Jerusalem Quartet
19 August 20
HAYDN String Quartet Op.76 No.5
WIESENBERG Between the Sacred and the Profane
MENDELSSOHN String Quartet Op.12
It’s difficult to know what to do, sometimes, in a pre-concert talk, especially a short one. There are some dilemmas, and they pose themselves mainly by wondering: how prepared is my audience, and what are they expecting? Perhaps they are looking at the talk as a substitute for buying a program – he’ll tell us what’s being played, and something about it – then we’ll be better prepared. At the opposite extreme is the woman who complained to me at a talk for this same string quartet on Friday night in Hobart that it was all very well my saying ‘you may already have read this in the printed program’, but the programs were not on sale by the time the talk began! But let me pay you the compliment of assuming that you know already what’s on the program: Haydn, Mendelssohn, familiar composers, those, and an unfamiliar composer, Wiesenberg. Perhaps I should concentrate on telling you about the unfamiliar one? But how familiar are Haydn and Mendelssohn – or rather, the particular works of theirs we hear tonight?
Take Haydn Op.76. You may know that this is a set of six string quartets. But which one is Op.76 No.5? Can you remember how that goes? I can remember the ones with nicknames: The ‘Fifths’ Quartet, the ‘Emperor’ Quartet, and the ‘Sunrise’ Quartet. But what about this one? I have to confess that I couldn’t remember how it went, though of course I recognised it when I began to study it for this talk. And it turns out it does have a nickname, in German-speaking countries, at least, it’s called the ‘Largo’ quartet, or ‘the quartet with the famous Largo’.
That’s because of the slow movement, which is long – almost as long as the other three movements put together – and very striking. It has an unusual title, ‘Largo cantabile e mesto’ (very slow, sad, and in a broad, singing style). About that unusual word ‘mesto’ in the title: in Sydney last week the Jerusalem Quartet played another string quartet which uses that word in its movement titles, the sixth of Bartók. In my talk I said that Bartók almost certainly got the title from Beethoven, who uses it in one of his Rasumovsky Quartets. After the talk, a friend of mine, who happens to be one of Australia’s leading Haydn experts, came up to me and said – ‘You know, David, Haydn used that word “mesto” in one of his tempo indications, too. Do you know which quartet it was in? I muttered something about Op.76, and he said, ‘It’s Op.76 No.2’. Then when I got home I found an email from him, saying that he’d gone home and checked, and he had to correct himself – it wasn’t Op.76 No.2, it was Op.76 No.5 – the very quartet, in fact, we’ll hear this morning. My friend’s email added: ‘I wasn't wrong, obviously, in thinking that one of my major goals in retirement should be to study properly the Haydn quartets – there’s clearly a need!’. Well, I had told myself the same thing, though unlike him I’m not planning to retire – not just yet! This same former colleague of mine, in the same email, gave me a very useful connection for this talk. He told me that Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix’s sister, reported that her brother had played through this movement, the Largo from the quartet we’re about to hear, the one marked ‘mesto’ – sad, and that he, Felix, found it cheerful. This tells us two things: one, that Mendelssohn knew the Haydn quartets well, and two, that sensibilities change. In this remarkable slow movement, there’s a quite extraordinary passage, which makes more sense in context. Before I play it to you, I need to mention that this movement is in a most unusual key for the 18th century – F sharp major. Then it goes to even stranger places:
PLAY: HAYDN, Op.76/5 MVT II
A passage, one authority has said, unique in the Haydn quartets in both texture and harmonic progression. Now Mendelssohn, in reportedly finding this movement cheerful, was being honest – because he certainly understood the music. How does a string quartet by Mendelssohn sound? It’s a funny thing, but most of us probably don’t remember. And you know why? I think it’s because all his other string music has been eclipsed by this:
PLAY: MENDELSSOHN Octet: Scherzo
That’s the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Octet, that unbelievably precocious work of genius by a 16-year old. This fairy-like music, also found in his music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a Mendelssohn trademark, and perhaps you’re hoping there’ll be something like it in today’s quartet, too. Well, there is:
PLAY: MENDELSSOHN String Quartet Op.12: Scherzo
But Mendelssohn didn’t invent this kind of music, or not entirely. You wouldn’t expect a 20 year-old not to be influenced by his predecessors, and sure enough, there’s something very similar in a quartet by Cherubini, written in 1814, 15 years before Mendelssohn’s:
PLAY: CHERUBINI String Quartet No.1: MOVEMENT III
Mendelssohn may not have known that music by Cherubini, but here’s something he certainly did know, the opening of Beethoven’s so-called ‘Harp’ Quartet:
PLAY: BEETHOVEN, Op.74 BEGINNING
Now here’s how Mendelssohn begins his quartet, the one we hear today, in the same key as Beethoven:
PLAY: MENDELSSOHN String Quartet Op.12: BEGINNING
Actually, there is something you may recognise, in this Mendelssohn quartet, though you may not have been able to place it, if I’d played it without telling you, especially transcribed for guitar!
