The Balourdet Quartet Opens the Season, Part Three: Meet György Ligeti

Wednesday, in addition to being the second full day of Autumn (time flies whether you're having fun or not), marks the opening of our new season with the Balourdet Quartet at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg at 7:30. They'll be playing Haydn's "Lark" Quartet, Ligeti's 2nd Quartet, and Smetana's 1st Quartet, "From My Life." The two earlier posts covered the Haydn and the Smetana; this post looks into the world behind György Ligeti's quartet from 1968.

Ligeti, speaking about his music at a rehearsal in 1984

Ligeti’s Centennial Year, 2023, passed largely unnoticed in American concert halls, though he has been recognized as one of the world’s leading, more innovative voices in what is often called (because everything has to be called something) “post-modernism” (what do you call whatever comes next?). Things had changed radically with the New Century – this would be 1900 – and artists, not just composers, were looking for something appropriately new. It didn’t happen overnight: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring were first heard in 1913; Schoenberg, though abandoning tonality, didn’t develop his “twelve-tone style,” usually called Serialism, until the 1920s, around the time Stravinsky adopted a “neo-classical” style and Bartók began exploring the folk music of his native Hungary and incorporating it into his own natural style not as a form of imitation but by absorbing the elements at its core to create his own unique sound.

“When you are accepted in a club, without willing or without noticing you take over certain habits of what is in and what is out,” György Ligeti said in a 1993 talk. “Tonality was definitely out. To write melodies, even non-tonal melodies, was absolutely taboo. Periodic rhythms” (that is, the repeated patterns we associate with certain meters) “pulsation, was taboo, not possible. Music has to be a priori… It worked when it was new but it became stale. Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to [Classical-era] tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.”

Most composers’ lives – or at least their musical output – are usually divided into the ubiquitous three parts: Early, Middle, and Late. Ligeti disavowed the Bartók-inspired music he wrote while living in Communist Hungary, adopted the then current avant-garde style when he escaped to the West and settled in Austria and Germany, a style he then also disavowed by fusing – and this was the journey – elements of the past and the present to find his own voice. The 2nd String Quartet is one of these pieces. By combining elements from the 15th Century – think Ockgehem, especially, with his cerebral counterpoint – with elements of folk music (courtesy of Bartók and Kodály) and the various things he heard (and learned or rejected) from the German-led avant-garde of Stockhausen (and even though Boulez was a French composer, he was thoroughly Germanic in his creative style), Ligeti composed a series of works in the 1960s that catapulted him to the forefront of New Music. Later he would expand on this, between the influences of Franz Liszt’s pianistic virtuosity, the “saxophone solos of Eric Dolphy,” and the complex rhythmic polyphony of African Pygmy tribes, to evolve a new voice in the decades ahead.

György Ligeti – his last name sort of rhymes with “lickety” rather than “spaghetti,” and if you can approximate his first name in French (Zhorzh) it’s better than pronouncing it GHYER-ghee – was born in 1923 in what is now Romania but which had, until a few years before his birth, been part of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family was ethnically Hungarian (as well as Jewish) but given the fluidity of history and the political boundaries in Eastern Europe over the centuries, it’s not entirely logical to identify him as a Romanian composer. As a child, he was 6 years old before he’d heard a language other than Hungarian being spoken around him. In 1940, as World War II reshaped Europe once more, that part of Romania was “returned” to Hungary, now under Nazi control. His initial musical studies were interrupted when the regime conscripted him for a “forced labor brigade.” His brother was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp and his parents were sent to Auschwitz. Only György and his mother survived the war.

Afterwards, Ligeti resumed his studies, this time in Budapest where he studied with, among others, Zoltan Kodály. (Bartók, fleeing the Nazis in 1940, had died in the United States in 1945.) With the Nazis driven out of Hungary, the Communists went about taking over the elected government by threatening to have their coalition members deported unless they “converted” to their cause), finally setting up their own dictatorship by 1949. They cut off most communication with the West and it was almost impossible for a Hungarian composer to follow what was going on in new music circles outside the Eastern Bloc: the ruling Communists “outlawed” modernist tendencies, except for an accessible folk-based style like Kodály or Bartók. Somehow he managed to avoid the dilemma many composers living in totalitarian states of having to write propaganda music.

