To trace anything as definite as a tradition, even in one country, with an activity as egoistic as conducting, is a delicate and hazardous task. Realistically considered, perhaps, the French tradition boils down to a list of conductors, from Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87) to Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) – the former keeping time by thumping the ground with the long stick which was to cause his death from gangrene when he inadvertently jammed the point into his toe, the latter shaping complex meters with batonless hands, and still, happily, very much with us.

True, conductors tend in practice to be conservative people (though the opposite is the case with two of the greatest, Berlioz and Boulez). They can often be shown to have reproduced quite closely what they grew up learning to do: making the same cuts and the same ritardandos and accelerandos as their mentors did, omitting the same exposition repeats, and so on. Even then, however, the reproduction, colored by the mind and temperament of the individual concerned, is likely to take on a new character and become something different. Tradition, as Stravinsky's dictum has it, is made, not inherited.

The word “culture” is a contested term. It hesitates between “nature” and “nurture,” an insoluble conundrum. It can, for instance, mean a corporation's management structures or the medium in which people come to discover their existence. Mary Shelley engaged with varied forms of what we might call “culture.” She worked on the journal The Liberal, a collaboration amongst the Shelley-Godwin-Hunt circle in England and Italy (J II 431). She published at least a dozen essays of the genre that we now call “review essays” and dozens more stories and sketches for the annuals. Shelley also edited and wrote the prefaces and notes to two editions of her late husband's poetry and edited his essays, letters, and translations. In addition to her novels and novella, she wrote poems and plays and translated works from Italian and German. A scholarly edition of her biographies is now available and her travelogues are at last back in print. In all these works, Shelley demonstrated her special awareness and intelligence concerning culture, both specifically as the literary productions and values of her era, and generally as notions of culture as a whole way of life (as the critic Raymond Williams, author of Culture and Society, would have phrased it).

The fascination of sf with faith and with ritual can be located in the geography of two strands of genre development. The first, scientific romance, bestowed upon sf a sense of grandeur and wonder at the cosmos and its works. From the scientific romance were drawn the great space operas of E. E. 'Doc' Smith, the spiritual journeys of David Lindsay (A Voyage to Arcturus, 1920) and the eschatological futurism of Olaf Stapledon. While the scientific romance did not support a religious interpretation of the world, it revelled in the immaterial and imparted to genre sf a desire for the transcendent; this vision of the future represented an attempt to peer into the heavens. The second, sf as it developed in the pulp magazines, leaned towards a much more material and ritualistic understanding of religion and, on the surface at least, this became the dominant mode of the sf encounter with religion.

Genre publishing began in the USA in the 1920s and much of what I describe in this chapter is consequent upon this specific cultural milieu. Most superficial accounts of the USA in this period adopt a particularist, northeastern approach in which America emerges into scientific and political rationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet most Americans remained deeply religious. From 1926 onwards, while court cases appeared to be ruling for ever greater secularization, legislation restricting the teaching of scientific knowledge and method quietly sneaked on to local statute books (this did not come to light until the curriculum reforms of the late 1950s, prompted by the Russian launch of Sputnik). By 1960, secularism, or at least a liberal interpretation of most faiths, provided an apparently hegemonic intellectual tradition in the USA.

The conductor, in any form recognizable today, emerged later in Italy than in other European countries. Italy had no Habeneck or Berlioz, no Spohr or Mendelssohn – and later, as the role of the professional conductor developed, No Bülow or Richter or Nikisch. It was not until the first years of the twentieth century that a real Italian star exploded on the international scene, and if the blaze of Toscanini's fame has tended to obscure the activities of his predecessors, that is chiefly because they had been obliged to struggle for so long with the last vestiges of a ubiquitous native tradition that would not easily relax its grip.

The dominating feature of that tradition was opera. The Italians invented opera, and they remained faithful to it as their main form of musical expression and social enjoyment for the best part of three centuries; in spite of the jigsaw of political frontiers it spread remorselessly over the whole peninsula, and was accompanied by a parallel decline in other forms of music. Church music (much of it on operatic lines) remained in constant production, but the history of Italian instrumental music, after the great days of the Baroque concerto, is one of gradual attenuation; the few interested Italians tended to go abroad – Boccherini to Spain, Clementi to England, Cherubini and Spontini to Paris. Italy was “the land of song,” and symphonic developments in other parts of Europe were regarded at best as irrelevant to the melodic invention that was the real purpose of music, at worst as a serious threat to it; orchestral complication was viewed with mistrust.

