String Quartet No.2, Op. 56

If you didn’t know it was Szymanowski’s Second String Quartet your first guess might well have been that it is French in origin and probably from the first decade of the twentieth century. Since the sound of the opening bars is apparently modelled on Ravel’s Quartet in F – a melodious legato line on violin and cello in octaves accompanied by quietly buzzing tremolandos in the inner parts – you might also have thought that it is the work of a young composer who has not yet found his own voice. It was indeed written in Paris, but in 1927 by a composer in his mid-forties who had just entered the last, distinctively Polish phase of his development.

The authentically Polish element in the work first makes its presence felt in the middle section of the first movement where, after a thematically significant transition, the music dramatically changes character. Clearly encouraged by Bartók’s example, Szymanowski liberates his harmonies and his instrumental colouring in a series of folk-inspired episodes some of which are as primitive in sound as others are poetic and all of which are highly sophisticated in their scoring. A reprise of the Parisian opening section is followed by a coda which briefly reconciles the two elements, not least by a closing reminder on first violin of the thematic motif that links them.

Szymanowski once described working with Góral folk music, which he got to know through lengthy visits to the Polish highlands, as “carving out ideas from impregnable and primeval granite.” There could be no better illustration than the Vivace second movement, a rough-hewn scherzo based on the tune introduced by second violin after an uninhibitedly dissonant introduction. The sound of the Tatra mountains can, however, be reconciled with the classical string-quartet texture, as Szymanowski demonstrates in the closing Lento, which is a largely fugal treatment of two themes. The first fugue takes a Góral subject (related to a prominent phrase from the first movement) on a rising tempo to a stormy climax. The second, beginning after a free central episode and a brief silence, eventually incorporates the first theme too. The heavily emphatic ending, which refers back to the second of the two themes, follows another climactic acceleration.