Six Degrees of Separation: The Arianna Quartet

Four Composers, Three Compositions

Felix Mendelssohn (1831) aged 22; Gabriela Lena Frank; Bela Bartók (1910) aged 29; Ernst von Dohnányi (1920s) in his mid-40s

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There are Six Degrees of Separation between our four composers directly or indirectly on the Arianna Quartet’s program this coming Sunday:

Felix Mendelssohn knew and worked with one of the great pianists of the 19^th Century,

Clara Schumann, who was a close friend of

Johannes Brahms, who was a mentor to a young Hungarian composer named

Ernst von Dohnányi who became a friend and colleague of

Bela Bartók who would later have a significant influence on

Gabriela Lena Frank whose work commissioned by the Arianna Quartet was inspired by Bartók.

The Arianna String Quartet, long regarded as one of the finer quartets in the United States, formed in 1992 and has been in residence at the University of Missouri’s St. Louis campus since 2000. They’ve been highly involved in teaching, in mentoring young string players and ensembles, in community involvement and in frequent national and worldwide tours.

They’ll be performing works by three of those “degrees” on Sunday, Nov. 15th, at 4:00 at Temple Ohev Sholom. The program opens with Mendelssohn’s tribute to the late Beethoven (no pun intended), his String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13, and continues with Gabriela Lena Frank’s Kanto Kechua #4 – for Bela, a tribute to Bela Bartók. It concludes with Dohnányi’s String Quartet No. 3, also in A Minor, Op. 33.

Single tickets are $35, $30 for seniors, $5 for college students and FREE for K-12 school-age students with a $10 ticket available for one accompanying adult. Tickets will be available at the door but you can also either call (717)221-9599, go to the Eventbrite site, or order them through the MSC website.

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One of the questions about classical music I hear frequently is “why do these composers sound like they do?” Behind that, I suspect, is something like “Why does Mendelssohn” (as an example) “sound like Mendelssohn?”

The “recognizable sound” we associate with a particular composer is usually referred to as their “voice,” the different traits and markers we associate with their style, the way you might hear two different people talk and be able to identify them by gender, register, accent, or any numerous other qualities we don’t need to examine but just simply sense – especially if it’s somebody you already know (“well, if you can’t see them, how do you know the one’s your Uncle Jack?”). If you’re acquainted with Mendelssohn’s music, especially his most famous works, you can simply recognize the familiar ones and maybe, by a process of comparison, works that are new but sound similar.

But if you’ve heard musicians talk about Early-, Middle-, or Late-Beethoven, for example, this further subdivides those traits and markers into the different periods of their lives, works Beethoven composed early in his life, those masterpieces of his maturity, and then those incredible works of his “late style” (he was only 57 when he died, so “old age” is hardly suitable here): each period may sound different compared to the others, yet they all “sound like Beethoven.” Of course, digging into the technical stuff isn’t likely to help the average “music lover” – the Germans called them liebhaber (literally, “love-havers” deriving our word amateur from the Latin, amo- for “love”); in fact, I’m not even sure a lot of those who “know a lot” about music – some call them aficionados, but the Germans called these kenner (literally “knowers”) – would not be snowed under by all the jargon scholars like to sling around…

Just as every individual is more or less unique – different personality traits, different physical characteristics, skin complexions or hair and eye color – composers also tend to be unique, at least those who go on to become “great composers.” The ones who don’t don’t usually develop their talents to the degree the most famous ones do: maybe they “sound like” whoever the reigning Great-Composer-of-the-Day is but we’d be hard pressed to identify them because while they may be talented mimics, they may not be “original” composers. (That word “original” can also be an old bugaboo to most young composers, but that’s a topic for another volume…)

So let’s look at this program with the Arianna Quartet from the standpoint of Composers Developing Their Voices. Thanks to Ms. Frank’s new work, a tribute to Bela Bartók, we can actually include four: Mendelssohn with his first “mature” quartet (despite being published as No. 2) written when he was 18; Dohnányi and his 3rd Quartet from 1926 when he was in his late-40s; and Gabriela Lena Frank who was inspired by Bartók finding his voice in his 1st String Quartet when he was in his mid-20s – she wrote her Kanto Kechua #4: For Bela in 2025 when she was turning 53 (curiously, making her the “oldest” composer on the program).

