By Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan is Assistant Professor of Music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She is the author of Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera, published by Harvard University Press.
The string quartet is hallowed ground. It has a reputation for profundity and innovation in equal measure: the place where composers work out their relationship to tradition, to each other, and to themselves. Consider, for example, musicologist Alfred Einstein’s description of Mozart’s set of six string quartets dedicated to Franz Joseph Haydn—including K. 421, the first work on this evening’s program—as works in which Mozart “completely found himself,” as “music made of music.” Freed from opera’s requisite drama, or the concerto’s requisite solo virtuosity, composers are liberated within the string quartet to make music of the purest form.
This is an appealing narrative, but not necessarily an entirely accurate one. String quartets offer a purely instrumental palette with an inimitable sonic blend, yet they are no more immune to external influence than any other sort of music. Indeed, the tradition has a palimpsestic nature, with composers often making direct reference to their predecessors in the genre. Beyond musical interchange, string quartets also reveal glimpses of the wider world—a world shaped, significantly, not only music history but also by broader social forces like imperialism, colonialism, and migration. These quartets may be “music made of music,” but they are also music made of the complex, messy, ever-changing environments in which their composers lived and worked.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, String Quartet No. 15 in D Minor, K. 421 (1785)
In a dedication page for the set of quartets to which this piece belongs, Mozart described his work as “the fruits of a long and laborious endeavor.” The effortlessly brilliant sound of his music masks his perfectionist tendencies: he often revised his music over and over again before finding it complete. The autograph score for this set of quartets, in fact, contains ten different types of paper—evidence of the works’ lengthy and complex gestation. In the case of the quartet K. 421, this extensive process yielded a work of exceptionally intricate design. The work foregrounds counterpoint, and all four players take on relatively equal—and equally complex—roles within the score. Its rhetorical language is one of dialogue and conversation, rather than solo oration. The first violin’s opening gesture—a descending leap of an octave—is mirrored by a passacaglia-like stepwise descent in the cello. As early as the fourth measure, the inner voices break from their opening pattern of repeated notes to momentarily pick up the melody from the violin.
K. 421 is the only quartet in this set in a minor key, and Mozart emphasizes this distinctive feature by remaining in that key for three of the four movements. The exception is the Andante, which transports us to a peaceful F major and a lilting 6/8 time signature. Flashes of the work’s essential minor-key despair nevertheless peek through, though, like an actor momentarily breaking character. The Menuetto hammers home the reappearance of the d minor key with repeated tonic notes in the first violin, as well as a descending bass line which echoes the first movement. Given the severity of this opening, the Trio section—gentle pizzicato, an impossibly elegant melody in the violin (and later the viola)—comes as an utter surprise. The quartet concludes with a mercurial theme and variations, jumping from despair to exuberance and back again. The ending is bright and triumphant, but it feels somehow less than joyous—as if it cannot entirely shake off all that it has endured to reach this point.
Maurice Ravel, String Quartet in F Major (1903)
Maurice Ravel was only fourteen years old at the time of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, a spectacular world’s fair that brought tens of millions of visitors to the city (and was the occasion for the construction of the Eiffel Tower). Located in the colonial metropole, the fair also introduced visitors to music and culture from around the world—often in a manner which exoticized and demeaned colonized peoples and other non-European groups. Colonial subjects were displayed in “living exhibits,” a cluster of constructed villages which misrepresented their cultures as primitive, unsophisticated, and culturally inferior to Europeans. One especially popular exhibit featured Javanese people living under Dutch colonial rule, including a group of dancers accompanied by musicians playing in a gamelan ensemble. This music had a profound influence on Ravel, Debussy, and other young French composers. Does the exploitative context in which they first encountered it matter to how we listen? This is a tricky question, particularly when it comes to works like Ravel’s String Quartet, which do not make direct allusions to “exotic” peoples or musical traditions. At the very least, this context might prompt us to consider how what’s often described as the quintessentially “French” sound of these composers’ music is related to the colonial context of its creation.
Composed in Paris, where Ravel was at the time auditing Gabriel Fauré’s composition class at the Conservatoire, the quartet delights in sonic variety. The first movement begins with a gentle sweetness, floats from theme to theme, and fades away toward ethereal stillness. The mood brightens in the second movement, whose vibrant pizzicato theme gives way to high trills and tremolos; the movement’s astonishing middle section is slow and searching, a glimpse into an utterly different world. A roaming sensibility pervades the third movement, which moves freely across tempi and textures. After such wandering, the fourth movement feels like a homecoming: energy bubbles up in repeated patterns, echoes of moments earlier in the quartet, and a sense of collective joy. One wonders how the Javanese visitors at the fair might have reacted to this music if the tables were turned; what might they have heard that was both exotic and familiar in Ravel’s sonic world?
Johannes Brahms, String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 51, No. 2 (1873)
Brahms’s two string quartets comprising Op. 51 were his first published works in the genre, but they represented the culmination of many years of attempts, pursued to various degrees of completion. Brahms was notoriously hard on himself, and he found it intimidating to make his own contribution to a form already mastered by such forebears as Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert. A sense of indebtedness to the past can be heard in this piece, namely in Brahms’s allusions to Schubert. Much like Schubert’s quartet in the same key, it mixes sorrow with perpetual hope. Yet it also showcases hallmarks of Brahms’s singular style: the fondness for three-against-two rhythms, the dense textures, the melodies that soar above.
The quartet’s first movement is rather anxious even as it is beautiful. The opening melodic figure has the shape of a parabola, with an upward leap followed by a descent. The second theme relaxes, its propulsive dotted rhythms flowing freely forward atop a gentle bed of triplets. The second movement’s song-like ease invokes Schubert once again. Yet it also looks forward: Arnold Schoenberg famously cited the development of this movement’s deceptively simple melody, composed of whole and half steps, as evidence of Brahms’s progressive tendencies. In lieu of a scherzo, the quartet’s third movement is marked “quasi Minuetto,” and it is restrained in mood and tempo. Its trio section is brighter, full of lively staccato rhythms. In the final movement, Brahms ventures beyond the Schubertian past and into another of his favorite realms of influence. Its dance rhythms are inspired by Hungarian folk music and by so-called “gypsy” music—more accurately known as music of the Roma people, who inspired many European composers despite, or perhaps because of, their social marginalization. The lively main theme moves around the ensemble, from violin to viola, before forceful chords sound in all four voices. Propelled forward by continual rhythmic vigor, the movement barrels toward a powerful close.