However, Ligeti learned about the basics of serialism (anathema to the Nazis and the Soviets) not from musical sources but from reading Thomas Mann’s recently published novel, Doctor Faustus, where the main character, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, was thinly based on Arnold Schoenberg. He had minimal access to a radio where he could occasionally hear broadcasts of the latest music coming out of Germany and became fascinated with the avant-garde works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, works he cherished as statements of creative freedom and works he listened to as the bullets flew around him.

In more ways than one, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 marked a turning point in Ligeti’s life. As Soviet tanks crushed the uprising, Ligeti hurriedly fled to Vienna, leaving behind most of what he’d written so far. This represented the past: now, he said, he “believed in twelve-tone music.” Soon, he gravitated toward the Darmstadt school of Stockhausen and Boulez and worked with the electronic studios in Köln where he soon fell out with the political in-fighting (“I, personally, [had] no ambition to be first or to be important”). But he ended up approximating the sound of electronic music while using live instruments and voices, going one step beyond the didactic “total twelve-tone” style of Stockhausen, Boulez and others. While there were elements of the “theoretical control” championed by serialists that Ligeti retained, he abandoned many others details which, frankly, made the music too cerebral, creating what one critic dismissed as “The Honk-Squeak School of Music.”

He called this new style of his micropolyphony, a texture created by various threads of sound played by individual instruments or voices that while played linearly created the vertical structures of dense tone-clusters rather than traditional chords, often working within very narrow confines (for instance, four different instruments weaving back and forth between all the chromatic notes playable between G and B-flat: it would present a constant sound of all the notes but undulating as the individual lines fluctuated in free and conflicting rhythms to give the impression of shimmering colors. Being made up of moving lines they still managed to give the impression of a static sound.

Of this, Ligeti writes, “Both Atmosphères and Lontano [see below] have a dense canonic structure. But you cannot actually hear the polyphony, the canon. You hear a kind of impenetrable texture, something like a very densely woven cobweb. I have retained melodic lines in the process of composition, they are governed by rules as strict as Palestrina’s or those of the Flemish school [some of the most rigorous systems in musical theory before the development of serialism], but the rules of this polyphony are worked out by me. The polyphonic structure does not come through, you cannot hear it; it remains hidden in a microscopic, underwater world, to us inaudible. I call it micropolyphony (such a beautiful word!).”

It is, essentially, a way of creating a systematic – I like to call it “consistent” – approach to the musical material without taking the time to find each pitch arbitrarily (and to what benefit?). One can argue this is little different from the canons of Bach’s Goldberg Variations or the mensuration canons that proliferate, for example, in the Missa prolationem by Johannes Ockeghem in the 15th Century.

Ligeti's music, particularly these works of the 1960s, is best known to a public not acquainted with 20th century classical music through its use in three of Stanley Kubrick’s films. The soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) included excerpts from four of his pieces: Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna, Requiem and Aventures, but the music was used, and in some cases modified, without Ligeti's knowledge (reportedly, the composer discovered this while sitting in the theater, watching the film!) or, for that matter, permission. So, given this copyright infringement (“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”), Ligeti “successfully sued for having had his music distorted.” He and Kubrick then settled out of court. Apparently they got along better in the future: Kubrick sought permission and compensated Ligeti for use of his Lontano in The Shining (1980); and a brief excerpt from Ligeti's Musica ricercata was used at pivotal moments in Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). “At the German premiere of that film, by which time Kubrick had died, his widow was escorted by Ligeti himself.”

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

Ligeti in 1965

György Ligeti's String Quartet No. 2, composed between February and August, 1968, is about 21 minutes long. The LaSalle Quartet, to whom it’s dedicated, gave the premiere in Baden-Baden in December, 1969.

