String Quartet No.2 in C, Op.36

Writing a quartet to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Purcell, Britten seems to have been liberated by his great predecessor’s example. The first movement is not a sonata-form structure but a fantasia on one interval, the rising tenth that so seductively opens the work. If Bartók was the model for the demonic Vivace scherzo, driven by spectral arpeggios on muted strings, the last movement is an impressively sustained tribute to Purcell, master of the “chacony.” Where Britten’s chacony depart from baroque procedure is in the three cadenzas so resourcefully interpolated to break up the regularity of the cycle.

After the first performance of his Second String Quartet, by the Zorian Quartet in the Wigmore Hall in 1945, Britten wrote to its dedicatee Mary Behrend to tell her that “to my mind it is the greatest advance that I have yet made and, although it is far from perfect, it has given me encouragement to continue on new lines.” While it is not clear exactly what he meant by that, he was probably not thinking of the self-consciously modernistic echoes of Berg and Bartók in the scoring or, in a work designed to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Purcell, his rethinking of the baroque chaconne in the last movement. It is more likely that what he had in mind was the extraordinarily liberated structure of the first movement.

Certainly, the opening Allegro is not a structure that can be understood in sonata-form terms. It is more a fantasia on one interval - the rising tenth which so seductively opens the work and which on each of its first three appearances merges into a different melodic shape. That interval and those three melodies are the sum of the thematic material of a movement which, held together by the ubiquitous tenth, is all development. Even the recapitulation, which so spectacularly present all three themes at once, is development. There is no looking back until the lingering coda.

The Vivace is a demonic scherzo driven by spectral arpeggios on muted strings, punished by massive double-stopped chords and diverted by a middle section that floats a Balkan-style melody in octaves on first violin over scrambling figuration in the rest of the ensemble. Longer than the first two movements put together, the third and last is an impressively sustained tribute to Purcell, master of the “chacony.” Like the baroque chaconne, Britten’s example offers a theme - nine bars of heavily accented dotted rhythms introduced by all four instruments in unison - and a succession of variations of just the same length. To break up the regularity of the process, however, he interpolates three cadenzas (for cello, viola and first violin) and changes the tempo after each one, turning at the end to a maestoso close to the opening sostenuto to complete the cycle in no uncertain terms.