Erwin Schulhoff (Austro-Czech; 1894-1942)—Five Pieces for String Quartet (1924)

1. Viennese Waltz
2. Serenade
3. Czech Folk Music
4. Tango
5. Tarantella

Erwin Schulhoff’s musical talents were stoked from a young age, but the Great War paused his career, and he served on the front lines for the Austro-Hungarian Army, where he was wounded and confined to a POW camp. The war’s end saw a change in society and art, and Schulhoff embraced the rise of Dadaism and its absurdist subversion. He relished in the growth of jazz and spent endless nights at dance halls, and in turn, filled his music with rhythmic complexity. Schulhoff’s Jewish ancestry, radical politics, and modern art were problematic amidst the rise of the Nazis. Despite his efforts to flee to the Soviet Union, he was arrested in Czechoslovakia, dying in a prison camp in 1942.

In his 1924 Five Pieces for String Quartet, Schulhoff wears his acerbic wit on his sleeve. As if embracing the deformations of cubism, the work is nearly comical for its abuse of dusty dance forms, beginning with the Viennese Waltz. Here, the common time meter is an explicit affront to the waltz tradition, but neither the proper meter, nor the written meter, is treated with respect. The dark Serenade creeps with rhythmic droning and spooky melodies. Neither the serenades of Mozart nor those sung to a lover, the movement beholds the nocturnal edge of a dark alley. The center movement retains rhythmic ideas of the previous, now with the frantic energy of a chase scene. 

The work was dedicated to his friend and contemporary, Darius Milhaud, who shared a love of jazz and Latin music. Perhaps the most explicit link to Milhaud is heard in the fourth movement, in which smoky tango rhythms support slinky melodies. The chromatically sliding finale provides an energetic bite to close the work. 

Dmitri Shostakovich (Russian; 1906-1975)—String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op 110 (1960)

1. Largo
2. Allegro Molto
3. Allegretto
4. Largo
5. Largo

Shostakovich spent his career treading the fraught line of artistic freedom during the most deadly and oppressive years of the Soviet Union. His life as an artist was one of survival, and in his works we find evidence of both supplication and protest. By 1960, he was the Soviet Union’s most venerated composer and faced the compromising expectation to officially join the Communist Party in order to chair the Union of Russian Composers. Possibly coerced, the trauma of Stalin-era repression made the move to align with the government a painful one, but also gave him some clout in protecting artists. 

In an episode of vague artistic intentions, he reacted to the new appointment with his eighth string quartet, composed in three days during a stay in Dresden. The work featured the subtitle “To the victims of fascism and war” as a reference to the bombing of Dresden during the war, and in so doing, successfully stroked the party’s ego. However, the opening bars feature his oft-used “DSCH” motif, placing him at the center of the action.

The work as a whole is a fundamental example of Shostakovich’s compositional techniques developed under artistically oppressive regimes: simple melodic materials and transparent textures are deployed with brutal force. The opening Largo’s imitative counterpoint is devoid of light and is followed by a hopeless violin melody while lower strings hold unending pedal tones. The movements bleed together without break. 

The second features a Jewish theme once used for his second piano trio, and careens at a treacherous pace. The Allegretto is a scherzo, made all the more nervous for its clarity in texture and disorienting meter shifts. A trio section features a disquieting cello in its high register. It concludes with the hum of a lone violin that sustains into the fourth movement as the ensemble rings a barrage of assaulting rhythms. 

At the heart of the fourth movement is a grim setting of the revolutionary lament “Tormented by Grievous Bondage.” The movement closes with a reminder of the attacking rhythms as the violin ushers in the final movement. 

Shostakovich met his first bout of danger in 1934 when his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was officially denounced. A melody from the opera is interwoven with the autobiographical DSCH motif in a quiet chorale that brings the work to its restless conclusion.

Felix Mendelssohn (German; 1809-1847)—String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13 (1827)

1. Adagio – Allegro vivace
2. Adagio non lento
3. Intermesso: Allegretto con moto – Allegro di molto
4. Presto – Adagio non lento

Beethoven’s death had a profound impact on the young Felix Mendelssohn. While Beethoven’s late string quartets vexed the conservative musical establishment, Mendelssohn pored over them with reverent curiosity. At a remarkable eighteen years old, Mendelssohn’s second string quartet builds upon the radical musical ideas exhibited in Beethoven’s late string quartets, specifically when dealing with the novel use of cyclic formal ideas as melodic materials are recycled throughout the work.

Whereas Beethoven’s Op. 135 quartet, his final work, is adorned with the expressive and searching text “Muss es sein?” (Must it be?), Mendelssohn follows this model with the more youthful search for love in the text “Ist es wahr?” (Is it true?), a unifying motif from a recent song, “Frage”, that asks, “Is it true…you always wait for me by the vine-draped wall?”

Beethoven’s Op. 135 provides other formal inspirations, as with the opening Adagio, set here in a warm A major, and features the first sounding of the questioning motif. The Allegro is underway as notes dash with electric energy, and a vigorous A minor melody is heard in the high singing violin. 

The Adagio features a sweet melody, but central to the movement is a gentle fugue with increasingly complex variations. The Intermezzo makes use of lightly floating melodies before launching into a vibrant Allegro. 

In his second string quartet, we see a young Mendelssohn deftly experimenting with Beethoven’s masterful late works as his model. The finale continues this thread as opening cadenzas lead to the driving finale. The strident energy breaks for a hushed fugue. The work closes as it began by repeating the delicate A major Adagio.