“The five movements,” Stephen Plaistow writes in his liner notes for the DG recording, “differ widely from each other in their types of motion. In the first, the structure is largely broken up” [in contrasting fragments that seem kaleidoscopic, with scurrying whisper-like passages within a narrow range alternating with sustained harmonics or wild scrambling chaos like they’re making it up; every note however is written out and, in fact, technically controlled.] “In the second, everything is reduced to very slow motion, and the music seems to be coming from a distance, with great lyricism. The pizzicato third movement is another of Ligeti's machine-like studies, hard and mechanical, whereby the parts playing repeated notes creates a ‘granulated’ continuum. In the fourth, which is fast and threatening, everything that happened before is crammed together. Lastly, in strong contrast, the fifth movement spreads itself out. In each movement, the same basic configurations return, but each time their coloring or viewpoint is different, so that the overall form only really emerges when one listens to all five movements in context.”

1. Allegro nervoso
   

2. Sostenuto, molto calmo

3. Come un meccanismo di precisione

4. Presto furioso, brutale, tumultuoso

5. Allegro con delicatezza

Note adjectives like “nervous,” “very calm,” “furious, brutal, tumultuous” and finally “with delicacy.” The third movement translates as “Like a machine, with precision.”

performed by the Arditti Quartet (from their recording released on the SONY label as part of the Gyorgy Ligeti Edition Vol. 1)

Having discovered a sonority he could call his own, in a manner of speaking, Ligeti began to explore how to use this “micropolyphony” in different ways:

Atmosphères (1961) for large orchestra

Requiem (1963-1965) for two choirs and large orchestra

Lux Aeterna (1966) for 16-part a cappella chorus

Lontano (1967) for large orchestra

and there is also a short work for harpsichord, Continuum, exploring similar textures, which he composed in 1968, the same year he wrote the 2nd String Quartet. Each medium – orchestra, chorus, chamber music, keyboard – requires a different approach, an application suitable to the limitations of the forces involved, obviously much easier to bring off with a full orchestra but bringing with it new challenges when using only four stringed instruments or a harpsichord.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

If you’re having any difficulties making sense out of that or out of Ligeti’s music – and there’s no reason to feel embarrassed if you cannot – frankly, composers writing about how their music is “put together” in a technical sense can be some of the most boring commentary imaginable, completely incomprehensible to a listener not familiar with “new music” (whether it’s the latest in modern music or merely music, however old, is just unfamiliar to the listener) and of little interest to someone who just wants to know “what the hell is going on?” I’ve read composers’ program notes that, as a composer myself, might be interesting since usually I want to figure out “how does he (or she) do that?” Most listeners are more likely to want to know “why does this sound different from the stuff I do know?” As I’ve often said, you don’t need to know a lot of facts about a composer or the composition in order to “enjoy” it; sometimes it’s more of a sense of “context” that will make that appreciation a little deeper, getting beyond the mere surface, whether you find that surface difficult to “understand” on first hearing (especially if you don’t like it on first hearing). You don’t need to read a manual designed for engineers who are going to build a car’s engine from scratch if all you want to do is drive the car to the grocery store…

One of my favorite stories about an introduction to something new and, initially, off-putting involves a class of college juniors at the University of Connecticut. The semester was designed around the transition between the more familiar 19th Century and the wilds of the mostly unfamiliar 20th Century with its myriad of styles and aesthetics (keeping in mind this was in the late-1970s, and there’s been a lot of “new music” under the bridge since then). “Today we’re going to begin examining the music of Bela Bartók,” I said, and immediately a clarinetist in the second row harrumphed dismissively. “Ah, I take it you don’t like Bartók…?”

“No, it’s all motor-music and dissonance and….” – he then listed a number of points that another colleague of mine would have used in a lecture called “Why You Don’t Like Bartók.”

Rather than rebut his statements, and knowing he was a big fan of Mahler, I asked to him explain what it was he liked – no, loved! – about Mahler. “Oh, those incredibly long melodies and the way they unfold; the harmonies that pull you along and suddenly change direction; the sudden contrasts that catch you unaware…” and so on for a few more rhapsodic minutes.

“Did you like Mahler the first time you heard it?”

“No, actually, I hated it!”

When he didn’t elaborate, I asked him, “what was it you didn’t like about it, on first hearing?”

