Takács Quartet
Sunday, December 9, 3pm, NEC’s Jordan Hall

The Takács Quartet is one of the world’s premier string ensembles. Noted for their relentless intellectual curiosity and passion, the Quartet seems to improve each year, piling musical discoveries one on top of the other as they go, each player with a distinctive, absorbing sound, yet all blending with startling cohesion. A Takács Quartet performance is probing, revealing, and engaging throughout.

“They are currently the greatest string quartet in the world...”
—The Guardian (UK)

PROGRAM: Program notes

HAYDN
String Quartet in C Major, Opus 74, no. 1

BARTÓK
String Quartet No. 5

BRAHMS
String Quartet in C minor, Opus 51, no. 1

ENCORE:

SHOSTAKOVICH
Polka from The Age of Gold, Op. 22

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Notes on the Program

Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1809)
String Quartet in C Major, Opus 74, no. 1, Hob. III 72
Haydn’s experience of writing symphonies for enthusiastic London audiences during his two lengthy visits in the early 1790s is well known. What is less familiar in our knowledge of Haydn’s musical development is the effect that these London visits had on his string quartet writing. Throughout his lifetime, it had been his experience that the string quartet was essentially a private form of music-making, with the performers alone—or at most a handful of friends and family—actually hearing the music. Perhaps a string quartet could serve as entertainment at an aristocratic dinner with a few, or a few dozen, guests.

But in London, Haydn found that Salomon, the impresario who had brought him there, also programmed string quartets for large audiences in full concert halls. This, naturally enough, changed the nature of the works, from intimate communications between the players themselves, seated only inches apart, to a broader kind of playing intended to project the work to hundreds of listeners, some of them at the far corners of a concert hall. Haydn instinctively knew that string quartets played in this environment needed to be different in character— less involved with the intricate interplay of tiny ideas and little decorations that might be heard in close quarters, and more concerned with a broader kind of musical conversation.

The first quartets that he composed with precisely this aim in mind are a group of six that he brought with him from Vienna to London on his second visit, in 1793. These works, composed especially for Salomon’s performances, with Salomon himself, a noted violin virtuoso, playing the lead role, are very different in character from most of Haydn’s earlier quartets. Salomon’s part is almost always more elaborate than those of the other players, making these quartets more top dominated than ever before or ever again in Haydn’s work. For another thing, these six works almost all begin with an introductory passage (though in the case of the present quartet in C, the introduction consists only of two chords). This introduction is akin to those of the symphonies Haydn was composing at the same time; a way, perhaps, of assuring himself that all of the listeners were ready to pay attention to the real beginning of the musical discourse.

When they came to be published, the six quartets that Haydn composed for this purpose were, for some reason, divided up into two groups of three works and published as Opus 71 and Opus 74. But Haydn himself never thought of them as anything but an “opus” consisting of six related works, composed more or less together, and all bearing some of the same stylistic features. Thus, Opus 74, no. 1, is the fourth of the six quartets in this group.

The opening phrase (after the two-chord introduction) emphasizes a touch of chromaticism unusual for Haydn (perhaps he thought of it as a tribute to his late young friend Mozart). At first it seems but a passing idea, but before long, Haydn moves into more chromatic passages, and these in turn lead him to some surprising harmonic moves in the development. The nature of the harmonies and the chromatic touches in the melodic lines in the first movement foreshadow the character of the entire piece. The graceful slow movement is even more Mozartean in its expressive chromatic turns, while the minuet and trio use the same chromatic gestures to lead into surprising key areas—very dark during the minuet, and very bright in the trio. The Finale brilliantly takes the same sorts of harmonic and melodic play into a lively and jesting conclusion.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
String Quartet No. 5
The fifth quartet of Bartók’s canon was commissioned by the Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation. Bartók composed the score in the month between August 6 and September 6, 1934; it was first performed in Washington, D.C. by the Kolisch Quartet on April 8, 1935.

Bartók had not worked on a major composition since completing his second piano concerto in January 1931, but he filled the interval with transcriptions of folk music and educational compositions. The renewal of his contact with the sources of folk music (not only Hungarian, but also Slovak, Ruthenian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and Arabic) was fruitful in paving the way for the new quartet. As in the String Quartet No. 4, Bartók employs a favorite ground plan, symmetrical arrangement of the movements. Here, two slow movements are grouped around a central scherzo, while two fast movements frame the whole. Each separate movement, too, shows elements of this arch construction, from the simple ABA of the central scherzo to the more complicated organization of the outer movements, in which the themes are restated in the reverse order of their original appearance.

