The following are Program Notes for the Tokyo String Quartet concert at the 92nd Street Y on Saturday, March 15.

Webern : String Quartet, Op. 28
Webern : Rondo for String Quartet
Anton Webern was born in Vienna in 1883 and died in Mittersill, in the Austrian Alps, in 1945. He composed the String Quartet, Op. 28 in 1937-38 and the Rondo for String Quartet circa 1906.

By his late twenties, Anton Webern had become one of the 20th century’s seminal composers, leaping ahead of his teacher Arnold Schöenberg in the development of 12-tone composition while cultivating the most compressed, epigrammatic style ever heard in Western music. While composers such as Mahler had responded to an expanded harmonic palette (based on all 12 notes of the chromatic scale) with vastly extended musical forms, Webern’s reaction was just the opposite; he wrote of his Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9, that “while working on them I had the feeling that once the 12 notes had run out, the piece was finished.” Only one of the bagatelles takes more than a minute to play, while the rest clock in at about 30 seconds. 

For such a composer, the concept of a Rondo for String Quartet might seem inconceivable. The title itself means that the same music “comes around” again and again, and most listeners think of Webern as the archpriest of “play it once and stop.” But a closer look at the music of the Schöenberg School reveals composers who were highly engaged with the music that had preceded them. However strange their music still sounds to some listeners, they considered themselves the inevitable outcome of a tradition leading from Palestrina through Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms. Although famous as a miniaturist, Webern was not deaf to the virtues of repetition, variation and development.

To compose for string quartet at all is to acknowledge one’s debt to the old masters, and to confront them on their home turf. Webern approached this challenge cautiously, as was his nature. He composed a one-movement string quartet in 1905, but didn’t publish it. Same for the Rondo on tonight’s program, which was found among his papers 20 years after his death. He thought the piece he composed in 1909 would be his official “String Quartet No. 1,” but he backed off from that, issuing it instead as Five Movements for String Quartet. (He did, however, dignify it with the designation Op. 5.) The Bagatelles followed in 1913. After that, it took 25 years—about as long as it took for Brahms to finish his Symphony No. 1—for Webern to issue a piece that he could call, simply, String Quartet.

This work was commissioned, like so much of the best European and American chamber music of that era, by the indefatigable American music patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. The Kolisch Quartet, led by the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, gave the premiere at a festival in South Mountain, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1938. Like many of Schöenberg’s later works, this piece makes a strong bid to bring together the requirements of the radical 12-tone method of composition with the aural and formal expectations of audiences accustomed to Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms. “It could be,” Webern wrote to Rudolf Kolisch in April 1938, “that I really succeeded in combining the two manners of presentation—the ‘horizontal’ and the ‘vertical’ as Schöenberg calls them....I must confess that hardly ever before have I had such a good feeling toward a completed work.” And then Webern, the perpetual student, dares to add: “It almost seems to me that this is altogether my first work.” In the same letter, Webern estimated that his three-movement work would take 20 minutes to play. The actual figure is about eight minutes, which indicates that the quartet must have seemed to Webern, from his previous experience, a heroically vast composition. Vast indeed was the composer’s technical analysis of the work, written for the critic and editor Erwin Stein, which extends for many pages of small print. In the letter to Kolisch, however, he describes the quartet in language any music fan can relate to; that’s where the quotations in this note come from.

“You must understand the quartet in its formal appearance like many of the piano sonatas of Beethoven in three movements!” wrote Webern to Kolisch. “Thus I think that nothing is missing if in my quartet I have restricted myself to the three movements.” The Beethoven model implied a broad, expressive adagio as the center movement, and that was Webern’s initial plan. However, when the work was published by Erwin Stein at Universal Edition, that slow movement had been moved to first position, followed by a brief scherzo and a finale. Perhaps remembering the Mozart and Beethoven sonatas that begin with variation movements, Webern had decided to put his best foot forward, since he was especially proud of this extensive piece marked Mässig (moderate tempo). “Fundamentally it is a variation form,” he wrote, “but the single variations are functionally parts of an adagio form, with main theme, transition, subsidiary idea, recapitulation, and coda. Thus it represents a fusion of variation and adagio form! Everything is pure counterpoint...” Indeed, Webern’s strong delineation of his melodic ideas, and spacious writing for bowed and pizzicato strings, make his expressive intentions perfectly clear. Long analysis of how he does it is interesting, but not required.

