Škampa Quartet

Pre-concert talk for Musica Viva

September 14, 1999

MOZART String Quartet in G, K.387

SMETANA String Quartet in D minor (No.2)

DVOŘÁK String Quintet in E flat, Op.77

Last Friday, in Wellington New Zealand, a friend of mine died, and I wish to dedicate this talk to his memory. His name was John Mansfield Thomson, and he was 72 years old. John Thomson had been for many years the most distinguished chronicler of New Zealand music and its history. Among his many books was one called Into a New Key, which is a history of the Music Federation of New Zealand, the parallel and companion to Musica Viva Australia. On page 81 of that book, John Thomson recalls the first visit to his country, in 1957, of the Smetana Quartet, the first ensemble to visit New Zealand from ‘behind the Iron Curtain’, as we used to say in those days.  ‘They had played from memory since 1949’ Thomson writes, ‘specialised in the music of their own composers and combined individual virtuosity with tremendous unity of ensemble based on scrupulous attention to detail. The warmth and passion of their personalities and playing made an indelible impression in Beethoven, Janáček and Smetana, and people were turned away from their second concert in Wellington’.  There will be people in my audience tonight, I’m sure, who remember the Smetana Quartet well. I’ll never forget the first time I saw and heard them, in Wilson Hall, Melbourne University, some time in the early 70s. And here, tonight, we have a quartet from the same country, with the same repertoire, and named after the viola player of the Smetana Quartet, Milan Škampa, who was their mentor. 

I’ve heard them play already, in Hobart last Saturday, and I think they will make something of the same impression on you, as they did on me, as their great predecessors did all those years ago. But I want to say some more about John Thomson, too, and I think you’ll find it’s not irrelevant to what we’re to hear in tonight’s concert. John Thomson was not just a New Zealand figure – he worked in London for many years as an editor of music books and journals, and in 1973 he founded the international quarterly Early Music, which is still one of the most important of all musical periodicals. John Thomson’s enthusiasm for early music, by his own account, had a lot to do with his hearing Bach’s Fourth Brandenburg Concerto played with recorders on an early Archiv recording he bought in a shop in Wellington’s Cuba Mall, in the early 1950s. He learnt to play the recorder, and became, with his usual scholarly thoroughness, an authority of the recorder and recorder players, publishing the first book in English of interviews with leading recorder players, and recently editing the Cambridge Companion to the Recorder. I want to talk a little about music in Australia and music in New Zealand, which I can do largely thanks to John Thomson’s books. One of these is a biography of a musician who played a large part in the history of music in both countries, Alfred Hill. The title of John Thomson’s biography is A Distant Music, and he did much of the research for it here in Sydney. Both Australia and New Zealand claim Hill as their most important early composer – not to mention orchestra builder and conductor. Yet what each country finds in Alfred Hill is subtly different. Some years ago there was a series of programs on TV, a BBC production called The Story of English. I found this fascinating, and bought the book of the series. My confidence was somewhat shaken when I read the comparison between English as it is spoken in Australia and as it is spoken in New Zealand. I don’t know how many New Zealanders you know, but what do you make of this, from the book?

‘If a New Zealander and an Australian from the same social background shared a railway carriage, only an expert phonetician could tell them apart on the basis of pronunciation’. 

Whatever happened to what has made New Zealand famous as ‘the land of the long flat vowel’?  When we, in this part of the world, find ourselves described in international publications, we sometimes flinch at the generalisations – we know better what is distinctive. And this brings me to the strategy for this talk.

Tonight’s concert presents a Czech quartet in presumably idiomatic performances of works by the two most famous Czech composers of chamber music, Dvořák and Smetana.  I thought to myself ‘perhaps it can be assumed that people will know that there’s a great contrast between the music of these two composers’, that they represent two sides of Czech music. Then I thought ‘have I ever really posed myself the question ‘what makes Dvořák and Smetana different?’ Let’s try a little test: I’ll play you a bit of a polka, a typical Czech dance adopted by both composers in their music. Can you tell whether it’s by Dvořák or Smetana?

