George Rochberg

Ricordanza (1972)

“Ricordanza” means a reminiscence or a memory. In a program note, the composer stated that it was dedicated to the memory of his nephew Robert Rochberg, and also that it was “a commentary on the opening solo cello statement of Beethoven’s C Major cello sonata, op. 102, no. 1.” Thus Ricordanza, for cello and piano, is a memory both of a person and of a piece of music.

The reminiscence is even broader, for Rochberg intends to evoke the memory of Beethoven’s style more generally. “After 1963,” writes Rochberg,

I began a slow, sometimes arduous approach to the tonal language, believing that a 20^th-century composer should be free to reach out in the widest possible circumference . . . I was (and remain) firmly convinced that the very survival of music . . . requires a renewal of its craft through an immersion in the traditions of the past . . . Ricordanza was one of the results of this process. (NWCR769 notes)

Ricordanza begins by alluding to Beeethoven’s style in a very general way: the octaves and the sustained pedal tones in the piano accompaniment, the alternation of stasis and movement in the cello melody, the use of turns and grace notes to emphasize dissonant notes (Example 1). Even the performance indications suggest Beethoven. Rochberg does not allude specifically to Op. 102 no. 1 until the middle section of the piece (poco adagio), where he quotes the opening solo, not in the cello, though but in the piano and not in the original C major but in F (Examples 2 and 3). The cello picks up the melody and plays it at the original pitch level (m.39), then proceeds to elaborate it in a very Beethovenian way, by breaking it down into motifs, which are repeated (m.43), displaced (m. 41-45), and diminished (m.49). The modulations of mm. 52 ff. begin very much in the manner of late Beethoven, then push this manner toward Brahms or perhaps even Richard Strauss. The reprise of the opening theme in Db major (m. 89) is not in Beethoven’s manner!

Ricordanza, like much of the music of the 20^th (and perhaps the 21^st) century is about the relation of the musical present and the musical past. In an essay he entitled “Reflrctoins on the Renewal of Music,” Rochberg wrote:

The history of music leapfrogs its way across the centuires. Stravinsky resurrects pseudoPergolesi in Pulcinella; Webern, in his Klangfarben version of Bach’s ricercar from the Musical Offering, virtuallly writes a new work; Ives’s Concord Sonata treats the motto of of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as an underlying presence; and so on. All such acts of renewal thorugh uses of the past renew both that past drawn upon and that present in which the act occurs. Far from begin acts of weakness or signs of the depletion of creative energy, they reveal a profound wisdom about the paradox of time, which does not consume itself and its products as if it were fire, but gathers up into itself everything which has occurred in it, preserving everything as the individual mind preserves its individual memories. (Aesthetics of Survival pp. 233-34)