Heir to the German lieder tradition stemming from Schubert and Robert Schumann, Wolf rose to prominence in the late 19th century as an acolyte of Wagner. In the course of his tragically foreshortened career, he wrote some 300 songs to texts ranging from Michelangelo to Mörike, whose wayward intensity was long regarded as the special province of connoisseurs. Wolf suffered from recurring depression and violent mood swings that prevented him from holding down regular teaching and conducting jobs, though he did enjoy an extended stint as music critic for a fashionable Vienna newspaper. Like Schubert, he contracted syphilis as a young man, probably after visiting a brothel with a fellow bohemian. Like Schumann, he eventually succumbed to insanity and died in an asylum at age 42.
Although he’s best known for his lieder, Wolf composed a small number of works in other genres, including the opera Der Corregidor, the tone poem Penthesilea, and the String Quartet in D Minor, whose slow movement echoes the “song of thanksgiving” in Beethoven’s Op. 132. Originally titled simply “Serenade,” the short, single-movement Italian Serenade took shape over a three-day span in May 1887. By the time Wolf arranged it for string orchestra five years later, the Italian connection was firmly planted in his mind, and during his intermittent periods of lucidity, he continued to toy unproductively with the idea of expanding his atmospheric miniature into a longer symphonic work, or possibly an opera.
Like Tchaikovsky in his 1890 string sextet Souvenir de Florence, Wolf evokes a lighthearted, outdoorsy, and vaguely Mediterranean ambience without incorporating any certifiably Italian music. (The energetic main theme of the Italian Serenade, which recurs episodically throughout the piece, is often said to have been based on an Italian folk tune, but no one has ever tracked it down.) The work does, however, have a programmatic subtext of sorts: a novella by Joseph von Eichendorff, whose lyrics Wolf was immersed in at the time for his Eichendorff-Lieder, in which the musician protagonist takes part in a performance of an “Italian serenade.” With its convivial repartee and rhythmic verve, the serenade is a brilliant instrumental pendant to the 46 lieder in Wolf’s Italian Songbook.
From an early age, Ravel was marked to succeed Debussy—13 years his senior—as the poet laureate of French music. The composers’ competing claims led to recurring friction, despite Ravel’s genuine and often-expressed admiration for Debussy. The two men had much in common, including a poetic sensibility, an allegiance to French musical traditions, and a fondness for sensuous, impressionistic timbres and textures. But Debussy’s revolutionary approach to harmony and form was alien to Ravel, who remained at heart a classicist. Over the decades he refined his art, ruthlessly pruning away superfluous notes and gestures in search of the “definitive clarity” that was his professed ideal. Ravel’s repeated failure to win the Prix de Rome, a rite of passage for French composers seeking establishment approval, only stiffened his determination to forge his own path. Not until 1920 was he awarded the prestigious Légion d’Honneur, an honor that he rebuffed with undisguised satisfaction.
Ravel felt acutely self-conscious about writing his first—and, as it turned out, only—string quartet in 1902 and 1903. That comparisons would be drawn to Debussy’s celebrated String Quartet of 1893 was as disconcerting as it was inevitable. Perhaps wary of calling attention to Debussy’s influence on his music, and eager to burnish his credentials as a member in good standing of the musical establishment, Ravel dedicated the F-Major Quartet to his teacher, Vincent d’Indy, an influential composer of a markedly more conservative and academic disposition. D’Indy, predictably dismayed to see his prize student playing fast and loose with tradition, bluntly pronounced the quartet’s highly compressed finale “stunted, badly balanced, in fact, a failure.” Debussy, on the other hand, instantly recognized the kindred spark of iconoclastic genius. “In the name of the gods of music, and in mine,” he exclaimed, “do not touch a single note of what you have written in your Quartet.” Ravel heeded this excellent advice, and the work’s well-received Paris premiere in March 1904 firmly established him as Debussy’s heir apparent.
According to his pupil Alexis Roland-Manuel, Ravel mistrusted “the secret powers which governed him unawares” and sought to strike a judicious balance in his music between spontaneity and premeditation. Roland-Manuel’s characterization of the String Quartet as “the most spontaneous work Ravel has ever written” is clearly applicable to the improvisatory-sounding slow movement, with its freely declamatory outbursts and dream-like reminiscences of the opening Allegro moderato. Yet Ravel’s Classical discipline is equally evident in the first movement’s two-theme sonata form and the slightly off-kilter but tightly controlled metrical patterns of the second and fourth movements. As the composer wrote in his autobiography, “My String Quartet represents a conception of musical construction, imperfectly realized no doubt, but set out much more precisely than in my earlier compositions.” Like Debussy (and later Bartók), Ravel experimented with cyclical structure in his quartet, achieving a strong sense of unity among the four movements by dint of recurring intervals, melodic shapes, textures, and sonorities.
Beethoven’s 16 string quartets have long been regarded as the Mount Everest of the genre, the pinnacle to which other composers aspired. The five quartets he composed between the summer of 1824 and the autumn of 1826 occupy a special place in his oeuvre. If the six early Op. 18 Quartets advertised his debt to his esteemed mentor Haydn and the five quartets of his so-called middle period are steeped in the “heroic” idiom of the Third Symphony and the “Appassionata” Piano Sonata, Beethoven’s late quartets—Opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, and 135—stretched the formal and expressive language of the Classical string quartet almost to the breaking point. In these knotty, inward-looking masterpieces, passages of great tenderness and lucidity are juxtaposed with lacerating eruptions of raw emotion.
In the spring of 1825, shortly after the premiere of his Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 127, Beethoven was laid low by a severe intestinal ailment. Although a strict dietary regimen soon put him back on his feet, this uncomfortable intimation of his mortality clearly made a profound impact. No sooner was the composer on the road to recovery than he applied himself to writing what he called a “sacred song of thanksgiving from a convalescent to the divinity.” This deeply felt slow movement is the focal point of the A-Minor String Quartet, a work of majestic proportions and startling contrasts that anticipates the radically innovative musical language of Beethoven’s Opp. 130, 131, and 135 (all of which were completed after Op. 132).
Beethoven’s deafness had forced—or perhaps freed—him to compose with his inner ear, and it is this quality of Innigkeit, or “inwardness,” that gives the slow movement of the A-Minor Quartet its exceptional emotional intensity. The Molto adagio consists of three statements of a broad, hymn-like melody in the archaic-sounding Lydian mode (F major with B naturals instead of B flats), each more elaborate than the last in terms of rhythm, harmony, and voice leading. Interspersed with these spiritual meditations are passages of a more rhapsodic, almost febrile character. “Feeling new strength” (as Beethoven’s marking in the score has it), the invalid’s pulse quickens, the music now surging forward, now pulling back, until it finally comes to rest on a peaceful F-major chord. The Molto adagio is framed by a pair of sharply contrasting fast movements in A major, the first a playful Allegro, notable for the evocation of a droning hurdy-gurdy in its midsection, the second a jaunty little march that leads to an incongruously dramatic “recitative” declaimed by the first violin. The quartet’s two outer movements, both firmly anchored in A minor, mirror the soul searching of the Molto adagio. A somberly mysterious prelude, dominated by the interval of a rising and falling half-step, sets the stage for the opening Allegro, a densely argued and somewhat elliptical movement, by turns lighthearted and grimly fatalistic in mood. The final Allegro appassionato is an agitated rondo in triple time. Beethoven had once considered using the principal theme in the heroic finale of his Ninth Symphony. Here, too, the struggle between light and darkness culminates in a life-affirming, major-key ending.
—Harry Haskell