By Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan is Assistant Professor of Music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her first book is Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera (Harvard University Press, 2025).
When Béla Bartók’s friend and fellow composer Zoltán Kodály heard Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2, he perceived the music as expressing a series of “life episodes”: quiet, then joy, then sorrow. Kodály’s assessment invokes the power of the string quartet to convey profound emotional states through the sheer power of instrumental sound. None of the works on this evening’s program is linked to a specific narrative program. Yet each one evokes an entire affective world. The first half of the program is a study in contrasts: the gentle splendor of Haydn’s “Sunrise” Quartet against the melancholic desolation of Cassandra Miller’s Leaving. In the second half, quartets by Bartók and Debussy both offer more variegated and abstract emotional landscapes, characteristic of the modernist era in which these composers worked. Their music tends not to wear its heart on its sleeve; it is more overtly interested in breaking formal convention and crafting new and surprising textures. But its jagged edges surround deeply felt compositions. In fact, in their ability to convey a multitude of emotional textures in such a relatively short time, these works demonstrate the remarkable ability of string quartets to concentrate the inevitable complexity of “life episodes” within the parameters of music alone.
Franz Joseph Haydn, String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4 “Sunrise” (1799)
Twenty-first-century listeners might hear a hint of the movie soundtrack in the opening to Haydn’s “Sunrise” Quartet. We can just about imagine the camera fixed on a warm-hued sky as we hear the first violin’s melody floating upwards against a background of gently sustained chords. Echoes of this initial melodic gesture—rising half-steps, sped-up bits and pieces of the violin’s melody—shimmer throughout the movement. The second movement is an oasis. Repeated notes in the supporting voices, coupled with serene and hymnlike melodies, offer a sense of abiding calm. The third movement is a high-energy minuet which sees the players pairing up, phrase by phrase, for back-and-forth volleys. The fourth minuet begins with deceptive simplicity, a folk song-like melody ornamented by grace notes and trills. But then this melody reveals itself to be the basis of an unpredictable series of variations, capped off with an energetic extended coda.
The self-assured grace and sophistication of the “Sunrise” speaks to Haydn’s expertise in the genre. By the time this quartet was published in 1799, as part of a set of six, he had been writing string quartets for more than four decades. Although even his very first works for the ensemble demonstrate his signature elegance, his compositions only increased in emotional and formal complexity over time. A cluster of highly dramatic works from the early 1770s seem to flow directly from his newfound interest in vocal music, while those written in the 1780s are the genial output of a hugely successful composer. By the 1790s, he had turned his attention to sacred vocal music; the quartets of this period reflect a more mature and ambitious persona. In all, Haydn wrote 68 string quartets which, individually and collectively, make for fascinating listening: a thorough panorama of the development of a singular voice.
Cassandra Miller, Leaving (2011)
Leaving has what composer Cassandra Miller calls an “unusual origin.” She explains, “Years ago, in order to leave my home on the west coast of Canada to study composition in Europe, I raised money for my travel by selling as-yet unwritten bars of music to everyone I’d ever met.” At the time, Miller was living on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, and she found many enthusiastic supporters within her community. One of them, the fiddler Zav RT, wrote the melody that eventually became the basis of Leaving. In sound and structure, the piece reflects the wild beauty of the place where it originated. Miller invites the players to embrace a “loosely proportional” sense of rhythm, and to maintain their own independence in placing particular notes vis-à-vis the other members of the ensemble. The result is a flowing, abundant, continuous well of sound, which evokes the natural resources of both folksong and birdsong in equal measure.
Béla Bartók, String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 17 (1917)
For Béla Bartók, the earth-shaking horrors of World War I were felt close to home. Although he was excluded from military service due to his medical history, he was acutely distressed by the inescapable threats of violence and instability. His musical life was also impacted: the sudden closure of national borders meant that he had to cease his ethnomusicological work collecting folk music in the central and eastern European countryside. With his research curtailed and few opportunities to perform during wartime, he turned more of his energies to composition. His style underwent a marked change as he was able to integrate his longstanding fascination with and respect for folksong with a more intense, momentum-driven approach to composition.
The String Quartet No. 2, composed during the war, is a perfect example of this new approach. It is crafted in three movements, which each seem to cascade inevitably from one another. The opening interval of a seventh, in the first violin, sets the tone for the work: searching, intense, audaciously modern. Throughout, folk music is present without being quoted directly, a shaper of the work’s melodies rather than a source of them. The most striking example of this comes in the middle movement, marked Allegro molto capriccioso. Based on north African drumming that Bartók had heard during a 1913 trip to the town of Biskra (in present-day Algeria), it is churning and raucous, with only brief moments of tranquility. The final movement seems to stop cold: sustained passages and moments of silence give it an air of tragic inevitability.
Claude Debussy, Quartet in G Minor, Op. 10 (1893)
The young Debussy was a restless conservatory student who chafed against the Germanic traditionalism of his teachers. He sought alternative inspiration in creative realms beyond Western art music, from painting to literature to the musical traditions of other cultures (including the Indonesian gamelan, which entranced him when he heard it at the Paris Exposition in 1889). He was especially intrigued by the prospect of leaving form behind, unmooring music from its conventional structures. When it came to the string quartet, he found himself intrigued by the conversational intimacy among players that the genre offered, while also eager to depart from its well-established structural norms.
Debussy’s first and only foray into the genre, composed in 1893, stages a tug of war between tradition and the future. The entire piece is governed by a single, forceful theme: presented by all four voices at the outset, it is rhythmically complex, vaguely modal-sounding, and robust in character. But rather than putting this theme through the usual paces, Debussy takes it on a meandering journey. Throughout the first movement, it shares space with a variety of other melodic gestures, recurring at what feel like unpredictable moments. The effect is labyrinthine: we know that we will eventually return to this theme, yet the pathway back is never obvious. The second movement begins with a sped-up, rather frenetic version of the theme played by the viola. It becomes an ostinato, above which the other instruments offer energetic pizzicato commentary (along with a striking, glamorous passage low in the first violin’s range). The third movement is stunningly tranquil. The muted inner voices set the tone, and the theme is cast briefly aside, with all four players wandering about a serene landscape. After a delicate beginning, the fourth movement revs up to offer a fugue-like treatment of the guiding theme. Vivid and vigorous, it builds up to a dramatically drawn-out rendition of the theme before snapping back into a unified texture.
