Bart▎: String Quartets Nos.1-6
To write string quartets in the twentieth century must be to pay one's
respect to history, and Bart▎'s six are fully aware that they stand on the
shoulders of Beethoven (not only late Beethoven) particularly. But where
emulate Beethoven most profoundly is in effecting a sea change, as he did,
in the quartet's sound and substance. This is partly a matter of new
materials, of the glissandos, pizzicatos, mutings and fierce multiple stops
that abound in the Third and Fourth Quartets especially. More deeply it is
a matter of a new distance and objectivity in quartet writing. Bart▎'s
quartet textures are rarely conversational; the medium has lost its
friendliness. Quite what is has become will be for listeners to discover, as
those listeners who have been later quartet writers - Shostakovich, Britten,
Carter, Babbitt, Boulez - have themselves had to discover in dealing with
wokrs that have marked the twentieth-century quartet as forcefully as
Beethoven's marked that of the nineteenth.
Bart▎ wrote three quartets while he was at school, the last of them, in F
major (1898), bearing the signature "Bela von Bart▎" and showing the
composer was pointing himself in the Brahmsian direction suggested by his
friend Dohn滢yi. During the next decade, however, his musical world was
drastically altered by his absorption in Liszt, Wagner, Strauss, Debussy and
Magyar folksong, and his published First Quartet (1907-9) marks the arrival
of a new personality after that battering of influences. It was first
performed by the Waldbauer Quartet (who also gave the first performance of
his next three quartets) at an all-Bart▎ concert in Budapest on 19 March
1910.
The work is in three movements which grow increasingly fast, vigorous and
decisive, as if they charted indeed the arrival of a new voice. There are
even motivic connections to emphasise the point, for the falling semitone of
the first movement's middle section is extended successively to make the main
theme of the Allegretto and then that of the Allegro vivace. Most of the
first movement, though, is concerned with imitative polyphony emerging from
a violin duet that itself emerges from paired falling sixths: F-A flat, C-E.
These together make up a minor version of a motif that Bart▎ had associated
with Stefi Geyer in the concerto written for her, and the whole movement,
which he described as a funeral dirge, might be understood in the light of
their relationship - though it marks the passing,; too, of Bart▎ as a late
Romantic composer. The second movement is still confused, most notably
by the presence of the whole-tone scale, presented quite straightforwardly
as a scale; like Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Stravonsky at the same time
(though he would hardly have been aware of them), Bart▎ uses ostinatos to
stabilise music in which the sense of key has become weak.
Ostinatos become still more vivid a presence in the finale, which like the
Allegretto, is a sort of sonata movement, prefaced by an introduction made
up of chrdal summonses separating recitatives from cello and first violin.
However, the movement is also galvanised by an element of variation so
intense that is sometimes amounts to parody. Much of the "development
section", for instance, is a fugato whose abrupt principle theme is teased
into a playful grazioso subject; and before this passage the theme has taken
on another mask, as the melody to a banal quasi-operatic accompaniment in
G sharp minor. This is very Bart▎ian. So too is the recasting of the
driving second theme to make an impassioned adagio lament, or the quick
replacement of this same idea by its inversion. But just as characteristic
as the violent variation is the rhythmic energy of this music: its fast
pulsations and its vigorous syncopations of the common time that is the
prevalling metre. Not for the last time, Bart▎ is most insistently himself
in a folkdance scherzo.
The Second Quartet (1915-17) has its scherzo in the middle. The first
movement is a sonata form very vaguely in A, with F sharp minor as secondary
key: this tonality, together with the moderate tempo, the abundance of
material, the corresponding lenth of the exposition and the constant motivic
alteration, suggests a kinship with Schoenberg's Second Quartet. The
principle theme, though subject to seemingly endless variation (and hese for
once the mode of Bart▎'s argument is conversational), makes a point of
fourths and minor seconds, which intervals are responsible not only for the
movement's harmonic uncertainty but also for its flavour of Hungarian folk
music.
