String Quartet No. 2 in D minor
Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884)

Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

String Quartet No. 2 in D minor
Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884)

In the aftermath of the nationalistic uprisings that gripped Europe in 1848-49, Eastern European nationalities under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire fought to preserve and revive their ethnic cultures. This trend accelerated in 1860 when Austria granted limited political autonomy to Bohemia.

Bohemian composer Bedřich Smetana was in the forefront of this cultural revival. “My homeland means more to me than anything else,” he wrote to a friend. He was involved in the 1848 uprising and had to flee overseas, settling in Sweden as a piano teacher. With the easing of the repressions, he returned to Prague in the early 1860s.

Throughout his career, Smetana was drawn to compose program music, with specific, descriptive aims in mind, as seen in his symphonic poems and operas, which were his most natural media. At age 50, and already losing his hearing probably due to neurosyphilis, he started a cycle of six tone poems celebrating aspects of the history and landscape of his homeland, collectively called Má vlast (My Homeland). By 1876, he was totally deaf and retreated to the peace and seclusion of the forestry lodge of his daughter and son-in-law. But the disease gradually affected his mind; by early 1884, he was committed to an asylum, dying shortly thereafter.

The String Quartet in D minor was one of his last compositions, written in 1882-83, contrary to his doctor's orders to refrain from any musical activity. He described it as “a whirlwind of music of a person who has lost his memory.”

While it is not always prudent, or even possible, to attach personal non- musical motives to music not specifically designed to be programmatic, in Smetana’s case, it may be considered a plausible and valid interpretation of this work. Smetana was not the only composer to pour out his supposedly damaged mind into great music. Franz Schubert met a similar fate, although his mind was probably not affected and he was not institutionalized. Hardly the musical ravings of a madman, this Quartet magnificently displays both the ravages of his pain and fantasies or memories of a happier life.

It opens with what we might call a chromatic “whirlwind motto” that ends on a tritone (the most unstable of harmonic intervals) and resolves into a gentle theme reminiscent of Bohemian melodies. As a sign of his instability, Smetana whips back and forth between these two moods, sometimes even combining them, the motto rumbling in the cello. A couple of other musical ideas try to intervene, but it is the emotional battle between these two that dominates. This instability pervades the entire Quartet. Although not labeled as such, the second movement is a dance-like scherzo with a cantabile trio. While lacking the fiery mood swings of the preceding movement, the constant tempo changes and odd modulations subtly suggest the composer’s meandering emotions.

In what we normally associate with a slow movement, Smetana is back in the middle of the storm, this time with added agitated tremolos. The alternation between agitation and calm continues, but here with contrasting cantabile motives that never quite coalesce into full-fledged themes as in the first movement. The movement does, however, end calmly.

Whatever his inner turmoil, Smetana concludes on a more positive note. The flowing 6/8-meter opening theme begins only after a brief “whirlwind” introduction. And even though the Quartet ends in D major, the coda passes through the agitation that has characterized so much of the piece.

Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Like a number of other compositions by the young Brahms, such as the First Piano Concerto, the F-minor Quintet underwent a complicated series of transformations until it reached its final form. It began life in 1862 as a string quintet on the Schubertian model, with two cellos, but Brahms was unhappy with it. His friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, tried it out with his quartet, also finding it to be problematic. After further changes, Joachim finally persuaded the composer that the work was not effective with strings alone.

Brahms discarded and destroyed this version and recast it in 1864 as the Sonata for Two Pianos, which has survived as Op. 34b. He performed it with Carl Tausig in Vienna in 1864, but it again received a cool reception. Apparently, the conductor Hermann Levi, who when rehearsing the Sonata with Clara Schumann, urged Brahms to revise the work once again into its final form, a piano quintet.

The history of the Piano Quintet reflects the musical and social environment in which Brahms composed. Both Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim were internationally famous virtuosi and composers in their own right; their musicianship was of such stature that composers often involved them as active participants in the creative process. But not every composer was as accommodating as Brahms. When Joachim, the dedicatee of Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, rejected the work, this son of a small-town butcher went only so far with his revisions and then took his score elsewhere to be performed.

The Quintet is a passionate work, expressing in music what the young Brahms seldom displayed in his own life. The first movement is dark, opening with all the instruments playing in unison, the ensuing chords like a breaking storm. He sustains the darkness by using a technique he had developed in the piano quartets, constructing the first movement in sonata form but with a series of themes in the minor tonic key, arriving at the obligatory relative major (A-flat) only as a closing motive. The development section reworks the themes in order, intensifying them and avoiding the closing motive.

The second movement, providing the only respite in the piece, is simple and tender, opening with the piano accompanied by muted strings. While gaining emotional intensity in its middle section, it never veers far from the initial calm.

The dynamic Scherzo is unusual for the extensive length and the complexity of its theme, which contains several distinct melodic phrases, changes from minor to major, and shifts in rhythm. The Trio, while in the same driving tempo, has a broad cantabile theme. The repeat of the Scherzo is not exact and includes an extensive coda.

Brahms opens the Finale with a lengthy slow introduction. He uses the ghostly, chromaticism of poco sostenuto strings to lead into the dramatic Allegro, an energetic but persistently melancholy dance initiated by the cello. Although there are moments of calm, oddly enough in the development section, where composers normally stir things up, the unrelenting minor mode persists. Instead of true recapitulation, Brahms revises the main theme by cranking up the tempo. The Quintet ends with a buildup in power and tension as the themes crowd in upon each other to reach the final chords, resolutely angry and defiant.