The String Quartets of Benjamin Britten by Mary C. Francis

Edward Benjmin Britten was the youngest of his parents' four children, and a musical prodigy from an early age. His mother, an enthusiastic amateur singer, was delighted by her son's musical ability. Britten's two sisters recalled that by the time their younger brother was three, they were jumping up from their own piano practice sessions (perhaps with relief?) to allow their little brother a chance to mimic what they had been playing. At the age of nine he became a string player, taking up the viola, since his older brother Robert already played the violin. Britten began composing while he was still a child, and was a practical musician from the start. His first pieces were for the performers at hand: songs for his mother, piano pieces for himself and his sisters, and violin and viola sontatas for his brother and himself. By the time he was in his teens, he had written three string quarets, as well as dozens of other pieces, from symphonic etudes to piano waltzes.

Chamber music was a part of Britten's musical life throughout his career, and he retained a particular fondness for his own instrument, the viola, which often plays a prominent role in his music. Evenings of chamber music with family and neighbors were a favorite pastime throughout his life. He was particularly fond of Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert (he claimed to keep the string quartets of Haydn by his bedside for late-night reading) and their influence is evident in his own chamber music, especially in his elegant, economical use of melodic material.

A keen radio listener from childhood, Britten was introduced to a wide range of new music by the BBC's broadcasts; the Britten-Pears Library holds several scores by Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Shostakovich that Britten bought or was given while still a school boy. When he was admitted to the Royal College of Music in 1930 his new teachers noted that his tastes were quite advanced; as S.P. Waddington, one of the RCM examiners, remarked at the time, "What is an English public school boy doing writing music of this kind?"

String Quartet #1, Op.25 (1941)
Andante sostenuto - Allegro vivo
Allegro con slancio
Andante calmo
Molto vivace

In 1939 Britten left London, where he had settled after getting his degree at the Royal College of Music, and sailed to North America. The poet W.H. Auden, one of Britten's closest and most influential friends, had declared his intention to wash his hands of Europe as it headed inevitably toward war. Britten, a pacifist equally discouraged by the deteriorating situation in Europe, followed his lead, hoping to make a new career in the United States or Canada. His composition teacher Frank Bridge provided him with an introduction to the patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Coolidge was passionately devoted to the cause of chamber music and had an enviable commissioning record, including works by Schoenberg and Bartók. She commissioned Britten to write a new string quartet, and the piece was dedicated to her.

The first movement opens quietly with a plangent, wistful melody played in the highest register. Like so much of Britten's early music, the opening of the quartet is gorgeously lyrical, almost vocal in character. But the high register also conveys a hint of strain, even eerieness. It is succeeded by a more brisk, imitative texture, but this haunting melody is the soul of the movement. It returns in the middle of the movement, and ends the movement as well, an intensified, hushed return. This lush, unsettling melody looks forward to the third movement, the quiet heart of the quartet.

As with his other two quartets, the second movement is more frenetic; a "volatile and highly stylized march-scherzo" one critic called it. Sardonic marches appear in many of Britten's important works of this period, including the Symphonia da Requiem, the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers, and the Violin Concerto of 1939. Critics have noted the connection between Britten's political views during this violent and unsettled period and his propensity for harsh marches and sardonic scherzos. His friend and executor Donald Mitchell has claimed that these often exaggerated marches and "dance of death" scherzos reflect Britten's unease over the rising tide of fascism in Europe. Sometimes subdued, sometimes quietly menacing, this movement is related to Britten's sinister marches of the period.

But it is a short interlude bridging the distance between the lyricism of the first movement and the heart of the quartet, the slow nocturnal third movement. This "Andante calmo" can be heard as a prophecy of the "Very calm" middle movement of Britten's third string quartet. and more immediately, the "Moonlight" interlude of his first opera, Peter Grimes, which Britten was beginning to contemplate as he completed the first string quartet. The surface of the movement is indeed calm, but underpinned by a kind of melodic restlessness, yearning, cadenza-like melodic lines that strive upward throughout the second half of the movement.

Like the other movements of this quartet, the finale is crisply economical with its themeatic material, showing Britten's debt to the similarly focused invention of Haydn's string quartets. The finale is indeed Haydn-like in its skittish, light affect, but this fleet energy concludes with a series of pungent chords that are pure Britten.

