Kammermusiksaal
Schoenberg:
String Quartet no.1, op.7
Beethoven:
String Quartet no.13 in
B-flat major, op.130, with Grosse Fuge,
op.133
Christian Tetzlaff, Elisabeth Kufferath (violins)
Hanna Weinmeister (viola)
Tanja Tetzlaff (cello)
What better way to attempt to
restore severely battered faith in humanity than with the music of these two
composers? We may deconstruct the heroism of Schoenberg and Beethoven all we
like – it is, in many respects, meet and right so to do – but first and
foremost, we construct and, in that construction, we remind ourselves of what
humanity can and should be. That is certainly what we heard in outstanding
performances from the Tetzlaff Quartet.
The first movement of
Schoenberg’s First String Quartet opened as if taking its leave from Verklärte Nacht: not the lazy, ‘late
Romantic’, ‘acceptable Schoenberg’ of reactionaries, but febrile, generative,
surveying the twentieth century as Beethoven did the nineteenth. More ‘expressionist’
too, for want of a better word, and but a stone’s throw from the life-affirming
complexities – and formal compression – of the First Chamber Symphony. There
was urgency yet, just as necessary, there was space. Motivic and harmonic
development less travelled less hand in hand than hurled each other, however
undeniable the intricacy, into the vortex of things to come. The second group of
the exposition/first movement/however one wishes to think of it – clue: one
should think of it in all these respects and more – spoke with perfectly judged
light depth, well-nigh immediately initiating regathering, redoubling of
strength. Counterpoint of vigour and teleological force, the sheer effort of
construction looked both back and forward to Beethoven. The latter’s good
humour and rapt lyricism seemed reborn too in a performance which, throughout
its three-quarters of an hour span, maintained tension even when, particularly
when, it relaxed. This was, rightly, no mere matter of background and
foreground, though it certainly included that, Schoenberg ever a superior guide
to Schenker.
Becoming, then, was ever the
thing: becoming that reminded us we need not look to later Schoenberg for
homage to and reckoning with the great Classical trinity of Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven. The stillness and serenity with which the third of the Quartet’s
four sections opened again seemed to presage what we would hear in Beethoven’s
op.130, though that would be negated and then have its negation negated soon
enough. Holy ground opened up before us, suggesting Schoenberg’s own air of
another planet, even the Burning Bush of Moses
und Aron, yet before we knew it, we were plunged headlong into something as
wondrously profane. The finale, if we may call it that and I think we may,
registered almost as a homage to Haydn, proving as full of fascinating, moving
contrast as all that had gone before it, all the time developing further,
before reaching, fulfilled yet far from spent: its very own Heiliger Dankgesang.
Emotional fragility and
sureness of line announced the Adagio ma
non troppo ‘introduction’ – does that word really suffice any more? – to Beethoven’s
first movement. The music, not unlike Schoenberg’s, spoke of and as something
too rare, too good to last, yet which we therefore needed all the more. This
movement’s concentration, contrasts, and general humanity were impossible not
to hear in the light of Schoenberg – and why would one try? Moreover, whilst
unquestionably a first movement ‘proper’, the performance suggested also an
exposition to the quartet as a whole. Dynamic form is never so straightforward
as either/or, certainly not in Beethoven. Haydn continued to sound both near
and far. And what music, what wisdom, lay in the silences.
Energy, constraint, and their
mutual frustration proved, in a whirlwind second movement, the stuff of melody
and it of them. The third, likewise yet differently, spoke similarly of
contrasts and complements equally hard-won, equally divine. It was an
intellectual and spiritual tour de force,
no doubt; it also sang with a plainspoken honesty that was equally
Beethovenian. The players left us in no
doubt that it both emerged from the dance that had preceded it and led to the
fragile joy of the next. That in turn necessitated, if only in retrospect, the
mysterious, untouchable, yet utterly human tones of the Cavatina. Whatever the
challenge – and these musicians left us in no doubt that late Beethoven will
always, must always, remain a challenge – the owl of Minerva will continue to instruct
us when it spreads its wings at dusk.
Speaking of challenge, the
small matter of the Grosse Fuge was
yet to come. A recent tendency to speak unreflectively of late Beethoven
anticipating twentieth-century modernism – it is never quite so easy as that – has rightly encountered some resistance
lately. Such resistance, however, would surely have wilted in the face of so
commanding, so uncompromising a performance as this. No, it is not Schoenberg;
nor is to Boulez or Stockhausen. No, it is not trying to be. The spirit of
exploration, however, in a struggle that threatened to have the Missa solemnis sound like a teddy bear’s
tea party, could hardly have been more honestly, necessarily sounded. The
struggle to write, to play, to listen was, so it seemed, everything: certainly
everything one needed. From Bach to Boulez, beyond in both directions, musical
history became alive, as it must in performance of that most enigmatic, most
modernistic of all settings of Christendom’s central rite. For an encore, the
second movement, ‘Allegretto vivo e scherzando’, of Tchaikovsky’s Third Quartet
may have been unexpected. It fitted the bell well, though, having me hear this
snatch of an apparently very different work in terms I should hardly have
guessed would ever apply.