“Well, it was awfully long, I mean those symphonies seem like they go on for hours. And the harmony never seemed to go where you expected it – then suddenly something happened and you’re like ‘now what’s going on?’…”

I didn’t point out that those were other ways of describing what it was he did like about it. Instead, I simply asked him, “so how did you come to love Mahler’s music?”

“Well, I had to listen to it a lot… and…”

(Insert long pause, here.)

“Oh…”

Given that epiphany, I’m pleased to say that after he graduated, he went on to Julliard to pursue a master’s degree in clarinet performance. I happened to attend his Master’s Recital and one of the works on that program was the trio for clarinet, violin, and piano, “Contrasts,” by Bela Bartók.

One of the things I’ve discovered that, repeated listening (while paying attention to what you’re hearing) is more difficult when you don’t have a way to describe it (and describing “sound” in “words” is not always a reliable experience). The average listener doesn’t have the vocabulary to do that with a piece of music, just as I don’t have the vocabulary and expertise to understand what friends are talking about when going off on anything involving computer technology or, for that matter, pop culture. Somewhere, I’d picked up a way of examining music by breaking it down into “parameters” (not a word I enjoy using, but when generically used to describe different aspects of music, it’ll have to do): these topics allow you to focus on one aspect of the music at a time, rather than floundering around trying to think of something to say more interesting than “interesting.” And it works well whether you only know a little about music theory or a lot. The more you know, the more detailed you can get; if you don’t know that much technically, at least it could give you something to latch on to.

Whoever this theorist was, the system he’d devised he’d called SHMRG.

S = Sonority: what instruments are involved, what sounds do you hear, what different ways does the composer use those instruments to create those sounds?

H = Harmony, usually an element most listeners don’t really know how to talk about, especially when you consider how many years of “theory” – “how harmony works” – undergraduate students take and will continue to take through further years of graduate study. But begin with “is it chordal?” How do those chords move (in expected, unexpected ways)? If it’s not chordal, how does the composer create those sounds? What about the texture? Melody + Accompaniment or does the music consist of various independent lines (“polyphony”)? One of my favorites is, does it sound logical or arbitrary (if it’s tonal, does it lead you in the direction of a home key; if it’s not, is there some way the chords pull you forward – is there some way the composer consistently uses “tension and release”?

M = Melody, usually the first thing most listeners hear: it’s what strikes you as “memorable” and the easiest way to determine whether you like it or not. But how is the “melodic element” used? Long-arching tunes like Mahler or short, motive-based themes like Beethoven or Haydn? What if the music’s not really “melodic”?

R = Rhythm, and by that I mean is the music divided into beats (or pulses) that create recognizable patterns (do you feel the urge to march, or dance)? If it’s not, does it sound chaotic or static? In the larger sense, do the different sections of the music create their own sense of time (a long lyrical section contrasted with shorter, more dramatic sections)? I’d rather think about the relation of Time in the music and how it’s subdivided (like minutes and seconds) and how does that create a sense of tempo, a sense of mood; but then SHMTG is harder to say…

G = Growth, though most people would prefer to think about Form (okay, SHMRF…?) but “form” gets us immediately into the larger span-of-things (Sonata Form, Rondo Form) when I’d rather you think on the micro-level: is the music based on “motives” rather than “tunes”? How do the smaller units we perceive “evolve” (“grow”) into larger ones? Two very important aspects of any kind of Western Music are “unity” and “variety” – so how do these contrasts shape the music we’re responding to? Are these units consistent (phrases like a march or a waltz) or unequal (phrases of different and varying lengths)? Do the larger units subdivide into regular smaller units, or do they flow continuously to create a constantly unfolding span of time?

