A Quartet of Quartets

Works by Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, and Tchaikovsky

Richard Wigmore

“I am composing six easy clavier sonatas for Princess Friederike and six quartets for the king,” wrote Mozart to his fellow freemason and regular creditor Michael Puchberg in July 1789. This was long taken, with no supporting evidence, to imply a specific commission from King Friedrich Wilhelm II, whose Prussian court Mozart had visited that spring. What seems more likely is that Mozart began the set of quartets with the intention of dedicating them to the king, for which he would expect due reward. He had finished the D-major Quartet K. 575 by the end of June. Then came a gap of 11 months, filled in part by Così fan tutte. Two further quartets, K. 589 and 590, followed in 1790. But Mozart never completed the set of six. Desperately in need of money, he sold all three to the Viennese publisher Artaria (“I have had to give away my quartets— such exhausting labor—for a trivial sum, simply to have cash in hand to meet my present difficulties,” he wrote to Puchberg). When they finally appeared in print, shortly after Mozart’s death, they bore no dedication to the king.

The “exhausting labor”—virtually identical to the phrase he had used in the dedication of the six “Haydn” Quartets—confirms that the writing of quartets was rarely an easy matter for Mozart. It may also refer to the particular challenge the composer set himself. Friedrich Wilhelm was an accomplished cellist, at least by royal standards; and in these so-called “Prussian” Quartets Mozart clearly set out to flatter the king’s technique. He was careful, though, to balance the cello’s prominence by allotting more solos than usual to the second violin and viola, so that at times they resemble “concertante quartets,” as Artaria described them on the title page.

K. 589 opens with a relaxed, triple-time movement, two of whose graceful themes are announced by the cello, then cunningly rescored in the recapitulation. The cello also takes the lead in the Larghetto, whose bare sonorities and air of refined abstraction are characteristic of Mozart’s later slow movements (compare, say, the Andante of the E flat–major String Quintet K. 614 or the Larghetto of the B-flat Piano Concerto K. 595).

In the minuet and finale Mozart abandons cello-led concertante textures and reverts to a style closer to the “Haydn” Quartets published in 1785. The finale, in a jig-like 6/8 meter, treats its blithe theme with dazzling resource and contrapuntal legerdemain. But the quartet’s expressive climax comes where you least expect it: in the trio of the minuet, usually a point of relaxation in an 18thcentury symphony or quartet. Here Mozart expands the trio to nearly double the length of the courtly minuet, gradually intensifying the music, via a disquieting chromatic passage, to a climax of hectic brilliance, with virtuosic cross-string bowing for the first violin over a sustained cello pedal.

Throughout the 19th century, the string quartet remained a quintessentially Austro-German genre. In Italy, several composers who had made their name in opera produced quartets modelled on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, sometimes leavened with a dash of Rossini. Donizetti composed as many as 18 fluent, lightweight quartets. But the only 19th-century Italian quartets with a toehold in the repertoire are Verdi’s E-minor work and Puccini’s singlemovement Cristantemi. Verdi’s Quartet, his only extended instrumental work, came about by chance. In the winter of 1872–3 the composer was in Naples supervising revivals of Don Carlo and Aida. Rehearsals had to be postponed when his principal soprano, Teresa Stolz, fell ill. Left with time on his hands in March, Verdi set about composing a string quartet. On April 1 he invited a group of friends to the Hotel delle Crocelle where, without introduction, four players entered the foyer and embarked on the first performance of the piece. The response was enthusiastic. Yet Verdi, characteristically, spoke deprecatingly of the work, insisting that he had written it “for mere amusement” and had never attached any importance to it. He even forbade its publication and public performance, relenting only after repeated requests from Italian music societies and his publisher Giulio Ricordi.

While Verdi’s dismissive attitude to his Quartet should not be taken literally, his reluctance to publish it may have stemmed from a feeling that he, an Italian, had encroached on territory rightfully occupied by the Viennese masters. Yet as he must have secretly acknowledged, he created an intensely individual work whose grace and lightness of touch conceal the subtlest craftsmanship. Textures are woven with the finesse of true chamber music; and it is possible to feel that the experience Verdi gained in writing the Quartet bore fruit in the wonderfully refined sonorities of the two late Shakespeare operas, Otello and Falstaff. The opening Allegro begins with an agitated theme, initially on second violin, that recalls a motif associated with the jealous Amneris in Aida. In the hushed, tense development, Verdi works this theme in tightly knit counterpoint, then omits it from the recapitulation, which begins instead with the songful, rather Mendelssohnian second theme.

