On Thursday evening at Rose Studio the Jerusalem Quartet completed its performance of the complete Bartók quartets with renditions of the Second, Fourth and Sixth. Once again the entire recital was webcast live on the Chamber Music Society's website.
The Quartet No. 2, Sz. 67 was begun in 1915 and completed in 1917 while World War I was still raging throughout Europe. The closing of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's borders during this period severely curtailed Bartók's exploration of ethnic folk music. Unable to travel, the war years became a period of consolidation in which the composer sought to understand how the different musical forms he had encountered could best be amalgamated into his own work. He was also hearing more of modern music. Already influenced by the work of Strauss and Debussy, he was now exposed to that of Stravinsky and Schoenberg as well. All these strands came together in the Second Quartet and allowed the composer to create music that stood removed from the European tradition in which he had been trained. The second movement, for example, owes a great deal to the Arabic music that Bartók had heard while traveling through North Africa. In that sense, the Second Quartet can be seen as a breakthrough that was to lead to the compositions of Bartók's maturity when he fully developed his unique style. Kodály saw in the work a personal accounting that portrayed various episodes in the composer's life. But it's not really necessary to read so much into the work. Whatever connection the final movement had to Bartók's actual experiences, it summed up perfectly the bleak outlook with which he and other European musicians viewed human existence at a time when a cataclysmic war threatened to put an end to the Western art and culture they had known.
Written only a year after the Third Quartet, the Quartet No. 4, Sz. 91 shows a strong connection to that earlier work but also breaks new ground in its implementation of an "arch" structure. Originally conceived in four movements, Bartók added another in the interest of symmetry. He would use the arch again in the Fifth Quartet. The centerpiece of the work, its keystone, is the third movement, the only slow movement in the entire quartet. Around this Bartók structured the other movements and used them to balance one another so that the fourth movement reflects the second and the fifth movement mirrors the first. There is also a symmetry in length with the second and fourth movements only roughly half the length of the other three. The third movement, which Bartók termed the "kernel," is the still point around which the others revolve. In it, the composer makes use of his nachtmusik technique and allows the use of his folk sources to be more clearly apprehended by the listener. I had heard an excellent performance of this work at Juilliard this past May that gave me a greater appreciation of what a masterpiece this work is. It could be argued that from a purely musical point of view this is the most successful of all six quartets.
One can only imagine Bartók's state of mind as completed the Quartet No. 6, Sz. 114 in late 1939. Germany had invaded Poland only weeks before and World War II had begun in earnest. The composer realized perfectly well that it was only a matter of time before the Nazis gained full control of Hungary which had already in 1937 signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. His publisher in Vienna, Universal Editions, was now under Nazi ownership and had sent him and the other composers it represented a questionnaire demanding the details of their ethnicity and ancestry. To those who had lived through the horrors of World War I, this must have seemed the cruel repetition of a nightmare. There could have been no doubt in Bartók's mind of the need to flee. All that held him to his native country was his mother who was at the time desperately ill. Her death shortly after the quartet was completed, while another sad blow, finally severed his last link to Hungary and allowed him to emigrate.
All this serves as a background to the music, each of whose four movements is marked mesto, meaning "sad." The composer's state of mind can perhaps best be seen in the second and third movements. The second contains an off-kilter march that might represent Europe once again goosestepping toward the abyss like some drunken soldier. The third, entitled Burletta ("burlesque"), only emphasizes this sense of despair and hopelessness in a world gone mad. The final movement, rewritten by Bartók upon the death of his mother, is an elegy not only for a lost parent but for European civilization as well. This was the last piece of music Bartók composed while still living in Hungary and it is filled with the bitterness anyone must feel when forced by circumstances to leave one's homeland, probably forever, to live in exile. If the ending of the Second Quartet was bleak, that which concludes the Sixth plumbs the very depths of despair and unhappiness.
The Jerusalem Quartet's decision to play the odd numbered quartets on one evening and the even on the next is the way the cycle is usually performed. The Takács Quartet followed the same pattern a couple of seasons ago at Carnegie Hall. I think, though, that whatever inconvenience may be entailed it would be better to stage these works in chronological order so that the audience can better understand not only the progression of Bartók's artistry from one to the next but his state of mind as well. In the six quartets he leaves not just a personal account of his life but a record of the chaos that consumed all Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.
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