106. Main Evening Concert

The shadow of war has darkened much of this Festival’s music. Kodály began his magnificent Duo for violin and cello while waiting at the Austrian border at the outbreak of the First World War, an echo of the plight of refugees in our time. Brahms’ C minor Piano Quartet is yet another autobiographical work, a highly melodramatic recounting of his long relationship with Clara Schumann hidden in references to Goethe’s archetypical Romantic tale of Young Werther’s unrequited love for a woman married to a man he admires. As Brahms once wrote, I speak in music, the obsessive sighing two-note phrase that haunts this work surely speaks the name Clara.