Joaquín Turina (1882-1949)
La oración del torero (The Bullfighter’s Prayer), Op. 34 (1925)
Spanish composer Joaquín Turina Pérez was born in Seville, where he began his studies in both composition and piano. In 1905, after having worked and studied for a few years in Madrid, Turina made his way to Paris, where he studied with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum. In addition to d’Indy’s highly structured and historically-grounded curriculum, Turina was exposed to the influential Impressionist musical styles of Debussy and Ravel. Despite this surfeit of French influence, his friend and countryman, the composer Manuel de Falla, counseled Turina to continue to seek musical inspiration in the popular musical styles of Spain. This proved to be good advice: throughout his career, Turina’s most successful and beloved works were those that integrated the lessons of the composer’s Parisian education with the musical traditions of his homeland.
La oración del torero is one of Turina’s most performed works and among the few mentioned by name in his 1949 obituary in The Musical Times. It is characteristically inflected by the lush open harmonies of the Impressionist music he became familiar with in Paris as well as his affinity for the musical cultures of his native Spain. It was originally scored for four laúdes (Spanish lutes, plucked folk instruments distinct from the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque instruments which share their name in English), with two high laudines as the upper voices, a standard laúd as the inner voice, and a low laudón as the bass part. The work was composed for the Cuarteto Aguilar, a laúd ensemble made up of four siblings who performed widely in both Europe and the Americas from 1923 until the 1940s. Almost simultaneously with its initial composition, Turina arranged La oración del torero for string quartet, the version performed tonight. The characteristic Iberian folk sound of the plectrum-plucked laúd is carried over into this bowed string arrangement, which prominently features tremolo, pizzicato, mutes, and other techniques evocative of the láud and its close relative the bandurria.
As with many of Turina’s smaller works for piano or chamber ensemble, The Bullfighter’s Prayer is explicitly Spanish in the setting and subject, as well as highly imagistic in its conception, variously evoking episodes of quiet reverence, pensive anticipation, and heightened exhilaration before the fighters enter the arena. The composer himself described the scene that inspired the work in a note accompanying the performance of the orchestral arrangement of the work in Barcelona in 1928.
“In an afternoon of bullfighting in the Plaza de Madrid – that old, harmonious, and graceful square – I saw my composition. I was in the horse yard. There, behind a small door, was the chapel, filled with anointing, where the bullfighters came to pray a moment before facing death. Then I was presented, in all its richness, this subjectively musical and expressive contrast: the distant hubbub of the plaza, of the public awaiting the party, and the devotion of those who came to that altar, poor and full of entreating poetry, to pray to God for their life, perhaps for their soul, for the pain, for the excitement and for the hope perhaps they were going to leave forever in a few moments in that arena full of laughter, music and sun.”
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
String Quartet No. 2 “Intimate Letters” (1928)
In January 1928, the Czech composer Leoš Janáček wrote to Kamila Stösslová of his new string quartet project:
“Now I’ve begun to write something nice. Our life will be in it. It will be called ‘Love Letters’…There have already been so many of those dear adventures of ours, haven’t there? They’ll be little fires in my soul and they’ll set it ablaze with the most beautiful melodies…A special instrument will particularly hold the whole thing together. It’s called the viola d’amore – the viola of love. Oh, how I’m looking forward to it! In that work I’ll be always only with you! No third person beside us…You know, don’t you, that I know no world other than you! You’re everything to me, I don’t want anything else but your love.”
Janáček had been writing such letters as he now sought to put into music almost from his first meeting with Stösslová in 1917 in the spa town of Luhačovice. Stösslová was a young married mother thirty-eight years Janáček’s junior. He himself had been married to the long-suffering Zdenka Janáčková (née Schulzová) since 1881. Janáček’s near-instant infatuation with Stösslová would last the rest of his life; the degree to which she returned his ardent feelings seems to have varied over the course of their friendship.
The String Quartet eventually subtitled “Intimate Letters” (Czech: Listy důvěrné) was completed in mid-February 1928. In the summer of that same year, the composer and Stösslová sojourned in Janáček’s hometown of Hukvaldy with her son Otto. It was there that Janáček fell ill with the pneumonia that would result in his death on August 12 at the age of 74. Janáček’s String Quartet No. 2 received its posthumous premiere by the Moravian Quartet on September 7, 1928 in a private performance for critics in Brno.
