Who: The Balourdet Quartet
What: Haydn’s “Lark”
Quartet, György Ligeti’s String Quartet No, 2, and Bedřich
Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor ("From My Life")
When: Wednesday, September 24th, 2025, at
7:30
Where: Market Square Church, downtown Harrisburg
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Three-quarters of the Balourdet Quartet met at the Taos Music Festival in the summer of 2018, on their way to study that fall at the Shepherd School of Music at Houston’s Rice University where the quartet formed under the tutelage of James Dunham, a former member of the Cleveland Quartet, and other teachers at the acclaimed school. Eventually, they were accepted into the New England Conservatory’s Professional Quartet Program, working with Paul Katz, a founding member of the Cleveland Quartet.
In March, 2024, it was announced they – then graduate students at Indiana University (Bloomington) where they were being mentored by the Pacifca Quartet – had received a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. The previous November, it was announced they’d won the Cleveland Quartet Award for 2024-2025, which includes Market Square Concerts as one of eight nationwide performance venues for the award’s winners (including Carnegie Hall). (Incidentally, the Pacifica Quartet is a past winner of the Cleveland Quartet Prize.) This month, they’ve just begun a season’s residency with the Seattle Chamber Music Society.
You can read more
about the Cleveland Quartet Award in the second of these two posts,
along with a presentation about the works on the first half of their
Market Square Concerts’ program, Haydn’s “Lark” Quartet and
the 2nd Quartet of György Ligeti (which you can read here once it is available). This post takes you behind the scenes for Bedřich
Smetana’s 1st Quartet which concludes the program.
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If composers are inspired to respond through their art to the reality around them – whether historical or biographical – well, speaking of reality, it doesn’t get more "Reality Quartet" than Bedřich Smetana's "From My Life."
When
Beethoven was going deaf – or, more accurately, showing the first
serious signs of his impending deafness – he continued to compose
his 2nd Symphony. In the midst of working on the finale, he wrote the
devastating Heiligenstadt Testament which, to us, reads like a
suicide note, and yet there is nothing in the music he composed that
would indicate what was happening in his personal life. But then,
while Beethoven's struggle with Fate in his 5th Symphony is often
described as “the artist overcoming his deafness” (“I will
seize Fate by the throat,” he had written to a friend the year
before the Testament), that struggle transcends the very nature of
the music, becoming universal rather than personal.
When
Bedřich Smetana was going deaf, he wrote a string quartet about it.
Well, not entirely about it, but the quartet he composed at that time
focused on various parts of his life, an autobiographical summing-up,
perhaps, in which his impending deafness makes a dramatic appearance
in the last chapter.
He had lost hearing in his right ear
by September of 1874, following a throat infection (complete with a
rash) that led to a blockage in the ears. Forced to take time off
from his duties as artistic director of the opera theater in Prague
where he'd been having run-ins with the administration – the
official press release explaining his absence stated he had “become
ill as a result of nervous strain caused by certain people recently”
(art and politics, nothing new, there) – and by October, had
lost all hearing in his left ear as well. The next January, he wrote
in his journal, “If my disease is incurable, then I should prefer
to be liberated from this life.”
It wasn't until the
next year, however, that he composed his first string quartet which
he himself subtitled “From My Life.” Completed in late-December,
1876, the quartet reflects different periods of his life beginning
with a musical depiction of his romantic ideals of a nationalist
style for his native Bohemia, the “love of art in my youth,” he
explained, “my romantic mood and the unspoken longing for
something which I could not name or imagine clearly.” The first
theme, a dramatic viola solo beginning with downward leaps, stood for
“Fate's summons to take part in life's combat” and that the
opening falling fifth which recurs at the end of the quartet was “a
warning as it were of my future misery.”
This is followed by a lively dance (a folksy polka), full of memories of a joyful youth. The third movement is one of “great emotional depth, a paean to love, which transcends the adversities of fate and finds harmony in life.” In the last movement, “the composer describes the journey that led to an understanding of the true essence of national art, only to be interrupted by the catastrophe of his incipient deafness. The end is almost resigned, with only a small ray of hope for a better future.”
It's in the last
movement where, in the midst of a lively celebration, a high note in
the violin played as a harmonic (giving it an entirely different,
almost other-worldly sonority) represents the sound he heard inside
his head, the onset of his deafness.
And yet, in reality,
that high note occurs only once and at the very end of the last
movement and its immediate impact is to cut off the flow of the
finale (which seemed about to end, anyway), before recalling the
opening motive and then reminiscing over the second theme of the
first movement and an idea from the opening of the last, before
ending on a long sustained if undulating E Major chord (thanks to the
viola's underpinning) – resigned but, yes, hopeful. And certainly
dramatic. (Curiously, the idea of leaving it as an E Minor
chord at the end might have an entirely different emotional
response.)
When Smetana submitted his new quartet to the Prague Chamber Music Society, they rejected the work as unplayable, too advanced in style and too challenging to play, mostly because the key signature of the Polka's middle section was in five flats with “much modulation” and too many double stops which created intonation issues for the performers.
Here’s a
performance by the Balourdet Quartet of Smetana’s String Quartet
No. 1 in E Minor, “From My Life.”It was performed recently at the Chamber Music Society of Fort Worth.
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In July of 1874,
Smetana noticed his ears were blocked and he felt giddy. His doctor
advised him to avoid any musical activity (he was, at the time,
composing the first of the Ma Vlast tone-poems: the famous
“Moldau” is the second of the cycle). “I am to stay at home for
almost a week,” he wrote in his diary. “I cannot go out and have
my ears wrapped in cotton wool since I must have complete quiet. I
fear the worst—that I will become permanently deaf.” He described
it as “a pounding and intense hissing in the head, day and night,
without ceasing, as if I were standing underneath a huge
waterfall.”
Smetana in 1878
Asking to be temporarily relieved of his
duties at the theater, Smetana went to see his doctor again who tried
electric shocks and then gave him “an ether douche.” “For the
first time for ages,” he wrote, “I can again hear the entire
range of octaves in tune. Previously, they were all jumbled up. I can
still hear nothing with my right ear.” Twelve days later he lost
what hearing he had briefly regained: he was now totally deaf.
Friends sent him money to pay for trips to Germany to see specialists
but there was no further improvement, temporary or
otherwise.
Business issues regarding his salary from the
theater's association led to his giving up his apartment in Prague to
move in with his married daughter in a town north of Prague. He
complained of a “piercing whistling sound” that “haunted” him
every evening (in the quartet, it's represented by a high E; in
reality, it was more like an A-flat major chord). He could not work
for more than an hour at a time. Yet during this time, he was also
composing perhaps his most famous, certainly his most performed
piece, the tone-poem “The Moldau.” The following year he
completed a new comic opera, The Secret.
About a year after completing the string quartet, he wrote
to a friend, “I should like... to be able to work without having to
worry, but unfortunately those gentlemen of the [theater] association
– and fate – will not allow that. When I continually see only
poverty and misery ahead of me all enthusiasm for my work goes, or at
least my cheerful mood vanishes. ...When I plunge into musical
ecstasy [when composing] then for a while I forget everything that
persecutes me so cruelly in my old age.”
He was in his
early 50s.
For those of us who think deafness means a loss
of hearing and a descent into silence (which for many people, it may
be), Smetana's descriptions sound frightening. In recent times
(decades, really), more attention has been paid to a condition called
tinnitus, an official name now for what used to be called
simply "ringing in the ears." The impression Smetana's
deafness was (or at least began as) a case of tinnitus, given its
brief appearance at the end of his quartet, may seem natural: to have
written music describing the actual sounds, especially the pounding
and hissing sounds he experienced day and night, the idea of standing
under a waterfall, may have been more than a musician, at least in
the 19th Century, might have been able to recreate (or an audience to
put up with).
American composer Brent Michael Davids
realized he had developed tinnitus and composed his own quartet in
which the pitch he heard - in his case, a high A - is played
constantly by some member of the quartet throughout the entire piece.
As James Oestreich describes it in his 2005
New York Times review, "As that sustained pitch slowly
shifts from one instrument to another, the remaining players work
around it, producing skittish tremolos, slides and scrapes that hint
at other aural aberrations as well. Short-breathed, repetitive
melodies break through occasionally and come to dominate in what
might be called an apotheosis. But the real apotheosis follows, with
the tinnitus tone surrounded by suggestions of chirping crickets."
The sound of crickets can sometimes mask the intrusive sound, as
Davids explains, allowing him to "tune it out for periods of
time." "And the conclusion of this unsettling piece,"
Oestreich writes, "vividly illustrates the relief they can
provide."
(When the Miró Quartet performed it here
with Market Square Concerts in 2006 as part of their Cleveland
Quartet Award tour, it was indeed an uncomfortable experience,
allowing us to hear for fifteen minutes or so what the world sounds
like to someone with tinnitus. When I asked a friend who has tinnitus
if that's what it's like, that constant sound, he admitted he could
not hear that specific recurring pitch: it was masked by his
own.)
Perhaps the idea of writing such an autobiographical
quartet was more cathartic, something to take the composer's mind off
reality (again with the reality!) rather than being merely
self-pitying. After all, the part of the quartet that specifically
concerns his deafness is a very small part of it, yet almost the only
thing about it anyone seems to mention!
Smetana's quartet
is certainly the first of its kind, as far as autobiographical
chamber music is concerned: it's not just the idea of its telling a
story but turning a personal experience into music. Did the idea come
from Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique? (He had met Berlioz when
he was a student and would conduct his Romeo et Juliette in
1864.) At any rate, Leoš Janáček would later write two such string
quartets, one inspired by Tolstoy's tale of adultery, “The Kreutzer
Sonata,” and then “Intimate Pages,” inspired by love letters
written to his mistress.
Speaking of personal relationships, another issue plagued Smetana
at the time of his deafness. He had married his second wife, Bettina
Ferdinandiová, 16 years his junior, in 1860. They had two daughters,
both of whom survived their father. But the relationship with Bettina
became increasingly unpleasant. "I cannot live under the same
roof with a person who hates and persecutes me," he'd written to
her in a letter. They considered divorce but chose instead to remain,
however unhappily, together.
To conclude this brief
summary of a life, I should mention that, despite his continuing to
compose and the belated success he was finding with the premieres of
Ma Vlast, Smetana began having bouts of forgetfulness, being
unable to remember what he had just written down, barely writing four
measures of music a day (difficult when you're composing an opera).
Forbidden any musical activity, he was not even allowed to read a
book for more than fifteen minutes.
Still, five months
later, he succeeded in finishing a second string quartet, worked on a
new orchestral suite, started sketching another opera (this one
inspired by the very un-Czech story of Shakespeare's Twelfth
Night) before he suffered an attack we would describe as
dementia, affecting his mental equilibrium. He began having
hallucinations and had to be watched in case he injured himself.
Unable to recognize his family, he tried to escape from the house and
eventually had to be placed in what was then known as Prague's
Kateřinky Lunatic Asylum where he died less than three weeks
later.
His family (and most others) had long assumed his
deafness, difficult to evaluate with the technology of the day, was
the result of syphilis, something no one in polite society discussed.
But modern research tends to point to other possible causes, none of
which can be definitively proven.The official cause of death,
however, was listed as senile dementia.
He had recently
turned 60.
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It occurred to me, overhearing a concert-goer at the
symphony a few years ago, surprised to find Sibelius was “that
recent” (presumably meaning since he died in 1957, not that the
violin concerto was written in 1905), that we often tend to overlook
specifically when the composers of the music we're listening to
lived. I know my dad once told me he had no idea when Bach or
Tchaikovsky lived – “they could be contemporaries” for all he
knew – but it didn't keep him from enjoying their music. Preparing
this post, I realized I'm not all that sure where to fit Smetana into
this musical time-line. He's not, I admit, a composer high on my list
though I enjoy the music most of us in this country are aware of. We
speak of Dvořák and Smetana as one of those “pairs” like Bach
and Handel, Mozart and Haydn, or Wagner and Liszt. Usually, that
leads to the misconception they were friends and colleagues, not just
contemporaries, which is not the case.
Smetana is referred
to as the “Father of Czech Music” but Dvořák, at least in this
country, is considered the “Greatest Czech Composer” or, more
accurately, the “Most Popular Czech Composer” even if few
concert-goers could name many more.
First of all, let me
point out that Dvořák was born in 1841. When Smetana was born –
listed as Friedrich rather than Bedřich in the register since German
was the official language – it was 1824 and Beethoven had not yet
completed his 9th Symphony. When Smetana gave his first public
performance as a budding pianist at the age of 6, Berlioz was working
on his Symphonie fantastique. Mendelssohn was 21 and Brahms
wouldn't be born for another three years.
As a fervent
patriot in his mid-20s, Smetana participated briefly in the
“uprisings” in the spring of 1848, only one part of a
continent-wide series of uprisings and revolutions that led to the
national awareness of many ethnic minorities then under German or
Austrian control. There were other issues as well – in Paris, in
Dresden (where Wagner and Schumann were both affected by it) – but
in Prague it was primarily a revolt against the German-speaking
oppressors. Like most of these revolts, this one too ended in
failure. (It's interesting to note the new, young Emperor of Austria
who held sway against the 1848 uprisings was the same one still in
power at the start of World War I in 1914!)
Smetana had married Katerina Kolářová in 1849 and they had four
daughters, three of whom died in infancy. One of them showed early
talent as a musician but died of scarlet fever in 1855, prompting him
to write an elegiac Piano Trio in G Minor in her memory.
Unable
to establish a career in Prague (perhaps because of his recent
political role), Smetana and his family moved to Göteborg in Sweden
where he heard they were looking for music teachers. With the
exception of a few visits home – during one of these, his wife,
already in frail health, died en route – he remained in
Sweden until the early-1860s when “a more liberal climate” in
Bohemia prompted him to return to Prague. The Provisional Theater (so
called because it was intended to be a temporary home for Czech music
until a National Theater could be built) opened in 1862. The building
eventually became part of the new theater when it finally opened in
1881.
During the early-1860s, his first years back at
home, Smetana began work on two operas on Czech stories: a historical
“grand” opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, and a comedy
about a romantic tangle involving a marriage broker, a village girl,
and the boy she'd rather marry, The Bartered Bride.
One
of the musicians in the theater's orchestra in 1862 was a violist
named Antonin Dvořák.
Dvořák in 1868
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Dvořák started his musical life as a fan of
Wagner, even played viola in the orchestra when Wagner came to Prague
to conduct an all-Wagner program of opera excerpts. Not surprisingly,
some of Dvořák's early works (those rarely played early symphonies
and operas, for instance) have a Wagnerian sound about them, not the
folk-inspired voice we associate with the mature composer. He had
been composing since 1861 (when he was 20) – this is about the same
time Smetana was trying to establish himself in Prague – but his
first public appearance as a composer didn't occur until ten years
later.
Then, in the mid-1870s, he started entering the
competitions for the Austrian State Prize (keep in mind that Bohemia,
as the Czech Republic was known then, had been a province of the
Austrian or Austro-Hungarian Empire from the 16th Century until 1918)
and, in addition to winning some grants and prizes, in 1877 garnered
the attention of Johannes Brahms who agreed to ask his own publisher
to publish some of Dvořák's music.
Now, so far, there's
not much mention of Bedřich Smetana in Dvořák's story. True, in
1866, Smetana became the director of Prague's Provisional Theater
where Dvořák was one of the players, the same year The Bartered
Bride was not a success and they may have known each other but
there was never anything like a friendship between them and Smetana
never seemed to have any role as a teacher or mentor to the younger
composer. They certainly would never have "hung out"
together, discussing how to create a national music style! Or did
they?
It was Smetana's job, as artistic director and conductor, to
foster new Czech music. But when Dvořák submitted his opera, The
King and the Charcoal-Burner, in 1871, the score was returned,
declared to be “unperformable.” Given the musical politics of the
day, espousing Wagnerian concepts of opera was to many musicians the
equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. And Smetana, who not only
admired Wagner, he was a friend of Liszt's, had enough political
problems with the theater management not to champion a young and
inexperienced Wagnerite like this Dvořák fellow.
As it
was, Smetana was forced to resign in 1872 following opposition from
prominent subscribers but was reinstated after the management
received an ultimate signed by most of the theater's musicians,
including Dvořák. Now given more authority, he planned to produce
more Czech operas, though he himself had little time for composing.
Then, in 1874, Smetana became ill, lost his hearing, and
retired from the theater. Moving to a town outside of Prague where he
could live with his one daughter while hoping to recuperate, as I
mentioned, he composed his first string quartet in 1876 which he himself
subtitled “From My Life.”
This was the year Wagner's
Ring of the Nibelung was given its first full production at
Bayreuth, and the year Brahms finally finished his 1st Symphony.
Dvořák's career didn't really get started until 1877
when he received the backing of the great Brahms (and more
importantly, his anti-Wagnerian friend, the critic Eduard Hanslick).
By this time, Dvořák had passed over from being a Wagnerite to
following in the footsteps of Brahms, but it was his use of Bohemian
folk music that caught Brahms' attention which resulted in his
request for Dvořák to compose a set of dances for piano duet,
modeled after Brahms' own “Hungarian Dances” which would be
attractive to the amateur audience. And so, with the appearance of
his “Slavonic Dances,” Dvořák's career was on its way.
