String Quartet in D, K. 575 —— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 — 1791)
i. Allegretto; ii. Andante; iii. Menuetto (Allegretto); iv Allegretto
In April we heard Mozart's Quartet No. 22 in B flat major
(K589, Prussian No. 2); today its predecessor, No. 21, the first of the
so-called 'Prussian Quartets'. In April 1789, Mozart's wife claiming illness
and needing a spa cure (where however she flirted to Mozart's distress), left
Mozart desperate for money. Hope came when Prince Lichnowsky, an aristocratic
pupil, offered to take him to Berlin and present him to King Friedrich Wilhelm
II (himself an amateur cellist). He came back to Vienna intending to write 6
quartets for the King and 6 'easy' piano sonatas for his daughter Princess
Frederike. Of the latter, only one was written — Mozart's last piano sonata. Of
the quartets, Mozart wrote only 3. Somewhat neglected, these quartets are
overshadowed by his earlier 'Haydn' quartets and the later quintets. Some of
his contemporaries got the impression that Mozart wrote with a facility
bordering on flippancy for he would write out the score without errors while
talking to friends, but others insisted that he spent much of the night at the
piano, and it was only his extraordinary memory that enabled him to write the
fair copy at speed. A distinctive feature of all 3 'Prussian' quartets is the
prominent and interesting cello part, intended for the king himself to play. In
this, the first of the set, 3 of the 4 movements are marked allegretto ('mildly cheerful' ?). The outer
movements are in D major; the andante
second movement is in A, the minuet (in D) has a trio section that swithers
between D and G.
String Quartet No. 2, (Op. 17) —— Béla Bartók (1881 – 1945)
i. Moderato; ii. Allegro molto capriccioso; iii. Lento
At the age of 21 Bartók, travelling abroad as a virtuoso
pianist, was stimulated by Strauss's Zarathustra
to try his hand at composition (Kossuth
in 1903). In 1904, hearing a nanny sing a folk song he was stimulated to take
up the collecting and study of Folk Music as his main preoccupation and life's
work, with only occasional diversion into composition: the 1st
quartet (1909), an opera Bluebeard's
Castle (1911), 2nd quartet (1917), the ballets Wooden Prince (1916), and Miraculous
Mandarin (1919). In 1909 the 28 yr old Bartók married 16 yr old Marta. By
then, he was living in Budapest as professor of pianoforte at the Royal Academy
of Music (where one of his pupils was Sir Georg Solti). The First World War was
a relatively peaceful time in Hungary. For Bartók and his colleague, great
friend and fellow collector Kodály, it meant that they had to give up their
travelling abroad collecting folk songs onto wax cylinders and return to
Hungary; turmoil came with Hungary's Soviet revolution after the war. So Bartók
spent most of the war simultaneously writing the Wooden Prince and his 2nd quartet; both showing the influence of
Debussy. Bartók apparently described the first movement as being in sonata
form, the second as "a kind of rondo" and the third as
"difficult to define" but possibly a sort of ternary form (Wikipedia). It is not in his 'mature' style, which developed only in the
twenties and thirties.
String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, (Op. 13) — Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847)
1. Adagio/allegro vivace, 2. Adagio non lento, 3. Intermezzo (allegretto con moto/allegro di molto), 4. Presto
This quartet, composed in 1827 when Mendelssohn was 18 years
old, is actually his first, as Opus 12 (though called Quartet No. 1) was
written two years later. It astonishes the listener with its assured mastery of
the medium, and its bold originality; but then we remember that he wrote his
superb String Octet (1825) two years before that. Many musicologists have compared
Mendelssohn's opus 13 with Beethoven's late quartets, the last of which, though
not performed in public till 1828 was published in September 1827 (Beethoven
died March 1827). (See e.g.: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/mendelssohn-quartet-in-a-minor-op-13.) While most contemporaries regarded
these late Beethoven quartets as flawed, and even 'horrible', the young
Mendelssohn must have obtained and studied the score in the weeks before
writing his opus 13. An easily conceded but trivial similarity between older
and younger master is that the final movement of Beethoven's last quartet (Op.
135) opens with a musical motif under which Beethoven wrote "Muß es sein?" ("Must it be?"),
while in the last 5 bars of the opening adagio, adolescent Mendelssohn quoted
the "Ist es wahr?" motif
from a song he had previously written (of which the words run "Is it true,
is it true that you are always waiting for me in the arboured walk?"). But
the one utterance is a disturbed, existential question, while the other
expresses the uncertainty and excitement of a youthful romantic yearning. So
differ also the works.
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