String Quartet No.2 (1945-6)

Langsam - äusserst lebhaft und sehr energisch

Andantino (sehr audsrucksvoll)

Presto

As a dedicated symphonist - he wrote eight symphonies in all - Karl Amadeus Hartmann had neither the time nor the inclination to write much chamber music. One of his earliest successes was his First String Quartet, which was to win the Carillon Prize in Geneva in 1936, but at much the same time as he wrote it, in order to disassociate himself from the newly installed Nazi regime, he forbade performances of his music in Germany and withdrew from public musical life. During his long period of isolation in Munich - his “internal exile” as he called it - his composing changed direction. The Second String Quartet was one of the first things he wrote when the War was over but he was already more interested in orchestral music - several of his scores having been performed outside Germany in the meantime - and his activities as director of the famous Musica Viva concert series, which he founded in Munich in 1945, confirmed him in his mission as a symphonist.

Although Hartmann had taken the opportunity to take private lessons with Webern in Vienna in 1941 and 1942, there is little trace of Webernism in his own works. Like much of his music, the Second String Quartet is atonal (except in the cadences at the end of the movements) but not serially organised. The stylistic inspiration behind it clearly derives from Bartók and Hindemith, an unlikely combination which is reconciled by both elements being subject to the extraordinary integrity of Hartmann’s own musical personality. The eloquent cello solo at the beginning calls to mind the opening viola solo of Bartók’s Sixth Quartet (which, in Germany in 1945, Hartmann might not actually have known) and the whole of the slow introduction has a fundamental influence on the rest of the work - not, however, as recurring episode as in the Bartók and not as a systematically developed source of material. While there are thematic relationships between the movements, the importance of the Langsam introduction is that it sets in motion a chain of profoundly serious thought which is continued in the central Andantino and held in precise balance by the physical activity of the Äusserst lebhaft und sehr energisch (“extremely lively and very energetic”) section of the first movement and the even livelier Presto finale.

While the most appealing aspect of the slow introduction is the wide-ranging line uttered by solo cello and later repeated by first violin, the cramped melodic fragments heard on the first entry of the four instruments together are no less influential. In the following quick section the first subject - anticipated in the opening canonic flurry and definitively introduced by first violin in emphatic octaves with the viola against vigorous rhythmic figuration on second violin and cello - seems to have little to do with the introductory material. The second subject, on the other hand, a contrastingly quiet and mysterious episode in a slightly slower tempo, derives from the second part of the introduction. As the tempo rises again a third theme is thrust to the surface by cello and viola in octaves. Even so, in spite of this melodic abundance, the development is devoted largely to a fourth theme, a playful variant of the first subject, which has no part to play in the recapitulation or the Prestissimo coda.

The opening violin solo of the Andantino takes up the train of thought initiated in the slow introduction to the first movement. Its main theme, however, is the graceful melody introduced by the viola on its first solo entry and extensively developed, both dramatically and lyrically, in the middle section. At the same time there are numerous references back to events in the first movement and towards the end the cello distantly recalls part of its opening soliloquy.

The function of the Presto finale is not to continue the argument, which has now worked itself out, as to take up the activity of the first movement and complete the proportional balance of the work. A vigorous rondo with several more or less tuneful episodes, it is a virtuoso study in rhythmic ingenuity on the part of the composer and of high-speed stamina on the part of the performers - the more daring of whom take the longer, more demanding and even quicker of the two alternative endings.