Ferdinand Rebay: Sonatas for flute and guitar
Brilliant Classics 9291, 2012
Over the last few months I've been soaking up Maria Jose
Belotto and Gonzalo Noque's CD of Ferdinand Rebay's sonatas for flute and
guitar (Brilliant Classics 9291) The sonatas in E major and D major were both
composed during 1942. Having written in
the past about Rebay's sonatas for clarinet and guitar I had planned for some
time to blog about more of Rebay's chamber music for guitar. These two sonatas for flute and guitar are an
interesting contrast to Rebay's sonatas for clarinet and guitar. The clarinet sonatas were cast in the keys of
D minor and A minor around 1941 and those works are pervaded by a Brahmsian
melancholy with a few thematic appearances by Schubert. Rebay's flute sonatas, by contrast, are
bright, lyric, and neoclassical. In fact
Rebay's sonatas for flute and guitar are suffused with a serenity that I find
unusual even for flute and guitar literature, a serenity that can border at
times on emotional detachment.
Now it is possible the flute and guitar are simply a
combination that inspires guitarists and composers alike to create unusually
limpid and airy works.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco's duet is lively, sometimes thoughtful, but never
particularly somber. Giuliani's
collected output for flute and guitar could be considered light, perhaps even
trivial for listeners who haven't or won't take a shine to chamber music for
the guitar. Even if Giuliani's works
resemble lighter moods from Mozart the lack of body in the guitar's voice and
its remarkable decay rate can make a work in the Classic era style seem more
limpid and evanescent than usual. On the
whole I have to search high and low for flute and guitar literature that is
actually dark or brooding or fiery.
Piazzolla's work for flute and guitar gets fiery and somber, but I don't
hear in them darkness so much as passion.
Only Nikita Koshkin's Sonata for flute and guitar, of the flute and
guitar literature I've had a chance to hear, plays with darkness and grotesquery. So when I wrote earlier that Rebay's flute
and guitar sonatas seem serene even to the point of detachment I wrote that
with this broader observation about the literature in mind.
In saying that these sonatas by Rebay seem to have an emotional
remove I'm not making a negative remark about them. I love the music of Shostakvoich, which most
people have understood to have within itself an emotional distance. There may be bitterness or sorrow hidden
behind ostensibly triumphant, heroic themes.
Even in his happiest music Shostakovich often conveys a subliminal
misery. I'm sure not everyone will agree
that Rebay's flute sonatas have an emotional detachment, let alone that there
is a peaceful undercurrent, a sort of serenity beneath the serenity that some
might consider emptiness. Well, I'm not
the sort of listener who hears that in Rebay.
His sonatas are pristine and immaculate and if they were written this
way in the midst of global conflict let's remember that a composer like Rebay
didn't exactly give way either to the Expressionist or New Objectivism fads
that permeated German music between the wars.
Rebay's style is deliberately conservative and now that Cold Wars and
other ideologically saturated movements that Rebay didn't seem to be part of
have long since gone it's just as well we've discovered Rebay's work roughly
half a century after he passed.
The Sonata for flute and Guitar in E major opens with a
simple rising melody (that begins with a rising perfect fourth) that is often
the start of a marching theme. What we
get is a more delicate and light-footed walk than a boot-wearing march. The mood is light, airy and considered. This is thoughtful happiness rather than
explosive joy. It is a happiness that
can be continuously if slightly tinged with minor key interruptions and
asides--we're given enough darkness not to hint at sadness so much as to give
the happiness momentum. The few
dissonances in this opening sonata form we hear are given by Rebay as though to
let us savor from a distance the unhappiness that isn't going to appear in this
first movement.
The second theme in this opening sonata form also begins
with a rising fourth played by the flute.
This lilting theme transforms into a set of closing phrases, the flute
rises higher and higher as the guitar winds down chromatically through lower
and lower notes as both instruments work toward resolving the second
theme. When this second theme returns at
the end of the movement it resolves into an ineffably delicate and composed
ending.
