Grand Duo Concertant in E flat major, Op.48 (1815-16)

Just as Mozart had an Anton Stadler and Brahms was to have a Richard Mühlfeld, Weber also had a favourite clarinetist in Heinrich Bärmann. It was for Bärmann – who first attracted the young composer’s attention when he played the clarinet obbligato in Weber’s Se il mio ben    in Darmstadt in 1811 – that Weber wrote the Concertino, the two Concertos, the Clarinet Quintet, the Silvana Variations and the Grand Duo Concertant. While they all offer abundant evidence of the composer’s admiration for the clarinetist’s technique and expressive abilities, the most vivid demonstration of the joy Weber found in Bärmann’s musical company is the exuberant scoring for clarinet and piano in the last of those works.

Started in Munich in 1815 and completed in Berlin a year later, the Grand Duo Concertant was intended for Weber and Bärmann to play together, with the composer-pianist clearly determined to derive as much virtuoso exhilaration from it as the clarinetist. So, although it is basically a sonata in three movements, the fancy title is not out of place. The shared flourishes at the beginning of the Allegro con fuoco are so elaborate, in fact, that the outline of the main theme emerges none too clearly from the figuration around it. The second subject, on the other hand, is most graciously delineated by the clarinet and a short but imaginative development section reshapes the first subject in such a way as to contribute to its more precise linear definition in the recapitulation.

The Andante con moto is a study in pathos in C minor and is largely a matter of an expressively sustained and freely developing melodic line for the clarinet. The piano, however, is prominently featured in a passionately agitated middle section and is particularly inspired in the veiled harmonic colouring it applies at the end. If any of that seems a little operatic, the dramatic scena for clarinet in the middle of the closing rondo is a very operatic parallel to an episode in Der Freischütz. The debonair main theme is a characteristic Weber tune for Bärmann and the prolonged virtuoso coda, with exploit succeeded by exploit, must have been a source of much amusement to both of them.