The Program
LEOŠ JANÁČEK
String Quartet No. 1, "Kreutzer Sonata"
About the Composer
Long after the successful premiere of his opera
Jenůfa in 1904, Janáček remained little known outside
his native Moravia. His modest fame rested largely on his
accomplishments as a teacher, organist, and musical folklorist. It
wasn't until 1916 when a revised version of
Jenůfa was staged in Prague that his fame began to
spread. Janáček was already moving away from the late-Romantic
idiom of his early works to the distinctive style of his maturity,
characterized by terseness, abrupt changes of mood and atmosphere,
and speech-like rhythmic patterns. In the last decade of his life,
his passionate (but platonic) affair with Kamila Stösslová sparked
a white-hot blaze of compositional activity. Janáček immortalized
his young muse in such masterworks as the operas Kát'a
Kabanová, The Cunning Little
Vixen, and The Makropulos Affair, as well as
String Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters," which the Takács Quartet
performs tomorrow evening.
About the Work
Janáček's gift for impassioned utterance and dramatic
characterization are on full display in his String Quartet of 1923.
The work takes its subtitle from Leo Tolstoy's novella The
Kreutzer Sonata, in which a pathologically jealous husband
stabs his wife upon discovering her with her violinist paramour. At
a crucial point in the story, the two lovers play Beethoven's
"Kreutzer" Sonata together, prompting the cuckolded husband to
declare that "music in general is a terrible thing ... Its effect
is neither to elevate nor to degrade, but to excite." After reading
Tolstoy's novella in the original Russian many years earlier, the
Slavophile Janáček was inspired to compose a piano trio (now lost),
some of whose ideas subsequently gave rise to the quartet. Whether
those ideas were musical or programmatic, Janáček's own loveless
marriage provides a compelling subtext for the First String
Quartet—unlike Tolstoy's tormented protagonist, though, he found at
least a measure of happiness in his last years.
A Closer Listen
The fact that all four movements are marked con
moto suggests that Janáček envisioned the quartet as a
continuous narrative. Yet nearly everything else about the
music—its unstable rhythms, disjointed structure, and harsh
juxtapositions of tender lyricism and savage angst—bespeaks
discontinuity. The opening theme—a sad little tune that rises and
falls back on itself in exhaustion—casts a mood of bleak despair
that is never fully dispelled: Its return in the quartet's final
bars is less a sign of closure than of open-ended grief. Even the
work's lighter moments, such as the cello's perky countermelody at
the beginning, are fraught with anxiety and foreboding. Janáček's
sympathies were clearly with the wife in Tolstoy's morbid tale of
marital infidelity: In a letter to Stösslová about the quartet, he
conjured the image of "a poor woman, tormented, beaten, battered to
death."
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
String Quartet No. 1 in D Major, Op. 25
About the Composer
A professed pacifist, homosexual, and agnostic, Britten
paradoxically came to be widely regarded as the most
quintessentially English composer since Henry Purcell. As a young
man, he had little sympathy for the patriotic effusions of the
older generation, gravitating instead toward young mavericks like
Frank Bridge, William Walton, and Lennox Berkeley. During the
1930s, work in a government film production unit brought him into
contact with a cadre of left-wing writers and artists who shared
his disdain for bourgeois convention. When his friends W. H. Auden
and Christopher Isherwood moved to New York in 1938, Britten and
his lover, tenor Peter Pears, quickly followed. Highlights of his
three productive years in North America included the limpid song
cycle Les illuminations, the folk operetta Paul
Bunyan, the powerful Sinfonia da Requiem, and
the ever-popular Ceremony of Carols.
About the Work
The D-Major Quartet was the last major work Britten completed
before he and Pears returned to England in 1942. They had set off
for California in the spring of 1941, lured by the siren song of
Hollywood. But the hoped-for studio work failed to materialize, and
Britten jumped at a timely commission from arts patron Elizabeth
Sprague Coolidge. The commission had just one condition: The work
had to be finished in time for a performance in Los Angeles three
weeks later. "Short notice and a bit of a stretch," he declared,
"but I'll do it as the cash will be useful!" Britten, who was
staying in the home of pianist friends in Escondido, holed himself
up in a backyard shed where he wouldn't be distracted by their
practicing. The Coolidge Quartet premiered the new opus—on
schedule—on September 21.
A Closer Listen
Despite its traditional key designation, the D-Major Quartet masks
its tonal identity as carefully as the intensely private composer
guarded his personal life. It opens with a softly shimmering
three-note cluster—D, E, F-sharp—that returns later in the
movement, transformed into undulating triplets. Alternating with
outbursts of prickly, propulsive counterpoint, this unstable chord
prepares our ears for the fine-grained ambiguities of the ensuing
movements: a short, skittish, scherzo-like Allegretto con slancio
and a melancholy, meandering Andante calmo, whose throbbing, mildly
dissonant harmonies are shot through with a sense of resignation.
It's not until the last bars of the playful Molto vivace that D
major finally emerges as the tonal center around which Britten's
enigmatic music has been fitfully circling.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 10
About the Composer
In 1893, Debussy was still finding his voice and struggling for
recognition. Although the 31-year-old composer had already
completed La damoiselle élue for women's voices and
orchestra, his revolutionary masterpiece Prélude à l'après-midi
d'un faune was still on the drawing board, and another decade
would pass before the success of his symbolist opera
Pelléaset Mélisande made him a household
name. At once radical and traditionalist, Debussy rebelled against
the ponderous academic style of establishment composers like
Saint-Saëns and d'Indy. Proudly signing himself "compositeur
français," he urged his compatriots to return to the "pure French
tradition" that he admired in the music of 18th-century composer
Jean-Philippe Rameau.
About the Work
Debussy's only string quartet had a difficult gestation (he
evidently planned to write another but never got around to it).
Conscious that he was plowing new ground, he fussed over the score
like a first-born child, starting over three times before sending
it out into the world. The composer's "Classical" side is apparent
in the quartet's clearly delineated themes, the magnetic pull of
tonal centers, and the intermittent stretches of disciplined
canonic writing. Yet the work's recurring elements reflect
Debussy's abiding interest in organic musical processes and
anticipate Bartók's use of cyclical forms in his quartets. The
renowned Ysaÿe Quartet gave the first performance of the piece in
Paris on December 29, 1893.
A Closer Listen
The G-Major Quartet is laid out in the traditional four-part
format, with a scherzo-like second movement and a sweetly
expressive Andantino sandwiched between two
expansive and dynamic fast movements. Although Debussy probably
borrowed the idea of using common thematic material to unify the
four movements from César Franck's D-Major Quartet of 1889, he went
far beyond his teacher in the use of unconventional chord
sequences, exotic scalar patterns, and nonfunctional harmonies.
From the opening bars, the listener is swept up in the work's
sensuous and emotionally turbulent sound world. The first violin
presents a terse motto whose sinuous contour—one step down, a skip,
and a rising third finished off with a triplet curlicue—recurs
throughout the quartet in various intervallic and rhythmic guises.
Also typical of Debussy's mature style are the work's vividly
orchestral sonorities and shifting tonal perspectives in which a
repeated note or phrase is cast in subtly different lights as the
harmonic ground shifts beneath it.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation