Danish String Quartet

Northern Horizons

On the Program of the Danish String Quartet

Anne do Paço

For almost 20 years, the four musicians of the Danish String Quartet have succeeded not only in broadening horizons again and again, but have also managed to invite their audiences to listen ever more closely. Contemporary music has a permanent place in the ensemble’s performances just like the major repertoire works, but the latter are presented in unusual contexts—as in today’s concert—allowing them to be heard in new and different ways.

Short Stories for String Quartet

The program opens with music of stark contrasts: Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen draws us into a thick jungle of sound at the beginning of his Ten Preludes for String Quartet—yet after only a few bars, the highly expressive energy breaks down and the music, limited to individual sustained notes and repetitions, seems as if frozen, reminiscent of the plaintive call of a lost fledgling bird. Violent outbursts in triple forte answer passages that are reduced almost to the point of silence. Experimental roughness keeps colliding with a simplicity that illuminates the essential sources of music-making—to explore the waxing and waning of sounds. The energy of forward-propelled rhythms is thwarted by crass chord clusters. A homophonic section could appear as a thing of great simpleness, were not its harmonics so sharply jarring. A melody that develops from a straightforward scale with all four instruments in unison exudes an aura of sacred archaism, lending the ensemble playing great unity. At another moment, the violins and viola explore the effects of individual, feverishly pale chords above a “ticking” motion of the cello. Finally, a folk song full of complicated, dance-like rhythms is hinted at. “In all their briefness, these ten ‘short stories’ for string quartet contain almost all that can be desired of musical expressions within the relatively short period of 20 minutes,” Abrahamsen himself said about his Preludes. “Violence expressed as joy, simplicity as necessity, contrasts as form. The eruptive side of the music is not sharply segregated from the simple, harmoniously melodious side. Each of the ‘short stories’ points forward to the next and at the same time back to its predecessor, and thus makes for a composed overall structure.”

The first performance of the Ten Preludes by the Copenhagen-based Kontra Quartet in 1973 put Hans Abra hamsen into the spotlight of the Danish avant-garde almost overnight. At the age of only 21, the artist, who had studied horn and composition at the Royal Music Academies in Copenhagen and Århus and whose teachers included Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Per Nørgård, and later György Ligeti, had produced a key work of the musical movement that tried to describe itself with the term “New Simplicity.” Abrahamsen, however, quickly moved away from Nørgård’s confessional, large-perspective style, searching for a more objective view of his musical material. At the same time, he began to integrate even more complex structures, without giving up the precision and clarity so characteristic of his early works, or the ability to create magic through transparency. He invariably treated his material in an extremely sensitive manner—as if it were exceedingly precious. Yet maybe it was exactly this heightened conscience of compositional questions that plunged Abrahamsen into a profound crisis between 1990 and 1998, during which he set only one single song down on paper. In retrospect, he himself called this phase his “hibernation”: “One might say that I lacked the courage to speak, but one might also say that I had the courage to maintain silence.” Having won a more distanced view of his oeuvre and having spent time overpainting his own work almost like a palimpsest, shifting, quoting, and transforming his own music, he finally found new energy, and he has long since returned as a composer, forging a body of work upon which Michael Stallknecht commented: “[Abrahamsen] merges complex structures into an unmistakable personal style; he seems to cover them with a layer of snow under which they keep vibrating, like the molecules of an ice crystal, […] winter landscapes that always have a touch of the unreal.”

The last of the Ten Preludes also has a surprising, almost irritating air of unreality: a pastiche that points back to the Baroque era—during which the prelude was such an important musical form—though not without a contemporary wink of the eye. Abrahamsen has compared this device to the “moral of the story” at the end of the fables by the Danish- Norwegian Baroque poet Ludvig Holberg: “The moral where things are sorted out and loose ends tied. Like in the fairy tales, one could say, ‘… there, this was a true story’.”

The String Quartet—a Field for Experimentation

Joseph Haydn is often called the “inventor” of the string quartet. That is not entirely correct, as musical forms and genres are usually neither invented nor discovered, but are the result of a gradual process, continuing past developments and incorporating what is “in the air” at any given time. In this regard, Haydn was a genius: amidst the remoteness of the Esterházy court—situated within the triangle of Eisenstadt, the Hungarian lowlands, and Vienna—he found a home for many years, recognized as one of the most important musical creators of his time. He was constantly inventing ways to reconcile his employer’s demands with his own artistic standards and unparalleled musical imagination. He first composed string quartets as a young man and left behind a quartet fragment written in his old age. In between these two, he found an incomparable compositional field for experimentation: on the one hand, the compendium of 83 completed string quartets—which can hardly be grasped in its diversity, conceptual density, and freedom—raises all kinds of questions regarding structure, sonic gestures, melody, and harmony; on the other, it stands as a grand testimony to the joy and culture of playing attainable by two violins, a viola, and a cello.

