Jerusalem Quartet

August 17, 2001

BEETHOVEN Op.18 No.1

WIESENBERG Between the Holy and the Profane 

SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No.3

Israel is very much in the news at the moment. There haven’t been many times in recent years when it hasn’t been. Chamber music is an international language, but there are times when even so we are reminded of the players’ country of origin.  If – say – a Czech string quartet, and there have been so many great ones – comes here, we look forward especially to their Dvořák, their Smetana, or their Janáček, which we think will have not only a home-grown musical authority, but also, perhaps, a special injection of a feeling which could be called patriotic. The young members of the Jerusalem Quartet, tonight, don’t shirk the issue. They are playing music by one of their countrymen, a piece which deals explicitly with Israel’s Jewish heritage. And in Shostakovich’s Third String Quartet they leave us at the conclusion of the concert with music which at least raises the question of politics – though whether that’s Shostakovich’s intention or just the way we’ve grown used to thinking of his music is a question to be raised in this talk. If you look at the names of the members of the Jerusalem Quartet, you’ll see that like so many Israeli musicians, they may, perhaps all of them, be of Russian descent, which gives them a further link with Shostakovich, who was deeply troubled by the fate of Russia’s Jews, the kinds of pressure which may have led these young men’s parents or grandparents to emigrate to Israel.

But how much should we be focussing on these aspects of tonight? After all, the same program could be played by an English String Quartet, or an Australian one. It’s the music, I hope, we’re most here for, and it can speak for itself. Or can it? There is a pre-concert talk, so perhaps not entirely, or not exclusively. Words, then. When you look at tonight’s program listing, you’ll see the word String Quartet in two of the titles, with keys and opus numbers – and in two of the three works, just that. The third piece – the middle one – has a more evocative title: Between the Holy and the Profane. The two pieces just called String Quartet have the familiar Italian tempo indications for each movement, and that’s it. 

So I suppose you’d assume that the piece with the evocative title was more programmatic, and the other two pieces were what is sometimes regarded as the opposite of program music, so-called ‘absolute’ music. But it’s not quite that simple. At one stage the Shostakovich quartet came with a program as well, supplied by the composer. I want to test it on you, at least a little test, a teaser for the concert. What should come first, the description in words, or the musical illustration? I know what we expect: take Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, for example – the narrator tells us what we’re about to hear, then we hear the musical illustration – the duck, the grandfather, the wolf, the hunters and so on. But it isn’t always so – in Haydn’s Creation, for example, we hear the musical illustration first, then the singer tells us what it is: the lion, the horse, the sinuous worm and so on. So let me try both ways.  See what you think of the musical appropriateness.

Shostakovich’s program title for the first movement of the quartet we hear tonight was ‘Calm unawareness of future cataclysm’. And here’s how he begins in music:

PLAY: SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No.3: I

 What cataclysm? Well, it helps to know that this String Quartet was composed in 1946, the first year after the Second World War, which had been particularly terrible for Russia. The titles, as we’ll see, relate the quartet – apparently – to the war. But a warning: don’t take this program too seriously, because Shostakovich soon dropped it, and published the quartet without it. All the same, this music does have a kind of innocent insouciance. The musical strategy here has been compared with the folksy beginning of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony;

PLAY: MAHLER Symphony No.4: beginning

 Now let’s try Shostakovich’s second movement, but in reverse.  Here’s some music:

PLAY: SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No.3: II

And that has the programmatic heading ‘Rumblings of unrest and anticipation’. Well, maybe you need to hear more of it to see the relevance of that, if any. Certainly, as the music goes on it becomes stranger and more disturbed, written in two keys simultaneously and suggesting a hurdy-gurdy:

PLAY: ditto

So, as Anna Russell says, it’s obvious there’s dirty work afoot. The next title purports to show what it is: ‘The forces of war unleashed’. To return to musical descriptions, this third movement is the Scherzo, but a dance with uneven legs, one in double, the other in triple time:

PLAY: ditto: III

The next movement’s music only gradually reveals itself fully as what it is, which may be several things.  But let’s hear the beginning, a minor key unison for all four instruments, a kind of dirge:

PLAY: ditto IV

There’ll be other facets of this music later in the movement, with strong suggestions of a funeral march. So what’s the message? Well, Shostakovich’s program says this movement is ‘homage to the dead’. Maybe. But here’s another piece of extraneous information. The movement was composed, according to someone who knew, when Shostakovich was visiting his mother in Leningrad, just after the end of the war.  Leningrad, which had been under a long German siege – in which Shostakovich took part as a firefighter – was ruined. There were homeless people everywhere, many starving, and cold, cold. Maybe the movement reflects the composer’s feelings about what had happened to his city just before. But who knows exactly what a piece of music means. We can sense the deep feeling, and wonder, noting that after the first performance of this string quartet in December 1946, a pianist colleague of Shostakovich commented: ‘this man sees and feels life a thousand times more profoundly than all of us other musicians put together’.  Maybe it’s appropriate that Shoastakovich’s program for the last movement was a question: ‘The eternal question: Why? And for what?’.

