String Quartet No.1 in D major Op.11 (1871)

The Quartet in D major was a great achievement not only because it was Tchaikovsky’s first piece of chamber music – apart from a solitary quartet movement in B flat he had written six years earlier – but also because there was not one significant Russian model in this area of the repertoire. When he wrote it, for a concert of his own music in Moscow in 1871, he was not quite on his own, since he was well aware of the Viennese string-quartet tradition, but he clearly had no intention of writing imitation Mozart in this particular case. In fact, in spite of the composer’s respect for classsical forms and his conscience for contrapuntal textures, it is a strikingly original score.

The syncopated theme that opens the first movement, for example, is not just a modestly exotic main theme but also a vital factor in securing the identity of the work. Rhythmic syncopation is a consistent characteristic. It is not featured prominently in the largamente second subject, it is true, although it occurs there too, but it motivates the transitional passages, the closing theme of the exposition, the whole of the development, the skillfully concealed approach to the recapitulation and the accelerating allegro giusto coda.

“They don’t want to know anything else!” said Tchaikovsky, exasperated by the inordinate popularity of the Andante cantabile. He clearly had great affection for it, however – or at least for the main theme, based on a folk song he had noted down on his sister’s estate at Kamenka and had already used in a piano piece – since he later made an arrangement of the movement for cello and strings. Although the rhythms of the opening theme require the occasional 2/4 bar within the basic 3/4 metre, syncopation is not one of its characteristics. It is, on the other hand, a feature of the short transition to the second subject and of the inner parts between the melody on first violin and the chromatic accompaniment on pizzicato cello.

Syncopation also plays a prominent part in the rhythmically ingenious Scherzo, both in the outer sections and, above all in the Trio section, where the viola draws a line in apparent duple time through the triple time texture around it. In the Finale it is the delightfully scored second subject that so resourcefully stresses the off-beats as a vital contrast to the more regular material of the rest of the movement.

Gerald Larner ©2009