CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Pavel Haas Quartet

Weill Recital Hall
Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Pavel Haas Quartet
·· Veronika Jaruskova, Violin
·· Maria Fuxová, Violin
·· Pavel Nikl, Viola
·· Peter Jarusek, Cello

JANÁČEK String Quartet No. 1, "Kreutzer Sonata"
DVOŘÁK String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, "American"
BEETHOVEN String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132

Rising Stars is a project of the European Concert Hall Organization (ECHO), supported by the European Commission. For this series, the directors of Europe’s most important concert halls and Carnegie Hall—the only non-European member of ECHO—nominate young soloists or ensembles from their own countries to appear in other ECHO halls. Rising Stars nominees appear at Carnegie Hall in the Distinctive Debuts series in Weill Recital Hall.

The Pavel Haas Quartet was nominated by the Festpielhaus (Baden-Baden) and the Philharmonie (Cologne).

Encore:
SMETANA Largo sostenuto from String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor, "From My Life"

The Distinctive Debuts series is made possible, in part, by an endowment fund for the presentation of young artists generously provided by The Lizabeth and Frank Newman Charitable Foundation.

Additional endowment support for international outreach has been provided by the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation.

Program Notes:

LEOŠ JANÁČEK String Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata”
Born July 3, 1854, in Hukvaldy, Moravia; died August 12, 1928, in Moravská Ostrava.

Composed in 1923, Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1 was first performed in 1924. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 16, 1958, at Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) with the Janáček Quartet: Jirí Trávnícek and Adolf Sýkora, violins; Jirí Kratochvíl, viola; and Karel Krafka, cello.

Janáček, a composer of great originality and independence, devoted an important part of his work to two great causes that commanded his interest. One was the advancement of the native Slavic cultures in the regions that became Czechoslovakia and their preservation from the powerful German-speaking societies around them. The other was concern for the condition of women, which provided the subject of this quartet and of several of his operas and other works.

Janáček began his musical career as a choirboy in Brno. Later, he studied in Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna, but he returned to Brno to teach and subsequently spent almost all of his adult life there. As a young adult, he wrote a string quartet that disappeared for many years but was rediscovered long after his death. In the interim, the present work, composed in 1923, was known as his String Quartet No. 1. Like many of his works, its music has literary associations.

The idea for this quartet originated in 1908, when Janáček wrote a trio for piano, violin, and cello inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s story The Kreutzer Sonata, a tale of adulterous passion aroused by a performance of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata, Op. 47, called the “Kreutzer” Sonata. Janáček’s trio was performed in 1909 but was lost or destroyed. It is thought that he may have reused some of the material in this quartet, which would explain how he was able to compose it in just one week, during the autumn of 1923. Shortly after the first performance in 1924, he wrote to a friend, “I had in mind an unhappy, tortured, beaten woman, as Tolstoy described her.” Tolstoy ascribed “the most immoral effects” to music, but Janáček contended that his music was a moral protest against male despotism over women. Janáček intended to compose this work based on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and like his 1921 opera, Katya Kabanova, used as the subject an unhappily married woman who takes an unworthy lover and dies tragically.

The general mood of Tolstoy’s story, rather than its specific events, is directly reflected in Janáček’s yearning, brooding String Quartet No. 1. The first movement opens Adagio, and then becomes Con moto, with two germinal motives. He uses the first motive, thought to be associated with the heroine’s desires, again in the second and fourth movements. The second movement, Con moto, a kind of polka-scherzo, was probably patterned after a similar work, the autobiographical First String Quartet, “From My Life,” composed by another Czech composer, Bedøich Smetana. Janáček derives his main theme from the one that opens the Smetana work. The throbbing, passionate, slow third movement begins Con moto with a theme related to one appearing in Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata”; it goes on to an agitated Vivace middle section and closes with resignation. The music drama of the quartet reaches its climax in the anguished finale, which is based on the theme of yearning from the first movement. It, too, begins Con moto and concludes with a brief adagio.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, “American”
Born September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves, near Kralupy; died May 1, 1904, in Prague.

Composed June 12–23, 1893, in Spillville, Ohio, Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 received its New York premiere in Carnegie Hall on January 12, 1894, with the Kneisel Quartet: Franz Kneisel and Otto Roth, violins; Louis Sveèenski, viola; and Alwin Schroeder, cello.

