String Transformations

Music by Dvořák, Enescu, Hindemith, and Widmann

Thomas May

The constellation of four voices known as the string quartet established itself in the 18th century as a particularly full and satisfying standard for chamber music for strings alone. But alternative chamber formations that had long been practiced continued to coexist. Burgeoning interest in domestic music-making generated additional demand for music for two or three players. Meanwhile, the constraints of writing pieces for more limited resources may originate from reasons of economy but have proved attractive to composers up to the present—think of some of the innovations developed to make music during the pandemic, for example.

We begin this program with excerpts from Jörg Widmann’s cycle of 24 Duos for Violin and Cello from 2008. The “vulnerability and reductive nature of this duo constellation,” as the composer describes it, initially seemed to inhibit his imagination, until he realized he could embed these “unprotected and naked two-part structures” in a richer harmonic landscape. When Antonín Dvořák listened to his tenant practicing violin with his teacher, it summoned memories of his days as a working violist, prompting the idea for his unusually scored Terzetto

Paul Hindemith’s mini–viola concerto Trauermusik (Lament, or “Music for Grieving”) presents a prime example of occasional music that makes use of available resources. While Dvořák lavished a bit over a week on his Terzetto, Trauermusik spilled out from Hindemith in six hours in response to the need for something suitable to mark the death of King George V—and to replace the full-scale viola concerto in which the composer had originally been scheduled to perform. George Enescu’s Octet from 1900 takes us in another direction from the first two works by multiplying the strength of the string quartet. The result, one of the miracles of a prodigy composer, is a kind of music that Enescu described as representing “an action” rather than a “state” of being.

The Bare and Essential Substance

In its tally for 2022, the highly visited classical website Bachtrack once again ranked Jörg Widmann among its list of the top 10 most-performed contemporary composers of the year (with Arvo Pärt ensconced at the top). His extensive oeuvre ranges across the genres, but chamber music plays a central role in the development of the Munich-born composer, who turns 50 this June. His last five string quartets, for example, address the legacy of Beethoven and attempt to mimic the sheer weirdness of his late quartets in a 21st-century context.

Widmann took up the far less usual genre of the violin-cello duo in 2008 and built a substantial opus of 24 numbers, asymmetrically published in two volumes (that is, containing 13 and 11 duos, respectively). The process, he recalls, was not something foreseen, as he had initially set out to merely write a few such pieces.

In much of the collection, he resorts to using double stops extensively to expand the harmonic canvas and generate structures of three and even four parts—the “missing limbs,” so to speak, of the string quartet. Widmann brings a contrapuntal approach to his treatment of the violin and cello that makes them “inseparably dependent.” As he writes: “Everything is interwoven, and everything one instrument does has consequences for the other. They attract each other, reject each other, love and hate each other, sometimes throw balls back and forth in play and then suddenly with an almost destructive intent. The playful elements of the work therefore always remain serious and the serious elements playful. Tricks and effects are totally absent: I have concentrated on the bare and essential musical substance right down to the most miniature phrases.” According to Widmann, he was inspired to an “elated” state of “compositional excess” while visiting Dubai and expanded the group from the originally fragmentary pieces.