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About the Program
The Amernet Quartet and Audrey Luna perform for us a program of
masterpieces from three composers who, more than most, changed the world
of chamber music.
Among Haydn's string quartets Op. 74, No. 3, in G minor, is one of the
most frequently performed. Not only has this colorful work an immediate
appeal, but it is also wonderfully subtle and original in design and
details. Haydn wrote it in Vienna in 1793, between his two London
visits. There is a brusque, jagged and attention-getting eight-bar
opening, followed by an effective Haydn trademark: silence. Almost
tentatively, then, does the cello suggest a first theme. Motion
increases until a lilting contrasting theme appears. The brusque
quasi-introduction reappears as the underpinning of the development
section, but is absent from the recapitulation. The emotional center of
the quartet is the noble Largo assai, in the remote key of E major. The
entire movement is developed out of the first four notes. The minuet is
unusual, having an ABC sequence of thematic material rather than the
typical ABA, and is provided with a minor-key trio which is itself the
tension center of the entire movement. The finale is responsible for
the quartet's nickname, "The Rider", but our equestrian prefers a canter
at an off-the-beat 4/4 rhythm rather than the charging 6/8 gallop of the
typical 18th Century "hunting scene" finale.
Arnold Schoenberg's five existing string quartets mirror most of the
stages in his creative development, and the Quartet No. 2 (third in the
cycle) is the keystone, both chronologically and musically. A Quartet
in D major, from 1897, was Schoenberg's first really successful
composition, but despite its Dvorak-inspired genuine delights the
composer put it aside, and it was only published, posthumously, in 1966.
(Two or three even earlier quartets have disappeared.) The "official"
Quartet No. 1 (D minor, 1905) pushes tonal harmony to its limits. It
remains for Quartet No. 2 (1907-08), ostensibly in F-sharp minor, to
make the crucial step into atonality (but not yet twelve-tone: Quartet
No. 3 (1927) is based on that innovation). Actually, the Quartet No. 2
more or less reprises Schoenberg's earlier styles in its first three
movements, arriving at atonality only in the finale. But of course
there is another striking innovation: the inclusion of a soprano voice
in the last two movements. For the string quartet literature this was
as novel and daring as the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony had been
more than eighty years before.
The overall structure of the Quartet No. 2 follows classic practices in
the first three movements: sonata-form, scherzo and
theme-and-variations. Harmonic relations, however, are another matter.
By the sixth bar the brief opening theme, which had begun in F-sharp
minor, has morphed to a distant C major. But no key or motif (there are
five in this first movement, and they provide material for much of the
entire quartet) persists for long in the concise opening movement, which
does manage to regain F-sharp minor at the end. The scherzo is in D
minor and 2/2 meter, but the more relaxed 3/4 trio gives us just a bit
of Ach, du lieber Augustin;
the segment declaiming Alles ist
hin (It's all over) has been interpreted to recall
Schoenberg's marital problems at the time, or perhaps to signify the end
of traditional harmony in the face of the new atonality. The slow third
movement, more or less in E-flat minor, brings in the soprano singing
the words of Stefan George's supplicatory poem
Litanei (Litany). At
the great climax at the words
nimm mir die liebe (take away love from me) the vocal line
plunges dramatically down more than two octaves on the last syllable.
The finale begins with twenty bars of ghostly instrumental music before
the singer intones the famous opening line of Stefan George's
Entrückung (Rapture):
Ich fühle luft von anderen planeten
(I feel the air of other planets). Schoenberg himself described that
mysterious instrumental introduction as portraying the interplanetary
voyage. Prophetic indeed for 1908! With the soprano's final lines ("I
am merely a spark of the sacred fire / I am merely a rumbling of the
sacred voice.") however, definite tonal centers appear, and the work
ends in the original F-sharp minor.
Beethoven's Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, was the second of the marvelous
final five to be written (in 1825), although the B-flat (Op. 130) and
C-sharp minor (Op.131) Quartets were published before it. The brief
slow opening becomes part of the fabric of the first allegro, which also
features as second subject one of those deceptively "simple" Beethoven
themes which are magical in effect. There follows a rather relaxed
scherzo with a beguiling bagpipe effect in the trio. The crown of this
quartet, of course, is the middle movement, the "Holy Song of
Thanksgiving" which Beethoven offered up upon recovering from a
debilitating illness. It begins with a chorale written in the Lydian
mode (scale of F major with B-natural replacing B-flat). The effect is
remote, austere. Then with a rush of "new strength" a life-filled
D-major intervenes. The chorale returns, less frozen now, with its
lower voices moving in syncopated figures. Once again the life force,
and finally, the culminating stroke as the chorale appears in its
transfigured final setting, "with the most intimate expression." After
this overwhelming emotion a light-textured march-like interlude affords
a breathing space. A recitative leads to a finale which sets just the
right tone of dignity combined with grace.
Edwin Daley
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