Elias Quartet program notes MOZART STRING QUARTET in C MAJOR, K. 465 DISSONANCE (1785) A few short months after Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, Haydn finished his six Op. 33 string quartets. This was a major event in the genre, and Mozart was among the many composers in Vienna and elsewhere who took notice. Like Haydn, Mozart also had not written any quartets since 1773 but Op. 33 demonstrated to Mozart that he had some major catching up to do. Because his early quartets often featured lighter, homophonic violin-plus-accompaniment texture, he struggled to master Haydn s more equal-voiced style. His manuscripts bear an extraordinary number of cross-outs and fragmentary beginnings, a significant number of revisions in points of detail (individual notes, scorings of chords) as well as large-scale alterations to sections and even entire movements (Mozart scholar John Irving). Mozart s famous dedication of these six new quartets to Haydn mentions that they were the fruits of long and laborious toil, and it showed after finishing only three quartets and starting a fourth by the summer of 1783, Mozart abandoned the project for over a year. Once he returned to it in the Autumn of 1784, he finished the final three quartets quickly, and tonight s quartet was the last of the six. Attention has rightly focused on the remarkable dissonance in the opening bars (Mozart s only slow introduction for a string quartet). Even Haydn held reservations about the extreme chromaticism of the passage, and forty years later, two 19 th century theorists still debated it, each offering corrections to Mozart s cross-relations that differed from each other! Yet that harmony is just one weapon in Mozart s vast arsenal of sophisticated late-style techniques displayed with abundance throughout the quartet. The bright sunshine of Mozart s Sonata-form Allegro which follows features an profusion of lighthearted secondary themes. And that renders the following development section all the more remarkable. The rich chromaticism of the opening returns, as Mozart focuses exclusively on varied presentations of the primary theme. Both the length of development section (almost fifty bars) and the extensive coda at the end (with further permutations of the primary theme) depart from Mozart s earlier style, where such sections got short shrift if Mozart employed them at all. All these features combine to make this longer than any Haydn first movement in Op. 33.
Mozart s late harmonic richness surfaces again in both the primary and secondary themes of the heart-felt Andante cantabile movement. He sets it in Sonatina form (Sonata form without development section), and in typical 18 th -century fashion heavily ornaments this material when it returns in the recap. But Mozart s structural maturity also surfaces as he recomposes the recap as well, extending and developing the secondary theme. Baron van Swieten opened his library of Bach and Handel to Mozart when he moved to Vienna, and Mozart s newfound richness of Baroque motivic counterpoint appeared in the violin and cello dialogue of the transition section. Such counterpoint also dominates passages in the Minuet and Trio as well. A melodically chromatic pickup for the first violin opens the minuet theme, and its new motivic interplay among all string parts when the theme returns almost obscures its arrival. Mozart also sets the Trio in a new key (C Minor). He employs this broader harmonic canvas in five of the six trios in these Haydn quartets, while Haydn changed key for his Trios only once in the Op. 33 set. The Allegro finale in Sonata form includes a wonderfully light-hearted virtuoso violin solo in the secondary section, followed by an unexpected cadence in the wrong key (E-flat Major) for ten bars before order is restored. And once again, Mozart reaches beyond the simple repetitions found in his earlier forms. In typical late fashion he recomposes and extends the material in the recap, crowned by another substantial coda lasting almost fifty bars. Mozart s struggles to master this new quartet style paid off handsomely, for critics and historians consider these six quartets longer, more complex and harmonically richer than the Haydn s Op. 33. Haydn soon followed with twelve masterful quartets (Op. 50 & 54/55), launching one of the greatest (friendly) rivalries in music history. DUTILLEUX AINSI LA NUIT Thus the Night (1976) Henri Dutilleux initially followed the path of many prominent 20 th -century French composers. He won the Prix de Rome competition in 1938, and his earliest works reflect the influence of Ravel and Debussy. In his two symphonies from the 1950s, however, his style broadened as Dutilleux reached further afield. He began to draw on some decidedly non-french sources: Bartok jazz and the 19 th -century German concept of the masterpiece writes critic Caroline Potter. His orchestral style remained basically consistent since his second symphony (1959), commissioned by the Boston Symphony. Sergey Koussevitsky, Boston s
