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| The Escher Quartet |
I covered the Dvořák and re-introduced the Escher in the previous post which you can read here. It also includes videos of the complete concert they performed when they first appeared with Market Square Concerts in November 2016.
For my pre-concert talk, getting “behind” the music you'll hear on this program, I'll be taking on the role of a “forensic musicologist,” looking at these pieces from different aspects and associations with some of the influences on the composers and the pieces they've composed.
This post is about Bartók's 3rd (written in Budapest in 1927) -- Zemlinsky's 4th (written in Vienna in 1936) gets a post of its own.
Though I won't get into it here, there's an historic “common denominator” that's missing: a string quartet by Alban Berg written in 1926 which he called the Lyric Suite, inspired in part by Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony of 1923 (first heard in Prague in 1924). For this post, let's just leave it at this: Bartók was inspired to compose his 3rd and 4th String Quartets after hearing Berg's Lyric Suite in early-1927; Berg dedicated his quartet to Zemlinsky; and after hearing that Berg had died just before Christmas Day in 1935, Zemlinsky began his 4th Quartet as a memorial to his friend.
(If you have time and the inclination – or are reading this after the concert – you can listen to Berg's Suite here with score and performed by the Juilliard Quartet; and follow a lecture recorded at London's Wigmore Hall on the very involved and highly personal story behind Berg's music, here.)
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| Bela Bartók in 1927 |
In the 1920s, Schoenberg had presented his first “serial” works: if atonal music was “not tonal” and sounded too arbitrary, he felt he needed some way of logically organizing his pitches like tonality but without sounding old-fashioned. Music was becoming more “chromatic” – more reliant on the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale rather than the 7 pitches of the traditional Major or Minor scale – since the days of Mozart, especially once we hit the “Music of the Future” of Wagner and Liszt in the mid-19th Century. Schoenberg was just taking this chromaticism one step further. It is unfortunate people point to all the rules and constraints the system (any system) places on a composer without realizing that Classical Tonality has, after all, its own systematic approach with just as many rules and constraints (ask any college freshman music major struggling with Harmony 101).
Bartók apparently – though he never said anything in writing about his style that I'm aware of – agreed with Schoenberg about the need to organize pitches into some kind of systematic approach. He just didn't agree with Schoenberg's apparently pedantic use of it. More to his liking was the neo-Romanticism of Alban Berg's music with its emotional content and often violent use of tension: it is the release of that tension that drives classical tonality and without some kind of anchoring, the idea of “resolution” is only a vague and often unsatisfying veneer. It is the harmonic tension of tonality that supplies “structural satisfaction” to the ear of a 19th Century listener, aware of how it's done or not, and how else one could do that is what Berg – and eventually Bartók – was trying to discover.
Nominally, Bartók refers to his quartet as the Quartet No. 3 in C-sharp, yet as you follow the score and listen to this terse single-movement 15-minute work, you might think “C-sharp Major? He must be bonkers!” Without getting into the theory behind this architectural concept, just listen to ways Bartók creates a mounting tension, reaches a climax, resolves that tension and moves on to the next one. The fact it begins on a C-sharp pitch and ends on a kind of C-sharp chord (not built on thirds like your typical triad) - see below - may bypass you completely, but it's there and, in its own way, creates its own logical sense of “statement – digression – and return” that is the same sense one gets out of a piece in C Major by Beethoven.
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| Final Measures of Bartók's 3rd Quartet in C-sharp |
This performance with the Hungarian Quartet allows you to follow along with the score: even if you can't read the music (or if it goes by too fast to make sense of it), sometimes just seeing the shapes and densities of the music can be illuminating.
Or if you prefer to watch a live performance, here's one with the Amernet Quartet who played an all-Russian program for MSC this past November:
You can, of course, listen to it any way you like: aesthetically for the emotional response to some very dramatic music; or technically to the ways Bartók might be creating those sounds and tensions through his dynamics, his sound effects and the music's harmonic and rhythmic drive, its tension-and-release.
There are sounds here Beethoven or Brahms would never have dreamed of using: the glassy, almost spooky sounds of playing “near the bridge” (sul ponticello) or the different kinds of attacks, especially his use of pizzicato, or plucking the string (in the 4th Quartet of 1928 he would make use of a “snap” pizzicato that became known as “the Bartók Pizzicato”). The way his textures weave in and out, piling up only to be interrupted by slashing chords, sometimes in contrasting rhythms, all manage to create “unexpected expectations” for the first-time listener: where did this come from? Where is that going?
