profile of genius could simply evolve to include a broader range of personalities and faces. The “Price Renaissance” is perhaps one step in this direction.

*****

Beethoven’s Op. 74 Quartet in E-flat Major is one of his few important works of 1809, a year marked in May by the second Napoleonic invasion of Vienna, a noisy process that included a nearly eighteen-hour-long bombardment which drove Beethoven to seek refuge in the cellar of the house of his brother Caspar, where, according to Ferdinand Ries, he attempted to preserve his weakened ears by “covering his head with pillows so as not to hear the cannons.” Although the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung’s review of the work (published 1810) warned that it was very difficult to execute, and though Beethoven apparently had, from the wealth of sketch materials that survive, a difficult time devising it (possibly due as much to external circumstances as to Promethean grappling with its musical essence), it is for the listener perhaps the most accessible of the five middle-period quartets. Its nickname “the Harp” does not stem Beethoven, but clearly alludes to the thematically important pizzicato passages of the first movement (one of which is shown on the cover of tonight’s program), which were utterly novel at the time of their composition. The second movement is a six-section rondo (ABA’CA”) with coda, merging aspects of aria, theme and variations, and fantasia. The third movement, like many of Beethoven’s middle-period scherzi, repeats its trio, resulting in five-part form. Although the trio remains in 3/4 time, the players are instructed to mold their scurrying counterpoint as if it was written in 6/8 meter (Si ha s’immaginar la battuta di 6/8), turning what might have been a rather schoolmaster-ish exercise in C major into a madcap romp. The relatively relaxed Finale is the only last movement in all the Beethoven quartets to be cast in theme-and-variation form, and recalls, in its dissipation of the energy of the scherzo, the serene conclusion of the “Pastorale” Symphony.

*****

On 20 December 1823, the Theater an der Wien, one of Vienna’s most important venues for staged works, presented the premiere of Rosamunde, Princess of Cypress, with incidental music (D797) composed by Schubert. The performance, like most of Schubert’s operatic and theatrical ventures, was not successful, as may be judged not only from the luke-warm review it received, but also from an article published in the Wiener Zeitschrift of 13 January 1824, in which the author of both the poem “Rosamunde” and the eponymous play, Helmina von Chézy, excused the “breakneck speed with which the production was staged, which was no part of the directorate’s plan, but due to accessory circumstances which need not be mentioned here. To this one calamity were added several others, as for instance the fact that the dances were rehearsed for the first time only 48 hours before the performance, the last musical pieces had arrived equally late, and, for a crowning misfortune, a brand new prompter made his first trial run in Rosamunde.”  However, she noted, “the orchestra did wonders, though it was able to go through Schubert’s glorious music but twice at a single rehearsal, and performed the overture and most of the other numbers with precision and devotion. A majestic stream, winding through the poem’s complexities like a sweetly transfiguring mirror, grandiose, purely melodious, soulful, unspeakably touching and profound, the power of its tones carries away every soul . . .” Despite Schubert’s contributions, the play was given but one repeat performance the following night, after which, according to one commentator, “it disappeared forever.”

In a now-famous letter to his painter friend Leopold Kupelwieser, dated 31 March 1824, Schubert wrote: “I feel myself to be the most unhappy and unfortunate creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again [the progress of his syphilis had advanced considerably], and who in sheer despair over this makes things ever worse and worse, instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the felicity of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain, at best, whom enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating kind) for all things beautiful threatens to forsake, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being? . . .  Of songs I have not written many new ones, but I have tried my hand at several instrumental works, for I wrote two Quartets for violins, viola, and violoncello and an Octet, and I want to write another quartet, in fact I intend to pave my way towards a grand symphony in that manner . . .” The “grand symphony” towards which Schubert was laboring was the “Great” C Major (D944), the Octet (D803) that marvelously felicitous work for clarinet, bassoon, horn, and string quintet, in which very few signs of stress are to be felt. The two string quartets were the D minor “Death and the Maiden,”(D810) which takes Schubert’s song of the same name for the theme of its slow movement, and the Quartet in A Minor D804 heard this evening. In this latter work, the beginning of the second movement is nearly identical to the third entre-acte in Rosamunde, Princess of Cypress. Thus, though that theater piece had a very short life, one of its most memorable tunes was allowed to achieve immortality, as Schubert chose it not only for his A minor quartet (dedicated to and first performed by Ignaz Schuppanzigh), but also for his third piano Impromptu, D935.

—Kenneth Slowik