Britten's last masterpiece
Hans Keller
This Saturday morning, 2 June, at 11.00 a.”1. at the Bath Festival, the Chilingirian Quartet's recital will include Benjamin Brit ten's Third String Quartet. Radio 3 relays the event live.
I see from a recent book on Britten that the reason why he dedicated his Third Quartet tome was that I kept 'prodding' him to write it. It wasn't, and I didn't really. Mind you, all I know about the dedication is that one daY a note from him arrived out of the blue, asking my 'permission' for it: you can imagine my telegraphic reply. But many, years ago, I had a long discussion with tam about string-quartet texture in general, sonata structure in particular and, quite especially, about development: as I didn't tell him, the development section in the first Movement of his great Second Quartet (written 30 years before the Third) had always struck me as being marginally below the level of the rest of the work's invention; In fact, I might now add that the beginning Of the recapitulation is more of an intrinsic development than is the development section proper. Anyhow, what I concentrated on in that Protracted discussion was contrast — textural contrast so far as string-quartet writing Was concerned, and the essence of sonata contrast from the formal point of view: I Pointed out that successive analytic fashInns, highlighting thematic contrast and tonal contrast, had not hit the very heart of the sonata's matter, which was the contrast b.etween statement and development, and its Integration — statement meaning stability, and development (continual modulation in tonal music) a labile structure which was not confined, of course, to the official development section. A long pause punctuated the end of our conversation, and then Britten said, 'One day, I'll write a string quartet for you'. Thereafter, there was no 'prodding' for Years and years. Came his heart operation and the partial paralysis of his right side: when he complained that he couldn't even move his right arm sufficiently to cover a all score, I wrote him a pseudo-jocular note suggesting that this was the time for four staves, the more so since he was rid of public commitments — the ideal time for a string quartet, for our musical culture's private, Personal work par excellence. When I received an advance copy of the ScOre, and after I had overcome my initial, idiotic shock at the five movements, the two scherzos very short (was this a bloody suite or something?), my actual perusal of the opening movement soon disclosed a stunningly novel answer to my lifelong preoccu pations with quartet and sonata — so specific a creative response that the experience was that of a causal relation. My delusion? Maybe — but it doesn't matter, for the musical relation is there, whether it's causal or not, a question which is of little interest to anybody but myself, anyway.
Myself apart, nobody has yet dared to call that movement a sonata form in public, though there have been evasive whispers about 'elements of sonata' and the like. The reason is that the structure is so original, so precisely and pregnantly composed against the background of sonata form that people who can only think in terms of form (that which musics have in common) as distinct from structure (that which they haven't) are confused: how can these contradictions of sonata be called sonata? Easily — first, because they can be shown to be closely related to that which they contradict, and secondly, because the basic sonata contrasts — thematic and tonal as well as developmental —are there anyway, though things tend to happen in the wrong place.
But then, they've been doing that ever since Haydn started contradicting sonata form; only, in due course, wrong places become right places, which means that individual structure turns into collective form so that you've got to find new wrong places if you want to say something new — and this Britten does to an extent which helps to make his opening movement one of the most unprecedented sonatas of our time, our century even. What's more, it's unprecedented as against the background of any musical form, not only sonata: the coda, the stage of eventual relaxation, is not eventual; it happens before the end, before the recapitulation of the second subject, which thus takes on the concluding job of the coda, with the truly eventual help of the first.
How so, why? Because for the first time in the history of sonata, the very material of instability's climax, of the development proper, is used for the diametrically opposite purpose — extreme stability, total relaxation, the coda before the coda. It must be stressed that technical as this may sound, the untutored, musical ear can take it all in at the first hearing, without any interruption of the purely musical experience: Britten's clarity invariably increases with his complexity, demonstrably so.
There's nothing more essentially instrumental in the Western musical world than sonata — yet, paradoxically, Britten honoured this movement with an operatic title: 'Duets'. There is the most lucid method in Britten's apparent madness: the duets are the statements (exposition and recapitula tion), whereas the development establishes extreme textural contrast by going so far as an octet and nonet — with the help of double and triple stoppings. And even though to begin with, the development still evinces transitional duet texture, it can't be missed: powerful downbows and tremolando upbeat phrases throw you into the stage of instability which develops the syncopations of the first subject — and all you have to hear is sudden unrest.
But towards the end of the recapitulation, the resumed duet texture is interrupted — no, continued by those very double and triple stoppings which now re-emerge, against all expectation, 'very quietly', expressing rest with the help of pizzacatos: again, this extreme contrast on the basis of extreme unity can immediately be heard, because it is spontaneously experienced. At the end of it, for a bar or two, the developmental explosion recurs — to introduce the recapitulation of the second subject which, at the same time, unfolds, or folds, the conclusion after the coda. The most contrasting quartet textures thus prove sheer functions of sonata structure, while sonata form's own traditional contrasts are subordinated to the even more fundamental polarity between statement and development, and so create a new order of events which confuses the annotator and enlightens the analyst: if that's not inspired mastery, you can call me a music critic.
The remaining four movements, of which the final 'Recitative and Passacaglia' is the longest (over eight minutes) and the most moving, gradually reveal the entire work as having been composed against the background of what my first superficial glance feared to be its foreground — that of a suite or divertimento. The weighty, symphonic contradiction of this 'light' background has a long and distinguished history — from the Mozart string trio, still called 'Divertimento', through Beethoven's early string trio in the same key and mould, his late B flat Quartet, through Mahler and Shostakovich, right up to, into, Britten's transubstantiation of dance backgrounds into three of his five movements, where Beethoven's Op. 130 had four dances at the back of its six movements, and Mahler's Ninth two successive dances behind its four movements — like Beethoven's C minor Quartet or Eighth Symphony.
The lineage from Mahler's Ninth, moreover, is even straighter than that: the Rondo: Burleske, the second of Mahler's two successive dance inspirations, is not only responsible for the title — 'Burlesque' — of the second of the two scherzos that surround Britten's central slow movement, but has concretely stimulated its thematic characters — the movement's character, in fact. Whether the Viennese waltz that forms the background of the trio does homage to Mahler or pulls the dedicatee's legs, both of them, is not for him to say; a bit of both is the most likely answer — which, however, leaves the most important point unarticulated, to wit, the work's handshake with the Austro-Germ an symphonic tradition, which is at least as firm as the Second Quartet's.
Nor is the Second Quartet itself only remembered by the opening movement, which beats the Second's first movement at its developmental game. The extended C major that liquidates the slow third movement's tense middle section — an astonishingly free cadenza for the first violin whose dominant role gives the piece its title, 'Solo' — recalls the extended C major relaxation that is the coda of the Second Quartet's first movement — as if it had been yesterday. C major hovers in the background of much of the rest of the work, too, and indeed starts it: Britten's own key, this, the way minor keys are other great composers' personal keys, such as Bach's B minor or, in more major-mode times, Haydn's F minor, Mozart's G minor, Beethoven's C minor, Mendelssohn's E minor, Schoenberg's D minor . . .
When I lectured on the work at Snape the other month, I analysed the heavily charged end, or non-end, against the harmonic background of the traditional interrupted cadence, and ventured that the only possible verbal translation of these last, unfinal notes was, 'This is not the end.' Whereupon Donald Mitchell, the composer's authorised biographer, recounted that in reply to the question what this end meant, Britten had said, 'I'm not dead yet.' Nor, `advanced' phoneys, is his music.
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