The family resemblance of the three movements is apparent; Webern has used the same 12-tone row for all of them. He describes the second movement (Gemächlich, easygoing) as “a miniature rondo or else a scherzo with trio.” The main theme, he says, is a four-voice canon that could run indefinitely but is limited to an 18-bar “sentence”—Baroque infinity, Classical discipline, “a combination of the two manners of presentation, as everywhere else in the quartet.” The trio section offers a contrast of rhythm and mood: “a slow waltz, versus a very deliberate polka.” While the closing movement (Sehr fliessend, very flowing) doesn’t lose sight of the tone row and counterpoint (sharp-eared listeners will detect the famous four-note motive B-A-C-H), this music emphasizes drama and passion over everything else. Phrases bark, swoon, surge and sigh. By the composer’s account the counterpoint runs forward, then backward, and at the end the main melodic motives are gathered in a stretto (in effect, a musical knot), after which Webern writes, “the whole thing flies away” in the middle of a soft phrase.

* * *

Webern died during the chaotic conditions at the end of World War II, and his relatives literally had their hands full rescuing his library and manuscripts from his vacant house in the Austrian village of Maria Enzersdorf. Over the years, they went through these materials and tried to find significant compositions and writings. Among these were numerous compositions for string quartet, many of which had pages missing and so were unpublishable. On October 26, 1965, the scholar Hans Moldenhauer was going though a stack of Webern’s books and found music manuscripts at the bottom of the pile. Among these was an intact Rondo for String Quartet, apparently dating from 1906. Moldenhauer lost no time getting this piece into print; the premiere was given by the Philadelphia String Quartet on August 1, 1968, at the fourth annual Webern Festival at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. And thus a little gem from turn-of-the-century Vienna was added to the quartet repertoire. This rondo is rich in incidents and moods, from seductive to angry to ecstatic, all to a waltz rhythm (notated in 6/8 meter instead of the waltz’s 3/4, but there’s no mistaking where that swing-and-sway comes from). The music’s vital energy and wayward harmonies are indebted to Strauss—Richard, not Johann. Webern demonstrates his skill at counterpoint throughout, especially when he writes a fugue on the graceful main theme in a middle section, and stirs several themes together in the coda. At this concert, the Rondo becomes a juicy dessert to follow the string quartet he would compose 33 years later.

Haydn : String Quartet in D Major, Op. 50, No. 6, “The Frog”
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, in 1732 and died in Vienna in 1809. He wrote the six Op. 50 String Quartets in 1787.

Imagine the best four-way conversation you’ve ever heard. The talkers are all quick-witted and articulate, compatible yet distinct in personality. Someone suggests an idea, and each person takes a whack at it. As often as one says “But seriously...” another cracks a joke and everybody laughs. At any moment, anyone can mutter an aside, turn someone else’s words around, top the last remark, fall suddenly silent or all can talk at once. The effect is exhilarating for talkers and listeners alike. In music, the equivalent of this experience is a Haydn string quartet.

This is not to discount the tonal and emotional virtues of Haydn’s quartets. He concocted the silken blend of sound that made two violins, a viola and a cello the touchstone ensemble for chamber music in his time and after, and his quartets contain moments as furious and as tender as anything else composed in the eighteenth century. But the hallmark of a Haydn quartet is discourse—which can include anything from corny jokes to profound philosophy. Haydn introduced a form of musical democracy not unlike the revolutionary social changes that were happening in his lifetime; where the baroque trio sonata was soloistic, giving all the best material to the upper parts, Haydn’s quartets liberated the lower strata of the musical society (viola and cello) from the role of accompanists, to have their say right along with the high and mighty violins.

