Notes for: August 11, 2009
Bartók wrote only six string quartets, but they played a central part in his musical development. The quartets were spaced throughout his life – from ages 27 to 58 – and each typified, in fact culminated, a particular phase of his evolving growth and experience. Taken together, they constitute a contribution to the quartet literature rivaled in the 20th century only by the 15 quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich.
Like its predecessors, the Sixth Quartet offers Bartók’s highly individualistic blend of expressive dissonance, Magyar folk elements, bursting energy and percussive rhythms, novel instrumental effects, and intricate development of thematic fragments. But there is something more. The quartet, composed in the fall of 1939, has an undercurrent of melancholy, nostalgia, even tragedy, reflecting the composer’s emotional response to Nazi aggression and to the growing ties of his native Hungary to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
As reflected in his letters, the rapid advance of Nazism had plunged Bartók into a state of panic and pessimism, and he had sought refuge in a peaceful Alpine valley in Switzerland. However, with the advent of World War II and the signing by Hitler and Stalin of a non-aggression pact, he was called back to Hungary by the turn of political events and the illness of his mother. Before Christmas his mother died, and he felt free to leave his native country never to return.
He died six years later in New York City, and was buried in suburban Hartsdale. In the late 1980s, his remains were transferred to Budapest for a state funeral, with burial in Budapest’s Farkasréti Cemetery.
Bartók’s began the Sixth Quartet in Switzerland early in August, 1939, and completed it in Budapest in November. It was thus his last work in Europe, and reflected his depression and growing sense of personal alienation in the disintegrating central European society.
The work’s overall-mood is set and maintained through a highly unorthodox musical device – the use of a motto-theme marked mesto (sad) at the start of each of the four movements. The motto is mournfully stated at the outset of the quartet by the unaccompanied viola. It is then repeated at the beginning of the subsequent movements with growing intensity.
Thus, to open the second movement the motto-theme is played muted, in a two-part setting, with the cello taking the melody proper. In the third movement, it is played in a three-part setting, with the first violin taking the melody and the viola silent for several measures. To open the fourth movement, it is played in counterpoint by four independent voices.
For the first three movements, the motto-theme serves only as an introduction and is separate from the material that follows. For the fourth movement, the mesto continues and becomes the movement itself.
The first movement is in sonata form, with the main theme consisting of a short, almost flippant upward run of 8th notes that culminates in a hold. The theme is first stated by the first violin, but only after it has been foreshadowed in sustained longer notes played by the four instruments pesante (heavily). The second theme is marked con calore (with warmth) and has a distinct Magyar flavor, and a third theme is derived from the first two measures of the motto-theme.
The second movement is a march, the main theme of which is taken from the fifth and sixth measures of the motto-theme. In the middle section, marked rubato (in free tempo), the cello leads with a recitative-like passage in the upper register, accompanied by violin tremolos and guitar-like strumming of the viola.
As suggested by its title “Burletta” (roughly “farce”), the third movement has a grim, sardonic humor. Savage effects are achieved through such devices as glissandi (sliding up and down the strings), grating discords, percussive chords played at the lower end of the bow, notes marked to be played a quartertone flat, and, in the composer’s own words, “strong pizzicato so that the string rebounds off the fingerboard.”
The fourth movement is really the slow movement, an expressive free fantasia on the motto-theme. The flow is eventually interrupted by a statement of the first three measures of the motto played in sustained notes, pianissimo, senza colore (without vibrato). This is followed by brief reminiscences of the first and second themes of the first movement. The motto-theme appears once more in the viola, and the quartet ends in a whisper.
In his other multi-movement works, Bartók, almost as an article of faith, ends with an optimistic finale rooted in rustic folk dance, drawing a sense of hopeful renewal from the expression of the common people. He initially had such an ending in mind for this quartet, but just could not bring himself to write it.