In the months that followed the death of Joseph Haydn in May 1809 the Leipzig journal Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung published a biography of the composer in eight instalments. Written by Georg August Griesinger and subsequently published as a single volume, it had been prepared in Vienna over a period of some ten years during which Griesinger had won the confidence of the composer. Its factual content and its tonewere to play a significant part indetermining the posthumous image of the composer. Both Griesinger and Haydn were conscious of the international esteem in which the composer was held and the biography sought to explore, through an attractive mixture of direct quotation, anecdote and reverential comment, how he had achieved this pre-eminence. Since the genre of the quartet was central to this fame Griesinger attempted to shed light on how Haydn had first come to compose such works:

With the publication of Haydn's Op. 33 (1782) and Mozart's ensuing ‘Haydn’ Quartets (1785), the influence of the Austro-Germanic string quartet spread throughout Europe concurrently with the gradual emergence of professional quartet ensembles. Like nineteenth-century symphonists, quartet composers faced a formidable heritage, especially after Beethoven. Brahms summed it up famously: ‘You have no idea how it feels to the likes of us always to hear such a giant (Beethoven) marching behind one.’ In the context of current musical discourse, it might seem naive to accept Brahms' observation as the starting point for an historical overview of quartet literature. Yet careful study of works by both famous and lesser-known composers points one repeatedly to the problem of the Viennese inheritance, and not only in German-speaking lands. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on the quartets of four acknowledged nineteenth-century masters of the genre and one whose works, although all but forgotten today, were widely acclaimed during his lifetime.

Schubert

Among the first to sense the giant marching behind him was Franz Schubert (1797–1828), who was born in Vienna just as the twenty-six-year-old Beethoven was becoming securely established in the Austrian capital; he would survive Beethoven by only twenty months. Although he is best known today for his Lieder, chamber music occupied Schubert more consistently than any other type throughout his regrettably short career: string quartets dating from 1810 or early 1811 (D. 18–19a) are among his earliest known pieces, and his last completed instrumental work is the extraordinary C major String Quintet with two cellos (D. 956) composed just weeks before he died.

We are ‘living in a bad time for practising the intimate, introspective art of the string quartet’. So writes a UK broadsheet journalist at the dawn of the twenty-first century. He is talking, be it said at once, about the difficulties of making a living solely as a professional chamber ensemble that plays the classical repertoire and, though despairing of dwindling public interest, and of string quartets selling out to razzmatazz and pop, he ends with an optimistic assessment of fresh ideas for drawing in new audiences. Be that as it may, his initial, nostalgic message is clear: it was not always thus. Indeed, times have changed as far as the string quartet's relationship with society is concerned: and like other types of music, the string quartet has a social and cultural history, well worth exploring.

This chapter attempts to draw out some of the central threads in that history, by presenting an outline of the changing social function of the string quartet, along with fluctuations in cultural attitudes towards it, from mid-eighteenth-century central-European beginnings right up to the present. The main theme is the relationship between performers and repertoire on the one hand and audiences or ‘society’ on the other – at root demonstrating a shift from participation to listening. But there is counterpoint, too, not least in the intimacy of the quartet genre and in how, as the very epitome of the chamber music ideal, it has responded to the problems and challenges that external factors have brought.

The composition and publication of Beethoven's first six quartets, Op. 18, are intertwined with those of Haydn's Op. 76 and Op. 77. Haydn had completed the six quartets of Op. 76 in 1797 but they were not published until the July and December of 1799, dedicated to Prince Joseph Erdödy who had commissioned them. Meanwhile Haydn had embarked on a new set commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz, completing two works in 1799; progress on a third work was painfully slow and eventually the two completed quartets only were issued, as Op. 77 in September 1802. The dedicatee, Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian Lobkowitz, was one of Vienna's leading patrons of music, devoting large amounts of money to the commissioning, purchasing and performing of all kinds of music, from songs to oratorios, and sonatas to symphonies. Over the next decade he was to become one of Beethoven's most ardent supporters, a process that began in 1798 in a deliberately significant manner with the commissioning of six quartets. Beethoven began work on them in the summer of 1798, and handed over copies of the first three in autumn 1799 and the final three in autumn 1800. They were not published, however, until 1801. In the case of both Haydn and Beethoven these contemporaneous quartets – Op. 76, Op. 77 and Op. 18 – initially remained in the private possession of the two aristocrats who had commissioned them, Erdödy and Lobkowitz, until their publication when they were released to the public with formal dedications. While it is possible that Beethoven may have seen manuscript copies of Haydn's Op. 76 and Op. 77 (particularly the latter because they were commissioned by Lobkowitz) before completing his set, it is likely that only with the publication of Op. 76 in the period July–December 1799 was Beethoven able to study any of Haydn's latest quartets. Having already completed three of the quartets of Op. 18 (nos. 1, 2 and 3), Beethoven revised them in the summer of 1800, and it is tempting to speculate that the revision was in part prompted by the publication of Op. 76.

