This string quartet exhibit is inpsired by San Franciso Music Day 2016, the 9th annual ensemble music showcase created and produced by the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music. In 2016, they entrusted me to curate an indepth field report highlighting the string quartet which I titled The First 250 Years. Here you will find an inspiring overview and introduction to this extraordinary musical genre. The sidebar offers numerous string quartet "lists" to accompany your exploration as well as some fine books for further reading. Welcome to the vast, enchanting world of the string quartet. You could spend the rest of your life here. I know I will.

Bohuslav Martinů 1890-1950

Bergerettes for violin, cello and piano, 1939

A short list of first-rank important Czech composers would include, in chronological order, Smetana, Dvořák, Janacek and Martinů. Bohuslav Martinů was an extraordinarily prolific composer across a full range of musical genres including dramatic music for stage and film with at least fifteen operas, several orchestral concerti and symphonies as well as choral music. A substantial catalog of chamber music for a variety of ensembles totals nearly one hundred works. While his mature music lies entirely within the 20th century, Martinů developed a fresh, personal style that is predominantly tonal and accessible, largely independent of the numerous schools, trends and "isms" that characterize the multi-faceted landscape of modern music through the mid-century. In additional to several duo sonatas,

Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)

Deux pièces en trio , (1918)

Lili Boulanger came from a multi-generational family of extraordinary musicians: her grandfather, a prize-winning cellist; her father, a winner of the Prix de Rome for composition; and her older sister, Nadia, a prodigy, who became, arguably, the most important and prolific 20th-century teacher of composition. After winning second place in the Prix de Rome on her fourth attempt, Nadia would give up composing completely in deference to her younger sister Lili, whom she deemed the greater talent. Lili, beset with illness and an increasingly frail constitution, would die an untimely death in 1918 at the tragically tender age of 24. But during her short life of prodigious achievement, Lili became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome, leaving a small but precious cache of brilliant compositions reflecting both her historical/aesthetic context and her beguiling originality.

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

String Quartet in C major, Op. 33, No. 3, "Bird" , (1781)

Haydn’s Op. 33 set of six quartets goes by various nicknames: Russian (as they were dedicated to the Grand Duke of Russia), Maiden (due to an image on the title page of a Hummel edition), and Gli Scherzi (because the Menuetto dance movements were newly dubbed Scherzo). This last is one of several features scholars have posited to explain Haydn’s advertising pitch that these quartets were composed in a “new and special way.” Another innovation introduces the Rondo finale, a fast and often jolly genre that would become a Haydn specialty and an emerging standard for the string quartet and symphony. Compared with the previous Op. 20 set composed nine years earlier, the Op. 33 quartets sing with a fresh “lightness”, a warm joie de vivre many trace to the influence of Mozart as well as Haydn’s foray into comic opera.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

String Quartet No. 6 in e minor, Op. 35 (1946)

In April of 1939, Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), with close friend and musical colleague Peter Pears, sailed from England to North America. Their reasons were manifold. Both were pacifists and as the inevitability of England declaring war became clear, they chose to leave. Britten was also intrigued by the possibility of commissions, working with American composers, and cultivating his career abroad. Finally, Britten was encouraged by close friends, the writers and partners W.H. Auden and Christoper Isherwood, who left for New York months prior. Britten’s American sojourn was full of discovery. Living with Auden and Isherwood in a Bohemian enclave enabled Britten and Pears to “come out” as lovers. It was also by chance that, while in America, Britten read the English writer George Crabbe and discovered his poem about a fisherman named Peter Grimes that would eventually lead to Britten’s post-war opera.

Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969)

String Quartet No. 4 (1951)

Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) was born into a musical family in Łódź, Poland. She studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and, later, in Paris: composition with Nadia Boulanger, and violin with Carl Flesch. Bacewicz became an extraordinary professional violinist, as a concert violinist and as principal violinist of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, while pursuing a parallel and prolific career as an award-winning composer.

Following the German occupation in WWII, Bacewicz was part of the Underground Union of Musicians that sustained musical life during the war. Following the Warsaw uprising of 1944, her family fled, eventually settling back in Łódź after the war, where Bacewicz became a professor at the conservatory. Commissioned by the Underground Union, Bacewicz’s Fourth Quartet completed in 1951 was an immediate success. It won first prize at the International Composers’ Competition in Liège and the Polish National Prize in 1952. In 1953 it became a required piece for competitors in the International String Quartet Competition in Geneva and, in 1956, It was featured in the first International Festival of Contemporary Music.

Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996)

String Quartet No. 6 in e minor, Op. 35 (1946)

Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) was a Polish, Jewish, and later, Soviet composer largely unknown outside of Russia until the end of the 20th Century. His father was a well-known conductor of the Warsaw Jewish Theatre. Mieczysław taught himself to play and compose and entered the Warsaw Conservatory at the age of 12 to study piano and composition. In 1939, as the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, Weinberg fled Warsaw leaving his parents and sister behind. It was not until 1966 that he discovered his family was murdered at the Trawniki concentration camp.

Weinberg reached the Soviet Union settling in Minsk (where he was granted Soviet citizenship and earned a diploma at the conservatory) and was then evacuated to Tashkent (Uzbekistan) where he met his wife, the daughter of Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow Jewish Theatre. Weinberg sent a manuscript of his first symphony to Shostakovich who arranged for Weinberg to move yet again to Moscow where he would spend the rest of his life. Weinberg and Shostakovich cultivated an important lifelong relationship as friends and colleagues where admiration and musical influences were exchanged.

Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983)

Piano Trio (1916-17/1978)

The legendary 20th-century French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger once gravely advised, “Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so.” It would seem that her contemporary and compatriot, Germaine Tailleferre, was a living example. Defying significant opposition from her father, she learned piano and started composing as a young child. Secretly, she entered the Paris Conservatoire as a twelve-year-old piano prodigy. There, Tailleferre met and befriended some of the other young composers that would establish “a scene” in Montmartre and Montparnasse haunts becoming an entourage first gathered around Erik Satie and then Jean Cocteau, eventually dubbed “Les Six” by critic Henri Collet. Satie appeared to be particularly taken with the music of Tailleferre: he affectionately called her his “musical daughter.”

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Piano Trio No. 2 in e minor, Op. 92 (1892)

Saint-Saëns composed his second piano trio nearly thirty years after his first at the behest of a publisher who missed the opportunity the first time around. Begun in March of 1892 but not finished for over a year, Saint-Saëns wrote, “I am working quietly away at a Trio which I hope will drive to despair all those unlucky enough to hear it.” He called it “black with notes and black in mood.” This almost certainly refers to the two outer movements of an unusual five-movement work, both dominated by the key of E minor along with a bluster of rhythmic fury in the first. But this is not the drama of Wagner nor even Mendelssohn per se as Saint-Saëns, even at his “blackest,” maintains the poise, balance, and transparent clarity of the most characteristic French composers.

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Trio in E-flat Major, Hob. XV:29 (c. 1795-1797)

Haydn is well known for his monumental achievements with the symphony and the string quartet; he produced a combined total of works in both genres numbering around one hundred and forty-two. But Haydn was prodigious in at least two other genres at the heart of the classical tradition: the keyboard sonata and the keyboard trio, both transitioning from the harpsichord to the piano during the course of his career. Haydn composed something like fifty keyboard sonatas and another forty or so keyboard trios of which over thirty have been authenticated. The final ten "late" trios were written between 1794 and 1797 specifically for the piano rather than the harpsichord. They are known as the "London Trios" since Haydn wrote them primarily during his second, marvelously successful trip to England following his retirement from service to the Hungarian Esterházys.

Anton Arensky (1861-1906)

Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 32 (1894)

Anton Arensky was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor of the late Romantic period who, for context, was a generation younger than Tchaikovsky and a generation older than Stravinsky. A child of musical parents, he attended the St. Petersburg conservatory studying under Rimsky-Korsakov among others. He became a professor of harmony and counterpoint at the Moscow conservatory where his own students included Scriabin and Rachmaninoff. In Moscow, Arensky befriended Tchaikovsky who would exert a noticeable influence on Arensky’s style. A subsequent appointment at the Imperial Chapel resulted in pension that enabled Arensky the freedom to pursue composing and a successful touring career as both pianist and conductor.

