Salus Quartet 7 March 2020
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) – String Quartet No. 19 in C major (K. 465), ‘Dissonance’ (1785)
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Adagio – Allegro
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Andante cantabile
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Menuetto & Allegro
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Allegro molto
When Mozart arrived in Vienna in 1781, Joseph Haydn was the undisputed titan of the city’s musical life, having revolutionised both the symphony and the string quartet. Haydn had established the familiar form of the quartet which would be later inherited by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, not least by giving more prominent roles to the lower voices of the viola and cello. In an atmosphere of collegiate good grace, Mozart stood on these giant shoulders and developed the genre even further in his 23 quartets. His six ‘Haydn’ quartets, composed between 1782 and 1785, were dedicated with beseeching piety to the grand master himself:
A father who had resolved to send his children out into the great world took it to be his duty to confide them to the protection and guidance of a very celebrated man, especially when the latter by good fortune was at the same time his best friend. Here they are then, O great man and dearest friend, these six children of mine. They are, it is true, the fruit of a long and laborious endeavour… May it therefore please you to receive them kindly and to be their father, guide and friend! From this moment I resign to you all my rights in them, begging you however to look indulgently upon the defects which the partiality of a father's eye may have concealed from me, and in spite of them to continue in your generous Friendship for him who so greatly values it…
The six ‘Haydn’ quartets were well received: Haydn wrote back to Mozart’s father that ‘Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.’ The Dissonance quartet was the last of these six, and the most popular. Its nickname appears to have arisen in the early nineteenth century in view of its distinctive and unusual introduction, in which a highly unconventional and musically ambiguous set of harmonies set up a sense of bleak intrigue. These few bars so bemused Mozart’s publishers that they wondered whether Wolfgang had written them out in error. Mozart’s wife later recounted a story that the Bratislavan Prince Grassalkovic had chastised his court musicians for playing badly and, on learning that they were faithfully playing what Mozart had written, tore up the music. Haydn was more forgiving, simply shrugging that if it had been written by Mozart, it must be correct.
The first of the quartet’s standard four movements opens out into a breezily bright sonata form, after those opening moments which had perplexed early listeners so grievously. A rhythmically pulsing motor figure appears frequently in the quartet from its very first bar, continuing through the convivial C-major Allegro without any recurrence of the ominous earlier undertones. The Andante slow movement is similarly warm-hearted, particularly in the song-like conversations between first violin and cello.
The third movement is a minuet and trio in the style of Haydn, though with a rustic feel in the roughly lilting figures of the minuet. The trio is more restless, though the minuet has the final word. In the finale, a breathlessly energetic rondo, any moments of tension or drama are short lifted, the music dashing to an ebullient close with sparkling wit and good spirits.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) – String Quartet No. 8 in E minor (Opus 59 No. 2), ‘Razumovsky’ (1808)
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Allegro
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Molto adagio (Si tratta questo pezzo con molto di sentimento)
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Allegretto and Maggiore – Theme Russe
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Finale (Presto)
Ludwig van Beethoven’s music remains some of the most influential art in any genre through history. In his 56 years, his greatest achievement was to raise the arts from a polite entertainment for the ruling classes to a universal endeavour relevant to all of humanity. In his ninth symphony, the Ode to Joy, he quotes the poet Friedrich Schiller: ‘[Joy’s] magic binds again / What custom strictly divided / All people become brothers / Where [its] gentle wing abides’. Beethoven was not simply rehashing some convenient and aurally satisfying poetry here: he firmly believed the sentiment behind the text. When his hero, Napoleon, abandoned liberté, égalité et fraternité and declared himself Emperor, Beethoven furiously scratched out Napoleon’s title dedication on his third symphony, and dedicated it instead ‘To the memory of a great man’.
The turning point in Beethoven’s career, when he grew from a merely excellent composer to perhaps the greatest ever, was his ‘Heligenstadt Testament’, in which he resolved to live on and continue writing for the sake of his art despite his encroaching deafness. This marked the end of his early period, which had produced his first two symphonies, three piano concertos and six string quartets, and heralded the start of his middle (or ‘heroic’) period of 1802-1812. This remarkable decade saw him publish his third to eighth symphonies, the opera Fidelio, and five string quartets, while the Napoleonic Wars (and bombardment of Vienna) rumbled on. The Razumovsky quartets formed three of these five, along with the Harp and Serioso quartets. In broad terms, Beethoven’s middle period brought about the beginning of the Romantic period in music, with works of ever-increasing complexity taking on new meaning and relevance to real life, individual experience and nature. His late period may have produced such titanic works as the ninth symphony, Missa Solemnis and the last five quartets, but it was the middle period which irreversibly changed the course of music history.
The three Razumovsky quartets, collectively his Opus 59, are among the most important of Beethoven’s sixteen works in the genre. During his middle period, he revolutionised the string quartet every bit as much as he did the symphony. From this point onwards, his quartets become longer, more difficult and, significantly, worthy of publication as single works rather than in albums of six, as had previously been the custom. The set was commissioned by Count Razumovsky, the Russian Ambassador to Vienna, a keen amateur second violinist and much-needed patron of Beethoven, as was his brother-in-law, Prince Lobkowitz. In addition to the three eponymous quartets, the Count was also dedicatee of the fifth and six symphonies. His latter years were less prosperous: after a fire destroyed the palace he had built outside Vienna, his eyes were left permanently damaged by smoke, and he lived out his days as a recluse.
The second Razumovsky quartet – Beethoven’s eighth overall – is characterised by its otherworldly, celestial inspiration and outlook. Perhaps reflective of his worsening deafness, Beethoven looked away from the gritty human inspirations of his other contemporary works and was reported by his student Carl Czerny to have conceived the quartet’s slow movement (its emotional heart) on gazing up at the starry night sky. It is music of such striking complexity that the critic and musicologist Joseph Kerman suggested that it had “Doomed the amateur string quartet”.
Unusually for Beethoven, all four movements of the quartet are in the key of E, though there characteristic excursions into remote keys throughout. This is apparent from the first moments of the piece: after two declamatory chords (a bold summons much like the Eroica symphony), the soft E minor line is immediately echoed in F major, a key about as harmonically distant from E minor as possible. This immediately sets up a sense of terse energy which pervades the movement, the same dissonance repeatedly appearing as the music tries (unsuccessfully) to find its way into the light.
The slow movement, that which Czerny reported as having been inspired by the celestial vista, carries a sense of a funeral cortege in its soft tread. There is more than a passing resemblance to the fifteenth quartet’s Heiliger Dankgesang (’Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity’), written by Beethoven on recovery from one of his many episodes of (presumably) decompensated chronic liver disease. Once again, the harmonic dissonances feature strongly, here between the home key of E and the again distant D-sharp.
The scherzo, in A-B-A-B-A form, contrasts a major-key trio against a minor-key B section. In reference to the quartet’s sponsor, the maggiore passage is the quartet’s Russian section, featuring a 1790s tune originally entitled Glory to the Sun. The same tune would later also be used by Mussorgsky in Boris Godunov and Rachmaninov in his 6 Morceaux for piano duet. Beethoven’s handling of the tune is far from reverential, and if anything is heavy handed; Kerman suggests that ‘Count Razumovsky had been tactless enough to hand Beethoven the tune, and Beethoven is pile-driving it into the ground by way of revenge’. The dissonant harmonies remain a prominent feature into the finale: after a suspiciously overoptimistic major key opening, there are frequent dangerous intrusions from other tonalities. Eventually, the music is swept into a vigorous tarantella, which gallops vigorously into the quartet’s last moments.