Dvořák began life modestly as the son of a village innkeeper and butcher, whose aspirations were limited to hoping that his son would take over the family trade, but Dvořák chose to make a career in music instead. He studied the violin and organ locally as a child, and at age 16, left home to study in Prague. Five years later, he joined the orchestra of the National Theater as a violist (in those days an instrument usually taken up only by failed violinists), but he was almost 30 before he had his first successful performance of one of his own major compositions. Then his career took off, and as he wrote more music, his fame grew, and he eventually became a figure of world importance. Chamber music held an important place in Dvořák’s life; many of his earliest works were quartets and quintets, modeled after those of Beethoven and Schubert that he played with his colleagues and friends while developing his craft. He held a post as professor of composition at Prague Conservatory; was the recipient of honorary degrees from Cambridge University in England and the University in Prague; and during his three-year residence in the US, was director of a conservatory in New York.

One of the most gifted of the eager young people who flocked to his classes in New York was an African American musician Henry Thacker Burleigh (1866–1949), who was to have a distinguished career as a composer and singer. Burleigh spent long hours teaching Dvořák the spirituals and slaves’ work songs; Dvořák had them in mind when he wrote, “The future music of this country must be founded upon what are called Negro melodies. These beautiful themes are the product of the soil, the folk songs of America, and composers must turn to them. All great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people.” Dvořák himself borrowed from them, but not by quotation. As he later explained, “I tried to write in the spirit of the American folk melodies.”

When his first academic year came to an end, Dvořák happily left the noise and tumult—that even then plagued New Yorkers—to spend the summer in Spillville, Iowa, a tiny town settled by Czech immigrants. Spillville had a Czech newspaper and church, and he felt very much at home there, composing two major works in his newly invented “American” style, this quartet and the String Quintet, Op. 97. The “New World” Symphony, which he had completely sketched in New York, was orchestrated in Spillville. He arrived there on June 5, 1893, and between June 8 and 10, sketched the entire quartet, noting when he had finished it, “It went quickly, thank God. I am satisfied with it.” On June 12 he began to write out the final score, which he headed, “Second composition written in America,” and at the end of the first movement noted, “How beautifully the sun is shining!” On June 23 he completed the work. As soon as parts could be copied, he and some friends played through it, and on January 12, 1894, the Kneisel Quartet gave the first public performance of the work in New York.

The quartet’s beauty and freshness of expression really have less to do with America than with Dvořák’s delight in discovering Bohemia in Spillville. The syncopated rhythms and the pentatonic scales may possibly suggest the kind of melody that he learned from his African American students, or, as is sometimes claimed, from the Native Americans who lived near Spillville, but he would probably not have learned enough of the latter’s style to begin using it in so important a work only three days after his arrival there. The simple truth is that many of the characteristics of this music that vary from the Classical standards of Germany and Austria also appear in the folk music of Bohemia, and can be found in many works that Dvořák wrote long before he arrived in America.

The Quartet opens Allegro ma non troppo with a quietly joyous, expansive movement, whose original themes, clearly stated and defined, are classically organized and treated. The Lento slow movement is an extended melancholy duet for the first violin and cello, or sometimes the second violin, with a gently rocking accompaniment. Next comes a scherzo, Molto vivace, in which the predominance of a single theme makes the music seem almost to be a set of free variations. The warbling figure makes a witty reflection on the song of what Dvořák called “a damned bird, red, but with black wings,” perhaps the scarlet tanager. The finale, a rondo, Vivace ma non troppo, takes the listener for a jolly romp that pauses only for a brief chorale—one can imagine Dvořák improvising it the local Spillville church organ.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132
Baptized December 17, 1770, in Bonn, Germany; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna.

Composed in 1825–26, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 was first performed on November 6, 1825, by the Schuppanzigh Quartet. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 22, 1892, at Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) with the New York Symphony String Quartet: Adolph Brodsky and Jan Koert, violins; Ottokar Nováèek, viola; and Anton Hekking, cello.

Between 1816 and 1826, Beethoven composed a series of extraordinary masterpieces: his Symphony No. 9, Missa Solemnis, five piano sonatas, and the five string quartets with opus numbers 127 to 135. Just before these works began to appear, his output had been slim, for the compositions of his middle years had exhausted the possibilities of the classical forms that he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart. His final works were to require new subjects, new forms, and new powers of creation.

Beethoven’s last quartets have such great density, combining concentration and tension with great weight, that they puzzled musicians for generations. The technical and interpretative difficulties they presented were usually blamed on the composer’s deafness. Early critics thought that during his years without hearing, Beethoven had lost touch with musical reality, yet we now believe that deafness liberated him from concern for common practicality and freed his imagination for greater invention.

