Takacs Quartet - Program Notes 92Y

TAKÁCS QUARTET program notes

BÉLA BARTÓK Born March 25, 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania) Died September 26, 1945 in New York City

Béla Bartók began his musical career amid a surge of Nationalism in Europe, when composers in smaller and less powerful countries sought to express and differentiate the identities of their own lands and people. This process had already started in Hungary through the efforts of Liszt and Dohnányi, but at the Budapest Academy, where Bartók graduated in 1903, the tradition-bound curriculum was really no different than what a student might have encountered at the Vienna Conservatory.

The revelation that led Bartók toward a true Hungarian sound came in 1904, when he overheard a maid singing a folksong at a resort in what is now Slovakia. He and his former classmate Zoltán Kodály embarked on a quest to record all the folk music they could find in villages and rural outposts around the region, capturing the performances on primitive wax cylinders. At the time, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary encompassed a vast swatch of Europe, and Bartók’s journeys extended far beyond modern Hungary, into lands populated

by Slovaks, Croats, Serbians, Bulgarians, and, in an area of particular interest to him, the remote Transylvanian region that is now part of Romania.

In the decades that followed, Bartók helped collect and catalog some 14,000 folksongs, and his research gave rise to the academic field of ethnomusicology. Meanwhile these ancestral melodies seeped into Bartók’s musical consciousness, and his own composing became a prime meeting ground between the old German-Austrian lineage of concert music and the even older history of communal music-making in Central Europe. The six string quartets that Bartók wrote over a thirty-year span illuminate his musical metamorphosis, from an obscure young composer ensconced in the last throes of Germanic Romanticism to an international trendsetter who introduced a vigorous new strain of Modernism.

STRING QUARTET NO. 1, SZ. 40 Composed in 1909; 31 minutes In the String Quartet No. 1, composed in 1908-09, Bartók was testing the boundaries of traditional tonal harmony, not unlike the parallel explorations of his near-peer Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna (whose own collision course with tonal practice ultimately took a different fork in the road). The slow first movement is a sober statement built upon distinctive intervals and patient counterpoint between voices, underscoring Bartók’s lifelong obsession with symmetry and contrapuntal layering. By tradition, this slow music should have served as an introduction to faster music, but Bartók instead developed it as a self-contained statement within a three-movement form.

Reached through a linking passage, the scherzo-like middle movement once again focuses on manipulating compact cells, demonstrating Bartók’s respect for the precedent that Beethoven set in his taut, obsessive quartets. With its repeated notes and pulsing rhythms, the fast and lively finale comes closest to channeling the dancing drive of Hungarian folk music, but still the

overarching concern is motivic interplay, at a time when Bartók was reckoning with and pushing back on the German-speaking musical world.

STRING QUARTET NO. 3, SZ. 85 Composed in 1927; 16 minutes Bartók’s composing slowed to a trickle in the 1920s, displaced by his academic research and his performance career as a pianist. By the time he returned to the string quartet genre in 1927, a decade had passed since his String Quartet No. 2, and his compositional framework had become leaner and more contrapuntal, rooted in the practices of Bach and his contemporaries. Bartók had also grown bolder with how he incorporated folk material, and at the same time he was challenging the concert hall conventions that led composers to use instruments in predictable and mostly pleasant ways. The String Quartet No. 3 encapsulated these new trends in one thrilling, continuous movement, making it the shortest of the six quartets. Bartók submitted the score to a competition in Philadelphia, through which he earned a US premiere and a sizable financial prize.

The Third Quartet breaks into three connected sections that track loosely with traditional sonata form: a first part, a second part with contrasting themes, and a recapitulation that sheds new light on both groups of material. The first part builds up gently within a chromatic, motive-based language recognizable from the first two quartets. Otherworldly sounds are part of what disturbs the quietude, including glissandi (slides) and passages played sul ponticello (with the bow near the bridge, creating an icy, unstable tone). The second part shifts to folk-inspired themes, crunching rhythms and an obsessive examination of diverse string sounds, using all manner of bowing, plucking, tapping and sliding. The dream-like recapitulation compresses the opposing ideas even further, ending this mysterious and explosive quartet on a bold note.

STRING QUARTET NO. 5, SZ. 102 Composed in 1934; 32 minutes

In 1934, Bartók happily left his teaching job at the Budapest Academy of Music for a longdesired position as an ethnomusicology researcher at the Academy of Sciences. The next five years turned out to be his most fruitful as a composer, starting with the String Quartet No. 5, composed at the request of the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. She had funded a small auditorium at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and her efforts to commission the world’s leading composers made this intimate venue an incubator for some of the 20th century’s most iconic music for small ensembles, including Stravinsky’s Apollo and Copland’s Appalachian Spring in the years to come.

