Dvorak: Piano Quartet No. 2

Antonin Dvořák (1841–1904)

Last night I heard the Dvořák E-flat Piano Quartet at Garth Newel Music Center in the first concert of their 2017 summer season. As often as I have heard this quartet over the years, I am still surprised at how new it sounds to me with each hearing. The craftsmanship and sheer energy are a marvel.  This morning I recalled that about fifteen years ago I wrote liner notes for this work and the Martinů First Piano Quartet which were included on a CD the Garth Newel Piano Quartet recorded. Below is the essay I wrote for the Dvořák. Since I can't find the GNPQ recording anywhere on the web now, I've included a 2014 performance by Mistral.

☐☐☐☐☐☐☐

1889: the year Antonin Dvořák composed his Piano Quartet in E-­flat major and the eve of the twentieth century. Most of the leading early and middle romantics, Beethoven, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner, were dead; and in 1889 Brahms had privately resolved to lay down his pen. But an even more adventurous generation had already taken over.

If we look at a musical map of Europe in 1889, here is what we see. In Prague, Dvořák had just finished his eighth symphony. In Germany, Richard Strauss had just completed the tone poems Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration. In Russia, Dvořák’s friend Tchaikovsky had just written his fifth symphony and was at work on Sleeping    Beauty.         Glinka    and    Rimsky-­Korsakov    attended    four    complete performances of Wagner’s Ring cycle in St. Petersburg in 1889, after which Rimsky-­Korsakov devoted nearly the rest of his career to writing operas. This was also the year of the World Exhibition in Paris where both Debussy and Ravel were first exposed to – and enthralled by – the Javanese gamelan.

All of these efforts by a new generation of composers, whose styles often differed radically from one another, involved at least one common element – an increasingly intense search to find fresh harmonic and melodic resources and new musical  forms. Often this search involved attempts to expand the traditional resources handed down from Bach and Beethoven. Increasingly this involved the exploration of resources found in folk and “exotic” music. For instance, composers as musically and culturally distinct as Debussy and Rimsky-­Korsakov both made significant use of the same folk-­based eight-­note scale (the octatonic scale later used extensively by Bartók and Stravinsky).

While it cannot be said that Dvořák was as revolutionary as some of his contemporaries,  he  nevertheless  made  extensive  use  of  the  harmonic  and  large-­form techniques of both Wagner and Brahms. Certainly Dvořák was influenced by Brahms, his close friend and most important mentor. But as a violinist at age 17 he played in Prague performances of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin Tannhäuser in 1857; and in 1863 he had the experience of playing extracts from Die Walküre and the Prelude to Tristan under the baton of Wagner himself. He abandoned his early Wagnerian inclinations around 1874 when Brahms became important to him, but in 1894, a year before his final trip home from his brief sojourn in America, he took a renewed interest in Wagner as he returned to his earlier ambitions in opera. As a result, it is virtually impossible to sort out the contemporary influences resulting in Dvořák’s amazing skills as a craftsman– at times we hear a little Brahms, at times a little Wagner (and many are the experts that have been occasionally fooled); but in the end,  always we know we are hearing Dvořák.

Antonin Dvořák

Piano Quartet No. 2, E-flat major, Op. 87

Perf. by Mistral in 2014

Andover, MA

(Sharon Roffman, Max Levinson, Adrian Daurov, Amadi Azikiwe)

The first movement of the E-­flat Piano Quartet begins with a solemn, forceful four-­‐ note  motto  in  unison  from  the  string  trio.    With  a  slight  change,  this  short  one-­measure motto is immediately repeated before the line continues – a balancing trick found frequently in eastern European folksongs and often employed by Dvořák. This initial thematic line is capped with a brief motto that seems to have cadenced the entire phrase on the dominant tone B-­flat.   One would think that the piece should continue  in  this  ultra-­‐serious,  harmonically  traditional  vein,  but  the  piano  has something else in mind – a puckish, rhythmically lopsided answer that enters a beat too soon, refuses the string trio’s serioso gambit, and destabilizes the tonality. All of this has happened in the first six measures! If we were to continue in this manner, note by note and phrase by phrase, we would discover that the entire first movement, even the wonderfully lyrical second theme, can be traced back to these first six measures. The primary key relationships building the overall sonata form here, as well as many of the chord progressions, can all be traced to similar techniques found in Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky – that is, these relationships “flavored” the entire romantic era. But the constant dramatic tension between the serious and the playful – the tragic and the comic living together in close quarters – is a particularly characteristic device of Dvořák.

Another quintessential feature of most of Dvořák’s work – his varied and colorful scoring – is also present in this quartet. The second movement, marked Lento, has  an almost absurdly simple form. There are five distinct themes presented one after another with no obvious development taking place. The technique for making this work is reminiscent of Brahms’ method of “continuous variation.” But once all five have been stated, they are simply stated again in the same order in which they originally appeared, with relatively negligible changes except to spin out the fifth theme to end the movement. We are tempted to ask: Isn’t this cheating? – And why isn’t it boring? One answer is that Dvořák subtly changes the instrumentation for the repeat.   Here is how the five themes (I‐V) are assigned to the various instruments the first time through (A) and then the second time (B):

	I	II	III	IV	V
A	cello	violin	piano	violin+cello	piano
B	cello	piano	violin+viola+cello	piano	piano

The third movement, a relaxed scherzo, gets its peasant flavor from several basic  folk elements. The primary grazioso theme is often accompanied by figures reminiscent of the cimbalom (dulcimer) prevalent in folk bands. There are four distinct statements of this theme (the second and third are repeated), each with a different accompaniment reflecting different cimbalom techniques. The secondary theme, in contrasting minor, is characterized by another device Dvořák often uses to suggest an eastern European flavor – raising the seventh degree of the scale. This is accompanied by a drone in the cello, reminding us that the bagpipe is also an important instrument in many Czech folk bands.

The most notable feature of the final movement, and what gives it a breathless feeling as if there is a horse race to the final cadence, is a technique called stretto. Historically associated with the Baroque fugue, the Italian term stretto (“close, narrow, tight” or the narrow “strait” between two large bodies of water) refers to the musical situation where themes begin to overlap – a little like an argument or an animated conversation with a friend who excitedly interrupts before you’ve finished your own interruptions. The result (in music) is a kind of controlled chaos that leaves the listener exhausted and happy – but sorry the race is over.