The following are program notes by Harry Haskell for the Jerusalem Quartet performance with clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein at the 92nd Street Y on December 6.

BEETHOVEN: String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95, “Serioso”
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770 and died in Vienna in 1827. He composed the F minor String Quartet in 1810-11.

In the conventional tripartite division of Beethoven’s life and works, the F minor Quartet falls squarely in the so-called middle period, along with the three “Rasumovsky” Quartets, Op. 59, and the Op. 74 “Harp” Quartet. In some respects, however, Op. 95 belongs in a category by itself. Its radical brevity harks back to Beethoven’s Haydnesque Op. 18 Quartets rather than to its immediate predecessors. At the same time, the work’s emotional intensity and idiosyncratic treatment of form and harmony prefigure the composer’s mold-breaking string quartets of the mid-1820s.

Beethoven’s description of the F minor Quartet as “serioso” may or may not reflect his state of mind after the collapse of his marriage plans in 1810. In any case, he gets straight down to serious business in the opening Allegro con brio. A terse, tightly wound motto, played by the four instruments in unison, sets the tone for the entire work. Both its structure and its emotional content are highly compressed. A persistent undercurrent of turbulence runs throughout the first movement, roiling its lyrical surface. In music as in life, Beethoven struggled to find a balance between heroic affirmation and near-suicidal depression.

With a leisurely descending scale, the cello introduces one of Beethoven’s most luminous and beguiling slow movements. Very soon, however, the mood darkens as the viola launches a quirkily chromatic fugue, interrupted by a ghostly echo of the cello’s opening stepwise theme. The Allegretto wends its way toward an apparently tranquil close. Instead of the expected D major cadence, however, a jarring diminished-seventh chord heralds a return to the home key of F minor and an abrupt transition to a bracing Allegro in ¾ time, marked assai vivace, ma serioso (quite lively, but serious).

These contrasting moods are further explored, if never quite reconciled, in the Finale. Within its highly condensed span of 175 bars, the Allegretto agitato runs the gamut from wistful tenderness to fierce, almost savage despair. Out of nowhere, it seems, a hushed F major chord once more disperses the prevailing gloom. Whereupon a lighthearted coda, as incongruous as it is brief, brings this enigmatic but richly satisfying Quartet to an unexpectedly upbeat conclusion.

AVNI: Summer Strings
Tzvi Avni was born in Saarbrücken in 1927 and teaches and composes at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy of Music and Dance. He composed Summer Strings in 1962.

Tzvi Avni’s Summer Strings, the first of the Israeli composer’s two string quartets by other names, is a busy, colorful, and robustly energetic work. Many of its elements—the propulsive motor rhythms, shifting, asymmetrical meters, terse motivic cells, and modal-sounding melodies—strongly suggest the influence of Bartók. Yet Avni’s music has its own distinctive character, a cosmopolitan blend of Middle European rigor and Mediterranean exuberance, seasoned with a healthy dash of Middle Eastern folk motives.

Born in Germany in 1927, Avni emigrated to Palestine when he was eight, graduated from the Israel Academy of Music in 1958, and went on to become one of his country’s musical elder statesmen. For much of his career he has been associated with electronic music, beginning with his apprenticeship under Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio in New York. Summer Strings, written in 1962, antedates this watershed in his musical development. Its sound world, although recognizably avant garde in its density and dissonance, still falls well within the mainstream of mid-20th century concert music.

A resourceful tone painter, Avni employs such special string effects as mutes, harmonics, glissandos, tremolos, and sul ponticello technique (bowing above the fingerboard) to extend his palette of colors and textures. The titles of the four short movements—Destination, Argument, Variations Without Theme, and Interweaving—are more quizzical than informative. In any case, it seems fruitless to parse them for clues to extramusical meanings. If Summer Strings is “about” anything, it is about pure sound. Although it takes barely 10 minutes to perform, the abundance of musical ideas leaves the impression of a much more substantial work. 

BRAHMS: Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in B minor, Op. 115
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833 and died in Vienna in 1897. He composed the B minor Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in 1891.

In December of 1890, Brahms presented his publisher with the manuscript of his Op. 111 String Quartet, along with a succinct message: “With this slip, bid farewell to notes of mine.” As it turned out, the composer’s valedictory was premature. Several weeks later, Brahms met Richard Mühlfeld, principal clarinetist of the court orchestra at Meiningen, whose conductor, Hans von Bülow, had long been one of his most ardent champions. It is to Mühlfeld’s virtuosity that we owe the late flowering of Brahms’ interest in the clarinet as expressed in the Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Cello, Op. 114, the two sonatas for clarinet (or viola) and piano, Op. 120, and, above all, the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings.

Brahms’ Op. 115 has few precedents—of the handful of clarinet quintets he might have known, only those by Mozart and Weber have stood the test of time. But Brahms needed no models to convince him that the clarinet had been unfairly neglected by chamber music composers. The clarinet, he told a friend, was “much more adapted to the piano than string instruments.” Brahms’ affinity for the clarinet, with its unique ability both to blend and to stand out in the company of piano and strings, opened a new channel of inspiration. The “autumnal” quality often associated with the music of his twilight years owes much to the reed instrument’s silky, baritonal timbre.

Completed in the late summer of 1891, the Clarinet Quintet received its first public performance in Berlin in early December, with Mülfeld joining the celebrated Joachim Quartet. Despite its far from sunny disposition, the work scored an immediate success. The opening Allegro, with its long-arching melodies and Schubertian alternation of minor and major tonalities, casts a bittersweet aura. In the Adagio, the clarinet’s yearning cantilena, wafted above quietly pulsing strings, frames a series of brilliant cadenza-like flourishes. Brahms lightens both the texture and the mood in the third and fourth movements. The latter is a set of variations showcasing each instrument in turn and leading, by way of a subtle modulation from duple to triple meter, to a reprise of the rippling theme with which the quintet began.

©2007 Harry Haskell