String Quartet No.5 (1938)

Although he spent only the first half of his life in Czechoslovakia, Martinu never forgot or ceased to yearn for his roots. If there is more Bartók than Smetana or Dvorák in the Fifth String Quartet, the last and much the best of four written in Paris in the 1930s, it is no less personal for that: in its emotional intimacy and its unremitting intensity it is not unworthy of comparison with the quartets of Janácek. It is a turbulent work, inspired - like the Concerto for Double String Orchestra and Timpani - by the imminent threat of war and the (married) composer’s doomed passion for his pupil Vitézslava Kaprálová, daughter of his composer colleague Václav Kaprál. Inscribed in the sketches to Vitézslava, it was later dedicated to the Pro Arte Quartet in anticipation of a first performance in 1939. War intervened, however, and the work was not heard until just a year before the composer’s death.

Anxiety pervades the first movement in a sustained fit of jagged rhythms that, while clinging grimly to G minor, are overlaid from time to time by achingly expressive lines of Czech melody. The slow movement is more reflective but, haunted as it is by eerie pizzicato sounds and painful sobs on cello or viola, it scarcely eases the situation. Although it seems to achieve a conciliatory C major towards the end, it finally sinks into the minor. Rhythmic anxiety is resumed in the Molto vivace scherzo and continues even through the comparatively lyrical middle section. The extended and eloquently melodious but desolate Lento introduction to the last movement suggests - and the ensuing, unshrinkingly G minor Allegro confirms, not least in its allusions to the brooding Lento - that there can be no happy ending.

Although he spent only the first half of his life in Czechoslovakia, Martinu never forgot or ceased to yearn for his roots. While there is more Bartók than Smetana or Dvorák in the Fifth String Quartet - the last and much the best of four written in Paris in the 1930s - it is a worthy descendant, by way of its emotional frankness and unremitting intensity, of Janácek’s similarly inspired “Intimate Letters.” It is a turbulent work stimulated by the imminent threat of war and the composer’s doomed passion for his pupil Vitézslava Kaprálová, a brilliantly gifted composer in her early twenties. Their on-off affair obsessed both of them until she died of tuberculosis - at the age of 25 and just two months after her marriage to the unfortunate Jiri Mucha - in June 1940.

Written in an agonising period in 1938 when the young composer lost patience with her married lover and left him, the Fifth String Quartet is inscribed to Vitézslava in the sketches and it still belongs to her even though it was formally dedicated on its completion to the Pro Arte Quartet - in anticipation of a performance which, because of the intervention of the war, could not take place. The score remained unpublished and unperformed until the Novák Quartet introduced it in Prague in 1958. The composer, who had emigrated with his wife to the United States in 1941 and who remained in exile from Czechoslavakia for the rest of his life, never heard it performed.

A vital aspect of Martinu’s relationship with Vitézslava was their consuming interest in his opera Julietta which, although it was written shortly before he met her, assumed such mystical significance for them that she identified closely with its heroine and both of them habitually quoted the opera’s Julietta motif in the music they were writing at the time. Basically three adjacent notes in descending order, the Julietta motif is featured in all four movements of the Fifth String Quartet. In the opening Allegro non troppo it is incorporated in the achingly expressive lines of Czech melody that from time to time offset the jagged ostinato rhythms of a movement clinging grimly to G minor and inescapably pervaded by anxiety. The Adagio is more reflective but, haunted by eerie pizzicato sounds and painful sobs on cello or viola, it scarcely eases the situation, least of all when invaded by an agitated recall of the Julietta motif. Although it seems to achieve a conciliatory C major towards the end, it finally sinks into the minor.

Rhythmic anxiety is resumed in the Molto vivace scherzo, the Julietta motif pounding in dissonant harmonies along the bass line, and continues even through the comparatively lyrical middle section. The eloquently melodious but desolate Lento introduction to the last movement is based on an extended version of the Julietta motif. As it suggests - and as the ensuing, unshrinkingly G minor Allegro confirms, not least in its allusions to the brooding Lento - there can be no happy ending.

Gerald Larner ©2005