Servais - Quatre Morceaux de Salon (Urtext Edition)

Quatre Morceaux de Salon is a set of four short pieces for cello and piano, among Servais’s most compact works. Since the set was published posthumously, the date of composition is uncertain. Although some features recall his earlier style, the musical language may point to the 1860s.

These pieces are best understood as salon pastiches. Servais seems to evoke the styles of other composers while retaining his own idiomatic cello writing: Schumann in No. 1, Schubert and/or Rossini in No. 2, and Rossini in No. 4. No. 3 is based on Ferdinand Fürchtegott Huber’s “Ach! wie churze-n-üsi Tage!,” a Swiss melody that Servais also used in his Fantaisie La Romantique.

To date, No. 2 appears to be the only piece from the set to have been recorded, under the title Piece, by Anner Bijlsma and Gérard van Blerk in 1975. No. 3 was also published separately in Albert E. Wier’s 1935 collection Pieces for violoncello: classic, romantic, modern.

ASTA Level: 6