Spohr: String Quintets Nos. 5 And 6

Description

Louis Spohr (1784-1838)Complete String Quintet, Vol. 3 Louis Spohr was accepted during his lifetime as one of the most important composers of early German Romanticism whose career encompassed the period from Beethoven’s Op.18 string quartets to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and whose compositions covered all the major genres of that era. Today’s revival of interest in Spohr was originally fuelled by the chamber music, especially the Nonet in F major, Op.31, the Octet, Op.32, and the Piano and Wind Quintet in C minor, Op.52. It was music for strings, however, which dominated Spohr’s chamber output; 36 quartets, seven quintets, a sextet and four double-quartets. Spohr was involved in chamber music all his life - some violin duos composed in 1796 when he was a twelve-year-old in Brunswick still survive and his last completed large-scale work was his 36th string quartet dating from the summer of 1857. From the time of his appointment as Kapellmeister in Kassel in 1822 (for life, but he was pensioned off in December 1857) until the year before his death Spohr organized an annual winter quartet circle at which all the classical masterpieces were performed as well as his own works and those of once popular composers such as Fesca and Onslow. As additional string players were easily available from among his many pupils or the court orchestra, he was also able to compose quintets to add some variety to the programmes, and it was during this period of his life that his last five quintets were written (1826, 1834, 1838, 1845 and 1850), whereas his first two appeared much earlier, during Spohr’s time as orchestral director at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna from 1813 to 1815. In all of these he followed the example of Mozart in writing for two violins, two violas and a cello. The first of the present two quintets was composed in August and September 1838 at an eventful period in Spohr’s life. It had been a shattering blow for him when his first wife, Dorette, died in November 1834. She had shared all his earlier successes and in their younger days they had formed a brilliant harp and violin duo. In January 1836 he had married again and his second wife Marianne, being an accomplished pianist, encouraged him to write a number of chamber works with piano parts. This quintet was the only work for strings alone that he composed during the first nine years of his marriage with Marianne. Previously he had been producing a new set of string quartets every three or four years. In June 1838 Spohr suffered another grievous loss with the sudden death of his youngest daughter, Therese, at the age of nineteen. Spohr says in a letter to Speyer that "she was an exact likeness of her never-to-be-forgotten mother". He and Marianne then went to Carlsbad to recuperate and travelled back by way of Leipzig, where they met Schumann for the first time. Though both could be critical of each other’s works, they also had great admiration for