Arts
Little-known greatness
Hans Keller
0n Monday 7 May at 8.30 at the Wigmore Hall, the BBC presents, on behalf of the European Broadcasting Union, the last recitcti of the EBU's four-season-long International String Quartet Series, climactically a quintet concert: Mendelssohn's A major and Yozart's D major frame the slow movement from the Bruckner Quintet, played by the
Lindsay Quartet with Simon RowlandJones. As well as the live broadcast on Radio
3,11 radio organisations are participating in the event.
Ours is a curious musical culture: known greatness is over-supplied, neglected greatn,ess under-demanded. The trouble is that both known and unknown smallness (especially baroque smallness!) are oversuPPlied, too. The result is that after my recent, nowise insubstantial exchange with Lord Boyle and Misha Donat in these P. ages, i am again in a position to throw out a tantalising challenge: if, amongst this jour'liars or this article's thousands of readers, there are two dozen that can whistle, before monday, 8.25 p.m., two tunes from each of the EBU concert's two-and-a-quarter Works without recourse to their respective s,cores. I shall conscientiously reconsider my decided view of the Mozart's status in our society; so far as the other two works are ccmcered, I'm winning my challenge, anyWay. But from the outset, I have to disqualify not only all string players. but also Lord nile and Misha Donat; while I don't know htiord Boyle as well as Misha Donat, I know int well enough to fear that he knows more intisic than I do. Seriously, though. I could make my challenge far sterner if I confined it to the Mendelssohn: there are world-leading quartets which, at least until a year or two akgo, did not know the work, did not even now of it, and were stunned to make its acquaintance: we should not confine our criticisms of our culture to the listening and concert-promoting world — which, after all, :lust needs depend on the knowledge and isclom of leading performers; and it is a tact that our time's simultaneous technical Perfection and musical degeneration of getiartet-playing are, in large measure, due to ernPetitive perfection demanding a depopulated decrepit repertoire, which Produces too many performances of too few Works.
the there were the remotest doubt about tr stature of the Mendelssohn, as opposed suk its status, my Haydnesque (and, as we ail see below, Mozartian) slow introduction would be a waste of words — which stand or fall by what I consider musical reality: this Quintet is one of the few gigan tic, perfect masterpieces of its genre, perhaps even more so than Mendelssohn's other (B flat) Quintet, composed almost twenty years later. Like Mozart, Mendelssohn was a quartet player — preferring, like virtually all quartet-playing composers, the viola part (he played quartets with Spohr!), and it seems obvious that the existence of relatively few two-viola quintets as great in texture as in substance is due to this practical circumstance; at any rate, there simply is no great two-viola quintet, texturally perfect, written by an instrumental outsider — and if you think more of the Beethoven C major than I do (which is not little). I must remind you that Beethoven, too, played the viola.
If we consider, moreover, that the A major Quintet dates from the height of the composer's paradoxically inverted maturity, to wit, the age of 17, its uniqueness, by which one simply means its congruent originality and mastery. remains incontestable. Of course, at this stage in the history of listening, all the highbrow odds are loaded against it: romanticism is out, anyway, and as for Mendelssohn in particular, this country has not yet survived the trauma of realising that he was no Beethoven, as it had confidently thought. Well, in the area of the string quintet, Beethoven was no Mendelssohn, because he had to write himself into a medium before he mastered it, and never completed Op. 29's explorations.
Mendelssohn, on the other hand, was the nearest we find to a born master in the entire history of music — its only composer who wrote mature, flawless chamber music for strings before the age of 20, no fewer than four works. Among them, the Quintet is the least known and, in some welldefinable respects, the most original. There was no firm tradition of quintet mastery within which the boy could accommodate himself — yet he achieved innovations, contraditions of textural expectation, which clearly implied a traditional way of quintet-writing that never was: think of the way quintet-writing would have developed if it had developed, he seems to say, and now listen to this.
Nor does he address himself to the Boyles and Donats of this world alone: the meaningful newness of his sonorities will be instinctively recognised by musical musiclovers who have never heard a quintet in their lives. A single example from the characteristically yearning first movement will readily be identified when listening time comes. It is, in fact,.the chief contrast to that basic mood of longing — the scherzoid second-subject tune in F sharp minor: yes. Schubert apart, Mendelssohn was sonata structure's most insistent minor-mode composer when you have every reason to expect the major.
Now, what happens here is that a single line, the melody, is split into two parts, and that its apex, a repeated dominant, implies not only melody but also an inverted pedal. overlapping as it does with its melodic continuation: recurringly, then, melody and accompaniment are rolled into one, the downright sensation being literally topped by the accompanimental note being the highest, and on the second violin to boot. This textural revolution — fortunate metaphor! — would, of course, have been impossible without the possibilities proffered by the quintet texture: underneath, we still have a stably accompanying string quartet of three instruments, with the second viola playing in double-stoppings: what a scherzo at the heart of a sonata exposition! Not that the listener has to fear that, after this second subject, he has had his full share of Mendelssohn's unequalled scherzo spirit: the scherzo proper has further paradoxes to offer — above all, right from the start, anti academic fugal thought translated into Mendelssohn's own weighty lightheartedness.
If the Mozart is better known, it remains the worst known of his best-known quintets: again, its uncompromising originality may have something to do with it. The slow introduction itself is, for Mozart, unusual: in his mature chamber music for strings, there are only two other examples. the C major Quartet and the C minor Adagio and Fugue — less a 'prelude and fugue' than an adagio and fugal postlude. But it is only in the present work that the late Mozart, out-Haydning Haydn as with his surprising monothematic preoccupations, develops his friend's invention of an introduction that turns out not to be one, integrated as its subsequent variation is into the body of the movement: a straight pointer to the late Beethoven.
In the allegro itself, a musical miracle is the result — one of which no other composer has been capable. Abstractly, to be sure, the idea of the beginning being identical with the end seems to be as old as human thought. Psychoanalysis has discovered inseparable combinations of intra-uterine fantasies and death fantasies, and T.S. Eliot confirms thrice over that 'In my beginning is my end' (second Quartet). Last but first, there is religion: Eliot is indebted, of course, to Revelation i.7: `I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty'. God apart, who or what spoke, sorry, spake thus?
Fantasies, yes, but reality? Is there a real beginning which, at the same time, is a real end? The only such god-like entities are certain thematic thoughts of Mozart. In the Clarinet Trio's first movement, the first subject's closing phrase is the second's opening phrase. The end of the 'little' A major Piano Concerto's first movement is the beginning of the Cosi fan tutte duet in the same key. 'Fra gli amplessi'. But only in our D major Quintet do we get a complete thought, an eight-bar sentence, opening the first movement, an explosive, unambiguous beginning, which yet returns at the very end, after the resumption of the larghetto introduction: the note-for-note recapitulation is now experienced as an explosive. unambiguous conclusion. Can a thought be almightier? If Freud had been musical, he would not have confined his concept of the 'omnipotence of thought' to psychic reality.
What is round need not be rounded off by a coda. Figuratively, things seem to find it . easy to 'come full circle', but literally, only God. Mozart. and, of course, the circle itself seem to manage it. Should we not all be able to whistle this Alpha and Omega? And to know what's where? It took me months to remember which work or movement the opening phrase of the Cosi duet concluded; I had, unsuccessfully, asked almost every deeply knowledgeable musician of my acquaintance, and some of them spent hours researching. Mind you, I hadn't asked Lord Boyle. Nevertheless, ours is a curious musical culture.
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