Jean Sibelius, 1865-1957

Piano Trio No. 4 in C Major, JS 208, "Loviisa”, 1888

Jean Sibelius is an important early 20th century composer recognized for his outstanding orchestral music including his brilliant contributions to Finnish Nationalism. His celebrated works, very much still active in the repertoire, include tone poems (e.g. Finlandia, the Karelia Suite, Valse triste , The Swan of Tuonela, etc.), a very popular violin concerto and seven stunning symphonies. As such, it might appear that, much like other late Romantic composers (e.g. Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, etc.), Sibelius had little to do with chamber music. Of his mature music, one typically encounters but a single work: the exquisite string quartet subtitled “Voces intimae”, composed in his mid-forties. But a closer examination of his earlier years reveals the young Sibelius of the 1880’s who, in his late teens and early twenties, was an aspiring violinist playing and composing chamber music.

Carl Frühling (1868-1937)

Trio in A Minor, Op. 40 (for clarinet, cello and piano)

Carl Frühling was an Austrian pianist and composer of the late Romantic era active in Vienna. He was born in a city known at the time as Lemberg, the capital of Galicia, today known as Lviv, Ukraine. He studied piano and composition at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, graduating with the Liszt prize. Between the last decade of the 19th century the end of World War I, Frühling would have been best known as a pianist: an accompanist to noteworthy instrumentalists and singers as well as often playing chamber music with Vienna’s premiere string quartet, the Rosé Quartet. He was also a relatively prolific composer producing a poorly documented catalogue of more than one hundred works featuring especial music for solo piano, art songs and chamber music.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957)

Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 15 (1921)

The extraordinary 20th Century Austrian composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold stunned the world as a child prodigy, achieved international fame as a young man in the 1920s, emigrated to the United States after already having established himself as the father of the classic Hollywood movie soundtrack and ultimately left a small but breathtaking oeuvre of concert music. But with the radical shifts in politics, culture and taste following two world wars, the ferocity of the postwar avant-garde, and the misapplied stigma of “selling out”, Korngold’s reputation tanked. If he was not ridiculed or disdained as anachronistic or opportunistic, he was utterly forgotten as irrelevant.

Joseph Haydn, 1732-1809

Piano Trio No. 35 in C major, Op. 71, No. 1, Hob. XV:21, circa 1792-94

Haydn is well known for his monumental achievements with the symphony and the string quartet; he produced a combined total of works in both genres numbering around one hundred and forty-two. But Haydn was prodigious in at least two other genres at the heart of the classical tradition: the keyboard sonata and the keyboard trio, both transitioning from the harpsichord to the piano during the course of his career. Haydn composed something like fifty keyboard sonatas and another forty or so keyboard trios of which over thirty have been authenticated. The final ten "late" trios were written between 1794 and 1797 specifically for the piano rather than the harpsichord. They are known as the "London Trios" since Haydn wrote them

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

String Quartet No. 13 in G major, Op. 106, B. 192

Antonín Dvořák composed reams of outstanding chamber music such that it seems there is always something more to discover or certainly, to rediscover. Spanning a diversity of ensembles and instruments, even “just” the string quartets offer a marvelous expanse and range. While the beloved “American” quartet is surely the most famous and frequently programmed, there are 14 to explore with at least the last five widely considered masterworks. The “American” is the 12th in chronological order, composed in 1893 while Dvořák served as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Two years later, in 1895, he departed from America and returned to his native Bohemia. In November, Dvořák began earnestly working on a new string quartet that initially germinated while he was still in the U.S., but he quickly encountered a writer’s block. Setting this aside and weathering a bit of a lull, Dvořák began again with yet another new quartet, found his stride and with customary momentum, swiftly completed what became his 13th string quartet.

Frédéric Chopin, 1810-1849

Ballade No.1 in G minor, Op. 23, 1831-1835

Frédéric Chopin was a perfect miracle for the flowering of art music for the solo piano. His life almost perfectly coincides with the perfection of the instrument and its universal adoption as the solo instrument par excellence. But unlike the numerous performers and composers brandishing thundering feats of technical virtuosity that pushed the instrument and performer to their physical limits, Chopin brought only pure musical expression employing virtuosity and technique as means to an artistic end. With a fresh, novel approach to the piano, Chopin astonished and confounded the musicians of his day, essentially revealing a whole new domain of keyboard music uniquely his own becoming known as the “poet of the piano.”

