CM Notes » Chiara String Quartet
April 23, 2006
String Quartet in d minor K 421 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756- 1791
Mozart wrote this quartet in 1783, a fairly stressful period of his life. His father had not been pleased by his decision to marry Costanze and had only given consent very grudgingly after repeated requests. By all accounts, Costanze Weber was a default choice when her elder sister Aloysia spurned Mozart’s advances. Frau Weber quickly pushed him into a potentially compromising situation with her second daughter. Leopold not surprisingly felt his son had been manipulated.
It is not usually considered to be correct to relate the mood of Mozart’s music to the events of his life but this work starts out in d minor and sticks to it pretty closely from one movement to the next. In other words it sounds gloomy. Both Mozart and Beethoven used the key of d minor to express sadness and tragic feelings. One critic has gone so far as to label this quartet “morose”. Eric Blom, a great mid-20th century scholar, suggested that Mozart’s habitual mood was pessimistic but that he held this in check most of the time, only occasionally allowing himself to reveal it.
He completed the quartet, which is the second of the “Haydn” group, at about the time of the birth of his first child. It should have been an optimistic phase for him but he and Costanze were not to be lucky with their children. This infant died at the age of eight weeks, two months after the work was finished. Of the six children Costanze bore, only two survived infancy. Wolfgang and his sister “Nannerl” were the sole survivors of a large family in their generation. Hideous infant mortality was to persist unchecked until the twentieth century.
The increasing complexity and deeper character of Mozart’s music after 1784 might possibly be attributed to repeated personal tragedies such as this but they did not affect K 421. In the previous year Mozart had concentrated on learning how Haydn solved problems of harmony and sonority within the confines of four string instruments. It was typical of his amazing skill that he overcame the difficulties in a fraction of the time it had taken Haydn. There are six of these quartets dedicated to Haydn but they are not imitations. They have Mozart’s indelible stamp on all of them.
In K 421, not only is d minor a common thread but the opening phrase of the first movement rapidly drops by an octave, also symbolizing sorrow. The distress is augmented by the rhythms of the accompanying voices. Immediately after the development begins, Mozart shifts keys abruptly, from F major, the relative major, to E flat major, a fairly remote key.
These modulations were startling in their day and set a strange mood of their own. The great exponent of such modulation and the associated enharmonic change was Schubert, building on Mozart’s precedents. (”Enharmonic” is a modulation built on the fact that in the well-tempered system now used, the sharp of one note is the same as the flat of the note next above it. eg C sharp is also D flat. This is true of the piano. In a stringed instrument, there are minute differences between the sharp of one note and the flat of the next above it due to unsuppressed natural harmonics.)
The Andante’s lilting melody is modified by frequent dynamic change. In the Minuet and Trio, sharply defined dance rhythms and the use of some major keys relieve some of the gloom. Mozart turned to 6:8 rhythm in the finale, a Siciliano. This motif is enriched by four variations in the home key. The work ends on the same falling octave as it opened. In this Mozart anticipated Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer’s Night” overture, with the first and last phrases being the same.
String Quartet number 8 in c minor, opus 110 Dmitri Shostakovich 1906 - 1975
This year, 2006, is the centennial of Shostakovich’s birth. He had the misfortune to fall foul of the Soviet authorities not once but twice and on the second occasion the punishment was far more onerous. During the first period of disfavor, in the mid 1930s, he could continue to teach and scratch a living with lowbrow composing. In the second episode, at the end of the 1940s, he was stripped of his teaching posts and had many fewer options for survival. The implacable commissar for the arts, A. Zhadanov, was a dangerous enemy.
At one point Stalin came to his rescue. This was bizarre as all the torment stemmed from Stalin in the first place. Shostakovich saw friends and allies imprisoned and shot. He owed his survival to mortifying compromises which filled him with shame. One of those requirements was joining the Communist Party.
Today’s audience will be delighted to learn that musicians in San Francisco organized a Shostakovich festival in 1942. Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, Toscanini and Stokowski were the prime movers. The festival was to celebrate his 36th birthday.
The c minor quartet was written in 1960, after the death of Stalin but still during a period of some turmoil for him. He remained deeply distressed by the huge numbers of Russians who had died in “the Great Patriotic War”. Many critics consider this quartet to be an expression of his sorrow. Whether or not it has an overt program, the quartet was written at top speed in a total of three days and in the grip of powerful emotion, following a visit to Dresden. He dedicated it to “The Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War.” It was composed after he had been allowed to visit England and become friendly with Benjamin Britten.
