« I wrote a quartet in my idle moments in Naples. I had it performed one evening in my house without giving it the slightest importance, and without any invitation whatsoever. There were only seven or eight people present who are used to coming to me. Whether the quartet is beautiful or ugly I do not know … but I do know that it is a quartet! ». In these few words, straightforward and unadorned as was his custom, Verdi did not limit himself to giving some details of his life to his friend Count Arrivabene in April 1873. Willing or unwilling (rather), aware more or less, the sixty-year-old maestro also found himself shedding some light on the complex history of the string quartet (which, in turn, was about halfway through its two-decade history). In idle moments, in the intervals of composition and staging at home, without the pomp of too many invitations: with a certain aesthetic nonchalance, but with precise formal attention: so said the man who a decade earlier had refused to preside over a Società del Quartetto (‘I don’t remember if in Milan or elsewhere’). In fact, the string quartet had arisen and had long flourished in noble halls, as a form of entertainment, even for amateurs, based on the certainty of a construction, a structure and a form that did not tolerate many liberties. Webern’s five pieces for string quartet would undoubtedly have turned the classical form upside down, not even forty years later; but in 1938 the quartet op. 28 by Webern himself, as well as reweaving the threads of the form, would have worked on a dodecaphonic series derived from the letters of Bach’s name. Even further back were Malipiero’s eight quartets, composed over a fully twentieth-century forty-year period; yet, in the meantime, it was Classicism that the quartets of Prokofiev, Shostakovic, Reger and Pfitzner were aiming at, even the less vital and more academic. Further back, then, although not very far. In the late 18th century, between the slow end of the Baroque and the sudden outbreak of the French Revolution, the invention and approach of the classic string quartet were consumed. From a hundred streams, from the concerto, from the sonata for four, from the ricercare, from ancient counterpoint and from the modern galant style had derived that instrumental essentiality, that chastity of timbre, that seriousness or simplicity of speech that figured so well in the quartet: the trio was too amateurish, the sonata too indulgent of melody, the symphony too rich and colourful, the concerto too brilliant. Two violins, a viola and a cello also appealed to occasional music, aimed at pure entertainment; but above all to learned music, in whose arms they soon forgot the flattery of mid-eighteenth-century gallantry, the short breath of the three or even two movements, the significant name of “entertainment”, the pleasantly salon-like function and aristocratic and amateurish. And quartet it was, from Haydn’s Op. I, dated in the late 1750s and printed in 1764, and Boccherini’s Op. I, written in 1761 and published in 1767. Cultured, composed, refined, not lacking in humorous hints but more often austere, even serious, the quartet had no difficulty in accompanying the other classical genres in the assumption of the four-part structure, of the sonata-form, naturally of all the secrets of harmony and modulation: for the purposes of a dialogue and conversation that took place on the rule of economy (if possible) inspired by an Enlightenment of the finest water.
How to say Mozart. Mozart was in Vienna in June 1783, enjoying the company of Baron Gottfriend van Swieten who taught him a passion for old German music, Bach and Haendelian in particular. Two, even three hours were spent on Sundays in the house of the mature and cultured bureaucrat: playing, singing, improvising, reading something like The Well-Tempered Clavier and The Art of the Fugue. And the twenty-seven-year-old maestro, whose vocation had just erected the Italian, Gluckian, supranational edifice of ldomeneus, King of Crete and the proudly German one of Il Seraglio (in a catalogue of over four hundred works), also made a vigorous leap forward in the instrumental field, almost simultaneously discovering himself as another musical father and an authentic musical ancestor: Haydn, who was then in his mid-fifties, and Bach, who had been dead for over thirty years, the one enjoying a substantial topical reputation and the other unfortunately hardly even a name anymore (by Bach, then, we meant Carl Philipp Emanuel, not Johann Sebastian). But more than life and death, Wolfgang Amadeus was interested in music, technique and musical style, hence the six quartets composed between December 1982 and January 1985, published by Artaria in 1785 as op. X and dedicated to the nearby Haydn with all possible reverence for the distant Bach. The tonal impact of the cycle’s second number, the Quartet in D min. K 421: although “sotto voce”, the first bar asks the first violin for a high D and two low D’s, the second violin for six A’s, the viola for six F’s, the cello for a D and a C not yet sharp; and the second bar, while the cello continues to descend almost like an ancient passacaglia, offers the first violin the right to introduce that C sharp that ensures the key of D minor (the same as in the Piano Concerto K 466, Don Giovanni, and the Requiem). As a whole, the Allegro is alive with the austerity of the sonata-form, but above all in the whole. In the details, the inapparent richness of the piece carves out unexpected spaces, from the strange second theme to that happy ascent of the first violin which, pointed and even trilled, refuses the cello’s accompaniment. The Andante indulges only in part in the suave cantilena of which Mozart is elsewhere so capable: interwoven with pauses and close scalar connections, it succeeds in making Beethoven (Carli Ballala) present, and no less in spreading into arpeggios and agile virtuoso volutes. In Allegretto, the Minuet that follows sounds equally severe, and if it contrasts with the Trio it is only because it is so schematic (in D major) that it smells very much of parody, of a gallant piece not seriously but ridiculously intended. The work closes with an Allegretto ma non troppo that varies a Siciliana borrowed from the Sonata in A major, K 377 (for violin and piano): but there are few tendernesses that emerge from a Siciliana treated in this way, despite the liquidity of certain variations and the welcome assumption of D major, and the last bars in Più allegro have the dryness, almost the violence of tragedy.
