The Terra Quartet, Capital Region Classical at Tannery Pond, August 31, 2024
Mozart, String Quartet no. 15 in D minor, K. 421
Britten, String Quartet no. 1 in D major, op. 25 (1941)
Mendelssohn, String Quartet no. 6 in F minor, op. 80
A recent healthy trend finds string quartets programming unfamiliar repertory in the form of new commissions or works by previously neglected composers. Since there is a familiar core quartet repertory by composers like Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., this trend provides audiences with a sense of adventure and discovery. But every so often, a composition by one of those big names will appear that, for some reason, is less frequently performed and therefore also a source of discovery. This was the case with last week’s offering from the enterprising Terra String Quartet, a relatively young and impressive group currently making the rounds, which fortunately includes Tannery Pond. This is a group that could have showcased its formidable skills with staples by Beethoven or late Schubert, but instead chose to expand our horizons with less frequently played works by Mozart and especially Mendelssohn, whose F minor Quartet may be the least performed of that composer’s half-dozen such works. The third work on the program was by another rarity by a familiar name, one particularly associated with quartets: Benjamin Britten. In fact, he wrote three of them, two in the 1940s and one shortly before his death, in 1975. Number 1 in D major, a work of youthful spirit placed at the center of this program, worked as an effective foil for the other two works, both of which are in minor keys and are unusually dour for those usually more-light-hearted composers. I had not previously encountered this work in concert.
Although these three works have no titles or clues pointing to any literary or pictorial subject matter, a bit of digging reveals some interesting autobiographical tie-ins. Mozart’s Quartet no. 14 is his only mature one in a minor key (although he wrote other great chamber works in minor keys.) In a previous review, I mentioned that D minor was Mozart’s “demonic” key, used in his Piano Concerto no. 20, in important moments in the opera “Don Giovanni,” in a familiar piano fantasia, and, of course, in the Requiem. He also used it for some early church pieces and in a string quartet from 1773 that is very rarely performed but whose opening seems like a sketch for the work in the same key from a decade later. His later D minor Quartet is the second of a set of six great quartets that Mozart eventually dedicated to Joseph Haydn, writing a very effusive and touching page of homage to the elder (and more famous) composer, in elegant Italian. Why did Mozart undertake this task, which, as he says in his dedication, cost him more effort than almost anything else he had written to date? The connection to Haydn is a clue: Mozart had arrived in Vienna two years earlier. A year later he initiated this set with Quartet no. 13 in G major, followed a year later by the present work. He was struggling to become known, trying to earn a living as a freelance musician against the wishes of his father, who also disapproved of his new bride Constanze. Haydn was already the most famous composer in Europe, known for, among other things, his developing of the string-quartet form. It is easy to think that Mozart was laying down a respectful challenge in the quartet sweepstakes. These works are rich in “learned devices” such as counterpoint, which Mozart was absorbing at that time through study of Bach. But his complex textures of inner voices are never the point in themselves; they are subordinate to Mozart’s fertile melodic gifts: The solo lines sing over a rich interweaving of the accompanying instruments. A year earlier, in 1781, Haydn had reactivated his quartet production by publishing his own set of six quartets, op. 33, claiming that this set represented a whole new style, a claim successfully designed to help sell printed copies. Echoes of Haydn’s quartets pop up in Mozart. The final movement here, Allegretto, seems like a fraternal twin to the last movement of Haydn’s op. 33 no. 5 in G major. Both are sets of theme and variations; both themes are in a moderate 6/8 meter and in binary form; and both have a folk-like simplicity that makes the variations easy to follow. In both, the variations are unnumbered and flow smoothly together. Haydn’s is elegantly simple and pastoral; Mozart’s is more elaborate and dramatic.
Haydn, op. 33 no. 5, Finale (1781):
Mozart, K. 421, Finale (1783):
It should be pointed out that Haydn received the dedication very graciously and complimented Mozart effusively to his father when they met.
Another biographical connection for this quartet is supplied by commentary from the time. The quartet was composed, supposedly, while his wife was in labor giving birth to their first child, Raimund. Constanze maintained that the opening of the slow movement represented her cries during the process. A contemporary French music critic, Jerôme-Joseph de Momigny, linked the first movement of the quartet to the words of Dido’s lament on her funeral pyre, from Vergil’s “Aeneid.” While these attributions can be taken with a grain of salt, their existence points to the unique atmosphere of this work, seeming to call for a special explanation.
While Britten’s first quartet of 1941 is in the bright major key of D, it is not free from darker shadows. In her introductory comments, Terra’s first violinist Harriet Langley aptly described the opening movement as an alternation between a dream state and reality. Understanding Britten’s situation at the time of composition leads to a more specific reading of this duality. Britten was for his entire life a committed pacifist. His greatest non-operatic work is his powerful “War Requiem” (1959), which is really an anti-war requiem, and his most significant orchestral work is the “Sinfonia da Requiem,” a powerful expression of anti-war sentiment completed in 1940. In 1941, he was living in the United States, partly due to his status in England as a draft resister; at that time, England was already deeply engaged in the conflicts of World War II, including the Blitz. Whether consciously or in the background, it is easy to believe that war was never far from his thoughts. The “dream state” of this movement is portrayed as highly fragile, while the “reality” has an aggressive quality not far from brutality, a condition vividly demonstrated by the Terra’s energetic and characterful performance. The second movement is a swift, tiny scherzo that to me seemed almost like an homage to Shostakovich, who had just written a similar movement in his Sixth Symphony of 1939, recorded in the United States in 1940 by Stokowski. Although he had not yet personally met the Russian composer, with whom he was later to become great friends, he had already written an eloquent defense of the opera “Lady Macbeth of Mzensk District,” which had been denounced in Pravda in 1936, thus demonstrating his familiarity and sympathy for Shostakovich’s music. The remaining movements of Britten’s quartet are generally positive in tone, the Andante rising from a static opening to an ecstatic climax and leading to the final “Molto vivace” full of youthful high spirits and even moments of ironic humor.
