Notes for: July 19, 2005
In 1877, Dvorák was still a struggling composer. While he had won a few stipends from an Austrian government fund to assist young artists, only a few of his compositions had been published, all of them by a small Prague firm, and no large sales were produced or expected. Then in November Brahms, an adjudicator of the government fund, became interested in Dvorák’s music and sent Dvorák’s Moravian Duets to his Berlin publisher, Simrock.
The direct result of Brahms’s intervention was that Simrock accepted the duets, and asked for something in the same vein as Brahms’s Hungarian Dances. Dvorák’s responded with his first series of Slavonic Dances, and Simrock published both the duets and the dances in 1878. After favorable reviews in Vienna and Berlin, Simrock went on to publish – all within a 12-month period – three Slavonic Rhapsodies, a string sextet, a string quartet, two sets of songs, more Moravian duets and the Serenade for Wind Instruments.
By this time, the demand for Dvorák’s music was growing all over western Europe, and other Berlin publishers asked the composer if he had any older unpublished music on the shelf. Dvorák responded by sending two piano trios, eight songs, the now familiar Serenade for Strings and this piano quartet, all composed four or five years earlier. With such international recognition, Dvorák was able to arrange the first public performance of the piano quartet – in Prague in December 1880. Thanks to Brahms, Dvorák never again had any economic worries.
Composed in 1875, the piano quartet was one of the first chamber-music works in which Dvorák, following Smetana’s lead, introduced Czech folk-music idioms into his music. None of the themes in the piece are authentic Czech folk songs, but they could well be. In subsequent chamber music, Dvorák was to pursue and develop further his unique blending of musical nationalism and classical musical forms.
At the time, Dvorák was also developing in another respect – as a composer for the piano. Trained as a violinist and violist, he had served for many years as a member of the string section of the Czech National Theater. But as a pianist, he was largely self-taught, and his early efforts with the piano reflected that inexperience. In this piano quartet, the piano writing shows considerable progress toward the mastery of the instrument in his later compositions.
The first movement, in sonata form, displays in abundance the rich vein of folk-like melody and its imaginative treatment that were to become a Dvorák hallmark. The relaxed first theme in D major consists of two syncopated phrases presented by the cello, with a more rounded response by the first violin. The theme is then repeated in the unrelated key of B major, and is presented further in a wide range of keys. Eventually, the musical flow leads to the dominant A major for the second theme, one of Dvorák’s most gracious folk-like strains.
This material is repeated, developed at considerable length and recapitulated. Then, in the culminating coda, the first and second themes are combined, and the first theme is restated wistfully by the cello. Finally, the instruments exclaim them in unison, and the movement dies away.
The second movement, in B minor, consists of a theme, five variations and a concluding coda. The melancholy theme has three sections – the first section in B minor, the second in the relative D major and the third a return to the opening section. The variations then follow this outline.
The first three variations are easy enough to follow, but the fourth variation shifts abruptly into E flat major and becomes a broad, expressive tune. The fifth variation breaks the theme into small, descending, rhythmic figures voiced by the instruments canonically, that is, with overlapping entrances. The coda returns to the original theme, rising to a climax of unexpected intensity.
The third movement combines the features of the customary scherzo and final movement, with separate sections for each idea in alternating order: that is, A-B-A-B. The scherzo section (A) is based on a waltz-like theme, supplemented by a faster passage with cross rhythms suggesting a furiant, a Czech dance that crops up in many of Dvorák’s works. The ensuing section (B), using a smoother singing theme, passes through a number of keys and is enriched with counterpoint. The second appearance of B winds up the quartet in a quick-paced variation in 6/8 time.