Belcea Quartet & Anderszewski

Confessions Below the Surface

Works by Schubert, Britten, Shostakovich

Richard Wigmore

During his teens Franz Schubert wrote fluently in every genre he touched. Yet while he never lost his inspired facility in song, in the years 1818 to 1822 he began and abandoned far more instrumental works than he completed. Outgrowing the debonair charm of his youthful works, epitomized by the Third and Fifth Symphonies, Schubert seems to have experienced something of a creative crisis as he strove to reconcile the mighty example of Beethoven’s middle-period works with his own subjective, Romantic vision.

Greatest and most tantalizing of these instrumental torsos are the “Unfinished” Symphony and the Quartettsatz, meaning “Quartet Movement,” in C minor D 703 of December 1820. We can only speculate why Schubert downed tools after completing a magnificent Allegro assai and some 40 bars of an Andante. Perhaps he felt that, as with the “Unfinished” two years later, he had set the bar so high that he could not find a worthy continuation for the moment. Or perhaps he simply became sidetracked by other projects that offered more immediate prospects of performance.

The whispering tremolos that open the Quartettsatz may have been distantly influenced by a passage in the scherzo of Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet Op. 74. But the voice is uniquely Schubert’s, not least in the way the music quickly builds to a volcanic, quasi-orchestral climax and then dissolves in lyrical pathos, with a variant of the tremolo theme. The whole, epic movement oscillates between extremes of storm-swept anguish and, in the soaring second theme, aching tenderness, unified by the fragmentary recurrences of the opening. No earlier instrumental work of Schubert equals the emotional reach and structural mastery of the Quartettsatz. In this, the first great Romantic string quartet, we seem to meet for the first time the isolated, confessional figure of so many late Schubert masterpieces.

When Benjamin Britten composed his Third String Quartet in the autumn of 1975, encouraged by the Amadeus Quartet and the writer Hans Keller (the quartet’s dedicatee), he knew that he would not have long to live. And it is not over-fanciful to hear the whole work, completed in November in his beloved Venice, as death-haunted. Britten’s titles for the five movements—“Duets,” “Ostinato,” “Solo,” “Burlesque,” and “Recitative and Passacaglia” (whose repeated ground bass is prefigured at the end of the first movement)—suggest a suite. He even considered titling the quartet a “divertimento.” Yet the whole work has an underlying bleakness, even in the opening movement, a gently rocking barcarolle that seems to evoke the lapping waters of a Venetian canal. Beginning with second violin and viola (shades here of a Bachian two-part invention), Britten explores all six possible duet permutations during the course of the movement.

The third movement, “Solo,” initially presents a bittersweet song in the first violin, high above a series of sustained arpeggios that move slowly upwards through cello, viola, and second violin. At the movement’s center Britten writes an ad libitum cadenza for all four instruments featuring glassy harmonics, pizzicati, glissandi, and stratospheric trills. The impression is of manic, surreal birdsong.

There is something savagely obsessive about the second and fourth movements, the “Ostinato” and “Burlesque.” It’s hard to believe that this music was the work of a man in frail and failing health. Both movements seem to pay oblique homage to Mahler and the recently dead Shostakovich, two composers who profoundly influenced Britten’s music. The scherzo-like “Ostinato” (marked “very fast”) is built on a four-note pattern spanning two and a half octaves, announced bluntly by all four instruments in the opening bars. In the central trio, the ostinato continues softly, initially on pizzicato cello, against dolce duetting, first for the violins, then for the lower pair of instruments—an affectionate parody, perhaps, of a Venetian serenade.

The “Burlesque” is another scherzo-trio structure. It begins as a twisted, syncopated waltz, à la Shostakovich, with what sounds like a wry dig at the scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the brief, grotesque fugato rising from the cello’s depths. (Britten always had a problem with Beethoven in “heroic” vein.) In the trio, the first violin, now muted, plays a variant of the waltz above three distinct ostinato patterns. The second violin plays col legno (with the wood of the bow), while the cello’s pizzicati alternate with the viola’s whistling arpeggio swirls played “on the wrong side of the bridge.” The upshot is the strangest soundscape in all of Britten’s chamber music.

