Two String Quartets, Op. 51 (Brahms)

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Johannes Brahms's String Quartet No. 1 in C minor and String Quartet No. 2 in A minor were completed in Tutzing, Bavaria, during the summer of 1873, and published together that autumn as Op.  51. They are dedicated to his friend Theodor Billroth.

Johannes Brahms German composer and pianist

Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. His reputation and status as a composer are such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

Tutzing Place in Bavaria, Germany

Tutzing is a municipality in the district of Starnberg in Bavaria, Germany, on the west bank of the Starnberger See. Just 40 km south-west of Munich and with good views of the Alps, the town was traditionally a favorite vacation spot for those living in the city.

In musical composition, the opus number is the "work number" that is assigned to a composition, or to a set of compositions, to indicate the chronological order of the composer's production. Opus numbers are used to distinguish among compositions with similar titles; the word is abbreviated as "Op." for a single work, or "Opp." when referring to more than one work.

Contents

Composition

Brahms was slow in writing his first two string quartets. We know from a letter from Joseph Joachim that a C minor quartet was in progress in 1865, but it may not have been the same work that would become Op. 51 No. 1 in 1873. Four years before publication, however, in 1869, we know for certain that the two quartets were complete enough to be played through. But the composer remained unsatisfied. Years passed. New practice runs then occurred in Munich, probably in June 1873, and Brahms ventured south of the city to the small lakeside town of Tutzing for a summer respite. There, with the Würmsee (as Lake Starnberg was then called) and the Bavarian Prealps as backdrop, he put the finishing touches on the two quartets.

String quartet musical ensemble of four string players

A string quartet is a musical ensemble consisting of four string players – two violin players, a viola player and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group. The string quartet is one of the most prominent chamber ensembles in classical music, with most major composers, from the mid 18th century onwards, writing string quartets.

Lake Starnberg lake in Bavaria, Germany

Lake Starnberg — called Lake Würm until 1962 — is Germany's fifth largest freshwater lake in terms of area and, due to its great average depth, the second largest in terms of water volume, after Lake Constance. The lake and its surroundings are an unincorporated area within the rural district of Starnberg; the lake itself is the property of the state of Bavaria and is administered by the Bavarian Administration of State-Owned Palaces, Gardens and Lakes.

Bavarian Prealps mountain range

The Bavarian Prealps are a mountain range within the Northern Limestone Alps in south Germany. They include the Bavarian Prealp region between the river Loisach to the west and the river Inn to the east; the range is about 80 kilometres (50 mi) long and 20–30 kilometres (12–19 mi) wide. The term is not defined politically, but alpine-geographically because small areas of the Bavarian Prealps lie in Tyrol.

He was 40 years old at the time of publication. Brahms regarded the string quartet as a particularly important genre. He reportedly destroyed some twenty string quartets before allowing the two Op. 51 quartets to be published. [1] At least one of the quartets (No. 1 in C minor) had been complete as early as 1865 but Brahms continued to revise it for nearly a decade. [1]

Explaining his slow progress to a publisher in 1869, Brahms wrote that as Mozart had taken "particular trouble" over the six "beautiful" Haydn Quartets, he intended to do his "very best to turn out one or two passably decent ones." [1] According to his friend Max Kalbeck, Brahms insisted on hearing a secret performance of the Op. 51 quartets before they were published, after which he substantially revised them.

The "Haydn" Quartets by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are a set of six string quartets published in 1785 in Vienna as his Op. 10, dedicated to the composer Joseph Haydn. They contain some of Mozart's most memorable melodic writing and refined compositional thought.

Max Kalbeck German music critic

Max Kalbeck was a German writer, critic and translator. He became one of the most influential critics in Austria and was bitterly opposed to the music of Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf.

During Brahms's lifetime, the string quartet, like the symphony, was a genre dominated by the compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven. In choosing the key of C minor for the first of his quartets, Brahms may have been seeking to acknowledge as well as break free from Beethoven's paralyzing[ clarification needed ] influence, since Beethoven composed some of his greatest and most characteristic works in that key. [1] (Brahms likewise chose the key of C minor for his First Symphony.)

Symphony extended musical composition

A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often written by composers for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning common today: a work usually consisting of multiple distinct sections or movements, often four, with the first movement in sonata form. Symphonies are almost always scored for an orchestra consisting of a string section, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments which altogether number about 30 to 100 musicians. Symphonies are notated in a musical score, which contains all the instrument parts. Orchestral musicians play from parts which contain just the notated music for their own instrument. Some symphonies also contain vocal parts.

