Turning New Pages String Quartets by Mozart, Bartók, and Sibelius
Har r y Haskell
Each of the three quartets on tonight’s program was a pivotal work in its composer’s career. Mozart’s Quartet in D minor, one of the six “Haydn” Quartets dedicated to his esteemed elder, looks both backward and forward, paying homage to Haydn’s classical poise and wit even as it anticipates the more overtly dramatic music of Beethoven and Schubert. Bartók’s search for a way to organize his music more organically yielded the innovative “arch” design of the Fourth Quartet, whose five thematically interrelated movements are arrayed symmetrically around a central slow movement, like the kernel of a nut. Sibelius won a reputation as a musical nationalist at the beginning of his career in a series of works imbued with the spirit of the great outdoors, many of which were inspired by the poetry of Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala. With the brooding D-minor Quartet of 1908–09, however, he embarked on a radically different path that would lead to the spare, post-Romantic landscape of his late period. Mozart’s Minor-Mode Lyricism By the early 1780s, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had completed his informal apprenticeship in string quartet writing under Haydn. If the elder composer had brought the classical quartet genre to full maturity, the younger invested it with unprecedented emotional depth and complexity. Nowhere are these qualities more apparent than in the six quartets composed between late 1782 and early 1785 and known collectively as the “Haydn” Quartets. In dedicating the set to his mentor, Mozart reciprocated the magnanimous gesture Haydn had made several months earlier, when he famously declared to Wolfgang’s father, Leopold Mozart, that his son was “the greatest composer known to 11
