Eybler Quartet: Time Uncharted

Early Music from the Americas is no longer an exotic novelty in concert programs but has become an important reminder of the musical syncretism that took place in Colonial America. This is in large part thanks to the efforts in the past decades of institutions such as the Americas Society, GEMAS of the Gotham Early Music Scene, various early music ensembles worldwide, and musical scholars whose research has focused on this repertoire. Music from the Colonial Baroque period has so far dominated the stage. Tonight however, we have the rare opportunity to listen to music produced in a later period, the Republican era—a time in which fighting for freedom, liberty, independence and ultimately democracy permeated every aspect of life, including art and music.
In the final decades of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century, South America experienced a period called the ‘age of revolutions,’ during which the Spanish colonial rule ended and new Republics were founded. With all resources being managed by newly formed independent governments, many South American countries made music and arts the core of cultural activity in their capitals. Peruvian composer Pedro Ximenez Abrill Tirado lived during this period, and his music reflects the interaction between local elements and European models and aesthetics. He is one of the most prolific composers of the Classical and early Romantic styles in South America. Tonight’s concert, appropriately taking place at the Simon Bolivar salon, will bring us back to a period during which the transfer of musical styles between Europe and South America was not entirely clear cut: a period that reflects the ways in which South American composers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries assumed their aesthetic identities in the midst of enlightenment movements, Colonial reforms, and the independence revolutions. 

Ximenez was born in 1786 in Arequipa – a city with a majority population comprising Spanish citizens loyal to the King of Spain – at a crucial moment in the city’s history. 1780 marked the beginning of the independence revolutions, which would culminate in Peru’s foundation as a country in 1821. Ximenez enjoyed the privileges of belonging to a well-respected aristocratic criollo family, evident in the music education he received in his youth. In the first decades of the 19th century, Ximenez became an important cultural actor in Arequipa, known for hosting the famous tertulias literarias at his house the Quinta Tirado. These literary nights were frequented by poets, musicians and members of the most prestigious families; their presence enabled ideological debates between conservatives, royalists and patriots, and provided Ximenez with a diverse audience for the performances of his latest compositions. In 1833, Bolivia’s President, Mariscal Andrés de Santa Cruz, offered him the post of Chapel Master at the Cathedral in Sucre, the capital of Bolivia. The post had previously been occupied by renowned composers such as Juan de Araujo, Blas Tardío de Guzmán, and Roque Jacinto Chavarría. Ximenez held this position until his death in 1854.
Ximenez’s music collection was only discovered around a decade ago in Sucre. His collection, which resides at the Archivo y Bibliotecas Nacionales de Bolivia, contains over 120 large format compositions including masses, passions and symphonies, and more than 400 small format compositions both sacred and secular. Beyond his own compositions, the collection includes works by Cambini, Pleyel, Haydn, Beethoven, Boccherini and other European composers. This discovery attests to the rich musical production in South America in the first half of the 19th century. We are able to present this music tonight thanks to the research, reconstruction and editorial work of musicologist Jose Manuel Izquierdo, and the Centro Studi Santa Giacinta Marescotti of Vignanello in collaboration with the Ruspoli Association of São Paulo, who published a critical edition of the three string quartets written by Ximenez.

The program tonight opens with three pieces from 15 Meditaciones para el Quinario, Día 4 – a set of para liturgical pieces, meant to be performed as instrumental interludes to inspire prayer and introspection. They were intended to be performed in alternation with the Cinco Salutaciones a las Cinco Llagas – a sacred work for two sopranos, two flutes and string quartet that makes reference to the Five Holy Wounds of Christ, meant to be performed during Holy week.
The festivity of the Quinario – the observance of the Five Holy Wounds – was made official in 1831 for all Christianity. For this reason, it is fair to believe that this collection of pieces was probably composed for the Cathedral in Sucre around 1834. It is celebrated over the course of five days (a wound for each day: right foot, left foot, right hand, left hand and side – in that order) and tonight we will listen to the Meditaciones Día 4 – day four. In these instrumental pieces Ximenez introduces yaravíes and other Andean dances. In doing so, he appealed to the congregation’s familiarity with these genres in order to infuse patriotic feelings through a hybrid musical language. The separation of European and local musical elements became indistinguishable both for Ximenez and for his audiences.

Around 1810 the yaraví was reinvented as a way of narration and canto criollo within some circles of the Peruvian society. This song genre was appropriated from the rural and urban indigenous traditions, and seen as a remnant of the Inca traditions, fusing formal elements from the Inca harawi and Spanish poetry.
In El Mercurio Peruano in 1809, Sicramio, a Peruvian musician contemporary to Ximenez describes the yaraví as a genre essential to the Peruvian identity, without any foreign influence; obscure, sad and melancholic music, in evident contrast to the Fandango incorporated from Spain. By the first decade of the 19th century, the yaraví had become a key element of identity and taste in Peru’s biggest cities such as Arequipa and Lima. Aspects central to the yaraví are its metric variety of 3/8, 3/4, 6/8, and its variety of verses of 5, 6 or 7 syllables. The harmony is colored by accidentals, appoggiaturas and suspensions—ornaments proper to the style; and voices sing along in duos or trios over a bourdon played by the guitar. The lack of harmonic, melodic or structural logic, as well as the lack of symmetry in its phraseology, mark this genre as very different from European norms.

