Rockport Chamber Music Festival’s most cerebral but quite possibly also the most nakedly emotional of this summer’s concerts on Sunday featured elucidator Jeremy Eichler (formerly music critic for the Boston Globe), the string orchestra A Far Cry, and violinist Julian Rhee. Entitled “The Dreams and Requiems of German Music,” it mixed Eichler’s reflections on music’s properties beyond the aesthetic while also elucidating specific works we would hear. This blending of performance with musings about music’s role as a cultural/historical repository and its lament about death and the senseless destruction of war, made for an intellectually stimulating and moving experience.

Eichler topically tied together all the afternoon’s works by playing a brief excerpt from a 1928 recording of Arnold and Alma Rosé, gifted violinists and father and daughter, as soloists in J. S. Bach’s D Minor Concerto for Two Violins, BWV 1043. The author referred to “music and history . . . echoing inside of each other,” as he pointed out that while the father (born Arnold Rosenblum) escaped the Nazis and survived the Second World War, his daughter was not so lucky, meeting her death in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Remarkably free of affectation and the possibly expected self-indulgent interpretation for its time, the recording demonstrated these Jewish artists’ reverence for the music of Bach, the most devoutly Protestant Christian of the major composers.

One could plausibly posit that Bach stood among the first composers to introduce the element of personal expression into music. One thinks of his brilliant, often daring harmony; his exploitation of his own virtuosity, equaled by very few, on multiple instruments; and his extensive musical symbolism, ranging from subtle to overt and heartily secular to profoundly spiritual. The Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor for solo violin, BWV 1004, proved to be an inspired opener. In the greatest single work of the solo violin literature, the richness of invention and sheer scale stand out starkly from all others; moreover, because the set of variations exists within the chaconne form, the composer displays his talent for creating freedom within a set structure, “conjuring multitudes” with but a single instrument. Julian Rhee, recipient of the 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant and a U.S. Presidential Scholar, delivered a superb account, magisterial in technique and intelligence and simultaneously moving and imaginative. Among the numerous special moments, we cite the imposing and emphatic beginning, as forbidding and beautiful as a mighty mountain; the drama of many of the triple- and quadruple-stop chords throughout, and the exquisitely sweet intimacy with which Rhee began the central section in the major. One could experience the work’s extraordinary range from intimate endearment to thunderous declamation (Eichler noted the common belief, neither proven nor disproven, that Bach intended this movement as a tombeau to his first wife just after her unexpected death at age 36).

Felix Mendelssohn played the role of musical and religious maverick. Clearly an early Romantic, he nonetheless displayed an uncommon sympathy with earlier composers, Bach über alles. Furthermore, despite Felix’s grandfather Moses Mendelssohn’s fame as a Jewish philosopher and theologian, his father Abraham had renounced his Judaism before Felix’s birth; when Abraham later requested that the adult Felix change his surname to Bartholdy to reflect his official Christian status, Felix declined, retaining both names. [Indeed he told a friend, “How ironic that I, a Jew boy and a comedian brought the Matthew Passion back to the Christian people.”] Thus his musical and religious sympathies provided plenty of grist for discussion. Eichler reminded us that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, old enough to remember hearing the child prodigy Mozart, had pronounced the 12-year-old Felix an even greater prodigy in 1821. The Far Cry ensemble, comprising two string quartets, offered the final movement (Presto) of the String Octet, Op. 20, by the 16-year-old Mendelssohn. In this astounding work the composer manages to salute his musical predecessors, but also uses the novel form of a string octet to ingeniously treat eight instruments individually as well as jointly, all while giving free rein to the virtually unbounded energy of a supremely gifted teenager driven to “sow his musical oats.” A Far Cry rendered this near moto perpetuo with blazing virtuosity and keen awareness to the contrasts of texture; they demonstrated that the eight voices generated tremendous power whether as scampering individual fugal voices or playing longer note values entirely in accented octaves. Clearly, Mendelssohn understood that he could learn much from older and contemporary musicians alike, not unlike the way he embraced both his Jewish and Christian heritage. One would be hard pressed to find any other piece in his oeuvre that synthesizes such an assortment of influences as compellingly as this work.

Introducing the closing work, Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Eichler gave us valuable historical context. By 1933 (the year Hitler seized power in Germany) music had regularly become a means of deeply personal expression. Though others denounced Strauss, then Europe’s most famous living composer, for collaborating with the Nazis after he became head of the Reich’s Chamber of Music, privately, he had only disdain for the party and reasoned that accepting the prominent post was the best way to keep his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren out of the concentration camps. Strauss only gradually recognized that the Nazis were co-opting German culture for the sake of glorifying “pure”, Aryan music and suppressing entartete (degenerate) music that of Jewish composers, atonal works, jazz, etc.). By 1944 he was mourning the destruction of German culture, pouring out his grief in Metamorphosen, unique among his works for its intense air of tragedy, possibly as an act of atonement for unintentionally assisting a regime of “the greatest criminals.” The Criers stirred profound emotions, assisted by altered lighting. During intermission the hall drew its shutters over the great windows behind the stage, eliminating the beautiful view of Rockport Harbor that is a singular feature of daytime concerts in the Shalin Liu Performance Center, while centering us on sound rather than sight. Just before the performance began, the house lights lowered to almost nothing, only gradually coming back up well into the work. The 23 strings (five quartets plus three double basses) produced what Eichler called Strauss’s “delicate haze of beauty, nostalgia, and regret” in the elegiac first section, beginning with the four-chord motif heard at the outset that unifies the entire work. The faster and more passionate central section supplied catharsis via a series of climaxes like great ocean swells while, remarkably, adding more complex polyphony. In the concluding section Strauss returned us to the elegiac mood of the beginning but with the familiar melodies and motifs harmonized ever more strangely. As the musicians approached the coda, the house lights again dimmed until it was nearly dark when the basses and cellos played a quotation of the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony; at this point in the score Strauss marked “IN MEMORIAM!” without specifying to what. After the last dark C minor chord evanesced into silence, the room stayed utterly silent as time seemed suspended.

In a Q&A after the concert, Eichler further expounded on the thesis of his award-winning book, “Time’s Echo,” that music has the unique power to carry forward cultural memory and thus bear witness to history’s effect on human lives. The turbulent events of our own time have inescapable parallels with those of Strauss’s, but Eichler, A Far Cry, and Julian Rhee gave us enough historical context to feel hope alongside grief and soothing alongside outrage. Received with thanks.

Geoffrey Wieting holds Bachelor’s degrees in organ and Latin from Oberlin College and a Master’s degree in collaborative piano from New England Conservatory. He is Organist of First Parish Church of Weston as well as a freelance organist, collaborative pianist and vocal coach. He sings with the Back Bay Chorale and serves on the Board of Directors of the Old West Organ Society.