The 3 Piano Quartets

Abstract

"He will live until the end of time," slid Grillparzer, the poet, as Beethoven's body was lowered into the grave in Vienna's Central Cemetery. These words are quoted by Stravinsky in a review of Beethoven's quartets in the Septmember 1968 issue of the New York Review of Books, and he writes "These quartets are my highest articles of musical belief (which is a longer word for love, whatever else), as indispenable to the ways and meanings of art, as a musician of my era thinks of art and has tried to learn it, as temperature is to life. They are a triumph over tenporality, too. . ." To a musician only a decade younger than Stravinsky, these words sound like a Credo. And they can be applied to the piano quartets of Brahms as well, which are also a triumph over temporality. Much music has been written since Brahms' piano quartets were the sensation of the day, and much of it will not triumph over temporality. But these three quartets sound exciting almost a hundred and fifty years after they were written, and they will live until the end of time, for they contain all those elements of musical art which stand the test of time: invention and technique, poetic content and form, intimacy and virtuosity, unity and variety. They are so rich in all these tha: their repeated playing or hearing, far from exhausting the interest, rewards the player and listener with ever new discoveries. An interesting discovery is the shuttle movement in the character or type of music in the mainstream of German absolute music, between concentration and abstraction on one hand, lyrical expansion and spontaneity on the other—and this on two planes, the historical and the personal. On the historical plane, we have Bach as an example of extreme concentration and abstraction in his concertos, sonatas, and solistic instrumental music; this changed to lyrical expansion and spontaneity in the works of his sons Philip Emanuel and especially Johann Christian and their contemporaries. In the music of Mozart, we can see the two tendencies, the "gallant" lyricism alternating with the "learned" concentration of his more contrapuntal works. Beethoven started off with the lyrical type, to become gradually more and more concentrated until he ended with the utmost concentration in his late sonatas and quartets. After his death, Schubert and Schumann completely neglected concentration and remained spontaneously lyrical to the end. Brahms brought back concentration—alternating with lyricism again, as we shall see—and never eally reaching the concentration of Bach or Beethoven. It was only in the next generation that utmost concentration re-appeared in the works olSchonberg and mainly Bartok, whose chamber music stands alone in the 20th century, reaching the concentration and abstraction of Bach and Beethoven.