The first string quartet has been called "the last important score of Britten's American period." It was while he was finishing the string quartet that the homesick young composer decided return to England. He had not found the cultural climate of North America any more welcoming to new music than London ; perhaps more importantly, he felt rootless and adrift so far from his home. Auden, reflecting on the quest for a new path in America that he shared with Britten, wrote that an artist must work where he has deep roots - or no roots at all. Auden chose to stay in the United States. Britten chose to return, crossing the wartime seas to return to Aldeburgh on the North Sea coast, just a few miles from where he had been born and raised, where he spent the remainder of his career.

String Quartet #2, Op.36 (1945)
Allegro calmo senza rigore
Vivace
Chacony: Sostenuto

Reflecting on his decision to return to his native Aldeburgh after two unsettled years living in the United States, Britten could pinpoint the moment when he decided to return home. In 1941, while he was still working on his String Quartet #1 in Southern California, he encountered the poetry of George Crabbe, a native of Britten's North Sea coast home, whose work inspired Britten's 1945 opera, Peter Grimes. "I suddenly realized where I belonged and what I lacked. I had become without roots, and when I got back to England....I was ready to put them down." Part of the process of putting down roots for Britten was an intense exploration of the greatest music of England 's past, that of the early baroque composer Henry Purcell.

During this period, Britten performed Purcell's songs frequently with his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, using his own piano arrangments of Purcell's figured bass parts. He arranged performaces of Purcell's opera, Dido and Aeneas for the English Opera Group, which he co-founded during this period, and even made a string quartet arrangement of Purcell's Chacony in G minor for a group of musical neighbors. Purcell's influence on Britten's own music is clear, from the use of a Purcell theme as the basis of The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, to the deliberately Purcellian vocal style of the song cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, both written during the same year as the String Quartet #2. Purcell's vocal style, with its metrical and melodic fluidity, remained a strong influence throughout Britten's career: "I had never realized, before I first met Purcell's music, that that words could be set with such ingenuity, with such color."

The Second Quartet also shows Purcell's influence on Britten, particularly the last movement. Written as part of the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Purcell's death, the quartet was premiered on the anniversary itself (November 21, 1945) in London. The quartet is formally striking, even eccentric: the first two movements are relatively brief and the third movement more than counterbalances the other two with its stately length and breadth. As with Britten's first quartet, the influence of Haydn is also evident, particularly in the way the first movement uses a single lyric theme throughout with Haydnesque economy of means. The melodic focus is countered by a marked harmonic instability throughout the movement. Unlike the traditional sonata form, Britten's first movement only accomplishes harmonic stability in its coda. This kind of wide ranging harmonic journey is typical of many of Purcell's arias and songs that Britten admired. The second movement is a shadowy scherzo. The entire movement is played with muted strings, which creates an eerie contrast of timbre with the two outer movements. The haunted, sardonic tone created by the muted strings has reminded many critics of another composer Britten admired, Shostakovich.

The majestic final movement is Britten at his most self-consciously Purcellian. The movement is a passacaglia, structured by a repeating melody or ground bass. The ground bass was a favorite device of Purcell's, acting as an anchor to the Purcell's ornate, asymmetrical melodic style and far-reaching harmonies, and allowing the buildup of musical drama across a long span of time. Britten favored the passacaglia for the same reasons: the finale of this quartet is Purcellian in its wide-ranging harmonies and melodic invention.

The passacaglia itself is an asymmetrical nine bar melody. Its dotted sarabande rhythms are another nod to the baroque period; as the melody unfolds, the rhythmic pace is telescoped, driving the melody to its close. The leaps that shape the ground bass offer frequent opportunities for harmonic change, which Britten exploits adroitly. As with the first movement, harmonic stability is constantly deferred; the stability of the bass line and the instability of the constanly shifting harmonies create tremendous tension across the long movement. Britten enhances the dramatic tension further by interrupting the progress of the passacaglia with three cadenzas: first the cello, then the viola, and then the violin. It is only after the violin cadenza that the home key is at last allowed to assert itself; the final three iterations of the ground bass are emphatically in C major.

At the time, Britten wrote of this quartet, "to my mind it is the greatest advance that I have yet made, & altho' it is far from perfect, it has given me encouragement to continue on new lines." Most of the "new lines" that he chose to explore were in opera and song: Britten did not write for string quartet again for thirty years.

String Quartet #3, Op.94 (1975)
Duets
Ostinato
Solo
Burlesque
Recitative and Passacaglia (La Serenissima)

Benjamin Britten was first diagnosed with heart disease in his late fifties, and it was soon clear that an operation would be needed. By the time his condition had become truly serious Britten was working on what would be his last opera, Death in Venice. Fearing that he might not be able to complete the work while convalescing, Britten chose to delay the operation until the opera was finished. Death in Venice enjoyed a critically acclaimed premiere, with Britten's partner, the tenor Peter Pears, creating the principal role of writer Gustav von Aschenbach, who dies in plague-stricken Venice at the end of the opera. The heart surgery was less successful: Britten suffered a stroke during the operation, from which he never fully recovered.

The third string quartet was written during October and November of 1975, and is closely tied to Death in Venice, particularly the final movement, which was written in Venice during the composer's last visit to the city that he had always loved. According to Rita Thompson, who was Britten's nurse, he wanted to return "to hear the bells" of Venice once more despite his poor health. Those bells are the basis of the ground bass pattern of the final movement of the quartet.

The third quartet is an arch of five movements that recalls aspects of both of Britten's previous quartets. Like the first quartet, the third quartet's middle movement is a moment of quiet, lyrical poise between faster, more energetic second and fourth movements. And like the second quartet, the third quartet ends with a passacaglia of great intensity that echoes the Purcell-inflected second quartet's finale.

The first movement, "Duets," is indeed a series of duets, rotating through six combinations of two instruments. Unlike many first movements, this movement begins and ends very quietly, reaching loud unisons only twice-and both times withdrawing to piano. The second movement, "Ostinato," shares the obsessive character of the scherzo movements of the first two string quartets. Britten's skill in using a repeating pattern to structure a movement is evident once again in this movement. The wide leaps of the opening bars launch a propulsive ostinato that is rapidly traded from player to player. The headlong rush is amplified rhythmically when the ostinato is overlaid first with a syncopated pattern and then triplets, culminating in a dramatic pause. A brief coda fragments the ostinato, fading to a pianissimo close.

The short third movement, "Solo," as quiet as the "Ostinato" is frenetic, is just as intense. The first violin soars into its highest range, sometime serene, sometimes eerie, sometimes ecstatic. The supple, vocal character of the solo evokes the extended recitatives sung by Aschenbach in Death in Venice.

The contrasted pairing of the second and third movements is echoed and amplified by the fourth and fifth movements. "Burlesque" is even faster and more frantic than "Ostinato." Its harried, desperate character is emphasized by the deliberately strained orchestration of the "quasi trio," in which the viola plays above the first violin (on the wrong side of the bridge no less), with the cello barking harsh seconds.

The first four movements evoke the world of Britten's final opera in subtle ways, but the finale, "Recitative and Passacaglia" makes the connection to Death in Venice abundantly clear, beginning with its subtitle, "La Serenissima," Venice itself. The movement opens with another nod to the recitative vocal style of the opera, a sequence of cadenzas, each one using a particular melody from the opera. The opening section culminates with a unison statement of Aschenbach's declaration of love. At this point the rocking bass pattern that had underlined the unison passages of the opening emerges as the ground bass of Britten's final passacaglia. More subdued than the majestic ground bass of the finale of the second quartet, this somber, simple pattern sustains a beautifully proportioned structure.

The third string quartet was premiered on December 19 1976, fifteen days after Britten's death. Knowing, as Britten knew himself, that this would be one of the last pieces that he would ever complete, it is difficult not to hear the passacaglia as a meditation on the end of life. As the movement draws to its quiet close, the passacaglia becomes halting and fragmented. The final measures do not resolve in a conventional cadence but come to rest in a harmonically unstable equilibrium, what the Hans Keller, the dedicatee of the quartet, called a "non-end."

Britten was normally very reticent about his music, but towards the end of his life he was more revealing. "I wanted passionately to finish this piece before anything happened," he told one of his colleagues, and, "I wanted the work to end with a question." The beautiful, but unstable closing chord is indeed, a question. As one critic said of the quartet, "It is intensely, simply, ambiguous. Its meaning is its mystery."

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