CHARLES RICHARD-HAMELIN WITHAPOLLON MUSAGÈTE QUARTET

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN (1732 - 1809)STRING QUARTET NO. 53 IN D MAJOR (“THE LARK”), HOB III:63, OP. 64, NO. 5Joseph Haydn’s Opus 64 dates from 1790, one of the most eventful years in the composer’s life. He began the year as he had the previous 30, at the palace of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy, which is located in an isolated area of northwestern Hungary about 60 miles (a two-day coach ride in those days) from Vienna. Haydn had once said that he “hoped to live and to die” in the service of the music-loving prince. By 1790, however, his attitude had soured, and he chafed at his forced residency at the Esterházy palace. Vienna had been the focus of Haydn’s attention for some years. The city was the scene of much music making both public and private, and the composer had many friends there.One of these friends was Marianne von Genziger, the young, pretty, and very musical wife of an Esterházy court physician. Frau von Genziger had turned Haydn’s head, and the correspondence between the two contains some of the composer’s most intimate thoughts. In a letter to Marianne dated 27 June, Haydn revealed how odious his job had become:“I am forced to remain here [at the Esterházy estate]. Your Grace can imagine how much I lose by having to do so. It really is sad always to be a slave, but Providence wills it so. I am a poor creature! Always plagued by hard work, very few hours of recreation, and friends? What am I saying! One true one? There aren’t any true friends anymore - one lady friend? Oh yes! There might be one. But she’s far away from me.”

And then on 28 September Prince Nicolaus died and Haydn’s whole world changed. Nicolaus’s heir, Prince Anton, dismissed the court orchestra, and Haydn was informed that he could keep his salary and title, but that he was no longer required to stay at the Esterházy palace. Not surprisingly, the composer was on the next coach to Vienna carrying hardly any belongings save his razor and the clothes on his back. He enjoyed some time in Vienna, but by New Year’s Day 1791, Haydn had reached the port of Dover, England, on his way to the first of his lengthy residencies in London.The Quartets, Op. 64, were composed amidst this physical and emotional upheaval, but one would be hard pressed to find any evidence of it in the music. Unlike many later composers, Haydn considered his personal problems personal. Music, he said, must be composed “according to the rules of art.” The Fifth of the quartets is about as amiable as it could be. The work earned its nickname from the high-pitched opening melody played by the violin. For the second movement, the label “cantabile” (like a song) is essential. The piece is indeed a song, much like an operatic aria, “sung” by the first violin. The menuet is lively and fun, and sprinkled with unexpected twists of harmony. The whirlwind finale is a cascade of sixteenth notes, with the first violinist instructed to play “soft and always staccato” (short, detached notes). The ending comes all too soon, but it should leave you with a smile on your face.

© Mark Benson, Ph. D.

KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI (B. 1933)STRING QUARTET NO. 3 “LEAVES FROM AN UNWRITTEN DIARY”Penderecki’s Third Quartet, commissioned by the Shanghai Quartet, received its first performance during a special festival honoring the Polish master’s 75th birthday. The string quartet repertoire has been enriched by a splendid new work that has already been adopted by many groups and performed in concert all over the world. Due to the work’s great success, Penderecki also issued an alternative version as string quintet with double bass. (Since then, Penderecki has composed a Fourth Quartet, which was premiered in 2016.)Penderecki rarely gives his works programmatic subtitles. The fact that he chose to do so in this case shows that this quartet meant something special to him. Returning to the genre after a forty-year hiatus (his first two quartets were written in the high modernist style that made the young Penderecki a leading composer of his generation), Penderecki reconnects with some old memories, and with earlier “confessional” quartets such as Sibelius’s Voces intimae (1909) or Janáček’s Intimate Letters (1928). Although Penderecki hadn’t written a quartet in decades, in 1991 he composed a String Trio, and in the present quartet he expanded on some of the musical ideas in that work. But there are other reminiscences as well, such as a modified folk melody, of which Penderecki said that it is a gypsy tune, perhaps from Romania, that his father used to play on his fiddle.The quartet is in a single movement, divided into several sections. Violinist Amanda Wang, who has devoted an entire doctoral dissertation to the work at Boston University, has identified five major divisions—a brief introduction; a Vivace section; a central slow nocturne, prefaced by a languid quasi-waltz; a second Vivace where the gypsy tune appears; and a brief, slow coda. This outline is filled out with music in turn passionate, intensely lyrical and tragic. A wild ostinato consisting of the constant repeat of a single minor-third interval, returns periodically as a dramatic force propelling the quartet forward. After many mood changes amounting to an emotional journey of rare power, the quartet concludes with some ethereal, dreamlike sounds.

© Peter Laki, Ph. D.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841 - 1904)PIANO QUINTET NO. 2 IN A MAJOR, OP. 81For the first twenty years of his professional career, Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) made steady progress as a composer, organist and conductor in his native Bohemia. He was well respected in Prague, where most of his early works were published, but he was virtually unknown outside of Eastern Europe. In 1874, Dvořák began submitting works to an annual composition contest in Vienna, whose most prominent judge was Johannes Brahms. He won a stipend in that contest, and won again in 1877. Brahms was so

impressed by a set of vocal pieces entitled Moravian Duets that he recommended them to his own publisher, the giant Berlin firm of Simrock. Their success led to Simrock’s commission for the Slavonic Dances, op. 46, in 1878, which soon became best sellers all over Europe. Their success unleashed a flood of commissions and invitations that continued unabated until the composer’s death.For most of the 1880s, Dvořák accepted commissions from any organization that cared to pay him. He traveled often, and made five trips to London alone. In 1887, however, the composer took a break to look back at some of his earlier works that had not been published, or had rarely been performed. One of those was a Quintet for Piano and Strings, op. 5, which had been composed and performed in 1872, but had not been played much at all in the fifteen years since. As so often happens when composers go to revise their earlier works, Dvořák found that writing a completely new piece would be a less onerous task. His Opus 81 was the result.The Quintet begins quietly with a pensive melody for the cello accompanied by the piano. The dreamy mood is shattered, however, with the abrupt entry of the other instruments, who clearly have more serious business in mind. This contrast between tranquil tunes and bustling activity recurs throughout the movement. A similar alternation of moods is found in the second movement in which Dvořák uses the dance form known as a dumka. This term originally denoted a slow, meditative folk song from the Ukraine. By the time he composed his Quintet, however, Dvořák considered the dumka to have not only a meditative section, but a much livelier section as well. The movement begins and ends with the slower music, which becomes increasingly more melancholy each time it returns. The contrast is provided by a slightly faster, but much brighter section.Dvořák follows this with a furiant, a fast, cheerful dance that often follows a dumka when folk musicians perform. Its main purpose is to cancel out any gloomy thoughts that may have accumulated during the dumka. The final movement shows less influence from folk music than the previous ones. It is good-natured and lively, save for a brief section in the middle in which Dvořák introduces a fugue. Toward the end there is a passage of long, slow, very quiet notes, but this merely sets the stage for the joyful ending. Quintets for piano and strings are fairly rare in chamber music. For the most part, they had their heyday from the 1840s, when Robert Schumann wrote his quintet, through the 1880s, when Dvořák wrote his. Quintets by Johannes Brahms (1864), César Franck (1879), and Dmitri Shostakovich (1940) round out the handful of great works in the medium.

© Mark Benson, Ph. D.