Notes on the Piece
Béla Bartók’s six
string quartets are iconic works, articulating the divide between Romanticism
and Modernism, East and West, emotional expression and rational conception. It
took music theorists years to crack the code on how the scores were put
together, the result being a trove of publications that try to explain Bartók’s
obsession with palindromic, mirror-like musical forms, symmetrical pitch
arrays, and unusual scales.
The paradox, if
not perversion, of the analyses is their disregard for the kinetic dimension of
Bartók’s music—that is to say, how it moves the body. The quartets range in
reference from keening laments to rustic round dances to the eerie rustling of
critters in the night.
It’s often noted that Stanley Kubrick relied on Bartók for
the soundtrack to his horror film The
Shining. Violence is
enacted upon the strings. In other words, Bartók’s catalog of effects is not
for classical music’s faint of heart.
The First String
Quartet of 1909 is the tamest of the set, and can be appreciated outside the
matrix of technical diagrams. It’s a personal work, a musical tribute of sorts
to violinist Stefi Geyer, with whom Bartok fell desperately in love in 1907. He
even composed a special musical gesture for her: a stack of thirds—two major,
one minor—nicknamed the “Stefi” motif. It is heard using the pitches D–F-sharp–A–C-sharp
in his Violin Concerto of 1908. The two movements of that piece were intended
to represent the hot and cold sides of Stefi’s personality, which perhaps
explains why she ended her relationship with the composer at the time of his
completion of the First String Quartet.
In one of his
letters, Bartók described the first movement of the quartet as funereal. For
Malcolm Gillies, the music bears the influence of Beethoven, specifically the
opening fugue of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14. But Wagner is also in the
mix. Bartók’s first movement recalls the bitter, dissatisfied longing of the
title characters in Wagner’s Tristan
und Isolde. Listen closely, however, and the comparisons fall away. Bartók’s
dense corkscrew of notes cannot be likened to the slacker constructions of his
Romantic predecessors.
From this tense
state, the second and third movements progress to a more lighthearted ending.
Much has been made of the influence of different folksong traditions in Bartók’s
mature works, and the First String Quartet is seen as a transition into the
folkloric syncretism and abstraction of his later years. The third movement
offers a simple example of this influence in the emphasis on five-note,
“pentatonic” gestures. Other passages suggest the rhythmic flex, or rubato, of
folk singing. Gillies reminds us, however, that even here—in the bustling
village of the third movement—Bartók’s affair with Stefi Geyer left its mark.
The cello mocks a popular Budapest song titled, in translation, “Just a Fair
Girl.”
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