The first and last of the five movements are both Largo. The entire piece is played without any breaks. By manipulating the names and meaning of the pitches, the constantly recurring theme can be said to spell out his initials: DSCH. (It is a little far-fetched but all the critics make a point of mentioning this. “S” is the German name for E flat and “H” is the German equivalent of “B”. “SCH” is the Cyrillic form of “SH”.) This motif appears in all the movements, though the first movement starts fugato contrasted with three other themes. The final movement is based on DSCH.
Between the outer movements, three highly differentiated sections not only persist with this refrain but also quote extensively from his other work. The Allegro molto is a very percussive toccata, in full sonata form. The Allegretto is a brittle waltz. It has been described as “sinister” and lacks the usual smooth gliding style. DSCH is in full throttle here, incessantly repeated with diminution rather in the manner of Janacek. In another Largo, a sustained note on the violin is interrupted several times by heavy chords ripping the texture. A declamatory recitative introduces this movement, quoting a patriotic song “Crushed by the weight of bondage”. If one accepts the idea of a program, then these chords could be shrieks of mourning.
Shostakovich quotes extensively from his other compositions throughout the piece. An alert listener will hear fragments of his first cello concerto, the first, fifth and tenth symphonies, “Lady Macbeth of Mtensk” and the second piano trio. He is said to be in the piece as himself wherever the DSCH fragment occurs but this going a little too far.
The final Largo answers the opening contrapuntal play of the theme with another fugue. At the end passages from the first movement form the coda in recapitulation. Shostakovich had used thematic unity in some of his other chamber music but not to the extremes in this work. It was daring of him to depart so far from the conventional style the Soviets demanded at this epoch.
He forged a highly personal style not to be taken up again until Schnittke began his career and had to leave Russia because of artistic disapproval.
String Quartet in F major, opus 59, no.1 Ludwig van Beethoven 1770 - 1827
The F major quartet is the first in the series of three quartets Beethoven wrote for Count Alexei Grigorievich Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador in Vienna at the time. Alexei Grigorievich was a penniless Ukraininian shepherd boy but had an exquisite voice. The Tsarina Elisabet’s courtiers discovered him as a child and took him to Moscow. It is a measure of his personality and social skill that he remained the Tsarina’s favorite even after his voice broke.
The Tsarina adored him and may even have married him clandestinely once he grew up. She gave him large estates and relied on him for many services. His estate at Gorenki later became the Moscow Botanical Garden because of its phenomenal planting.
Music continued to be very important to him. He was one of Beethoven’s most significant patrons over his twenty years as ambassador. In his commission Razumovsky stipulated that the quartets should include Russian themes.
There is a Russian gloss to some of the phrases but Beethoven’s heart was not really in it. The finale of the first quartet opens with a “Thème Russe” and the third movement of the second quartet contains a Russian-sounding melody. By the third quartet, he no longer even tried.
This quartet was completed in 1806. Beethoven wrote the Appassionata sonata, the Emperor Concerto, the fifth and sixth symphonies and the violin concerto during the same period. His deafness was already a problem but he was not otherwise in poor health.
Opus 59, no.1, is so familiar to us that we cannot imagine its stormy reception. The musicians rebelled, saying it could not be played and the audiences were puzzled and annoyed by it. For one thing all four movements have striking material and large dimensions more consonant with a quartet’s outer movements than the usually slight interior ones.
An authoritative stepwise theme in the cello opens the work, beginning on the dominant and moving from one instrument to another until it peaks at the F more than two octaves above middle C. After some bridge work the second theme comes in on a dissonant note and leads to a complex development. In the development Beethoven explored every facet of his first theme, almost but not completely exhausting its potential. What he then did was to return to the second theme for the recapitulation, another arresting deviation from accepted practice.
The second movement is called a Scherzo but bears about as much resemblance to the lively little trifles Beethoven himself wrote just a few years before as a mountain stream to the Mississippi River.
This “scherzo” is in sonata form with two first subjects, two bridge passages and two developments. It was the first time Beethoven used this type of construction, building on a variation of a theme already stated. It was said to lay the foundation for the cyclic form later introduced by Cesar Franck. Strong rhythmic impulses carry the music forward to some very resonant chordal climaxes with fortissimo double stopping in all four instruments.
The Adagio flows hauntingly. Its opening theme is in f minor. Beethoven embroiders the accompanying voices with 32nd notes yet still retains the leisurely pace. He was expert in this technique. Even this movement has elements of sonata form. There are first and second subjects and a rich development. This is followed by the recapitulation which carries on into the finale without a break after a long trill by the first violin.
The “Thème Russe” is given to the cello. It appears in the home key of F major. The theme is repeated in varying forms and succeeded by another subject before Beethoven once again prepares a development and recapitulation just as though this too were an opening movement. No wonder the early nineteenth century listeners were on “overload”. They never had a moment to rest before the intellectual assault continued.
