String Quartet No.4, Op.25

In spite of all the personal and political misfortunes they experienced, none of Zemlinsky’s distinguished Viennese colleagues - Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern - can compete with him as a tragic figure. His major misfortune was not his notoriously ugly appearance: “A small, repugnant, chinless, toothless, and unwashed gnome," he was nevertheless attractive to Alma Mahler for “the force of intellect in every glance of his eyes and in every one of his abrupt movements.” Nor was it the manner of his death, forgotten and poverty-stricken in wartime exile in Larchmont, New York. It was his failure, consummate musician though he was, to fulfil himself as a composer.

Zemlinsky was a victim of musical history, unable to emulate Mahler and yet unwilling to follow Schoenberg - once his pupil, then his brother-in-law - into areas that were alien to his genius. Had he accepted the validity of the twelve-note technique, he might, like Berg, have been able to work out some kind of compromise. But he rejected it completely and in so doing fell out with both Schoenberg and Webern. He did on the other hand, remain on good terms with Berg, whose sudden death in 1935 so distressed him that he dropped everything else he was doing to get to work on a memorial to him in the Fourth String Quartet.

The clue to the inspiration of the work is the subtitle “Suite,” which is clear enough in the manuscript but which is omitted from the printed version (first published as long thirty-two years after the composer’s death). The subtitle allies it to the Lyric Suite that Berg had dedicated to Zemlinsky ten years earlier and at the same time accounts for both the six-part structure of the work and the generic headings. The formal scheme is that each slow movement is paired with a quick movement that makes some kind of comment on it. So the main theme of the contemplative Präludium is vigorously sent up in the quicker sections of a rondo-shape Burleske with three lyrical episodes. Similarly, the expressive material of the elegiac Adagietto is transformed into light-footed dance music in the Intermezzo. If the theme of the fifth movement is as much a cello cadenza as a barcarolle, it nevertheless gives rise to three beautifully written variations, the last of which explodes into the (so-titled) double fugue that links the two thematic cells fundamental to the work.