Introduction

Ensemble combinations based on the string quartet have inspired some of the most expressive and intense pieces of all chamber music. The various genres examined in this survey attracted a remarkable array of composers, so their vast field of work can only be given a brief overview here. There is no space for detailed musical analysis or even a listing of every work of notable significance. Such enduring masterpieces as Mozart's G minor Quintet and Schubert's C major Quintet are illustrations of the inspiration afforded by the addition to the quartet of just one stringed instrument. However, the necessity to integrate extra players within an established quartet means that such works have tended to find their way into the concert hall only on an occasional basis. Long before these pieces were familiar through recordings, Walter Cobbett in 1929 went so far as to advocate the formation of string quintets specifically for touring purposes, as a way of doing justice to both the quality and the quantity of the repertory. The age of recording has consolidated the reputation of many of the pieces discussed below, including larger-scale string pieces such as Brahms' sextets and Mendelssohn's Octet, whose live performance has continued to be inhibited by practical and economic considerations.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century the medium of the piano quintet has become established as an important element in the repertories of both pianists and string quartets, with masterly contributions from such front-rank composers as Borodin, Brahms, Dvořák, Elgar, Fauré, Schumann, Shostakovich and Schnittke. Their various solutions to the balance of form, content and texture illustrate the distinctive versatility of the medium. Many of these composers also wrote for the closely related piano quartet, representative of a large body of chamber music which dispenses with a second violin and thus strictly lies outside the scope of this chapter.

Although the string quartet did not regain the privileged position it enjoyed during the Classical period, many twentieth-century composers from many different cultural backgrounds and stylistic positions looked to the genre as a context suitable for their most intimate thoughts. Throughout the century the string quartet was often viewed not only as a medium conducive to experimentation and formal innovation, but also for its positive re-engagement with tradition; this double focus was symptomatic of the multifarious nature of modernism, an ‘ism’ which encapsulated the defining aesthetic trends of the early decades of the century. This sense of experimentation and innovation often led to an expansion of playing techniques, an increase in the expressive parameters of the music and departures from the standard four-movement pattern of the Classical quartet. However, despite its use as a vehicle for change, the string quartet continued to provide a generic framework which reflected the inherited traditions and conventions as accumulated through the history and stylistic developments of the genre, even if in some cases it was only to construct a point for new departure. This relationship between tradition and innovation, a relationship which was at times oppositional, at others interactive, will come to be seen as a defining reference point for a generalised understanding of the string quartet repertory of the twentieth century. It will become pertinent through regional/national surveys of some of the main composers and works in the medium. Such surveys are not necessarily intended always to suggest national style groupings; rather they are used merely as a convenient and accessible format through which the principal works can be presented.

The exclusive image of the string quartet, established relatively early in its history and lasting up to the present day, has determined that only a narrow range of works from the eighteenth century remains in general circulation. There is a comparative lack of editions, recordings and above all live performances of quartets by any composers other than Haydn and Mozart. This might seem to mirror the current representation of later eighteenth-century music altogether, confined like that of no other period to a tiny number of ‘Classical’ figures. Nevertheless, one senses a greater openness to unfamiliar repertory with other genres. It seems to have been assumed that it is the quartet that most readily finds out the lesser figures, that sorts the great from the good. The collective image of these lesser figures tends not to accord them much dignity: they are lightweights, and any attempted revival of their music may well prompt a bemused reaction.

This reflects an attitude towards the whole musical language of the time: that it is inherently undemanding, that only the best can transcend its expressive and technical blandness. This reflects (and misinterprets) the marked preoccupation with medium and low styles in this language, the aesthetic preference for accessibility, to the relative exclusion of a high style that was by definition associated with a less accessible past. The heart of the matter concerns technical rather more than expressive tone: just what constitutes good technique, how does it relate to genre and how conspicuously ought it to be displayed for the listener? Once more the question arises of how distinct a role the quartet plays in such a larger reception history.

This chapter can give only a flavour of the myriad ways in which twentieth-century composers extended the frontiers of string playing in their quartets and, hence, the timbral palette of ensembles. Restrictions of space allow only a general overview, together with some detailed discussions of specific trends, techniques and expressive effects, with pertinent examples from the repertory. In many respects the weight of Classical tradition and the perceived limitations in the technical possibilities of stringed instruments initially resulted in the genre resisting radical change to a greater extent than most other media. Despite the extraordinary variety and concentration of texture and timbres in Webern's Bagatelles Op. 9, for example, performers are consistently required to pursue their traditional roles of hearing and feeling as a unified ensemble, interpreting each note as belonging to a single melody of timbres.