All of these characteristics are heard in the first movement of 15 Meditaciones para el Quinario Día 4: recurring closing-off arpeggio in the cello, asymmetric melodic content marked by a duality between binary and ternary, metric irregularity and abundance of ornaments. The second movement is a straight-forward, through-composed European learned-style adagio. The third movement starts and finishes with a remembrance of the yaraví of the first movement, with a middle section in the form of a Huayño – Quechua dance rhythm of lively and roughish character characterized by agile and vigorous stamping of the feet, with a more symmetric structure than the yaraví, and a distinctive repetitive rhythm of long-short-short. From churches in South America we move to the realm of the salon in Vienna with Ludwig van Beethoven’s string quartet Op. 18 no. 5 in A major. In this work Beethoven pays homage to Mozart’s quartet in the same key, K. 464. The Allegro in 6/8 starts with an energetical, attention-grabbing A major chord. Beethoven relies on the energy given by the triplets to create both momentum and lyrical lines throughout the movement. Emulating Mozart’s K. 464. Beethoven puts the Minuet into second rather than third place. This movement contains some peculiarities: it starts with the melody presented by the first violin accompanied by the second violin, while the other instruments remain silent. The repeat of the first section is fully written out so as to give the viola the opportunity to play the tune. Like Mozart, Beethoven gives us a set of variations in D major in the Andante cantabile. A warm, symmetrical theme with simple harmonic vocabulary is presented by the first violin and unfolds in five variations and a coda. Variation 1 presents a series of imitations that always build from the cello up. A pianissimo variation 2, a subtle and murmurous variation 3, and a simple and rhythmically reduced variation 4 contrast with an exuberant variation 5, featuring staccatos, off-beats accents in the cello, trills and a cheerfully decorated version of the theme in the violins and viola which then vanish pianissimo. The finale Allegro opens with a chattering first theme in eight-notes not unlike a commedia dell’arte romp. In contrast, the second theme uses long cantabile notes. The development explores a wide range of harmonies and counterpoint, and the movement finishes in a humor-filled coda.

Back in South America, the Quarteto Concertante op.55 para dos Violines, Viola y Violoncelo, was written in the quatuor concertante style sometime in the first decades of the 19th century. General characteristics of this style, which sprouted in Paris in the last decades of the 18th century, are equal scoring for four instrumentalists (guaranteeing each player their share in the melodic action as soloists) and the prioritizing of the composer’s ingenuity in creating interesting textures. While the Viennese style focussed on motivic exploration, the quatuor concertante relies on texture as a means for expression. More than melody, rhythm, harmony or sophisticated syntactical relationships, texture is the primary means to glorify individual musical moments. In this way texture assumes a prime rhetorical value in the quatuor concertante. Embodied in this style are the most popular non-chamber styles: the solo concerto and the comic opera, in a time when theatrical gesture was an important source of musical inspiration, both in composition and performance. A musical trademark and prized aspect of expression of the quatuor concertante was the use of musical allusion to symphonies or concerti recently applauded in the public concert hall, or to favorite operas of the day. The quatuor concertante thus became a vehicle for importing into the chamber the life of the concert hall and opera house. As in theatre, introducing a new or unexpected twist to a fairly stereotyped plot became more important than profundity and originality.

Along with French classical music, the ideals of the enlightenment valuing knowledge, equality and freedom also made it to South America through the port of entry for all European culture – Lima. It is then not surprising that Ximenez chose the concertante style for most of his chamber works. By giving voice to each individual of the ensemble, the quatour concertante is the epitome of the democratic model, so desired in those times of independence revolutions. In the 1st movement, Allegro, written in extended sonata form, we hear all these elements of the style: different operatic characters, and solos presented by all the members of the ensemble in a display of a variety of textures. It is necessary to point out that since Ximenez was a cellist, the cello solos are of special length and virtuosity. Adagio con Sordina, written in the form of a yaraví, explores a variety of timbres and colors while putting into conversation two very contrasting themes always sung by the violins and viola, and accompanied by bourdon-like arpeggiated accompaniment by the cello. The Minué Allegro-Trio subscribe to European expected norms, while the Rondo Allegro brings us back to the world of commedia dell’arte, with clownish characters, jokes, jugglers and a Haydnesque farewell at the end.

©Karin Cuellar Rendon