String Quartet in d minor K 421 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756- 1791
Mozart wrote this quartet in 1783, a fairly stressful period of his life. His father had not been pleased by his decision to marry Costanze and had only given consent very grudgingly after repeated requests. By all accounts, Costanze Weber was a default choice when her elder sister Aloysia spurned Mozart’s advances. Frau Weber quickly pushed him into a potentially compromising situation with her second daughter. Leopold not surprisingly felt his son had been manipulated.
It is not usually considered to be correct to relate the mood of Mozart’s music to the events of his life but this work starts out in d minor and sticks to it pretty closely from one movement to the next. In other words it sounds gloomy. Both Mozart and Beethoven used the key of d minor to express sadness and tragic feelings. One critic has gone so far as to label this quartet “morose”. Eric Blom, a great mid-20th century scholar, suggested that Mozart’s habitual mood was pessimistic but that he held this in check most of the time, only occasionally allowing himself to reveal it.
He completed the quartet, which is the second of the “Haydn” group, at about the time of the birth of his first child. It should have been an optimistic phase for him but he and Costanze were not to be lucky with their children. This infant died at the age of eight weeks, two months after the work was finished. Of the six children Costanze bore, only two survived infancy. Wolfgang and his sister “Nannerl” were the sole survivors of a large family in their generation. Hideous infant mortality was to persist unchecked until the twentieth century.
The increasing complexity and deeper character of Mozart’s music after 1784 might possibly be attributed to repeated personal tragedies such as this but they did not affect K 421. In the previous year Mozart had concentrated on learning how Haydn solved problems of harmony and sonority within the confines of four string instruments. It was typical of his amazing skill that he overcame the difficulties in a fraction of the time it had taken Haydn. There are six of these quartets dedicated to Haydn but they are not imitations. They have Mozart’s indelible stamp on all of them.
In K 421, not only is d minor a common thread but the opening phrase of the first movement rapidly drops by an octave, also symbolizing sorrow. The distress is augmented by the rhythms of the accompanying voices. Immediately after the development begins, Mozart shifts keys abruptly, from F major, the relative major, to E flat major, a fairly remote key.
These modulations were startling in their day and set a strange mood of their own. The great exponent of such modulation and the associated enharmonic change was Schubert, building on Mozart’s precedents. (”Enharmonic” is a modulation built on the fact that in the well-tempered system now used, the sharp of one note is the same as the flat of the note next above it. eg C sharp is also D flat. This is true of the piano. In a stringed instrument, there are minute differences between the sharp of one note and the flat of the next above it due to unsuppressed natural harmonics.)
The Andante’s lilting melody is modified by frequent dynamic change. In the Minuet and Trio, sharply defined dance rhythms and the use of some major keys relieve some of the gloom. Mozart turned to 6:8 rhythm in the finale, a Siciliano. This motif is enriched by four variations in the home key. The work ends on the same falling octave as it opened. In this Mozart anticipated Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer’s Night” overture, with the first and last phrases being the same.
String Quartet number 8 in c minor, opus 110 Dmitri Shostakovich 1906 - 1975
This year, 2006, is the centennial of Shostakovich’s birth. He had the misfortune to fall foul of the Soviet authorities not once but twice and on the second occasion the punishment was far more onerous. During the first period of disfavor, in the mid 1930s, he could continue to teach and scratch a living with lowbrow composing. In the second episode, at the end of the 1940s, he was stripped of his teaching posts and had many fewer options for survival. The implacable commissar for the arts, A. Zhadanov, was a dangerous enemy.
At one point Stalin came to his rescue. This was bizarre as all the torment stemmed from Stalin in the first place. Shostakovich saw friends and allies imprisoned and shot. He owed his survival to mortifying compromises which filled him with shame. One of those requirements was joining the Communist Party.
Today’s audience will be delighted to learn that musicians in San Francisco organized a Shostakovich festival in 1942. Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, Toscanini and Stokowski were the prime movers. The festival was to celebrate his 36th birthday.
The c minor quartet was written in 1960, after the death of Stalin but still during a period of some turmoil for him. He remained deeply distressed by the huge numbers of Russians who had died in “the Great Patriotic War”. Many critics consider this quartet to be an expression of his sorrow. Whether or not it has an overt program, the quartet was written at top speed in a total of three days and in the grip of powerful emotion, following a visit to Dresden. He dedicated it to “The Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War.” It was composed after he had been allowed to visit England and become friendly with Benjamin Britten.
