Robert Schumann, who celebrated his 200th anniversary in 2009, was largely regarded as a crank in his lifetime. Friends of his such as Brahms did what they could, but his music remained largely obscure until much later. His fragile mental state wasn’t helped by his secondary role as ‘Mr Clara Schumann’; his wife enjoyed a wonderful career as concert pianist and sustained Robert through his brooding depressions.
In 1842 he wrote to Clara complaining about the increasing limitations of the piano as a vessel for his ideas, and the need to attack different instruments and genres. What followed was a spectacular year of inspiration that yielded all of his most famous chamber works including the set of three string quartets, of which the A minor is the first. He had studied the great quartets of Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn in depth, simultaneously building up a well of ideas that exploded onto the page in record time. The A minor took just a week to be sketched and formed, and three months and much rehearsal later, received its premiere as a gift to Clara on her 23rd birthday.
The work opens with a bow to Bach and is characterised by the canons Schumann loved to write. The work contains much progressive tonality, constantly taking one away from a tonal centre: it is only at the end of the quartet that one can establish the key of A minor as the tonic for sure. If his studies of the above-mentioned great masters had convinced him to tackle this genre, the style is much closer to Mendelssohn in spirit. Moreover, the deeply engrained pianistic style of Schumann’s composing is evident in these works too, a factor that would persuade him not to write any more music without piano for small forces following the quartets’ completion. Schumann scholar Donald Taylor went so far as to describe the works as ‘music written for a string quartet but not string quartet music’.
Another work written at unbelievable speed was Leoš Janáček’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ for string quartet, inspired by Tolstoy’s novella of that name. The piece was finished in fifteen days, and has a fittingly intense hue - Janáček wrote that he imagined ‘a poor woman, tormented and run down, just like...Tolstoy describes’. The music is a psychological drama with great conflict at heart, almost abandoning the fields of traditional harmony.
The work as a whole seems to be constructed by the juxtaposition of melodic and rhythmic fragments. The melancholy first movement, with its opening rising motif, sets the tone of the work. The second movement scherzo is a tortured affair, with a polka-like theme that is interrupted with an icy tremolo ‘sul ponticello’ (bowed at the bridge) and a motif that foreshadows the quote in the following movement from Beethoven’s own ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ for violin and piano. The distortion and obsessive repetition of this theme transports us into the mind of the jealous husband featured in Tolstoy’s book (who catches his wife with a violinist he introduced her to, playing Beethoven’s work together. He ends up stabbing his wife with a dagger as the violinist flees). The fourth movement reprises the works opening theme before ending tearfully, as his dying wife scoffs at his request for forgiveness and denies him the custody of their children.
Janáček only achieved success in the last decade of his life, predominantly through his opera ‘Jenufa’. By that stage he was living in a virtual dreamworld, hopelessly and one-sidedly obsessed with a woman 37 years his junior, who became his unwitting muse for the rest of his life.
Beethoven’s ‘Harp quartet’ received its title from the publisher, as was often the case with Beethoven’s music. It refers to the extended pizzicato section of the first movement, where the instruments collectively sound like the plucking of a harp. Of more interest than the title though, is the unique and somewhat baffling form of the piece.
The ‘Harp’ parallels many facets of the fifth symphony, which was written alongside it. And the heroic, progressive quality evident in this and other works of Beethoven’s middle period is reflected in this quartet too, but with some intriguing anomalies such as the last movement, which is a very traditionally conceived theme and variations. This movement has stymied scholar’s attempts to contextualise this piece in Beethoven’s stylistic trajectory, but also demonstrates the remarkable ways in which the composer understood to create successful new musical edifices by doing the unexpected. In some ways this could also be seen as a continuation of Haydn’s own delight in surprising his audience and playing with and distorting form. Another plausible reason for the accessibility of the Finale is the somewhat muted reaction to his opus 59 ‘Razumovsky’ quartets, so groundbreaking and daring in their conception. It could be that he fancied giving his audience a breather with the ‘Harp’ before reverting to type with his intense and very private ‘Quartetto serioso’ opus 95.
Beethoven dedicated most of his music around this time to his patron Prince Lobkowitz, who promised him an income for life if the composer stayed in Vienna or within the Habsburg territories. Beethoven inevitably fell out with him, but not before producing some of the most memorable works in his entire output in the years 1809-1815, within which the ‘Harp’ has an assured place.
Adrian Brendel
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