The feverish compositional activity that marked the last two or three years of Mozart’s life was partly induced by the precarious state of his finances. Despite his poor health, he brought forth one masterpiece after another in an impressive variety of genres. Così fan tutte, the last of the three great comedic operas that he wrote with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, premiered at the court theater in Vienna in January 1790; it was soon followed by Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), a Masonic morality play masquerading as a lighthearted singspiel, and the serious opera La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus). Somehow Mozart also found time to write concertos for piano and clarinet, three string quartets, two string quintets, a clarinet quintet, and several small-scale vocal works—not to mention the great Requiem Mass that he was working on when he died on December 5, 1791.
In spring 1789, Mozart embarked on a concert tour to Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden in hopes of replenishing his depleted bank account. It was on this trip that he agreed to compose the last of his 23 string quartets—the three so-called “Prussian” quartets—for King Friedrich Wilhelm II, an enthusiastic and apparently quite accomplished amateur cellist. The Quartet in D Major, K. 575, was written in Vienna that June, a few weeks after the Prussian monarch had received the composer in Potsdam. A year later, Mozart—who seems to have received no payment for his work from the King—dispatched the scores of the three works to his publisher, grumbling to a friend that he had been “forced to give away my quartets … for a song, simply in order to have cash in hand.”
In a nod to his royal patron, Mozart awards the cellist unusual prominence in the D-Major Quartet. Much of the cello writing is virtuosic and highly exposed; indeed, the central trio section of the Menuetto—the movement placed here in third position instead of second, as in Mozart’s earlier quartets—is virtually a cello solo. By spotlighting the cello’s upper register, Mozart further accentuates the music’s soloistic character. The two outer movements, both in cut time and marked Allegretto, feature kindred melodies that trace ascending D-major triads and incorporate lively “snap” rhythms. There is much engaging repartee between the first violin and cello, with first one and then the other taking the lead in presenting thematic material. Their dialogue intensifies in the luminous A-major Andante: The two instruments respond to and comment on each other’s music, and for four sublime measures in the middle of the movement their voices intertwine in a rapturous duet.
Bartók’s six string quartets, composed between 1909 and 1939, have achieved the canonic status of modern classics. As such, they have been subjected to microscopic analysis that touches on every aspect of Bartók’s musical language, from the finest points of pitch structure to large-scale formal organization. For the average listener, however, the most immediately striking feature of Bartók’s highly distinctive sound world may well be his prodigious inventiveness in the rhythmic sphere and the captivating sonorities he coaxes from the four string instruments.
Bartók’s fondness for special tonal effects—swooping glissandos, exotic strummings, ghostly muted passages, screeching tremolos played with the bow almost on top of the bridge—is evident throughout the short but substantial String Quartet No. 3. The score dates from the summer of 1927, shortly after Bartók—an internationally renowned concert pianist—unveiled his formidably complex Piano Sonata at a contemporary music festival in Baden-Baden. On the same concert, the Kolisch Quartet played Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite; Bartók seems to have fallen under the spell of its richly coloristic atmosphere. Indeed, the so-called “special” effects of the quartet are so deeply embedded in his music as to be intrinsic to its very meaning and expressive power. The same might be said of the gestural quality that gives Bartók’s work so much of its irrepressible kinetic vitality.
It is to the elements of timbre, texture, rhythm, and gesture—as much as to its unconventional formal design—that the Third Quartet owes its concentrated intensity and cohesiveness. Its single, uninterrupted span is divided into two parts: the first knotty and densely contrapuntal, the second a set of variations on a vigorous, folk-like theme. These are followed by a “recapitulation” of the first part, so free as to be virtually unrecognizable, and topped off with a coda that combines elements of both sections. Although the quartet flies by at a helter-skelter pace that makes it all but impossible to take in much of its detail on a single hearing, Bartók helpfully provides signposts for the listener in the form of clearly defined sections, transitions, repetitions, and allusions to traditional tonality. With a little effort, and a willing ear, it is not difficult to penetrate the work’s bristling chromatic surface and savor the somber lyricism at its core.
Grieg was born on the eve of the revolutionary upheavals that transformed the social and political landscape of 19th-century Europe. When the 15-year-old Norwegian arrived to study at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1858, the Romantic tradition established by Mendelssohn and Schumann was still going strong. By the time Grieg died in 1907, Richard Strauss had scandalized opera audiences with his dissonantly modernist Salome, and Schoenberg had sallied forth on the path toward atonality. Grieg’s own music was deeply rooted in Norway’s landscape and folk culture, as reflected in his dozens of art songs and short piano pieces. Yet he also experimented with forms and harmonies that anticipated 20th-century practices. So strong was his influence on Debussy, Ravel, and their fellow impressionists that British composer Frederick Delius was moved to quip that all of “modern French music is simply Grieg plus the prelude to the third act of [Wagner’s] Tristan.”
Grieg composed his first string quartet (now lost) as a student in Leipzig in 1861. Sixteen years later, encouraged by the favorable reception of his first two violin sonatas, he returned to the quartet medium during an extended working holiday among the spectacular mountains and fjords of Norway’s Hardanger district, a setting that never failed to stimulate his creative juices. Grieg’s innate melodic facility ensured an endless store of thematic material, although he struggled to stretch his ideas out to fill the standard four-movement framework. Whatever obstacles he encountered in composing the G-Minor Quartet, the finished score is a work of astonishing vigor and originality in which lyrical and dramatic elements are juxtaposed, contrasted, and combined into a satisfyingly integrated whole.
Both the first and last movements begin with portentous chordal introductions that abruptly give way to outbursts of nervous, almost savage energy. After the sound and fury of the opening Allegro molto ed agitato, a limpid, meltingly beautiful melody—borrowed from one of Grieg’s own songs—emerges as an organizing theme, a little like one of Wagner’s leitmotifs. (Grieg had traveled to Bayreuth in 1876 to hear the first performance of the Ring cycle.) It pops up throughout the quartet in various contexts and permutations, returning at the very end in resplendent G major. Grieg’s score is full of such surprises: magical sonorities, sudden dynamic contrasts, throbbing syncopations, shifting metrical patterns, pregnant pauses, and pungent dissonances. No sooner does one passage get set in a groove than the music changes course and darts off on an unpredictable tangent. Harmonically, the quartet was ahead of its time; a decade later, Debussy would incorporate some of Grieg’s tonal innovations (without acknowledgment) in his own G-Minor Quartet.
—Harry Haskell