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Felix Mendelssohn began writing this quartet in 1827. He was 18 but had already written two of the finest masterpieces of his entire life, the Octet for Strings when he was 16 and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” when he was 17½. Despite his age, it’s clear these are stylistically mature works and masterpieces in every sense of the word. By this time he was 12, he was already a talented pianist who could play any of the 48 fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier from memory, a violinist talented enough to play concertos and be a member of the ensemble premiering his String Octet. He was also conducting the chamber orchestra his father hired for their Sunday afternoon musicales when he was 12 (though he had to stand on a chair so all the players could see him over their music stands). Musically, he had absorbed the musical styles of Bach’s son, C.P.E. Bach, as well as Haydn and his contemporaries – in other words the giants of the 18th Century Classical School.

But there’s another important factor in the genesis of this particular work: he started working on it four months after the death of Beethoven. He opens the work with a musical question, quoted from one of his own songs to words “Ist es wahr? (Is it true?)” which he’d written a few months earlier. Beethoven opens the last movement of his final string quartet, composed in October, 1826, with a pair of related musical motive he labels Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß (“The Very Difficult Decision”): over the opening upward interval (questioning), he writes Muß es sein? (“Must it be?)” then subsequently answers it with a decisive downward interval labeled Es muß sein! (“It must be!). 

Now you can argue he doesn’t make much use of this motive, not nearly as much as Beethoven used his – but then Beethoven was a more motivically oriented guy and Mendelssohn, even then, was more about tunes – perhaps that wasn’t his point. The whole quartet is still an hommage to Beethoven. There’s a chromatic fugue theme in the slow movement that slithers around very much like the one in Beethoven’s Serioso Quartet (Op. 95) of 1810 (written the year after Mendelssohn was born). There are other similarities to passages from the Op. 132 A Minor quartet in both Mendelssohn’s first movement, and the finale, with dramatic tremolos accompanying recitative-like “cadenzas” for the 1st Violin. Only the light-hearted third movement, an Intermezzo rather than a scherzo or minuet, seems free of any Beethoven references, but one can feel shadows of Mendelssohn’s “Is it true” Motive in the violin’s main theme. It is the middle section of the Intermezzo that shows us some “familiar” Mendelssohn, the spritely music straight out of his Octet’s scherzo.

As Mendelssohn wrote to a friend about his new work and this opening motive, "You will hear its notes resound in the first and last movements, and sense its feeling in all four."

Something else, though: the “Serioso Fugue” from the slow movement reappears in the last movement. Is there a Beethoven precedent for this? Well, much was made of the re-statement of the ghostly scherzo passage from the third movement that recurs, dramatically, in the middle of Beethoven’s triumphal finale of his 5th Symphony, something quite new in Classical Music. And then Mendelssohn also restates his string quartet’s opening slow introduction, slightly extended, at the very end not only as a way of rounding it off but also of unifying the whole work.

As for the work as a whole, Lucy Miller writes in her concert guide to chamber music, Adams to Zemlinsky, "This quartet, relying heavily on compositional techniques of late Beethoven, links Classical form to Romantic expression.” Beethoven, by his “Late Period,” had long transformed the classical form, harmonies, textures, and, in general, aesthetic he’d grown up with, learning from Mozart’s music and, less so, from his lessons with Haydn. Mendelssohn, at 18, is also finding his way from the classical traditions absorbed in his youth (!) to the new style now considered Romantic: unlike the introspective, existential quality of Beethoven's late quartets, Mendelssohn's Op., 13 is “passionate and richly romantic.”

In this “score/video,” we’ll hear a recording by the Emerson Quartet. You may notice that Mendelssohn’s “Ist es wahr?” Motive is not marked in this edition of the score, but as it’s the final phrase of the opening slow introduction, one can argue how significant is it, really, to the main part of the movement which begins immediately afterward?

