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Saturday, January 28, 2017 at 8pm
NEC’s Jordan Hall
Danish String Quartet
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Quartet in G Major, Opus 18, no. 2 (1799-1800)
When the 21-year-old Beethoven arrived in Vienna in 1792, Mozart had been dead less than a year, and
Haydn—with whom Beethoven studied briefly—was in his prime. Under their long shadows, Beethoven
spent his first decade in Vienna mastering the “Classical” style. Works involving piano (Beethoven’s own
instrument) were a natural starting point; more daunting were the symphony and string quartet, two
quintessential genres of the Viennese masters. Beethoven finally began composing string quartets in
1798, and by the end of 1800 he had completed his Symphony No. 1 as well as a set of six quartets,
cataloged as Opus 18.
The Allegro movement that begins the String Quartet in G Major from Opus 18 (published as the second
in the set but probably composed third) demonstrates how well Beethoven had absorbed Haydn’s style
and made it his own. The music is a study in elegant contrasts, starting with the first four measures: the
opening phrase is a smooth, slurred melody in the home key of G, and the answer comes immediately as a
choppy descent outlining a contrasting D chord. Even within this polite example from Beethoven’s
“early” period, there are traces of the uncompromising rigor that marked his forthcoming “middle”
period, with themes broken into essential fragments that can be manipulated and examined from all
angles.
When Beethoven revised the G-major Quartet before its publication in 1800, his biggest changes came in
the slow movement, with a feisty new Allegro passage inserted between the outer statements of a tuneful
Adagio cantabile. The fun continues in the quick Scherzo (Italian for “joke”), Beethoven’s faster, rowdier
answer to Haydn’s minuets.
The very speedy finale begins with a favorite trick of Haydn’s, in which a long stretch played at a piano
dynamic gives extra oomph to the first forte arrival. In all the harmonic tomfoolery that follows, the
telltale motive of a rising triad (as in the first three notes from the cello) provides a familiar point of
reference.
Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)
Quartet No. 3 (1983)
The Russian composer Alfred Schnittke received his earliest musical training in Vienna, while his father
served there as a translator. After his graduation from the Moscow Conservatory in 1958, he made waves
with the oratorio Nagasaki, which received sharp criticism from the government-backed Union of
Composers. Like Shostakovich, an early target of the Union, Schnittke proved resilient in the face of such
a rebuke, and he managed to sustain a career by scoring state-sponsored films, lecturing, and teaching at
his alma mater. In the following decades he honed a “polystylistic” sound that borrowed freely from
music of just about any style and era, from the holiest church music to the bawdiest songs.
Schnittke’s idiosyncratic relationship to music of the past drives his String Quartet No. 3 from 1983,
which begins with paraphrases of three wildly disparate sources. First, the Renaissance-style harmonies
distill aspects of a sacred vocal work by Lassus, a leading composer in sixteenth-century Europe. When
the Quartet veers suddenly toward a more chromatic phrase, it is a reference to Beethoven’s massive
Grosse fuge for string quartet. A third quotation, more subtle for now but emphasized later, borrows the
signature motive of Shostakovich: the notes D, E-flat, C, B, or as they are known in German parlance, DS-C-H, abbreviating the German spelling of Dmitri Schostakowitsch.
After the abstractions and collisions of the first movement, the middle Agitato movement plays out as a
parody of the type of quartets that were composed in the Vienna of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, a
sound that made a lasting impression on Schnittke during his Viennese upbringing. The slow and heavy
third movement rehashes the borrowed material from the first movement, with particular emphasis on the
echoes of Shostakovich and his four-note signature.
Beethoven
Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 130 (1825-6)
Grosse fuge, Opus 133 (1825)
When the young Ludwig van Beethoven published his first six string quartets in 1800 (including the Gmajor Quartet heard earlier), he was still working under the shadow of Joseph Haydn. Beethoven reached
a new level of independence and refinement with the works from his “middle period,” including five
string quartets composed between 1806 and 1811. Had he stopped there, his collection of string quartets
would have been legendary, but he was not finished. Between 1824 and 1826—a time of failing health,
personal crises, and total deafness—he completed five more quartets, plus the “Great Fugue” discussed in
more detail below. These late essays, so intimate and expressive and yet crafted with such utter mastery,
place Beethoven’s string quartets in a class without equal.
The Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 130, was one of three late quartets Beethoven wrote on a commission
from Prince Nikolay Galitzin, a nobleman and amateur cellist in St. Petersburg, Russia. Having finished
the Quartet in A minor (later published as Opus 132) during a visit to the spa town of Baden in the
summer of 1825, Beethoven launched directly into his next quartet in B-flat and finished it in November.
In its original version that debuted in March of 1826, the six-movement form culminated with a massive
finale in the form of a fugue, but it left the public so flummoxed that Beethoven’s publisher asked for a
replacement finale before the score went into print. Beethoven accepted the request (and the additional
fee), and he wrote the new finale in November of 1826. He fell ill soon thereafter and died in March,
leaving the extra quartet movement as the very last word in his epic career.
The non-traditional shape of the Opus 130 quartet makes itself apparent early on, when the expected
pairing of a slow introduction and a fast body of the movement turns out to be not quite what it seems.
The two tempos oscillate back and forth, leaving the matter unsettled all the way to the closing phrases.
After the whiplash of the large opening movement, the middle movements roll out a series of contrasting
miniatures. We could still be basically on script for a typical quartet after the manic Presto (serving as a
Scherzo) and the relaxed third movement, which inflects its earnest tunefulness with a bit of winking
humor, as per the marking poco scherzoso. But then we get an unexpected extra pair of interior
movements: first a little diversion in the style of a German dance, and then an expressive Cavatina (a
term for a short, simple song) that treats the first violinist like a surrogate for a female singer.
In the original version of the quartet, as performed here, the contentious final fugue came next. When
Beethoven received word that the Viennese audience had not appreciated this finale at the quartet’s
premiere in 1826, his response—very much in character for him—was to call them “cattle” and “asses!”
Maybe some part of him sympathized with their confusion over his 20-minute tour de force, enough that
he did agree to replace it with the lighter rondo. The Grosse fuge or “Great Fugue” thus entered the canon
as its own independent work, and one that has earned a mythic status unlike any other. As the music critic
Alex Ross aptly wrote, it is “more than a piece; it’s a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and
implications. It is the most radical work by the most formidable composer in history.”
Like the mythical Hydra, with many heads on a serpent’s body, the Grosse fuge is a kinetic tangle of
ideas and identities. The introductory overture (a surprising element borrowed from theater music)
announces the unsettled mood immediately with an angular opening line, declaimed in stark octaves and
straining toward the very edges of tonality, until it breaks off suddenly after a trill. On the first page of the
score alone, there are three different key signatures and meters, as well as five held pauses, all before the
first fugue even begins. That initial course of counterpoint is an unrelenting assault of pounding rhythms,
daring leaps, and full-throttle volume. A sweet response follows, reusing some of the same themes in a
flowing section marked sempre pianissimo (“always very quiet”). Each new section shows another face—
a lively dance in triple meter, a hushed chorale, a series of hovering trills—but the distinct music from the
fugue binds everything together into one incomparable statement.
© 2016 Aaron Grad.