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Sonata for Two Violins in C Major, Op. 56 (1932)

Sergei Prokofiev came of age in the 20th century and has remained both a popular and critical favorite especially as a Russian/Soviet composer along with the elder Stravinsky and the younger Shostakovich. A child prodigy, he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory at the age of 13 and caused a sensation with his intensely percussive piano playing with a startlingly modern rhythmic vitality that would characterize his mature work. Prokofiev launched a career as concert pianist, composer and conductor and, shortly after the revolution, left Russia for a few decades living the United States and then Paris where a combination of misfortunes including lukewarm reception and a worldwide economic depression left Prokofiev feeling unfulfilled and unappreciated. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1936 where, despite some newfound success, he would endure WWII and then the devastating state censure accusing him (along with several other composers) of “degenerate formalism.”

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Les berceaux, Op. 23, No. 1 (1879)

Notre amour, Op. 23, No. 2 (c.1879)

Gabriel Fauré is especially celebrated for his contributions to French “art song” known specifically by the word mélodie, essentially the French equivalent to the German Lied. The history of French song is, naturally, long, rich and complex, but the undisputed masters of the late Romantic and early modern French mélodie are Fauré, Henri Duparc and Claude Debussy during the a period that precisely corresponds with late 19th Century flowering of French instrumental chamber music, really two side of the same coin. With his gifts for melody, exquisite pianism, harmonic color and textural clarity particularly within an intimate ensemble, Fauré was perfectly suited to write music for voice and piano. Between 1861 and 1921, from the age of 16 to 76, Fauré composed over 100 mélodies, often grouped into sets and, in the latter period, thematically interrelated into remarkably innovative song cycles.

César Franck (1822-1890)

Piano Quintet in f minor, Op. 14 (1879)

César Franck was Belgian but spent the majority of his life in Paris as one of several composers in a Renaissance of French instrumental music towards the end of the 19th century after the Franco-Prussian war. A child prodigy, he entered the Paris Conservatoire at the tender age of twelve when he astonished the faculty with his virtuosity at the piano. After a short career as a touring, performing musician, Franck settled into the organ loft of one or more Parisian cathedrals where he once again dazzled others with his improvisations earning the admiration of no less than Franz Liszt. Frank eventually acquired a faculty position at the Conservatoire where his organ classes became celebrated forums for harmony and composition establishing a cult following among a younger generation of composers including Vincent d’Indy and Claude Debussy.

Lera Auerbach (b. 1973)

Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 28, (1992/1996)

Living composer Lera Auerbach is a multi-dimensional creative force of nature. Composer, concert pianist, poet and visual artist, she was born in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on the border of Siberia. While on a concert tour of the United States in 1991, she defected and remained in New York to pursue an education and a subsequent career. Despite her lack of financial resources as well as her inability to speak English, Auerbach persisted, studying at the Manhattan School of Music and earning degrees in composition and piano from Juilliard. To date, she has composed a rather astonishing catalog of music including two operas, four symphonies, numerous concerti and, for chamber music, at least nine string quartets and five piano trios.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957)

String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 34, 1945

The Austrian, Jewish composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold was arguably one of the very last European Romantics. Born in Vienna just before the turn of the 20th Century, the son of a prominent music critic, Korngold was soon identified as a startling child prodigy and proclaimed the Mozart of a new age. While still very young, his music astonished some of Europe’s finest Avant-garde composer including Mahler, Strauss and Puccini. At only 11 years old, his ballet "The Snowman" became a sensation. His first published opus was sophisticated piano trio from his 12th year. The noted pianist Artur Schnabel championed Korngold’s second piano sonata composed when he was merely 13. One success after another propelled Korngold forward as a composer as well as a conductor of first-rate opera and other stage works as he also managed to become a professor at the Vienna State Academy.

Alban Berg, 1885-1935

String Quartet Op, 3, 1910

Alban Berg’s first string quartet is an extraordinary work for many reasons and, without reservation, an important work in the “canon” of great string quartets if not music in general. Historically, it is a milestone of the early 20th Century as it is the first feature-length quartet written in a strikingly new language of pervasive atonality. Despite its radical departure from a nearly 300-year-old tradition of music anchored in tonality, it leverages a consistent tradition of music for the string quartet including formal underpinnings, the centrality of the “motive” and a dense conversational web of imitative counterpoint. Fundamentally, it sounds almost like a late Romantic string quartet. Emotionally, it is among the most intense string quartets ever written.

