The Bennewitz is back!

We heard the Bennewitz String Quartet from Prague play music by JS Bach, Mendelssohn and Beethoven, this afternoon. There was a linking theme in that Mendelssohn had promoted and revived Bach's music for audiences of his (Mendelssohn's) day, having discovered in his gifted youth how great it was. He had also admired and tried to imitate Beethoven's compositions, so the 2nd violinist (Štěpán Ježek) told us in his well thought out introduction. All four string quartet members were recognised by the Ottawa audience, having appeared in town before. Last time Chris and I had heard them play, at the hall in Landsdowne Park, they were competing with noisy air conditioners, but the Dominion-Chalmers' "Event Space" (as this large, decomissioned church is now called) had much better acoustics, not to mention effective air-conditioning on this very hot day, so they seemed more relaxed.

An extract from Bach's Art of Fugue came first, the theme appearing in three different tempi (although I couldn't follow this very well) and in a mirror image.

Mendelssohn's Quartet in A minor, Opus 13, was itself full of fugues or "fragments of fugalisation" as the 2nd violinist told us, giving us a thorough music appreciation lesson from on stage. Also fragmentary were the references at the start and end of the quartet of a song Mendelssohn had once written to a girl he'd loved.

Beethoven's "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit", the long third movement (Molto adagio) in the Op.132 Quartet was particularly fine. I thought of my mother who deeply loved this music and used to tell me in her old age that she followed the composer's train of thought while listening to it. Our lecturer-violinist told us today that the Beethoven quartets mark a "watershed" in the history of music. In its day, Beethoven's music was unfashionably personal, subjective, a different kind of sound from what people were used to, this probably being a result of his deafness and consequent isolation. However, Beethoven explicitly did not care if he was liked or understood or not. He was rudely told, "No one wants to listen to your music!" The instrumentalists didn't even want to play it. A cellist once famously threw a new manuscript by Beethoven on the floor and stamped on it. But the composer retorted that he was not writing for his contemporaries but for future generations. Some of his actual pronouncements have survived because, being deaf, he was obliged to read what other people were asking and write everything down in reply. Many of these Conversation Books have been preserved.

*****

Added later ...

Hans Krása

I also attended the second concert in this year's series featuring the Bennewitz Quartet, at which they played music by Czech composers Suk, Krása, Janácek and Dvorak. Suk was a patriotic composer, Dvorak's pupil and eventually son-in-law. Krása was a Jewish composer who organised cultural events in the Theresienstadt ghetto, including the creation of an opera for children. He died at Ausschwitz in 1944. The Theme and Variations for String Quartet that we heard here in Ottawa had been premièred in the ghetto.

Leos Janácek's famous Quartet no. 1, known as the Kreuzer Sonata Quartet is his comment on tragedy of a more personal kind. "For some people" said the 2nd violinist who introduced everything again, "this [music] comes too close"; it is a depiction of male, sexual jealousy. The music (which I have described before, in a blogpost from 2008) was inspired by Tolstoy's novella by the same name in which a jealous husband catches his wife playing the piano for a young violinist as they practise Beethoven's Kreuzer Sonata together. The intimacy he sees there is too much for him and he murders her. As in Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht, inspired by a poem about lovers by Richard Dehmel, you have to use your imagination to follow the programme of emotions in the work. In fact the Janacek quartet is very similar in its painful intensity and dislocation at its worst moments, so to speak, the players scratching at their strings in a deliberate, symbolic disruption of the lyricism, but unlike the Schönberg, this one does not have a happy ending. The Bennewitz Quartet violinist said that Janacek was interested in "difficult stories" and in the arguments, common in Tolstoy's day, about whether a husband should have "a right" to murder his wife if she is perceived to be misbehaving. He pointed out that the music seems to end "with a question".