Takacs Quartet
Pre-concert talk for Musica Viva
2008
RICHARD MILLS Fantasias and Capriccio
JANÁČEK Intimate Letters
SCHUBERT String Quartet No.15 in G, D.887
Many, many years ago, I can reveal to you now, I applied for a job with Musica Viva, which I didn’t get. Part of the trouble, probably, was the interview, in which I suggested in reply to a question that a concert program made up entirely of string quartets was a hard sell – that there weren’t many, even in the music-loving public, who if they were really honest would say that they found such a program attractive. It wasn’t perhaps the wisest thing to say to Musica Viva – or perhaps they made their decision on other very sensible grounds. You don’t really need to know about me, but it does prompt some reflections. You might say that the existence of Musica Viva, with its programs in which string quartets play so large a part, was a living refutation of my claim in that interview. And here we are tonight, looking forward to a whole program of string quartets. But we shouldn’t take it for granted. It is a hard sell, if we’re honest, and tonight’s is a very demanding program. But something has happened, in our history, to make it cool to go to a string quartet program, and especially, perhaps, if the string quartet performing it has some fame, some cachet, if you like. In my real work life, when I’m not moonlighting by giving talks like this, I’m looking into some of the history of concert giving in Australia. Let’s go back to before there was a Musica Viva, before the Second World War, in fact.
It’s 1938, and for some years the Australian Broadcasting Commission, formed in 1932, has been increasing its concert giving activity. You will think orchestras, but not necessarily. That would be reading history backwards. In 1938 the ABC had studio orchestras, and these were being augmented for concert series, but there were no permanent symphonic-sized orchestras in Australia. The ABC was a concert entrepreneur before it became the main organisation maintaining orchestras. Part of the reason for augmenting orchestras for concerts was so that Celebrity touring artists could appear with orchestra. A few of these were conductors, beginning with Sir Hamilton Harty in 1934, but most were soloists: singers and instrumentalists. And in 1938 one of the most talked about and admired Celebrity tours was by a string quartet, the Budapest String Quartet. A few string quartets had come to Australia before, but never so famous a one. The thing is this – if the ABC hadn’t toured the Budapest Quartet, it’s doubtful they would have come here. And why did they tour them? You would think that it was because they thought Australia should hear chamber music played at the highest standard, and you’d be right. But hear it how? Remember, the ABC was a broadcasting organisation. It had not been expected that they would go into the concert-giving field. That was a by-product, if you like, of wanting to represent music – the full range of music – in what could be heard on what was then called the wireless. At the same time, in 1938, the ABC had on contract some resident celebrities, lesser, but celebrities nevertheless. The brothers Jascha and Tossy Spivakovsky, pianist and violinist respectively, were living in Melbourne. So was the cellist Edmund Kurtz.
They could appear as soloists with orchestra, or, as in 1938, the Melbourne Conservatorium, which had given them a base, put on the Spivakovsky brothers in all the Beethoven piano and violin sonatas, and the ABC broadcast the concerts. And the three also appeared as a piano trio. There was some demand, but it’s to be doubted that there would have been enough public to sustain such high-level chamber music, if there hadn’t been the support of a broadcaster. Remember, there was no Musica Viva then. That came after the War, and had a lot to do with the arrival of a lot of displaced Europeans who had chamber music, so to speak, in their bones. They were the backbone of the performers, and of the audience – granted with a lot of participation by locals. The excitement created by the Budapest tour had something to do with creating that fertile local ground. There was talk that the Budapest Quartet might become resident here in Australia, with the support of the ABC. It came to nothing. Musica Viva’s first idea was to be based on its resident ensemble, and the ABC supported that as well. By that time the ABC’s own main emphasis was on the orchestras. Musica Viva picked up, eventually, the ABC’s earlier pattern of importing celebrities. The Pascal String quartet, for example, whose sole surviving member I met in Paris a few years ago, and found that he well remembered that tour to Australia 50 years earlier.
Why this historical introduction? The fact that the Takacs Quartet keeps being reinvited by Musica Viva shows that it’s a kind of Budapest Quartet equivalent of our time. By looking at tonight’s program and the kind of event this represents we can measure how far we’ve come since 1938. Or perhaps just note that the same excitement can still greet chamber music in performance? But I think the history is important. The more the audience is prepared to come, because they trust the presenter and the performers, the more demanding can the musical experience be made. The Budapest Quartet’s programs in Australia, back in 1938, were built around Beethoven.