When Haydn completed the six quartets of his Opus 20 in the summer of 1772, he was 40 years old. Under the oldfashioned title Divertimenti a quattro, he presented a collection that was unique for its time. The four string instruments appear as equal partners, but Haydn devoted special attention to the cello. With unusually independent, virtuosic passages, its part is far more than a supporting bass voice—rather, it pays homage to the dedicatee of the quartets: the Austro- Hungarian civil servant and cellist Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz. Inscriptions at the beginning and end of the scores also show a humble composer with a religious bent: Haydn inscribed the beginning of each of the quartets with the words “In Nomine Domini” and ended them with various formulas, e.g. “Laus Deo et Beatissimae Virginis Mariae,” “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” or, in the case of the Quartet No. 2 in C major, “Laus omnip. Deo,” to which he added the wordplay “Sic fugit amicus amicum” (“Praise be to God the Almighty. Thus flees the friend the friend.”).

In keeping with the original title of “divertimento,” the C-major quartet begins in a rather innocent vein. But the simple tone is misleading. A dark-tinged middle section changes the atmosphere and the structure grows increasingly complex, with the movement’s monothematic material treated as in the development of a sonata movement. In contrast, the character of the C-minor Adagio is downright dramatic, opening with all four instruments in unison before the cello unfolds a melancholy theme above pulsating sounds from the other strings. The effect is reminiscent of a recitativo accompagnato in a grand opera, as recitative-like elements mix with the melodic phrases that are by turn halting and assertive, as if Haydn were searching for his material in a spontaneous improvisation. Matching the structure of a vocal scene, this is in fact followed by an arioso with a lyrical theme from the first violin that soars over a gentle carpet of sound, woven out of sustained notes and broken chords. This theme finally culminates in a cadenza before the idyll is disrupted several times by rough, declamatory chords. The minuet has a capricious, dance-like nature with the open G string, played like a drone, making it resemble a musette. Once again, however, the cheerfulness is not without shadows. In the finale, an artful quadruple fugue, Haydn sets no fewer than four themes against each other—albeit without any stuffy fugal pathos; instead, the movement is breathtaking in its modernity and refinement, which is largely due to its attractive chromatic colors. The movement is initially to be performed “sotto voce”—only in the final measures does Haydn broaden the dynamics, letting the four instrumentalists play all four themes in a jubilant stretta.

The Beauty and Depth of Old Folk Songs

The idea of arranging folk songs for different combinations of instruments did not originate with the national movements of the late 19th century or the 20th-century fascination with folk music. Even in the late 18th century, many composers were interested in this subject, including Ludwig van Beethoven and most of all Haydn, who was commissioned by various Scottish and British publishers to arrange more than 400 Scottish, Welsh, and Irish folk songs between 1792 and 1804.

A Danish song about a beautiful rose blossoming amidst a vastness of thorns and thistles held such a strong fascination for the musicians of the Danish String Quartet that they decided to explore the cosmos of Scandinavian folk music even more deeply after presenting their folk-inspired CD Wood Works in 2014. The results were released in 2017 on the album Last Leaf. The Danish theologian and poet Hans Adolf Brorson published the song Den yndigste Rose er funden (“Now Found Is the Fairest of Roses”) in 1732—a hymn to the beauty of nature amidst a wasteland, and also a Christmas carol recounting the birth of Jesus. The composition’s dark character is striking but not a coincidence, as it is based on a funerary chorale ascribed to Martin Luther, and the text meditates upon the transience of all things beautiful and refers to the death of the savior on the cross, already inherent in the birth of Christ. “We believe that Brorson touched on something very important,” the four musicians explain in their program note to Last Leaf: “That strong musical material can possess endless possibilities and it is meaningful to explore what happens when the ‘function’ of a melody is tweaked. Can a funeral chorale be used to celebrate Christmas? Can a rustic folk dance conjure up feelings of melancholy and contemplation? Is a traditional Norse boat song supposed to be sung by the men at the oars or the women at home? And what happens when a classical string quartet yet again travels through the world of Nordic folk music?” The four musicians’ research goes back to the oldest known Scandinavian secular song, the medieval Drømte mig en drøm (“I Had a Dream”), which was published in the Codex Runicus around 1300. Other important sources were the folk song collections that Rasmus Storm, from the island of Funen, published during the 1760s, as well as the work of the Bast Brothers, who between 1763 and 1782 assembled a collection of Danish folk melodies that has remained the most comprehensive to this day. But the members of the Danish String Quartet also studied the traditions of the fiddlers who originally accompanied rural folk dances and later traveled the land giving concerts as folk music virtuosos. Not least, the project also entailed new compositions inspired by the spirit of folk melodies—heard, as are