Takács Quartet
with Jeremy Denk, piano

Ludwig van Beethoven
String Quartet in F major, Op. 18, No. 1
Beethoven composed his F major String Quartet between 1798 and 1800, making the work roughly contemporary with his Symphony No. 1 and Piano Concerto No. 3. All these early works exhibit a command of form and gesture that tell us this composer knew his mind and knew where he was headed.

Published in 1801 as the first of a set of six string quartets, this was the second of that group to be composed. Beethoven liked it well enough to share what he had done with his friend Carl Amenda. Soon he looked again at the manuscript. He slapped his forehead, spread out the pages, and sharpened his pen. When he finished the rewrite, he pleaded with Amenda. That music I sent you: do not show it around. “Only now do I know how to write quartets properly.”

The quartet launches with a commanding gesture, voiced twice in unison. As the exposition proceeds, that opening gesture is repeated, but it also generates figures at once new and familiar, bearing the unmistakable marks of the opening’s DNA. This rich texture feels satisfying, expansive, complete. Wonderfully theatrical moves by the first violin are imitated by his colleagues. After a repeat of the exposition, the work’s first bars are explored further in the development, the minor mode now dominating. The recapitulation arrives triumphantly and revels in the paradox of instrumental profiles strikingly individual but also integrated—as if, you could almost believe, by magic.

The slow movement is the first of the great adagios Beethoven reserved for his string quartets. It begins as the first violin sings a lament above the pulsing accompaniment sounded by his colleagues. The movement unfolds as an operatic scene that all but begs for words, and although Beethoven is not likely to have had words in mind as he wrote, he did tell Carl Amenda that he was thinking of Romeo and Juliet while composing this music.

So many Beethoven scherzos are in-your-face numbers, sharp-tongued and bordering on rude, that this one is surprising in its restraint. It is elegant music, and only in the central trio section do we get a hint of a rougher side, a rustic dance marked by braying gestures. These are ancestors to the hee-haws depicting Bottom in Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music.

The finale opens with a kind of yodel, a comic gesture that gives way to passages of fugato spelled by lyricism, reflective though never too serious. Even as the music rushes to the end, it does not so much race to a finish as dance toward it: good-humored, sinewy, a delight.

Leoš Janáček
String Quartet No. 1, The Kreutzer Sonata
Were he alive today, you might expect to see Leoš Janáček on the cover of the AARP magazine, an example of why age need not limit accomplishment. He was already 62 when his opera Jenůfa brought him his first wide acclaim, but even greater works were to come—inspired, we are given to understand, by his passion for Kamila Stösslová, a woman 38 years his junior. Kamila was married, and the romance unfolded mainly in Janáček’s mind. But if love can move mountains, it can also help birth musical masterpieces. Katya Kabanova, The Makropulos Case, The Cunning Little Vixen (to name only three of the stage works Janáček composed after meeting Kamila in 1917, when he was 63)—these are among the 20th century’s most captivating operas, and to those essential pieces you can add the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass, and his two string quartets.

The String Quartet No. 1, composed in nine days in 1923, is subtitled The Kreutzer Sonata, after the Tolstoy novella, which takes its title from Beethoven’s Opus 47 sonata for violin and piano. In the heat it generates and the despair it captures, Janáček’s quartet renders an emotional sense of Tolstoy’s tale.

Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata fell victim to government censors upon its publication in 1889. It’s a disturbing read. A jealous husband murders his pianist wife, imagining she is having an affair with a violinist she has accompanied in a performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. The main action of the story is preceded by a long diatribe, misogynistic and preachy, that strains a reader’s patience. And although the graphic violence of the murder is abhorrent, it is less off-putting than the narrator’s self-pity. Tolstoy in a postscript reflects on the virtues of celibacy and makes clear that the tale represents his own thinking.

Why would a composer be attracted to a story like that? Especially if he meant the music it inspired as a love offering.

The answer is that Janáček inverts Tolstoy. He wrote that, in his quartet, he focused on the woman in the story. If the musical narrative is “told” from her point of view, we’re given to understand that men have no monopoly on passion.

