String Quartet No.1, Op.7
Lento
Allegretto
Allegro vivace
On the 17th March 1910, the young Hungarian pianist Bela Bartok performed with the Waldbauer-Kerpely String Quartet at an all-Kodaly concert in Budapest. Two days later, Bartok's own First Quartet received its premiere. These two concerts have been called "the double birthday of Hungarian Music", and perhaps no one work exemplifies why this should be so more clearly than this First Quartet of Bela Bartok. Bartok and Kodaly were by no means Hungary's first, or even most prominent, internationally recognised composers, and Hungary was by no stretch of the imagination a musical backwater. Budapest was the second capital of a flourishing empire; its opera house had enjoyed such directors as Mahler and Nikisch, and the composer-pianist Erno Dohnanyi was internationally recognised as the successor to the most celebrated of all Hungarian musicians, Franz Liszt. But this premiere in 1910 has a special significance. It marked the public emergence of Kodaly and Bartok as a new kind of Hungarian composer, collectors of authentic national folk-music and educators informed by its spirit. It began Bartok's lifelong exploration of the musical form in which he was to become the most original, expressive master since Beethoven - the string quartet. And for Bartok himself, it marked an arrival at artistic and emotional maturity. In 1908, shortly before he commenced writing the First Quartet, he had broken off a profound relationship with the violinist Stefi Geyer. He called the lamenting first movement of the Quartet his "funeral dirge" for their love.
Bartok's First Quartet, then, was a work of both personal and artistic significance. It does not represent Bartok's mature quartet style in all its intensity, classicism and dazzling colour, but it does give us a moving portrasit of a young genius striving towards, and joyfully finding, his own creative voice - and a shy, serious man candidly expressing deep emotion. The Quartet's unusual form reflects this - three progressively faster movements, played without a break. The first movement is a searching, tortuously chromatic Lento, expressive after the manner of Wagner, or the Schoenberg of Verklarte Nacht. This was the received musical language of turn-of-the-century Central Europe, and Bartok had already shown himself its master in such works as the symphonic poem Kossuth (1903). The movement opens in the form of a canon; a more declamatory central section over a grinding 'cello drone-bass is the first taste of the visceral, earthy expressiveness so characteristic of the later Bartok quartets. The opening canon returns in a higher register and the movement dies away into the central Allegretto. This opens in the style of a highly chromatic, rather Brahmsian waltz, but develops in sonata form rather than the expected scherzo & trio layout. Rather than relaxing, then, the quartet continues to develop and evolve, and is final destination becomes apparent as the Allegretto ends. A tiny semitone quaver figure becomes more and more prominent, and eventually emerges as the "cell" from which the entire finale has been built. Linking the Allegretto and the final Allegro vivace is an instrumental recitative, a question-and-answer exchange between tempo giusto violins and rubato parlando 'cello which evokes Beethoven's famous instrumental dialogue in the Ninth Symphony. Bartok's final answer to the question is very different from Beethoven's, but no less personally significant. The Allegro vivace proper is an explosively rhythmic, high-speed Hungarian folk-dance finale, its dissonant ostinato-figures, and fantastic, dancing central fugato the first fully-integrated examples of the techniques and styles at the heart of Bartok's later quartet writing. The effect is of energy finally released, an artistic arrival.
Kodaly, Bartok's lifelong friend, described the First Quartet as "an intimate drama, a kind of 'return to life' of one who has reached the brink of the abyss". We can hear in it not only a programmatic depiction of an emotional journey from sorrow to joyful energy, but also an artistic voyage from Central European mainstream to vigorous assertion of originality and stylistic freedom. This profoundly optimistic programme, of a journey from despair to joyous life-assertion, from severity to freedom, would remain central to Bartok's music until the very end of his life. But as Kodaly wrote of this quartet, Bartok's music "does not need a programme, so clearly does it express itself".
R.G.Bratby 1998
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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