Belcea Quartet

Music at the Close

String Quartets by Mozart, Bartók, and Mendelssohn

Harry Haskell

Valediction is the common thread that binds tonight’s program together. The three quartets that Mozart wrote in 1789–90 for the Prussian monarch Friedrich Wilhelm II, an enthusiastic amateur cellist, are his last and among his finest contributions to the genre. Bravura writing for both first violin and cello gives K. 589 an extra dollop of sparkle. By contrast, the last of Bartók’s six quartets, composed in Switzerland and Hungary just before and after the outbreak of World War II, is very much a work of its time: the prevailing mood is conveyed by the expressive marking mesto, or “sad,” attached to each of the four movements. Although Mendelssohn seldom used music as a vehicle for expressing his innermost feelings, the F-minor Quartet is an exception; his last and arguably greatest piece of chamber music, it was prompted by the death of his sister Fanny in May 1847, less than six months before his own demise.

A Northern Tour

The feverish compositional activity that marked the last year or two of Mozart’s life was partly induced by the precarious state of his finances. Poor health notwithstanding, he brought forth one masterpiece after another in a wide variety of genres. Così fan tutte, the last of the three great comic operas that he wrote with Lorenzo Da Ponte, premiered at the court theater in Vienna in January 1790; it was soon followed by Die Zauberflöte and La clemenza di Tito. Somehow Mozart also found time to write concertos for piano and clarinet, three string quartets, two string quintets, a clarinet quintet, and several small-scale vocal works—not to mention the great Requiem Mass on which he was working when he died on December 5, 1791.

In the spring of 1789, Mozart embarked on a concert tour to Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden in hopes of replenishing his depleted bank account. It was on this trip that he undertook to write the last of his 27 string quartets—the three so-called “Prussian” Quartets—for King Friedrich Wilhelm II. The Quartet in B-flat major was finished in Vienna in May 1790, a year after the Quartet in D major, K. 575, and a month before the Quartet in F Major, K. 590. But Mozart’s hopes for an audience with the king had remained unfulfilled, and he never received any payment for his work. He later dispatched the scores to his publisher, grumbling to a friend that he had been “forced to give away my quartets … for a song, simply in order to have cash in hand.” Whereupon he accepted a more lucrative commission from Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a connoisseur of what was then called “ancient” music, to arrange two of Handel’s choral works for private performances in Vienna.

In a nod to the cello-playing monarch, Mozart awards the instrument unusual prominence in the B-flat major Quartet. Much of the cello writing is highly soloistic, particularly in the aria-like slow movement, whose intricate figuration highlights the instrument’s treble register. Throughout the work, Mozart makes wonderfully effective use of contrasts; thus the broadly lyrical melody that opens the first Allegro gives way to a series of stuttering sighs and then to driving triplets set against a lightly syncopated accompaniment. Time and again Mozart sets up the listener’s expectations only to thwart them, for instance by extending or truncating his carefully balanced phrases. The lightweight minuet is overshadowed by its long and substantial trio midsection, throwing the conventional proportions askew. The final Allegro assai bears a strong thematic resemblance to the corresponding movement of Haydn’s “Joke” Quartet, a work that Mozart’s audiences would have known well, and owes much of its character to the contrast between smooth legato motion and athletic leaps.

A Tormented Spirit

The history of the sixth and last of Bartók’s string quartets mirrors the composer’s wanderings in the final years of his life. The first three movements were drafted in August 1939 in Switzerland, where Bartók was fulfilling a commission from Paul Sacher to write his Divertimento for String Orchestra. (“I feel like a musician of olden times,” the composer wrote to his son, “the invited guest of a patron of the arts.”) Returning to Hungary shortly before the German army invaded Poland, he completed the quartet in Budapest that fall. One year later Bartók sought refuge in the United States. He was in the audience when the Kolisch Quartet gave the first performance of the Sixth Quartet in New York City on January 20, 1941.

