TURN

Reserve your copy now!

“TURN” will be released in the fall of 2021. Please click on the link below to reserve your copy now.

F. J. Haydn: String Quartet in G minor, “The Rider”, Op. 74 no. 3

The nickname attached to this quartet, “Rider”, was, as with so many of Haydn’s other works, not chosen by the composer but rather assigned post-publication by critics who likened sections of the final movement to the gait of a galloping horse. It is easy to imagine why the moniker has stuck, given the quartet’s vibrant and imaginative writing, but perhaps more important than any invented program is the context in which the work was written, and the transformation that it represents within Haydn’s canon.

In 1790, after having served as Kappelmeister for the wealthy Hungarian Esterhaza estate for 30 years, Haydn suddenly found his comfortable position considerably diminished. Following the death of the family patriarch Nikolaus, the estate dismissed most of their musicians and significantly reduced Haydn’s salary. Because Prince Anton, Nikolaus’ successor, no longer needed Haydn’s constant presence at court, he allowed the composer to travel. Thus, Haydn set off for London, his music already having attained great prestige in the city. The two-year stint there would be transformational for Haydn, providing the perfect conditions for an evolution of his style. Given that Haydn had never traveled outside of a 65-mile radius within Austria and Hungary, London was a deep new well of inspiration from which to draw. The cosmopolitan atmosphere allowed for the free exchange of musical ideas. He took a lover, who would serve as his muse. And the financial gains from this wildly successful tour allowed him to take his time and compose more deliberately moving forward. So when Haydn arrived back in Vienna in July of 1792, it is hardly surprising that his compositional style had been remade, and this shift is nowhere more apparent than in the quartets of Op. 74.

Those familiar with Haydn’s early quartets will easily discern the stark contrast “Rider” presents with his prior style; whereas the early works feature primarily a series of uninterrupted melodies, in “Rider”, Haydn frequently constructs the music from “motives”, or small snippets of musical material, which are passed between the instruments. The result of this practice is a much more equal distribution of important musical material, rather than the constant featuring of the first violin part that characterizes his earlier work. Haydn’s motivic use runs throughout the quartet, but poignant examples include the quarter-quarter-dotted half motive after the opening statement in the first movement, as well as the “interruptions” on the slurred octaves throughout the Trio section of the third movement.

We also see more frequent use of folk melodies in quartets from this Opus, and “Rider” is no exception. Perhaps his London excursion allowed Haydn to view the music of his native land with a different lens, and he came to see it as an untapped source of inspirational potential. In any case, the second theme from the exposition of the first movement is unmistakably a Hungarian Mazurka.

Haydn’s adventurism in “Rider” is not limited solely to melody, however. The 8-bar phrases of his early quartets are nowhere to be found in the work, with Haydn frequently using deceptive cadences, chromaticism, and secondary dominant chords to extend his phrases. A good example of this can be seen at the end of the development section in the last movement, where Haydn uses secondary dominants and chromatic motion to cycle through several keys before seeming to settle in C Major, only to tear away the harmonic stability by immediately transitioning into C minor, then C fully diminished, and stoking the fire of this chaos with a subito ff indication.

While Haydn’s style in “Rider” remains unmistakable, this work was without a doubt a revolutionary one for Haydn, who had invented the string quartet medium only thirty years prior. It can be said without exaggeration that the late quartets of Haydn, “Rider” among them, represent a major evolution of the quartet more broadly as well, as the compositional elements he begins to use after his London years pave the way for further harmonic exploration, further equalization among the parts, and more motivic construction, all hallmarks of the Romantic era to come.

String Quartet no. 2 by Alexander Borodin

Borodin’s Second String Quartet is easily one of the composer’s best-known works. Written later in his life during a period of chronic illness that ultimately led to his death, the quartet was conceived as a musical love letter to his wife, Ekaterina. As such, Borodin’s writing is teeming with indulgent romanticism, soaring melodies and rich harmonies throughout. In the first and third movements in particular, Borodin uses the cello and first violin parts to mimic the affectionate exchanges between himself and his wife, passing the melodic material back and forth between the two instruments. Some scholars have suggested that each movement of the work is representative of a particular moment in the couples’ relationship, with the first movement evocative of their initial meeting in Heidelberg, the second movement portraying the giddy excitement of young love, etc. However, no explicit programmatic indication was ever given by the composer. The work is in four movements and lasts about 28 minutes.

String Quartet no. 3, “Mishima” by Philip Glass

The music of Glass’ 3rd String Quartet is taken from a score Glass wrote for the 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters—a dramatized biopic which recounts the life of the Japanese literary icon Yukio Mishima. Although this setting presents the material out of order of linear time, each of the six movements corresponds with an important moment in Mishima’s life.

As with all explicitly programmatic compositions, it serves our understanding of the music to explore the subject upon which it is based. Yukio Mishima was in many ways a man shaped by regret. He regretted his lack of patriotism when he feigned tuberculosis to avoid military service during World War 2. He regretted his rejection of beauty as a corrupting force as a young man. And he regretted his failure to synthesize art and action, or “pen and sword”, to effect meaningful change over the course of his literary career. The events of November 25th, 1970, then, enabled Mishima to atone for his shortcomings in one fell swoop. After he and his private militia occupied a garrison of the Japanese army, the author went out onto the balcony of the building and gave a speech to reporters and soldiers, asking them to join him in reinstalling the emperor as head of government and recommitting as a society to traditional Japanese values. Following his speech, during most of which the crowd relentlessly heckled him, Mishima went back inside and committed seppuku. The garrison occupation was conceived of as “performance art” that would effect meaningful change combining art and action, the speech was intended as his act of patriotic atonement, and his death by seppuku at the peak of his physical fitness was meant to preserve his beauty forever. Of course, the modern observer will realize that the “performance” was fleeting, there was no long-term change to the course of Japanese society, and a dead body rots no matter how beautiful the person was before death.

The emptiness of these gestures is not lost on Glass in his construction of the quartet score. The hypnotic use of repetition gives the listener a sense of neither beginning nor end, and modally ambiguous endings to several movements reflect the uncertainty in Mishima’s mind as he wrestled with conflicting views on art and action, beauty, and patriotism. The only two movements that conclude in a cadence are the last two in linear time (2 and 6), which correspond with the final day of Mishima’s life (2), and an epilogue serving as a summation of his life in its entirety (6). These two movements are also the only two with a clearly recognizable melody, suggesting that Glass is using lyricism as a stand-in for action, while harmony, whether in block chords or arpeggiated, embodies art. Even in these two movements, however, Glass’ score leaves the listener feeling there is something left unfinished, and his omission of any sort of traditional ritardando at the end of each movement intensifies this feeling, as the work ends unexpectedly and without fanfare.

Out of respect for the composer, we have maintained the order of movements as written in the score. However, if any listeners are interested in hearing the piece as a linear biography of Yukio Mishima, they may listen in the following order:

III. Grandmother and Kimitake

I. 1957: Award Montage

IV. Body Building

V. Blood Oath

II. November 25 - Ichigaya

VI. Mishima/Closing