Glazunov and the String Quartet

Abstract

The Russian string quartet has a considerably longer history than the Russian symphony; Alyabiev wrote his first string quartet in 1815, to say nothing of the three quartets by a certain Taneev—possibly an ancestor of one or both of the two late-nineteenth-century Taneevs—published by Breitkopf at the end of the eighteenth century, of which the last traceable copies seem to have been destroyed in the Dresden holocaust of 1945. Yet the quartet has never achieved the importance in Russian music that it enjoys in other countries; numerically there are plenty of quartets but they are the stepchildren of Russian music. The Balakirev circle was in its early days actively hostile to chamber music, though Borodin eventually conquered his friends by his two fine compositions. Tchaikovsky's three are not as bad as seems to be commonly supposed but they can hardly be reckoned among his masterpieces, and the world would be little poorer if it were for ever deprived of the quartets of Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov. The only nineteenth-century Russians who took the quartet seriously enough to write a whole series of them were Glazunov and S.I. Taneev (whose unrelated or only distantly related namesake, A. S. Taneev, also produced three respectably written but very lightweight quartets), and their only twentieth-century successors have been Myaskovsky and Shostakovich.