Mozart: String Quartet No. 21, K. 575
The young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) had privileged access to a world of musical knowledge, and he absorbed all of it. Everywhere his travels as a keyboard prodigy took him—London, Paris, Milan, Vienna—he folded the best local practices into his compositional toolkit. Thanks to Joseph Haydn, Vienna was the epicenter of the string quartet, and Mozart wrote his finest early quartets during the summer he spent there as a 17-year-old.
Mozart wrote no more quartets before he moved to Vienna in 1781, but the publication that year of Haydn’s latest set revived Mozart’s interest, leading him to compose a series of quartets between 1782 and 1786, a period when he also befriended Haydn and played quartets with him for fun. He turned to the genre one last time after he visited the royal court in Berlin in 1789 and made a positive impression on King Wilhelm Friedrich II; Mozart added the String Quartet in D Major (K. 575) to his log of compositions a few months later, noting that it was intended for the Prussian king, but it appears that he was never paid for the commission, and the planned set of six quartets stalled after he finished just three.
String quartets at the time were often played by amateurs for their own entertainment, and the king was a decent cellist himself, so it’s likely that Mozart wrote this quartet anticipating that his royal patron would be part of the ensemble. There’s a lovely section in the Andante movement, for instance, where the cello answers melodic fragments from the first violin, delivered in matched phrases that could come straight out of a tender operatic duet. In the contrasting trio section of the Menuetto, the cello soars high into its treble range, with the violins and viola dropping down to provide accompaniment.
Barber: Adagio From String Quartet Op. 11
Samuel Barber (1910-1981), a child prodigy from a musical family, enrolled in the founding class at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 14. He went on to win the American Academy’s prestigious Rome Prize, which bankrolled his Italian residency from 1935 to 1937. During that time, Barber composed his String Quartet (Opus 11) as well as an adaptation for string orchestra of the quartet’s slow movement. It was that Adagio for Strings that launched Barber’s international career, when Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra debuted it on a radio broadcast in 1938. This mournful excerpt has been played at the funerals of John F. Kennedy and Leonard Bernstein, in the devastating war film Platoon, and in a televised performance at the BBC Proms four days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, cementing its status as The Saddest Music Ever Written, to borrow the title of Thomas Larson’s 2010 book on the Adagio.
This Molto adagio (“very slow”) movement, as it is marked in the original quartet, centers on a melodic gesture of three rising notes, creating a persistent sense of unfulfilled yearning and reaching. Drawn-out suspensions in the harmonies generate waves of tension and release while a grounded bass line progresses with glacial patience.
Dvořák: String Quartet No. 14 in A-flat major, Op. 105
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) might have been stuck forever in Prague, underpaid and unknown to the world, had it not been for an intervention on his behalf by the celebrated composer Johannes Brahms, who arranged for an introduction to his publisher in 1877. Almost overnight, Dvořák became an international star, famous for the Slavonic Dances and other pieces that embraced the folk traditions of his Czech homeland.
Despite having forged his reputation with short and simple compositions rooted in local color, Dvořák’s real calling (like Brahms before him) was to engage with the formal structures and traditions that had crystallized in the time of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. As a violist himself, Dvořák was particularly adept at writing string quartets, a format that had long been a proving ground for serious composers, and one that even Brahms had struggled to find his footing with.
Dvořák began his String Quartet No. 14 in A-flat Major (Op. 105) in March of 1895, as he was preparing to leave New York after several years spent there directing a new conservatory. He completed the score that December in Prague, having paused for several months to draft a different string quartet. After this final quartet, Dvořák pivoted away from abstract forms and dedicated his remaining years to tone poems and operas.
The String Quartet No. 14 begins with a slow introduction, a structure popularized by Haydn. This section previews the main theme of the first movement, making for a seamless transition into the fast continuation. Blurred boundaries between major and minor keys introduce the type of emotional ambiguity that is a hallmark of Czech folk music.
The second movement serves as the quartet’s scherzo, introducing “very lively” music in a three-beat pulse reminiscent of a Czech folk dance. The contrasting trio section has ample space to develop its alluring themes before it dovetails smoothly into a return of the original minor-key statement.
In the “very songlike” slow movement, the four voices harmonize with each other exquisitely, especially when the foreground melody drops into the inner voice of the second violin. A more insistent central section, driven forward by pulsing accompaniments, offsets the serene and tuneful treatment of the main theme. This pulsing makes a haunting return at the end.
The finale begins with a menacing solo from the cello, and the upper voices shudder in response with a tense dissonance. Then, as if with a shrug, the music slips effortlessly into the home key. It’s a testament to the particular ease and fluidity that Dvořák cultivated within the structures of “absolute” music, making the path through a rigorous form seem as natural as a stroll through the Bohemian countryside.
