From the time he arrived in Vienna in 1792, Beethoven was determined to show that he was a man to be reckoned with both as a composer and a pianist. In choosing three mild-mannered piano trios as his first published works, however, he evidently hoped to put his best foot forward and ingratiate himself with his well-heeled patrons. A diligent student, Beethoven copied out a number of string quartets by Haydn and Mozart, biding his time until he felt ready to enter the field. He began sketching the Op. 18 quartets in 1798 and systematically worked out his ideas in a leisurely fashion over the next two years, continuing to fine-tune the scores even after the manuscript was complete.
Compared to Haydn’s 68 string quartets and Mozart’s 27, Beethoven’s total output of 16 was modest. His dependence on the financial support of various aristocratic acquaintances meant that his production of quartets was sporadic and often preempted by more pressing projects. The six Op. 18 quartets and the “Harp” Quartet, Op. 74, were dedicated to Prince Joseph Lobkowitz, Vienna’s foremost patron of the arts in the early 19th century. Haydn was one of Lobkowitz’s favorite composers; he commissioned his Op. 77 string quartets and sponsored the oratorios The Creation and The Seasons. The prince’s response to Beethoven’s music is not recorded, but one contemporary reviewer described the Op. 18 quartets as “very difficult to perform and not at all popular,” a judgment that has not held up to history.
The stormy atmosphere of the C-Minor Quartet recalls that of the “Pathétique” Sonata, also in C minor, which Beethoven completed shortly before he began work on the Op. 18 quartets. The roiling turbulence of the opening theme is tempered by a placid, broadly lyrical countersubject that the second violin belatedly, and quite unexpectedly, introduces after the initial commotion has died down. This uneasy balance of light and dark, serenity and agitation, is mirrored in the quartet’s two middle movements: a delicate, playfully canonic Scherzo in C major, substituting for a conventional slow movement, and a robust Menuetto characterized by restless syncopations and slithering, chromatic melodic lines. The final movement is in rondo form, with a recurring eight-bar theme whose pent-up energy seems to be constantly on the verge of exploding. A fast, furious coda brings the work to a surprisingly lighthearted conclusion.
Although Bartók’s music is rooted in Central European folk traditions and late–19th-century impressionism, it was forged in the harsh crucible of 20th-century modernism. Many of his early works are suffused with the melodies, rhythms, and colors of the Hungarian and Balkan folk music that he heard and studied as a young man on his travels around the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The combination of extroverted, peasant-style music and a darker, highly wrought, introspective idiom is a salient feature of many of the Hungarian composer’s works, including the First String Quartet. It and the other five quartets that Bartók wrote in the three decades between 1908 and 1939 have achieved the status of modern classics, charting a course from the impassioned Romanticism of his youth to the bleak pessimism of his later works. As composer-critic Virgil Thomson observed, “The quartets of Bartók have a sincerity, indeed, and a natural elevation that are well-nigh unique in the history of music.”
Few of Bartók’s works are as transparently autobiographical as the First Quartet, written in Budapest in 1908–1909. Indeed, this poignant and luminous masterpiece might almost be described as confessional, suffused as it is with the 27-year-old composer’s unrequited passion for violinist Stefi Geyer. A former child prodigy who would shortly leave Hungary to seek fame in Vienna, Geyer eventually settled in Zurich, where she became a renowned teacher and performer. In the course of her lengthy career, she served as muse to several composers, but none was more hopelessly infatuated than Bartók. He inscribed his First Violin Concerto of 1907–1908 with a musical motif based on Geyer’s name, and was cruelly disappointed by her refusal to play the work in public. By the time he began sketching his Op. 7 Quartet in 1908, the violinist had broken off their relationship, prompting Bartók to retaliate in a short, sardonic piano piece subtitled “Elle est morte” (“She Is Dead”).
Geyer nonetheless continued to haunt Bartók. Her four-note musical “signature” is embedded in a series of compositions, including the First Quartet’s plaintive opening theme, which Bartók bitterly described as his “funeral dirge.” The work’s three movements flow into each other without breaks, producing the effect of a continuously unfolding musical scroll. The somberly contrapuntal opening Lento, with its mournful motif of a falling sixth, is steeped in late-Romantic harmonies redolent of Wagner and Strauss. A short bridge passage leads to an energetic Allegretto featuring a typically terse Bartókian theme—two half-steps separated by a leap—and marked by sharp contrasts in register and volume. A second interlude—a cadenza-like cello solo based on a Hungarian folk melody—gives way to the final Allegro vivace, whose rhythmic exuberance expresses what composer Zoltán Kodály aptly called a “return to life.”
In 1893, Debussy was still finding his voice and struggling for recognition. Although the 31-year-old composer had already completed La damoiselle élue, a Wagnerian lyric poem for female chorus and orchestra, his revolutionary masterpiece Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune was still on the drawing board, and another decade would pass before the success of his symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande made him a household name. At once radical and traditionalist, Debussy rebelled against the ponderous academic style of establishment composers such as Camille Saint-Saëns and Vincent d’Indy. Proudly referring to himself as a compositeur français, Debussy urged his compatriots to return to the “pure French tradition” that he admired in the music of 18th-century composer Jean-Philippe Rameau.
Debussy’s only string quartet—he evidently planned to write another, but never got around to it—had a difficult gestation. Conscious that he was plowing new ground, Debussy fussed over the score like a first-born child, comprehensively overhauling it no fewer than three times before finally sending it out into the world. The composer’s more classical side is apparent in the G-Minor Quartet’s clearly delineated themes, the magnetic pull of tonal centers, and the intermittent stretches of disciplined canonic writing. Yet the work’s recurring elements reflect Debussy’s abiding interest in organic musical processes and anticipate Béla Bartók’s use of cyclical forms in his string quartets.
The G-Minor Quartet is laid out in the traditional four-part format, with a scherzo-like second movement and a sweetly expressive Andantino sandwiched between two expansive and dynamic fast movements. Although Debussy might have borrowed the idea to use common thematic material to unify the four movements from César Franck’s D-Major Quartet of 1889, he went far beyond his teacher in the use of unconventional chord sequences, exotic scalar patterns, and nonfunctional harmonies. From the opening bars, the listener is swept up in the work’s sensuous and emotionally turbulent sound world. The first violin presents a terse motto whose sinuous contour—one step down, another skip, and a rising third, finished off with a triplet curlicue—appears throughout the quartet in various intervallic and rhythmic guises. Also typical of Debussy’s mature style are the work’s vividly orchestral sonorities and shifting tonal perspectives, in which a repeated note or phrase is cast in subtly different lights as the harmonic ground shifts beneath it.
—Harry Haskell