The Brentano String Quartet at South Mountain Concerts
Sunday October 2, 2022
Haydn, Quartet in B-flat, op. 33 no. 4
Bartok, Quartet no. 5
Dvorak, Quartet no. 14 in A-flat, op. 105
You can almost draw a straight line on a map of central Europe through the birthplaces of the three composers represented on last Sunday afternoon’s concert at South Mountain. It would run northwest and southeast from the center point in Ruhrau, currently in eastern Austria, where Joseph Haydn was born in 1732. One hundred seventy miles northwest is Antonin Dvorak’s birthplace, Nelahozeves, near Prague. Two hundred miles in the opposite direction is Nagyszentmiklós, Romania, the birthplace of Bela Bartok. The borderlines of these countries have snaked around during the last several centuries: At the time of his birth, Haydn’s native town was on the Hungarian-Croatian border, while Bartok’s was solidly inside the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. All three composers were outsiders to the imperial center of Vienna; their early years were steeped in rural folk music which provided foundational experiences throughout their creative lives.
The classical string quartet was a central European product. Divertimenti for two violins, viola, and cello were written shortly before Haydn wrote the first of his 83 works in that genre, but it was Haydn who brought it to its first maturity—a fact acknowledged by Mozart, who dedicated six of his finest quartets to the older composer. After Schubert, it became a less crucial medium, but remained a mark of prestige for composers like Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms. While Antonin Dvorak started his career under the powerful romantic influence of Richard Wagner, once he gained the favor of Brahms, his music took a decidedly classical turn toward symphonies (nine) and string quartets (fifteen!). Like Haydn, Dvorak’s works in this form often display folk characteristics, especially in dance rhythms like the Furiant that appears in the scherzo of Quartet no. 14.
Bela Bartok was a virtuoso pianist whose early compositions utilized the central European harmonic language of late romanticism, primarily that of Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss. His first major work was a romantic tone poem celebrating the life of Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian national hero of the 19th century. Soon afterwards, Bartok discovered the music of Debussy, which opened up the possibility of developing new musical languages; he also began to study Hungarian folk music in a systematic way that anticipated the more “scientific” methods of modern ethnomusicology. By 1909 (when he was 26) the first of his six string quartets simultaneously (but not coincidentally) displayed radical harmonic changes inspired by Debussy and the influence of folk idioms, which did not adhere to the rules of classical harmony. Subsequently, his five other quartets continued to show the evolution of his musical thinking which was powerfully influenced by his folk music studies, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in his Fifth String Quartet of 1934.
How do these works reveal their folkish roots? Certain musical tropes point the way: Short, clear, symmetrical phrases suggest the regular strophic structures of folk-song; when combined with animated rhythms they can also suggest dances. More specific to central or eastern European sources are rhythmic complexities associated with particular dance forms. Dvorak was very fond of the Czech dance Furiant, which he included and labeled in a number of works. In this quartet, the third movement is only marked “molto vivace” (very lively), but it uses the device of hemiola in a “rapid and fiery” manner associated specifically with the Furiant. (Hemiola is a form of syncopation resulting from changing from a fast triple meter to one twice as slow, or vice-versa: Think about the rhythmic setting of the lyric “I like to be in America” from West Side Story, where its presence and usage points to Latin America.)
Another folk trope is humor, which can be an elusive quality in purely instrumental music. The greatest master of musical humor was Haydn, who could indulge in broad slapstick, as in Symphony no. 93, where, in a quiet moment, the bassoon unleashes a single low, loud note, as if a member of the audience had committed an embarrassing indiscretion; or in Symphony no. 94 which is famous for its “surprise,” a comment on the audience’s tendency to grab a quick nap. In the B-flat quartet on the Brentano’s program (op. 33 no. 4), the humor takes the form of constant disruptions of the musical flow, starting as early as the second full bar. During this opening section, there is an anapestic figure (short-short- long) that is tossed around the instruments like a hot potato, with the cello being caught out alone at the end, like a game of musical chairs. That Haydn regularly infused such humorous tropes into the so-called “serious” forms of symphony and string quartet speaks not only to his individual personality, but to a down-to-earth conception of music-making derived from his early home-life in rural Hungary where the family would make music together, led by his very musical father who could not read a note.
Remembering that Haydn essentially established the string quartet as a “serious” art-form, we can nevetheless recognize the origins of the social, conversational, and playful character of his chamber works. The six string quartets of op. 33, composed in 1781, were transitional, meant to be played at home, but also suitable for audience consumption. They were undoubtedly among the works that Haydn enjoyed recreationally as second violin with his musical friends Tomasini (his concertmaster), Mozart on viola, and Dittersdorf on cello. One can only imagine how much fun these connoisseurs had playing these works, especially in spots like the pizzicato ending of the B-flat quartet that sounds like the players are winking at each other as they tiptoe out the door. Ideally, these works should be enjoyed in intimate surroundings where the audience can feel like they are over-hearing them rather than having them presented. In the long concert space of the South Mountain barn, the experience was more the latter, especially from the rear; and it was a bit harder to enjoy the banter and fun from a distance, although first violinist Mark Steinberg looked like he was dancing in his chair.