While Rebay's work has many neo-Romantic and post-Romantic
traits what may be his most striking approach to sonata form is how his
development sections tend to trail off and evaporate into the ether before his
recapitulations begin. As a long-time admirer
of Haydn and Beethoven I admit this is a quality of Rebay's approach to sonata
form I have had to get used to. I like
development sections in sonata forms to inexorably burst forward to the
recapitulation. Having said that, the
overall sweetness and calm of Rebay's sonatas for flute and guitar make this
aforementioned trait of his sonata developments thoroughly appropriate.
Now in preparing to commend Rebay's handling of variation
form I admit I'm going to make a complaint about how some guitarists and
composers compose variations. Variation
is a form and method beloved by many who write for the guitar yet it is hardly
an easily done art and there are some examples of odious writing in variation
forms. At the risk of offending some
people and naming names, I can't stand the variation movements in Carulli's Op.
21 guitar sonatas. The themes themselves
hardly lodge in the memory and the variations are blunt decorations of what
are, for me, forgettable themes.
Decorative variation can be the refuge of guitarists and composers who
do not understand how freewheeling their options and possibilities really
are.
Another problem guitarists (and those writing for the
guitar) can often have (evinced disappointingly in Ponce's Variations and Fugue
on La Folia) is making a point of writing variations in a manner which does not
necessarily highlight the strengths and possibilities of a theme. Ponce's work, for instance, makes use of
character variation on a theme that I think is too short to sustain character
variation form. To pick two touchstones
of variation as counterexamples, consider how long the foundational themes in
both the Diabelli Variations and Goldberg Variations actually are. Character variation works brilliantly in
these cycles precisely because we're given themes long enough to give the
contrasting characters of each variation time to matter. It's not that a short theme can't be
subjected to character variation, of course, it's that a composer should
understand the elements of the foundational theme well enough to understand
what shifts in character best highlight the way a theme can change while still
being recognizably built upon the founding theme.
Now perhaps it may additionally be said that some guitarists
and composers for guitar have simply opted for themes that were never suitable
for variation to begin with. Or perhaps
they chose themes that could be varied and then varied them in tedious and
uninspiring ways (e.g. Carulli's Op. 21 Guitar Sonatas).
Having written all those criticisms of variation form from
guitarist composers, none of them apply to Rebay's handling of variation form
in general or of the variation movement that is movement 2 of his Sonata for
flute and guitar in E major. For
instance, after his opening lyric theme is completed Rebay gives a first
variation with the flute lilting through a waltzing tune. Halfway through the variation the guitar
plays a 2 across 3 rhythm, an abrupt shift in accent that will prepare us for
the perkier second variation but suggests the potential to derail the meter
away from 3/4 into 2/4.
But instead we are led into a lively dance variation where
the flute flutters up and down in a brief prelude to the climactic parallel
minor variation. It's common in Classic
era variation forms to interrupt a set of variations on a major theme with an
aside in parallel minor. Rebay delivers
and it's one of the moments in his E major sonata flirts with the edges of
sadness. But not for long, the intimations of 2 from the rhythms of 3 turn up
as a 6/8 dance that rounds off the variations.
We're given hints of the pathos from the previous variation but it's
still a sweet, happy end to the variations on the theme.
As if sensing that we've had too much laconic sweetness
Rebay shifts gears with the lively scherzo that makes the third movement. The opening theme is abrupt and, atypical of scherzo
and minuets, does not repeat. The
repeating phrases are saved for the minor key trio. But even this section has just one repeating
phrase that is then sequentially developed in major, giving the flute and
guitar cascading call and response phrases that lead back to the boisterous
initial theme. Here we see an example of
Rebay's skill as a composer. His opening
sonata and variation forms made use of a lot of structural and conceptual
repetition. Rebay shows in the Scherzo
that he appreciated the ideals of the Classic era in which balance and
proportion were not just matters within phrases but in forms, even in forms
within forms. At the risk of making yet
another aside about guitarists, this is the kind of thing I'm not always
convinced we guitarists have taken fully to heart. Rebay's music has a few lessons we can learn
if we're game. Of course the works of
Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart would also be instructive, to say the least.
Rebay's fourth and final movement in the E major sonata is a
laidback Rondo. If it were any more
laidback I could have mistaken it for something by Claude Bolling (if we took
out quite a bit of the jazz influence).
Obviously I've written at such length about the first sonata it will be no surprise I have enough to say about the second sonata that it will get a separate post.