A lot of “modern music” – that is, “modern” in the sense of what was new in the 20th Century – is not only “non-melodic,” it’s often “non-harmonic.” So what does the composer use to replace these elements? Rather than “recognizable tunes,” is it built on “recognizable shapes” (I prefer calling them “gestures”). If you listen to the opening of the Ligeti quartet on the Balourdet’s program, you’ll recognize elements of silence and near-silence, quiet and rapidly meandering sounds built around clusters of notes (hardly a “chord” but does it work like one?), and then suddenly some kind of outburst (contrast). How do these elements – in the sense of being unifying elements or contrasting elements – relate to each other; how do they create a sense of the whole? Is it like light being refracted through a prism or maybe the sudden intrusion of unwanted thoughts (“boo!”)? If you respond emotionally to a lovely melody in a Schubert song or an increase in harmonic tension in a late Beethoven quartet, how do these elements make you respond? Is it enough to create the sense of “a piece” (making up a whole) or does it sound (as many critics have said) like “a collection of special effects waiting for a piece to happen”?

Ah! Speaking of epiphanies, I just had a vision of a dusty brown-covered book on my shelf of theory texts most of which I have ignored for the past 40 years and realized this is the one that used SHMRG. It's called Guidelines for Style Analysis, and it’s by the theorist, Jan LaRue (1918-2004), originally published in 1970 by W.W. Norton.Though geared for advanced theory students, much of the material, especially the delineations of what to listen for re:SHMRG, can be applicable to most listeners.

– Dick Strawser

The Balourdet Quartet Opens the Season, Part Two: Haydn's Quartet, "The Lark"

What’s in a name? When the members of the Balourdet Quartet – who open the new season for Market Square Concerts on Wednesday, 7:30, at Market Square Church – were wondering what to call themselves, they considered many options. As cellist Russell Houston explains it (in the video header for the previous post in this series), since three of them had met at the Taos Music Festival, they wanted to take a name from the festival as a way of honoring the inspiration they’d found there. So, at the end of their first semester at the Shepherd School of Music, they were at Russell’s locker when a business card fell out of his shoe (having been a student once, I can relate to his filing system) – a card for Antoine Balourdet “who really was a lover of life and a lover of music… and he was the chef of the Hotel St. Bernard where the Taos School of Music used to be held. One of the main things about that festival is that they have this amazing French food. We sort of all became a community through the shared love of food and music; we were always reading chamber music late into the night. As a group, one of the things that brings us together is our love of food. When we’re on the road, it’s a chance for us to catch up on how we’re living life and what’s going on with us outside of just rehearsing. We get to share meals together and it really brings us together as a group.”

In this post, we’ll hear about Haydn’s Quartet known as “The Lark.” I’ve saved György Ligeti’s 2nd String Quartetfor one last post.You can read the earlier post about Smetana's 1st String Quartet, "From My Life," here. 

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

Haydn (in London), 1791

Speaking of names, the average listener might wonder why this particular Haydn quartet is called The Lark. 

Given the large number of nicknames among Haydn's works, it’s almost a necessity to tell one of his 68 quartets from another. (First of all, some sources list 83 quartets, but that includes a number of spurious works (“attributed to Haydn”) as well as arrangements of other works of his (arranged by someone not Haydn) and not originally string quartets. Usually, they’re referred to by Opus Numbers rather than various other catalog numbers: the quartet the Balourdet opens their program with is the String Quartet in D Major, Op. 64 No. 5; or it could be the String Quartet No. 53; the String Quartet FHE No. 35; the String Quartet Hob.III:63. It’s so much easier just to call it “The Lark.”

First of all, the lark in question – I’ll skip the dad joke about “he was just larking about, calling it that...” – would probably be the Eurasian Skylark, a songbird well-known to Europeans. Since the nickname didn’t originate with Haydn, he didn’t wake up one morning to a bird singing outside his window and become inspired to begin writing this quartet. Who came up with the name is unknown: one of the musicians, or maybe the Prince’s valet? Or perhaps a publisher or critic later on who, looking for something descriptive to say beyond “a pretty melody” decided it resembled a bird singing – “maybe a lark?”

According to one modern-day writer I found on-line, “the violin melody that opens and dominates the first movement soars and sings like a bird on the wing. Why a lark? Because unlike most birds who sing only when perched, larks sing while in flight, and their cheerful song is extraordinarily melodious.” Though our friend captured here, aside from being grounded, would seem to be more chatty than “melodious.”