In the quartets composed after 1785, another important principle in addition to the above is at work: the spirit of Mozart. That was the year in which Haydn heard two of the quartets the younger composer had dedicated to him and uttered the famous encomium to Leopold Mozart (“I tell you before God, as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know...”). There are glimmers of a Mozartean expressiveness in the first movement of Op. 50, No. 6, but Haydn’s native wit and logic are responsible for the daring melodic plunge in the opening measure and the persuasive musical argument that springs from it. The touchingly simple melody, abrupt key changes and final shift to major of the Poco adagio anticipate Schubert as much as they reflect Mozart. In the last two movements, pathos gives way to Haydn’s sometimes‑grotesque sense of humor; perhaps the hopping appogiaturas, syncopations and hesitations of the minuet suggested a frog to whoever gave this quartet its nickname. More likely, the name refers to the opening motive of the finale, one of Haydn’s most novel thematic ideas: one note repeated rapidly 10 times, but on alternating strings, creating the sort of odd undulating sound one might indeed hear by a pond on a summer night.

Dvořák: String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, “American”
Antonin Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves, near Kralupy, Bohemia, in 1841 and died in Prague in 1904. He composed the String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, in 1893.

Antonín Dvořák lived in the United States for three years, from 1892 to 1895, and this country still hasn’t gotten over it. Of course, during the 19th century, many famous musicians came to America on concert tours and more recently, wars and oppression compelled many of Europe’s greatest composers to take refuge here. But in 1892, the idea that a composer of international renown would actually come and live among us and take an interest in our native musical idioms caused Americans to swell with pride. Dvořák even called his mighty Symphony No. 9 “From the New World,” and listeners detected the American vernacular sound in a number of his works, including the String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96, composed during his summer vacation in Spillville, Iowa, in 1893. Critics and the public dubbed the work his “American” Quartet, and have demanded it on concert programs ever since. It is hard to know exactly the provenance of the folk-like themes from which Dvořák creates the first movement of the F Major Quartet; Scotch-Irish fiddle tunes, black spirituals and Bohemian folk songs all use the same “pentatonic” scale, which is found all over the world. (When you play a tune on the black keys of a piano, you’re using the pentatonic scale.) The quartet’s opening motive even resembles the main theme of Beethoven’s Leonore overtures. The Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick had been using similar tunes to give his string quartets an American flavor for a decade or more before Dvořák arrived. In fact, the melodious, sentimental second theme of this movement and its silky quartet scoring are so Chadwickian as to raise the question of who influenced whom. By the way, Dvořák’s Op. 96 and Chadwick’s quartets were all premiered by the same Boston ensemble, the Kneisel Quartet.

The plaintive second movement of the F Major Quartet made at least one commentator think of Dvořák’s “nostalgia for his homeland,” but its persistent falling phrase, murmuring accompaniment and tom-tom-like pizzicato in the cello give it a distinctly Native American flavor. Dvořák met Indians in Spillville and it’s quite possible that here he was anticipating the “Indianist” school of American composers, such as Arthur Farwell and Charles Wakefield Cadman, who made concert music from Indian themes, beginning around the turn of the 20th century. In this movement, Dvořák sustains a seemingly endless melodic line, discreetly moving the tune from one instrument to another without ever disturbing the rapt, meditative mood.

Another simple pentatonic motive—which Dvořák attributed not to blacks or Indians but to another kind of American, “a red bird with black wings” that sang outside his window—is all the theme Dvořák needs for his scherzo and its two trios. The motive is surrounded with witty, bird-like counterpoint, but (also like bird song) it doesn’t venture far from its home key, and by the end of this charming movement one can tell why Dvořák referred to the creature as not just a bird but a “damned bird.”

The lively rondo finale is based on a handful of pentatonic tunes, all of which seem to have been born in the same litter as the first-movement and scherzo themes. The exception is a slower theme in a minor key, like an echo of the mournful atmosphere of the second movement; but this soon yields to the original fast polka tempo. After one more pause for sentimental reflection, an exuberant coda brings the quartet to a rousing close.

© David Wright