The Last Romantics

The arc of Draeseke's career is one of the most striking in nineteenth century music. He began as an ardent adherent of the New German School of Liszt and Wagner, immediately following Liszt's performances of Lohengrin in Weimar, where he took up residence in 1856 to immerse himself in the music of the future. His Piano Sonata quasi Fantasia earned Liszt's admiration as one of the most impressive works of his modern era, and he was described by contemporaries as especially dangerous among the progressives. What followed was one of the most complete reversals in musical aesthetics: his early progressive inclinations were gradually moderated by his adherence to classical precepts, and in his last years he became an ardent upholder of conservative musical values, culminating in his 1905 pamphlet attacking Richard Strauss's Salome, a particularly striking gesture given that Draeseke had been an influence on the young Strauss himself.

The Clarinet Sonata in B flat major, Op. 38, published in 1888, sits at the midpoint of this journey. It is the work of a composer who had absorbed the chromatic harmonic language of the progressive camp and was now directing it into more classical formal structures: warm, formally disciplined, and deeply serious. The three movements give both instruments equal standing throughout, neither subordinated to the other, and the writing rewards close listening.

Saint-Saëns and Draeseke were born in the same year and their careers trace remarkably similar arcs. Both began as advocates for progressive music, and both, as the twentieth century arrived with its new and more radical progressivisms, retreated into increasingly conservative positions. Saint-Saëns had been the embodiment of artistic modernity during the 1850s and 1860s, but by the dawn of the twentieth century he was an ultra-conservative, fighting the influence of Debussy and Richard Strauss. The animosity was mutual: Debussy remarked that he had a horror of sentimentality, and that its name was Saint-Saëns. What is easy to lose in this story of mutual hostility is how confident and purposeful Saint-Saëns's conservatism actually was. He did not hold his ground out of ignorance or exhaustion, but out of conviction.

The Sonata in E flat major was written in 1921, the second of three sonatas for wind instruments composed that year. In a letter to a friend that April, Saint-Saëns wrote that he was concentrating his last reserves on giving rarely considered instruments the chance to be heard. The three sonatas came into print in November 1921, a month before his death at the age of eighty-six, and he did not live to hear their premieres. The Sonata is in four movements, moving from an opening Allegretto of considerable grace through a spirited second movement and a searching slow movement before returning to the opening theme in the finale with a satisfying sense of homecoming. This was not a composer running out of ideas. It was a composer who knew exactly what he believed and said it one last time with complete conviction.

Rabl's position among the Last Romantics is the most quietly remarkable of the three. In 1894 he submitted this Quartet to a competition adjudicated by Brahms, won, and attracted letters from the greatest composer of the age urging him to continue. His replies were polite and cheerful: he had other work to attend to, and would write when he felt moved to do so. He produced a small catalogue before stopping composition entirely at the age of thirty to devote himself to choral conducting. He did not rage against the new music or write polemical pamphlets. He simply stopped.

The Quartet is the work of a composer who had absorbed the late Romantic language completely and was beginning, in places, to push at its edges. The harmonic writing is dense and adventurous in moments, yet the work's fundamental orientation is unmistakably Romantic: its emotional world, its formal architecture, its sense of what music is for all belong to the tradition Brahms represented. The four movements give each instrument a clearly defined voice, and they come together with a naturalness that does not feel like the work of a beginner. That Rabl wrote this at twenty-one, won the admiration of Brahms, and then chose to lay composition aside entirely makes the Quartet a singular document: a composer who arrived fully formed at the threshold of a new century, looked at what lay ahead, and quietly declined to cross it.