Poised somewhere between a minuet and mazurka, the C-major Andantino (marked “con eleganza”) is a delightfully whimsical movement that refracts Haydn’s spirit through a Verdian prism. Back in E minor, the third movement is a scherzo of demonic energy, replete with biting accents and rude dynamic contrasts. The whispering staccato central section contains a reminiscence, surely conscious, of the scherzo of Beethoven’s last Quartet, Op. 135. In the most overtly Italianate part of the work, the serenading trio presents a gloriously uninhibited cello melody against strumming pizzicatos. Marked “Scherzo Fuga,” the finale is a tour de force of contrapuntal dexterity that wears its learning with nonchalant lightness. Its witty élan is enhanced by kaleidoscopic changes of harmony and texture, with the key of E major only firmly established near the close. Without being in any way a preliminary study, this scintillating fugue looks forward 20 years to the bubbling final ensemble of Falstaff, sung to the words “Tutto nel mondo è burla” (“All the world’s a joke”).

“God touched me with His little finger and said, ‘Write for the theater, only for the theater!’ And I have obeyed the supreme command.” So wrote Puccini late in life to Giuseppe Adami, librettist of La rondine and Turandot. Among the exceptions to his self-imposed rule were a handful of early works for string quartet. The most successful, and famous, of these is Crisantemi (“Chrysanthemums”), a miniature tone poem based on two plangent melodies. (In Italy chrysanthemums are traditionally associated with mourning.) Puccini composed the piece, allegedly in a single evening, in 1890 in response to the sudden death of his friend Amadeo, Duke of Savoy, whose colorful career had included a turbulent spell as King of Spain. He evidently valued the music enough to reuse both of its melodies in the opera Manon Lescaut three years later.

Until well into the 20th century, the string quartet was as marginal to Russian concert life as it was to the Italians. As an Austro-German import, it relied on the support of the sizeable expatriate German communities in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Tchaikovsky, the most “westernized” Russian composer of his generation—and in this the antithesis of Mussorgsky—wrote the first of his three string quartets in February and March 1871; and like Verdi’s virtually contemporary work, it came about rather by chance. Planning a fundraising concert of his own music at the end of March, Tchaikovsky came to realize that it would be too expensive to hire an orchestra. But he needed a substantial piece to complement a selection of piano and vocal works. The upshot was the D-major String Quartet, whose melodic freshness ensured that it was the success of the evening. The whole concert was an important staging post in Tchaikovsky’s growing reputation.

There is no whiff of Tchaikovskian confessional anguish in this, perhaps the most charming of all his instrumental works. The sonataform first movement, Moderato e semplice, contrasts a gently obsessive syncopated tune over bagpipe drones (distant Schubertian echoes here) with a more animated second theme that turns out to be a contrapuntally decorated version of the first. Tchaikovsky’s quartet textures are both rich and luminous. Yet true to form, he cannot resist creating quasi-orchestral climaxes both at the end of the exposition and in the accelerating coda.

The Andante cantabile, for muted strings, was an instant hit in

1871, and was quickly popularized in arrangements for every instrument under the sun. Its outer sections are built on a simple yet haunting folksong Tchaikovsky had heard sung by a Ukrainian peasant at the home of his sister. At the movement’s center is a succulent romantic melody played by first violin over a repeated pizzicato figure for the cello.

Tchaikovsky the ballet composer is to the fore in the delightful D-minor scherzo, with its piquant alternation of triple and duple meters. The central trio contrasts a rather gawky theme over a slow cello trill with a syncopated dolce tune played by first violin and viola in octaves. Opening with a blunt theme that proves a fertile source of development, the finale recreates Haydn’s playful spirit in terms of Tchaikovsky’s own idiom. Quickfire exchanges between the instruments, à la Haydn, coexist with passages in which the four instruments do a fair imitation of an orchestra, above all in the delirious coda.

Richard Wigmore is a writer, broadcaster, and lecturer specializing in Classical and Romantic chamber music and lieder. He writes for Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and other journals, and has taught at Birkbeck College, the Royal Academy of Music, and the Guildhall. His publications include Schubert: The Complete Song Texts and The Faber Pocket Guide to Haydn.