Pacifica Quartet
Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847): Quartet in E-flat Major (1834)
Works for string quartet were first composed in the late eighteenth; anything like a core repertoire took a few decades to establish. This is true also of symphonies and other genres. Performances of chamber music were primarily at house concerts, performed by amateurs or professional musicians, occasionally mixed. Some scores were published immediately after composition, others circulated in manuscript or hand-copied versions. Court composers, most notably Haydn, had essentially a captive audience and via their job description composed large numbers of works in all genres. Performers were of varying quality, with a few professional chamber ensembles just being formed.
Beethoven benefited from close association with the Schuppanzigh Quartet, usually credited as the first professional string quartet. As the nineteenth century progressed, other professional ensembles followed as repertoire increased along with public audience demand. Commissions fortified composers, notably Beethoven, who embraced the string quartet instrumentation, and repertoire from the period grew also by discovery and resurrection of extant works, some overlooked until recently. Fanny Mendelssohn’s quartet is from the latter category.
Felix Mendelssohn’s older sister, Fanny received the same education as her brother. She composed more than 400 works, about 300 of them lieder, and was considered by Felix and others as equally gifted. As a woman, however, opportunities for publication and public performance were limited to almost nil. This extreme restriction on women composers lasted well into the twentieth century. Today the repertoire is expanding with resuscitation of lost works regardless of a composer’s gender, with some emphasis on scores by women known to have been talented but whose careers were severely attenuated by societal restriction.
Mendelssohn composer siblings were grandchildren of Moses Mendelssohn, a highly regarded Enlightenment philosopher. Their father, Abraham, sought to offset prevalent anti-Semitism by having his children baptized in a Christian church in Berlin. (For a similar reason, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg also converted to Christianity. Schoenberg reconverted to Judaism in 1933, just before moving permanently to the United States.) Abraham and his wife converted later, and they added the name Bartholdy, which Fanny didn’t use.
Fanny and Felix were taught piano first by their mother. Recognizing their talent, their parents enrolled them in Carl Zelter’s theory and composition classes in Berlin. Both flourished. In a letter to Goethe, Zelter wrote, “He (father Abraham) has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special.” Zelter’s reference to Bach acknowledges Fanny’s performance at age 13 of the preludes from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier for her father’s birthday at a house concert.
European house concerts grew to extended salons by 1825, when the Mendelssohns bought a large estate near Berlin. Some audiences there might have been as large as 100. Eventually, Fanny managed these salon recitals, performing her own works as well as Felix’s and others’. Berlin’s best musicians often took part, and occasional attendees included composers Carl Maria von Weber, Liszt, Robert and Clara Schumann, and E.T.A Hoffmann; literary figures Heinrich Heine and Jacob Grimm; the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; and members of Berlin’s high society.
As adults the Mendelssohns traveled frequently, Felix much more than Fanny. At a performance for Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace in July, 1842, the Queen was asked if she wanted to sing one of the lieder from Felix’s Op. 8 set. (The screeching parrot had to be moved to another room.) Felix reported, “She very kindly consented, choosing ‘Schöner und schöner’ (‘Italien’), sang it beautifully in tune, in strict time, and with very nice expression. Then I was obliged to confess that Fanny had written the song (which I found very hard, but pride must have a fall), and begged her to sing one of my own as well.” She did.
A bit of sibling rivalry.
Such was their relationship—mutually supportive at times, sometimes critical, always overshadowed by gender roles of the era. Felix’s Opp. 8 and 9 include some of Fanny’s lieder, but Felix never supported her for public performance outside the salon, and acquiesced to publication under her own name only the year before she died. Some of her other of her works may have been published under Felix’s name.
Fanny married painter Wilhelm Hensel in 1829. She was not hopeful that marriage would provide opportunity for public performance as pianist and composer (she was reputedly a capable conductor as well). In a letter she wrote to Hensel during their engagement Fanny expressed with dismay, “I am composing no more songs, at least not by modern poets I know personally. (Perhaps referring to Goethe, whose poems she had set frequently.) I now comprehend what I've always heard and what the truth-speaking Jean Paul has also said: Art is not for women, only for girls; on the threshold of my new life I take leave of this plaything.”
Fortunately, she did continue to compose. String Quartet in E-Flat was completed in 1834 after several years’ gestation. Parts of it derive from sketches for a piano sonata. Her grasp of conventional form is evident throughout, as is balance of phrasing and overall structure.
The short, contemplative opening movement is a fantasia of a sort, featuring a principal theme with counterpoint that becomes a second theme. Motivic development is consistent, something Fanny learned from study of Beethoven’s scores. Melody dominates with the principal theme serving as a coda.
The scherzo references a theme from Paganini’s second violin concerto. It’s a lively movement that features counterpoint in the trio with occasional pizzicato strokes that vary the timbre. Harmonic sequences provide the alternation of major and minor. The extended third movement is a lovely Romanze, free-ranging with an improvisatory character. It features perpetual motion for the ensemble, with an engaging passage involving violins playing long notes over busy lower strings. The final movement is vigorous throughout, a tantalizing impression of unfettered personality and character.
This quartet is salon-like, the salon after all was the nearly exclusive setting for Fanny’s creativity.