Here’s the gentle beginning:

PLAY: ditto V

About the rather enigmatic ending, with the violin, as your program note says, searching its entire range for a resolution, the program note writer gives you the only part of Shostakovich’s program to which he refers:

‘Life is beautiful. All that is dark and ignominious will disappear. All that is beautiful will triumph’.

Remember Pollyanna? This reads like the propagandist equivalent of her seeing life through rose-coloured spectacles, doesn’t it? A writer on Shotakovich is dismissive of the whole program in words. ‘A bodyguard of lies’ he calls it. The kind of protective screen Shostakovich put up to deflect possible official criticism. You couldn’t write an enigmatic work with an emotionally ambivalent sub-text. If you did you had to pretend it was something else. Poor old Shostakovich – he certainly had to make his music under pressures and threats almost unimaginable to us here in Australia, though perhaps they are easier to sense for performers based in Israel. In a sense, Shostakovich was on the defensive about composing string quartets at all. For a long time, he was regarded, in the Soviet Union and especially outside it, mainly as a composer of symphonies. In 1974 a BBC producer asked Shostakovich what seemed to him an entirely reasonable question: ‘Why do you prefer symphonic form?’ and got an unexpectedly blunt response ‘I think your question could have been better put. As you know, I’ve written a great many different works – I have 143 opus numbers so far – and only fifteen of them are symphonies. I write music in the most varied genres’. 

It was the eighth string quartet, the one ‘dedicated to the victims of Fascism and War’ and later arranged by Barshai as a Chamber Symphony, which first alerted many people to the importance of Shostakovich’s string quartets. Yet he was 32 before his first string quartet appeared, by which stage there were already five symphonies.

Chamber music was perhaps a little suspect in a socialist state. In Russia it had been fostered mainly by well-off connoisseurs – not exactly music for the people. So what had changed to make writing string quartets an option? Well, Stalinist Russia wasn’t exactly revolutionary any more, especially in the arts. Traditional moulds and forms for music came to seem the only safe ones, and the string quartet was a traditional form. All the same, Shostakovich’s string quartets seem very different from his symphonies, and this third quartet we hear tonight is a very good example. His string quartets seem withdrawn, almost private, sometimes mysteriously fragmented, and very spare – sparse almost to the point of emptiness. I’m sure you’ve noticed some of those characteristics already even in the short bits I’ve played from the third quartet. But you’ll also have noticed, I think, that the music can be very intensely emotional, and seem to have a very private and personal message. This third quartet has been described as a spiritual progress from innocence to bitter experience, and at the climax of its final movement, it brings back the most intense part of the funeral march-like previous movement, like this:

PLAY: SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No.3 : V climax.

Now I want you to listen to some other music which we’ll hear in tonight’s concert, and ask yourselves whether there’s an affinity:

PLAY: BEETHOVEN String Quartet Op.18 No.1: slow movement climax

 Beethoven’s intensity here has something in common with Shostakovich, don’t you think? Not suprising, really, given that Beethoven’s cycle of 16 quartets was a model for any composer of string quartets after Beethoven. 

I mentioned earlier that this Beethoven quartet has no programmatic titles, but this movement may at one stage have had a title in Beethoven’s mind – it is said to have been inspired by the tomb scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But it may be that this is another case, rather like that of the ‘Moonlight’ sonata, where people very impressed by the evocative effect of the music, were searching for a romantic metaphor which would explain it. There could, of course, be alternative, purely musical explanations. At the risk of baffling you with technicalities, we may observe that two of the works in tonight’s program are in the same key, the same tonality – F major. This lack of contrast of key isn’t usually considered good programming. But probably it doesn’t matter, tonight, because both composers, Beethoven and especially Shostakovich, roam far away from the home key. And in the movements I’ve just been describing, both composers are in the minor mode, which is usually chosen for sad or tragic expression. Shostakovich is in C sharp minor in his slow movement, Beethoven in D minor in his. And now we can see that Beethoven’s movement heading in Italian does have a kind of programmatic implication after all.  ‘Adagio’ – a slow tempo – ‘affettuoso ed appassionato’ - that means ‘with affection and passionate’. Or perhaps ‘with passionate feeling’ - bit of a tautology here – I think Beethoven wants everyone to realise this music is unusually intense and needs to be played that way. It’s interesting, then, that he puts it in his very first string quartet – not necessarily the first he composed, but published as the first in the group of six quartets Op.18. Perhaps Beethoven realised that as a whole this quartet was the most impressive of the set – and many have agreed with him since. So it is a good one to begin the concert tonight, because it enables us to consider the utterance of a new voice in the string quartet genre – some would say the greatest, before or since. And it came at a crucial historical time. Neatly we can situate it in 1800-01, exactly 200 years ago, which is when Beethoven finished and published his Op.18 quartets.  Haydn was writing his last string quartets just then, and Beethoven had been his pupil. The idea that there should be concerts just of string quartets, like tonight’s, was just beginning to catch on, and the first professional ensembles were being formed to play them. There were many composers of good string quartets around, but what I call the iceberg view of music history means that we now see only Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. What about Pleyel? What about Foerster? Ever heard their quartets? 