PLAY  SMETANA Souvenir of Pilzen  – Polka (Moravec)

Well, it’s by Smetana. From a piece called Souvenir of Pilzen. But it could almost have been Dvořák. In fact, we’ll hear another Polka by Smetana tonight, in his second String Quartet, where he seeks to recall the joys of his youth, the ones celebrated in his autobiographical first quartet, with its subtitle ‘From my life’.  That Polka, which you are more likely to recognise, since the first quartet is better known, goes like this:

PLAY  SMETANA String Quartet No.1: Polka, 0:00-0:20

Now here’s from the second String Quartet:

PLAY  SMETANA String Quartet No.2: 0:00-1:03

The difference, the sense of trouble, of striving for getting something back, gives already some of what makes the second quartet so different from the first. But back to the generalisations – how different is Dvořák from Smetana? There is at least one Czech dance evocation in his String Quintet, written in America:

PLAY  DVOŘÁK String Quintet: 2nd movement

But what is Czech? We’ve recently been reminded by the breakaway of Slovakia from the Czech Republic formed by the Versailles Treaty in 1918 that the adjective ‘Czech’ covers an association of regions – now Bohemia and Moravia. Bohemia is the western-most part – much closer to Western Europe than Vienna. If you travel due north from Vienna on the train, you’ll come to Brno, the main town in Moravia, which is the home town of Janáček, whose second String Quartet the Škampa Quartet will play in the Seymour Centre on Thursday. Janáček was a Moravian composer, which explains some of his differences with Dvořák and Smetana, who were both Bohemian. To get to Prague, the capital of Bohemia, and the metropolis for both these composers, though neither was born in the capital, you have to travel quite a long way in a northwest direction from Brno. Dvořák and Smetana, then. Both Bohemians. But do they speak the same language, or are they as distinguishable as an Australian and a New Zealander - or even more? 

The answer is partly concealed tonight by the fact that they’re both speaking the language of chamber music for strings, which means that they are relating to a tradition of writing for this medium. 

In fact, we will be measuring the distance by which each composer departs from the tradition represented by the Mozart String Quartet which opens the concert. Of course, if this weren’t a Musica Viva concert, the differences might seem greater. An orchestral concert of Czech music might begin with this:

PLAY  SMETANA The Bartered Bride: Overture

That’s from the overture to Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride.  And it might conclude with this:

PLAY  DVOŘÁK Symphony No.9 From the New World: slow movement

That’s merely the most famous part of Dvořák’s symphony ‘From the New World’, which has a direct relation to the music of his we hear tonight. But consider – we think of Smetana as a very Czech composer mainly because of the opera The Bartered Bride, which contains polkas, furiants and the like, and is set in a Czech village milieu. If you are Czech however, you will probably consider Smetana’s most important opera Dalibor, which has a subject a little like Beethoven’s Fidelio. Its theme of liberation spoke powerfully to a people who considered themselves oppressed. Smetana was not, in fact, folklorist, and the virtual invention of a Czech national music, with which Czech’s credit him, was by no means a matter of basing the music on folksong.

Smetana said: ‘Imitating the turns and rhythms of our folk songs will not create a national style, still less an authentic drama, but at the most a shallow imitation of those very folk songs’. Yet musicians recognised that Smetana was the first native composer to write music which could be acclaimed as characteristically Czech. 

This had a liberating effect on Dvořák, who was more than 16 years younger than Smetana, but was already playing as a violist in the orchestra of the Prague theatre where Smetana’s Bartered Bride was premiered. But where did it free Dvořák to look, for his music? A clue to the answer comes in the slow movement of tonight’s Quintet, where the very first time I heard it I was straight away reminded of another composer – perhaps you will be too?

PLAY  DVOŘÁK String Quintet Op.97: Larghetto, 'answer', 0:51-1:07

As one of Dvořák’s biographers has said ‘the effect of Beethoven gazing out of the score is almost startling’. And which Beethoven?