There is one thing I want to point out because this is not just a young impressionable composer imitating his idol. How a teenager in Berlin became so familiar with the most recent works by Beethoven is surprising: Op. 132 was published in April of 1827, the month after Beethoven died, and I could imagine Mendelssohn, in the days long before one could download things from the Internet, ordering a copy of it as soon as it became available. But what about Op. 135? It wasn’t published until September, 1827, but in fact it wasn’t even premiered until Schuppanzigh’s quartet played it on the one-year Anniversary of Beethoven’s Death.

Mendelssohn began working on the quartet in July, four months after Beethoven died, and dated the final page 27 October, 1827. So, conceivably, Mendelssohn could have purchased a copy of the quartet and completed his own six weeks later: but how could he have been working on a quartet with that motive for the previous two months – unless, perhaps, he wrote the middle two movements first, and then, after becoming acquainted with Op.135, began the first, then last movements? Did someone in Vienna write to him or his teacher, Zelter, describing the quartet in a letter (“...and the finale begins with this curious motive…”)? Is it possible that friends of Mendelssohn’s well-connected teacher got hold of a hand-written copy of the work from the publisher? Aha – wait for it – it turns out the particular publisher Beethoven was dealing with with Op. 135 was Moritz Schlesinger who was located in – Berlin!

Last piece of the puzzle solved!

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What can be more “American” than a composer who grew up in Berkeley CA in the ‘70s and ‘80s, whose father was a “nice Jewish boy from the Bronx” who met his wife in Peru while working with the Peace Corps – a woman who was herself Peruvian-Chinese? She embraced all these different and disparate elements as she was growing up to become one of the leading composers of her generation. "I think [my] music can be seen as a by-product of my always trying to figure out how Latina I am and how gringa I am." We’ve heard her music before with Market Square Concerts: her piano trio, “Four Folk Songs,” based on musical motifs and rhythms from the folk music of Peru, in March 2025 with Trio Gaia; and before that when the Arianna Quartet performed her Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout when they appeared here in 2021. This time, the Arianna Quartet brings with them a work they'd commissioned and premiered in May earlier this year.

Gabriela Lena Frank's Kanto Kechua #4 – for Bela pays homage, in a way, to Hungarian composer Bela Bartók at a time in his career when he first heard some authentic Hungarian folk music and decided to dig deeper into not only what this was – not Gypsy music, that’s something entirely different – but what it meant to his own identity as a Hungarian Composer. In this sense, it parallels Ms. Frank’s own exploration of South American music, Andean in particular, in finding her identity, her voice.

Here is a “zoom” interview with members of the quartet and the composer: while all of it is interesting, the part where she begins talking about the piece and its meaning for her starts around 7:04, growing up with various musical experiences and her “Frank music genes” passed down from her East European side of the family.

Talking about her “Kanto Kechua,” she describes it as part of a series of miniatures – it’s about nine minutes long – inspired by Quechuan songs (Quechua being the indigenous language of the Andes predating the Incas) but in this case, less an authentic folk song than it is, as Bartók would later do, transform the traits of these thousands of songs he collected from across Eastern Europe into something he called it “imaginary folk-music” that sounds like folk music but which he composed himself, music that has the flavor of Hungary at its root. This examination of folk music, actual or imagined, has been an on-going part of her compositional evolution and, as she says, “it’s symbolic of the depth of my cultural inheritance.”

Brooklyn Rider, a string quartet that (no surprise) hails from Brooklyn, performs her Kanto Kechua No. 2, written for them in 2018. A different piece with a different inspiration, it’s based on fragments of ideas she wrote down at a time following a diagnosis of a serious autoimmune disease when she was terrified of impeding surgeries and treatments, dealing with lots of pain. She sought healing in what to her, then in her 30s, was most life affirming: being creative. This is not a programmatic piece descriptive of those events or emotions in her life, merely the source of some of those fragments she had written down at a time she needed some creative therapy.

