Martinu Quartet Program Notes

Program Notes

W. A. Mozart

Divertimento in D, KV 136 (1772)

In one of his most famous remarks, Mozart complained to a friend about the strain of having to compose under the shadow of Beethoven: “You have no idea how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us.” This comment is usually taken to refer to the overpowering example of Beethoven’s symphonies, for Brahms put off writing his first symphony until he was forty-three years old. He waited nearly as long in the string quartet genre, and did not publish his first quartets until he was forty.

Brahms was not uninterested in writing them; on the contrary, he had been attempting to write quartets for years. He also was incredibly self-critical, and at one point disclosed that he had written and destroyed at least twenty quartets before he wrote two that he liked well enough to publish in 1873 as his op. 51. One of Brahms’s friends reported seeing sketches for these quartets as early as 1859, which means that the composer worked on them for fourteen years before he felt they were finished.

The lyrical and genial Quartet in A minor was completed in the summer of 1873, and much of its overall material grows directly from the first violin’s opening theme. Brahms wrote this quartet for his violinist friend Joseph Joachim, and he incorporated Joachim’s personal motto, Frei aber einsam (Free but lonely), into the notes that shape the opening theme: F-A-E. Three more rising eighth notes also return in various forms in the first and subsequent movements. The quartet is not an exercise in crabbed motivic manipulation, however. Brahms also supplies a second, glowing subject: a long duet for the violins marked to be played sweetly, charmingly, and gracefully. From these contrasting materials, he fashions an extended sonata-form movement that concludes with evocations of Joachim’s motto. The Andante moderato takes its shape from the beginning segment of the quartet’s main theme. Most striking is the ensuing first violin and cello duet at the center. Over buzzing tremolos from the middle voices, the two sing a Hungarian-tinged duet in close canon before the movement closes on another turn of the opening material.

In the third movement, Brahms bends traditional minuet form and calls it a “quasi-minuet.” Rather than building the music on a standard minuet-and-trio sequence, he presents a lilting, ghostly dance contrasted with two sections in which the music suddenly flashes ahead on a steady patter of sixteenth notes, only to be reined in to resume a more stately tempo. Many have heard the influence of Hungarian music in the finale; the first violin’s vigorous, strongly inflected dance seems to have its origins in gypsy fiddling. Full of energy and snap, this theme recurs throughout, with subtle evolutions each time, and the wild dance speeds to its close with a coda.