CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Zehetmair Quartet

Zankel Hall
Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 7:30 PM

Zehetmair Quartet
·· Thomas Zehetmair, Violin
·· Kuba Jakowicz, Violin
·· Ruth Killius, Viola
·· Ursula Smith, Cello

MOZART String Quartet in G Major, K. 156
HINDEMITH String Quartet No. 4, Op. 22
SCHUMANN String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 41, No. 1

Program Notes:

By Harry Haskell

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART String Quartet in G Major, K. 156Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, in Vienna.

Composed in late 1772 or early 1773, Mozart’s String Quartet in G Major received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on February 25, 1984, with the Mozarteum Quartett Salzburg: Karlheinz Franke and Josef Smola, violins; Jiri Pospichal, viola; and Heinrich Amminger, cello.

Scholars have long debated whether the six string quartets designated as numbers 155–160 in the Köchel catalogue of Mozart’s works were composed as a unified cycle. The evidence, both historical and stylistic, is inconclusive. Nevertheless, the fact that all six quartets are in the traditional three-movement format of the Italian concerto grosso and date from the teenage Mozart’s last trip to Italy with his father, in late 1772 and early 1773, has given rise to the works’ collective nickname: the “Italian” quartets.

Energized by his Italian journeys, Mozart churned out a steady stream of compositions under his father’s watchful eye. At the end of October 1772, Leopold wrote home from Bolzano that Wolfgang was writing a string quartet (probably K. 155) “to while away the time.” In its two outer movements, at least, the G-Major Quartet bears the hallmarks of a jeu d’esprit tossed off in a happy burst of youthful inspiration. The themes are compact, spirited, and gay, and Mozart’s characteristically lucid development holds few detours or surprises. Only the minor-key trio section of the concluding minuet, with its darkly cascading eighth notes, hints at weightier matters.

The central Adagio is a very different proposition. The heart of the quartet, it is one of the most sublime slow movements to be found in early Mozart. Its emotional intensity, piquant harmonies, and intricately wrought part writing stand in sharp contrast to the carefree simplicity of the surrounding movements. Mozart wisely discarded an earlier version, also in E minor but infinitely more conventional and poorer in invention. He did, however, salvage the idea of alternating loud and soft passages, a chiaroscuro effect that greatly enhances the music’s tender pathos.

PAUL HINDEMITH String Quartet No. 4, Op. 22Born November 16, 1895, in Hanau (near Frankfurt); died December 28, 1963, in Frankfurt.

Composed in November and December of 1921, Hindemith’s String Quartet No. 4 was first performed at the Donaueschingen Festival on November 4, 1922, by the Amar Quartet. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on February 1, 1976, with the Audubon String Quartet: Ronald Copes and Janet Brady, violins; Judy Geist, viola; and C. Thomas Shaw, cello.

1921 was a banner year for Paul Hindemith. His pair of boldly expressionistic one-act operas, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderers, the Hope of Women) and Das Nusch-Nuschi—the latter with its controversially salacious quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—had established the 26-year-old composer’s reputation as an enfant terrible. In fact, Hindemith’s bark was considerably worse than his bite. Beneath his impulse to shock the solid burghers of Weimar Germany lay a deep-seated devotion to compositional craft and a conviction that music should do more than merely titillate the senses.

While earning a living as concert master of the Frankfurt Opera House Orchestra, Hindemith indulged his passion for chamber music by performing with a succession of string quartets. In the summer of 1921, frustrated by the hidebound repertoire of his current ensemble, he broke away and started a new foursome devoted to contemporary music. The Amar Quartet made its bow at that year’s Donaueschingen chamber music festival, with Hindemith on viola and his brother Rudolf on cello. The vehicle for their acclaimed debut was Hindemith’s own String Quartet, Op. 16. The following year, the group chose the same venue to introduce Hindemith’s Op. 22, sometimes identified as his third string quartet, although it was in fact his fourth essay in the genre.

Audiences encountering Hindemith’s music for the first time in 1922 were surely struck by its radical departure from the plush textures and long-breathed phrases that characterized the overripe romanticism of the prewar years. The quartet opens with a slow, wistful fugue—a foretaste of the spare linear polyphony that pervades the work. The music builds steadily in speed, intensity, and volume before subsiding into a quiet reminiscence of the initial theme, this time punctuated by the cello’s plucked “walking” bass line. The second movement evokes the fugal subject in a more agitated setting, sandwiched between rollicking outbursts of irregular, Hungarian-flavored rhythms.

