Emerson String Quartet

Discovering New Angles to the String Quartet

Haydn—Verdi—Wernick

Thomas May

“America’s deepest explorer of the spiritual immensities—a seer painting his discoveries in masses with any color that may lie at hand—cosmic, religious, human, even sensuous,” enthused the composer Charles Ives over one of his American heroes, the poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson—and namesake of the Emerson String Quartet.

When starting out in 1976 (at a time when the U.S. faced its first election since the Watergate crisis and Richard Nixon’s resignation), the Emersons wanted to look back for inspiration to a nobler moment of American history and optimism. “We chose our name because we liked what Ralph Waldo Emerson stood for,” says Eugene Drucker. Together with fellow violinist Philip Setzer, he cofounded the Emerson String Quartet (which continues the principle of alternating the primarius role to this day). Drucker adds: “We knew he was a great idealist and had a profound effect on many people in the arts and also espoused a lot of good social ideas.”

The group, which has gone on to establish itself as a standard-setting ensemble, makes its Pierre Boulez Saal debut with a characteristically invigorating program rich in provocative juxtapositions. They look back to the foundations of the string quartet as we know it with a mature Haydn work that suggests an intriguing counterpart to his sensationally successful “London” symphonies of the same vintage. Over the years, the Emersons have also commissioned new works from an impressive range of composers (Thomas Adès, Kaija Saariaho, Wolfgang Rihm, and Mark-Anthony Turnage among them). This evening, a new score by fellow American Richard Wernick is on the agenda, as is an older discovery: Verdi’s all-too-rarely encountered, sole contribution to the medium.

From Salon to Concert Hall

A vast tradition of chamber music preceded the string quartet as cultivated by Joseph Haydn. But the paradigmatic configuration of two violins, viola, and cello began to stir up more widespread interest thanks to Haydn’s works for this medium. In fact, the composer himself did not initially use the term “string quartet,” and other contemporaries were also trying out ideas for this formation. Still, it was Haydn who succeeded in synthesizing a viable and attractive language well-suited to it. This in turn paved the way for the concept of an enduing repertoire of chamber music— and it is in this sense that Haydn can justly claim paternity, even if, like the symphony, the string quartet evolved from a rather complicated family tree made of earlier pioneers.

“String quartet” has become interchangeable as a term for the formation of musicians and for the genre composed for them. In the former sense, such ensembles were of an appropriate size for domestic music-making. A preoccupation with the challenges and delights of this specific form of chamber music spans Haydn’s career from before he embarked on his long tenure with the Esterházy family, when another patron, Baron Carl Joseph Fürnberg, commissioned his first string quartets (published in the early 1760s), up to the very end, after he abandoned public music-making. Haydn left a string quartet incomplete when he died in 1809.

Periodically, Haydn uncovered new angles to explore, tending to write his quartets in batches that were published as sets of six (or sometimes three.) When Mozart relocated to Vienna, for example, the two composers developed a mutually inspiring friendship that influenced his (and Mozart’s) production of string quartets in particular, and a flurry of quartets followed (three sets between 1787 and 1790).

The String Quartet in D major, Hob. III:70 (also known as Op. 71, No. 2) dates from 1793, when Haydn was back in Vienna, between his two sojourns in London. The amateur violinist and fellow Mason Count Anton Georg Apponyi commissioned six quartets for 100 ducats—thus giving him the right to be the dedicatee (hence these are known as the “Apponyi” quartets) as well as exclusive entitlement to a manuscript copy until they were officially published (which occurred in 1795 and 1796, as Op. 71 and Op. 74, respectively).

While the D-major Quartet was therefore not specifically commissioned for London, Haydn undoubtedly had the fans he had come to know on his first trip in mind, having recently experienced the thrill of celebrity from his enthusiastic followers across the Channel—along with the satisfaction of serious appreciation of what he was up to musically. Not all of his time had been devoted to the new set of symphonies he introduced in London. Then the largest city in the world, London also offered Haydn night after night of additional music-making and socializing, and he spent the off-season traveling and making new high-profile friends.

The brief but attention-getting Adagio introduction indicates that Haydn was thinking of a new context for string quartet performance: the spacious concert hall in contrast to the more intimate domestic settings of the past. And such traits continue throughout. In general, write Floyd and Margaret Grave, the “Apponyi” quartets “display such concert-style traits as bold introductory gestures, declamatory unisons, and concertante passages that engage the ensemble in brilliant figuration.” H.C. Robbins Landon sees Haydn painting here “with a broad brush.”

Energetic octave leaps (prefigured in the introduction) are the engine for the main Allegro, which echoes the adventurous harmonic spirit of the late symphonies. Shifting to A major, the Adagio is a glory of late Haydn at his most blissfully lyrical and features a varied recapitulation. The third movement juxtaposes an extroverted minuet with a minuet that almost seems to whisper sighs. Shifting personalities propel the brief finale as well, which moves into the minor in the middle but speeds ahead for a symphony-style, fortissimo coda.