PLAY: MENDELSSOHN Canzonetta (Bream)
That’s the other part of the movement which contains the fairy-scherzo stuff. The movement is called Canzonetta, ‘little song’. But the most remarkable thing about this quartet by the 20-year old Mendelssohn is its cyclical construction, which was probably suggested by Beethoven’s example. At the end of the last movement, with a magically subtle preparation, Mendelssohn eventually brings back the main theme of his first movement. It’s so wonderful that I’d spoil it by playing it twice. So listen hard for it in the concert. But to help you recognise it – to fix it in your minds, let me play it as it occurs in the first movement:
PLAY: MENDELSSOHN, Op.12: MOVEMENT I main theme
Getting to know this Mendelssohn quartet better has been a major pleasure for me in preparing this talk. It makes me think that one of Mendelssohn’s admirers may be right: that in the string quartet he was the greatest master of the medium between Beethoven and Bartók.
Finally, the music in this concert by an unfamiliar composer. I’ve heard the Jerusalem Quartet play Menachem Wiesenberg’s Between the Holy and the Profane three times, now, once on tape, and twice live. I’ve enjoyed it more and more each time, but actually I enjoyed it the first time, from the tape. I’ve left the tape in Hobart, but perhaps it doesn’t matter, because I found it very hard to decide which part I should play you. It’s very easy to grasp what this piece is doing, even at a first hearing.
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 the Juilliard School in New York. This piece of his, Between the Holy and the Profane, was composed 10 years ago. 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.
It’s a feature of the kind of melodic material that Wiesenberg uses in this piece that you have to present the melodies more or less complete. You can’t break them up and do the kind of musical argumentative development that Mendelssohn, say, learnt from Haydn and Beethoven. But you can make the melodies very affecting and interesting by varying the texture and the intensity, which is what Wiesenberg does. If you want a parallel, it’s perhaps in the Russian string quartets of Tchaikovsky and Borodin, from the country where today’s Israeli players have their family origins. Or even more in the treatment of Hungarian folk melodies not as done by Bartók, but rather by Kodály. Or even English folk melodies by Vaughan Williams. The kind of variation you won’t get is Haydn’s witty kind, where at the beginning of today’s quartet’s final movement, he begins varying his tune before he has even stated it:
PLAY: HAYDN Op.76/5: MOVEMENT IV
But you will, after all, get something similar in the mysterious beginning of Wiesenberg’s piece. It’s a program of contrasts, and of affinities, as you’d expect with a program entirely of string quartets. And brilliantly presented by these young players. I’m not trying to undercut their achievement if I tell you on the authority of someone who knows that the first violin part there isn’t as hard to play as it sounds! There’s plenty that is hard, but I don’t think you’ll notice!
First presented for Musica Viva in 2001