This week’s music is Bela Bartok’s third string quartet, performed by the renowned Emerson String Quartet.
Ask any musician over forty what they think of when they hear the words “Emerson String Quartet” and they will probably tell you they think of the Bartok recordings. The first of the Emerson’s nine Grammy awards came for their recording of the six Bartok string quartets in 1988. At the time, the Emerson was the only ensemble who had ever attempted the Herculean task of recording all six.
Bartok’s third string quartet, written during the 1920s, synthesizes his love of Hungarian folk tunes and the raw physicality of his late modernist style. Bartok seemed to have a way of making dissonance sound punchy, exciting, almost dance-like. You’ll hear this throughout the quartet, juxtaposed with smooth, nocturnal conversations between the instruments and surging outbursts of physicality. Listen for the way Bartok incorporates unique string-playing techniques like glissandos (slides), pizzicato (plucking), harmonics, and con sordino (playing behind the bridge) into the music.
We’ve done a wide range of series here on This Week’s Music over the past eight (8!) years. We’ve done series on music written for a particular instrument, series on the music of individual composers, and series on entire eras of music. Until now, however, we’ve never done a series about a single ensemble. But I think it is time we do. The legendary Emerson String Quartet will be wrapping up its 47-year career next week, so I thought it would be nice to spend a few weeks listening to their best recordings and performances.
Philip Setzer, Eugene Drucker, Guillermo Figueroa, and Eric Wilson formed the Emerson String Quartet in New York City in 1976. Figueroa was soon replaced on viola by Lawrence Dutton, who remains the ensemble’s violist today. And Wilson was replaced by David Finckel, who remained the (much-loved) cellist of the ensemble until he was succeeded by Paul Watkins in 2013. The ensemble took its name from the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. They made history by not designating a first violinist; instead, they rotated between their two violin players as to who led the quartet. Over the years, the Emerson made more than 30 recordings and won nine Grammys, three Grammophone awards, and the prestigious Avery Fisher prize. Their unmatched discography includes the complete string quartets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bartok, Webern, and Shostakovich, as well as sets of the major works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Dvorak. They have taught as faculty-in-residence at Stony Brook University since the mid-1990s and have been given honorary musical doctorates from over twenty other conservatories and universities.
After announcing their retirement this past spring, the Emerson embarked on a jaw-dropping international farewell tour that included over 100 performances of the entire Beethoven, Bartok, Schumann, and Shostakovich string quartet cycles across 60 countries. And if that weren’t enough, they also released three new albums in 2023 alone! (Most ensembles are lucky to do one per year).
All of the Emerson’s recordings are masterful, but their interpretations of four composers in particular have received special commendation: late period Beethoven, Shostakovich, Bartok, and Ives. Thus, for the next four weeks, we will listen to the Emerson’s best recordings and performances of those four composers’ works. And to start things off, we will be listening today to one of their live performances of the first movement of Beethoven’s twelfth string quartet.
The twelfth string quartet is the first chamber music composition in Beethoven’s late period (1822-1825). The first movement is structured in sonata form (opening-development-recapitulation) with a few twists thrown in. For instance, Beethoven opens the movement with a six-bar chorale before introducing the primary theme in bar 7. Later, the choral returns in a bizarre rhythmic structure in which the time signature remains 4/4 but the underlying quarter notes are grouped 5 + 3. Beethoven also included multiple canons in the movement, each one using a different fragment of the opening theme.
We are wrapping up our series on the octet with Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, performed by two of the world’s best string quartets.
Schoenberg is one of the most pivotal and polarizing characters in the story of music. His early career include works like Verklarte Nacht, which reveal his unbelievable talent and his complete mastery of tonal harmony. However, later in his career, he came under the influence of the Marxist philosopher Theodore Adorno, a member of the Frankfurt School. Soon afterward, Schoenberg began advocating for the “liberation of dissonance,” and his music devolved into unplayable 12-tone serialism. Today, the only Schoenberg compositions that are performed are those from his early years; audiences have made it clear to musicians that the unintelligibility of Schoenberg’s later works do not interest them.
Schoenberg’s early works are in a league of their own, and Verklarte Nacht may be at the top of that league. It bridges the gap between Romantic and 20th-century music like nothing else. You will hear lush, almost Mendelssohn-esque passages, but you will also hear forecasts to the modernism of Prokofiev and Ives. A critic from the Los Angeles Philharmonic said it best: “Lush, dense, highly chromatic yet still just within the bounds of tonality, [Verklarte Nacht] can be regarded as a very late example of 19th century German Romanticism, a natural product of the trajectory from Beethoven and Schubert to Brahms, Wagner, and Strauss.”
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