Music about Music: the First String Quartet, Opus 37, in C, by Karol Szymanowski

Abstract

MUSIC ABOUT MUSIC: THE FIRST STRING QUARTET, OPUS 37, IN C, BY KAROL SZYMANOWSKI In their recent book about Stravinsky, the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and critic Elmer Schonberger propose the following allegory for music: We have to imagine an art of painting that has its roots in one single painting... That one painting portrays the last tree and the last landscape. After the completion of that painting, the tree was cut down and the landscape devastated. Since then, there were no more trees or landscapes to be seen. But that painting inspired other painters to paint trees and landscapes. The resulting paintings, in their turn, inspired a new generation of painters. In that way, it is possible that the present practitioners of this school paint trees and landscapes which, it must be said, in no way resemble the last tree and the last landscape. This school of painting is similar to what happens in music. Just as treeand-landscape paintings portray other tree-and-landscape paintings, portrays other music. [Andriessen and Schonberger 1983: 30] If this view of is exact, in what way, one may ask, is Szymanowski's First String Quartet different from any other piece of In what particular way can it be said to be music about music? Careful analysis suggests that, within the Quartet, the evolution of the composer's style, from his upbringing in the hotbed of German late romanticism to his discovery of the French-Russian avant-garde in 1913, is retraced. The First String Quartet, Opus 37, in C was composed in 1917, at the peak of the composer's most creative period. Before the work was completed, however, the Szymanowski family estate, in Ukraine, was razed to the ground in the October Revolution. The two compositions on which Szymanowski was working at the time, the Quartet and the cantata Agave, were never to be completed as planned. Of the projected four movements of the Quartet, three were later revised for publication. The original plan was to include a sonata-allegro, a scherzo, a theme and variations for the slow movement, and a fugue for the finale. According to Michatowski [1967: 137], the scherzo was reworked to become the last movement, presumably by integrating elements of fugal writing within the structure and character of a scherzo. On the other hand, the first movement is preceded with a rather elaborate slow introduction, a most unusual feature in the quartet literature of the time, possibly as a means of compensating for the missing fourth movement. Certain aspects of the Quartet stand out as strangely anachronistic with respect to other works of the same creative period, for example, the Third Symphony, Opus 27 (1914-16), the First Violin Concerto, Opus 35 (1916), or the Third Piano Sonata, Opus 36 (1917). No indication of tonality had appeared in the title of a composition since the second Piano Sonata, in A major (1911). The Quartet was to be the last work to carry such an indication. This suggests the composer's awareness that this work belongs to a different stylistic lineage. As noted by Alistair Wightman: The progressive disruption of tonality, a process well under way in the earlier war-time works, seems to have been arrested in the first of the Quartets. [Wightman 1972: 94] To a certain extent, this anachronism could be credited to the composer's discomfort with the resources of the string quartet. At the age of 34, this was his first venture into the medium. The only comparable work written previously, the Piano Trio, opus 16, had been withdrawn after its first performance, in 1909. In a letter to Szymanowski dated 24 July 1917, the violinist Pawel Kochanski had this to say in reaction to the composer's announcement that he was writing a quartet (the composer's letter is lost): It is strange how one changes. Do you remember, you used to dislike the quartet, to say it could not give you full satisfaction, not enough sound? …