Since composing the Kanto Kechua #4 last year, there have been new developments in Ms. Frank’s life: she has won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in May of this year for her Picaflor: A Future Myth; and her 2022 opera, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego (“The Final Dream of Frida and Diego”), was performed at the Metropolitan Opera also in May of this year. (Incidentally, as much as she loves writing chamber music, she'll be very busy now since there's a new opera scheduled for a premiere in 2028.)

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Ernst von Dohnányi is the German form of his name; Ernő Dohnányi, the Hungarian. Two names in two different languages for the same person. He was born in Pressburg as it was known to the German-speaking Austrians – it’s barely 30 miles from Vienna – but to the Hungarians (and it was at the time officially part of Hungary), it’s Pozsony. Today, the city is called Bratislava, the present-day capital of modern Slovakia. One city, but three names with three different cultures.

The political boundaries of Eastern Europe have created, over the centuries, so much confusion, us poor Westerners have difficulty keeping track. Dohnányi was ethnically Hungarian but in 1864, Hungary was recognized as an autonomous kingdom within the old Austrian Empire which now became the Dual Monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Though a kingdom, it didn’t have a Hungarian king; its king was the Austrian emperor. Boundaries ebbed and flowed but with the collapse of the empire at the end of World War I, Pressburg/Pozsony became part of the newly formed Czechoslovakia. Hungary was, briefly, part of the new Soviet Union’s sphere but shortly became… well… it ended up becoming a kingdom again, but again without a Hungarian king. In lieu of one, a regent was appointed who was not related to royalty (or even aristocracy) but who was an admiral, Miklos Horthy, who ruled as a proto-fascist dictator for 24 years, through most of World War II, aligning himself with Hitler and Mussolini.

Speaking of boundaries, when Bela Bartók was born in the region of Transylvania, now part of Romania, it was then part of Hungary. When his father died, his mother moved first to a Hungarian city now in Ukraine, then eventually to Pozsony before settling in Budapest so young Bela could study piano at the Liszt Academy in the Hungarian capital.

But even though part of this Dual Monarchy, the Austrians still controlled much of the government and society; German was essentially the official language if you wanted to get ahead. German culture dominated the region regardless of one’s ethnicity.

Dohnányi was caught between this dual conundrum: his family had been ennobled by a Holy Roman Emperor in 1653 and, like the more famous (and far more wealthy) Esterházys, they were Austrian Nobles with Hungarian blood in their veins. Given the two forms of his names, he did not, as some believe, change it from German to Hungarian when the old empire and its influence collapsed: he still printed his name in German on his published compositions but he used the Hungarian form in his personal life, speaking either language as needed. His tombstone bears the name “Ernst von Dohnanyi” (without the accent).

Bartók, four years younger, was a more hot-headed nationalist, proud of his Hungarian heritage: he refused to speak German at home. He and his music (especially his stage works) were constantly running afoul of the government censors.

And yet both composers began their careers heavily influenced by Germans: Dohnányi by Brahms (who even gave the young Dohnányi’s first published work, a piano quintet, his seal of approval), and Bartók, once he became more serious about composition, by Richard Strauss after hearing a performance of Also sprach Zarathustra in Budapest.

At the time, thanks to Franz Liszt and Brahms, the world viewed Hungarian music as that created by the Gypsies who were not ethnically Hungarian and had their own separate culture (more officially called, now, the “Roma”). Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and Brahms’ popular Hungarian Dances were based on well-known Gypsy tunes; but Brahms would incorporate this Gypsy style, especially its rhythmic flare, into the finales of his 1st Piano Quartet and the Violin Concerto. Brahms liked to visit the Viennese smoky taverns where Gypsy musicians played: it would be like slumming in New York City, visiting the speak-easies to listen to jazz. We should more accurately think of this form of “Hungarian Music” as Urban Popular Music rather than actual folk music.

Generically, Dohnányi was more firmly rooted in the traditions of Brahms (in his compositions) and Liszt (in his piano playing). Yes, both Brahms and Liszt are Romantic composers and contemporaries but they are also diametrically opposed stylistically, so by the time Dohnányi adapted Brahms’ more classical structural concepts in terms of form, tonality, and harmony, he was also absorbing Liszt’s chromaticism and sense of rhapsody, often incorporating an improvisatory flexibility (Liszt) within a structured overall design (Brahms). He could be described as a traditionalist within the Romantic Style – Bartók and Kodály both thought him “not modern enough.”

