“It has to be enough to know that one has contributed to building the temple of art to the best of one’s knowledge and ability,” rationalized Luise Adolpha Le Beau in her autobiography of 1910 (Memoirs of a Female Composer). “Even if I was only allowed to add a few pebbles, I always tried to fulfil my artistic obligations.” With that cogent thought, Le Beau summarized the situation for many 19th-century women whose musical gifts were little appreciated and severely restricted because of the social and artistic attitudes of their time.

Luise Adolpha Le Beau was born in 1850 in Rastatt, on the Rhine River mid-way between Strasbourg and Heidelberg, into the family of a career military officer who worked in the War Ministry of the Grand Duchy of Baden. He was also a talented amateur musician and composer who introduced his daughter to piano and took over her general and musical education when he retired from the service in 1856; Luise learned quickly and first tried composing when she was eight. She took violin and singing lessons with local musicians, attended a girls’ school as a teenager mainly to study languages, and at sixteen began advanced piano instruction with Wilhelm Kalliwoda, director of the court orchestra in nearby Karlsruhe and son of the prominent Bohemian composer and conductor Jan Kalliwoda. Le Beau made her public debut as a pianist at a concert in Karlsruhe in November 1867 in Bach’s Concerto for Three Pianos, BWV 1063; she appeared there the following year as the featured soloist in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto and Mendelssohn’s G minor Concerto. She had some lessons with Clara Schumann in Baden-Baden during the summer of 1873, though they had differences over teaching methods as well as personally and the sessions soon broke off. Le Beau was already accomplished enough, however, that she presented five concerts in The Netherlands in February 1874.

Le Beau was composing seriously by the early 1870s, and while in Baden-Baden in 1873 for the lessons with Clara Schumann, she met celebrated conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow. She played some of her pieces for von Bülow, who was impressed enough with her talent that he wrote a letter recommending her to Josef Rheinberger, composition teacher at the Royal Conservatory in Munich. Rheinberger accepted Le Beau, but notified her that she had to be tutored separately from the male students because of the school’s regulations. She composed prolifically during the following years — her catalog came to include two operas, a symphony, piano concerto, concert overture, many choral works and songs, and pieces for chamber ensembles and for piano — enjoying numerous performances with favorable reviews, winning prizes, concertizing, beginning to write music criticism and teach (mainly young women to prepare them as piano teachers), and meeting such notables as Brahms, Liszt and Hanslick. Le Beau became a significant figure in Bavarian musical life over the next decade, but she had a falling out with Rheinberger because of philosophical differences over the conservative (i.e., Brahms) and progressive strains (Wagner, Liszt) of new German music, and she found performance opportunities dwindled in Munich after 1880.

In 1885, Le Beau moved to Wiesbaden, where she devoted herself mainly to composition and teaching, and continued struggling to have her music performed locally, though her works were heard in Cologne, Frankfurt and several other cities. In 1890, she went to Berlin, teaching a few students and continuing to compose, but she was refused admittance to the faculty of the city’s Royal School of Music because of her gender. After three years in Berlin, she settled in Baden-Baden, where she found support for performances of her work from the Duchess Luise von Baden, established good relations with the local musicians, and resumed writing music criticism. Le Beau had always lived with her parents, and when her father died in 1896 and her mother three years later, she started to withdraw from her musical career. She remained in Baden-Baden until her death in 1927, writing her memoirs, traveling, cataloguing Duchess Luise von Baden’s musical library, and occasionally attending or playing her music at a private performance, including a celebration of her 75th birthday, in 1925.

For all her talent, ambition and accomplishment, Luise Adolpha Le Beau was limited by her gender in achieving complete success in her chosen field. She lobbied tirelessly to have her works performed and published, and her songs, choruses, piano pieces and chamber compositions were heard frequently and many issued by reputable music publishers, but they were often met with a sort of grudging acceptance — “a creditable exception amongst the ladies,” wrote one critic. Her large works fared less well. Her two operas were both performed locally and well received, but she could never stir interest in further productions elsewhere. Her orchestral works — a symphony, concert overture, tone poem, piano concerto — were heard a few times, but, like her operas, were never published. The distinguished critic Richard Pohl, who was sympathetic to Le Beau, implied that the premiere of her Symphony in F major, in 1895 in Baden-Baden, showed that such an ambitious work lay beyond a woman’s creative abilities: “We have never heard a symphony by a lady; it is probably unique. The reason is in the art form itself.” Le Beau’s music was little recognized following her death, in 1927, but her legacy is well preserved in many publications and in the duplicate copies of her manuscripts she deposited with libraries in Berlin and Munich. In recent years, recordings of her complete solo piano works, Piano Concerto, Cello Sonata, Piano Sonata and some chamber pieces, as well as new editions of several scores (the String Quintet was published from her manuscript in 2010), have reflected the renewed interest in many lesser-known composers, especially women, active in the later decades of the 19th century.

Le Beau composed her String Quintet, her last important chamber work, in 1900 at the request of Oscar Braun-Zundel, a cello-playing friend who asked for a piece including two of his instrument, the same scoring as Schubert’s great C major Quintet. (The second cello may be replaced by double bass, as at this performance.) The Quintet was well received at its premiere in Baden-Baden on April 2, 1901, but Le Beau did not publish the score during her lifetime. The work’s four movements attest to her assured handling of form, orchestration and texture and her refined sense of melody and harmonic color. It is a composition that should be welcomed into the repertory.

The Quintet’s opening movement follows traditional sonata form, with an arching main theme of dark harmonic color and a lyrical cello strain in a brighter key as the subsidiary subject. The skillfully worked development section uses both themes as well as an octave-leap, dotted rhythm motive that had been em- bedded with little notice in the main theme. A full recapitulation of the exposi- tion’s materials rounds out the movement. The Adagio is a movement of almost hymn-like simplicity with an animated central episode that provides formal and expressive contrast. The traditional scherzo is replaced in this Quintet with a straightforward Mazurka, the Polish national dance that Chopin elevated to a concert genre. The sonata-form finale takes as its main theme a nimble, triplet- rhythm strain with a dotted-rhythm counter-subject presented as a fugue and a cello melody in a brighter tonality as its second subject. These motives are in- geniously woven together in the development. The recapitulation moves toward the key of C major to end the Quintet in a positive, affirming mood.

The year 1786 was the crucial one of Mozart’s decade in Vienna. The five years after his arrival in 1781 were marked by a steady increase in his local popularity and the demand for his works and performances: the tuneful and exotic Abduction from the Seraglio was a great hit in 1782; many chamber works and symphonies were commissioned; of the seventeen piano concertos he produced for his own concerts in Vienna, all but two were finished by the end of 1786. In March 1786, when Mozart wrote this A major Concerto, it seemed that his desire to live successfully from the proceeds of his compositions and performances as a free-lance musician would be fulfilled. That wish was soon to be crushed.

During his early years in Vienna, Mozart was able to attract audiences because he was the best piano player in town, because he was something new, and because of a certain public curiosity about the durability of an aging child prodigy. As his novelty diminished, it would have been necessary for him to compose exactly what the Viennese audiences wanted to hear if he were to continue to draw listeners, and what they wanted was a good time, a frivolous entertainment, full of frothy tunes easily heard and quickly forgotten. By 1786, however, Mozart’s genius was leading him in a different direction — into musi- cal realms that were well outside the conservative Viennese taste. The previous year, 1785, yielded up the brooding D minor Concerto, K. 466. Such a thoughtful, minor-mode piece was almost unknown in Vienna at the time, but perhaps, thought Mozart’s patrons, it was only an experimental aberration. After all, how could the composer of so many lighthearted dances and serenades choose such a disturbing musical style? Certainly, next year’s concerts would show Mozart back to his old self.

However, for the Lenten programs of 1786, Mozart composed not only this beautiful and deeply felt A major Concerto, but also one in the tragic key of C minor (K. 491). The Viennese public would have none of that. From that time, his fortunes and finances steadily declined. Concert subscription lists for the fol- lowing years were almost blank, and his need for new concertos dwindled. The noble C major Concerto (K. 503) of December was the last such piece that he played at one of his own concerts. He wrote only two more piano concertos in the remaining five years of his life. He took K. 537, the so-called “Coronation” Concerto, to the investiture ceremonies of Leopold II in Frankfurt in 1788 with the hope of impressing the monarch or some other nobleman and improving his employment situation. The tactic failed — he lost so much money on the venture that he had to pawn the family silver to pay his travel expenses. Mozart played his last Piano Concerto, K. 595, as part of a program presented by the clarinetist Joseph Bähr because he could no longer secure enough patrons to support his own concert.

One need not look far in the A major Concerto to discover the wealth of emotion that so disturbed the Viennese audiences of Mozart’s day. The tonality of A major was, for Mozart, one of luminous beauty shadowed by somber mel- ancholy — of “concealed intensities,” according to the Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein. The opening Allegro is invested with a surface beauty that belies its depth of feeling. The movement begins with a presentation of the lovely and abundant thematic material by the ensemble. The soloist then takes up the themes and embroiders them with glistening elaborations. The central section is not based on the earlier themes, but rather takes up a new motive. The key of the second movement, F-sharp minor, is rare in Mozart’s works, and it here evokes a passionate, tragic mood. The finale is in an involved sonata-rondo form that gives absolutely no trouble to the ear, and is the perfect conclusion for this work, which Sir Donald Tovey dubbed “a study in euphony.”

The arrangement for chamber ensemble is by German composer, conductor and organist Ignaz Lachner (1807-1895), who was Music Director at Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich during his distinguished career.

“If music communicates emotion, I do feel that it is a way to reach people on a deeper level instead of just in their head, where we get stuck in things like dogma, racism, stereotypes, politics. But when we go to our heart, it’s completely different. I am really rethinking this idea of music as a universal language.” In that powerful statement, Dawn Avery expressed not only her personal artistic philosophy but also her dedication to nurturing essential spiritual elements of her Mohawk heritage that are rooted in her studying and speaking the ancestral language and participating in traditional Longhouse ceremonies. Her Indian name is leriho:kwats.

