JAVS Spring 2023

Chamber Music

Loki: The Ethos of the Viola by Daniel Orsen

If we are being honest, not much has been said about the viola. More has been said about the “one weird trick gut doctors don’t want you to know,” or the “twenty things flight attendants notice in three seconds.” But when something is said about the viola, it is usually to the effect that it has a melancholy and beguiling timbre, that it is more palatable than the violin, or that appreciation of the viola is a sign of either sophistication or a psychological disorder. I hope to add a new thesis to the viola literature: that the ethos of the viola follows a mythic archetype, namely, the Norse demi-god Loki. Loki the prankster has two prominent qualities: a fixation on death and a love of impish pranks. He capriciously schemes for and against the gods, especially on his many adventures with Thor. But he has a darker side, and it is Loki and his children, a snake named Jormungand and a wolf named Fenrir, who bring about Ragnarok—the death of the gods and the end of the world. It is well known, at least amongst violists, that many composers turned to the viola for their last works. Not all of these works dwell on death, but many of them do: Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata, Bartok’s unfinished Viola Concerto and the opening of the 6th String Quartet, Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Harp, and Viola, an unfinished sonata by Vieuxtemps, Schumann’s Märchennbilder and Märchenzhalungen , Smetana’s String Quartet in E minor Ma Vlast , and a Viola Concerto that Ravel was planning but never started. Smetana also left behind fragments of an opera entitled Viola , based on the character in Shake speare’s Twelfth Night , but it still counts. If we are going to include transcriptions—and we must for the viola—we can include the Brahms Viola Sonatas and Bach’s Art of the Fugue. The Art of the Fugue is admittedly a stretch, but when performed by string quartet the moment the manuscript leaves off is in the middle of a viola solo.

The viola was also often used to evoke death or premoni tions of death by composers who were not themselves preparing to set off into the abyss: the end of Act 1 of Parsifal , the beginning of Act 3 of Otello , the march-like music of Tosca’s execution scene, The King of Thule from Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust , the viola solo in the Passacaglia from Peter Grimes , Brahms’ Gestille Sehnsucht and the viola-rich German Requim , the Fauré Requiem— which eschews violins entirely and has two viola sections (perhaps there are no violins in heaven?), Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung, the opening of Mahler’s death-haunted 9th Symphony, Hindemith’s Trauermusik, and Walton’s Viola Concerto (which in my reading, à la the dedica tion to his unrequited love Christobel, ends with a Werther- esque suicide). This list is surely incomplete. If the implicit, the merely melancholy, or music of spiritual transcendence is considered we might add works like Britten’s Lachrymae , Feldman’s Rothko Chapel , Carter’s Elegy , Vieuxtemps’ Elegy, almost everything by Vaughn Williams, and Sibelius’s 7th Symphony. The most compelling theory about the “deathyness” of the viola is that the viola is the alto voice, the voice of mother, and we naturally think about, and call upon, our mothers in times of distress and death. It is the same timbral quality that draws composers to use human altos when treating death; the fourth movement of Mahler 2, Strauss’s Vier Letzte Lieder (which quotes from Tod und Verklärung), I Know that My Redeemer Liveth from Handel’s Messiah , and Es ist voll’Bracht (with viola da gamba solo) from Bach’s St. John Passion . The other side to the viola is the clever, impish prankster, who has a good sense of humor, and more often than not, ends up the butt of the joke. The most famous example of this from the orchestral literature is Sancho Panza in Strauss’s Don Quixote. The viola quartet in the Overture to Candide, and the solo violist in Percy Grainger’s Country

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 39, No. 1, Spring 2023

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