Dohnányi’s String Quartet No. 3 in A Minor is a case in point. At the time he was composing this, Schoenberg was developing his serial style; Berg’s Wozzeck had premiered in late-1925; Bartók would write his 3rd Quartet in 1927; Stravinsky had embraced Neo-Classicism with his Pulcinella and Renard premiered in 1926 and would write Oedipus Rex the following year; Rachmaninoff completed his little-known 4th Piano Concerto in 1926; Shostakovich premiered his 1st Symphony; Ravel would write his (in)famous Bolero in 1928. Clearly, a lot was going on in the wider musical world!

This performance, complete with score, is with the Fine Arts Quartet. The work is in three movements, opening with an edgy Allegro marked agitato ed appassionato, followed by a set of contrasting variations, Andante religioso. The lively finale is a kind of rondo, Vivace giocoso. There are Brahmsian figures and classical phrases and structures but Liszt is perhaps less in evidence in this piece (I admit I’m not familiar enough with more of Dohnányi’s works to confirm this as a mature trend or if he just didn’t feel this improvisatory sense lent itself to this string quartet). The work is dedicated “to my dear wife.”

We often think of all these composers we listen to – Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, whoever – as hermetically sealed individuals, a genius unto themselves. While it might be difficult to find any direct influence of Mendelssohn on Bartók despite the connections I’d made at the beginning, it’s almost as unexpected to find that Mendelssohn met Hector Berlioz in Rome and they became good friends, later championing each other’s music, even if Mendelssohn wrote to his father how he felt he needed to wash his hands after paging through this new piece Berlioz was working on then called the Symphonie fantastique…

But at some point in those few years while both Dohnányi and Bartók lived in Pozsony, they met. It was Dohnányi who recommended the young would-be pianist move to Budapest to study at the Franz Liszt Academy. They remained friends and colleagues, though we more often pair Bartók’s name with Zoltan Kodály.

We also often think of all these composers we listen to as being “very serious.” Yet this famous photograph would show a lighter side to three friends “goofing around” for the camera (remind anyone of silly pictures with cell phones?).

Ostensibly, this is Dohnányi wielding a weaponized guitar on the left, Bartók (seated) cowering in the face of Kodaly’s menacing walking stick and goatee (and what is that Bartók is holding?). But there seems to be some disagreement since I'd last posted this a few years ago: though I can find no proof specifically identifying these three, I’ve seen comments from people presuming to have but supplying no proof to the contrary. It certainly looks like Bartók, given a student photograph of him from 1900 and the one I posted in the banner image above, taken in 1910; but while they knew of each other at the Liszt Academy, Bartók and Kodaly didn’t become friends until 1905. So take it for what it’s worth: it’s definitely a picture of three amigos clowning around who may be Dohnányi, Bartók, and Kodály…

Dohnányi had graduated from the Liszt Academy at the age of 20 and went on to pursue a career as a concert pianist (his signature piece was Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto: he played this for his debuts in London and, in 1898, in St. Louis, MO, on his first American tour; he also had conducted it with one of his students as soloist eleven days before he died in 1960. Through Brahms, he had met the violinist Josef Joachim who invited him to teach at his conservatory in Berlin where he stayed from 1905 to 1915.

(Incidentally, speaking of meeting other composers, while Dohnányi was in Berlin, Arnold Schoenberg was also living in the German capital, and premiered his mammoth oratorio Gurrelieder there in 1913. Richard Strauss, who was also living in Berlin at the time, attended the performance. Did Dohnányi?)

