The Program
LEOŠ JANÁČEK
String Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters"
About the Composer
While vacationing in a Moravian spa town in 1917, Czech composer
Leos Janáček met and fell in love with the 25-year-old Kamila
Stösslová. She was less than half his age—he was 63—and unlettered.
Both were already married. But no matter; the two became devoted
correspondents. Their nearly 700 letters document a moving (and
chaste) love affair along with the history of Janáček's late music
with Kamila as his muse. She inspired the heroines in his operas
Kát'a Kabanová and The Makropulos Affair, both of
which use the viola d'amore, an unusual instrument the composer
associated with his beloved.
About the Work
Instead of the viola d'amore, the instrument linked to Kamila,
Janáček gives the standard viola special prominence in this
quartet. He described the work to Kamila as a musical depiction of
their relationship. "In this work I will always be only with you! …
I shall love doing it! You know, don't you, that I know no other
world than you!" Thus, the quartet bears the subtitle "Intimate
Letters." Whereas other pieces were composed "only in hot ash," he
described this quartet as having been "written in fire."
A Closer Listen
At the very opening, the viola plays an intense, nearly inaudible
solo, playing on the bridge of the instrument. Group and solo
alternate, loud and soft, until a new melody takes flight. The
composer described the second movement Adagio as an account of his
dream of Kamila giving birth to their son. A gently rocking theme
rises, falls, and returns to center; it is passed among the
instruments, heard as solos, duets, and accompanied by trills.
Eventually a new, dance-like theme appears in the first violin,
book-ended by quick, quietly descending figures. The movement ends
with the opening, rocking theme played fortissimo, accompanied by
the falling flourishes. The third movement piles on brief melodic
ideas, but the finale begins with a memorable melody in the first
violin. The many changes in tempo and mood reflect the composer's
fiery inspiration.
—Elizabeth Bergman
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
String Quartet No. 3, Op. 94
About the Composer
Upon returning to England in 1942 after three years in the US,
Britten determined to make his mark as a composer of operas, a
genre in which no English composer since Purcell had excelled. In
Peter Grimes, produced in London to wide acclaim in 1945,
he crystallized his signature theme of the "deviant" individual in
conflict with society. (As a conscientious objector, Britten had
been exempted from military service, but he lived in constant fear
of persecution for both his pacifism and his homosexuality.) It was
the first of a series of theatrical masterpieces—including The
Turn of the Screw, Billy Budd, A Midsummer
Night's Dream, and Death in Venice—that
revitalized British opera and transformed the reticent composer
into a prominent public figure. In his last years, Britten turned
increasingly inward, concentrating on the chamber music festival he
had founded in Aldeburgh and on his loving relationship with tenor
Peter Pears.
About the Work
With its many references to Death in Venice—in particular
to music associated with the hopelessly infatuated writer
Aschenbach, Britten's putative alter ego—the String Quartet No. 3
has unmistakable autobiographical overtones. Britten began
sketching the score in Aldeburgh in October 1975 and finished it a
month later in Venice, a city where he had always felt at home.
(The last movement of the quartet bears the rubric of the
once-powerful Venetian republic, "La serenissima.") Scholar Hans
Keller, to whom the quartet is dedicated, went so far as to
describe it as a Mozartean exercise in "the instrumental
purification of opera." Whether or not Britten intended the work as
a musical valediction, it was inevitably received as such when the
Amadeus Quartet gave the first performance in Aldeburgh two weeks
after the composer's death in 1976.
A Closer Listen
Unlike the traditional three- and four-movement formats that
Britten adopted in his earlier quartets, the Third Quartet is cast
as a suite-like sequence of five movements. Each alludes, either
directly or obliquely, to its operatic precursor. The first
movement, "Duets," evokes music associated with Aschenbach's erotic
fascination with the beautiful and exotic young Tadzio. The manic,
circling motifs of "Ostinato" are the musical image of his
obsession, while "Solo" treats the first violin as an isolated
protagonist, floating in an emotional space high above the spare
linear texture of the accompaniment. "Burlesque," with its
lumbering jollity and dancelike midsection, conjures a
phantasmagorical vision of the City of Bridges. In the final
"Recitative and Passacaglia," echoes of Aschenbach's love motif
consort with a lugubrious passacaglia theme (which, according to
Britten, was suggested by the tolling of Venetian church bells).
Unlike the First Quartet, which closes in a blaze of D major, the
Third Quartet leaves us hanging in air, its passions unresolved and
unresolvable.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
MAURICE RAVEL
String Quartet in F Major
About the Composer
Ravel felt acutely self-conscious about writing his first—and, as
it turned out, only—string quartet. Having made his mark in his
mid-20s with a small group of brilliantly crafted piano pieces,
including the ever-popular Pavane pour une infante
défunte and Jeux d'eaux, he found himself being
bracketed with Claude Debussy, 13 years his senior, as the shining
hope of French music. That comparisons would be drawn to Debussy's
celebrated String Quartet of 1893 was as disconcerting as it was
inevitable. Perhaps wary of calling attention to Debussy's
influence on his music, and eager to burnish his credentials as a
member in good standing of the musical establishment, Ravel
dedicated the F-Major Quartet to his teacher, Vincent d'Indy, an
influential composer of a markedly more conservative and academic
disposition.
About the Work
A judicious blend of spontaneity and premeditation is one of the
things that gives Ravel's quartet its distinctive fluidity and
eloquence. According to his pupil Alexis Roland-Manuel, Ravel
mistrusted "the secret powers which governed him unawares" and
sought to counterbalance his creative instincts with the criticism
of friends. D'Indy, predictably dismayed to see his prize student
playing fast and loose with tradition, bluntly pronounced the
quartet's highly compressed finale "stunted, badly balanced, in
fact, a failure." Debussy, on the other hand, instantly recognized
the kindred spark of iconoclastic genius. "In the name of the gods
of music, and in mine," he exclaimed, "do not touch a single note
of what you have written in your quartet." Ravel heeded this
excellent advice, and the work's well-received Paris premiere in
March 1904 firmly established him as Debussy's heir apparent.
A Closer Listen
Roland-Manuel characterized the quartet as "the most spontaneous
work Ravel has ever written," a description that applies especially
to the improvisatory-sounding slow movement, with its freely
declamatory outbursts and dreamlike reminiscences of the opening
Allegro moderato. Yet Ravel's Classical discipline is equally
evident in the first movement's two-theme sonata form and the
slightly off-kilter but tightly controlled metrical patterns of the
second and fourth movements. As the composer wrote in his
autobiography, "My String Quartet represents a conception of
musical construction, imperfectly realized no doubt, but set out
much more precisely than in my earlier compositions." Like Debussy
(and Bartók after him), Ravel experimented with cyclical structure
in his quartet, achieving a strong sense of unity among the four
movements by means of recurring intervals, melodic shapes,
textures, and sonorities.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation