A information to Zemlinsky’s String Quartet No. 2 and its greatest recordings

What impressed Zemlinsky’s String Quartet No. 2?

Written between 1913 and 1915, this epic one-movement composition lays naked all of the bitter disappointments he skilled on a private {and professional} stage after 1900. A doomed love affair along with his composition pupil Alma Schindler, who left him to marry Gustav Mahler, had a very traumatic affect. However no much less damaging was the decline in his fortunes as a composer.

Following the award of the celebrated Beethoven Prize in 1897 and the appreciable success loved by his fairy-tale opera Es conflict einmal, premiered on the Vienna Opera in 1900, Zemlinsky was totally anticipating to make additional waves in Viennese musical life. However his luck appears to have run out. The cancelled first efficiency of his subsequent stage work, Der Traumgörge (‘Görge the Dreamer’), was a merciless blow, not least as a result of its elimination happened not for creative causes however as a result of Felix Weingartner, Mahler’s successor as director of the Vienna Opera, refused to programme the work, regardless that it had already been positioned into manufacturing.

Three years later, the lukewarm reception accorded to his fourth opera, Kleider machen Leute (‘Garments make the person’), successfully satisfied Zemlinsky to depart the Austrian capital and relocate to Prague, the place he grew to become conductor on the German Opera Home.

Throughout this era, Zemlinsky’s musical model moved far past the Brahmsian atmosphere of his early years. Of explicit significance was the shut relationship he fashioned with Arnold Schoenberg, additional cemented when the youthful man married Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde. For a few years, Zemlinsky was Schoenberg’s mentor in musical issues, each composers pursuing an more and more superior musical idiom in response to the rising attract of Wagnerian chromaticism, options which might be notably evident within the Second Quartet’s emotionally frenzied and dissonant expressionist writing. Nonetheless, Zemlinsky resisted the temptation to comply with his youthful up to date down the trail of atonality, and the robust rapport between the 2 males got here below extreme pressure with the scandal that surrounded the suicide of the painter Richard Gerstl, who was having an affair with Schoenberg’s spouse.

The harrowing autobiographical circumstances of Zemlinsky’s long-standing infatuation for Alma Mahler, Gerstl’s suicide and his more and more troubled relationship with Schoenberg are encapsulated within the Second Quartet by way of using musical ciphers which serve to bind the work right into a convincing entity. These embrace the composer’s personal musical cipher D-E-G, heard on the very opening, a citation from Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, and a four-note motif (A-B-D-E) related to Mathilde.

A information to Zemlinsky’s String Quartet No. 2

The Second Quartet is a extremely risky music drama. But for all its seemingly impulsive adjustments of temper and tempo, Zemlinsky workout routines a formidable management over the work’s prolonged construction. It’s potential, even on first listening to, to comply with the logic of its narrative which to all intents and functions incorporates options that you simply’d discover in a Classical or Romantic quartet – a passionate dynamic opening part, which then unexpectedly subsides right into a tripartite and emotionally eloquent gradual motion. A sudden jolt in temper heralds a neurotic and shadowy Scherzo and a extra reflective Trio earlier than the quartet’s ultimate part. This builds up an actual head of steam, working in the direction of a ferocious climax marked by palpitating syncopated octaves within the viola, earlier than collapsing right into a extra serene and reconciliatory gradual epilogue.

Zemlinsky entrusted the Rosé Quartet with the primary efficiency, which befell in Vienna in April 1918. Most critics had been hostile to the brand new work. One complained that Zemlinsky had challenged the ‘basic dialogue of what we nonetheless perceive as music,’ whereas one other failed to know how ‘such an esteemed musician’ might have fallen so readily below the spell of Schoenberg. Nonetheless, in line with Anton Webern, a lot of this antipathy may very well be defined by the Rosé Quartet’s seeming incapability to grasp such a musically advanced and technically difficult work.

One other ensemble, the Feist Quartet, championed the work way more to Webern’s liking, and in subsequent years it featured a number of occasions in programmes organised below the auspices of Schoenberg’s Society for Personal Music Efficiency. But after additional performances in Prague and Berlin within the early Twenties, Zemlinsky’s Second fully disappeared from the repertoire. It fell out of vogue primarily as a result of its expressionist musical language now not chimed with the extra austere model in favour at the moment.

Revival of curiosity in Zemlinsky grew to become inconceivable following the rise of the Nazis, who so airbrushed the composer out of Austrian musical historical past that he remained grievously uncared for, even after 1945. It was largely because of the LaSalle Quartet, whose pioneering LP recording for Deutsche Grammophon appeared in 1978, that Zemlinsky’s Second was rediscovered and acquired due recognition as one of many composer’s most vital achievements.

The perfect recordings of Zemlinsky’s String Quartet No. 2

Escher String Quartet

Naxos 8.573088

Given the widespread crucial acclaim accorded to the LaSalle Quartet’s DG launch which, in line with violinist Walter Levin, even grew to become a best-seller for a time within the US, it was hardly stunning that few different ensembles within the Seventies and ’80s had been courageous sufficient to take Zemlinsky’s emotionally bruising Second Quartet into their repertoire, not to mention commit their interpretations to disc. However by the Nineteen Nineties, a youthful era of quartets had taken the plunge with the likes of the Artis Quartet of Vienna bringing out a nice first recording on the Orfeo label and the Kocian Quartet releasing a considerably much less compelling model on Praga Digitals. Subsequently, the Artis Quartet recorded the work once more, this time for Nimbus as a part of an entire Zemlinsky Quartet cycle, and had been quickly adopted by the Dutch-based Schoenberg Quartet on Chandos.

Since then, the vast majority of new recordings of the Second Quartet place the work within the context of Zemlinsky’s different compositions for this style. One notable exception is the latest 2019 launch from the Quatuor Arod on Erato. This actually deserves critical consideration, not least for its imaginative programme which appropriately pairs the Zemlinsky alongside Schoenberg’s Second Quartet and Webern’s Langsamer Satz. With staggeringly good enjoying, particularly within the formidably troublesome sooner sections of the work, there may be a lot to admire right here. However the tendency to pile on the emotional stress for a lot an excessive amount of of the time begins to pall after some time.

Deciding which recording finally offers listeners probably the most full and satisfying overview of Zemlinsky’s compositional imaginative and prescient is on no account a simple course of. Given the large interpretative and technical calls for the work makes on the gamers, the acid take a look at is how successfully the interpreters handle to convey a convincing narrative to the construction and maintain your consideration from first bar to final.

On this respect, it could be troublesome to surpass the searing account recorded in 2012 by the Escher Quartet. This American ensemble negotiates the ebb and circulate of Zemlinsky’s musical argument with bristling urgency, elevating the emotional temperature at essential dramatic factors, reasonably than relentlessly hectoring the listener. Equally, the Eschers are magically reflective within the work’s extra introverted sections, imbuing Zemlinsky’s writing with a beautiful subtlety of nuance.