Ludwig van Beethoven German classical and romantic composer

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in classical music, he remains one of the most recognised and influential of all composers. His best-known compositions include 9 symphonies; 5 piano concertos; 1 violin concerto; 32 piano sonatas; 16 string quartets; a mass, the Missa solemnis; and an opera, Fidelio. His career as a composer is conventionally divided into early, middle, and late periods; the "early" period is typically seen to last until 1802, the "middle" period from 1802 to 1812, and the "late" period from 1812 to his death in 1827.

C minor tonality

C minor is a minor scale based on C, consisting of the pitches C, D, E♭, F, G, A♭, and B♭. Its key signature consists of three flats. Its relative major is E♭ major and its parallel major is C major.

Structure

The "terse", "tragic" [2] String Quartet No. 1 in C minor is remarkable for its organic unity and for the harmonically sophisticated, "orchestrally inclined" outer movements that bracket its more intimate inner movements. [1] Structurally and thematically, the first movement shows the influence of Schubert's Quartettsatz, D. 703, also in C minor. [2] The quartet consists of four movements:

A movement is a self-contained part of a musical composition or musical form. While individual or selected movements from a composition are sometimes performed separately, a performance of the complete work requires all the movements to be performed in succession. A movement is a section, "a major structural unit perceived as the result of the coincidence of relatively large numbers of structural phenomena".

A unit of a larger work that may stand by itself as a complete composition. Such divisions are usually self-contained. Most often the sequence of movements is arranged fast-slow-fast or in some other order that provides contrast.

  1. Allegro (C minor, ends in C major)
  2. Romanze: Poco adagio (A♭ major)
  3. Allegretto molto moderato e comodo (F minor, ends in F major)
  4. Allegro (C minor)

The String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, also highly unified thematically, is comparatively lyrical, although culminating in a dramatic and propulsive finale whose tension "derives...from a metrical conflict between theme and accompaniment." [3] Like Brahms's Piano Quartet No. 1 and Violin Concerto, the A minor quartet has a final movement modeled on a Hungarian folk dance, in this case a czárdás. [4] The quartet consists of four movements:

  1. Allegro non troppo (A minor)
  2. Andante moderato (A major)
  3. Quasi Minuetto, moderato (A minor)
  4. Finale. Allegro non assai (A minor)

With all the movements in A minor or A major, the String Quartet No. 2 is therefore homotonal. Each quartet lasts about half an hour in performance.

Critical reception

The Op. 51 string quartets were received "respectfully if without great enthusiasm" at their respective premieres in October and December 1873. [5] While the quartets have enjoyed less popularity than some of Brahms's other chamber music, they helped revitalize "the great but moribund tradition" of the string quartet that had stagnated after Beethoven and Schubert, and helped inspire the quartets of Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, and other twentieth century composers. [5] In his famous essay "Brahms the Progressive", Schoenberg praised the quartets for their advanced harmony and for the unprecedented completeness with which Brahms derives each movement from a tiny motif. [6]

The Op. 51 quartets have been recorded by many ensembles including the Amadeus Quartet, Quartetto Italiano, Alban Berg Quartet, Cleveland Quartet, Tokyo Quartet, Emerson Quartet, Chiara String Quartet and Takács Quartet.

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The Takács Quartet is a string quartet, founded in Hungary, and now based in Boulder, Colorado, United States.

Piano Quintet (Schumann) musical composition by Robert Schumann (1842)

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The Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34, by Johannes Brahms was completed during the summer of 1864 and published in 1865. It was dedicated to Her Royal Highness Princess Anna of Hesse. Like most piano quintets composed after Robert Schumann's Piano Quintet (1842), it is written for piano and string quartet.

The Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance has been awarded since 1959. The award has had several minor name changes:

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D minor minor key with a single-flat key signature

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The Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg published four string quartets, distributed over his lifetime: String Quartet No. 1 in D minor, Op. 7 (1905), String Quartet No. 2 in F♯ minor, Op. 10 (1908), String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30 (1927), and the String Quartet No. 4, Op. 37 (1936).

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Donat, Misha (2008). Liner notes. In Takács Quartet, Brahms: String Quartets Op. 67 and Op. 51, No. 1, pp. 2–3
  2. 1 2 Hefling, Stephen E. (2003). "The Austro–Germanic quartet tradition in the nineteenth century." In Robin Stowell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet , pp. 244–246.
  3. ↑ Donat, Misha (2007). Liner notes. In Takács Quartet and Stephen Hough, Brahms: String Quartet Op. 51, No. 2, and Piano Quintet, Op. 34, London: Hyperion], p. 7.
  4. ↑ Berger, Melvin (2001). Guide to Chamber Music, Dover Books, p. 100.
  5. 1 2 Swafford, Jan (1997). Johannes Brahms: A Biography, Knopf, p. 386
  6. ↑ Schoenberg, Arnold (1950). Style and Idea, Philosophical Library.

Further reading

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