Artemis: Program Notes

Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad Molto adagio from String Quartet, Op. 11 [1936] SAMUEL BARBER Born March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania Died January 23, 1981 in New York, New York Samuel Barber, a child prodigy from a musical family, enrolled in the founding class at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 14. He went on to win the American Academy’s prestigious Rome Prize, which bankrolled his Italian residency from 1935 to 1937. During that time, Barber composed his String Quartet (Opus 11) as well as an adaptation for string orchestra of the quartet’s slow movement. It was that Adagio for Strings that launched Barber’s international career, when Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra debuted it on a radio broadcast in 1938. This mournful excerpt has been played at the funerals of John F. Kennedy and Leonard Bernstein, in the devastating war film Platoon, and in a televised performance at the BBC Proms four days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, cementing its status as The Saddest Music Ever Written, to borrow the title of Thomas Larson’s 2010 book on the Adagio.

This Molto adagio (“very slow”) movement, as it is marked in the original quartet, centers on a melodic gesture of three rising notes, creating a persistent sense of unfulfilled yearning and reaching. Drawn-out suspensions in the harmonies generate waves of tension and release while a grounded bass line progresses with glacial patience.

String Quartet No. 2 in C Major, Op. 36 [1945] BENJAMIN BRITTEN Born November 22, 1913 in Lowestoft, England Died December 4, 1976 in Aldeburgh, England Benjamin Britten had a precocious start in music, studying piano and viola and composing hundreds of works by the time he was a teenager. At 14, Britten’s viola teacher introduced him to the composer Frank Bridge, who agreed to give Britten private lessons. “I, who thought I was already on the verge of immortality, saw my illusions shattered,” Britten later wrote about his course of study with Bridge, a demanding teacher who fostered the rigorous technique needed to round out the young composer’s natural inventiveness. Britten went on to enroll at the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1930, and even if he chafed at the conservative approach of his teachers, he was able to fill in the gaps by devouring recent music by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and other modernists. After some early successes in England and a formative period spent in New York during World War II, Britten entered his thirties poised to reshape the British musical landscape.

Britten’s watershed year was 1945, when his first full-length opera, Peter Grimes, reached the London stage. Not only did it mark the return of opera after the dark years of World War II; it was truly the first great opera created on British soil in 250 years, dating back to the death of Henry Purcell (of Dido and Aeneas fame). Britten honored the Purcell anniversary that same year with his Second String Quartet, echoing Purcell’s extensive writing for string consort early in his career.

The quartet begins with music that sounds more like an incantation than a traditional exposition. Three related themes, unified by their far-reaching leaps up the interval of a major tenth, appear in turn, played in octaves over a drone. These strands become fodder for a fast movement that progresses with unusual freedom, until the final passage bookends the movement with more of the mystical calmness.

The bewitching central movement, played with mutes, clears space for the quartet’s extended finale in the form of a Chacony, a structure of continuous variations that was a favorite of Purcell and other Baroque composers throughout Europe. (On the mainland, composers like J. S. Bach used the French term chaconne or the Italian ciacona.) A ninemeasure pattern, first played in a stark unison that highlights the leaping intervals, underlies this enormous movement that makes up some two-thirds of the whole quartet.

Solo cadenzas for cello, viola and violin serve as pivot points in the spacious form.

String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”) [1824] FRANZ SCHUBERT Born January 31, 1797 in Vienna, Austria Died November 19, 1828 in Vienna, Austria As of 1817, Franz Schubert’s music had not been published, mentioned in a newspaper, or performed publicly in Vienna a single time, even though the 20-year-old had already composed some 300 songs (half of his lifetime output), including the haunting and prescient song Death and the Maiden. Eventually Schubert had some success publishing songs, but otherwise his career was a continual struggle, leaving him dependent on a small circle of friends and supporters. Meanwhile his purported sexual excesses caught up with him: He contracted syphilis in late 1822 or early 1823 and died of the infection in 1828.

When Schubert returned to his earlier song Death and the Maiden in 1824 as the inspiration for a string quartet, he must have known on some level that his own death was all too near. In that song, the Maiden pleads, in impassioned D-minor music, for Death to pass her by; Death responds by taking her hand through a smooth and static D-major melody. Elements of the song inform all four movements of the quartet, starting with the intense descending motive that recalls the tailing end of the Maiden’s verse, when she anxiously awaits Death’s answer. By echoing that pregnant moment and dwelling in it for an entire movement, the music hovers in that harrowing interval before death responds.

A direct quotation of the song comes in the second movement, a broad set of variations.

The theme borrows only the element of the song associated with Death, a somber chorale, leaving aside the Maiden’s more urgent plea. The mounting tension eases for an ornate major-key variation, and then the movement closes its final variation with a poignant return to the prayer-like texture.

The third movement reframes the song’s clash between its starting key of D minor and its closing key of D major. The scherzo’s minor-key music is loud and brittle, while the contrasting trio section moves to the major key for a smooth and quiet response.

The finale features the breakneck triplet rhythm of a tarantella, a manic Italian dance supposedly meant to rid a victim of deadly tarantula venom. The prestissimo coda flirts with an optimistic major-key resolution, but in the end the key of D minor regains its mortal grip. © 2019 Aaron Grad.