The quartet is in four movements and reflects both Janáček’s timbral sensitivities (players are frequently instructed to play sul ponticello or “on the bridge”) as well as his penchant for Czech-folk-inflected melodies and an extended tonal language. Each movement consists of a mixture of tempos and affects, juxtaposing fragments, melodies, and moods rather than adhering to a formal or narrative structure. After hearing the work rehearsed the composer reluctantly allowed that the viola d’amore was an impractical choice for the ensemble and replaced it with a standard viola. The viola nonetheless plays a prominent role throughout the work, symbolically forefronting the intensely romantic nature of these “intimate letters.” The first movement, Andante – Con moto – Allegro, is by turns both powerfully gestural and tuneful, animated by the excitement of his first meetings with Stösslová. The smoldering second movement, Adagio – Vivace, opens with a tender, melancholy melody in the viola, which features particularly prominently throughout the movement. The composer noted that the third movement, Moderato – Andante – Adagio, depicted the moment “when the earth trembled.” This was the metaphor Janáček used in describing the event of his confession of love to Stösslová in a wood near Písek. The final movement of the quartet is perhaps the most optimistic – at times even upbeat – sounding with “a great longing – as if it were fulfilled,” as the composer described the movement to his muse.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor “Death and the Maiden”, D810 (1824)
Written in 1824, Schubert’s celebrated Quartet in D Minor (“Death and the Maiden”) was the third of his four “mature” string quartets, an illustrious group that begins with the single-movement Quartettsatz in C Minor of 1820 and the Quartet in A Minor (“Rosamunde”) composed directly prior to the D Minor quartet in 1824. Schubert composed his final string quartet, No. 15 in G Major, in 1826.
1823 and 1824 were especially difficult years for Schubert: In early 1823, at the age of 26, he had been diagnosed with syphilis, a common but largely fatal disease prior to the development of modern antibiotics. The same month that he completed the Quartet In D Minor, Schubert wrote to his friend Josef Kupelwieser of the psychological suffering that accompanied his illness.
“I find myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair continually makes things worse and worse instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the felicity of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain at best, whom enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating variety) for all things beautiful threatens to forsake, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?”
Quoting a text from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which Schubert had set in 1814 as “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” he continued: “‘My peace is gone, my heart is sore, I shall find it nevermore.’ I might as well sing every day now, for upon retiring to bed each night I hope that I may not wake again, and each morning only recalls yesterday’s grief.”
Schubert’s despair at his foreshortened lifespan is unavoidable in interpreting the Quartet in D Minor, which takes its subtitle from the composer’s 1817 setting of Mattias Claudius’ poem “Der Tod und das Mädchen.” Claudius’ poem is in the form of a dialogue between a personified Death and an unnamed maiden, who begs him to spare her young life. While Schubert’s song is used only as the theme of the second movement variations, motifs of death – the struggle against it, the somber anticipation of it, the bittersweetness of loss – have been heard by many throughout the work.
The first movement, Allegro, opens with a fortissimo D in unison and a powerful triplet motif. This immediately gives way to a soft, plaintive melody in the first violin; this initial contrast sets up the thematic struggle between resignation and resistance that will be revisited throughout the work. The first movement is a characteristic early Romantic sonata form, animated consistently by the triplets that are by turns both thematic and accompanimental, their inevitable drive contrasted with the unevenness of dotted rhythms. The movement ends with a coda that, after a last burst of energy, transforms the dogged insistence of the movement into something quieter and graver.
The Andante second movement is a kaleidoscope of color and affect. Schubert presents the theme of his setting of “Der Tod und das Mädchen” followed by five variations, each inhabiting its own emotional realm. The dactylic theme is presented in chorale texture. The first two variations maintain the lyricism of the theme with a flowering of countermelody in the violin and then the cello – undergirded by insistent rhythmic accompaniment. In the third variation the character changes: a burst of determination in rhythmic unison juxtaposed with a high descant in the violin, a cri de coeur against the soft entreaties of personified Death. The fourth variation turns tender: G major, the violin soaring in elegant triplets above. The fifth and final variation calls again on the character of the third variation, with huge swings in dynamics and unison rhythmic passages underscoring the almost-desperate tone. Finally, the movement ends with a restatement of the theme, a heavenly ascent back into G major, fading into pianississimo.
The third movement is marked Scherzo: Allegro presto. A conventionally ternary scherzo and trio, it is the shortest and perhaps lightest of the four movements. The scherzo has a playfully sinister triple-meter theme, simultaneously lightened by anacrustic grace notes in the violin and tethered to earth by a descending accompaniment line in the viola and cello. The trio is in D major, a characteristically vocalic Schubertian melody that temporarily clears any dust left by the stomping of the scherzo which thereafter returns to end the movement.
The theme of the rondo finale of Schubert’s Quartet in D Minor is often described as a tarantella, a rapid folk dance of southern Italian origin in 6/8 time. Although the composer did not provide such a designator, this movement meets those requirements in both Presto tempo and time signature, as well as in the playful flick of the rising fourth at the center of the main theme. Often erroneously described as a folkloric cure for the poisonous bite of a tarantula (both the dance and the spider take their name from the Italian city of Taranto), the tarantella mimes a courtship dance in which the couple is surrounded by a circle of others who may sing and play instruments. The idea of frenzied dancing intended to ward off death has obvious resonance with the themes often heard in “Death and the Maiden”; equally possible is an interpretation of Death and his victim as the courting couple of the tarantella. It is however likely that Schubert intended no such concrete image, and rather designed the movement more abstractly as a series of contrasts via the rondo form: the rapid if somewhat lurching dance theme positioned against the contrasting sections, which variously contain broad, chorale-like writing and off-kilter hemiolas that obscure the sense of regular meter. The movement ends with a careening coda, beginning in D major and aiming at a triumphant major-mode finish, only to be thwarted at the last moment by a return to the darkness of D minor to end the work.
