Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Two Pieces for String Octet, Op. 11 (1924-5)
Of Dmitri Shostakovich’s early works, his Two Pieces for String Octet, Op. 11 provides a vivid preview of the modernism and harmonic daringiness that would characterize his mature style. Begun in 1924 when the eighteen-year-old composer was still a student at the Petrograd Conservatory, the work was originally imagined as a paired prelude and fugue in the pattern of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, with which Shostakovich was intimately familiar as an accomplished concert pianist. After having sketched a prelude and part of the fugue, the composition of the octet was interrupted in early 1925 by the significant labor of orchestrating and copying parts for his First Symphony, the work that would propel him to fame upon its premiere in 1926. When Shostakovich returned to the octet in the summer of 1925, he found the fugue no longer suited his taste, and replaced it instead with the corybantic scherzo that completes the work. This newly adventurous style was not altogether to the preferences of his composition teacher, who said that he hoped that when Shostakovich turned thirty, he “would no longer write such wild music.” Already skeptical of his teachers’ conservative leanings, the young composer was not dissuaded from his path, describing the scherzo in a letter to a friend as “the very best thing I have ever written.”
The Prelude opens Adagio with an emphatic chord in D minor, followed by a wandering scalar interpolation from the first violin. Another emphatic chord – this time expansive D major – follows. Alternations between similar almost recitivate-like interpolations and broad chords follow until a new, singing melody emerges in the first viola. Introduced by softly thrumming pizzicato notes, a new, faster section emerges, dominated by bouncing spiccato and drily plucked notes. Thereafter, the broad, resonant character of the movement’s opening returns, leading once again to a singing melody, this time with the fourth violin predominating. The Prelude ends shimmeringly, punctuated by soft pizzicato.
The Scherzo wastes no time in inhabiting its erratic, raucous character: sharply-punctuated motivic cells are passed around the ensemble in a fashion reminiscent of Shostakovich’s later quartets. The composer uses the size of the ensemble to great advantage here, with fragments exchanged between groups of high and low voices like a heavy ball being thrown rapidly back and forth. An almost perpetuum-mobile quality pervades the latter half of the Scherzo, driving it to it’s glissando-accented close.
Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960)
Tenebrae (2002)
The composer Osvaldo Golijov was born in Argentina to Romanian and Ukrainian Jewish parents in 1960. As a child, he grew up listening to Argentine tango, Klezmer and Jewish liturgical music, and chamber music, all of which have had a lasting impact on his compositional style. His work Tenebrae, for string quartet, was written for the Kronos Quartet in 2002. The word tenebrae, Latin for “shadows” or “darkness,” is a word of multiplicitous reference. Most commonly, Tenebrae is a liturgical service in Western Christianity held in the three days before Easter. In the Christian rite, these days are among the most somber of the year, comprising the crucifixion of Christ and his entombment prior to the resurrection celebrated on Easter. Less commonly referred to are the Tenebrae of Classical mythology. In this context, the Tenebrae (Greek: keres) are female death-spirits, goddesses of the bloody battlefield, and the daughters of Nyx, the personification of night. While it is not clear that Golijov intended either of these references directly by his title, the connotation of the darkness of tenebrae is not one of nocturnal serenity, but of suffering and death. Golijov describes the inspiration for his Tenebrae upon its composition in 2002:
“I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it ‘from afar,’ the music would probably offer a ‘beautiful’ surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain…The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground.”
The “orbiting spaceship” of Tenebrae opens in the depths of the cello, suggesting the darkness of the work’s name. The initial section of the movement is atmospheric, by turns evoking both the counterpoint and ornamentation of Baroque music and a more modern, vernacular style of improvisation underpinned with tremolo and other timbral effects. The second section of Tenebrae is marked by a continuous pulse in the accompanimental parts, which, rather than remaining reliably steady, shifts and is variously subdivided, giving even the long, legato notes of the melody a slightly unsettled, rippling quality. The pulsation becomes more and more insistent and the melody with it: the melodic line takes on the quality of deeply-felt lamentation, an almost-guttural cry low in the range of each instrument. This too dissolves: the shadowy contrapuntal atmosphere of the opening of the work returns to bring the piece full circle.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
String Quartet in E-flat “Harp”, Op. 74 (1809)
The year 1809 found Ludwig van Beethoven in the midst of what would come to be known as his “middle period.” He had broken new ground in the genre of the string quartet with the three Op. 59 (“Razumovsky”) quartets of 1806, which Joseph Kerman described as having “doomed the amateur string quartet” by their musical depth and technical difficulty. Determined to follow up on these efforts, the String Quartet Op. 74, known as the “Harp” quartet, was completed in 1809 and met with much of the same mix of puzzlement and awe as the Op. 59 quartets by contemporary critics. An 1811 review in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung described these new quartets thusly:
These great quartets [the three Op. 59 quartets], which came out over a year ago, breathe a totally different air. The author gave himself over without concern to the most wonderful and strange flights of his original fantasy, and dealt with almost everything with such a deep and heavy style that lightness and winsomeness were almost lost in the dark spirit. The composer’s new quartet [the Op. 74 “Harp quartet] at hand is still more similar to this recent work than to the early work. More serious than cheerful, more deep and artful than charming and attractive, it wields, as any work of genius does, a particular power over the listener; but not exactly in order to caress him.
