Schaarwächter, Jürgen

Schaarwächter, Jürgen

Sonate jaune for trumpet and piano (score and parts)

(b. Cologne,  8.3.1967)

This little “péché de jeunesse” generated from 5 December1988 to 26 May 1989 during M.A. studies at the University of Cologne, for my then fellow-student Thomas Schaffrath, who had just started reading musicology and who in former years had practised the trumpet. The initial impulse to its gestation dated from our first meeting, on 17 October 1988, and after the first movement had taken (not least to my duties as a student) quite some time to be completed (on 23 March), the second and third movement were written considerably quicker (from 30 March to 28 April and from 2 to 26 May respectively). The work was originally subtitled “for trumpet and clavier”, as an ordinary piano may not fulfil all the particular effects intended; yet this may probably be compensated by wise use of the pedal; consciously I have not written out the pedalling in order not to diminish the clarity of the texture of the piano part. The present edition, which was prepared by Dennis Ried and Daniel Fütterer, corrects some oddities and slips in the final manuscript (particularly slips of over- or under-filling bars); otherwise it has been consciously avoided to interfere with the original compositional concept, which not only in its title makes reference to a composition of the past, i.e. Jacques Offenbach’s one-acter Monsieur Choufleuri restera chez lui le … (1861) (whose title-figure pretends his Belgian servant in front of his guests grandiloquently to be his English butler “Jaune” [for “John”]), but also through a considerable number of more or less audible references or quotations from Mozart to Stockhausen, from Charles Villiers Stanford to Francis Poulenc. It would take too long to list all the references here, not least because probably not even myself will be able to spot them after so long a time.

Jürgen Schaarwächter, March 2017