Piano Quintet in C major op. 45 op. 45 Reprint of a copy from the Musikbibliothek der Münchner Stadtbibliothek by Giuseppe Martucci Cello - Sheet Music

SKU: M7.MGSL-979

Today Giuseppe Martucci is often known only to specialists, at least outside Italy. Even such standard histories as Carl Dahlhaus's Nineteenth-Century Music (Berkeley and London, 1989) or Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht's Musik im Abendland (Munich, 1991) regularly make do without so much as mentioning Martucci's name or musical existence. Aside from scholarly publications and encyclopedias, information on Martucci is almost entirely in Italian, and even there it is relatively rare. Readers well-versed in Italian are hereby referred to Folco Perrino's monumental multi-volume biography (Novara, 1992-2009). As Martucci is seldom performed outside his native country and relatively little of his music has appeared in print, to obtain an impression of his oeuvre we must ultimately rely on commercial recordings, which at least make available most of his masterpieces, such as the ravishingly orchestrated song cycle La canzone dei ricordi, op. 68 (1888, orchestrated 1898), or the Symphony No. 2 in F major, op. 81 (1899-1904), which had a sizable impact on the next generation of Italian composers. The same applies to the present Piano Quintet in C major, op. 45, which was superbly recorded by the Giovane Quartetto Italiano and the pianist Mario Borciani for Claves in 2002. Nonetheless, the reception - or rather the non-reception - of Martucci's music can be considered a case study of the strange paths often taken by music history and its source traditions. This is especially, and memorably, the case with the incredible wealth of fascinating but largely unknown music from the incomparably productive nineteenth century. Like many of his prominent contemporaries north of the Alps, such as Johannes Brahms (whose music Martucci especially revered), Edvard Grieg, Gustav Mahler, and Anton Bruckner, Martucci entirely avoided writing for the theater, although, like Mahler a short while later, he was fully at home there as a conductor, even giving the Italian première of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (Bologna, 1888). In his day he was considered the leading Italian composer of instrumental music, alongside Giovanni Sgambati, who likewise produced two outstanding early piano quintets, one in F minor (op. 4), and another in B-flat major (op. 5) that Wagner excitedly recommended to German publishers. Sadly, this reputation did Martucci little good in an age dominated from Naples to Milan by opera, the genre with which it is still exclusively associated today. This is most likely the main reason for the neglect he has suffered to the present day, though his music has been championed time and again by such sterling musicians as Arturo Toscanni or, more recently, Ricardo Muti. We thus have all the more reason to turn our attention to an artist who consistently swam against the current of his time and surroundings. Scarcely any work of his is better suited than the Piano Quintet to present the distinctive qualities of his music: its elegant handling of form; its ingratiating cantabile melodies and concise, sharply-etched themes; its richly colored late-romantic harmonies that always remain within the bounds of tonality and revel in sixth, seventh, and ninth chords and effective suspensions while avoiding disruptive chromaticism, violent discontinuities, or ungainly contrasts; its artful but never obtrusive or garish orchestration; it broad range of characters, from sunlit exuberance and lilting dance gestures to gentle but never lugubrious melancholy. Martucci wrote music without jolts or sharp edges - to be sure not the most innovative of his day, but never courting boredom or drifting off monotonously into stereotypes, always sustained by his distinctive charm and adorned with his great love for timbral detail. For this reason, his works basically have the potential to attract a broader circle of musicians and listeners. An outstanding pianist and a conductor of renown, Martucci did yeoman's service for the performance not only of his own works, but of the instrumental music of his German, French, Russian, and British contemporaries, thereby gaining a special position in Italian music. In addition he worked as a teacher, holding various positions at Naples Conservatory and Bologna's Liceo Musicale in the 1880s and 1890s. From 1902 he headed the former institution as its director. His best-known pupil was Ottorino Respighi. But his formative impact on the next generation, which brought forth a great many instrumental works (not only Respighi's but in particular those of Alfredo Casella and GianFrancesco Malipiero), went far beyond the purlieus of