PLAY  BEETHOVEN Sonata, Op.26 (Kempff), 0:42-1:05

Beethoven’s sonata in A flat major, the same key as Dvořák is using here.  Whereas Smetana had turned to the example of Wagner and Liszt, particularly the Liszt of the symphonic poems, which lies behind Smetana’s orchestral cycle My Fatherland, Dvořák turned towards Vienna, and especially Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.

Poor Dvořák – he has suffered so much from musical snobbery and badly applied sophistication! Hans von Bülow, the friend of Wagner, then of Brahms, great musician that he was, did Dvořák a disservice by referring to him once as ‘Der Bauer in Frack’ - ‘the peasant in tails’.  It’s too easy to forget that Dvořák’s 14 String Quartets are the most substantial contribution to the genre since Beethoven and Schubert.  Yet when they are discussed, it’s almost always with reference to their supposed folk allusions.

Take tonight’s Quintet. It is supposed that it was the music of the Native Americans he heard while visiting the Czech community in Spillville, Iowa, that gave him the idea for the drum rhythms of the second movement of his Quintet:

PLAY  DVOŘÁK Op.97: 2nd movement, Allegro vivo, 0:00-0:20

Yet the Mozart Quartet the Škampa Quartet play not tonight, but on Thursday, is called in German-speaking countries the ‘Drum’ Quartet, because of this:

PLAY MOZART K.464: Andante, 8:18-10:14

But hardly anyone seeks folk origins for Mozart’s idea! A more illuminating comparison might be to look at how Dvořák handles the medium of the string quartet with an additional viola, for which the main models were Mozart’s string quintets. And we would note that Dvořák himself played the viola, the instrument Mozart himself preferred to play in chamber music. The second viola begins the quintet, alone. And the viola is at the core of the second movement, too.

PLAY DVOŘÁK Op.97: second movement

The very end of tonight’s Quintet shows how Dvořák is not ashamed to go beyond Mozart’s example and use the extra resources of the quintet to suggest an orchestral effect - here we are almost in the New World Symphony.

PLAY  DVOŘÁK Op.97: end

Perhaps, too, the example of Schubert’s great Quintet, with an extra cello, is behind this music of Dvořák.

We are never in any doubt that the music Dvořák wrote in America, including this quintet, is the music of a composer who had found his voice as a Czech musician. Indeed, there is an undeniable nostalgia, a longing for the homeland, which confirms someone’s witty saying that if there in anything American about Dvořák’s music composed in America, it is blueberry pie washed down with slivovitz!

Returning for a moment to the late John Thomson’s study of Alfred Hill, it can’t be denied that there was a composer whose voice was that of a student in Leipzig where he went to study on the suggestion of Reményi, the gypsy violinist friend of Brahms, who encountered Hill while touring New Zealand in the 1880s. For all his use of Māori material in his compositions, there is nothing recognisably Australian or New Zealand in the fundamentals of Alfred Hill’s style. For that we had a to wait a long time – until Hill was an old man in Sydney, and composers like Peter Sculthorpe found their voice. That is a measure of Dvořák and Smetana’s achievement – their mature music never sounds provincial, for all its constructive debt to the examples of their great non-Czech predecessors. 

The remarkable thing about Smetana’s two String Quartets is not that they sound Czech. Rather, in the history of the String Quartet, their great importance is that they were almost the first programmatic works conceived for that medium. And inevitably, because it has the most explicit program, which includes a graphic realisation in music of the onset of Smetana’s deafness, the first quartet has overshadowed the second. The second quartet is an extraordinary case of an autobiography created very near the events and states of mind it describes. Smetana described it as an attempt to put on paper ‘the whirlwind of music in the head of one who has lost his hearing’:

PLAY  SMETANA String Quartet No.2: beginning

The excellent notes by Anthony Cane in your program book quote movingly from Smetana, who describes his difficulty: ‘Alas, I tend to lose my memory when composing so that if a movement is too long I cannot remember the principal melody’. Cane suggests this explains the kaleidoscopic quality of much of the work, with new melodies coming and going, and often quirky shifts of mood and tempo. He also suggests that Smetana’s example made possible the programmatic, autobiographical quartets of a later Czech, or more accurately Moravian composer, Leoš Janáček, one of which the Škampa Quartet play on Thursday night. I heard their quite remarkable, indeed revelatory interpretation of Janáček’s Quartet called ‘Intimate or Love Letters’ in Hobart on Saturday, and can suggest that if you enjoy tonight’s concert, you should really consider hearing that second concert on Thursday, for the whole program, but especially for the Janáček. I can’t wait to hear the same insight applied to this powerful but challenging and puzzling quartet by Smetana.

