Morrison Artists Series: Jasper String Quartet
Please note: This concert will take place Sunday, Oct. 14, instead of Friday, Oct. 19, as previously announced.
Program
- Haydn (1732–1809): String Quartet in F major, Op. 77, No. 2, Hob. III:82 (1799)
- Ligeti (1923–2006): String Quartet No. 1, “Métamorphoses Nocturnes” (1953–54)
- Intermission
- Ravel (1875–1937): String Quartet in F major (1902–03)
Related events
Press coverage
Golden Gate Xpress, October 17, 2012
Program notes
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809): String Quartet in F major, Op. 77, No. 2, Hob. III: 82 (1799)
The very first theme of the opening movement has been identified by the English writer Cecil Gray as a quotation from Leporello’s “catalogue aria” in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It is only a few measures, but it does in fact contain the exact sequence of notes and rhythm of the passage in question. If this is Haydn’s homage to his late friend, he nonetheless works it into a sonata movement in his own style, particularly by bringing this reminiscence back as a counterpoint to the second theme and again as the main melody in the close of the exposition, so we can quite properly call this one of Haydn’s “monothematic” movements. Yet despite that frequent use of the figure, it flows with a freshness of texture and melody that never flags. And once Haydn gets into the development section, he becomes exceptionally daring in his harmonies, moving through keys that are very distantly related in ways that even Beethoven had not yet tried. At one point, in his original manuscript, Haydn made such a surprising change of harmony that he felt he had to remind the cellist that the last note of one phrase (a D-sharp) was exactly the same pitch as the opening note of the next phrase, an E-flat. And the music had gone so far afield harmonically that he asked the first violin, immediately after this, to play a long-held A on the open A-string, so as to ensure that all the players had a solid basis for tuning the chord! (Modern players would almost never choose to play the note that way, and Haydn’s manuscript marking is an indication of how daring he himself felt this passage to be.)
Haydn’s Menuet is no powdered-wig stately dance for a court. It chuckles and bounces with intentionally deceptive meter (the melody is cast in such a way as to make the ear sometimes hear two beats to the group rather than the three required by the dance. Thus, at the end of the phrase one sometimes feels caught on the “wrong foot”). The Trio is quieter, more lyrical and in the richly darker key of D-flat. Haydn provides a brief but witty link to return from that key to F for the repeat of the Menuet.
The slow movement is in third place, and it is clearly cast as a kind of leave-taking, as if the 70-year-old Haydn knew that his physical strength (though not his musical imagination!) was waning. He chooses a form that he had so often employed in his slow movements, theme and variations. It begins with a bare, two-line, melody-and-bass passage for first violin and cello, then progressively enriches the texture throughout. He extends the movement with a coda that gets softer and softer, finally dying away with a pianissimo farewell.
For his finale, Haydn creates a breathtaking fusion of a German dance style (with driving syncopations), the brilliance of a gypsy violinist, and the closely worked counterpoint in a sonata-form layout that shows, without the slightest question, that the old man still had his stuff. Indeed, the great critic Donald Francis Tovey ranks this entire quartet, along with several of the London symphonies, as Haydn’s greatest achievements in the realm of instrumental music.[1]
©Steven Ledbetter for Aspen Music Festival. Reprinted with permission.
György Ligeti (1923–2006): String Quartet No. 1, “Métamorphoses Nocturnes” (1953–1954)
György Ligeti was a very complex man, one of the strangest characters in 20th-century music. The general public knows him as the composer used in the soundtracks for some spectacular movies, including Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, in the world of professional music he is a prototypical “experimenter,” who, in spite of many brilliant creations, did not settle into a single signature style. The writer of these notes can attest to the universally recognized fact that Ligeti had a brilliant mind. We were colleagues—students at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest from 1945 to 1956. Although I did not know him well (but then, who did?), I can recall many conversations—more precisely, torrents of words and ideas from him—that left me, and all those present, with a spinning head. Had he wished, Ligeti could have been a brilliant mathematician or pursued just about any other intellectual field. He was a restless soul, impossible to satisfy, understanding that any musical or nonmusical idea included its own question that could have more than one potential “solution.”
During those years he was under the influence of the music of Béla Bartók—All of us at the Academy were. Yet it was also the time when Bartók’s Third, Fourth and Fifth quartets were banned by the Stalinist authorities as “decadent.” But then, Andrei Zhdanov, the official theoretician of Stalin, declared to the delight of his master that even Brahms was a decadent enemy of the people because he was incapable of writing a single melody! So for Bartók to also be considered “decadent” by such super morons might be considered an odd kind of high praise. I will not waste words describing how much Ligeti hated such oppressive political ideas. When he (and I) escaped Hungary after the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he went to Cologne, Germany, to join the group of experimenters that included Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.
