String Sextet in A major, Op.48 (1878)

Dvorak Sextet in A major was written in one of the happiest periods in the composer’s life - shortly before the birth of his daughter Otilie in June 1878 and just after he had completed the first set of Slavonic Dances, which had been commissioned by the Berlin publisher Simrock to follow up on the extraordinary success of his Moravian Duets. Since this first international break-through was due largely to Brahms’s influence with his publisher, and since there was a good prospect that Simrock would take an interest in his whatever else he might write, it is not surprising that Dvorak should at this stage turn to the music of his Viennese colleague for ideas. The models for the Sextet are clearly Brahms’s two works for the same combination of string instruments (two each of violins, violas and cellos) and, indeed, Simrock did publish it within a few months of its completion. Even more gratifyingly perhaps, the first performance of the Sextet, in Berlin in November 1879, was given by an ensemble led by no less a musician than Joseph Joachim.

Like Brahms, Dvorak evidently considered the string sextet a medium more appropriate for serenade-like entertainment than profound discussion. The first movement proceeds at an engagingly leisured pace through a happily expansive sonata-form construction. It is not, however, as innocently spontaneous as, on casual acquaintance, it might seem to be. The lyrically contented opening theme, for example, is developed in such a purposeful way as to anticipate a prominent rhythmic figure in the second subject which, when it is eventually presented in its definitive form, turns out to be a variant of the first. And the motivic relationships do not stop there, or even at the end of the movement.

In the meantime, in the two central movements, Dvorak indulges himself - and his publisher, who was well aware of the appeal of this kind of thing to his customers in Austria and Germany - in the Czech folk idiom. While there is nothing here as vividly idiomatic as in the roughly contemporaneous String Quartet in E flat Op 51 or the Slavonic Dances Op 46, the Dumka is at least authentic in its peculiarly poignant combination of polka rhythms and melancholy melody veering between minor and major harmonies. As for the Furiant, it isn’t one. Attractively vigorous though it is, it lacks the muscular rhythmic contradictions which are essential to this favourite among Dvorak’s national dances. The pale echo in the middle section of a tune that is given so much more colourful treatment in the Slavonic Dances is a particularly interesting indication of the composer’s uncharacteristic discretion here.

Dvorak’s long-term motivic strategy meets its objective in the Finale, which a series of six variations on a theme that is itself a (faintly lugubrious) variant of the second subject of the first movement. If the Brahms influence shows through in the figuration techniques applied to the first, second and fourth variations, there is more of Dvorak in the cello musings of the third and the delightfully textured scoring of the fifth. The last variation is almost orchestral in its conclusive splendour.

Gerald Larner©