Chamber music was a duty, a necessity for eighteenth-century composers, inclined in all genres to be an external occasion, or a personal project, or even a learned and academic punctiliousness. For Antonin Dvorak, it was all this, but also an impulse of musicality different from his symphonic vocation and theatrical passion: in almost 35 years, the enthusiastic spreader of Czech musical nationalism produced a few trios, some quintets, a sextet and several quartets. Where the respectful knowledge of the early German romantics and the friendly direct acquaintance with Brahms and his music will no doubt have operated, but no doubt alongside the Negro-American folklore, approached in the course of two trips, and the incoercible folk singing of his homeland. The Quartet in F major op. 96 ‘The American’ (1893) confirms the classic four-part division of its genre, now more than a hundred years old. The initial Allegro ma non troppo starts quietly on the tremolo of the violins and on the pedal of the cello, which in pianissimo immediately establishes the key of F major, while the melodic impetus is up to the viola. After a few more arpeggiating shynesses, it does not hesitate much to show Dvorak’s typical inventiveness, where richness and melodic liveliness coexist with a spontaneity that is not typical of quartets in general (if not that of Schubert). Classical as it may be, this movement never renounces communicativeness, which it actually enhances through the resources of the mode, with thematic and harmonic turns and twists that are pleasant, captivating, never cerebral or serious, always imbued with a winking vein of hedonism (so that the initial appeal to Smetana and the generic homage to Brahms are absorbed with the greatest of ease). The setting of the Lento is similar, opening with an octave acciaccatura and then conducted on a rather extravagant, almost rhapsodic, layout, pleased with embellishments (like trills) and high notes for the first violin; a pleasant alternation of chords rubbed with the bow and plucked with the fingers then close the movement. And they pave the way for the Scherzo that follows, simply defined as Molto vivace (then Poco meno mosso): frequent pauses, rhythmic vivacity, repetition of incises characterise the short movement, which after a parallel attack between second violin and cello, nevertheless makes use of marked tonal alternations. Much longer, the Finale is a Vivace ma non troppo (then Meno mosso) which insists on sounds, chords, incisions, obstinately and almost maliciously repeated (these are the seventeen bars all in A grave for the second violin and the same number in F for the viola). Several themes, it is customary to note, have pentatonic tendencies in this piece, but few achieve them decisively, as is easy to verify. Even if the fact that the Scherzo is an adaptation of a bird song heard in the woods of Iowa (west of Chicago) is not exactly easy to verify (twenty-five centuries earlier a Greek poet like Alcmane had written that he knew the songs of all the birds).
83 quartets by Haydn, and only one quartet contribution by Ravel (the discourse could continue comparing Mozart and Debussy, Beethoven and Berg, Schubert and Respighi). Only one and not even too problematic, at least in appearance. Of the Quartet in F major. Ravel’s Quartet, composed between December 1902 and April 1903 and performed in 1904, the critic Pierre Lalo immediately wrote in “Le Temps”: ‘in its harmonies and in its succession of chords, in its sonority and in its form, in all the elements it presents and in all the sensations it evokes, there emerges an incredible resemblance to the music of Debussy’, with the notable and declared difference that Debussy is always sensitive and suggestive, Ravel will never be able to enrich the aridity of his own geometric musical manufacture. Dedicated to his ‘cher Maître Gabriel Fauré’, the quartet opens with an Allegro moderato that immediately entrusts the beautiful theme to the first violin, while the cello rises regularly for two octaves from the low tonic: the theme will be ‘très doux’, and will reappear with the exact indication of the first tempo, but without abdicating its clear, precise, almost mechanical design, moreover unfolding through a respect for the classical form that is loosened but not cracked by the various expressive and dynamic indications. Ravel’s quartet is therefore classical, and certainly attentive to Saint-Saëns’s crystal-clear message; but since in the other three movements, carefully constructed, a theme always reappears, then it must mean that the composer’s memory is also of Saint-Saëns’s antagonist, of Franck, who in France in the second half of the 19th century represented the most genuine Wagnerian update. Thus, after a second and playful movement that is as ‘vif’ as it is ‘rythmé’, the third movement is not just the Très lent announced at the beginning: a few bars later we have Très calm and, Moderé, Pas trop lent, with frequent requests for mutes and an unpredictable acquisition of as many as five bemolli in key. Vif et agité is the fourth movement, somewhat extended and articulated (5/8, 5/4, 3/4 alternating) and also less bumpy than the others. Perhaps because in the final rather than in the middle section it is right that a piece should reveal its cards, and because the cards of Maurice Ravel’s quartet are always eager to reveal themselves. Is it the fault of aridity, insensitivity and musical automatism (shared, moreover, with Stravinsky, Hindemith and Honegger)? No, as André Suarés recommended: Ravel flirts with the classical, but ‘uses classical forms like a juggler uses his fingers’. Ravel makes fun of classical forms, renews them, transforms them with irony, like the mischievous and supreme representative of 20th-century music that he is.
Mozart is classical and sometimes romantic, Ravel classical and always parodic, and of the three composers included in this concert perhaps the most naive and natural and trusting devotee of the quartet is Dvorak himself, who would seem to be anagraphically excluded. But between Austria and France, in pure musicality Bohemia has no intention of giving way, advancing credentials that are also named Gluck and Mahler (without shame to masters such as Rameau, Debussy, Haydn and Bruckner). The centrality of European music in geographical terms also undermines those who confirm it in stylistic terms. Thanks to the quartet, therefore, alongside Mozart there is also room for Ravel and above all Dvorak.