Faces Instead of Clefs

Richard Wernick has enjoyed an association with the Emerson String Quartet for three decades, starting with the ensemble’s commission of his award-winning Fourth Quartet in 1989. Born in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s native Boston in 1934, Wernick discovered his interest in composing in high school, having been attracted in particular to such composers as Bartók after hearing his Concerto for Orchestra (newly introduced at the time).

Wernick later studied with Irving Fine, Leon Kirchner, Aaron Copland, Ernst Toch, and Boris Blacher. He was also mentored in conducting by Leonard Bernstein. After a stint writing film music, Wernick entered academia, serving for decades on the composition faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, alongside George Crumb and George Rochberg. For the Philadelphia Orchestra in the 1980s, he was a new-music consultant until the end of Riccardo Muti’s tenure there. That role is just one part of Wernick’s substantial legacy advocating on behalf of fellow contemporary composers.

In 1977 Wernick won the Pulitzer Prize in music for Visions of Terror and Wonder, a composition for mezzo-soprano and orchestra that sets verses from the sacred texts of the three Abrahamic religions. Earlier, in Kaddish Requiem (1971), he similarly combined texts from Jewish and Christian sources to commemorate victims of the Vietnam War. The composer’s oeuvre ranges from two symphonies and various concertos to an assortment of chamber and solo instrumental scores, among which is a substantial body of string quartets (ten to date). “Wernick’s style has been described as tonally referential, but based on fixed intervallic cells,” writes Jehoash Hirshberg in Grove Music, who also notes frequent repetition of “motivic-harmonic gestures.” With regard to his quartet writing, Hirschberg also notes the use of “quasi-Baroque contrapuntal devices.”

Richard Wernick has provided the following commentary on his new String Quartet No. 10: “A few years ago, I made the decision that, given my age, I would no longer accept assignments with deadlines, and to the greatest extent possible, write only for people I knew. I prefer to see faces on the left side of the music paper rather than clefs. In the case of the Emerson Quartet, in which the assignment of first and second violin parts is interchangeable, this posed a particular problem, but one easily solved by writing what are, essentially, two first violin parts. The most obvious use of this process is in the first movement’s Fuga Pomposa, where the presentation of the ‘subject’ is played by the second violin, with the ‘answer’ coming from the first violin in larger note values, at a different speed and upside down.

“The Quartet is divided into three movements, played without pause. The first movement is also in three parts, with the somewhat inebriate ‘fugue’ making up the central section. The second movement is dedicated to the brilliant neuro-surgeon whose magic has kept me upright, thus the (perhaps audacious) references to Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang. The ‘lamentoso’ third movement is a Coda to the extent that it is a ‘playing out’ of the ‘bolero’-type dance rhythm from the first movement.

“Composing music is hard work, very hard work, but fun. And even more fun when composing for a group of musicians whose contribution to our musical culture is incalculable.”

A Wordless Chamber Opera?

Giuseppe Verdi’s legacy is so closely associated with the opera house that listeners unfamiliar with his String Quartet in E minor might expect his only major non-vocal effort to be little more than a curiosity. The composer himself initially shrugged it off as a diversion “in my moments of idleness,” written in 1873 when he was stuck in Naples with time to kill. Verdi had traveled there to supervise the production of his new opera Aida, which was delayed when the soprano Teresa Stolz became ill. He had the quartet performed in an informal setting, with just a handful of listeners who happened to be around, “without attaching the slightest importance to it.” But others did, and Verdi published the piece three years later. It also began to circulate in a version for string orchestra.

Indeed, the E-minor Quartet is far from a trifle but manifests genuine fluency in this very challenging medium. Verdi was not the only 19th-century Italian opera composer to try his hand at a string quartet—Donizetti produced 18 or so—but his effort leads the pack in terms of musical substance and vigor. What a pity that Verdi did not take the results more seriously and make some more contributions to the literature. For all the spontaneity of its origins, he had schooled himself well in the art of chamber music. Verdi’s profound admiration for the old masters extended to their string quartets.

Naturally, Verdi’s experience as an opera composer shaped his understanding of the quartet’s potential. He had written stunningly effective vocal ensembles in every imaginable context throughout his career—an art that could be readily translated into the exchanges between wordless strings. Verdi aficionados might feel a name-that-opera urge to detect traces of the stage works at various moments in the quartet. This dual aspect—music that is self-contained and purely instrumental along with the familiarity of Verdi’s operatic style—makes the work particularly fascinating to experience.

The opening Allegro sustains a sense of drama and strong characterization through the interplay of tension and relaxation rather than conventional thematic development. Verdi contrasts the dark, twisting shape of the main theme with a sweetly radiant second one. The Andantino begins as a charmingly insouciant interlude but includes a stormy episode with a hint of Beethoven-like rumination before returning to its initial demeanor. Verdi offers a restless whirligig as the third movement, relaxing for a brief aria for accompanied cello in the central trio. The term “scherzo” is reserved for the finale, where it modifies “fuga.” If the quartet as a whole suggests a new point of departure from Verdi’s career up to that point, this “joke fugue” looks ahead to his farewell to the stage: the ensemble fugue that concludes Falstaff, setting the words “Tutto nel mondo è burla”—“All the world’s a joke.”