longtime conductor, remained an ardent champion of contemporary music, and Dutilleux served as composer-in-residence at Tanglewood (the Summer Festival home of the Boston Symphony) in 1995 and 1998. The Koussevitsky Foundation commissioned Ainsi la nuit, which Dutilleux finished in 1976, and dedicated it to both Olga Koussevitsky (Sergey s widow) and the memory of a friend (Ernest Sussman). In Beethoven s Pastoral Symphony of 1808, he provided each movement with a few words of description: Scene by the Brook or Storm. He stressed that the words suggested only a general feeling, not a specific program of events. Dutilleux takes the same approach in Ainsi la Nuit. Each of the seven main movements includes a one or two-word title, but Joan Rogers writes that they are not meant to be anecdotal or programmatic, but only suggest a certain poetic or spiritual mood. Dutilleux had not written a string quartet since his student days. He said he primarily studied Webern s 1913 Six Bagatelles for string quartet as preparation. Ainsi la nuit is written in a similarly striking progressive style, a series of studies in timber, mood, punctuation of color and texture (Rogers). Dutilleux also said the seven movements are isolated fragments without real links between them. That is true, but his Parentheses between the first five movements briefly provide just such a linkage. He was fascinated by concepts of memory, and its role in the work of Marcel Proust. The play of memory and anticipation, so beloved by Proust, plays a prominent part in Ainsi la nuit. The parentheses either develop past motives or anticipate the next ones. Or both: Parenthese 1 heralds the pizzicato of the following Miroir but concludes with the opening of the previous Nocturne. The theme in harmonics throughout Parenthese 3 anticipates the opening theme of Litanies 2, octaves lower in the viola and cello. The brief, eight-bar introduction to the quartet likewise contains much of the material explored in the seven main movements that follow. BEETHOVEN STRING QUARTET in C-SHARP MINOR, OP. 131 (1826) This piece shares a remarkable feature with the Mozart quartet heard earlier on the program. Both composers wrote these works without commission. For Mozart in particular this was both rare, given the scope of the project (six quartets, his largest single opus in any genre), and extraordinary. He wrote for performance and/or commission, and always needed the money a commission brought. Beethoven s continuous aristocratic support made the gesture less
dramatic, but remarkable nonetheless. Both men were challenging themselves, writing for art alone. The quartets share one other feature as well: these commission-less works were among the most astounding creations of their respective eras. Mozart s harmony in the introduction left 18 th -century audiences and musicians behind. In 1829 (almost 40 years after Mozart s death, and two years after Beethoven died), theorists Francois Fetis and Francois Perne still debated how to correct Mozart s quartet and arrived at different conclusions! Beethoven s quartet seemed equally incomprehensible to his contemporaries, writing the seven movements in six different keys as well as thirty-one tempo changes a variety of textures and a diversity of forms (fugue, suite, recitative, variation, scherzo, and sonata form), writes biographer Maynard Solomon. The critic for earsense expresses a similar spirit about Op. 131, that Beethoven made his quartets more complicated, more difficult to play more intellectually and emotionally intense Simply, more profound. Yet despite the complexity of the music s surface, Beethoven scholar Joseph Kerman nonetheless argues that this is the most integrated of all Beethoven s compositions. Beethoven begins with a full-scale Fugue, his only such opening for any multi-movement work. This is not the simpler structure of his finale to the C Major Quartet Op. 59 no. 3, with its imitative themes mere window dressing for a standard sonata-form movement. Instead, this restrained fugue maintains the structural integrity of Bach but with five changes in key signature, something Bach never contemplated in a single movement. Yet Beethoven s modulations (C-sharp Minor and Major, E Major, B Minor, A Major, and D Major) anticipate the key centers of the movements ahead the first hint of a long-range unified structure. The lively and lyrical D Major Sonata-form movement which follows links the primary and secondary themes by opening with the same seven-bar melody before spinning to different conclusions. The 11-bar third movement in B Minor serves as an introduction to the remarkable fourth movement Theme and Variations. This gentle theme and its extended treatment provide the emotional center of the quartet. He reaches far beyond the genre s treatment in Haydn and Mozart s era with the extraordinary step of presenting each of the last five variations and coda in its own separate tempo. Yet the basic 32-bar structure of the theme remains basically intact, despite the myriad contrasting
changes of mood and tempo another foundation of unity amidst all the complex surface activity. After such emotional power, a release is in order. It s time to play, and Beethoven next fashions one of his most breathtaking and delightful Scherzo and Trio movements at Presto tempo. The humorous, staccato Scherzo section contrasts with the smooth legato lines of the Trio, which Beethoven states twice for a five-part structure. Yet once again, another link the same motive of a rising fourth appears in both the Scherzo and Trio themes. A brief but lovely Adagio sixth movement lasting only 28 bars serves as the introduction to the dramatic Sonata-form finale. It not only returns to the C-sharp Minor key of the opening movement fugue (before closing in C-sharp Major), but the primary theme also provides a transformation of that fugal subject. Beethoven has also linked all seven movements together through shared figuration, sharing of pitches or attacca designations all helping to facilitate a common ground between consecutive movements. This was Wagner s favorite quartet of Beethoven, and he even wrote an accompanying narrative for it. Schoenberg said the unified structure inspired his first quartet, Op. 7 a single-movement work. Schubert requested its performance on his deathbed, which meant it was among the last music he heard. And Beethoven himself valued it highly, writing to a friend that it contains a new manner of part-writing and, Thank God, less lack of imagination than before. Program notes by Ed Wight