That flavour is inevitably sharper in the central scherzo, even though its
background may also include the music Bart▎ had recently heard in Algeria.
Is is, like several of Bart▎'s scharzos, and ingenious rondo of dances; it
is also exactingly quick and colourful for the performers. Bart▎ savours
in particular the frenzy of a pizzicato note thrown into quick bowed music,
as in the main theme, though the strangest sound in the whole quartet is the
final prestissimo of this movement, taking a pace of ten notes per second
and consuming the basic material in a shimmering haze.
After the decisive D-centredness of this movement, the final Lento moves
around and toward the half A minor of the opening, surveying, from its
aerial, adrift location, the melodic subject matter of that first movement
too. There are the outlines of sonata form, but they are, like everything
in this movement, uncertain and inconclusive. If the scherzo of the First
Quartet was a homecoming, that of the Second is an unavoidable but
disruptive experiance destroying even the tentative security that had been
pieced together in the work's opeing movement.
Then the Third Quartet (1927) combines both these types of scherzo in its
furious compactness. Playing continuously, it has four sections in a
slow-past-slow-fast pattern. The "Prima parte" is a joined sequence of
meditations on several small motivis cells, of which the most important is
formed from a rising fourth and falling minor third. The "Seconda parte" is
a 2/4 scherzo like the middle movement of the Second Quartet and a sonata
form like the finale of the First, but on both counts the similarity is only
partial: there is a constant tension between overlapping, abuttint and
simultaneous duple and triple metres, and the larger structer is ovscured
from view by the stridency of the harmony and the condensation of the
material into tiny, highly active particles of a few notes. Also, the energy
of the music keeps it going into a substantial coda afrer the relatively
straightforward recapitulation (the development is once more a fugato) Once
this coda has at last abated, a "Ricapitolazione della prima parte" steals
in, though what one hears is not so much a recapitulation as a revisiting
of certain ideads from the first part, seen in a new context. After this
comes a "Code", which is effectively a second code to the second part. But
far from wrapping up the argument, this final section ends on an upbeat,
so that one might imagine the dialogue of contemplative fantasia and vital
sonata continuing indefinitely.
The Fourth Quartet (1928), though it followed so soon, is quite different
in form, if similar in its range of special effects (these Bart▎ possibly
took from Berg's Lyric Suite, which he had heard two months before writing
his Third Quartet; his experience of folk fiddlers is also likely to have
been useful). A complex single movement gives way to a system of five quite
distinct movements, arranges in a mirror symmetre (ABCBA) so tight it makes
the superficially analogous patterns of the First Orchestral Suite and First
Piano Concerto look lax and coincidental. The finale has many motivic
connections with the first movement, and gathers such a number of
correspondences that at the end it runs into the tracks taken by its
predecessor and concludes with the same music. Moving inwards, the second
and fourth movements are both scherzos, again related in terms of motif and
also in speciality of colour: the former is a Prestissimo, con sordino, the
latter anAllegretto pizzicato. Moreover, while the outer movements both
end firmly on C, these scherzos reach a major third above (second movement)
and below (fourth mevement), so that the quartet as a whole outlines an
augmented triad. The central slow movement lies outside this scheme, being
based on a pile of fifths on D; it is also distinguished, within so
urgently polyphonic a work, by its texture of solo murmurings that grow into
melody against static harmonic support.
The twin scherzos include not only the muting and pizzicatos indecated by
their markings but also a deeper penetration of gliisandos than had come in
the Third Quartet (second movement) and a new kind of pizzicato, often called
a "Bart▎ pizzicato", in which the string is pulled so hard it snaps against
the fingerboard (fourth movement). These are also relationshops of speed and
timing, the second movement being roughly twice as fast as the fourth and
twice as long in rythmic units, so that the two movements have very similar
durations. Still more striking are the analogies of theme and form. Both
movements are based on rising and falling scale patterns, but where in the
second movement the scale is chromatic and its range a fifth, the fourth
movement uses Bart▎'s favourite diatonic scale, one found in Romanian folk
music (as played by the viola near the start of this movement it is A flat-
B flat-C-D-E flat-F-G flat-A flat), and expands the range to an octave.