I think John Thomson would have recognised that what Australia and New Zealand’s music have waited for, perhaps are still waiting for, is composers with the creative courage and ability to be themselves in music, which the works by Dvořák and Smetana in tonight’s concert show was so triumphantly achieved, in such different ways, in Bohemia last century. 

And what of Mozart? Tony Cane’s beautifully thought-out program notes make the connection between Mozart and Prague, where his music was received with a widespread love it got from very few in Vienna. All is not perfection – I tried to re-enter that feeling in Prague last year, by sitting in the very place, the Theatre of the Estates, where Mozart’s Don Giovanni was premiered in 1787. But the playing and singing seemed to me so bad that I left at the first interval. We tend to think of Mozart as achieving his result without obvious effort, and perhaps that is the effect, so it is good to be reminded that it sometimes cost him great pains. The String Quartet of Mozart’s we hear tonight is the first of the great set of six dedicated to Haydn. They were, as Mozart wrote in his dedicatory letter to Haydn, ‘truly, the fruit of a long and laborious endeavour’. We should take this seriously, and it is underlined by the surviving failed sketches and revisions of revisions – unusual for Mozart. Mozart’s encounter with the String Quartets of Haydn was – rather like what Haydn said about the effect of Handel’s music on him ‘to put him back to the beginning of his studies’.  By the time he completed and revised this great set of six, he had absorbed Haydn’s example and amalgamated it with his own style. So a movement like the finale of tonight’s quartet, with its fugal passages, doesn’t sound like its models in the fugal finales of Haydn’s Op. 20 quartets – it sounds like Mozart, great Mozart:

PLAY  MOZART String Quartet in G, K387: finale, 0:00-0:24

In fact, there’s already a suggestion of the last movement of the ‘Jupiter’ symphony.  But I need to bring Haydn, and especially Mozart, within the ambit of my theme. I hope I didn’t offend anyone by implying that you may not know the difference between Dvořák and Smetana. Another case of two composers speaking the same language with a different accent, like Australians and New Zealanders, is that of Mozart and Haydn. These String Quartets of Mozart’s dedicated to Haydn enable us to raise very pointedly the question – what is the difference between these two equally great, but different ways of writing string quartets? Well, that’s a subject for a whole new talk, but perhaps the drift of everything I’ve been saying is to emphasise that they are two very different ways. I’ve time left only to give you some pointers to listening, and, as there isn’t a Haydn String Quartet in tonight’s program, I’ll leave you with some Haydn in your ears. If you listen to music like that of Alfred Hill, you’ll hear constant echoes of the style of other composers. You might have thought Mozart, paying a younger man’s tribute to an older man’s great example, may have saluted Haydn by imitation. But he had overcome the first intimidating effect Haydn’s string quartets had on him. Now the aim for him was to be his very different self, with equal mastery. You’ll hear how he does it in 15 minutes’ time. Here is a String Quartet in the same key, from Haydn’s Op.33 set of six., Mozart’s immediate stimulus.

PLAY  HAYDN String Quartet in G, Op.33, No.5

Haydn, it has been said, is concerned with process, Mozart with the achieved result.

Haydn is concerned with change, Mozart with symmetry. Well, experience for yourselves. And let’s be grateful to Musica Viva, as John Thomson was to its New Zealand counterpart, for allowing these fascinating comparisons, which even transcend music. I hope people will be turned away from the Škampa Quartet’s second Sydney concert!

First presented for Musica Viva in Sydney, 1999