Notes for: July 18, 2017
Last week’s concert began with a delightful piece of Hausmusik from Mozart – a trio he wrote for the enjoyment of making music at home with friends. This week it’s Dvořák’s turn. At the time Dvořák wrote the Terzetto for Two Violins and Viola, he already had composed a large and acclaimed body of work – “ambitious symphonies, a lot of chamber music, and, of course, his Slavonic Dances” and his career was flourishing. In January 1887 he just had returned to Prague from one of his popular concert tours in England. In Prague he was staying in his mother-in-law’s house, where a young chemistry student, Josef Kruis, was renting a room. Kruis was studying the violin with Jan Pelikan, a friend of Dvořák’s. The composer heard Kruis practicing and thought it would be fun to write a string trio that he could play with the two violinists – one that would give him a chance to play the viola, the instrument with which he had supported himself early in his career. So he spent a week writing the Terzetto for Kruis, Pelican, and himself.
It turned out that Dvořák had overestimated Kruis’s abilities; the piece he wrote was too difficult for the student. Instead Dvořák dashed off some easier bagatelles. Clearly he was having a good time. To his publisher Simrock he wrote, “I am now writing some bagatelles for two violins and viola, and this work gives me just as much pleasure as if I were composing a great symphony; what do you say to that?” The more ambitious Terzetto must have given him the same pleasure. It exudes charm, and there is plenty of the melodic invention, folk spirit, rhythmic variety, and harmonic and contrapuntal adroitness that make Dvořák’s music so appealing.
From the beginning Dvořák effectively balances his unusual combination of instruments, through the deft use of counterpoint, and by having the viola compensate for the absence of a cello bass line. The Introduction, with its gently lyrical outer parts and rhythmically prickly middle section, sets the mood for what is to come. Like his mentor and friend Brahms, Dvořák had a gift for evoking bucolic calm, as he does in the serene Larghetto that flows from the Introduction. Here too, animated rhythms briefly interrupt the calm. For the Scherzo Dvořák turns to one of his favorite Bohemian dances, a spirited furiant with its two-against-three rhythm; the movement’s trio is a lovely, lilting waltz. Dvořák brings the Terzetto to a satisfying close with a harmonically inventive set of variations that end with an infectious flourish. For Dvořák’s biographer John Clapham, these variations – melodic, rhythmic, imitative, recitative – are a testament to Dvořák’s “great resource, imagination and experience.”