Richard Danielpour (b. 1956)
String Quartets Nos. 5–7
My Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh String Quartets were composed within an eleven-year span from 2004 to 2014. Quartets Nos. 5 and 6 were composed in 2004 and 2009 respectively, and have a fair amount in common. They were both composed in Northern Italy, at the Bogliasco Center near Genoa, on the Mediterranean Sea. They also both carry Italian subtitles, and both works are about the art of “letting go”.
String Quartet No. 5, ‘In Search of La vita nuova’ (2004), borrows its subtitle from Dante, and deals with my relationship to Italy over the last 35 years. I had always believed that Italy was, for me, a place of renewal and perhaps even a place where things became radically alive. It was finally on this trip that I began to understand that the magical place that many of us seek, is always within us. The trajectory of this three-movement work follows essentially that journey and sense of discovery. It was a commission for the Guarneri Quartet, and was the second work that I had written for them, with the first being a concerto for string quartet and orchestra titled Voices of Remembrance. There is an elliptical quality at the end of this quartet; it feels to me, many years later, almost intentionally unresolved or open, and I believe it may have unconsciously been because I had already thought about the connection to and content of what would become my Sixth Quartet.
String Quartet No. 6, ‘Addio’ (2009), was commissioned by the Eastman School of Music and Dartmouth College for the Ying Quartet. This nearly thirty minute, three-movement quartet, deals with the string quartet as a metaphor for family, and narrates the story of how families are eventually broken apart through distance, time, and ultimately through death. I specifically wanted a quartet whose members were actually related to one another, which is why I specifically asked the Ying Quartet, who are siblings, to premiere this work. (Oddly enough, one of its members, decided to leave the group shortly before the premiere of the piece.) The last movement, is particularly unusual and unique to my seven quartets in that the coda of the last movement consists of a hymn with variations, in which with each variation, one of the players leaves the stage until finally only the cellist is left. In the last thirteen bars of the piece, the three offstage players, two violinists and the violist, play off stage in answer to the cellist’s final soliloquy before they conclude the work together on an enigmatic C major chord. There are several subtle quotes dealing with the notion of ‘farewell’. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26, ‘Les Adieux’, Op. 81a, Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony are all covertly woven into the fabric of this piece.
My String Quartet No. 7, ‘Psalms of Solace’ (2014), was written as a complement of sorts to my String Quartet No. 3, ‘Psalms of Sorrow’ (1994). Both quartets employ a human voice in the last movement. In No. 3, I wrote a lyric baritone part with psalm texts translated by Steven Mitchell. But in No. 7, there is a soprano part in the last of the four movements, in which the soloist sings settings of psalm texts in Hebrew as well as a final text in the coda of the last movement, in English, which consists of a dovetailed sentence, borrowed from both the Book of Isaiah together with the Gospel of Luke (“Seek the Lord while He may be found, draw upon Him while He is near—for the Kingdom of God is within you.”).
If my Fifth Quartet was about the search for that magical place that we all seek, my Seventh was about a different search: the search for the Divine. Each movement relates to an attempt to find God. The intellect, the force of will, and romantic love are the topics of each of the first three movements respectively, but they all appear to fall short in their search for the Divine until they give way to the last movement. The soprano part in the last movement was written expressly for Hila Plitmann, who has performed and recorded two of my earlier works involving soprano and orchestra.
Finally, I want to thank the Delray String Quartet for their tireless devotion to this project and to the performance of these, my last three quartets. The String Quartet No. 7 was commissioned by the Delray String Quartet, with the generous assistance of Donald Thompson.
Richard Danielpour