Unlike the fourth quartet, which is built very largely on a single musical figure, the fifth is rich in materials of great variety; the arch-forms that Bartók loves so are carried out even in the treatment of the thematic materials, which often recur at the end of the movement in inversion, a mirror image of the form they had taken at the beginning. And the recapitulation of the opening movement’s sonata form takes place with the elements in reverse order, yet another expression of the “arch.” The second and fourth movements (occupying similar place in the work’s overall arch) balance one another in music character while they, too, are shaped internally as arches. The first movement begins on a strongly reiterated B-flat, with the tritone E appearing as an evident secondary tonal center. The last movement begins (after a few introductory bars) with a strongly reiterated E that suddenly sinks to B-flat. Bartók closes the arch of the whole with a fugue whose theme is derived from the opening of the first movement, leading to the recapitulation and a powerfully assertive close on B-flat.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
String Quartet in C minor, Opus 51, no. 1
Brahms never wanted the reputation of “Beethoven’s heir” that the musical public and some of his friends foisted on him. Though he composed constantly from the age of 20, he was wary of offering works in the two genres that Beethoven had made signally his own, the symphony and the string quartet. As with the symphony (he held back his first until he was 43), he spent many years working on string quartets before he was ready to let one out into the world.

At a very early stage of his career he had showed some of his music to his older and more experienced friend Robert Schumann, who proposed submitting some of it for publication. This included a string quartet—but Brahms modestly withdrew that work from consideration; we do not know whether it survives in any form.

So cautious did the example of Beethoven make him that, even when he composed larger chamber works for strings, he took pains to ensure that no one could confuse it for a string quartet. He opened his Opus 18 Sextet in B-flat with a theme played by two cellos and viola, insisting that even a listener with his eyes shut would know at once that this is not in any way a reworking of a medium in which Beethoven had achieved so much.

But he had to tackle the string quartet eventually. Certainly he worked on quartets long before the appearance of his first two in 1873, when he was 40. He claimed at one point to have written and destroyed no fewer than twenty quartets before bringing out the one in C minor! And he may have begun the two that eventually appeared as Opus 51 twenty years before he finally considered them ready for the light of day.

In 1866, Brahms played part of a “string quartet in C minor” to his friend and confidante Clara Schumann, along with some movements from his German Requiem. If this was an early version of the present C minor quartet, it took him another seven years to finish it to his satisfaction. In 1868, he played both Opus 51 quartets for another friend, the scholar Hermann Deiters, but still withheld them from publication. Occasionally he would let a group of friends read through the work, then he would take the music back and continue polishing. Finally, in 1873, he decided it was ready; in September, he sent it to his publisher, and the Hellmesberger Quartet gave the premiere in Vienna on December 11.

The key of C minor (the same key he used for the first symphony!) and the tense, strenuous manner are clearly Beethovenian. Yet there is of course much here that is pure Brahms.One of the most remarkable features of the work is the way he has saturated every part of the score with the principal musical motifs—hardly a note is superfluous, not derived from the principal figures of the piece. A generation later, Arnold Schoenberg wrote a famous essay, “Brahms the Progressive,” hailing Brahms as a leading contemporary composer for creating a work that has no filler but is “totally thematic” to the smallest details.

The first movement is darkly stormy both in its driven opening theme and in its second subject, which offers no relaxation. The middle movements are less complex in structure, but still melancholy or fatalistic in mood. The Romanze is densely written, with a straightforward ABAB pattern in which the return to the A section is gorgeously scored, giving the impression of greater complexity. The third movement, normally a place for vigorous dance styles and hints of folk elements, is here subdued, tenuous in character, with a colorful shift to the major for the middle section. The third movement ends in F minor. Brahms opens the finale with a recollection of the first movement’s principal motif, now starting on F so that it links the movements in the most natural manner. In fact, the thematic material of the finale is largely derived from that of earlier movements; it teases us with hints that at some point Brahms will move to C major (as Beethoven would surely have done, and as Brahms himself did in the finale of his still unperformed Symphony No. 1). This expectation remains frustrated; the movement closes with a grim, tragic C minor cadence which can be heard as the final answer to the opening statement from the very beginning of the quartet.

© Steven Ledbetter; www.stevenledbetter.com