Nonetheless, larks would go on to inspire other composers: for instance, Ralph Vaughan Williams and his popular “Lark Ascending” for violin and orchestra. And, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony aside, there’s Messiaen’s famous use of birdsong which may be more realistic: in his Réveil des oiseaux (The Awakening of the Birds), the solo piano opens with an extended solo for a nightingale as, eventually, other birds join in the “morning song,” each bird delineated in the score. 

But, as usual, the cute nickname assigned to Haydn’s delightful work deals with basically one single element of the whole piece: it could just as easily be known as “The Hornpipe Quartet” after the presto finale which brought to mind a lively sailor’s dance (not sure how many jaunty sailors used to hang out in Vienna in 1790, though…).

As one writer described the quartet, “it’s an entertainment in four acts: a story, a song, a dance, and a party.” Works for me!

Here’s the Balourdet Quartet performing Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major, Op. 64 No. 5, better known simply as “The Lark,” recorded recently at a concert presented by the Chamber Music Society of Fort Worth.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

Listening to this quartet – indeed almost any work by “Papa” Haydn – one would have little sense of what was going in his “real” life. In the start of 1790, Haydn was in Vienna (Prince Esterházy divided his time between the Winter Season in Vienna and the rest of the year at his country estates along the present-day Hungarian border) where he got to hear Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and attended various musicales and “quartet parties,” enjoying being a celebrity among the Imperial Capital’s musical circles. But when the prince decided to leave Vienna in February (prematurely, Haydn felt), the composer found himself writing to one of his many Viennese friends about sitting here “in my wilderness – almost without human society, full of the memories of the glorious past. When will those days return?” (His “past,” here, referred to the “past few weeks.”) Back on the job, he was beginning to feel the toll of the thirty years being in service to the Esterházy Family, whatever his position, and the future seemed to have little to offer him in the way of any challenges or new goals he could set for himself.

But the Prince’s wife died at the end of February and Prince Nikolaus was disconsolate. Perhaps these quartets were intended to help keep up the Prince’s spirit that summer, but as his own health deteriorated, the Prince himself died on September 28th, 1790.

Now, Prince Nikolaus was a wealthy man – in fact, he was reputedly richer than the Emperor – but when his brother Anton inherited the title and all the estates, it made no difference to Haydn: Anton had no love of music and, as a “cost-saving measure,” he disbanded the orchestra and the theatres, putting Haydn on a pension (rather than just laying him off). He lived only four more years before the title and the estates – and Haydn – passed on to his son, Prince Nicholas II, but that’s a story for another time.

So basically, in the autumn of 1790, Haydn found himself without his patron’s support and essentially unemployed (or at least his usual work assignments no longer required). Naturally, then, when Johann Peter Salomon, the impresario from London, showed up (again) and offered Haydn a season in the British capital, what was going to hold him back? He said “yes,” and arrived there on January 1st, 1791. He had recently completed the last of the six quartets which would soon be published as Op. 64 – they were written for the Prince but had their first performances in concerts for the London public – and with that, Haydn’s life changed. He wrote another six quartets for London, not to mention a dozen symphonies, six for the first tour, and six more for the second tour in 1794, the famous “London Symphonies” which quickly became the most famous symphonies in Europe.

By the way, when Haydn was beginning to feel his life trapped in a corner in 1790, he was 58 years old. Little did he know what glories would lie ahead for him over the next five years!

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

The six quartets of Op. 64 were written for Johann Tost in 1790. Typically, a dedication could be a way of thanking a patron for financial support or out of gratitude for a favor. In this case, Johann Tost was a former principal 2nd Violinist in Haydn’s orchestra at Esterháza between 1783 and 1788. After retiring from Prince Esterhazy’s employment, Tost traveled to Paris where he sold several of Haydn’s works to French publishers including his latest quartets (Op. 54 and Op. 55) and two symphonies, including the popular No. 88 in G Major. Among the works he sold there were apparently some he’d surreptitiously taken out of the Esterháza library and a few that weren’t by Haydn but passed off as Haydn’s. Some sources say Haydn wrote these works for Tost; other sources say Haydn gave him copies of these works so Tost could find a publisher for them in Paris.

