Etudes and Idylls: Piano music by Agnes Tyrrell (1846-1883)
Premiere of Complete Concert Etudes Op. 48, A837
Jocelyn Swigger, piano
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PROGRAM(scroll down for Program notes)
Idylls, A884
Pastorale in E major
Scherzo in a minor
Concert Etudes Book One, Op. 48, A837
No. 1 in bb minor: Thirds
No. 2 in B major: working title “The Juggler”
No. 3 in A major: Octaves
No. 4 in A major
No. 5 in a minor
No. 6 in Eb major
Poetry
In Thale die Mühle (The Mill in the Valley)
An den Mond (To the Moon)
Sehnsucht (Longing)
Abschied (Farewell)
Idyll in G major, A860 “Olivia”
Concert Etudes Book Two, Op. 48, A837
No. 7 in F major: Tenths
No. 8 in g minor working title “Hummingbirds”
No. 9 in d minor
No. 10 in Ab major: Trills
No. 11 in F# major
No. 12 in B major
Die Mühle (The Mill)
Notes
This concert is called “Etudes and Idylls,” and Etudes and Idylls are at the heart of this project. An etude is a piece that demands and develops a virtuoso technique: it's difficult, and it makes you a better player, and learning to play it well takes a lot of work and a lot of time. An Idyll is a poetic dream of a perfect moment in nature: think idyllic, idealized. Agnes's music, and the existence of Agnes's music, is a combination of incredibly hard work and an incredibly optimistic vision about an idyllic future.
Agnes once described herself as "industrious as any living creature." She was prolific--she wrote over 300 pieces, including a symphony and an opera. But it doesn’t seem to have been a joyless grind for her. She clearly had fun, loved composing, loved finding the next melody and the next modulation. She must have had a twinkle in her eye: you can imagine her saying “listen to this!” In times of great uncertainty and suffering, she found joy and comfort in devoting herself to her work. There might be a lesson in that.
I learned all of the music for this concert from photos I took of handwritten manuscripts in the Agnes Tyrrell archive in Brno, in the Czech Republic. I’m extremely grateful to the archive in the Moravian Museum (MZM) Department of the History of Music not just for their kind permission to publish and perform this music but also for their generations of librarians who have taken such beautiful care of the documents themselves.
All of the music on this concert is currently unpublished. My wonderful student assistant and collaborator, Riley Dunbar, and I are working on publishing typeset versions of many Agnes pieces, including the Idylls from this concert, to the open-source IMSLP platform. My printed score edition of the Concert Etudes will be available soon from Certosa Verlag, a publishing company in Germany.
Agnes assigned opus numbers to only some of her pieces. Fortunately the archive has catalogued all of her documents, and those numbers are perfect for keeping track of Agnes’s works. I don’t know what the A stands for—I’m sure it’s not Agnes—but it’s quite handy that it happens to be her first initial.
We begin with two Idylls, A884. An Idyll is a poetic vision of an idealized moment in nature. The Pastorale in E major is a perfect canon, where the left hand is an exact copycat of the right hand, and the Scherzo in a minor is a little joke (that could use your nickname).
Agnes did publish her Concert Etudes Op.48/A837, and she did get a positive review from the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the most important music journal of the day, but the etudes almost immediately fell out of print. The original edition also has lots of errors. I’m in the process of publishing a better edition from the handwritten manuscripts with Certosa Verlag, a German music publisher dedicated to publishing music by women, and that edition will be out soon. I will be recording the Agnes etudes next summer.
Agnes designated her etudes as Book One and Book Two, and I’m performing them in those groupings. These etudes do exactly what a good etude does: demand and develop a specific virtuoso technique. Practicing them is making me a better pianist, and I’m really grateful to Agnes for that. It’s also giving me a real appreciation of the amazing human brain. Many times now I’ve had the experience where I’m practicing a passage slowly, because that’s the only way I can play it, and of course I’ve never heard it played at full speed because there are no recordings, but I wake up in the morning with the music in my head up to tempo.
Etude 1 in b flat minor has a melody in thirds in the right hand. The opening bit of the tune returns later, upside down and in the left hand, and—usefully and cruelly—still in thirds, as accompaniment for a new melody in the right hand. Etude 2 in B major has lots of cross-hand jumps, and thus the working title The Juggler, but its pedal markings are where things get really interesting from a technical standpoint. They change where the main melody is: most of the time, the low note is long, but in one section the pedal makes the high note the long one. There are two contrasting middle sections, where both hands jump together instead of crossing each other. In the second, the pedal sustains only the top note of a rolled chord, making the high note soar over a feathery accompaniment. I think of Etude 3 in A major: Octaves as “the jolly octaves.” Etude 4 in A major has a melody mostly in sixths, so it’s a real workout for the hand. Many of the overarching harmonies are simple, especially in the coda, but the undulating chromaticism in the melody gives a feeling of uncertainty. There is one measure that appears almost verbatim in Agnes’s Grand Sonata Op.66, which I played a couple of years ago; discovering it here was like running into a good friend. Etude 5 in a minor has fast quintuplets in one hand with an insistent melody in the other hand. The technical game of Etude 6 in E flat major is that the right hand plays a melody and then crosses over the thumb to play an arpeggio accompaniment; it would be much easier if the left hand played the melody and the right hand just played the arpeggios (and that’s been a useful, aspirational, way to practice it). The melody opens with a falling fourth, and that falling fourth returns in a nocturne-like middle section, where chords replace the arpeggios. The pedal markings make many of the bass notes short rather than sustained: I imagine an upright bass plucking pizzicato notes.
