St. Lawrence String Quartet

Erich Korngold: String Quartet No. 3 in D Major, Op. 34

“More corn than gold,” was the harsh put-down of New York critic Irving Kolodin after hearing the 1947 première of Korngold’s opulent Violin Concerto, played by Heifetz.  Korngold was 50 and his life had already mirrored some of the major political and social upheavals of the 20^th century.  “Fifty is old for a child prodigy,” he said, wryly looking back on the unpredictable and, to him, ultimately unsatisfying course that his life and music had taken.  It would take a post-modern sensibility a half-century later, around the time of the composer’s centenary, to begin to re-evaluate and appreciate what had previously been dismissed as passé.  

Success came early.  At 10, Mahler declared the child prodigy a genius.  It made the middle name of Wolfgang, bestowed by a pushy, over-protective father, forward-looking rather than presumptuous.  The Vienna Court Opera presented Korngold’s precocious pantomime The Snowman, written when he was eleven.  Operas and symphonic works flowed from his pen before he was 20.  His music was taken up by the likes of Kreisler and Flesch, Schnabel and Cortot, Tauber and Lehmann, Weingartner and Walter.  Korngold’s early success was crowned by Die Tote Stadt (1916-20), which became one of the most performed operas of the 1920s, reaching more than 80 stages worldwide.  Korngold’s early accomplishment was defined by his operas and his operatic writing came to define his musical style. 

He had already made four annual trips to Hollywood when the Anschluss forced his emigration to the United States in 1938.  Korngold now found that his command of the late romantic musical vocabulary and his fluency in underscoring dramatic narrative blossomed from the stage into a medium that reached millions.  Nostalgia and fantasy were key ingredients of Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties and Korngold’s music captured the mood of the times to perfection.  His 17 major film scores for Warner Bros. included two Academy Award winners and now came to define the very language of the silver screen itself.

Korngold’s Third String Quartet, dated July 31, 1945, was the first work to break his self-imposed wartime exile from concert scores.  “I had suspected nothing about the quartet,” his wife said when given sketches of the work as a Christmas present the previous year.  “He had avoided the subject and had not struck even a single note on the piano.”  While the two earlier quartets were written in Europe, the Third draws on the melodic skills Korngold had fine-tuned in his movie work half a world away.  It draws equally on a keen feeling for craft.  The first movement follows a traditional structure, contrasting and interweaving two themes, restlessly in search of a tonal centre – which only arrives with the closing D major chord.  The interval of a seventh features prominently in the sinuously descending opening theme as it progresses throughout the movement.  It also underpins the vividly skeletal scherzo that follows.  Here, the two violins chase one another high above the musical staff over a busy, but determined accompaniment.  The calmer central trio section is based on a luxurious theme from Between Two Worlds, Korngold’s favorite film score.  The main theme of the slow movement, modally treated and marked to be played ‘like a folk tune’, is drawn from the love theme from the 1941 film The Sea Wolf.  The restraint and clarity of Korngold’s writing make this slow movement among his most successful.  The high spirited finale toys with the idea of a fugue, all four instruments either playing the entries in unison or passing the theme from one to another with glee.  Its dance-like second theme comes from the recently completed movie Devotion, about the Brontë sisters.  The Third Quartet, Korngold’s final chamber work, was given its première in Los Angeles, January 3, 1949.

— Notes  © 2011 Keith Horner.  Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca

John Adams: String Quartet (2008, Written SLSQ)

The String Quartet of 2008 was composed for the St. Lawrence String Quartet, whose performance of my only other work for quartet, “John’s Book of Alleged Dances,” stimulated my imagination to write something tailored to their exceptional blend of rhythmic drive and high-drama lyricism. The quartet—violinists Geoff Nuthall and Scott St. John; violist Leslie Robertson and cellist Chris Costanza—possess a style of playing, perfectly balanced between the instinctual and the intellectual, that greatly appealed to me. Their performances of Haydn and late Beethoven convinced me that they would be ideal performers of my music (and indeed they were, to the point where, several years later, I composed a further piece for them, a concerto for quartet and orchestra, “Absolute Jest,” based on fragments from Beethoven).

Normally impatient with traditional titles, I uncharacteristically defaulted to “String Quartet” for this one. The only other time I’d employed such a generic title was with the 1993 Violin Concerto. It may be that the choice of such an unadorned name for both works reflected a certain awe that I felt in approaching the medium. Historically speaking, both the violin concerto and the string quartet represent for me the epitome of the union of musical form and content. The models from the past, be they from the classical period of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, from the Romantic period of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms or from the twentieth century—from Schoenberg, Berg and Bartòk all the way up to Ligeti and Carter—constitute a compendium of those composers’ most eloquent and Apollonian statements.

My quartet is cast in a uniquely asymmetrical form: a single long first part and a much shorter second. The first part is itself divided into four distinct sections that, taken together, create a fully formed musical structure. Opening with a rippling 16th note figuration punctuated by the offbeat plucking of the cello, the music rapidly evolves into a sequence of intensely lyrical episodes that ride the engine of a regular pulsation, an easily identifiable vestige of my minimalist past.

A passage of becalmed stasis provides a relief from the restlessness of the opening; and this is followed by the eruption of a jaunty scherzo section, characterized by fractured dance steps and high-wire melodies for the violins. The energy winds down, and Part One concludes with a slower, muted music, similar to the opening in its restless inner movement. Only in its very last minute does the energy, now sounding as if blanketed by a layer of heavy cloth or snow, finally settle down to a short-lived slumber.

Part Two begins with bouncing octaves (not unlike the opening of Son of Chamber Symphony), a high-strung, nervous staccato that charges the entire remaining movement with a driven energy that will only occasionally break for pockets of espressivo that recall the earlier movement. The frequent appearance of the opening bars’ Morse Code figuration at critical structural points anchor the music’s growth. Its use might even suggest to some listeners a vestigial version of rondo form. A final coda pushes tempi and activity to the extreme. I make the kind of ensemble and emotional demands on the players that are only possible in that exhilarating and Utopian world of virtuoso chamber music.

--by John Adams