The first movement of Op. 74 begins with a stately slow introduction marked Poco Adagio, which soon gives way to the main tempo of the movement, Allegro, which establishes tonic E-flat and the gracious character that will be prominent throughout. Pizzicato – the plucking that gives the quartet its nickname – is featured early on as an accompanimental figure passed among the instruments of the ensemble. One of the most thrilling movements of the work comes at the end of the first movement as the first violin takes flight with cadenza-like arpeggios, tethered to earth only by the pizzicato arpeggios distributed among the lower three voices. Midway through this fantastical cadenza, the second violin emerges with a new melody, as if suddenly finding solid ground; the viola follows suit. The pizzicato disintegrates as all four voices return to the same plane to end the movement.
The second movement is a rondo-variations: a hybrid form in which the recurring rondo theme is varied upon each of its returns. After the presentation of the lyrical cantabile theme in A-flat major, the first episode in A-flat minor is a plaintive reimagining of the formerly idyllic theme, complete with ornamentation in the first violin. Although the major-key theme returns after this episode, the melancholy character of the episode infects the rest of the movement; we discover that although the form of this movement may be in its essence cyclical, its affect can move only forward. The aforementioned 1811 reviewer described the movement as a “dark nocturne” that “seems to lose us in shadowy perplexity, especially in the second half.”
The third movement of the quartet is in the form of a scherzo and trio. The humor of this scherzo (from the Italian for “joke”) is more rambunctious than droll. As the movement careens along, the C-minor scherzo with its rapid triple upbeats gives way to the trio, marked even faster at Più presto quasi prestissimo, now in C major. Rather than the three-part structure typical of these movements (scherzo-trio-scherzo), Beethoven here uses a five-part structure (scherzo-trio-scherzo-trio-scherzo). Upon its final return, the scherzo is dynamically compressed to a whisper. Once the audience is on the edge of its seat, the movement ends unexpectedly with an A-flat dominant to prepare straightaway for the beginning of the work’s finale.
The finale of the quartet is a theme and variations. Despite all that seems plainly Haydnesque or Mozartean in this movement – the lucid theme, the clearly structured and articulated variations – this apparently straightforward form is slightly off kilter. From the outset, a slur across the bar line between upbeat and downbeat weakens the downbeat arrival; the theme’s graceful dance has a subtly lurching quality. The chromatic shiftiness of the second half of the theme waxes and wanes over the course of the movement, sometimes dominating the second half of a variation and other times fading into the background. The coda of the movement, rather than bringing us back home or tying up loose ends, seems to spin us off into the ether. Rarely do we see a variations-movement coda so loosely related to the original theme, a coda that departs rather than circles back. It begins by carrying on the slippery character of the final variation, which was already marked un poco più vivace, and then, with increasing speed, into a compressed version of the movement’s theme, which itself has found a new form of expression, shucking off its halting shyness for something more like eager abandon. This figure gives way finally to brilliant unison sixteenth notes which rise to fortissimo before dropping back to the piano chords that end the movement.
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
String Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20 (1825)
At the age of 16, a precocious Felix Mendelssohn wrote his celebrated String Octet, a work from which youthful ebullience blooms in every bar. Composed as a birthday gift for his violin teacher, Eduard Rietz (for whom the virtuosic first violin part was intended), the octet received its first performance in private concert at the Mendelssohn family’s Berlin residence. The string octet was not yet a common genre, particularly in the undivided configuration Mendelssohn intended (rather than as two side-by-side string quartets). In the score, Mendelssohn specified that his octet “be played by all the instruments in the style of a symphony.” Indeed, the symphonic force of the octet is one of its most striking characteristics; Mendelssohn utilizes the many available pairs and combinations of this configuration to great effect, including in thrilling sweeps of sound that wash across the ensemble.
The sonata-form first movement, Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco, opens with an inexorably optimistic rising theme in the first violin. Mendelssohn reinforces his initial tempo marking by noting con fuoco (with fire) at key moments throughout the movement. The vim of this theme pervades the movement, including in the tremendous unison cadences before the closing sections of the exposition and recapitulation and the thrilling sixteenth-note sweep that leads out of the development.
The second movement, Andante, is tender and lyrical. The theme, which recalls the composer’s vocal compositions, is passed first from the first viola to the first violin. The tension between duple and triple meter in the movement gives it a characteristically Mendelssohnian emotional push and pull.
The third movement, Scherzo: Allegro leggerissimo, is yet another type of scherzo distinct from the Shostakovich and Beethoven scherzi heard on this program. The spirited scherzo of Mendelssohn’s octet is often described as elfin, spritely, fairy-like: the composer’s sister, Fanny Mendelssohn, wrote that he had used a stanza from the Walpurgis Night’s Dream from Goethe’s Faust as textual inspiration. In this movement, one imagines the supernatural prankster, a Puck-like character, flitting around the ensemble.
The fourth movement is no less fiery than the first, despite being marked simply Presto. The movement features contrapuntal writing heavily, opening with running eighth notes in imitative staggered entrances in each voice, a finely crafted eight-part fugato. Only in moments of emphatic arrival do the furiously constant eighth notes disappear briefly. Coupled with the emphatically major mode themes, the inescapable motion throughout gives the movement the feeling of joyous inevitability.
Dr. Lucy Turner, 1 September 2024
