The Program
WOLFGANG
AMADEUS MOZART
String Quartet in A Major, K. 464
About the Composer
By the early 1780s, Mozart had completed his informal apprenticeship in
string-quartet writing under Joseph Haydn. If the elder composer had brought
the Classical quartet genre to full maturity, the younger man invested it with
unprecedented emotional depth and
complexity. Nowhere are these qualities more apparent than in the
half-dozen quartets composed between late 1782 and early 1785, known
collectively as the “Haydn” Quartets. In dedicating the set to his esteemed
mentor, Mozart reciprocated the magnanimous gesture that Haydn had made several
months earlier, when he told Wolfgang’s father that his son was “the greatest
composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is
more, the most profound knowledge of composition.”
About the
Work
Completed in January 1785, the A-Major Quartet, K. 464, is the fourth of the
six “Haydn” Quartets. Mozart presented the published set to Haydn later that
year, describing it as “the fruit of long and laborious study.” The truth of
the statement is evidenced by the unusually large number of preparatory
sketches that Mozart made, which attest both
his industry and his “profound knowledge of composition.” Needless to
say, however, these highly polished masterpieces betray no whiff of midnight
oil. One contemporary critic chided Mozart for seeking novelty at the expense
of conventional feeling; the quartets, this reviewer complained, were “too
highly seasoned—and whose palate can endure this for long?” Evidently, he
underestimated the European public’s taste for spicy musical fare. The “Haydn”
Quartets were so enthusiastically received in Austria and elsewhere that the
scores had to be reprinted several times.
A Closer
Listen
In the opening Allegro, the first violin’s sweet-tempered melody is answered by
a gruff unison phrase in the lower register. Mozart combines, recombines, and
elaborates these two germinal ideas against
a kaleidoscopically changing harmonic backdrop, varying and enriching
the texture with imitative entries,
syncopation, and contrary motion between the voices. After an unusually
substantial Menuetto, built around a repeated-note figure in dotted rhythm, we
reach the quartet’s centerpiece: an extended theme and variations in the
dominant key of D major, featuring star turns for each of the four players in
succession. A deceptively simple four-note theme, descending by half steps,
announces the final Allegro, and soon we’re off on a merry chase, full of
exuberant contrapuntal artifice, unpredictable instrumental pairings, and
playful twists and turns. Keep your eye on the ball, Mozart seems to be saying
as he dazzles us with his compositional virtuosity and sleight of hand.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
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.
Not until a revised version of Jenůfa
was staged in Prague in 1916 did his fame begin to spread. Janáček was already
moving away from the late-Romantic ethos of his early works to the distinctive
sound world of his maturity, characterized by epigrammatic terseness, abrupt
changes of mood and atmosphere, and irregular, speech-like rhythms. In the last
decade of his life, his passionate but platonic affair with the much younger
Kamila Stösslová sparked a white-hot blaze of compositional activity. Janáček
immortalized his muse in such masterworks as the operas Kát’a Kabanová,The Cunning
Little Vixen, and The Makropulos Affair, as well as the Second String Quartet of
1928, subtitled “Intimate Letters,” which he described as having been “written
in fire.”
About the
Work
Janáček’s gift for impassioned utterance and dramatic characterization are
front and center in his First String Quartet of 1923. The work takes its
subtitle from Leo Tolstoy’s 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 well-known “Kreutzer” Sonata together,
prompting the 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 had been inspired to compose a piano trio (now lost), some of whose
ideas, he explained, “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—though, unlike Tolstoy’s tortured
protagonist, he found at least a measure of happiness in his last years.
A Closer
Listen
That Janáček envisioned the quartet as a
continuous narrative is suggested by the fact that all four movements
are marked Con moto. Yet nearly
everything about the music—its restless, unstable rhythms, disjointed, episodic
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, exhausted—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. Whatever attracted Janáček
to Tolstoy’s morbid tale of marital infidelity, his sympathies were clearly
with the wife: 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
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13, “Ist es wahr?”
About the
Composer
No work better illustrates Mendelssohn’s prodigious precocity than the A-Minor
String Quartet. Both its technical assurance and its depth of feeling belie the
fact that its composer was an 18-year-old student at the University of Berlin.
To be sure, by late 1827 Mendelssohn already had an impressive clutch of
masterpieces to his credit, including the first version of the great String
Octet and the overture to A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. Yet none of his previous works quite prepares one for the
boldly iconoclastic language of his second quartet. It was at once a tribute to
his artistic progenitors and a declaration of independence.
About the
Work
Mendelssohn freely acknowledged his debts to other composers. Prominent among
them was J. S. Bach, who inspired the profusion of counterpoint in the A-Minor
Quartet. (Weeks after finishing the quartet, Mendelssohn would begin rehearsals
for his epoch-making revival of Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion in Berlin.) The strongest influence on Mendelssohn’s
quartet writing, however, was Beethoven. Contemporary critics often bracketed the two composers together, and so
characteristically “Beethovenian” are the A-Minor Quartet’s
quasi-cyclical structure and generally high level of dissonance that one
Parisian listener mistook it for one of Beethoven’s late quartets, much to
Mendelssohn’s chagrin.
A Closer
Listen
The quartet opens with a luminous, triple-time melody in A major borrowed from
a love song that Mendelssohn had recently composed. A three-note motif—first
falling, then rising—soon emerges as one of the work’s germinal ideas. (It
originally accompanied the words Ist es
wahr?—“Is it true,” the lover asks, “that you are always waiting for me in
the arbored walk?”) The rather severe fugue that constitutes the midsection of
the quartet’s slow second movement recalls the Bach of the Musical Offering and the Beethoven of the late string quartets. Yet
there is no mistaking Mendelssohn’s touch in the third movement, with its
trademark gossamer scherzo. Nor is there anything remotely derivative in the
masterly way the finale recapitulates and elaborates on the themes of the
preceding movements. A spacious coda, in radiant A major, harks back to the
question posed at the beginning of the quartet, wordlessly affirming the poet’s
devotion to the beloved woman “who feels with me and stays ever true to me.”
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation