With Market Square Concert's first concert of its 45th Season this Thursday at 7:30 at uptown Harrisburg's Temple Ohev Sholom, the Terra String Quartet, winner of the prestigious Naumburg Chamber Music Competition, performs two major string quartets: Franz Schubert's String Quartet in A Minor, D.804, the "Rosamunde" Quartet, and Benjamin Britten's String Quartet No. 2 in C Major, Op.36.
In the previous post which you can read here, I wrote about the Schubert and also gave you the background on how the Terra Quartet came to step in for the previously scheduled Galvin Cello Quartet who had to cancel their October Tour due to last-minute, unforeseen complications.
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| Benjamin Britten, February, 1945 |
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The inception for his new string quartet was a specific concert at Wigmore Hall, one of the major chamber music venues in London, to be held on Nov. 21st, 1945, marking the 250th Anniversary of the Death of Henry Purcell, long regarded as one of the leading English composers and generally (if sadly) acknowledged at the time as the last English composer to have earned any international recognition.
On the next day, November 22nd, the Feast Day of St. Cecilia, the Patron Saint of Music, there was another concert planned at Wigmore Hall featuring another premiere by Benjamin Britten.
The 22nd was also Britten’s 32nd birthday.
And more importantly, this all came five months after the premiere of a work that would place Britten at the forefront of English Composers on the International Front: his first full-length opera, Peter Grimes.
Shortly after that auspicious debut on June 7th, 1945, Britten conducted his orchestral suite from Grimes, the “Four Sea Interludes,” which would soon become a concert staple for orchestras world-wide (even in the 1990s, it was referred to as “the most recent work to have entered the mainstream repertoire”). In a short time, Britten would find himself not only famous but regarded as “the first English composer to receive international recognition since the death of Henry Purcell.”
Then he composed two new works: a setting of nine sonnets by 17th-Century English poet John Donne, ending with the famous “Death Be Not Proud,” which he completed on August 19th; and a string quartet commissioned for the Zorian Quartet’s concert at Wigmore Hall to mark the Purcell anniversary, which he completed on October 14th.
Another date puts much of this into a different kind of context: the Year 1945. Oh yes, you may remember, thinking of History in General. The End of World War II. Officially, the long-awaited end of the European phase of the war (that which most closely affected England) happened on May 8th, 1945, when Germany surrendered to the Allies days after Hitler committed suicide.
After years of bombings across England (the Nazi Blitzkrieg had leveled more than great swaths of London), shortages and privation, including food rationing, would continue for yet another nine years in the United Kingdom, so it wasn’t a burst of euphoria followed by an immediate Return to Normal.
Peter Grimes, an intense examination of life in a simple fishing village on the English coast where Britten had grown up, was written while the war was still raging. It would be premiered only a month after the Germans surrendered. Its success gave English music lovers hope in the future of English music.
Then, now that the war was over and they had survived six years of constant hardships, Britten focused his creativity on new works with no doubt a sense of relief and hope.
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Purcell’s influence manifests itself primarily in the 2nd String Quartet’s last movement, clearly the most significant of all three movements, clocking in at around 18 minutes, more than twice the length of the other two movements combined. The opening of the quartet, marked calmo, creates a sense of space as well as peace. Keep in mind, this will be heard for the first time a little over six months following the long-awaited end of The War. The tension created by the build up to the rhythmic outburst about three minutes in seems like an inevitable flash-back and these two elements, the calm and the tense, become like “contrasting themes” in a traditional sonata form.
The scherzo is fast and brief, barely four minutes long. The quartet plays with mutes which gives it an eerie sound, a bit like Bartók’s “night music” but frenzied, though it may have more in common with the scherzo in Bartók’s 4th String Quartet, written in 1928. It had also been described as a tarantella, a folk dance inspired by the bite of a tarantula: the only way to overcome the poison was to dance madly about. The music’s frequent shifting between duple and triple meter and sharp contrasts gives it an air of instability as well.
The forensic musicologist in me wants to point out the weird scherzo in Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite” of 1926 and remind listeners the 19-year-old Britten shocked his friends and family by wanting to go to Vienna to study with Alban Berg, a student of Arnold Schoenberg who was, at this time, developing "serialism," a process of composing with all twelve notes. When his mother was told Berg “would not be a good influence” on the boy, Britten later assumed she took it to mean “morally,” not necessarily “musically,” the advice coming from a friend who had, Britten said, “an almost moral prejudice against serial music.” Berg would die two years later, as it happened, but still it does make one ponder…
Now comes the “crowning glory” of the quartet. Britten labeled it “Chacony,” the 17th Century English equivalent of the French chaconne or the Italian ciaconna, the work's first homage to Purcell.
Unlike the famous Chaconne in D Minor of Bach – again, a finale that’s half the five-movement suite’s entire length – Britten takes his structural inspiration from Purcell’s use of counterpoint and different variation techniques, particularly his love of what we call “ground bass variations” where a motive or short theme in the bass repeats over-and-over, while he composes his variations over it in the upper voices.
By way of introduction, listen to this six minute “Chacony,” Purcell's single movement Trio Sonata in G Minor (Z.730):
Listen first to the cello part, but then notice how the upper strings weave their variations often completely independently, frequently overlapping the harpsichord’s barely audible harmonic progressions.
In Britten’s structural solution, he creates an 18-minute span with 21 variations based on the opening “theme” of 9 measures presented by all four players in unison. These are subdivided into three groups of six variations each with an additional three at the end. Each group is set off by a solo cadenza, an almost operatic recitative, first for the cello, then the viola, and finally the first violin.
Britten, in his initial program notes, pointed out each group of variations “reviews” different aspects of the theme: first, its implied harmony; the second, its rhythms; the third, with new superimposed melodies. The final group of three variations examines “formal aspects”, not that, as a listener, you need to follow all of this precisely to appreciate the tight-knit structure of the movement: basically, follow the strongly accented opening idea’s jagged, descending intervals and be aware how, as the variations unfold, lines and intervals change from descending to ascending. The theme may be in the foreground, at other times in the background (as happens in the third set), but it is always present. The final set builds up to the ending’s slashing chords, all four instruments repeating four-note C Major chords against the last statement of the theme.
(For anyone interested in following one of those score videos, click on this link.)
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Another context follows the composer’s chronological trajectory leading up to this work. What came before it? What was going on in the composer's life that would eventually be revealed in it?
Preparatory work on Peter Grimes had started as early as 1941 while Britten and his life-partner, the tenor Peter Pears, were in America. They had left England in the spring of 1938, hoping to find new paths for their careers and a climate more in keeping with their pacifist views. Homesick before he’d even finished the crossed, one thing would have more impact on Britten’s future than all the excitement and potential they would discover during their stay in the United States: ever on the look-out for literary texts for songs or a new opera, he happened upon a copy of George Crabbe’s The Borough which describes the events that eventually became Peter Grimes.
Koussevitsky, director of the Boston Symphony, had graciously offered to commission the work for a premiere at Tanglewood but when the festival was canceled in 1942 for the duration of the war, Britten and Pears decided to return to England, hoping to arrange for the premiere of the opera there. After having some of his manuscripts confiscated by customs authorities in New York (fearful his music could contain coded messages for the enemy!) You would think this was a joke, right? But one of the sketches was for a new clarinet concerto he had started writing for Benny Goodman! Britten instead occupied his time during what proved a harrowing crossing (they traveled on “a rather decrepit old boat” as part of a convoy amidst the threat of Nazi torpedoes) by writing A Ceremony of Carols (speaking of compartmentalizing your creativity from your reality) while Pears worked out a scene-by-scene outline for the new opera’s structure.
They were much affected by seeing the impact of The Blitz on London. Eventually, they decided to settle in Britten’s home area Suffolk on the North Sea coast, finding an old mill in Snape which became their permanent home. This, of course, was Crabbe’s country, the place and people he wrote about in The Borough. Having grown up in Lowesoft, 28 miles to the north, Britten now felt he was home.
It was a challenge re-establishing themselves into English life both socially and professionally and it didn’t help that, while in London, Britten came down with measles in March of 1943 and had to be hospitalized (“isn’t this a major bore? – and at my age, too!”).
Actual composing on the opera didn’t begin until January 1944 and, despite serious doubts in June, thinking “my bloody opera stinks and that’s all there is to it,” he finished scoring the complete work on February 10th 1945.
So, while in America trying to find himself, Britten instead found a copy of a work that would inspire the opera set in a location close to where he was born and where he would eventually set up housekeeping, a work that would make him internationally famous and establish him, at 31, as one England’s leading composers.
Amidst the reshaping of English Life after the war and the re-establishing of his professional career, Britten was talking to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin who was going to undertake a tour through post-war Germany and Britten, who had been “casting about for some commitment to the human condition whose terrible depths had been so newly revealed,” begged to go along as his pianist. One of their stops was on June 27th, at Belsen, the site of one of the worst Nazi concentration camps that had been liberated only four months earlier. Writing home to Pears, we “spent the night in Belsen and saw over the hospital – & I needn’t describe that to you…” Pears explained, shortly after Britten's death, how “that experience had colored everything he had written subsequently.”
After the quartet's premiere, he wrote to Mrs. J. L. Behrend, the dedicatee, how “to my mind it is the greatest advance I have yet made & altho' it is far from perfect, it has given me encouragement to continue on a new line.”
Returning deeply affected after the experience of this German tour in August, Britten began composing a new song cycle, the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, with its final "Death Be Not Proud" presenting its argument against the power of death. These songs, to be premiered by Britten and Pears on November 22nd, were completed on August 19th.
Next, he was commissioned to write a string quartet that would be premiered on the anniversary of Henry Purcell’s death 250 years ago, November 21st. It would be finished on October 14th. And so we’ve come full circle.
One personal insight: Britten was sitting in on a rehearsal at the flat of the Zorian Quartet’s first violinist who was the wife of the music critic John Amis. Amis recalled how they only had four chairs in the whole apartment, which were needed for the quartet, so that meant Amis and the composer had to sit on the floor. When Amis, as the curious music critic, pointed out how “'oh, I see... this new tune is really the old one upside down,' ...Ben would look hard at his score and say ‘Oh, is it? Fancy that!’ and then wink at the musicians.”
After the premiere, Britten donated his commission fee to famine relief in India. He soon began work on his next commission, music for a film about the instruments of the orchestra which would be a set of variations with a climactic fugue based on a theme by Henry Purcell, usually known as “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” which he finished on New Year’s Eve.
In October of the following year, the Zorian Quartet recorded Britten’s 2nd Quartet on seven sides of a four-disc set of 78rpm records (anyone remember those?). The eighth side was taken up suitably by Purcell’s Fantasia Upon One Note, generally considered a kind of novelty piece. It consists of four independent parts while the “one note,” a Middle C, plays like a drone throughout the whole piece. In this arrangement, it's played by the second viola.
Aside from the Purcell association, I think if you follow the score (you may need to enlarge it to full screen to be able to read it), watching (and listening) for lines “ascending and descending” and how the tempo seems to change between segments with varying shorter or longer note values before returning to the original “slower” tempo (“diminution and augmentation”), you’ll have an idea how Britten found some inspiration in Purcell’s music to write the chaconne that concludes his string quartet on this program.
By the way, in the Zorian’s recording, the second viola part was played by Benjamin Britten.
– Dick Strawser
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