Regardless, the Op. 54/55 set is often referred to as “The Tost Quartets” even though they were not written for him or dedicated to him (it is said, when Tost had them published, he wrote in the dedication to himself on his own). To make it more confusing, the six Op. 64 quartets of 1790 are officially dedicated to Tost but are only occasionally referred to as “The Tost Quartets.” When these works were first released, Haydn was in London on the first of his two tours. Curiously, considering some of Tost’s previous disingenuous behavior, it’s interesting to note that, for the second edition in 1793, Haydn had the dedication removed...

So, considering Johann Tost is, shall we say, intimately involved with no less than a dozen Haydn quartets, just who is he? I thought this would give you a chance to see what it was like behind the scenes of the music you’re hearing: not just who wrote it or performed it, but who, in the matter of being a supporting patron, helped bring the work into being.

After leaving Esterháza and settling in Vienna, Tost married Maria Anna Jerlischeck in 1790, a former housekeeper with the Esterházy family (Mlle Nanette as Haydn referred to her in his letters). Haydn also wrote his Piano Sonata in E-flat Major (Hob.XVI:49) for her though it’s a long story since it was intended to be a gift for the wife of Prince Esterhazy’s physician, so he discreetly dedicated it instead to the housekeeper who’d “requested” it, not the woman who was actually a close friend of Haydn’s and for whom it’s thought he, er… well, “had feelings,” hence the subterfuge. After all, why would Haydn dedicate such a grand work to a housekeeper?

In reality, Maria Anna Jerlischeck was a moderately wealthy woman who served as the prince’s housekeeper much the way members of the lesser nobility formed the household of some higher ranking nobility or members of the ruling court. In that sense, when former musician Johann Tost married Miss Jerlischeck, he was indeed the “servant” and his wife more than a mere “housekeeper” in our eyes (to those of us tuned into the world of Downton Abbey). Haydn may have been the most famous living composer in Europe, but to Prince Esterházy’s court, he was still a servant, he still wore livery like a servant, and he ate downstairs with the other servants.

Anyway, with the help of his wife’s fortune, Former Servant Tost soon built up a wholesale empire to become a newly rich merchant. To maintain this new social lifestyle, the Tosts threw well-attended musical soirees. In 1791, Tost apparently commissioned Mozart (who was having worse-than-usual money problems at the time) to write his last two String Quintets (K.593 and K.614). Whatever the reason, Mozart did dedicate them to Tost.

Though most of this lies in the future, by 1795 Tost was already known as a wine merchant; then, around 1800, he opened a state-of-the-art cloth factory to produce military-grade uniforms in his home town of Iglau in Bohemia (later to become the birthplace of Gustav Mahler). Unfortunately, Napoleon’s 1809 invasion of the Hapsburg Empire (later resulting in his second occupation of Vienna) also brought Tost’s factory to a standstill from which the business never fully recovered.

In 1812, Tost was one of twelve founding board members of Vienna’s Society of Friends of Music, serving two years on the Executive Committee. Despite the downturn in his business, he was still actively involved in Vienna’s musical scene, playing in several charity concerts, and, among other works, commissioning the then leading composer Ludwig (or Louis) Spohr to compose a Nonet and then an Octet for his musical soirees in 1813 and 1814. Plans to establish a music conservatory never materialized after he was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1815. I can find no references to any events for the remainder of his life: his wife had died in 1797, but Tost himself survived until 1831, dying at the age of 71.

Bedřich Smetana: My Life and Welcome To It – The Balourdet Quartet Opens the Season (Part One)

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
= = = = = = = =

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 other works on the first half of their Market Square Concerts’ program, Haydn’s “Lark” Quartet and the 2nd Quartet of György Ligeti. This post takes you behind the scenes for Bedřich Smetana’s 1st Quartet which concludes the program.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

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.

= = = = = = =

= = = = = = =

Smetana in 1878

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.”

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.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

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.

Dvořák in 1868

One of the musicians in the theater's orchestra in 1862 was a violist named Antonin Dvořák.

* ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** *

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.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

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