String Quartet in D major, Op.76, No.5 (Hob.III.79) (“Famous Largo”) [1797]

Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)

String Quartet in D major, Op.76, No.5 (Hob.III.79) (“Famous Largo”) [1797]

Allegretto

Largo, cantabile e mesto

Menuetto: allegro

Finale: presto

The six Quartet’s Op.76 writen for Count Erdödy in 1797 have long been regard as representing the ideal alliance of maturity and creative vitality. One unlikely but fascinating testimonial is an entry in the diary of Eugène Delacroix who in February 1847 recorded Chopin’s opinion that “experience has given these works the perfection we so much admire in them.” Whatever Chopin made of the famed slow movement of the Quartet in D, Op.76, No.5 - Mendelssohn is said to have found it “cheerful” - he can only have admired Haydn’s achievement in so spontaneousl securing the elusive combination of harmonic freedom and structural integrity.

The first movement is no less inspired. Neither theme-and-variations nor sonata-form in shape, it is both at once and something new at the same time. The siciliano opening theme seems to be presented by first violin as a subject for variation but what follows its introduction is not so much a variation as a development section, beginning on the cello alone in D minor but then proliferating in contrapuntal interest before breaking out in dramatic virtuoso activity. The theme is recapitulated in D major and much as before, it seems, until it is cut short to make way for an unstoppable and brilliantly sustained Allegro coda based on little more than its opening phrase.

The slow movement which gives the work its “famous Largo” nickname - and which achieved its notoriety not least through the six sharps of its F sharp major key signature - is also based on one idea. There is no simulation of a variation structure in this case, however. The whole of the extended central section of the movement is a contemplative development of the melodious but emotionally vulnerable theme introduced by the first violin in the opening bars. The cello does much of the thinking, usually by presenting the rising arpeggio element of the theme in a new key and inviting a response from the others. They, it transpires, are by no means disinclined to probe the painful implications of the minor keys postulated by their colleague. The return to F sharp major occurs apparently by chance.

As though to compensate for the Largo experience, the Menuetto takes that same rising arpeggio as its main theme and makes light of it in D major, if not without some grumbling from the cello in the D minor Trio section. The impatient gesture repeated by the violins over the cello part in the Trio reappears at the beginning of the Finale but now, curiously enough, harmonised as a perfect cadence - which, far from halting proceedings, generates the energy for another highly resourceful, harmonically wayward monothematic construction. The opening chords are allowed to perform the conclusive function proper to them only when the Presto activity has run its course.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

String Quartet No.6 [1939]

Mesto - vivace

Mesto - Marcia

Mesto - Burletta: moderato - andantino - tempo 1

Mesto

Bartók’s Sixth String Quartet was written in tragic circumstances. He started work on it in August 1939 in a remote Alpine chalet in Switzerland where, at the invitation of Paul Sacher, he had just completed his Divertimento. But, as the slow movement of that work reveals, even at Saanen he was painfully aware of the rapidly deteriorating political situation: “The poor peace-loving Swiss are being forced to glow with war fever,” he wrote to his son on 18 August. With the outbreak of war on 1 September he was back in Budapest - which was miserable for him because, as an outspoken anti-Fascist, he was seriously out of favour with the authorities and, worse still, he found that his mother’s health was failing. Reproaching himself for the time he had “stolen” from her in Switzerland, he completed the Quartet in the second half of November, just a few weeks before she died. It was to be not only the last work he wrote before his American exile but also, although he contemplated a seventh, his last string quartet.

It is not surprising that, in the three eventful months he devoted to it, Bartók’s concept of the Sixth Quartet changed quite radically. Although it was always going to be in four movements, it was to have included a finale beginning with a slow introduction and ending with a quick folk dance. In the work as we know it that slow introduction, marked Mesto, is developed to form almost the whole of the finale: there is no folk dance and the slow tempo is retained throughout. The Mesto material is used also to introduce the first, second and third movements - in the same slow tempo but at increasing length and with growing textural intensity - so that it now casts its shadow over the whole work.

As the opening viola solo demonstrates, the basis of the Mesto material is one of Bartók’s characteristic winding melodies moving in semitonal steps at first but opening into wider intervals as it goes on. Since the Vivace has no direct thematic relationship with the Mesto a brief but emphatically pesante passage (alluding perhaps to the Ouvertura of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge) postulates a link between them, in preparation for the entry of the first subject on unaccompanied first violin. A capricious little theme, it immediately lends itself to development in a variety of elusive inversions and augmentations and in constantly shifting contrapuntal situations. The second subject, introduced by first violin over a viola and cello drone at a slightly slower tempo, though more clearly defined in its folksong-like outline, is no less adaptable. Even so, in the development section, which begins with a recall of the pesante passage, it is the first subject that dominates. It also has the wit to finesse a false recapitulation on viola before getting on with the real thing on first violin. The movement ends in a quietly serene D major.

In the two middle movements there is little or no transition after the ever more expressive Mesto introductions. The whole point of the Marcia and the Burletta is that they are brusquely intrusive. The symbolism of the Marcia - which, like the first movement of Contrasts, is written in the style of the the traditional Hungarian verbunkos or recruiting dance - is clear enough. If not, the protesting cello and violin in the middle section leave little doubt as to what is on their mind as they anticipate the return of the march, which duly reappears in even more grotesque colouring than before.

The object of derision in the Burletta is not so clear. But, to judge by an apparent allusion to Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale some way into the movement, it could be another military satire. Certainly, there is an absurdly strutting quality about the percussive rhythms that so rudely break in on the Mesto introduction. The sound of the two violins playing ostensibly in manful unison but actually a quarter-tone apart is even more derisive. If the mainly pizzicato reprise of the burlesque seems less bitter it is not, in comparison with the intervening recall of two graceful themes from the first movement, exactly lyrical either.

The extended development of the Mesto material in the last movement is, for much of its duration, a frank contemplation of its emotional implications in uncomprising four-part counterpoint. Towards the middle of the construction, however, a fragment of it is presented as a slow chorale which, with the colour drained away from it, seems so lifeless that it inspires a lingering reminiscence of the two main themes of the vivace first movement. Fond memory though this is, it can do nothing, on the eerily scored return of the Mesto material, to divert the course of the pre-ordained progression to a resigned D minor ending.