Folk roots of a more specific kind were discernible in Bartok’s quartet. For this composer, an obsessively detailed study of eastern European folk music fed his mature compositions, and this became especially clear in his later works of the 1930s, when his language started to relax and become more accessible. This was the great period of his Second Piano Concerto, the Divertimento for Strings, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, and Contrasts (composed for Benny Goodman). The Fifth Quartet fits right into this series of more accessible masterpieces. While it contains some of the raw emotional expressionism described by my colleague, David Edwards, in his preview, it does so within a powerful, classically balanced musical form of Bartok’s own devising. This is often referred to as “arch-form,” in which the music progresses to a unique mid-point and then reviews the previous material in backward order, using techniques of variation to provide an experience which blends the familiar with the new. Such an approach to formal design combines the forward-directed motion of traditional tonality with the cyclic motion of ritual, suggesting a kind of timelessness that Bartok valued about the folk cultures he studied. Ironically, that appearance of permanence would shortly vanish from the folk-world following World War II.
Bartok’s Fifth Quartet has five movements; the first and fifth and the second and fourth are paired, with the third acting as the keystone of the arch. Bartok also used this layout in his previous quartet (no. 4), but that work was fiercely avant-garde; audible references to folk melodies and rhythms are harder to find there. The second and fourth movements are very fast and use special sonorities: mutes in the second and plucked strings in the fourth. In the Fifth Quartet the corresponding movements are very slow, evoking the sounds of the Hungarian countryside at night, full of mystery and the songs of night birds and insects (a favorite musical landscape for Bartok also found in the Concerto for Orchestra’s third movement). Logically, the central movement is rapid. It is also the catchiest and most accessible section, utilizing unsymmetrical Bulgarian dance rhythms. (These can also be found in his contemporary set of piano pieces “Mikrokosmos” whose last volume contains “Six Pieces in Bulgarian Dance Rhythms.”) The lively irregular accents are set out right away (4 + 2 + 3) and maintained with variations throughout, providing a feeling of central European “swing.” The many short sections here suggest a group dance where individual soloists step up to take a solo turn showing off their favorite steps. The movement is a kind of miniature arch-within-an-arch: A central episode has the first violin playing a simple folk tune against a background of strange sounds from the rest of the group, a reminiscence of night music but in a faster tempo. The remainder of the movement reviews the earlier material to complete the arch. On a larger scale, the last movement returns to the material of the first, and closes with a very clear inversion of its opening bars. At the final moment, a childish music-box tune is heard, then repeated with the melody in “the wrong key,” another way of winking sardonically at the audience. The Brentano presented this very demanding music with a fervor and confidence that invited the audience to recognize its intensity but also to enjoy its melodiousness and humor.
Dvorak’s name is equated with Czech folklore, but also with the whole concept of musical nationalism, owing to his mentoring of American composers during his stay in the United States in the 1890s. His most popular quartet, no. 12 in F, has been nicknamed “the American” and was certainly influenced by native melodies he heard in Iowa where he composed that work. In his American works (especially “From the New World”), I have always visualized Dvorak’s compelling rhythmic drive as connected with pioneers traveling west (probably due to overexposure to movie westerns), but it is also a characteristic of his final quartet, no. 13 in A-flat, composed before and after he returned home to Czechoslovakia in 1895. Its only overt folk characteristic is the aforementioned Furiant second movement, whose lyrical trio is lifted from an earlier opera, “The Jacobin” of 1887. The other elements of national color might just as well be described as typical of late Dvorak in general, including gorgeous lyricism, use of the pentatonic scale, driving rhythms, structural clarity, and extremely varied and resourceful writing for the strings, reminding us that Dvorak’s primary instrument (like Mozart’s) was the viola. Although all three composers on this program appreciated the important roles to be taken by the middle voices (second violin and viola), Dvorak was the one who used them to create lush textures of romantic harmony through the active meshing of flowing figures in all parts. While the next generation of Debussy, Mahler, and Schoenberg was exploring new harmonic frontiers which would render outlines blurry or ambiguous, Dvorak retains a firm grip on classical forms, much like his advocate Brahms. Unlike him, however, Dvorak’s textures remain lucid and his structures straightforward—you can always tell where you are, even instinctively. He finds a bright middle way: between angst and obscurity, between the nostalgia of the slow movement with the folksy good cheer of the finale, which loops the program back to where it began. In the end, it returned to the spirit of Haydn in a journey through central Europe that turned out to be a round-trip.