This is in sharp contrast to the more individualistic roles encouraged later in the century, when the genre became a vehicle for remarkable experiment and radical compositional thought. Bartók's quartets, with their wide range of pizzicato effects, vibrato indications, col legno and microtones, provided the most significant spark to those composers seeking to expand the vocabulary of available sounds and timbres. The chromaticism, the rhythmic and metrical devices and the colouristic and textural use of glissandi in Bartók's Third Quartet, for example, were all highly unusual for the sometimes retrogressive 1920s; furthermore, Hindemith's contemporary Second Quartet (Op. 16) requires the second violinist to reiterate a figure without regard to the pulse of the other parts (finale, bb. 458–511), a technique tentatively foreshadowing the development of aleatory devices such as appeared in, for example, Gunter Schuller's First Quartet (1957), with its opportunities for improvisation.

Introduction

As has clearly been demonstrated in the previous chapters, the art of the string quartet was taken to its heights by the Austro-German composers of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that equally fertile traditions began to emerge elsewhere. These trends, discussed in this and the subsequent chapter, signal the development of the genre into a medium adopted by composers worldwide, who gradually exploited it as a vehicle for the most concentrated, the most experimental, the most radical as well as the most intimate compositional thought.

Austro-German influence nevertheless remained predominant; in Britain, for example, even the major string quartet ensemble of the second half of the nineteenth century, the (English) Joachim Quartet, was led by a German, Joseph Joachim. American composers had still to find their own voice; and whatever Italian ensembles there were continued to perform the works of the Austro-Germans to the exclusion of almost everything else, so immersed were their fellow countrymen in vocal music, and particularly in opera and in the instrumental traditions fostered by the Viennese Classical composers. Despite the relatively large number of string quartets composed in France during the nineteenth century, no distinctively French string quartet tradition developed until the late 1880s, when César Franck (1822–90) and his circle of composers contributed to a native quartet tradition in France, albeit with a strong German seasoning.

In the developing national musical traditions of the nineteenth century, certain genres, inevitably, were privileged. Given its explicit, decorative, often political nature, opera became the major mode of projecting nation and national character, followed at some distance by the symphonic poem and programme symphony. In such an environment the string quartet, which of all the major genres of the eighteenth century that continued to flourish in the nineteenth tended to retain its abstract credentials, was hardly a priority as a means of expression for the more nationally inclined composer. The landmarks of nationalism, such as Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, Moniuszko's Halka and Smetana's The Bartered Bride and My Country represented the public face of the composer both serving and dramatising the nation, courting and exploiting the aspirations of contemporary fashion in their nations' passage towards the construction of an identity.

For the reflective composer working within national traditions, the string quartet offered the chance to explore a hard-won compositional technique, but also, notably in the case of Smetana, to project a more personal mode of expression once the requirements of the nation had been served. Thus, paradoxically, given its abstract origins, the quartet, reimaged by nineteenth-century aspirations, not only could embody the rigour of orthodoxy, but for the programmatically orientated Smetana proved also to be the means of explicitly dramatising his life; and in the hands of the Russians Tchaikovsky and Arensky the quartet could in the manner of Renaissance and Baroque tombeaux commemorate a life.

Introduction

This chapter is not primarily intended as a manual for playing quartets; nor is it a description of what actually transpires in the privacy of any particular rehearsal room. Rather, it aims to describe the main issues which ensembles, in their own way, have to resolve in preparing their performances. After a brief exploration of the notion of a collective interpretation, the main body of the chapter deals with some important aspects of rehearsing, principally in relation to facets of ensemble playing such as voicing, blend, intonation, rhythm, tempo, articulation, phrasing and structure. There follows a discussion of different strategies for coping with residual disagreements, and then some concluding thoughts.

First movement: interpretation

The concept of musical interpretation

Any musician preparing a work of classical music for performance faces the challenge of developing an interpretation which reveals the soul of the work with conviction and freshness. Such a challenge is amplified for a string quartet, because the players have the additional task of reaching their interpretations collectively.

Even without the problem of collective decision-making, what does ‘interpretation’ involve? Just as Shakespeare's The Tempest can seem to be a multitude of extraordinarily different plays in the hands of different theatre companies (especially from various cultures and centuries), so there can be a comparable variety of readings of, say, Mozart's ‘Dissonance’ Quartet (K. 465), even if each group is aiming simply to be ‘true to the score’. This is because it is impossible for a composer to notate for musicians any more precisely than a playwright can for actors.