Mozart: String Quartet in B-flat Major, K.458 “The Hunt”
Mozart simply said it best: he learned how to write string quartets from his senior colleague, Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). With his set of six Opus 20 string quartets from 1772, Haydn really did earn the nickname “the father of the string quartet”, taking a nascent genre of a sonata-like work for two violins, viola and basso and establishing it as what we know and love today, one of the monuments of our civilization: four equal voices, richly developed, in argument and conversation. So it would be that Mozart, thirteen years later, having emerged from his own stylistic development from prodigy to genius in the 1770s, dedicated his own set of six quartets—like those of Haydn, developing on a tradition, in a new and original manner—to his dear and older friend. And just as Haydn’s Op.20 quartets would mark a style of writing, as he noted, “in an entirely new and particular manner”, so it was in his six quartets dedicated to Haydn that Mozart, in the words of Alfred Einstein, “completely found himself…music made of music”; fittingly, Haydn would be present for the premiere of Mozart’s “Haydn Quartets”, at Mozart’s Vienna lodgings in 1785. As our dear departed friend of the Maverick, Miriam Villchur Berg, would note,
“The Quartet in B-flat, K.458 is the fourth of those six quartets. It was nicknamed “The Hunt” by the concert-going public, who heard hunting-horns in the opening fanfare by the violins in the Allegro vivace assai. The 6/8 meter gives it a cheerful, carefree feeling. Mozart places the Minuet and Trio (Moderato) second. Here the composer reverts to the older galant style, conjuring images of courtly dancers. The central trio offers dainty, intricate steps as contrast, after which the noble dance returns.
“The Adagio offers a languid aria in the key of E-flat, played by the first violin, with the other parts providing gentle accompaniment. At times, other instruments offer comments, but his movement belongs to the top voice. In the Finale (Allegro assai), the lightheartedness of the first movement returns. Each of the instruments takes an important role—a technique that Mozart learned from his mentor Haydn. But unlike Haydn, with his penchant for mono-thematicism, Mozart’s finale is multi-thematic, combining and interweaving several motifs. At the end, the three main themes are played in succession, leading up to a simple but definitive ending cadence”.
Carlos Chavez: String Quartet No.1 (1921)
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Carlos Chavez was to 20th-century Mexican music what Joseph Haydn was to 18th-century central Europe: the great, long-surviving, elder-statesman figure, casting an awesomely wide net as composer, performer, educator, and impresario. And as Haydn gamely negotiated the caprices of the enlightened despots of the Austrian aristocracy in the Age of Enlightenment, so did Chavez brilliantly navigate the choppy waters of post-Revolutionary Mexico in helping to create a state bureaucracy and infrastructure for the furtherance of classical music in his native land, gaining recognition for himself and for Mexican music worldwide. In a long and storied life—as Haydn was very much the musical “great man of Europe”, Chavez was truly a man of the world—Copland, Nadia Boulanger, Clare Boothe Luce and Stravinsky were among his personal friends; and as a composer, he was sincerely influenced by both European and indigenous traditions, seeking to create a distinctive, national style that reflected both the richness and diversity of Mexican musical life.
His very first String Quartet, composed in 1921 when Chavez was all of 22 years old, already shows a mastery of its genre; the quartet is in three movements, each with a contrasting character and mood. The first movement, Allegro moderato, is lyrical and expressive, and is based on a four-note motif that recurs throughout the movement in different ways. In its many variations and harmonizations, this basic idea broadly conveys a confidently European, classical style. The second movement, Lento molto espressivo, is a serene and delicate nocturne, in which the vastness of the Mexican landscape could be said to be evoked. The bracing third movement, Vivo, is a lively and rhythmic dance, inspired by Mexican folk-music and featuring syncopated accents and cross-rhythms. This String Quartet No.1 of Chavez is a work of youthful mastery, betraying the 22 year-old’s already-impressive skill in blending classical forms and techniques with elements of native, indigenous traditions.
