Zemlinsky was born and raised in Vienna. The son of a relatively wealthy Sephardic Jewish family, he grew up in a period of contrast and conflict. On the one hand, Jews within the Austro-Hungarian Empire had recently been emancipated, though the very same process sparked intense anti-Semitism and division within Viennese society. For Zemlinsky’s chosen career, however, there was no greater city in which to study and, in turn, become a tutor in his own right, with Arnold Schoenberg and Alma Schindler (later Mahler) among his earliest mentees and pupils. It was the beginning of a vivid and varied career, including the composition of operas such as The Florentine Tragedy (after Oscar Wilde), the stirring tone poem The Little Mermaid, and the Lyric Symphony, all of which have gradually returned to the international repertoire in recent decades.
Chamber music was also a mainstay of Zemlinsky’s output. An early Clarinet Trio even won the admiration of Brahms himself at the city’s Conservatory of the Society of the Friends of Music, where the creation of quartets in the manner of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven would also have been a prerequisite of the curriculum. Zemlinsky’s first official quartet, however, dates to 1896, written in the shadow of Brahms (shortly before the great composer’s death). It is a deft homage, though its emotional profile nonetheless looks to the more vertiginous atmosphere of the fin de siècle, including Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht, of which Zemlinsky was to be a major advocate.
Conceived in a traditional four movements, the quartet opens in the bright key of A major. Its sense of joy is far from simplistic, however, with the harmonic language moving between major and minor with marked rapidity. Throughout the Allegro con fuoco, there is also notable rhythmic complexity within the texture—something Zemlinsky inherited from Brahms—matching the generosity of its material. The ensuing Allegretto nods to the harmonic profile of the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132, though there are also elements of the furiant, a passionate and metrically unpredictable Czech folk dance, before an elegiac slow movement. Beginning in an outspoken manner, it has a calmer, more poignant core, with modal harmonies lending the structure a folkloric feel. The finale, on the other hand, embraces both the thematic and metrical complexity introduced at the beginning of the quartet and the second movement’s unbridled lust for life. As a result, the first performance was a great success for Zemlinsky, though such experiences were to become an increasing rarity as his career developed.
Thomas Adès burst onto the international music scene in the early 1990s. A rapid slew of commissions, both at home in Britain and internationally, revealed his ready embrace of traditional genres, albeit married to a witty, occasionally pop-infused sensibility and a polyphonic force that spoke of his technical acuity. Early promise soon developed into confident maturity with the premieres of operas such as The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, both of which have since been presented at the Met, as well as ballet scores and symphonic commissions for the world’s leading orchestras. Adès simultaneously maintained a keen interest in smaller-scale forms, following the example of his 1994 string quartet Arcadiana with a Piano Quintet in 2000; The Four Quarters, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the Emerson String Quartet in 2010; and more recently, Alchymia for clarinet quintet (2021) and Wreath for string quintet (2024).
The title of Adès’s 2010 string quartet plays on Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s series of paintings, The Four Times of Day, as well as T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (themselves indebted to the poet’s study of Beethoven’s late quartets). Like those famously probing poems, which were first published in 1943, Adès’s music is cyclical, as if charting the course of a day. While the music is consequently programmatic, it can also sound intangible, much as in Arcadiana, where a series of musical landscapes were as evasive as they were evocative. When we do, as Eliot wrote, come to “the end of all our exploring” and “arrive where we started,” it is not so much in an act of recapitulation, as in a traditional quartet, but as the springboard to another world entirely. Or as Adès himself has described in another context, it is an “elsewhere, or a here that has gone, or is going.”
Nightfalls is composed of two groups: the viola and cello down on the ground and the violins leaping above, charting constellations. Eventually, these dense and light textures combine, suggesting the uncertainty of sleep. Morning Dew takes the form of a pizzicato dance, recalling analogous structures in Ravel’s and Debussy’s quartets, and provides another form of juxtaposition, with elements of violence. The steady pulse of Days blurs the barlines to confound any expectations of the mundane, as if the second violin’s arrhythmic heartbeat were the basis for a series of variations. And The Twenty-fifth Hour is no less idiosyncratic, with its time signature of 25 16th notes per bar, divided into groups of eight plus three plus eight plus six. Here, the violins resume their starry dance, while the viola and cello recall the second movement’s dewdrop pizzicato. And yet, the music is somehow beyond the 24 hours of the earthly day, not least at the quartet’s seraphic close.
Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his life in Vienna. As a young man, he had fostered a particularly close association with the Schumann family and a fundamentally happy friendship with the violinist Joseph Joachim, who remained a close confidant. A prolific perfectionist, Brahms essayed many of the major genres, bar opera, and often showed a debt of gratitude to those who had preceded him. But he also disclosed hints of emotional turbulence that were to become more outspoken in the scores of those who followed him. Even in the smallest musical postcard, Brahms nonetheless reveals much, thanks to the generosity of his melodic material, the intensity of its development, and the intricacy of its rhythmic interest.
Despite all the adulation thrown at him during his life, including by Zemlinsky and his contemporaries, Brahms was often reticent to release his music to the public. Like the First Symphony, his earliest string quartets endured a long wait in the wings. But once they finally appeared in print in 1873, the next work in line was much quicker to materialize, adopting an outwardly lighter approach. A “useless trifle” according to Brahms, the String Quartet No. 3 in B-flat Major, Op. 67, was written “to avoid facing the serious countenance of a symphony,” namely belated preparations for the premiere of the First while holidaying near Heidelberg in the summer of 1875. Staying with the artist Anton Hanno, Brahms received various visitors over the warmer months, though he was also able to focus on composition, completing his Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 60; the Five Duets for soprano, alto, and piano, Op. 66; and the Op. 67 Quartet. When it was finished, the score prompted rare immediate praise from Joachim and was dedicated to the esteemed biologist and amateur cellist Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann to thank him for hosting Brahms during a trip to Utrecht.
Despite its dedication to a cellist, Brahms’s Third String Quartet features little in the way to highlight that instrument. This doubtless points to the more Classical bearing of the work, led by the violins, with nods to Mozart as well as Felix Mendelssohn. But like his description of a “useless trifle,” this does not address the far richer seams in the score, including the rhythmic divergences of the opening movement, the dramatic middle section in the ensuing Andante or the aching viola melody that characterizes the third movement. And then, to cap it all, Brahms shows great imagination in the variation of thematic material during the finale. It includes what Clara Schumann described as a “delightful, mocking conclusion,” bringing us full circle in a manner not unlike Brahms’s later Clarinet Quintet.
—Gavin Plumley