Felix Mendelssohn’s final quartet in F minor clearly reflects the personal significance of its moment of composition: His beloved and very talented older sister Fanny had just died suddenly from a stroke at the age of 41. Felix had spent his entire life closely connected to her, both personally and artistically, and her death had a devastating effect on him, from which he never recovered; he died only six months later. This quartet was the only music he managed to produce during that time. It is an atypically grim work, a powerful expression of anger and grief, with a mood of disquietude and agitation. The choice of key is very telling; in the early 19th century, keys still possessed strong associations with affects (emotional states), something inherited from the baroque “doctrine of the affections” (Affektenlehre) as formulated by a number of philosophers and theorists. This was confirmed by later writers, among them Christian Schubart who, in 1806, listed each key along with its associated affect. This included F minor, which he described as portraying “deep depression, funereal lament, groans of misery and longing for the grave.” This description aligns well with others of that time, and it very likely reflects Mendelssohn’s conscious purpose in selecting this special key. (A select list of such works might include Vivaldi’s “Winter” from the Four Seasons; Haydn’s Symphony no. 49, “La Passione” and his late Piano Variations; Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata and “Serioso” Quartet; Chopin’s Ballade no. 4; Brahms’ Piano Quintet; and both Tchaikovsky’s and Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphonies.)
Despite his depression, Mendelssohn’s artistry here is, if anything, more powerful than ever, particularly in the way he molds classical sonata form to his expressive purposes. The first movement contains almost no cadences that fully conclude a phrase or section. Each formal element ends in uncertainty or deception, pushing the music restlessly on to the next moment. This even at the boundaries of the largest sectional divisions, which are somewhat concealed as a result. There is no articulated end point to exposition (as in his other quartets), and there is no repetition; the music just rushes onward into the development. Similarly, the recapitulation is not articulated; rather, it is signaled by an unstable reference to opening material without a full restatement. A recognizable return to the beginning occurs only after all the secondary material has been restated and acts not as a stabilizing element but as an introduction to a coda, in which the tempo accelerates with a dramatically descending minor scale in quadruple octaves leading to multiple reiterations of the only complete cadence that we get to hear, an image of a finality that can only refer to death. While the movement is a perfectly balanced tonal form in the classical tradition, expressively, it is a tone poem portraying a state of tragic desperation. Performing it is an act of courage, requiring unrelenting energy and trust in an audience that is ready to engage with such powerfully grim material.
The next movement is formally a scherzo but not labeled as such; Mendelssohn may have wanted to avoid its connotation as “joke.” (Of course, he was the master of the light-hearted scherzo and produced many great works under that title, including movements in each of his other quartets.) The thematic material here bears a strong resemblance to the minuet of Mozart’s quartet (not by coincidence?), and the trio, usually light-hearted (even in the Mozart), is a dour exercise in counterpoint, written strongly against type. Again, the only stable cadence is the one ending the first section, which, upon repetition, furnishes the conclusion of the whole movement.
The Adagio begins with a series of unresolved questioning phrases, similar to the introduction to last movement of Beethoven’s last quartet, which is in the same key, where the music asks the question “Muss es sein?” (“Must it be?”) In Mendelssohn, the tonality shifts to major and the second subject in particular arrives as the most harmonically stable moment yet. The mood here resembles his famous song-without-words for piano “Consolation,” and it seems almost obvious that we have here a portrait of Fanny drawn from memory. (The key, E-flat major, is that of Fanny’s wonderful String Quartet.) The final movement reverts to the mercilessly driven mood of the first; Mendelssohn works with a rhythmic motive that resembles two of Bach’s keyboard pieces in the same key, the F minor Prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, book 2, and the Sinfonia in F minor, but moving at a much faster speed.
Bach Sinfonia 7:
Mendelssohn, Allegro molto:
The music rushes furiously forward, finally arriving at another even more final-sounding cadence, as if the composer would slam the door shut on life itself. The impact is shattering.
The Terra players pulled no punches in their rendering of Mendelssohn’s fury and despair and possessed the virtuosity and energy necessary to build emotion all the way to the end. Despite the negative affect of most of the quartet, they managed to project the music with clarity, excitement, and rare moments of beauty (mostly in the third movement). Their performances of the rest of the program were similarly full of character, adapting their sound to its varied idioms and moods. This is an ensemble clearly led by a strong first violin; there were a few moments in the Mozart where I would have liked to hear a more equal dialogue between the violins, but they were few and far between. The intonation of the opening of the Britten seemed shaky, but that was undoubtedly the intention of the composer, who begins with a very high three-tone cluster over sparse pizzicato cello setting a trap for any ensemble. Beyond these quibbles, the very alert ensemble, homogenous sonority, and propensity for rapid tempos kept the voltage at a high level. They also could play with rich, smooth lyricism, as in the opening of the Mozart. They made a convincing case that these works deserve the same attention as their better-known counterparts, a case that was not lost on the grateful audience.