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Bela Bartók was a Hungarian composer, born in a part of Hungary now located in Romania when Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Usually he figures as one of the leading composers of the 20th Century along with Schoenberg and Stravinsky but is generally not regarded as important as he ought to be: let's say, if there were a Classical Music Olympics, he might have won the Silver for his Concerto for Orchestra and his six string quartets are regarded as the greatest collective achievement in the quartet repertoire since Beethoven and Brahms (that is, all of their quartets, not just a select few as one might hear from Haydn and Mozart).
Bartók, however, followed no school, writers on music will tell you, but then neither did Schoenberg or Stravinsky: other composers followed them. Schoenberg initiated what is called the “Second Viennese School” with his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and though few composers specifically imitated Stravinsky despite his winning three successive Gold medals between 1911 and 1914 for his three great ballets, Bartók seems to be a musical “dead end”: he had no disciples.
While Schoenberg, more notorious than famous, was one of the more “reviled” figures of 20th Century music, given the popular reaction against his serial style, and Stravinsky never had another popular success like The Rite of Spring (1914) even though he continued writing up until he died in 1971, Bartók's recognition was late in starting and was brought to a screeching halt by World War II – ironically, all three composers fled Europe to settle in the United States, Schoenberg and Stravinsky settling in the same neighborhood in Hollywood, Bartók trying to make a living in New York City – and he died in 1945 before he was able to regain the ground he'd lost by leaving his native Hungary behind.
But Bartók, like many artists, was not interested in catering to the popular crowd (even Beethoven bowed to popular appeal at times with things like Wellington's Victory and arranging, say, scads of British folk songs because they put food on the table). Works like the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin sometimes offended a potential audience through the amoral nature of its story even before they got to hear the raw music that conveys the story.
Plus Bartók was still “finding his voice” in his late-30s after World War I, a time when Hungary had become a newly independent nation, finally separated from centuries of domination by the Austrians. This was an even more turbulent time in its history between the ravages of politics and the collapsing economy. Bartók was a Hungarian Nationalist, refusing to speak German, the official language, at home. Now, in the social unrest of different factions trying to gain political control after the War, there was less interest in the arts, especially art that reminded them of the violence outside the concert hall. But to him it was more important than ever to find a “Hungarian Voice” not based on old German concepts of what music was.
Bartók had been primarily a pianist and teacher who composed in his spare time. He began The Miraculous Mandarin just before the war ended in 1918, essentially completing the first draft the next year; but he didn't actually finish it until 1924. The world premiere was given in Cologne, Germany, and was a disaster, followed by a 10-minute riot (Bartók himself never saw the work staged). In 1928, he created the orchestral suite from the full score and it has gone on to become a fairly popular concert work.
While completing his 1st String Quartet in 1909, Bartók heard a kitchen maid singing a song of such poignant beauty and simplicity, unlike anything he'd heard before, which, already in his late-20s, he realized was the “true folk music” of his native Hungary. Before that, everything he'd heard was the music of the gypsies, that typical “Hungarian” music beloved of Franz Liszt's Rhapsodies and Brahms' dances (and gypsies, though often associated with Hungary, are not ethnically Hungarian: in reality, their music is the equivalent of “urban pop” music and not actual folk music). This discovery was, to put it mildly, an ear-opener!
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| Bartók (4th from left) collecting folk songs in a Hungarian village |
As a result, he began researching this music and started to arrange some of it into collections of songs and dances himself, even utilizing the style of it (if not actually quoting it) in some of his own music. Having discovered the essence of the “Hungarian Voice,” he was now able to create a less-Western sound to his music and by the 1920s, he was utilizing what he called “imaginary folk music” as the basis of his melodic style. He also incorporated elements of other folk musics he'd heard and collected: music from across the Balkans as well as Northern Africa. While it might not be a way of advancing a Hungarian sound, it did manage to convey a non-Western sound which could be open to many more (and even more diverse) influences than Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
It is this sense of personal identity that permeates not only the 3rd Quartet but almost everything Bartók would compose the rest of his life.
And where does that leave Alexander Zemlinsky? Well, you can read about him and his 4th Quartet in the next post. (If you think this one's long, you should see what I cut out...)
- Dick Strawser
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