Download Read notes on the program

Sunday, November 20, 2016 at 3pm
NEC’s Jordan Hall
Emerson String Quartet
Notes on the Program
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Quartet in D minor, K.421
Not long after Mozart moved to Vienna to begin a freelance career, Joseph Haydn released his latest set
of groundbreaking string quartets. Mozart had not composed quartets since he was a teenager (when he
produced 13 of them), but Haydn’s efforts prompted Mozart to return to the genre at the end of 1782. He
completed the Quartet in D minor in June of 1783, and he published it in 1785 within a set of six quartets
dedicated to Haydn.
In this only minor-key quartet from Mozart’s adulthood, there are sounds that foreshadow two other
landmark works set in the same key of D minor: the Piano Concerto No. 20 from 1785, and the opera Don
Giovanni from 1787. Two central motives in the quartet’s opening Allegro moderato movement—the
melodic leap down an octave, and the bass line descending in steps—both reappear in that opera’s
climactic scene in which the ghost of the Commendatore calls out Don Giovanni.
In the Andante, one agitated outburst disturbs an otherwise placid slow movement. Mozart’s widow,
Constanze, later claimed that her husband was inspired by the screams of her labor pains while he
continued to compose in an adjacent room.
The third movement, Menuetto, is a study in opposites. Whereas the outer sections are in D minor and
built around dotted rhythms (i.e. long, short-long), the contrasting trio section moves to D major and
reverses the rhythmic pattern to put the short notes on the beat (a figure sometimes called the “Scotch
snap”). Plucked accompaniment further emphasizes the lightening of the mood in the trio.
A theme-and-variations finale continues this quartet’s ongoing push and pull between the major and
minor modes. After a late major-key variation, D minor takes hold once more, only to swing back to D
major at the last instant, thanks to the viola.
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Quartet No. 10 in A-flat Major, Opus 118
By 1964, when Shostakovich composed the String Quartet No. 10 at a composer’s retreat in Armenia, his
life was as settled as it had been in decades. He had recently married for the third time, a decade of
“thaw” under the political leadership of Khruschev had brought his music back to the fore in Russian
society, and the health problems that plagued his final decade had not yet afflicted him. Shostakovich’s
rosier outlook permeated the new Ninth and Tenth Quartets, composed in quick succession and premiered
on the same Moscow concert that November by the Beethoven Quartet. (In a collaboration that spanned
35 years, that group debuted all but the first and the last of Shostakovich’s 15 quartets.)
The Tenth String Quartet is “pure” music in the Classical tradition of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. It
delights in the same sorts of clean motives and transparent architecture, even if the musical vocabulary is
tempered by Shostakovich’s modern sensibility, including a burgeoning interest in twelve-tone
conventions. The opening Andante movement uses triads as melodic and harmonic building blocks, but
they often stack up in disorienting ways, as in the opening phrases that chase the keynote of A-flat with a
completely foreign E-minor triad.
The second movement, marked Allegretto furioso, delivers the quartet’s most muscular music. In a
traditional quartet, this would be seen to fill the palette-cleansing role of a scherzo (Italian for “joke”), but
with Shostakovich it is never easy to tell when his fury is tongue-in-cheek or deadly serious.
A subtle thematic link, with the first phrase of the Adagio picking up a motive still ringing from the
preceding movement, helps smooth a path for the stately unfurling of a passacaglia, an archaic form of
continuous variations that evokes grounding and constancy.
The Allegretto finale tiptoes in over the last wisps of the slow movement, and those quiet strains linger
and develop into broad counter-themes that offset the nimble new motives. Nostalgic traces of earlier
music bring closure to this austere finale.
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Quartet in F Major
The Paris Conservatoire dismissed Ravel as a piano student in 1895, and when he returned as a composer
they ushered him out again in 1900 after he failed to write a fugue that followed strict, academic rules.
Ravel’s five consecutive rejections in the prestigious Prix de Rome competition became something of a
public scandal, and even his own teacher, Gabriel Fauré, came down against the iconoclastic young
composer. Ravel’s last submission for the Prix de Rome was the String Quartet that he completed in 1903
and dedicated to Fauré—who declared the work “a failure.”
One musician who recognized the power of Ravel’s quartet was Claude Debussy; in 1905, he wrote to his
younger colleague, “In the name of the gods of music and in my own, do not touch a single note you have
written in your Quartet.” Ravel’s quartet in fact shares many traits with Debussy’s sole string quartet from
1893: both works develop thematic connections that link the separate movements, and each defies
conventional harmonic practice.
Ravel’s String Quartet opens with a sweet theme from the first violin, split into two balanced phrases—a
promising start for a competition entry. It only takes five measures, though, for the harmonies to abandon
the home key, while the telltale melody glides over mystical whole-tone sequences and Eastern-tinged
minor modes.
A close kin of the opening melody returns as the basis of the second movement, marked “rather lively,
very rhythmic.” The plucking textures and modal harmonies transport this scherzo-like statement to the
realm of a Flamenco dance, reflecting Ravel’s fascination with his mother’s native Spain.
The central melody of the “very slow” third movement, introduced by the muted viola, is a drawn-out
variant of the same unifying theme. The motive returns yet again as a secondary figure in the finale, but
first the quartet presents music that lives up to the “lively and agitated” tempo marking. Having worked
through this provocative material, the quartet rises to a bright F-major chord, reaching the conclusive
home key in a manner contrary to everything Ravel learned in a classroom.
© 2016 Aaron Grad