CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Mendelssohn String Quartet

Weill Recital Hall
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Mendelssohn String Quartet
·· Miriam Fried, Violin
·· Nicholas Mann, Violin
·· Daniel Panner, Viola
·· Marcy Rosen, Cello

MENDELSSOHN String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 13, "Ist es wahr?"
BARTÓK String Quartet No. 2

BEETHOVEN String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132

Program Notes:

THE PROGRAM

FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809–1847)
String Quartet No. 2 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 prepared anyone 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 began 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: 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."

Performance Time:
approximately 26 minutes



BÉLA BARTÓK (1881–1945)
String Quartet No. 2, Op. 17

About the Composer

Bartók was born in Transylvania in 1881 and died in New York City 64 years later. Although rooted in Middle European folk traditions and late–19th century Impressionism, his music was forged in the crucible of the early 20th century. Many of Bartók’s early works are suffused with the melodies, rhythms, and colors of Hungarian and Balkan peasant music. By contrast, the boldly expressionistic masterpieces of the 1930s and ‘40s, such as the Violin Concerto and the Concerto for Orchestra, express the restless, tormented spirit of the "Age of Anxiety."


About the Work

Bartók’s six string quartets, composed between 1909 and 1939, have achieved the canonic status of modern classics. As such, they have been subjected to microscopic analysis, touching on every aspect of the composer’s musical language from the finest points of pitch structure to large-scale formal organization. For the average listener, however, the most immediately striking feature of Bartók’s highly distinctive sound world may well be his prodigious inventiveness in the rhythmic sphere and the captivating sonorities he coaxes from the four instruments.

A Closer Listen

Bartók’s Second Quartet is an asymmetrical triptych: Two somberly lyrical outer panels of disparate dimensions frame an expansive, dancelike Allegro that pulses with raw energy. The opening Moderato has a haunted, otherworldly quality. The plaintive, arching melody that the first violin introduces at the beginning serves as a germinal motive: Listen for its characteristic intervals throughout the movement. The middle Allegro is a tour de force of quartet writing, with its kaleidoscopic sonorities and textures, and hyperkinetic, ever-changing rhythms. The muted Lento picks up where the Moderato left off. The music hovers delicately between dissonance and consonance, much as the quartet as a whole hovers over, but never quite settles into, the tonal centers of A and D.

Performance Time:
approximately 30 minutes



LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132

About the Composer

In the spring of 1825, shortly after the premiere of his Op. 127 String Quartet in E-flat Major, Beethoven was laid low by a severe intestinal ailment. Although a strict dietary regimen soon put him right, the intimation of his mortality clearly made a profound impact. No sooner was the composer on the road to recovery than he applied himself to writing what he called "a sacred song of thanksgiving from a convalescent to the divinity." This deeply felt slow movement is the focal point of the A-Minor String Quartet, a work of majestic proportions and startling contrasts that points the way toward the radically innovative musical language of Beethoven’s last quartets.

About the Work

Beethoven’s 16 string quartets have long been regarded as the Mount Everest of the genre, the pinnacle to which other composers aspired. (Both Mendelssohn and Bartók composed in Beethoven’s shadow and were keenly aware of his influence.) All five of Beethoven’s late-period quartets (opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, and 135) were composed between the summer of 1824 and the autumn of 1826. Op. 132 was the second of three commissioned by Prince Nikolai Galitsin, Beethoven’s Russian patron. These knotty, inward-looking masterpieces stretch the formal and expressive language of the Classical string quartet almost to the breaking point.

A Closer Listen

The heart of the quartet is the intense Molto adagio. It consists of three statements of a broad, hymnlike melody in the archaic-sounding Lydian mode (the fifth of the eight church modes, or scales), each more elaborate than the last. Interspersed with these spiritual meditations are passages of a more rhapsodic, almost febrile character. "Feeling new strength" (as Beethoven’s marking in the score has it), the invalid’s pulse quickens, the music now surging forward, now pulling back, until it finally comes to rest on a peaceful F-major chord.

The Molto adagio is flanked by a pair of fast movements in A major, the first a playful Allegro, the second a jaunty little march that leads to an incongruously dramatic "recitative" declaimed by the first violin. The quartet’s two outer movements, both firmly anchored in A minor, mirror the soul-searching of the Molto adagio. A somberly mysterious prelude sets the stage for the opening Allegro, which is by turns lighthearted and grimly fatalistic in mood. The final Allegro appassionato is an agitated rondo in triple time. Beethoven had once considered using the principal theme in the heroic finale of his Ninth Symphony. Here, too, the struggle between light and darkness culminates in a life-affirming major-key ending.

