String Quartet in A flat major, Op.105

Although it was completed at home in Bohemia, the Quartet in A flat was started just before the composer left America. If any unhappiness about his prolonged stay in New York shows through the Adagio introduction there is little sign of it in the rest of what turns out to be a joyfully lyrical first movement. The Molto vivace must be the most artful of all examples of the Dvorak furiant and, while there is certainly an expression of anxiety in the throbbing middle section of the Lento, the celebratory concluding rondo has no room for such things.

Dvorak’s last two string quartets were completed within a few months of his return to Czechoslovakia from the New World in April 1895. He had actually started on the one in A flat major Op.105 in New York but, after resting for a while at home in Prague, he put it aside in favour of the Quartet in G major Op.106, which was actually finished first. Both works are written with the easy mastery of a composer at ease not only with his technique but also with his inspiration: he still had an inexhaustible supply of melody and all he had to do, it seems, was to accommodate it in the most effective of structures and the most attractive of colours.

It has been suggested that the slow introduction to Op.105 reflects some kind of anxiety associated with the composer’s reluctant presence in New York. But the whole point of it, surely, is to foreshadow the first theme of the Allegro appassionato, which is all the brighter for the dark background it emerges from when it first appears in its authentic form in A flat major on first violin. Immediately contrasted with it, though in the same key, is an amorous companion melody, again on first violin, beginning with a deep sigh of a downward seventh. Winner though that melody is, Dvorak uses it sparingly, or even teasingly. The second subject, animated by urgent triplets and dotted rhythms, displaces it and it is only towards the end of the development section that it makes a reappearance, briefly and almost secretively, on viola. It is also forced out of its place in the recapitulation - not, however, to exclude it entirely but to make the most of its romantic profile in a lingering if ultimately decisive coda.

The Molto vivace is surely the most artful of all examples of the Dvorak furiant, which is to say that is the most artful of many. Its outstanding quality derives partly from the ingeniously varied effect of the duple-time rhythms within the triple-time metre – characteristically invigorating in the first theme, unusually seductive in the second – and partly from the contrast offered by the lyrical middle section with its passionate duets between violin and cello and between the two violins.

If Dvorak is haunted by any kind of misgivings in this work it is in the slow movement – not in the ecstatically tranquil, luxuriantly scored outer sections in F major but in the F minor middle section with its chromatic line drawn anxiously over a throbbing ostinato on the cello. Even that hint of a ghost is exorcised in the final bars, where it returns with subtly different harmonies calculated to lead directly into the security of the F major ending.

Just as in the first movement, the apparently anxious introductory bars of the Allegro non tanto finale are surely intended both to anticipate and to offset the cheerful main theme when it emerges on violin. In this case the introductory gesture, of fragmented chromatic phrases on the cello, has an another function in that it makes frequent reappearances to articulate a rondo construction so extensive and so delightfully varied in its melodic material that one could well get lost without it. Not that there is any room for doubt about the direction the celebration is taking in its dramatic approach to the suddenly quicker coda and in the brief hesitation just before the emphatically brilliant closing bars.