I haven’t, but I’ve read enough about them to be curious. I tried an experiment in the talk I gave in Sydney last Saturday night, for another concert by the Jerusalem Quartet. I asked my audience how many of them had ever played in a string quartet, at any level of competence. Let me ask you: put up your hand if you have! You know, to my surprise no one in my Sydney audience had. The point I wanted to make was that whereas the Mozart quartet they were playing that night was something amateur string players could attempt, the Bartók quartet wasn’t. With Beethoven we’re right on the cusp. For example, if you were a viola player, you might be challenged by meeting the need to match the violinists’ phrases at this tempo in the last movement:

PLAY: BEETHOVEN String Quartet Op.18 No.1: IV beginning

But as I was listening the other night to a recording of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ Quartet, composed for the same quartet that premiered many by Beethoven, I thought how far things moved in just a few years, towards music very difficult for amateurs. The thing about Beethoven’s first set of quartets is that they didn’t pose great difficulties in playing or listening for people used to Haydn’s. You remember the emotional climax of the slow movement;

PLAY: ditto  II

That turn, the little figure Beethoven raises there to such an emotional statement – it’s right with us straight away in the quartet’s very beginning, where the themes are entirely derived from variants of it:

PLAY: ditto I

Until we get a different idea - with a different rhythm, in a different key:

 PLAY: ditto second subject

Probably this writing is even more motivic – that is, made up out of little thematic scraps – than in the string quartets of Haydn or Mozart.  But enough detail - a pre-concert talk shouldn’t, probably, be a lesson in musical analysis. Rather, a guide to listening, with some helpful pointers and suggestions. Maybe it’s best to make some comparisons and contrasts between the Beethoven quartet and the quartet by Shostakovich. I guess for a start you could definitely say that the Shostakovich is more private and allusive. Maybe even mysterious. For something like that in Beethoven, you need to go to the other end of his string quartet composing career, to the last quartet. Like the first, it’s in F major – the cycle comes full circle:

PLAY: BEETHOVEN Op.135 beginning

And the same tempo here, as Shostakovich’s beginning: Allegretto. Secondly, about the Beethoven: you could say that it’s a rather public statement – it sets out to entertain, to impress, and to move, and it often handles the string quartet medium to make an impressive sound – or not, as the case may be: in that dramatic and passionate slow movement, you’ll notice Beethoven’s very telling use of silences.  Shostakovich seems to want to make us think about things other than music – Beethoven is about music and the string quartet medium. Of course, you can try, if you wish, to match what happens in the slow movement to what happens in Shakespeare’s play when Romeo comes to Juliet’s tomb and finds her apparently dead, but when I tried to do this, I caught myself, realising that I was probably missing the music’s real point. Romanticism hasn’t begun in 1801, even though there may be an anticipation of it here. Shostakovich’s quartet is written against the background of Romanticism, so we’re allowed to look for extra-musical references in it. Finally, of course, it occurred to me that Beethoven’s quartet could well have ended the concert rather than beginning it. It’s a brilliant, applause-seeking ending, whereas Shostakovich is inconclusive, deliberately. Provided there’s no encore, we’ll leave the concert with a question posed to us. Which is, I may say, a daring program strategy.  So what about what comes in between?  Between the Holy and the Profane.  By Menachem Wiesenberg. A few basics first, which you can also get from the program notes. 

Menachem Wiesenberg is an Israeli composer, about 50 years old. He is also a professional pianist, performing as soloist, accompanist, and chamber music player.  He studied at he Juilliard School in New York. This piece of his, Between the Holy and the Profane, was composed 10 years ago. Now in terms of what I’m focussing on in this talk, Wiesenberg’s piece has the most informative title, informative, that is, about the content. Holy or Sacred, and Profane, or Secular, are usually opposites. But I think this composer has chosen the word ‘between’ advisedly. He chooses his melodic materials from two kinds of traditional or folk music – old folk music – both with Jewish connections. We note from the composer’s biography that one of his specialities is arranging Israeli and Yiddish folk songs. The Holy tunes Wiesenberg has chosen are biblical cantillations. Cantillation is the chanting of sacred texts, prayers and so on, by a solo singer in worship. It is mainly used for chanting in the Jewish synagogue. These particular ones, like Christian plainchant, exist in several local variants. Wiesenberg uses both Morroccan, Casablanca versions and Spanish, Jerusalem versions. But in the second part of his piece come the Profane or Secular tunes, in this case three wedding songs of the Jewish community of Tetuan in Spanish Morocco. Actually, they’re more similar than different, which may explain why Wiesenberg calls the piece Between the Holy and the Profane. Without further information that I don’t have, I’m not in a position to tell which are holy, which profane. Maybe one of you will know better than I, but in any case, see if you can spot the tunes which sound like chant or ancient wedding songs:

PLAY: WIESENBERG Between the Holy and the Profane: excerpt

First given before a Musica Viva concert in 2001