Silvestre Revueltas: String Quartet No.4, “Musica de feria” (1934)
If Carlos Chavez was the Haydnesque, long-surviving elder-statesman of Mexican 20th-century art music, then surely Silvestre Revueltas—born in the same year of 1899, and dying of pneumonia in 1940—was the Mozart, living fast and dying young. Actually a far better analogy would be to Revueltas as the Modest Mussorgsky to Chavez’ Rimsky-Korsakov: for it might be said that Revueltas, deep down, was the more talented of the pair—Chavez being the “master operator” in the complicated musical renaissance of the Mexico of the 1920s and 30s—but, like his Russian counterpart, was ultimately brought down by poverty and alcoholism. Still, his contributions to the Hispanic cultural scene of the interwar period—it should be noted, too, that he ventured to Spain in 1937, as part of a failed effort on the part of leftist artists and writers to aid the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War—were lasting and profound, resulting in a treasured corpus of both chamber and orchestral works (one of which is his haunting Homage to Federico Garcia Lorca, which made an appearance on one of the past Chamber Orchestra concerts at the Maverick); he was also a pioneer in the realm of film music, with his stunning score to the 1939 The Night of the Mayans being perhaps his greatest work.
Revueltas’ several string quartets are still awaiting their full discovery to American audiences, but of these, the ten-minute, Fourth String Quartet of 1932, subtitled “Music of the Fair”, is a pocketful of miracles, and is deservedly the one that has placed at least a foothold this side of the border. The String Quartet No.4—in one, long movement that nonetheless breaks down into four, distinct sections that resemble a classical string-quartet structure—fully betrays the tragic genius of its composer, perhaps the mostly brilliant and wildly original voice of Latin-American music in the 20th century. Revueltas—whom the more sober Carlos Chavez would eventually hire as his first assistant conductor of the newly-formed Symphony Orchestra of Mexico—actually got his professional start as a violinist in theatre orchestras in Texas and Alabama, and the Fourth Quartet’s vivid and colorful description of a rowdy Mexican country fair is gloriously authentic while being fully attuned to the stylistic innovations of European classical music of the era. As one critic wrote, “this entire ten-minute quartet is the sort of musical postcard Bartok might have written, on a light holiday in Mexico”—but more seriously, Willard Hertz caught the measure of the music when he opined that “although it does not directly quote Mexican folksong, its melodic strains and rhythms reflect the colors of the people and the landscape; a solitary folk singer; the vitality of the popular mariachi street music, and the bustle of the market place”.
Heitor Villa-Lobos: String Quarte No.7, “Concertante”
Born in 1887, just as the storied and cultured Empire of Brazil was fading into oblivion, Heitor Villa-Lobos was to Brazilian art-music what Chavez and Revueltas were to Mexico, rolled into one. Such a simplistic statement does little justice to this amazing man, who in a long and stylish existence came to be seen as the Italians see Verdi and the Finns see Sibelius: a glamorous national hero of music. Born into a comfortable family in Rio de Janeiro, he was nonetheless—like Sir Edward Elgar, an older contemporary of similar importance—entirely self-taught, learning several instruments on his own and throwing himself into the incredibly vibrant world of fin-de-siecle Brazilian music, joining in its street ensembles, dance bands and theatre orchestras, as well as its already-hallowed European salon traditions. Truly fusing a vast range of both European classical and indigenous musical traditions into an endlessly inventive style—think of Revueltas, but with staying power—he gave, rather like Copland here in America, a new and native classical style, which is endlessly imitated but rarely achieves his level of originality, elegance and wit—not to mention, as with Haydn, a shining optimism that is most endearing.
Over a vast career as a composer, performer and personality—he cut a very elegant figure, for example, in midcentury New York—Villa-Lobos was endlessly prolific; but his greatest achievements—aside from the guitar music he wrote for the great Segovia—are his cycle of fifteen Choros and his nine Bachianas Brasileiras, for various groupings of instruments, and, most neglected of these, his seventeen string quartets. His String Quartet No.7, composed in 1942 and dedicated to the Quarteto Borgerth, has been widely seen as the most virtuosic and successful of them all; its sobriquet, “Concertante”, unlike Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet, is a nickname frankly given by its composer. In the course of its four movements—ranging from a straight-up exercise in classical sonata form, to a lyrical and expansive slow movement, to a lively and rustic Scherzo that reveals its composer’s love of Brazilian dance rhythms, to a convincing, final rondo, in which the Quartet’s opening spirit is recalled—this Seventh Quartet is truly the perfect introduction to the chamber music of this still-unsung South American genius.
– Alexander Platt