Like the Fourth Quartet, Bartók’s Fifth Quartet uses a five-movement arch structure, but the approach here is more expansive, as demonstrated by the extreme mood changes in the fast outer movements. Instead of the twin scherzos of the Fourth Quartet, the Fifth Quartet’s second and fourth movements investigate atmospheric statements in slow tempos.

The keystone at the center of the Fifth Quartet’s arch is a whimsical scherzo. The off-kilter rhythms in the outer sections are typical of Bulgarian dance music, while a buzzing trio section in the middle sets up a mini-arch within the movement, complementing the wider symmetries.

STRING QUARTET NO. 2, SZ. 67 Composed in 1917; 29 minutes Bartók’s folksong collecting took him to far-flung locales in the years before World War I, including a swing through northern Africa in 1913 that exposed him to new melodic modes and rhythmic structures. Deemed unfit for active duty once war broke out, he contributed by transcribing soldiers’ songs, and he used the space created by his disrupted concert calendar to work on new compositions, including the String Quartet No. 2.

Like Bartók’s First Quartet, the Second Quartet consists of three movements organized around elemental, recognizable motives. The harmonies of the first movement are highly chromatic, but the internal logic of each instrumental line acts as a thread that pulls the ear forward. The second movement delves more freely into folk-inspired sounds that jump around “very capriciously,” as promised by the tempo. In an echo of the First Quartet, which opened with a Lento movement, this quartet concludes in that same very slow tempo, using mutes at the beginning to further darken the tonal palette.

STRING QUARTET NO. 4, SZ. 91 Composed in 1928; 16 minutes The Fourth String Quartet, composed a year after its compact predecessor, was the fullest expression yet of Bartók’s fascination with balance and symmetry. The five-movement structure forms an arch or palindrome, all hinged upon the mystical middle movement. The fast opening movement employs short, brittle motives that move against each other in free-flying counterpoint, including snippets with characteristic traces of folksongs. Some of those folksongs return in new garb in the electrifying finale that serves as the counterweight to the opening movement.

The second and fourth movements form a matched pair of scherzos; the former draws its characteristic sound from mutes placed on the instrument’s bridges, while the latter uses pizzicato exclusively, including a snapping sound known among musicians as a “Bartók pizzicato.” The centerpiece of the quartet is the third movement, a hall of mirrors constructed around brooding melodies and austere, symmetrical harmonies.

STRING QUARTET NO. 6, SZ. 114 Composed in 1939; 30 minutes Bartók was juggling his concert bookings as a pianist and research as a faculty ethnomusicologist at the Budapest Academy of Sciences, all amidst a rapidly destabilizing political climate in Europe. Yet it was during this period that he produced an amazing string of masterpieces, including the Fifth String Quartet (1934), Music for Strings, Percussion and

Celesta (1936), the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), the Second Violin Concerto (1938) and the Divertimento for Strings (1939).

This remarkable run ended with the Sixth String Quartet, which Bartók began in August 1939 during a visit to Switzerland, and which he completed that November in Budapest. It was a terrible time to be in Europe and Bartók only stayed to be near his ailing mother, who finally died in December. The following spring he left for an American concert tour, returning to Europe briefly to settle his affairs before a permanent move to New York in October 1940. His career and his health both deteriorated in the United States, and his compositional output dropped off precipitously during his five remaining years of life, buoyed only by pleas for new music (and life-sustaining commissions) from concerned friends.

A unifying theme appears in all four movements of Bartók’s Sixth Quartet, in a tempo marked mesto, Italian for mournful or dejected. In the first movement, the viola plays the opening section unaccompanied, and the mesto theme ruminates on a pair of rising and falling phrases. The remaining voices enter and push the music toward a brisk Vivace pace that churns in overlapping layers. At the start of the second movement, the cello recasts the mesto theme under ghostly tremolo textures and a violin counter-line. The balance of the movement is labeled a March, with its snapping rhythms borrowed from the Verbunkos, a Hungarian folk dance with military origins.

The next occurrence of the mesto figure enters in the first violin, supported by tightlyvoiced harmonies. The third movement continues as a Burletta—a term typically applied to farcical operas—and this music features a good bit of sarcastic role-playing. After a more sober Andantino section, the jocular music returns, mostly plucked. The finale picks up the mesto strain one last time, and here it persists for the entire movement. The now-familiar rising and falling fragments circulate among the quartet, until the upper voices stick on a pale closing harmony and the cello trails off strumming low chords. © 2019 Aaron Grad