his teaching activities and proceeded equally from his special position and the quality of his music. The Piano Quintet, op. 45, is a prime example of the enormous potential allowed to lie fallow by the neglect of Martucci in today's world of music. It unquestionably belongs to the most graceful and melodically trenchant works of its kind in the late nineteenth century, a period particularly rich in piano quintets. This roughly half-hour piece, now radiantly buoyant, now sustained by a gentle melancholy, is invariably inspired and exhilarating. All four of its movements are of high quality. The string writing is varied; time and again Martucci interrupts the full five-instrument texture and allows the strings to appear without the piano. A revealing example occurs in the melodious central passage of the second movement beginning at rehearsal letter B, first in the Trio with the theme in the viola, followed a short while later, after a six-bar transition dominated by low arpeggios in the piano, by a richly textured but diaphanously scored quartet passage with the melody in the first violin. This brief, gracefully melancholy passage alone should suffice to win the hearts of all chamber music aficionados. Martucci's initial practical experiences as a conductor and concert pianist unmistakably left a mark on the protean variety with which he handles the instruments, not least in the technically demanding, at times concerto-like writing for his own instrument, the piano, for which he also left behind many solo pieces. The piano writing is always effective and, above all, deftly maintains a delicate timbral balance with the string quartet. Martucci's only Piano Quintet, composed in 1877 at a crucial stage of his career when he was still in his early twenties, is generally considered his first mature masterpiece. Although it won the prestigious Milan Composing Competition the following year, it had to wait until 1893 before it was published as op. 45 by Kistner in Leipzig. Before then, in the early 1890s, the composer subjected it to a thorough revision whose full scale has yet to be reconstructed. The history of this piece illustrates why, despite its obviously high musical quality, it was de facto impossible for this work to make a large impression in the late nineteenth century, quite apart from the conditions imposed by Italy's operatic bias. In the history of the piano quintet, which began in the 1770s and still remains intact in the early twenty-first century, Martucci's piece proves in many respects to be a typical representative. Though the genre is dominated by composers of the second or third rank, the prevalence of a tiny handful of pieces in our concert programs and sound recordings is readily seen to convey a quite different picture: Franz Schubert's 'Trout' Quintet in A major (D 667 with double bass), Robert Schumanns's Quintet in E-flat major (op. 44), Johannes Brahms's in F minor (op. 34), Antonín Dvo?ák's Quintet No. 2 in A major (op. 81), and Dmitri Shostakovich's G-minor Quintet (op. 57). Far back in the field are César Franck's F-minor Quintet, Gabriel Fauré's Second Quintet in C minor (op. 115), Edward Elgar's in A minor (op. 84), and Alfred Schnittke's opus of 1976. Apart from these instances, we can often count ourselves lucky to find a printed edition or a recording, still less performances or further information. A closer study of the genre reveals that these works are little more than the natural upshot of music histories and marketing strategies oriented on brand names and focused on heroiades and masterworks. Martucci's op. 45 serves as a good example of the multitude of excellent piano quintets surviving among the more than one-thousand known pieces in this genre, and it by no means falls short of the above-mentioned works by more prominent composers. By the same token, the status of the Piano Quintet in Martucci's own oeuvre is typical of its genre. It is evident that the large majority of composers produced only one work of this kind, even if they were otherwise voluminously active in chamber music and left behind a wealth of sonatas, trios, or string quartets. Yet it is equally characteristic that the piano quintet can stand at an important juncture in an artist's career, as does this crucial work from Martucci's early years (see e.g. Christian Sinding, Jean Sibelius, Béla Bártok, and Ernst von Dohnányi), or serve as a monumental magnum opus (as with Sergey Taneyev, Wilhelm Berger, Florent Schmitt, Arnold Bax, and Wilhelm Furtwängler), or even appear as the summa summarum of a composer's life work, as witness Nikolai Medtner's Piano Quintet in C major, op. post. In the rich tradition of this genre, Martucci's gentle and charming Piano Quintet in C major, op. 45, belongs to those that represent ingratiating melody.