Hindemith was constantly urging performers of his music to worry less about beauty of sound than overall effect. The Amar Quartet’s vigorous, devil-may-care performance of Op. 22, as heard on a recording made in 1927, takes full measure of the contrast between the work’s impetuous muscularity and its bittersweet lyricism. Hindemith further explores this dichotomy in the remaining three movements (the last two of which are played without a break). Relentlessly chromatic throughout, the quartet unpredictably comes to rest on an emphatic unison F sharp.

ROBERT SCHUMANN String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 41, No. 1
Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau, Germany; died July 29, 1856, in Endenich, near Bonn.

Composed in the spring of 1842, Schumann’s String Quartet in A Minor received its first public performance on January 8, 1843, at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on December 20, 1891, with the New York Symphony String Quartet: Adolph Brodsky and Jules Conus, violins; Jan Koert, viola; and Anton Hekking, cello.

The three quartets of Schumann’s Op. 41, composed in the spring and summer of 1842, reflect his deep immersion in the chamber music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Schumann was a keen student of music history and acutely aware of his own place in it. In dedicating the Op. 41 set to his contemporary, Felix Mendelssohn, he acknowledged its common debt to the masters of the first Viennese school, as well as his decision to refocus his energies on compositional technique rather than the literary models that had inspired so much of his earlier music.

The A-Minor Quartet begins with an expansive introduction, the plaintive theme stated by each of the four instruments in turn. A surprise modulation to the key of F major introduces a perky melody in a lilting 6/8 meter, which embarks on a sequence of venturesome harmonic excursions. A countersubject of a markedly different character gives Schumann an opportunity to display his contrapuntal prowess. In the second movement, a fleet Mendelssohnian scherzo in the home key of A minor, stabbing sforzandi echo the middle-of-the-bar accents of the preceding Allegro.

The richly expressive Adagio is almost fantasia-like in its construction, the languorous, typically Schumannesque melody supported by rippling arpeggiated figures. Both harmonically and rhythmically, this is the most free and overtly “Romantic” of the four movements. A hushed F- major cadence prepares the ground for a spitfire finale built on chains of interlocking thirds and laced with reminiscences of thematic material from earlier movements.

Schumann was justifiably proud of his Op. 41 quartets, which marked his return to chamber music composition after a hiatus of several years. In September 1842, he made a wedding-anniversary present of the scores to his wife, followed by a private performance. Clara recorded her delighted reaction in her diary, noting that everything in the three works was “new, along with being clear, well worked out, and always appropriate for a quartet.”


Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Harry Haskell is the editor of The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of
Music Criticism (Princeton University Press) and the author of
The Early Music Revival: A History (Dover).

Zehetmair Quartet
·· Thomas Zehetmair, Violin
·· Kuba Jakowicz, Violin
·· Ruth Killius, Viola
·· Ursula Smith, Cello
Founded in autumn 1994, the Zehetmair Quartet embarked upon its first concert tour in the spring of 1998. The Quartet’s success resulted in re-engagements by all of the tour’s promoters, followed by invitations to the US (2001 and 2003) and Japan (2002) to complement the Quartet’s annual European tours. In the summer of 2004, the Zehetmair Quartet was a guest at the Edinburgh, Helsinki, and Schleswig-Holstein Musik festivals, among others. In spring 2006, a very successful European tour led the Zehetmair Quartet throughout Europe, with appearances in Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Zurich, Madrid, Lisbon, and Manchester, among others. This past February, the Quartet gave concerts and taught a master class in Japan.

The ensemble’s first CD, featuring Bartók’s Fourth and Hartmann’s First quartet, was released in 2000 on the ECM label and was awarded the Quarterly Prize by the Deutsche Schallplattenkritik. The quartet’s ECM release of Schumann’s First and Third string quartets in 2003 won the Gramophone Award (Record of the Year), the Diapason d’Or, the Dutch Edison Classical Music Award (2004), the Belgian Caecilia Award, and the Klara Award for the best international production of the year. This past spring, the group issued its latest recording, which features Hindemith’s Fourth and Bartók’s Fifth string quartets.

The Zehetmair Quartet rehearses a new program each year, under a conception that generally envisages rarely performed masterpieces (e.g., by K. A. Hartmann, S. Veress) in combination with the more standard quartet repertoire.