This is an emotionally raw work, though elegantly structured and balanced. No sooner do we hear the long melodic opening than the line is undercut by short stabbing gestures from the cello. The long line is twice repeated and twice more interrupted. This short introduction leads to faster music marked by an obsessively persistent figure. A pause, and then a lamenting passage that recalls the opening. The stabbing music recurs, then all four players recall the opening and join in an impassioned song that rises in intensity and volume, ending quietly.

The operatic second movement speaks in short phrases. Over a drone in the cello comes a trembling, first in viola, then second violin, then first. The drama alternates between the languid and the inflamed, the fever peaking before subsiding into silence.

As cello and first violin sing a lament, viola and second violin interrupt with slashes of grating sul ponticello playing, bows scraping the bridges of the instruments. The lament is derived from Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata—the first movement’s second theme, heard here in a minor-mode version. Those nervous, slashing gestures return, and the movement grows alternately frenzied and yearning.

The finale opens with a recollection of the first movement. The first violin leads the dirge that follows. Faster music intrudes and the intensity ratchets up. The music gallops toward its goal, and then, like each of the preceding movements, subsides.

Johannes Brahms
Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34
The harshest critic of his own work, Johannes Brahms honed his material until he was satisfied. His F minor Piano Quintet, for example, began life in 1862 as a string quintet, then was recast as a sonata for two pianos, and ended two years later in its present form. In the contrasting sounds of keyboard and strings, Brahms believed he had finally found the configuration that realized his ideas most perfectly. (If you are not familiar with this music in its version for two pianos, you owe yourself the treat of hearing it that way and can access recordings via youtube. The resonant writing for the keyboard duo produces a sonority that lovers of Brahms will find utterly characteristic, a sound such as Robert Schumann must have had in mind when he called Brahms’ piano sonatas “veiled symphonies.”)

Brahms could write music of heart-piercing sweetness and poignancy. Not here. The quintet is a big, tightly built drama dominated by the minor mode. This is Brahms at his most serious.

The Allegro non troppo begins with a stern theme, outlined slowly, quickly gathering momentum. The lyrical second theme transforms into a march-like passage, re-emerges in its lyrical guise, and leads to a chorale that rounds out the exposition. In the development, these themes enter myriad byways, revealing dramatic possibilities Brahms continues to explore in the recapitulation. The extended coda starts in wistful reserve and grows into a great tragic capstone.

A song from the piano begins the Andante and becomes the foundation of this movement. Angry plucked cello strings open the scherzo, which knots itself into a ball of concentrated force, giving way to a heroic march. A nervous figure intrudes, crazed and obsessive. At its height it exhausts itself, introducing a lyrical episode—a brief respite, for again plucked notes on the cello lead to a reprise of the opening section, tension rising to its most fevered.

A grave opening in the strings begins with the same notes as the first movement and introduces a finale built on that movement’s scale. The allegro proper is a clipped dance with distant Gypsy roots. Mournful strings offer contrast. The coda returns to the movement’s slow introduction, builds in speed and volume, and compacts the emotional strands of this movement into a projectile. Its explosion marks the end.

Jan Swafford, in his 1998 biography Johannes Brahms, points out how, in this work, the composer matched formal means and expressive ends, moving forward in his creative evolution. Swafford continues:

Of the subtleties composers aspire to and only occasionally manage to achieve over the course of long pieces, [the] feeling of unity—within emotional variety—is one of the most elusive. It has little to do with technique as such, or motivic and tonal relationships as such; it cannot be taught, can hardly be analyzed, only felt intuitively by composer and listener alike. For Brahms this began to happen, perhaps, with the F Minor Quintet…. [T]he emotional intensity he achieved in it seems at times anguished, at times (in the scherzo) demonic, at times tragic. Yet the whole quintet remains a unified dramatic plot without becoming monochrome: one story.

—Larry Rothe

Larry Rothe writes about music for Cal Performances and San Francisco Opera. Visit larryrothe.com.