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73 (1946)
“Loyal Stalinist or Secret Dissident?” This subtitle from Ian MacDonald’s book titled The New Shostakovichsums the view of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic composer. Voluminous records and other documents provide a nearly complete picture of Shostakovich’s whereabouts, premieres and subsequent performances and by whom, as well as on his students at the St. Petersburg (Leningrad during Soviet times) and Moscow conservatories, where he taught occasionally. His favorite cafes and drinking partners are known, sometimes to the date and time.
Relationships with prominent performers, most notably concertos composed for violinist David Oistrakh and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, are well documented in prose and photographs. Pravda reviews of performances, often with Shostakovich in attendance, further locate the composer in time. Even his health issues, including convalescence in an institution following a heart attack, are described in extensive letters to and from friends.
What is unknown or otherwise not confidently known is Shostakovich’s political view of Soviet communism. Alone among major Russian composers, his life in Russia encompassed the end of Tsarist Era through Stalin’s death in 1953 and two decades beyond. In the 1910s older Russian composers Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky emigrated to Europe and, eventually, the United States; Prokofiev did as well, but returned permanently to Russia in 1933. Shostakovich, then, came of age during the tumultuous post-Bolshevik formation of the Soviet Union with its compositional opportunities and distractions.
Beginning in 1925, the date of his first symphony, Shostakovich was perpetually and prominently engulfed in Soviet life and, by necessity, its politics. Most of his 15 symphonies and 15 quartets exhibit political sensitivity.
Some of Shostakovich’s statements appear ironic, others seem merely to state what would be expected of a loyal Soviet citizen. He was occasionally anxious regarding how a piece would be reviewed by Pravda critics, or by Stalin. Composed in 1932 and revised 12 years later, the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was extraordinarily popular in Europe, the United States, and Russia. Stalin attended a performance one evening in 1936, storming out near the conclusion. Contrary to effusive praise in international press after numerous performances, Pravda accused the opera of “tickling the perverted taste of the bourgeoisie with its screaming neurotic music.” Five years later Shostakovich won the first of five Stalin Prizes.
Soviet arts, especially music, were supposed to exhibit “socialist realism.” The problem was that no one seemed to know what it meant. No written list of requirements, no examples from previous scores, no abstract models. For purely instrumental music this was a problem never solved, though the term was used to praise or damn a work. Shostakovich by
times was on the critics’ one side or the other. The Lady Macbeth experience for instance. During the most difficult years of Stalin’s purges, Shostakovich sometimes stayed up all night, fully dressed and with a small suitcase at hand, waiting for the dreaded 3:00 knock on the door.
Concern for censorship or worse attenuated composition in the 1940s. His ninth symphony was planned to celebrate the 1945 victory of Soviet forces over the Nazis, with chorus and vocal soloists complementing the orchestra. Instead the symphony is for orchestra alone, with nothing of the common celebratory or militaristic bombast Shostakovich was clearly capable of producing, as in the final movement of his Fifth Symphony.
Completed in 1945, the ninth was heavily criticized by critics soon thereafter, one stating that it showed “ideological weakness” and another found it a “failure to reflect the true spirit of the Soviet Union.” Performances were banned from 1948 to 1955, and Shostakovich didn’t compose another symphony until Stalin’s death in 1953. Usually prolific and working on several compositions simultaneously, Shostakovich produced fewer works in the late ‘40s. Of them, the original version of his first violin concerto and third string quartet are paramount.
The third quartet’s original score included prose phrases with each movement; after the premiere performance Shostakovich discarded the prose. The first movement prose was “calm unawareness of the future cataclysm.” Nothing is known about his decision to include this and other phrases or why he discarded them. Shostakovich often “signed” works with his initials—D S C H (German pitch names D E-flat C B). This tidy symmetrical tetrachord features most prominently in his eighth quartet and frequently in his third. Another favorite motive is a short-short-long rhythmic phrase. This motive is aurally apparent at the beginning of the first movement and, when contrasted with the conjunct second theme provides the structure for an imaginatively constructed sonata-allegro form. The character is jovially sarcastic, the movement punctuated by a frenzied coda.
“Rumblings of unrest and anticipation” addressed the dark second movement. A drunken waltz seems to simply be replaced without coherence by a bitonal, eerie staccato passage. Whereas the waltz seemed to meander to find a way out or into something, the static extension of the movement is unsettling by lack of motion and brief exclamations by violins.
“The forces unleashed” are indeed aggressively prevalent in the musclebound fourth movement. Intensely agitated, the mixed meter implies an explosion of uncontrollable events. A brief respite from the heavy multiple-stop texture does not relieve the tension set by the quartet’s musical forces.
The finale poses “the eternal question Why? And for What?” The rising unison melody at the outset exhibits the contour similar to other melodies in the quartet. The short-short-long rhythmic motive recurs, anchoring the work’s structural integrity. A bleak, mournful melody reflects elegies Shostakovich composed several times. The second section is a comment on the first, a series of brief melodic fragments, unfinished melodies of a sort, relieved by a jaunty reference to the first movement. The extended conclusion is episodic, as though trying varying answers to the philosophical question. The final moments are wistful, chilling.
Robert Zierolf