The first and last of the five movements are both Largo. The entire piece is played without any breaks. By manipulating the names and meaning of the pitches, the constantly recurring theme can be said to spell out his initials: DSCH. (It is a little far-fetched but all the critics make a point of mentioning this. “S” is the German name for E flat and “H” is the German equivalent of “B”. “SCH” is the Cyrillic form of “SH”.) This motif appears in all the movements, though the first movement starts fugato contrasted with three other themes. The final movement is based on DSCH.
Between the outer movements, three highly differentiated sections not only persist with this refrain but also quote extensively from his other work. The Allegro molto is a very percussive toccata, in full sonata form. The Allegretto is a brittle waltz. It has been described as “sinister” and lacks the usual smooth gliding style. DSCH is in full throttle here, incessantly repeated with diminution rather in the manner of Janacek. In another Largo, a sustained note on the violin is interrupted several times by heavy chords ripping the texture. A declamatory recitative introduces this movement, quoting a patriotic song “Crushed by the weight of bondage”. If one accepts the idea of a program, then these chords could be shrieks of mourning.
Shostakovich quotes extensively from his other compositions throughout the piece. An alert listener will hear fragments of his first cello concerto, the first, fifth and tenth symphonies, “Lady Macbeth of Mtensk” and the second piano trio. He is said to be in the piece as himself wherever the DSCH fragment occurs but this going a little too far.
The final Largo answers the opening contrapuntal play of the theme with another fugue. At the end passages from the first movement form the coda in recapitulation. Shostakovich had used thematic unity in some of his other chamber music but not to the extremes in this work. It was daring of him to depart so far from the conventional style the Soviets demanded at this epoch.
He forged a highly personal style not to be taken up again until Schnittke began his career and had to leave Russia because of artistic disapproval.
String Quartet in F major, opus 59, no.1 Ludwig van Beethoven 1770 - 1827
The F major quartet is the first in the series of three quartets Beethoven wrote for Count Alexei Grigorievich Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador in Vienna at the time. Alexei Grigorievich was a penniless Ukraininian shepherd boy but had an exquisite voice. The Tsarina Elisabet’s courtiers discovered him as a child and took him to Moscow. It is a measure of his personality and social skill that he remained the Tsarina’s favorite even after his voice broke.
The Tsarina adored him and may even have married him clandestinely once he grew up. She gave him large estates and relied on him for many services. His estate at Gorenki later became the Moscow Botanical Garden because of its phenomenal planting.
Music continued to be very important to him. He was one of Beethoven’s most significant patrons over his twenty years as ambassador. In his commission Razumovsky stipulated that the quartets should include Russian themes.
There is a Russian gloss to some of the phrases but Beethoven’s heart was not really in it. The finale of the first quartet opens with a “Thème Russe” and the third movement of the second quartet contains a Russian-sounding melody. By the third quartet, he no longer even tried.
This quartet was completed in 1806. Beethoven wrote the Appassionata sonata, the Emperor Concerto, the fifth and sixth symphonies and the violin concerto during the same period. His deafness was already a problem but he was not otherwise in poor health.
Opus 59, no.1, is so familiar to us that we cannot imagine its stormy reception. The musicians rebelled, saying it could not be played and the audiences were puzzled and annoyed by it. For one thing all four movements have striking material and large dimensions more consonant with a quartet’s outer movements than the usually slight interior ones.
An authoritative stepwise theme in the cello opens the work, beginning on the dominant and moving from one instrument to another until it peaks at the F more than two octaves above middle C. After some bridge work the second theme comes in on a dissonant note and leads to a complex development. In the development Beethoven explored every facet of his first theme, almost but not completely exhausting its potential. What he then did was to return to the second theme for the recapitulation, another arresting deviation from accepted practice.
The second movement is called a Scherzo but bears about as much resemblance to the lively little trifles Beethoven himself wrote just a few years before as a mountain stream to the Mississippi River.
This “scherzo” is in sonata form with two first subjects, two bridge passages and two developments. It was the first time Beethoven used this type of construction, building on a variation of a theme already stated. It was said to lay the foundation for the cyclic form later introduced by Cesar Franck. Strong rhythmic impulses carry the music forward to some very resonant chordal climaxes with fortissimo double stopping in all four instruments.
The Adagio flows hauntingly. Its opening theme is in f minor. Beethoven embroiders the accompanying voices with 32nd notes yet still retains the leisurely pace. He was expert in this technique. Even this movement has elements of sonata form. There are first and second subjects and a rich development. This is followed by the recapitulation which carries on into the finale without a break after a long trill by the first violin.
The “Thème Russe” is given to the cello. It appears in the home key of F major. The theme is repeated in varying forms and succeeded by another subject before Beethoven once again prepares a development and recapitulation just as though this too were an opening movement. No wonder the early nineteenth century listeners were on “overload”. They never had a moment to rest before the intellectual assault continued.