To what extent these displacements, the brutal efficiency of the Nazi blitzkrieg, and other life experiences left a mark on Bartók’s music is a matter of interpretation and conjecture. But there is no mistaking the fact that his musical language, for all its roots in Middle European folk traditions and turnof-the-century impressionism, was forged in the crucible of the early 20th century. A restless, tormented spirit haunts the Sixth Quartet, from the mournfully meandering melody of the opening viola solo to the violins’ hollow-sounding fifths and the cello’s spectral pizzicato chords at the close. Here gathered together are all the elements of Bartók’s late-period style—the terse, angular gestures, spiky, irregular rhythms, astringent harmonies, fitful lyricism, slithering chromatic lines, and surreal coloristic effects.

Formally, the Sixth Quartet represented a new path for the composer. In place of the symmetrical “arch” construction that characterized its two immediate precursors, Bartók opted for a four-part ritornello structure. The opening viola solo recurs, in richly varied settings, at the beginning of the second and third movements as a kind of unifying head-motif; and it is woven into the very fabric of the slow, searingly intense finale. If all four movements share a similar color, conveyed by the mesto marking, only the last is unremittingly lugubrious, lacking the satirical bite and dancelike, almost manic vitality that tempers the pessimism of its predecessors.

Not long after the premiere of the Sixth Quartet, the American composer-critic Virgil Thomson observed that the expressive content of Bartók’s music was inseparable from the times in which he lived: “The despair in his quartets is no personal maladjustment. It is a realistic facing of the human condition, the state of man as a moral animal, as this was perceptible to a musician of high moral sensibilities just come out of Hungary. No other musician of our century has faced its horrors quite so frankly. The quartets of Bartók have a sincerity, indeed, and a natural elevation that are well-nigh unique in the history of music.”

An Outpouring of Sadness

In 1845, having relinquished his duties as general music director of the Prussian court in Berlin, the 36-year old Mendelssohn “retired” to Frankfurt to spend time with his family and concentrate on composing. He was constitutionally incapable of resting on his laurels, however, and soon resumed his hyperactive pace as a conductor, pianist, and administrator. In addition, the last two years of his life saw the composition of such major works as the Violin Concerto, the String Quintet in B-flat major, the oratorio Elijah, and the great F-minor String Quartet, a powerfully emotional response to the death of his beloved sister.

A gifted composer herself, Fanny had been her brother’s closest artistic confidante since childhood. Felix wrote to a friend that “she was present at all times, in every piece of music, and in everything that I could experience, good or evil.” While vacationing in Switzerland in the summer of 1847, he assuaged his grief by immersing himself in work. That September, a few weeks before his own death, he put the finishing touches on the Quartet, which the English critic Henry Chorley, who visited him in Interlaken, called “one of the most impassioned outpourings of sadness existing in instrumental music.”

Never one to wear his heart on his sleeve, Mendelssohn channeled his sorrow into music that is closely argued and classically disciplined, and all the more moving for its balance and restraint. The slithering tremolos that give the opening Allegro vivace assai its ominously turbulent character are offset by a smoothly undulating major-key countermelody of great tenderness. Here and elsewhere, sequential writing—the use of the same thematic material at different tonal levels—contributes to the sense of emotional intensity. In place of a conventionally lighthearted scherzo, Mendelssohn gives us a seething Allegro assai, characterized by harmonic instability, restless rhythms, and ambiguity between triple and duple meters.

In the poignant Adagio, Mendelssohn comes closest to expressing pure grief. The signature motive—a mournful little tune first stated by the cello and spanning a falling fifth—is balanced later in the movement by a more hopeful melody that surges upward by thirds but never quite gets airborne. In repeating the falling motive just before the end, the cello surprises us by landing on C instead of the expected D flat, leading to a tranquil cadence on A-flat major. The final Allegro molto recalls the emotionally charged world of the first movement. This time, however, the thematic material is more compressed and fragmented. The main theme is not a melody but a syncopated rhythm, a terse shortlong-short figure whose restless energy prevents the music from settling into a groove and propels it to an energetic stretto conclusion.