String Quartet in E minor

On the top shelf of his bedside bookcase at Sant’ Agata Verdi kept copies of the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. His Shakespeare and Dante were there too but no music apart from the quartets. He is known to have read them regularly and it was a habit of his to slip one of the volumes into his pocket whenever he went out. Even then it is surprising that, having decided to write a string quartet – which is surprising enough anyway for a highly successful opera composer in his sixtieth year – Verdi should have adopted a style derived as much from classical precedent as from his own time. After Falstaff, twenty years later, the classical ambition of Verdi’s String Quartet would not have seemed so unlikely but between Aida and the Requiem it is a remarkable phenomenon. It is even more remarkable that but for the illness of Teresa Stolz, his Amneris, which held up rehearsals for a production of Aida in Naples, he might not    even have had the time to write it.

Although he was a little embarrassed by the work, three years after its first private performance he allowed it to be published and performed in public. In spite of his belief    that “the string quartet is a plant unsuited to Italian soil,” it is quite clear from the Amneris-like shape of the first theme of the first movement where it is planted. The contrapuntal style – like the fugal treatment of the cello figure early on in the exposition – derives from classical practice. But the material, like the second subject sweetly harmonised in G major, is unmistakably Italian.

The two middle movements are texturally less complex. There is some busy imitative activity in the middle of the Andantino but none of it is applied to the minuet-like main theme which does not lend itself to that sort of treatment. It is, on the other hand, a suitable case for the harmonic treatment Verdi so enterprisingly applies to it. As for the Prestissimo third movement, an obviously Italian version of the late Beethoven scherzo, it moves too fast to allow for more than one thing at a time. The central trio section is a delightful serenade – for tenor disguised as a cello – to which the only appropriate accompaniment is the strummed chords of the other instruments.

The last movement, on the other hand, is a tour de force of contrapuntal virtuosity. Like the closing chorus of Falstaff, it retains its sense of humour in spite of its fugal learning. It is not, of course, a strictly fugal construction: after the first four entries it is more a matter of keeping up appearances than sustaining a full-scale academic development. It is brilliantly done, however, with two briefly quiet episodes to offset the generally agitated activity and, as the key changes to E major, the Windsor-Forest merriment towards the end.