Antonfn Dvorak (1841 -1904)
String Quartets V 01. 4
String Quartet No.10 in E flat Major, Op. 51
String Quartet No.14 in A flat major, Op. 105
Antonin Dvorak was born in 1841, the son of a butcher and
innkeeper in the village of Nelahozeves, near Kralupy in Bohemia and some forty
miles north of Prague. It was natural that he should follow the example of his
father and grandfather by learning the family trade, and to this end he left
school at the age of eleven. There is no reliable record of his competence in
butchery, but his musical abilities were early apparent, and in 1853 he was
sent to lodge with an uncle in Zlonice, where he continued an apprenticeship
started at home, learning German and improving his know ledge of music,
rudimentary skill in which he had already acquired at home and in the village
band and church.
Further study of German and of music at Kamenice, a town
in northern Bohemia, led to his admission, in 1857, to the Prague Organ School,
from which he graduated two years later.
In the years that followed, Dvorak earned his living as a
viola-player in a band under the direction of Karel Komzak which was to form
the nucleus of the Provisional Theatre Orchestra, established in 1862. Four
years later Smetana was appointed conductor of the opera-house, where his Czech
operas The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and The Bartered Bride had
already been performed. It was not until 1871 that Dvorak resigned from the
theatre orchestra, to devote more time to composition, as his music began to
draw some favourable local attention. Two years later he married and early in
1874 became organist of the church of St Adalbert. During this period he
continued to support himself by private teaching, while busy on a series of
compositions that gradually became known to a wider circle.
Further recognition came with the award of a Ministry of
Education stipendium by a committee in Vienna that included the critic Eduard Hanslick
and Brahms for a number of compositions submitted to the committee in 1874. The
following year Dvorak failed to win the award, but was successful in 1876 and
again in 1877. His fourth application brought the personal interest of Hanslick
and Brahms and a connection with Simrock, the latter's publisher, who expressed
a wish to publish the Moraviiln Duets and commissioned a set of Slavonic
Dances for piano duet. These compositions won particular popularity. There
were visits to Germany, as well as to England, where he was always received
with greater enthusiasm than a Czech composer would ever at that time have won
in Vienna. The series of compositions that followed secured him an unassailable
position in Czech music and a place of honour in the larger world.
Early in 1891 Dvorak became professor of composition at
Prague Conservatory. In the summer of the same year he was invited to become director
of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, a venture which, it was
hoped, would lay the foundations for American national music. The very Bohemian
musical results of Dvorak's time in America are well known. Here he wrote his Ninth
Symphony, From the New World, its themes influenced, at least, by
what he had heard of indigenous American Indian and Negro music, his American
Quartet and a charming Sonatina for violin and piano. In 1895 he settled
at home again, returning to his work at the Prague Conservatory and writing in
the following year a series of symphonic poems and before the end of the
century two more operas, to add to the nine he had already composed. He died in
Prague in 1904.
The tenth of Dvorak's fourteen quartets, the Quartet in
E flat major, Opus 51, was written in 1879 in response to a request from
Jan Becker, leader of the Florentine Quartet, for a work of Czech inspiration.
The work won the approval of Brahms and of Josef Hellmesberger of the Hellmesberger
Quartet, who now found occasion to ask again for two of the earlier quartets,
as he planned his recital series. The Slavonic Dances had had
considerable success, provoking an unfortunate demand from his publisher
Simrock for works of a similar kind. The quartet offers a richness of texture,
a remarkable sonority, in an idiom that is essentially its own. The first
movement is in sonata-form, with its traditional three sections of exposition,
development and recapitulation. The lilt of the opening cello figure, however,
sets an unmistakably Slavonic mood, the music impelled forward by the insistent
folk-dance rhythms that appear, sometimes in accompanying parts. For the second
movement the title Dumka is used. The word, of Ukrainian origin, implies
a short piece of a melancholy cast, sometimes alternating with a more rapid
section. Its use in European art-music originates with Dvorak himself. Contrast
is here provided by a further element that is part of the theme dominant in the
movement, now in the shape of a furiant, with its cross-rhythms. The
opening brings a moving melody, accompanied by the plucked notes of the cello,
the rhythmic ending of the melodic phrase highly typical of the cadences of
folk-music. The slow movement proper is a Romanza in which the same
richness of texture predominates, sonorities which, miraculously, never become
muddy or turgid. Czech dance-forms return in the Finale, which is based
on the rhythm of the skocna. The cheerful opening melody is contrasted
with a second element of staider mould and the movement includes a fascinating
polyphonic treatment of the material.
Dvorak's Quartet in A flat major, Opus 105, is the
penultimate in published order, preceded there by the so-called American
Quartet and followed by the Quartet in G major, Opus 106. These last
two quartets were completed in 1895, after the composer's return from America,
and published by Simrock the following year. Opus 105 was, in fact,
started in New York and Dvorak resumed work on it with his teaching duties at
Prague Conservatory, completing it on 30th December, after finishing Opus
106. The first movement, with its slow introduction of almost melancholy
intensity, leads to a theme of great charm and further melodic material of
typically Czech rhythmic and melodic character. This, with a hunting-call
second subject, is worked out contrapuntally to splendid effect, the
recapitulation abbreviating much of the first subject on its re-appearance. The
approach to the conclusion is marked by a reference to the initial Adagio.
The second movement, marked Molto vivace, is in the manner of a Czech furiant,
a movement redolent of Bohemia in texture, rhythm and melody, with a trio
section that derives its opening figure from part of the opening theme. The slow
movement has one of those extended melodies of which Dvorak was such a master,
its subtle harmonies giving it a characteristic flavour of its own. This is
followed by a Finale that adds to its richness of invention by
introducing an extra second subject, in the key of G flat, a theme that does
not return when the material is recapitulated. The movement and the quartet as
a whole may be heard as an expression of thanksgiving for the composer's return
to his own country.