Things don’t change – having introduced the Takacs Quartet to Australia, some years ago, Musica Viva hatched the plan of their playing a complete cycle of the Beethoven string quartets. To get an idea of what’s happening in 2008, you need to look at both the programs the Takacs Quartet are playing. The second program, which will be heard in this venue on Monday, finishes with Beethoven’s Third Rasumovsky quartet. But meanwhile, if you attended both programs, you’d be on an adventurous path. It begins tonight – but before I suggest what we might bring to listening, let me note that it’s demanding programming indeed. Chamber music programs are demanding – that’s what I was trying to say when I did that unsuccessful interview for Musica Viva. You are planning to listen to just the same four instruments, for close on two hours, and playing music which, its very title suggests, is not intended for large audiences. Of course, you’re ready for it, aren’t you? You knew what you were buying. But you’ve come to the talk, not, presumably, to listen to me tell you how discriminating and perceptive you are, but for something else. Let’s see whether you’re ready.
Maybe you’ve listened already, in preparation for tonight – or you just know it very well. But try to listen to this without preconceptions:
PLAY (EX. 1): SCHUBERT D.887, opening
That’s the oldest music by far – by exactly 100 years, in fact, in tonight’s concert. Did you know it was the beginning of the Schubert G major quartet? Did anyone think it was Janáček, or Mills? Be honest…
I think you’ll agree it’s a challenging opening – battling over whether it’s to be in the minor or major mode, and almost forcing you to lose your harmonic bearings. That’s because Schubert is not only beginning what is one of the longest string quartets ever written – as long as Beethoven’s longest – he’s also off on one of what pianist Alfred Brendel calls Schubert’s sleepwalking adventures. Remember – Schubert’s late music was found puzzling, even by those close to him, and this quartet was out there with the most hard to comprehend, along with perhaps a few of the late songs. If you compare that with another piece, from the same time, in the same key, G major, I think you can sense the same breadth of big scle conception, but the musical language is less obviously challenging:
PLAY (EX. 2): SCHUBERT G major piano sonata, first 50”
That shift, and then another 40 minutes of sonata. Tonight at least 40 minutes –more if they repeat the first movement exposition. For a long time, I didn’t know this Schubert quartet from live performance, and it was hard to get on records, too. Notice the anniversaries: in 1828 this music was first heard – part of it – and 150 years later I heard it live for, I think, the first time. It was in the Sydney Town Hall, and I think the performers were Donald and Jane Hazelwood, violins, Hans Gyors, cello, and perhaps Ceska Baret, viola. And they played only the first movement – 20 minutes. You know why? Because that was all that was played in the concert of which they were celebrating the centenary. It was a Sydney Schubert Society concert, in 1978, a replica of the only all-Schubert concert given in Schubert’s lifetime. If the original performers, in Vienna 150 years earlier, had played the whole quartet, it would not only have dominated the concert, but also, let’s face it, have made the concert less successful.
Even the publisher of that piano sonata in G of which I played the opening wanted to publish it as four separate fantasies – the whole thing would be just too much for the public.
It’s in the nature of this Schubert string quartet that I can’t really illustrate to you with sound bites either why it’s so challenging, or why it’s so rewarding. I’ll have to adopt a different strategy. Because in its length and its musical adventure lies its greatness. But you really have to listen. God knows what the first audience made of it. The string quartet which played it to them had played the late Beethoven quartets, if only to an audience of connoisseurs – to the public they long remained, for most, incomprehensible. But Beethoven was world-famous – he had earned the right to be eccentric – and now here was a virtually unknown young composer, Schubert, attempting something even more searching, perhaps. You couldn’t sit down, as an amateur, and play through Schubert’s quartet, to get to know it. Here’s what the little book of advice for such amateurs, The Well-Tempered String Quartet, says on the matter: ‘In this quartet the amateur may feel as though he had been crossed in love. Even for mind and spirit it is too trying. It has great beauties of its own, but they can best be discovered in hearing it played by one of the great quartets’. Just so, and it will be, for us.