Beethoven began composing the A-Minor Quartet, Op. 132, in 1825 as part of a group of three dedicated to his faithful supporter, Prince Nikolas Galitzin, who organized the first performance of the Missa Solemnis, Op. 123, in St. Petersburg in 1824. Galitzin’s fortunes had begun to fall, and he paid for only one quartet, but Beethoven and Galitzin’s correspondence reveals much about their relationship. It was no ordinary thing, in those days, for a Russian prince, even one on the decline, to address a commoner as “Dear and Respected Monsieur van Beethoven.”

This work enlarges the quartet structure to five movements, and begins with a freely expanded sonata form, Allegro, which opens with a slow introduction, Assai sostenuto. Commentators have long noted that the opening angular theme has a strikingly similar shape to the main subject of the Grosse Fuge and to the opening fugue theme of the Op. 131 Quartet. One commentator, Erich Schenk, demonstrated that it derives from a thematic configuration used in the Baroque period to symbolize feelings like pain, sorrow, and even preparedness for death. The second movement, Allegro ma non tanto, is a lively scherzo-like intermezzo in moderate tempo with a contrasting middle section with rustic character dominated by drone basses.

Beethoven, who had been very ill that spring, headed the chorale theme of the third movement, Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen tonart (“A Convalescent’s Holy Song of Thanks to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode”). In this double-variation form movement, Beethoven employs modal harmony, which produces an antique and religious atmosphere. When the initial slow and unearthly section, Molto adagio, becomes Andante, it gathers more motion and a contrasting almost dance-like rhythm, to which Beethoven commented, “feeling new strength.” Passages in the two tempos alternate, and Beethoven marked the measures that begin the last molto adagio section “with deepest feeling.”

The first violin connects the contrasting fourth movement, a brief march, Alla marcia, assai vivace, to the rondo finale, Allegro appassionato, with a kind of recitative. Barry Cooper, one of Beethoven’s most recent biographers, mentions that Beethoven regarded the recitative as a separate movement and referred to the quartet as having six movements. Beethoven based the fifth movement, described by his biographer Solomon as an “urgent, floating waltz melody … an etheralization and dancing fulfillment of the ‘Feeling New Strength’ section” principally on a long, elegant melody he had once considered for his Ninth Symphony. Contrasting episodes and a unique development of great force and intensity reign, until a long coda, Presto, brings the quartet to a close.



Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Susan Halpern contributes program notes to numerous musical organizations.

Pavel Haas Quartet
·· Veronika Jaruskova, Violin
·· Maria Fuxová, Violin
·· Pavel Nikl, Viola
·· Peter Jarusek, Cello
Since winning the Paolo Borciani competition in Italy in 2005, the Pavel Haas Quartet has quickly become known to audiences, critics, and promoters around the world as one of today’s most exciting young string quartets.

The 2006–07 season saw the Pavel Haas Quartet perform extensively across Europe. Highlights included concerts at the Musée du Louvre (Paris), Alte Oper Frankfurt, and Philharmonie Essen, as well as tours of Germany, Italy, and Great Britain. The ensemble’s performance at Wigmore Hall in July 2007 was followed by further concerts there in 2008 and beyond.

In 2006 the quartet was nominated by the Cologne Philharmonie for the Rising Stars series, in which the quartet appears as soloist at some of the world’s most famous concert halls, including the Konzerthaus (Vienna), Mozarteum (Salzburg), Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), Cité de la Musique (Paris), Philharmonie (Cologne), Festspielhaus (Baden-Baden), Konserthuset (Stockholm), Birmingham Symphony Hall, and Carnegie Hall (New York).

From September 2007 to September 2009, the Pavel Haas Quartet will be BBC New Generation Artists. This scheme selects 12 exceptionally talented young artists and groups to perform in a number of BBC studio recordings and high-profile UK engagements.

The quartet’s debut CD on Supraphon was released in 2006 to outstanding acclaim. Including Haas’s Quartet No. 2 and Janáček’s Quartet No. 2 (“Intimate Letters”), the recording was voted CD of the Week by BBC Radio 3 and Chamber Choice of the BBC Music Magazine. Following its release, the quartet was named Newcomer of the Year in the 2007 BBC Music Magazine Awards. The quartet’s next disc will feature Janáček’s Quartet No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata” and Haas’s Quartets Nos. 1 and 3.

The quartet takes its name from the Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899–1944), who was tragically deported from Czechoslovakia in 1941 and died at Auschwitz three years later. His legacy includes three wonderful string quartets. Though the members of the quartet are passionately committed to the Czech repertoire, their performances of works by Mozart and Beethoven have also received extraordinary acclaim.