After our escape, we lost contact as our ways and lives parted, but I know that he had just as stormy a relationship with that group as he had with the Stalinist—and before that the fascist —authorities in Hungary. (Ligeti was deported, and his father and brother died at the hands of the fascists.) For instance, while at Cologne, as an intellectual exercise, he analyzed and tore apart one of the works of Boulez to demonstrate, to the composer’s annoyance, that Boulez did not follow his own stated theory in that composition. Needless to say, this was not a good way to make friends, though to Boulez’s credit, he not only forgave Ligeti, he also became a champion of his music.
I recall these events to demonstrate that the diversity of Ligeti’s music cannot be categorized as a single kind of music. He is not a modernist, he is not a serialist, his music is neither atonal or tonal; he is not this or that. He is none of these and all of them. He hated unifying theories of composition because he instantly and instinctively rejected their binding constrictions. To me he was a prime example of the ultimate “free soul”: a postmodern man who was willing to pay a very heavy price for his freedom.
Ligeti’s Quartet No. 1 was composed in 1953 during the oppressive Stalinist years in Hungary. Needless to say, it was not performed during those years. The influence of Bartók’s quartets is evident. It is a single-movement, rhapsodic transformation of a single musical idea into complex, contrasting forms. As you can see from the listing of tempo markings above, changes follow each other in rapid succession and place heavy burdens on the performers. Although the musical language of this composition might be described as “post-Bartók,” it is surprisingly easy on the ear. It moves from explosive emotional peaks to plateaus of quiet resignation, touching just about every shade of color on its journey. Ligeti worked in a wide variety of styles and genres in his long career. Although this quartet is a little jewel, it is not representative of Ligeti’s total oeuvre. No single work could be.
©Stephen Seleny for the Mimir Chamber Music Festival. Reprinted with permission.
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937): String Quartet in F major (1902–03)
Maurice Ravel composed his only string quartet in 1902 and 1903, while a student of Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire. More or less wholeheartedly adopting classical formal paradigms in this pivotal work, the string quartet, in Ravel’s own words, “represents a conception of musical construction, imperfectly realized no doubt, but set out much more precisely than in my earlier compositions.”[2]
A central aspect of the quartet lies in its cyclic treatment of themes: The two contrasting themes presented in the first movement are altered, transformed and developed in myriad ways in the other three movements, fusing the work into a highly integrated whole. This cyclic treatment, as well as the use of modal melodic and harmonic materials, links Ravel’s quartet closely with Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor, another seminal work of musical “impressionism,” written just 10 years earlier.
The beguilingly beautiful first movement of Ravel’s quartet is set in a conventional sonata allegro form, which serves to highlight the directness of the lyrical themes. Treatment of the first theme is extensive in the opening, even helping form the transition to the sublimely languorous second theme. The only real point of ambiguity in the movement is the end of the exposition, marked by contrapuntal combinations of the two central themes, suggesting that the development has already begun, an impression confirmed shortly by the elaborate figuration and thematic developments that follow. The rather brief development section is followed by a full recapitulation with no real surprises.
In a transparent ternary form, the second movement juxtaposes scherzo-like material, featuring pizzicato playing and set in fairly regular four- and eight-bar phrases (the whole of which is repeated in a new harmonic context) against a slow, contemplative middle section whose material is derived from the first movement themes. Again, at the end of the middle section Ravel combines the movement’s themes contrapuntally, helping reintroduce the scherzo material to close the movement, this time without redundancy.
The third movement is in the main a tranquil, amoroso reflection on the themes of the first movement. The most unusual passage, offering the movement’s principal element of contrast, is a more insistent cello solo accompanied by magical, colorful writing in the upper strings.
The finale’s driving energy is a much-needed foil to the lightness and serenity of the preceding movements, and it has the most complex form of the four. The scheme is one of alternation among three ideas, the opening agitated material in 5/8 meter, and two ideas drawn from the first movement’s two themes. Designating these three ideas as A, B and C, the movement scans as A-B-C-A-B-C-B-C-A. The use of the A material (the agitated 5/8 theme) at the beginning, middle and end relates the movement to many rondo forms found in classical and romantic sonatas and, additionally, rounds off the movement to end as it began.
©2012 Richard Festinger
Endnotes
1. Tovey, Donald Francis, “Haydn’s Chamber Music,” The Main Stream of Music and Other Essays, The World Publishing Co., 1949, p. 64.
2. Roland-Manuel, Alexis, Maurice Ravel, D. Dobson, 1947, p. 36.
The Morrison Chamber Music Center is supported, in part, by a generous gift from the May Treat Morrison Chamber Music Foundation.