After World War I began, Dohnányi returned to Budapest where he continued to teach and perform. During the short-lived post-war Soviet Republic of Hungary, he was appointed Director of the Budapest Academy, but soon the new interim government removed him because he refused to fire one of his colleagues, Zoltan Kodály, for his political views. When the “Regency” of Admiral Horthy took over the government in 1920, Dohnányi was appointed conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic where he proceeded to champion works by Bartók and Kodály, among other Hungarian-born composers. As a pianist, he also included several of Bartók’s more accessible pieces, including some of those inspired by his research into Hungarian folk music, helping establish him before he himself became recognized as a concert pianist to promote his own music.

To Bartók, Dohnányi was “not Hungarian enough” (this, in 1923). When Bartók first heard a true Hungarian folk-song sung by a young kitchen maid in 1904, this awakened something in him that initiated extensive research into the actual folk music of the Hungarian people, often traveling through the countryside, collecting songs the way a botanist might collect plant specimens. He discovered Kodály was already beginning a similar project and together they published a collection of twenty songs accompanied with their own unique, “non-classical” harmonies.

While Bartók was pining for the unrequited love of violinist Stefi Geyer, he was inspired to begin his String Quartet No. 1 in A Minor – read more about this in a post from 2009 – when he decided to incorporate some of these folk-song elements into the quartet’s fabric, expanding the idea of merely arranging them to actually absorbing them into a piece intended for a concert. It is this synthesis which created the voice we recognize as Bartók’s mature style, particularly in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th String Quartets.

Dohnányi was simply less interested in folk music. As a Hungarian, perhaps he figured being Hungarian was enough to write Hungarian music (a similar argument clouds American Music: must it sound like Copland or Gershwin to be considered “American”?). When he wrote his 3rd String Quartet in 1926, Budapest was a modern city comparable to other major cities in Western Europe or America, unlike the rest of Hungary which was primarily rural and poor. Society was divided differently than along the old German/Hungarian lines: aristocrats of various levels, even those without titles that were more like the old English gentry, were highly conscious of their social standing. Despite strict censorship, Horthy’s Regency was considered a Golden Age of literature, art, and music), even though much of the art being produced ran counter to most of the government’s proto-fascist ideology.

The urban middle class was divided by religion, the Christians dominating the government bureaucracy and the Jews taking on those jobs deemed unsuitable for “Christian gentlemen and ladies” (trades and business, but also doctors, lawyers, scientists and many others, not just menial jobs). Eventually, with the advent of the 1929 Great Depression and the Rise of Hitler and Mussolini, Horthy, a dictator regardless of his role as Regent, turned the country into a Fascist ally in the 1930s. This would lead to serious complications for Hungarian artists used to the cosmopolitan world of Budapest.

One other aspect of Dohnányi’s life should mention his family, especially his grandson, Christoph von Dohnányi, who became one of the major conductors of the late-20th Century, serving as Music Director with the Cleveland Orchestra from 1984 to 2002. Officially listed as “a German conductor,” Christoph had been born in Berlin in 1929 and raised there. His father, Ernst’s son Hans, a jurist, worked along with other members of his family in the German Resistance during World War II. He helped Jews escape from Germany but was then arrested by the Nazis for his involvement in “Operation Valkyrie,” the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. Just as the Soviet Army was preparing to attack Berlin, Hitler personally ordered Hans von Dohnanyi’s execution in April, 1945, hanged using piano wire instead of rope (presumably in honor of his concert pianist father) only days before Hitler himself committed suicide, finally bringing down the Third Reich and ending the war.

As Nazi Germany had been assuming more influence and outright control in Hungary during the '30s, Bartók left for America in 1940, but both Dohnányi and Kodály stayed. Dohnányi was never a political person, choosing to take the long view of being a care-taker to preserve the arts and the artists he worked with as conductor and director of the Academy. While this falls outside the time of the 3rd Quartet, it’s important to note that accusations of his being a Nazi Collaborator were enough to compel him, at 71, to leave Hungary in 1948 and settle in America where he ended up teaching piano at Florida State University and dying in Tallahassee in 1960. Curiously, in 1953, he composed an “American Rhapsody” which quoted “Turkey in the Straw,” “On Top of Old Smokey,” and “I am a poor wayfaring stranger.” 

 - Dick Strawser