The trouble is that Schubert here, while he sometimes seems as if he is about to be the self that we love, confounds those expectations. There’s nothing like those variations which give the Death and the Maiden quartet its nickname, or this, which endears us to the so-called Rosamunde Quartet:
PLAY (EX. 3): SCHUBERT A minor Quartet, 2nd movement
Nevertheless, those two quartets which Schubert also composed near the end of his short life are the best preparation for listening to this one, and because of Musica Viva, we have heard them, heard them more often. So, we will be half prepared for the way an apparently songful slow movement suddenly lurches into something quite different:
PLAY (EX. 4): SCHUBERT D.887, 2nd movement
And the tarantella-like dance of death of the D minor quartet will make the last movement tonight less of a surprise, when we hear this:
PLAY (EX. 5): D.887
The treatment is sometimes called symphonic, in that the scale seems to transcend most people’s idea of a string quartet. But note that it was not this quartet that Gustav Mahler chose for arrangement for full string orchestra, but the Death and the Maiden quartet. Mahler wanted his listeners to have some bearings in the familiar. The more you hear the G major quartet, the more it seems Schubert’s most visionary achievement in chamber music. Not his greatest – for me that’s the C major string quintet – but that piece reveals its beauties more easily. The existence of a tradition which brings us great string quartets enables us to keep working at getting to know Schubert’s last thoughts in the medium. Thank you Musica Viva, and if we go home exhausted, then we have listened well.
Now let’s go back to the beginning, and to what I think is the least problematical music, which is perhaps a surprise, since it was first heard just last year. Notice how much easier Richard Mills has it than did Schubert, and thanks to that Australian chamber music tradition helped by the ABC and consolidated by Musica Viva. Schubert’s early quartets he could try out in the family string quartet. But his three late ones he had to take cap in hand to the Schuppanzigh Quartet, who had in the years just past been the first to perform Beethoven’s late quartets. To their credit, they saw the worth of Schubert’s stuff, but they prudently advised him that they would not risk it in front of an audience – until Schubert’s friends persuaded them to play just one movement in a public concert. Richard Mills had a commission for the piece we hear tonight, not from Musica Viva, but from an enthusiast for one of the young string quartets which have sprung up in Australia, knowing that there is a public and opportunities. The Flinders Quartet, led by Erica Kennedy, played this Richard Mills music at a festival organised by Musica Viva, the Huntington Festival at Mudgee. That was before Richard Mills was made Musica Viva’s featured composer for 2008, and the inclusion of tonight’s Fantasias and Capriccio is an appetite whetter for Richard Mills’s Third String Quartet, which will be premiered in a Musica Viva concert later in the year. So, Richard Mills could write in the knowledge that he would be performed, and by professionals. For the purposes of this talk, and in the context in which it appears tonight, I think the most interesting thing about Richard Mills’s Fantasias and Capriccio is that it is not a string quartet like the other two pieces – not, that is, in the sense of having four separate movements. What struck me when I came to write about this Mills piece for the program is how few pieces there are, for string quartet, which are like it.
That’s a sign of how serious the whole tradition is – composers, when they come to tackle the quartet medium, seem to feel obliged to write a full-scale piece – Beethoven is the touchstone, I suppose. Richard has, whether deliberately or not, gone back to the historical origins of the string quartet, when Haydn was beginning. As Mills writes in his own note, Fantasias and Capriccio is in the tradition of the divertimento and serenade. In the title, both Fantasia and Capriccio imply a certain playfulness, and you can hear that in the music:
PLAY (EX. 6): RICHARD MILLS Fantasias and Capriccio 8’ or 9’24”
For the rest, if you read Richard’s note, and listen, you won’t find this piece at all hard to follow or enjoy. It’s as though a craftsmanlike musician not bothered by Beethovenian pretensions is enjoying putting his ideas into the string quartet medium, and making us enjoy it too. After consulting my mental data base, I decided that the nearest parallel was a piece by Hugo Wolf, who also composed a massive string quartet. Wolf’s seven-minute piece is called ‘Italian Serenade’
PLAY (EX. 7): HUGO WOLF: Italian Serenade beginning
That was played by the Melbourne String Quartet, a forerunner of the Flinders Quartet, and with the same Jane Hazelwood who played in that 1978 Schubert performance, now playing the featured viola part. I wish we heard that Wolf more often.
Meanwhile, a piece like Richard’s, as well as showing that string quartet composition is alive and well in Australia, also makes just the right kind of introduction in a lighter vein to the demands of the rest of the program.