The composer revealed that the repeated six-bar ground bass of the finale (subtitled La Serenissima) was inspired by the tolling bells of Santa Maria della Salute, near his hotel in Venice. In the opening “Recitative” each instrument in turn quotes a fragment from his final opera, Death in Venice. The “Passacaglia,” in a luminous E major (Aschenbach’s key in the opera), is Britten’s last homage to his beloved Purcell. The first violin intones a hypnotic, incantatory melody above the ground bass, which is then repeated with ever-changing decorations and counter-melodies. After a final tranquillo statement of the melody and bass, the close is characteristically enigmatic, with the E major of the two violins “soured” by the viola’s C sharp and the cello’s longheld low D natural. “I want the work to end with a question,” wrote the composer. He died two weeks before the Amadeus Quartet gave its world premiere, in the Snape Maltings on December 19, 1976.

It proved to be Britten’s last major work. A decade after his death, when he had dipped out of fashion in contemporary music circles, the composer Robert Saxton heard a performance of the Third Quartet in Tanglewood. As he revealingly recalled: “…it was a moving experience to witness a tough American modern music audience, nine hundred or a thousand of them, stunned into silence at the end, before they felt able to applaud.”

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his famous Piano Quintet in 1940 in response to a commission from the Beethoven Quartet, who gave the premieres of most of his string quartets. This was a period of strange, illusory calm, both for the Soviet Union and for Shostakovich himself, whose Fifth Symphony had partially restored him to favor with the Soviet regime in 1937. Like the Symphony, the Piano Quintet manages to reconcile an “approachable,” predominantly diatonic style with a profound subjectivity. It met with the approval of Pravda, who judged it “without doubt the finest composition of 1940.” And though it had its detractors (one self-styled critic complained to Stalin that this was “music that does not connect with the life of the people”), it won the Stalin Prize in 1941 and became something of a party piece for Shostakovich and the Beethoven Quartet.

Much of the Quintet’s idiom is neo-classical or neobaroque, yet Shostakovich’s personality is imprinted on every bar. Initiated by an ornate piano solo (featuring a cell of three rising notes that permeates the whole work), the opening Prelude sounds like a slightly skewed Baroque French Overture, at once majestic and faintly troubling. Its dignified tread is interrupted by one of Shostakovich’s breezily banal waltz themes, beginning as a piano solo above a sustained viola line before the strings take over. Was the composer being ironic here? Certainly, if we are to believe the self-portrait presented in Solomon Volkov’s Testimony. When the slow music returns it develops a quasi-orchestral wildness.

Built on a sighing theme announced by the muted first violin, the Fugue that follows, beginning in strict neo- Bachian style, is also ambivalent in tone: broadly laid out, measured in its progress, yet strangely stifled until it briefly erupts in an anguished fortissimo climax, with the four strings straining in their highest register. At the end the piano plays a fragment of the fugue theme in two-part canon, with the hands four octaves apart, to eerie effect.

The Scherzo, in B major, has often been taken at face value as an expression of high spirits. But as in the Prelude’s waltz interlude, Shostakovich’s intent is surely parodistic. He takes the cheerfully mechanical music of the fairground and a clodhopping rustic dance (in piano octaves, over a hyperbanal bass scale) and gives them a sour, even menacing, twist, not least in the piano’s brutally pounded “wrong notes.” In the equally ambiguous trio, the first violin spins what sounds like a Jewish folk tune over repeated piano chords.

The elegiac opening of the D-minor Intermezzo sounds like an overt homage to Bach. Its bittersweet violin melody above the cello’s stalking pizzicato evokes, in more disquieting mode, the famous Air from the Third Orchestral Suite. The three-note cell is prominent in both the theme and the bass line. After an impassioned fortissimo climax and a chromatic canon between the two violins, the movement subsides in an uneasy calm, with the first violin pitched high above the other instruments—another instance of Shostakovich’s fondness for leaving a chasm in the middle of the texture.

On the surface, at least, the G-major Finale (whose violin theme begins with the ubiquitous three-note cell) seems smiling, unproblematic. The fanfare-like second theme sounds like a parody of circus music, while the slinky closing pages, ending with three pianissimo pizzicato twangs, have a whiff of the cabaret. The abiding impression is of an evasion rather than a resolution of earlier ambiguities.