String Quartet

Introductory Movement -

Main Movement

Lutoslawski suffered the double misfortune of experiencing artistic repression under both the Nazi occupation of Poland - when the only form of musical activity available to him was playing the piano in a Warsaw café - and the post-War Stalinist regime which banned his “formalistic” First Symphony in 1949. The consolation was that, after changes brought about by the Gomulka government in 1956, Poland was the first country in the Soviet bloc to liberate its musical life from political control. Lutoslawski, who had long been thinking on progressive lines, though concealing his experiments in incidental music, was well placed to benefit from the new access to the latest developments in Western Europe and America. Within a few years the Polish avant-garde, with Lutoslawski one of its leading protagonists, was reciprocating with its own startling developments.

The String Quartet - which was commissioned by Swedish Radio and first performed by the LaSalle Quartet in Stockholm in 1965 - is one of the most radical expressions of Lutoslawski’s reaction to what he perceived as the dead-ends represented by the tonal system on the one hand and post-Webern serialism on the other. It derives, very basically, from the experience of hearing John Cage’s Piano Concerto in 1960 and the revelation of the potential of the chance element in music. But for Lutoslawski, meticulous craftsman and disciplined thinker as he was, chance had to be controlled. The notion of “controlled aleatorism” first emerged in the Jeux Vénetiens in 1961 and was further developed, by way of Trois Poèmes d’Henri Michaux, in the highly sophisticated “aleatoric counterpoint” of the String Quartet.

The fundamental concept of the String Quartet is that, as the composer puts it in the score, “each performer should play his part as though he were alone.” Each one plays as a soloist, with all the freedom that implies, interpreting such things as ritenuto and accelerando signs, rubato, pauses and even tempo in his own way - as long as he is prepared to meet with his colleagues at certain well signposted junctions. Obviously in such circumstances, the precise harmonic and rhythmic relationships between the parts are unpredictable and subject to chance. But that is the whole point. “Nothing could happen,” says Lutoslawski, “that has not been foreseen by the composer.”

The Introductory Movement begins, in a sense, before it starts: the first violin very discreetly repeats a phrase of three detached notes until, as the score dictates, “the audience has become completely quiet.” He can then proceed, in his hesitant way, to introduce the intervals fundamental to the piece, semitones and tritones prominent among them. Quarter-tones have a role to play too, as the first entries of the other three instruments successively confirm. A quite different kind of material, a pair of percussive octaves on C, is briefly introduced by the cello and, after a moment of panic, vigorously taken up by the whole quartet. This deliberately primitive motif then acts as a kind of ritornello separating episodes varying between more or less conventionally notated metrical counterpoint in four-part pizzicato, growling quarter-tones on cello and viola, sustained harmonics, a legato version of the pizzicato counterpoint… The last episode ends with a reminiscence on cello of the first violin’s hesitant beginning.

The first half of the Main Movement, which follows without a break, is a highly dramatic development of the material introduced in the previous movement. Again the structure is a series of episodes distinguished by their characteristic textures, including a prolonged assault of pizzicato and frequent interventions of wailing glissando. But this time the ritornello of octave Cs is not there to separate them and when it is heard it is in a variety of disguises and distortions. The appassionato climax spirals upwards until it disappears off the fingerboard into near silence. It is followed in the second half of the movement by a whispered chorale of sustained harmonies and then an eloquently lamenting funebre . The coda is an abbreviated, attenuated and ghostly reflection of preceding events.

Gerald Larner©