Get to know the composers: Haydn, Shaw & Smetana

Well folks, our first shows of the season are right around the corner! We’ve been busy this week with rehearsals, and are excited to get back on the road to share this great repertoire with you. We’re starting the season with our favourite concert formula; something old, something new, and a tune to sing on the way home. 

The concert kicks off with “The Emperor” string quartet by Haydn, the formative master of the quartet genre. The piece is a favourite classic, and has been a great exercise in shaking the rust off from a summer break. We continue with “Plan & Elevation” by Pulitzer Award winning composer Caroline Shaw, who is one of top movers and shakers in the modern quartet writing scene. We close the concert with Bedřich Smetana’s Quartet 1, “From My Life,” a musical memoir written while the composer’s hearing was rapidly deteriorating.

Joesph Haydn
String Quartet, Op. 76, No. 3 “The Emperor”

The "Emperor" String Quartet, officially known as String Quartet No. 2 in C major, Op. 76, No. 3, is one of the most renowned works by Joseph Haydn.  The piece gets its nickname from the second movement, which Haydn used as the basis for the national anthem of Austria, featuring the lyrics “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” (God Save Emperor Francis)”. Composed in 1797, the song was originally planned as a way to rally patriotism and boost military recruitment in the way that “God Save the King” had in England, but the anthem wasn't officially adopted until 1847. By this time the song had acquired a life of its own, and the melody was adopted as the German anthem, before Germany was even a unified country! You may recognize the melody - while Austria now has a different one, it remains the German national anthem to this day.

The quartet is part of six quartets “Opus 76,” which were composed for the esteemed Esterhazy family.  The Opus 76 quartets were written near the end of Haydn’s life and represent a mastery of the art form: melodic beauty, formal clarity, and emotional depth that stand the test of time. Haydn loved The Emperor so much that he would allegedly sit weeping as he played it on the piano in his later years.

Caroline Shaw
Plan & Elevation

We’ve been fans of Caroline Shaw’s writing for a long time, and first discovered Plan & Elevation through her collaboration with the New York-based Attacca Quartet. Their Grammy-award winning album Orange is sublime, and Plan & Elevation is the heart of the record. We’re lucky Caroline has written her own program notes for the quartet, so here is a little about Plan & Elevation in her own words:

“I have always loved drawing the architecture around me when travelling, and some of my favourite lessons in musical composition have occurred by chance in my drawing practice over the years. While writing a string quartet to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, I returned to these essential ideas of space and proportion — to the challenges of trying to represent them on paper. The title, Plan & Elevation, refers to two standard ways of representing architecture — essentially an orthographic, or “bird’s eye,” perspective (“plan”), and a side view which features more ornamental detail (“elevation”). This binary is also a gentle metaphor for one’s path in any endeavour — often the actual journey and results are quite different (and perhaps more elevated) than the original plan. 

I was fortunate to have been the inaugural music fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2014-15. Plan & Elevation examines different parts of the estate’s beautiful grounds and my personal experience in those particular spaces. Each movement is based on a simple ground bass line which supports a different musical concept or character. “The Ellipse” considers the notion of infinite repetition (I won’t deny a tiny Kierkegaard influence here). One can walk around and around the stone path, beneath the trimmed hornbeams, as I often did as a way to clear my mind while writing. The second movement, “The Cutting Garden,” is a fun fragmentation of various string quartets (primarily Ravel, Mozart K. 387, and my own Entr’acte, Valencia, and Punctum), referencing the variety of flowers grown there before they meet their inevitable end as cuttings for display. “The Herbaceous Border” is spare and strict at first, like the cold geometry of French formal gardens with their clear orthogonals (when viewed from the highest point), before building to the opposite of order: chaos. The fourth movement, “The Orangery,” evokes the slim, fractured shadows in that room as the light tries to peek through the leaves of the ageing fig vine. We end with my favourite spot in the garden, “The Beech Tree.” It is strong, simple, ancient, elegant, and quiet; it needs no introduction.”

- Caroline Shaw

Bedřich Smetana
String Quartet No. 1 "From My Life"

Bedřich Smetana was known for championing the language, music and folk culture of the Czech people, and is often referred as “the Father of Czech Classical Music.” In 1874, at the age of fifty, he begin to notice a variety of hearing problems, which was later diagnosed as tinnitus. His hearing quickly deteriorated, leaving him completely and permanently deaf by the end of the year. On one hand, this devastated Smetana, forcing him to resign all duties as conductor and performer. On the other hand, Smetana continued to apply his highly developed and fully internalized ability to compose music, in spite of his inability to "hear" it in the traditional sense. His musical output continued unabated in quantity and quality for over ten years until his death in 1884.

Written in 1876, Smetana’s first string quartet is an autobiographical one, depicting his life story in four movements. The quartet spans a wide range of distinctive music, featuring Bohemian polka in the second movement, a tender love song to his departed first wife in the third movement, and a devastating theme of tragic fate that dominates the first movement.

"My intention was to paint a tone picture of my life. The first movement depicts my youthful leanings toward art, the Romantic atmosphere, the inexpressible yearning for something I could neither express nor define, and also a kind of warning of my future misfortune. The second movement, a quasi-polka, brings to mind the joyful days of youth when I composed dance tunes and was known everywhere as a passionate lover of dancing. The third movement . . . reminds me of the happiness of my first love, the girl who later became my wife. The fourth movement describes the discovery that I could treat national elements in music and my joy in following this path until it was checked by the catastrophe of the onset of my deafness, the outlook into the sad future, the tiny rays of hope of recovery, but remembering all the promise of my early career, a feeling of painful regret."

Near the end of the last movement, you’ll hear the violin holds a lonely high-pitched note - this represents the ear-ringing that Smetana experienced before his hearing totally deteriorated:

. . . The long insistent note in the finale is the fateful ringing in my ears … the high-pitched tones which in 1874 announced the beginning of my deafness. I permitted myself this little joke, because it was so disastrous to me.”

The quartet doesn’t finish with a virtuosic bang like most - the sound gradually fades, disappearing from our ears just as it must have for Smetana himself.


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