Joseph Haydn, 1732-1809

String Quartet in g minor, Op. 74, No. 3, "The Rider", 1793

In 1790, Haydn essentially retired with a pension from his decades-long service as Kapellmeister to the Hungarian Esterházy family. He soon made arrangements with the impresario Johann Peter Salomon to travel to London where he was fêted as the greatest living European composer. At the height of his powers, Haydn witnessed his symphonies and string quartets performed before a huge public audience in a large theatrical setting, a far cry from the exclusive Esterházy salon. Inspired by this new kind of grandeur, Haydn prolifically composed a fresh series of symphonies and chamber music realizing the glorious apex of his career in what can be called the “London Years.”

A Beethoven Celebration: The Complete Cello Sonatas

2020 is the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth and effulgent celebrations abound. Among the symphonies, concertos, chamber music and piano sonatas (to name only the most obvious), there is ample, if not endless, music to explore: music not just for a year, but also for a lifetime. For chamber music lovers in particular, nearly every year features Beethoven’s extraordinary output comprising ensembles from three to eight players centering most especially on his unparalleled “cycle” for string quartet. But Beethoven also wrote numerous “duo sonatas” (for featured instrument and piano) including a rich trove of ten violin sonatas. But the special program tonight focuses on a wonderfully unique and most appropriate showcase for this Beethoven celebration: the complete sonatas for cello and piano. Comprising five individual works, a performance of the complete set remarkably fits within the compass of a single concert. And magically, unlike the violin sonatas, the cello sonatas span the three traditionally named periods of Beethoven’s creativity (early, middle and late) thereby representing, in a single microcosm, the totality of his musical life.

Debussy’s stunning musical originality would become revolutionary in 20th century classical music. His music became the very opposite of formal, dramatic and primarily Germanic musical rhetoric of the 19th century. Arising from a distinctly different French sensibility, Debussy conjured his colorful, sensuous musical atmospheres from new harmonies, exotic rhythms and myriad influences from Spain, Asia and the new world.

All of this would come to fruition in the mid early 1890’s. Meanwhile, in 1879, Tchaikovsky’s Russian patroness Nadezhda von Meck invited the eighteen-year-old student Debussy to teach her children piano as well as provide accompaniment and chamber music. During a significant sojourn, Debussy frequently performed piano trios and, according to her letters, found inspiration to compose one.

Édouard Lalo, 1823-1892

Piano Trio No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 26, 1880

For much of the Classical and early Romantic eras, the outstanding French composers were primarily consumed with music for the theatre: opera, ballet and orchestral extrapolations. As such, a substantial tradition of French chamber music did not emerge until the late 19th century especially at the hands of such composers as Franck, Saint-Saëns and Fauré followed in a subsequent generation by Debussy and Ravel. There are numerous other composers in the historical mix but Édouard Lalo is particularly important. General music lovers will know him for the Symphonie espagnole and perhaps his cello concerto while, within France, he is famous for his grand opera Le roi d'Ys. But Lalo was among that first generation of French chamber music composers producing three piano trios, a string quartet, and a number of chamber duos including sonatas for violin and cello.

Rebecca Clarke, 1886-1979

Piano Trio, 1921

Slowly but surely, Rebecca Clarke is being rescued from obscurity through sporadic performances of her chamber music works. The sum of her compositions for chamber music, chorus and solo song is about 100 yet only 20 were published during her long lifetime. She composed mostly from her 20’s through her 50’s but due to various discouragements, a change of lifestyle when she married and perhaps a change of heart and mind, she ceased composing almost completely for the last 30 years of her life. Despite her pioneering professional career as a world-travelling violist and the outstanding craft and originality of her compositions, particularly during the 1920’s, it seems that she was indeed of her time: essentially under recognized and thwarted as a woman in a field dominated by men and a culture that could not quite recognize her achievements.

The Beethovenian concept of “early”, “middle” and “late” applies fruitfully to Mozart’s string quartets. Of the 23 he wrote, a full 13 comprise the early period, the epic 6 quartets dedicated to Haydn the middle, with a final 4 quartets suggesting a late period. The difference in each case is refinement, particularly of texture.

The last of Brahms’ three quartets eventually became his favorite. Written in 1875 while Brahms was working on his first symphony, the String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 67 achieves a sureness of quartet writing and a bright buoyancy of mood and rhythmic vitality. The quartet opens with a bounding theme suggestive of hunting horns that soon become delightfully entangled in cross rhythms, a telltale Brahms signature of two against three found throughout his oeuvre.