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Tuesday, December 9, 2008, 8:00 PM |
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The Pro Arte Quartet http://www.music.wisc.edu/pro-arte The Pro Arte Quartet continues to maintain an 85-year tradition of dedication to classical and contemporary string chamber music. In addition to their residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where duties range from formal concerts and radio broadcasts to a variety of educational activities, the quartet tours nationally and internationally, often presenting premieres of new works, many of which are written for the ensemble. Founded in 1912 by violinist Alphonse Onnou, the Pro Arte Quartet became the Court Quartet to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium. Its world reputation blossomed in 1919 when the Quartet began the first of many tours and earned such acclaim that composers, notably Milhaud, Honegger and Bartok, gave the ensemble new works to introduce. By 1926, the Quartet made its debut in New York and toured American cities. They returned for 30 tours to the United States, often under the auspices of Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, noted patron of chamber music. Their first visit to Madison was in 1938. Two years later, the musicians were stranded in the United States by the outbreak of World War II and accepted a residency at the UW-Madison, the first such residency in a major American university. Today, the Pro Arte functions as a resource for the university and the state.
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Program
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: String Quartet in B-flat Major, K. 589
Béla Bartók: String Quartet No. 2
Intermission
Franz Schubert: String Quartet in G Major, D. 887
Program Notes
‘Whenever I was in Berlin, I would seldom miss Möser’s quartet evenings. For me, such artistic presentations were always the most intelligible forum for appreciating instrumental music, in which one heard four reasonable people conversing, as it were, believed their discourse to be profitable and became acquainted with the individuality of the instruments.”
With these words Goethe, the eminent key figure of German literature characterized the genre of the string quartet. While there are several different points of view about the development of the string quartet as a genre, the notion of conversation was always a defining feature. The works we will hear played by the renowned Pro Arte Quartet will demonstrate this, although the conversational style and content will vary considerably.
Mozart’s string quartet KV 589 shows great respect for the cello part. It is revered and even when the cello boldly takes over the role usually reserved for the violins, it is gladly tolerated by the other instruments. No wonder, the cello part was written for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia. This king was an accomplished cellist and was known to be a great supporter of the arts. Mozart planned to dedicate six string quartets to him and six easy pianoforte sonatas to the princess, hoping to improve his financial situation from the customary financial reward. However, his high flying dreams and hopes were not fulfilled, he completed only three of the six quartets (now called the “Prussian string quartets KV, 575, 589, 590) and had to sell them “for a bagatelle” to his publisher because he was financially broke and needed cash.
It is interesting that Mozart, who wrote his music seemingly with so much ease, described the work on string quartets as “lunga, laboriosa fatica” (long, laborious effort); and we know from his sketches that he made several attempts to find an appropriate last movement for this quartet. The formal architecture of the piece consists of the traditional four movements. The compositional structure is less complicated than in previous quartets, however the special treatment of the cello adds a characteristic note to the work: The themes in the first and second movement are often stated in the same register by the cello and the violin, giving an opportunity to fully appreciate the different timbres of the instruments.
Bartok’s found access to Mozart’s works relatively late in his life. In 1928 he describes his admiration about his “wonderful combination of contrapuntal and homophonic ideas”.
Before that, in 1915-17, while working on his second String quartet, his ideals were Bach, Beethoven and Debussy, and throughout his life his creative ideal remained a synthesis of these three composers. He confessed that the “stimuli gained from Debussy are metastasically merged into my musical style,” which is especially obvious in the last movement of this string quartet. The form is, in Bartok’s own words “nothing special, the first movement is a normal sonata form, the second is a kind of rondo with a development-type section in the middle, the last movement is the most difficult to define…some kind of augmented ABA form.”
The two main themes in the first movement are both built on arpeggiations, the first in a fast and more improvisatory style, the second in more choral like fashion. The second movement is inspired by Arab folk music and reminds us that Bartok, in his interest for peasant music, traveled not only to Hungary and the Balkan, but even went as far as the African continent. The slow and mystical third movement has strong motivic relations with the first movement, which gives the quartet formal cohesion, but exhibits a much more grave character. The quartet was “tailor-made” for the Waldbauer-Kerpely quartet, to whom it is also dedicated. This ensemble was especially devoted to Bartok’s music and promoted his music throughout his career.
“So do these lovely impressions… remain in the mind and influence for good our whole existence.” These were Schubert’s thoughts when hearing Mozart’s works. His own approach to the genre seems radically different. There is, at first sight no trace of “lunga, laboriosa fatica.” “In his larger forms, Schubert is a wanderer. He likes to move at the edge of the precipice, and does so with the assurance of a sleepwalker,” as the pianist and Schubert authority Alfred Brendel puts it.
There are already many comments on the length of Schubert’s works, from Robert Schumann’s “heavenly lengths” to Carl Dahlhaus’ statement, who associates the first movement of the G Major quartet with the “The timelessness, in which a musical moment stretches into the immeasurable.” As you will hear, they all apply to this quartet. How does Schubert maintain musical tension over a period of more than 45 minutes? The source of power in this piece is the conflict between sonata form and variation form. The sonata form needs clear delimitations in order to achieve dramatic contrasts, whereas the variation form has the tendency to extend and embellish musical material and to blur strict boundaries. In this piece the variations (or embellished repetitions), compelled by the laws of the sonata form, are often discontinued without having reached a conceivable destination, leaving us in a state of tension, on which the next part of the piece builds up and which is necessary for its appreciation. Here we can grasp the hidden “laborious effort,” as Carl Dahlhaus writes: “What appears as involuntary occurrence nevertheless represents the outward manifestation of precise calculation; there is no question of unreflective composing.”
There are several characteristic features to this work, the most obvious being the frequent appearance of tremolo in the first movement. Much more important is the sharp contrast of minor and major chords, strikingly obvious already in the first measures and determining much of the character of the piece, especially in the first and last movement. The second movement features a long elegiac melody, initiated by an upward seventh leap, which is contrasted with a rhythmic, dramatic episode. The Scherzo, a light, fast movement with animated dialog, almost better described as gossip between the players, is interrupted by a charming Ländler. The finale, a dance with almost consistent eight note motion, but with many irregularities in phrase structure and unexpected accents and modulations keeps the listener’s attention on the run. These compositional deviations, to which Schubert gives in as they appear on the wayside, leave us out of breath after the closing chords.
This work, the last string quartet Schubert’s was written in the year 1826, two years before his death. His first public performance by the famous Helmesberger quartet, however, occurred not until 1850, and it was only published in 1851.
-Albert Mühlböck
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