Now I suppose, wrongly maybe, that some of you are wondering why I haven’t talked about the Janáček quartet yet, except in passing about its date. You may well think it’s the piece needing the most introduction, and I venture to suggest that for a very few of you it may even be the piece which makes the concert most of an event for you. Am I right? Well, if you’re one of those for whom I’m not right, what I have to say may help you understand the anticipation of some of those around you. In a sense this Janáček appears the piece most needing words. In the first place because it’s the only piece on this program with a non-musical title, and what an intriguing one! Not only is it called ‘Intimate Letters’, but some of you may know that Janáček wanted to call it ‘love letters’, but was dissuaded and thought better of it. At any rate its title suggests it is a confessional piece, lifting the lid on private matters, and that’s true. The letters exist, hundreds of them, from Janáček to the woman who inspired the music of his later years. He was seriously smitten with her, a rather one-sided relationship, it seems, but she went along with the old man, so much her senior, and we should be grateful. They were both married to other people, but Janáček’s passion gave new sap to his creativity. I’m not going to give you the tabloid version, which would undoubtedly give a suggestive version of the ‘real truth’ of how Janáček caught the cold which led to his death, apparently searching on the hillsides and in the woods for one of Kamila Stoesslova’s children – that was her name – who had become lost. The string quartet turned out to be Janáček’s last completed composition, though that wasn’t his intention.
Intimate letters, then. Janáček didn’t actually want anyone to read them – he wrote their meaning for him into the music instead. All the same, many performers haven’t been able to resist presenting this quartet in the context of a reading of the letters – there was a performance like that in Sydney years ago. And that’s because Janáček is such an interesting man, such a character. When you get to know him through his music he becomes one of the most fascinating of all composers. By chance last night I ran into someone who got closer than most – a young Sydney pianist and music journalist who on a visit to her native Czech land a few years ago got to play some of Janáček’s music on his own piano, in the garden house of the Organ School in Brno, which was Janáček’s work room. There, on that piano, he hammered out again and again the ideas that were to go into this quartet – and people who heard him at work remarked on how strange it sounded:
PLAY (EX.8): JANÁČEK Intimate Letters (Hagen)
This music is really the result of obsession – that’s why the title is suggestive. It was an obsession not by any means limited to this quartet, which is why the best way to prepare for it is to listen to other late Janáček music. The other string quartet, for example, with a literary theme of its own, on Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata. Janáček was a kind of quirky women’s liberationist long before that became common. He identified with women trapped in bad relationships with inadequate men. He projected that onto Kamila – who possibly didn’t see herself that way. Doesn’t matter. Janáček felt that he had gone further than any composer had before in putting this kind of self-revelation into music.
The other reason why Janáček’s quartet seems to invite words is that he had developed a musical language which is based, in large parts, in speech rhythms. You can hear that in his operas, of course, but his instrumental writing is the same. Let me give you some Janáček vocal writing – this is from his song cycle The Diary of one who disappeared, which comes from near the beginning of his passion for Kamila, and tells of a young man who left his life of convention through his seduction by a gypsy girl. He goes to her, and to the son she’s borne him, a more positive outcome than Schubert’s Winter’s Journey. This song gets the crux of the story: ‘Forest’s shady height/water cold and bright/eyes as black as night/bare knees snowy white/these four things, till death relieve me, will, I swear it, never leave me
PLAY (EX. 9): JANÁČEK Diary XII Blachut
Now test whether you can hear the same directness of speech-like communication in this passage near the beginning of the string quartet, a phrase actually very like one the gypsy sings in the song cycle
PLAY (EX.10): JANÁČEK Intimate Letters I
And notice this is given to viola – Janáček wanted a viola d’amore – it doesn’t work, and he’d never heard one – but he responded to the title. The quartet is about love. It’s full of coded references to other Janáček works which make its meaning explicit. I could indeed give a whole talk about just this, but must keep things in perspective. I want to say just one more thing, which brings it back to my historical introduction.
The Janáček, in a colloquial way of speaking, is way out. For a long time, his quartets were off the map, completely. For instance, that little German book for string quartet players, which came out in 1936, doesn’t mention him at all. Now his quartets are recorded by lots of quartets, and not just Czech ones. They still sound strangely original, but we have learnt to enjoy the very strangeness. In Australia perhaps more than in some other places, and that’s thanks to Musica Viva. The Smetana Quartet were, when I was learning my quartets in Musica Viva concerts, as frequent visitors as the Takacs have become now. They introduced us to Czech quartets, including the confessional ones by Smetana and Janáček. It was partly thanks to them that Peter Mann, of Discurio in Melbourne, could run a nice little business importing Supraphon recordings, from which we could gain the familiarity really necessary for learning to love Janáček. And we did. That’s how we became able to cope with demanding programming like tonight’s – a happy combination of admired performers and the most concentrated music of all. Let’s celebrate the tradition as well as gaining the musical rewards…
First presented for Musica Viva in 2008