By
this time, Smetana was out of the active music scene, though his
music, what he had already composed – at this time, much of Ma
Vlast and several more operas were in the future – proved
enough to influence a whole generation of younger composers.
As
for one bit of connectivity between Smetana's and Dvořák's
time-lines, there's this tantalizing bit: after Smetana's string
quartet was finished in December of 1876, it was given a "private
performance" in Prague sometime in 1878 (the public premiere
wasn't until March of 1879) in which the violist was Antonin
Dvořák.
And Dvořák began writing his Slavonic Dances,
the fruits of his new connection with Brahms & Co., sometime in
1878. These do not quote actual Bohemian folk-songs but incorporate
the essence of the sound in its use of dance-forms and -rhythms,
similar to what Smetana had done.
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As for being the “Father of
Czech Music,” or at least the Nationalist School that developed in
Bohemia following the 1848 uprising, Smetana did not do it by
utilizing existing folk-songs which is what we normally assume. He
did not learn to speak Czech until the 1860s when he was already in
his late-30s – before then, he spoke only German, the official
language of society, education and commerce – and much of the music
he composed followed certain guidelines established by Wagner though
not necessarily imitating his style (as one writer more knowledgeable
of Smetana's operas pointed out, people who complained of his
Wagnerism apparently were not familiar with much of Wagner's music).
He was a patriot which might seem a problem in a German-dominated
society like Prague's, but he was a “radical patriot” as opposed
to a “conservative patriot” and that was the problem, Wagner or
not.
His first opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia,
was a historical drama about a 13th Century German occupation, and
most of his subsequent operas were about legendary heroes rather than
real-life people like the peasants who populated The Bartered
Bride. This would seem to be his “masterpiece,” viewed from
its world-wide popularity, but it wasn't until 1870 that the fourth
and final version of it – which also added those three famous
dances – became a hit. Still, when it was staged in St. Petersburg,
Russia, the next year, one critic said it was “no better than the
work of a gifted fourteen-year-old boy.” (Odd, you might think,
considering the famous school of Russian nationalists known as “The
Five” or “The Mighty Handful,” not having any sympathy for
Czech nationalism, but keep in mind, at that time, their familiar
works were several years in the future, including Mussorgsky's Boris
Godunov, its first complete performance not until 1874;
Tchaikovsky had so far not yet composed even his 2nd Symphony.) The
Bartered Bride wasn't heard in Vienna until 1892, eight years
after the composer's death, and only then started to gain any gradual
international success, the only one of his eight operas to do so.
When we think of “Czech Nationalism” (or any ethnic
nationalism in music), we tend to think of those pleasant peasants
who dance beside the waters of the Moldau (how ironic the Bohemian
river is known internationally by its German name rather than as the
Vltava) or frolic through the village square of The Bartered
Bride. Dvořák became a “Czech Nationalist” because he used
folk songs and dances in his music – and even when he used what he
thought were American folk songs in the mid-1890s for his “New
World” Symphony, they still sounded like Czech tunes.
(The
same argument continues today regarding “American Music.” Can
“American Music” only be something like Aaron Copland's
folk-song-inspired Billy the Kid or is Elliott Carter an
example of American Music because he happens to be a composer who
spent most of his 103 years writing in the United States?)
If
your argument is popularity, then when you visit the Czech Republic,
you should be aware that there Smetana is held in much higher regard
than Dvořák and more of his works are heard in the opera and
concert repertoire. When Smetana began conducting new Czech works in
the 1860s, there really was no “tradition” of Czech music,
especially music sung in Czech: these composers may have been
Czech-born (like Smetana) but their music was German in style and
ethos. Anything in Czech was more on the level of operetta and even
then, pretty poor. The most “famous” Czech composer of operas
immediately before Smetana was a fellow named František Škroup who
died in 1862, few of whose 16 stage works, according to a couple of
sources, ran for more than two performances. There were dozens of
famous Bohemian musicians in the late-18th and early-19th Centuries,
many of them fine composers, but they all gravitated toward Vienna or
Paris if they wanted to make a living, especially back in the days of
Haydn and Mozart. Prague, musically, was basically a vacuum as far as
its national musical identity was concerned. And it was slow to
change.
If nothing else, Smetana did change all that,
making a case for music in the native language with a national
"voice." Without him, even without the direct contact of
teacher or mentor, it's quite possible Dvořák might have continued
imitating Brahms.
- Dick Strawser