Performance Time:
approximately 44 minutes

—Harry Haskell

© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation


Online Supplement

Mendelssohn’s adulation of J. S. Bach turned him into a lifelong student of counterpoint, but his efforts in that line (as represented by the fugue in the slow movement of the A-Minor Quartet) did not meet with universal approval. Henry Chorley, the famously crotchety British critic, complained that Mendelssohn was "parading his science, his knowledge of the ancients, his mastery over all the learning of his Art" in an effort to "prove himself a man among the double refined intelligences of those by whom he was surrounded."

Beethoven’s influence on Mendelssohn was less controversial. The French predilection for Beethoven helps explain why the A-Minor Quartet became a popular set piece at the Paris Conservatoire. "The pupils there," Mendelssohn proudly reported to his family, "are practicing their fingers off to play ‘Ist es wahr?’"

Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1, composed in 1909, was so far ahead of its time that it had to wait nearly two years for its first performance. The Second Quartet won acceptance more readily: Completed in 1917, it was first heard in Budapest on March 3, 1918. Both performances were given by the enterprising quartet led by the violinist Imre Waldbauer, which championed Bartók’s music long before other ensembles did.

Published in 1920, the Quartet No. 2 was recorded in 1925 by the Amar Quartet, in which Paul Hindemith played the viola. It was the first of Bartók’s six string quartets to be recorded—and the last for many years thereafter.

The first performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132, took place on Sept. 9, 1825, at a tavern in Bonn named, appropriately enough, the "Wild Man." In the audience was the English conductor Sir George Smart. He recorded in his journal that the quartet was "three-quarters of an hour long. They played it twice. The four performers were Schuppanzigh, Holz, Weiss, and Lincke. It is most chromatic and there is a slow movement entitled ‘Praise for the recovery of an invalid.’ Beethoven intended to allude to himself I suppose for he was very ill during the early part of this year. He directed the performers, and took off his coat, the room being warm and crowded. A staccato passage not being expressed to the satisfaction of his eye, for alas, he could not hear, he seized Holz’s violin and played the passage a quarter of a tone too flat."

Mendelssohn String Quartet
·· Miriam Fried, Violin
·· Nicholas Mann, Violin
·· Daniel Panner, Viola
·· Marcy Rosen, Cello
THE ARTISTS

MENDELSSOHN STRING QUARTET

Miriam Fried, Violin
Nicholas Mann, Violin
Daniel Panner, Viola
Marcy Rosen, Cello

After 30 hugely successful and critically acclaimed seasons, the Mendelssohn String Quartet announces that 2009–2010 marks its final season. Having established a reputation as one of the most imaginative, vital, and exciting quartets of its generation, it has toured annually throughout North America and worldwide.

The quartet was, for nine years, the Blodgett Artists in Residence at Harvard University. It has performed at such distinguished venues as Carnegie Hall; the Kennedy Center and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw; Wigmore Hall in London; and Zurich’s Tonhalle. The resident quartet of the Eastern Shore Chamber Music Festival and former resident quartet of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Mendelssohn String Quartet has performed at the Caramoor Festival and at the Festival Pablo Casals in Prades, France; in addition, it has made frequent appearances at New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, as well as the Ravinia, Aspen, and Saratoga music festivals.

The quartet’s long association with the Ravinia Festival continued in the summer seasons of both 2008 and 2009, and its 2008–2009 season included performances across the US in cities such as Albuquerque, Savannah, and Corpus Christi. In addition to tonight’s farewell performance, the 2009–2010 season includes a final return to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, as well as performances at the Harvard Musical Association and the Chamber Music Societies of Buffalo and Bethlehem (Pennsylvania).

The Mendelssohn Quartet has had a strong commitment to contemporary music, and has given world premieres of works commissioned by and for them. During the past several seasons, the quartet performed the world premieres of string quartets by Bernard Rands, Augusta Read Thomas, David Horne, and Scott Wheeler.

The quartet’s discography can be found on the BIS, Laurel, Nonesuch, and Music Masters labels. Its most recent recording is a two-CD release on the BIS label of the Mendelssohn viola quintets (with Robert Mann, viola), and of composers associated with Harvard University—Mario Davidovsky, Bernard Rands, Walter Piston, Leon Kirchner, and Earl Kim (with Lucy Shelton, soprano).

Other distinguished artists who have appeared with the Mendelssohn String Quartet have included pianists Claude Frank, Ursula Oppens, Peter Serkin, and Menahem Pressler; sopranos Phyllis Bryn-Julson and Lucy Shelton; violinist Jaime Laredo and violist Scott Nickrenz; cellist David Soyer; and clarinetists Richard Stoltzman and Charles Neidich.