#virtuELLES

#virtuELLES Ep04 - At home with Andrea Stewart (and Gili Loftus)
Produced by Infusion Baroque
Edited by Emily Gan

Grande Sonate pour pianoforte et violoncelle, Op. 11, III. Andante con Variazioni (excerpts)
Hélène Liebmann née Riese (c. 1796 - ?)

In 18th and 19th century European musical practice, improvisation held a significant place, and musicians were expected to take liberties with the written score be that with ornamentation, tempo fluctuations, or the creation of variations. The cadenza, sometimes freely improvised and sometimes written out, is an example of this freedom from the score, and we find a very special example of this in Hélène Liebmann’s Grande Sonate pour pianoforte et violoncelle, Op. 11.

Hélène Liebmann (née Riese) was born in Berlin in 1795 or 1796 to wealthy middle-class parents, and received an excellent musical education in piano and composition. Lauded as a child prodigy - already called a brilliant pianist by the age of ten - she studied with the best teachers available: Franz Lauska (a former student of Clementi), Joseph Augustin Gürrlich, and later Ferdinand Ries (a famous pupil of Beethoven), among others. Her presence on the public concert scene would have been dependent on social contacts in addition to her musical prowess, and her family were likely guests at salon concerts in the homes of Berlin hosts.

Liebmann surprised critics as a young woman by the depth of her early compositions: an 1811 review of her opus 1 and 2 in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung compared her music to the early works of the great masters (the reviewer expected “ladies music” to be “a weak imitation of music written by men”). Her Grande Sonate Op. 11 was probably published in 1813 or 1814, due to the presence of her married name on the title page, but other scholars have considered this sonata to have been written as early as 1806. Liebmann’s Grande Sonate is particularly special for its equality between the cello and fortepiano parts, something that we consider innovative in Beethoven’s Sonata for cello and piano in A major, Op. 69, written in 1808.

The third and last movement of this sonata, Andante con Variazioni, is written in a theme-and-variations structure based on “Là ci darem la mano” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni written some twenty years earlier. The movement culminates in a written cadenza that is shared between the two musicians, an interesting feature that promotes the idea of a shared improvisation. This particular cadenza provided a fruitful base for the two musicians, Andrea Stewart and Gili Loftus, to explore different levels of group improvisation. Andrea and Gili infused elements of individual improvisation - already present in their home practices - with elements of “open listening”, the result of which included hours of trial and error, moments of magic and of uncertainty. This type of practice is only possible in an environment of curiosity, and the home studio (or any other part of the home within which people make music) is the ideal setting.


Most of Liebmann’s works were dedicated to those with whom she would have had a personal relationship, or those found within her circle of friends and family. This particular work was dedicated to the 19th century German virtuoso-cellist, Max Bohrer, and although we don’t have information pointing to a friendship between the two musicians, the presence of a shared cadenza in this work can bring us to imagine a rich musical relationship, an image (or fantasy) that could in turn cultivate spontaneity within one’s interpretation of this part of the sonata.

Hélène Liebmann and her family were known by several different names, likely due to the rising anti-Semitism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Both Hélène and her husband, John Joseph Liebmann, converted from Judaism to Christianity in the 1810s, Hélène just before her marriage in 1813, and John Joseph in 1819. The couple then changed their name to the more Christian-sounding “Liebert”. No compositions can be found under the name “Hélène Liebert”; as the last known publication of Hélène Liebmann was in 1819, she may have stopped composing to focus on her singing, as Hélène Liebert seems to have been a well-known singer in Hamburg, where she and her husband resided between 1818 and 1859. “Madame Liebert” was present at a private concert given at the home of a wealthy family in Hamburg by the young Clara Wieck (Schumann) in 1835. This tells us that Hélène was still present in upper class social circles and engaging in the music-at-home scene of mid-19th century Hamburg, perhaps even sometimes performing as a singer.

Hélène Liebmann’s year of birth is sometimes recorded as 1795 and sometimes 1796, and the year of her death is unknown. She and her husband applied for a passport in 1859, and this is our last known record of Hélène. She may have been buried in 1869 in a cemetery in Dresden.

---------------

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts