The Program
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
String Quartet No. 1 in D Major, Op. 11
About the Composer
Like a number of other Russian composers, Tchaikovsky began his
career as a low-level civil servant, working as a clerk in the
Ministry of Justice in St. Petersburg. Not until age 23 did he find
his true vocation and enroll as a full-time student at the newly
established St. Petersburg Conservatory. Upon graduating, he moved
to Moscow to teach at the sister school founded by pianist and
conductor Nikolai Rubinstein. Tchaikovsky's extensive academic
training and cosmopolitan outlook eventually put him at odds with
Russian nationalists like Borodin, Balakirev, and Mussorgsky. But
he shared their deep interest in Russian history and culture, as
illustrated by works like the operas Vakula the
Smith and Eugene Onegin, the Second Symphony
("Little Russian"), the Slavonic March, and dozens of art
songs.
About the Work
Tchaikovsky's First String Quartet, composed in 1871, is a case in
point: Its transcendently beautiful slow movement is based on a
Ukrainian folk tune that he had jotted down while visiting his
sister and her husband at their country estate two years earlier.
(The Andante cantabile would become enormously popular as a
standalone piece; Tchaikovsky himself made an arrangement for cello
and orchestra in the late 1880s.) The D-Major Quartet was the
centerpiece of a benefit concert devoted to Tchaikovsky's music
held at the Moscow Conservatory that March. The work's success gave
a fillip to the composer's growing reputation and helped ensure
that it would gain a secure place in the standard quartet
repertoire.
A Closer Listen
The opening Moderato e semplice—with its plush, velvety sonorities
and dramatic modulations—reminds us that Tchaikovsky was a
symphonist at heart. It features a warm, gently pulsating theme
whose distinctive syncopated rhythmic pattern lends itself to
expansion and development on a broad scale. The Andante cantabile,
by contrast, is intimacy itself. Tchaikovsky milks the bittersweet
B-flat-major folk tune for all it's worth, then pivots on the
second violin's repeated Fs to an equally beguiling melody of his
own, in D-flat, accompanied by hypnotically repeating pizzicato
notes in the cello. More surprises lie in store in the vigorous,
dancelike Scherzo; listen for the three superimposed metric
patterns in the middle trio section. The rousing Finale opens
outward from a compact three-note motif (short-short-long),
announcing a gracefully arching theme that migrates from one voice
to another, now in artful disguise, now in playful canon.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
String Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 108
About the Composer
Few composers have been as rudely buffeted by the winds of
political fortune as Shostakovich. From the time his music first
incurred official censure for its bourgeois "formalism" in the
early 1930s, the highly strung composer played an elaborate game of
feint and attack with the Soviet regime, cannily balancing his more
abrasive, cutting-edge music with a stream of reassuringly
patriotic and artistically conservative works. In the thaw that
followed Stalin's death in 1953, Shostakovich reached a precarious
entente with his political masters, who needed his support nearly
as much as he needed theirs. He traveled abroad, established
contact with Benjamin Britten and other Western composers, and
achieved performances of works that had long been suppressed. With
acute misgivings, he also accepted a number of official posts,
becoming secretary of the state-run composers' union and belatedly
joining the Communist Party.
About the Work
The seventh of Shostakovich's 15 string quartets falls squarely in
the thick of this emotionally turbulent period in his life.
Chronologically, it falls between two of his most blatantly
sycophantic works, the 11th and 12th symphonies of 1957 and 1961,
respectively, both commemorating events associated with the Russian
Revolution. Such monumental "official" productions are probably
best seen as opportunistic attempts to curry favor in high places.
At the same time, following his established pattern, Shostakovich
withdrew from the public sphere and plumbed new expressive depths
in a series of brooding, hermetic works that departed radically
from the sterile dogmas of socialist realism. A series of personal
tragedies, coupled with declining health, may have reinforced the
introspective frame of mind that is evident in the Seventh and
Eighth quartets, both composed in 1960.
A Closer Listen
Dedicated to the composer's first wife Nina, who died of cancer in
1954, the Seventh Quartet is notably brief, elliptical, and
enigmatic. There is little trace of the dark lyricism or
autobiographical intensity of the Eighth Quartet, written a few
months later. Instead, Shostakovich seems determined to keep the
listener at an ironic distance. But the gaiety is forced and
fleeting: The first violin's looping melody at the beginning
plummets groundward like a falling kite, and when the cello picks
up the thread a few bars later, its brisk, march-like tune circles
back on itself without taking flight. The whole quartet is full of
strangeness: the shrill, piercing accents that disrupt the delicate
pizzicato tread of the opening Allegretto's midsection; the muted,
mirthless cantilena and semitonal slitherings of the ghostly Lento;
the disjointed waltz that follows hard on the heels of a savage
fugue in the final Allegro. Strangest of all, perhaps, are the
hushed F-sharp-minor chords that close the first and last
movements, suggesting neither resolution nor peace, but the
stillness of death.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
BEDŘICH SMETANA
String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor, "From My Life"
About the Composer
Together with Dvořák, Smetana was the public voice of Czech
nationalism in the last decades of the 19th century. The son of a
prosperous brewer in rural Bohemia, he gravitated toward
cosmopolitan Prague as a young man and took part in the abortive
uprising of 1848 against the Austrian Habsburgs. With the support
of Liszt, he began to build a reputation at home and abroad; the
production of his opera The Brandenburgers in Bohemia in
1866 brought him his first taste of real fame. It was quickly
followed by The Bartered Bride, a sun-drenched comedy that
put Czech opera on the international map. The early 1870s marked
the onset of the syphilis-induced deafness that would plague the
composer for the rest of his life. Smetana bravely soldiered on,
completing his cycle of symphonic tone poems Má
vlast (My Country) and his patriotic opera
Libuše, which inaugurated Prague's National Theater in
1881. By the time he died in a lunatic asylum three years later, he
was honored as a founding father of Czech music.
About the Work
Smetana wrote the first of his two quartets under trying
circumstances. By late 1876, the persistent buzzing in his ear
prevented him from working for more than an hour at a stretch.
Moreover, the ensemble for which the work was intended refused to
perform it, declaring the polka movement unplayable. (The
unofficial premiere finally took place at a friend's house in 1878,
with Dvořák playing the viola.) Hoping to facilitate the quartet's
reception, Smetana attached a programmatic subtitle, "From My
Life." He explained that the first movement expressed the "romantic
spirit" of his early years, tinged with premonitions of deafness.
The second movement recalled "the cheerful time of my youth in
which I composed dance pieces that I presented copiously to all my
acquaintances and was known as a passionate dancer in my own
right." The third movement was imbued with "the happiness of my
first love," while the fourth marked his "discovery of the essence
of national music and my joy in following this path up to the
moment when it was brutally interrupted by the ominous
calamity."
A Closer Listen
In the Allegro vivo appassionato, the viola's dramatically charged,
foreboding theme is set against a restless undercurrent of
undulating eighth notes. This gives way to a tenderly lyrical
countersubject; the ensuing struggle between the two ideas ends in
a draw when the first violin combines them in the final bars. The
Allegro moderato alla Polka is all boyish insouciance, with its
foot-stomping rhythms, off-kilter accents, jerky hesitations, and
whimsical imitations of a wheezy harmonium. The searing intensity
of the Largo sostenuto is accentuated by the warm key of A-flat
major. The final Vivace dashes off in a blaze of E major; not until
the dust settles do we hear the rollicking folk-like tune that
Smetana posited as "the essence of national music." Instead of the
expected happy conclusion, however, the high spirits dissolve into
shuddering tremolos, the first violin emits a screeching high E,
themes from the first movement return in fragmentary form, and
silence engulfs us.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation