String Quartet No.1 in C major Op. 37 (1917)

In 1917, when he was working on his the first of his two string quartets, Szymanowski was in a difficult situation. Until then, having been born into the Polish landed gentry with an estate in the Ukraine, life had been easy for him, but suddenly, with the October Revolution and the loss of the family home at in Timoszówka, he had to face what he called “the scoffing, cynical force of brutal facts.” That could well explain why he was unable to complete what had been going to be a four-movement quartet. Certainly, it was at this time that he found he could no longer compose and started writing a novel. Although his musical creativity was restored within a few months, he never produced a fourth movement for the String Quartet. He finally resolved the situation by putting the Scherzando alla burlesca after rather than before the Andante semplice and presenting the work as a three-movement construction complete in itself. It was published and first performed in that form in Warsaw in 1924.

Another reason for Szymanowski’s difficulty with the First String Quartet could be that he was moving away from the hyper-impressionistic style that had served him so well in such recent masterpieces as the First Violin Concerto towards something more “classical.” That description scarcely applies, however, to the highly wrought first movement. Given its pervasive chromaticism, its crowded contrapuntal textures, its elaborately detailed instrumental colouring, its constantly fluctuating tempi, it is closer to Viennese expressionism than Viennese classicism. In its construction, on the other hand, it does approximate to classical sonata form. It has a slow introduction, featuring a perilously high first violin, and a quicker main section with two principal themes. T­he first of these themes is introduced low on the first violin as, on a pizzicato cello chord, the tempo changes from Lento assai to Allegro moderato. Always in a slower tempo than the first, the more lyrical second theme is a combination of a sustained first-violin line and a caressing chromatic figure on second violin or viola just below it. The two themes pass through an eventful development and are then recalled in their original form before an accelerating coda, based on the first theme, brings a dramatic end to the movement.

The idyllic Andante semplice is more nearly “classical” than the first, at least in melodic line and texture. The main theme came to Szymanowski when he was sitting in a famously beautiful 18th-century formal garden at Zofijówka near Humán in the summer of 1916. At the same time, although the composer adds in modo d’una canzona (in the manner of a song) to the tempo direction, it is far from song-like in form. In fact, it is a remarkably spontaneous construction that develops for the most part from the violin melody in the opening bars but then changes the subject to a different but equally expressive melody, also introduced by violin, and never returns to the first.

The idea is to leave the Andante semplice open-ended and to lead, by way of two brief but surprising three-note interjections, into the last movement. Here is another surprise: the cello enters with what sounds like a fugue theme and, sure enough, the viola promptly takes it up – but in the wrong key. The second violin enters in another wrong key and the first violin in yet another. Each instrument has, in fact, a different key signature. The sound is not, however, as cacophonous as that might suggest either here on a later episode based on the rhythm of the three-note interjections. The last surprise of this strident and yet witty scherzo is the way that, at the end, the four instruments agree on one key and meekly perform a perfect cadence.