Agnes wrote poetry as well as a composing music. She wrote in Kurrent, an old-fashioned German handwriting that takes special training to read, and I just recently got transcriptions of her poems. I can’t help reading clues in them about Agnes: she loved nature, and she described herself as a genius, and she poked fun at fleeting fashions. When she struggled with long painful nights, she found comfort in her faith and her dedication to a higher calling. Or her speakers did; in some of her poems she borrows personas, like an old grey-haired man or a mother singing a lullaby, so not every poem is definitely her feelings. Still, it’s striking that she writes so longingly about embracing women. Here are four of her poems, all with typical Romantic-era themes of love and nature. In Thale die Mühle wishes for a cottage in nature and the love of its rosy-cheeked inhabitant. An den Mond chastises the moon: the speaker asks to be left alone, claiming never to have been in love. The speaker of Sehnsucht longs to rush to her beloved, and Abschied is a passionate goodbye to a gentle damsel. I translated these poems to English, with copious help from the Google Translate and DeepL platforms (corrections from native German speakers are fervently welcome). Photos are from my travels to Agnes’s world in the Czech Republic.
I think of the Idyll in G major, A860 as “Olivia.” My wonderful student collaborator and assistant, Riley Dunbar, and I worked hard last year on preparing the orchestral score and parts for Agnes’s Overture in E flat. Last spring the overture was part of Frauenorchesterprojekt, a women’s orchestra festival in Berlin, and we got to go. I’ll never forget it. As part of the festival I performed an afternoon recital and premiered this Idyll. Riley’s partner Olivia singled out this piece: “I really liked that one.” So I think of this as Olivia’s Idyll. This piece feels timeless to me: there are some moments towards the end that I swear belong in a jazz ballad. This piece is currently unpublished but Riley and I are working on making it available on IMSLP.
Etude 7 in F major:Tenths will be very doable for pianists who can reach a tenth. For me, with my small hands, playing all those jumping tenths has been the best kind of challenge: I can do a thing now I couldn’t do before. At the end, the jumping tenths include thirds at both ends. Etude 8 in g minor has the working title Hummingbirds: a melody of fast triplets whirls around and leaps up into the air. Etude 9 in d minor has a moody chromatic melody, as though it can’t make up its mind between major or minor, over a rhythmic drone. The technical game is one-hand multitasking, where one hand plays two voices. Probably the most famous example of that is Chopin’s a minor etude Op. 10 no. 2, where the pinky and ring finger play the fast moving voice; Agnes’s etude would be an excellent prerequisite for that, because in this one the moving voice is on the easier thumb side of the hand. A contrasting middle section clarifies everything for a moment with two-voice counterpoint in major, before the murky chromaticism and drone return. In Etude 10 in A flat major: Trills a songlike melody trills in the right hand over a simple accompaniment. After the texture changes for a contrasting minor middle section, the trills and melody return, but this time the melody is in the left hand and the trills are harmonizing above. The main motif of Etude 11 in F sharp major has gentle jumping chords landing on a dotted rhythm, with frequent (and often surprising) modulations. Etude 12 in B major has forceful jumping chords. Agnes’s very specific pedal markings make some chords long, some short, organizing all those leaps into coherent melodies. The jumps are in both hands and in both directions, in different patterns, making this piece quite a coordination hurdle and a fitting grand finale to the whole set of etudes.
Die Mühle means The Mill. Textiles were the main industry in Agnes’s hometown of Brno, and I love to imagine the young composer walking by the factories and hearing the giant sewing machines and being inspired to write this.
We have this music because Agnes worked hard and hoped hard, even when she was suffering and felt powerless. Though publishers mostly ignored her, she dedicated herself to writing beautiful music, and she wrote perfectly clear final drafts, because she believed, she hoped with all her might, that future audiences and musicians would want them. And we have this music because Agnes's sister Bertha hoped hard, and kept all of Agnes's papers--all her music scores and letters--and made sure they ended up in a museum. And we have this music because the librarians in that archive cared lovingly for all of Agnes's manuscripts. They organized them and wrote beautiful handwritten catalog cards and made sure the paper would last--it isn't even brittle--and here's the thing: the librarians who cared so lovingly for Agnes's music didn't think she was particularly important. I know that because her card catalog was in a file cabinet marked "less important composers.” But--and this is the thing--those librarians did their job. They did their work. So now this gorgeous music can come to light, after more than a century in the dark. We have this music, this miracle, because of hard work and hope. It's etudes and idylls.
Thank you for being one of the first audiences to hear this music!
Special thanks to:
The librarians, past and present, at the MZM Department of History of Music in Brno, Czech Republic
Riley Dunbar
Colleagues at Sunderman Conservatory and Gettysburg College, especially Susan Hochmiller and Steve Marx
The Kolbe Foundation
Gettysburg College Research and Professional Development Grants