Alice Tully: Juilliard Quartet Performs Bach, Berg and Beethoven

Yesterday evening at Alice Tully Hall, the Juilliard Quartet gave a performance as part of the Saidenberg Faculty Recital Series that went from Baroque (J.S. Bach) to twentieth century (Berg) back to classical (Beethoven).

The program opened with Contrapuncti I - IV from Bach's Die Kunst der Fugue, BWV 1080 (1746).  More than ten years ago, I heard the Juilliard Quartet, then with a different membership, perform this same Bach work in its entirety; and I immediately went out and purchased their recording of it.  I felt that their interpretation for string quartet (Bach himself did not provide any instrumentation for the work) was as close to definitive as it was possible to come.  The performance I heard yesterday evening did nothing to diminish that view.  Though the first four contrapuncti are the "simplest" (since the movements progress in an ascending order of difficulty), this was one of the chamber repertoire's greatest works performed as close to perfection as it is possible to come.

The next piece was Berg's  Lyric Suite (1926).  Although the abstract theoretical nature of the twelve-tone system might lead one to believe that its adherents were a group of dry academics, nothing could be further from the truth.  The private lives of these composers sometimes resembled a soap opera in their romantic entanglements.  In this case, though Berg nominally dedicated his Suite to Alexander von Zemlinsky from whose Lyric Symphony he took the title of his own piece, the work actually had a secret program and dedication to the married Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, sister of Franz Werfel, at whose home in Prague Berg had been a guest.  In the annotated score which Berg presented to Hanna, he wrote:

"It has also, my Hanna, allowed me other freedoms! For example, that of secretly inserting our initials, HF and AB, into the music, and relating every movement and every section of every movement to our numbers, 10 and 23. I have written these, and much that has other meanings, into the score for you. ... May it be a small monument to a great love."

After intermission, the program closed with Beethoven's String Quartet in C, Op. 59, No. 3 (1807).  It was extremely interesting to have heard this work after having so recently attended a performance of the composer's Third Symphony given by the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.  Both works were written early in Beethoven's Middle Period and both are nicknamed the Eroica.  More importantly, both represent breakthroughs in their respective genres as well as in Beethoven's style of composition.  Just as the Third Symphony was utterly unlike any that had come before it, so the Razumovsky quartets transcend in their complexity all earlier string quartets, including those written by the composer himself.  One online article goes even further in suggesting that the three quartets taken together should not necessarily even be considered individual pieces:

"Many have suggested that Beethoven conceived of the three separate Razumovsky quartets as a unified whole...  A performance of the complete set in a single concert gives this very impression. With the proper preparation for its context within this larger setting, the third quartet acquires a further triumphal radiance. The distinguished scholar Leonard Ratner suggests that all of Beethoven’s quartets may even form a kind of mega-work, a single great narrative that stands apart from all other music in history."

While it is difficult to conceive that any composer, even one of Beethoven's genius, should have been capable of such an accomplishment, it is still a fascinating thought.