Both movements, too, have an ABA form complicated by the fact that the
return of the A material is disguised by development incorporating aspects
of the B music, which is both movements is based on a three-note chromatic
motif. Such structural complication is also a feature of the basically
sonata-form first movement and the ternary finale, whose main theme is a
diatonic version of the six-note chromatic motif that gradually invades the
first movement. Yet another aspect of the work's taut consistency is the
frequency of canon and imitation by inversion, not least in the finale.
Strict counterpoint also abounds in the Fifth Quartet (1934), which again
is a palindrome in five movements. In style, though, it is quite different,
belonging not with the abrasive Third and Fourth Quartets but rather with the
more self-assured and dratonic Second Piano concerto that had intervened. As
in that concerto, the formal symmetry is centred on a scherzo, flanked by
parallel slow movements (in the concero they are parts of the same movement)
and framed by a sonata and a rondo. But, significantly, the scherzo is not
bounding or intensive like its predecessors among Bart▎'s quartets; it is,
rather, playful, being a game of cadences in shifting Bulgarian metre
(4+2+3/8), with a trio in dissolved polyphony. Around it, the slow movement
are nocturnes, thematically related, particularly as they start, but
different in atmosphere: entomological and human, perhaps.
The outer movements are more elaborate. The first is built on an ascanding
whole-tone scale, with a first subject anchored to B flat, a second that
strives to get away from C, and a third, smoother than either, in D. The
development then takes place within the sphere of E (the augmented fourth
functions as dominant, as so often in Bart▎), after which the three subjects
are recapitulated in reverse order and inverted: the third is in F sharp, the
second digs down towards A flat, and the first is again chained to B flat.
All of them duly appear in new variants in the exuberant 2/4 finale, which,
repeating a gambit from the Fourth Quartet, links hands with the first
movement as it ends. But it remembers other movements too, most explicitly
in one extraordinary passage where a theme from the Adagion molto is given
a degrading barrel-organ treatment, and so the work's exhaustive variation
of itself spills over into parody.
There is parody again in the Sixth Quartet (1939), and variation. Indeed,
each of the four movements begins with a different treatment of the same
music, heard as a viola solo in the first and then presented in
progressively longer and richer forms until in the finale it occupies the
whole substance. It is as if each movement were an answer to the same
question, that answer first taking the shape of a sonata allegro based on
two themes: a curling cadence like the principle theme of the Fifth Quartet's
scherzo (but now eschweing Bulgarian exoticism for standard 6/8), the other
a tune in a variety of C minor. Both return, much decelerated, in the finale,
suggesting less the symmetry of the Fourth and Fifth Quartet than the
catastrophic alteration of the Second.
If the connection if just, then the agents of the catastrophe this time are
the disortions offered in the middle movements, Marcia and Burletta. Both are
in plain scherzo-plus-trio form, as if their deep irony had robbed them of
any potential for the usual structural ingenuity. The march theme is a bald
simplification of a phrase from the slow introductory material; still more
grotesque is its trio, where the cello sings that material in an appallingly
cheapened form, acoompanied by violin tremolandos and banjo strumming from
the viola. Then the Burletta exposes the work's repeated question to further
abuse, this time more clownish in style, with the dry discord, orinatos and
special effects of Stravinsky's quartet pieces. The finale does not, of
course, bring the work to a satisfactory answer but rather pursues the
question into silence, the last silence of these quartets.
Paul Griffiths, 1987
--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.m8.ntu.edu.tw)
◆ From: ccsun75.cc.ntu.