Early in her career, Avery, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music and University of Maryland, performed and recorded widely as a cellist and vocalist in styles ranging from pop, folk and blues to classical and musical theater while maintaining a parallel stream of creativity rooted in her Mohawk heritage. In recent years, she has devoted herself more fully to promoting American Indian and world music cultures as both performer and composer while continuing to write for concert, theater, opera and film. She directs the World Music program at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, and has researched and published on the practice and theory of historical and contemporary music by indigenous people and their descendants. (Her 2014 doctoral dissertation is titled Native Classical: Musical Modernities, Indigenous Research Methodologies, and A Kanienkéha [Mohawk] Concept of Non:Wa [Now].) She serves on the Native Classical Music Initiative and the national board of the American Com- poser’s Forum, as well as the First Nations Composers Initiative and the Native Composer’s Project, which is dedicated to language and music revitalization. Avery has toured with the North American Indian Cello Project, which performs contemporary classical works by Native composers, presented her works at such varied venues as the Alaska Native Heritage Center, Tyendinega Mohawk Territories, Kennedy Center and 92nd Street Y, composed and performed on many Native American documentaries, and been honored for her multi-media projects and recordings with a Global Music Award, Indian Summer Award, New Mexico Music Award, Native American Music Award, Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian Award, and a Grammy nomination. Dr. Avery also received the 2011 United States Professor of the Year Award from the Council for Advance- ment and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Her exploration of the relationship between music and spirituality in the sacred music of world cultures has also allowed her to lead meditation groups and spiritual music performances in Mexico, Italy and America.

Notes from Dawn Avery
Peace was commissioned by CityMusic Cleveland in 2022 as part of the ‘Justice, Equality, Hope Chamber Music Series’ for perfor- mance by the Pantheon Ensemble. The work, in four short movements, focuses on various aspects of peace based on spiritual principles. Sonically, these spiritual understandings are communicated in this piece through spoken word, melody, harmony, rhythm, group participation and extended performance techniques.

Movement I, in the beginning there was peace, begins with a series of blocked harmonies that support many words for peace spoken in different languages by the musicians. This section contains consonant harmonies, repetitive patterns and expansive melodies often played in unison, representing peace and unity that exist beyond and before space and time. Extended performance techniques of muting strings and strumming inside the piano help to create an otherworldly atmosphere from which we may remember this divine intelligence that knows peace. The audience is asked to become part of the work by joining in to say the word peace in the language of their choice.

Movement II, overtones and undertones of peace. The metaphor of a musical doppler effect, in which melodies come in and out of focus, reflects how mutable the desire for and existence of peace really are. Dissonant harmonies, rattle sounds that are produced by strings and piano, strong bell tones created by mallets as well as the haunting memory of peace strummed inside the piano fight against a variety of melodies, one quoted from a phrase of an Ukrainian folk tune, one an original song in the style of a Haudenosaunee stomp dance.

As I began to compose this work, I asked for a dream and awoke with the melody. The double bass plays a solo in an especially high register with expansive intervals to embody what a reach peace seems to be. The instrumentalists are asked to speak words for peace that come from the language of their heri- tage: skennen, mir, heiwa, pace and peace. They include skennen from my own Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) heritage. The Haudenosaunee confederacy follow the Great Law of Peace and at one time had over 250 ‘international’ members joined to uphold peace. At the end of this section, the performers are asked to think the word peace on each downbeat strengthening the thought form for peace, an important spiritual concept analogous to prayer.

Movement III, cherishing peace, may be performed entirely as spoken word or with the addition of violin harmonics in the middle of the movement. Each performer recites the same phrases that they were given in Movement I with additional directions as to their entrances, physical position and the approximate length of each section congruent with dynamic changes. Knowing, holding and cherishing peace require great attention and intention, especially in our daily lives. This same patience and perseverance are asked by the per- formers as they move slowly through dynamic changes. An optional harmonic for the violins is offered should the ensemble want to add this timbre to the spoken word.

Movement IV, upholding peace, begins with the bell tones of a mallet striking the strings inside the piano. The higher strings often play col legno battuto ricochet (batting and bouncing the wood side of the bow) to imitate the sound of a rattle. Ancient rattles have been associated with protection, com- munity, healing and clearing negativity. Written in a 5-beat meter with repeated chords that are accented on 1 and 3, its drive is a reminder of the work and necessity of upholding peace. The melody contains variations on the original Haudenosaunee melody. In the Haudenosaunee world view, peace begins with me. As a Haudenosaunee (of which the Kanièkéha, Mohawk, are part), I have learned that it is my responsibility to bring peace to everything I do. As someone who has performed, composed, prayed and meditated for peace, I became aware of the need to intentionally practice living and acting peacefully throughout my daily life. This piece for chamber ensemble is a reflection of that intentionality. It ends with the piano striking inside the piano to stress the urgency and effort it takes to uphold peace, as well as the interruptions and fights against peace.