Bartók String Quartet No. 2, Op. 17
Bela Bartók was born at Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary, now Sînnicolaue Mare, Romania, on 25 March 1881 and died in New York City on 26 September 1945. Bartók began sketching the String Quartet No. 2, Op. 17, in 1915 and completed it in October, 1917. This period of composition also included the completion of the Wooden Prince, several piano pieces, and the Opp. 15 and 16 songs. The work is dedicated to the Quatuor Hongrois (Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet), who premiered the work in Budapest on 3 March 1918. The quartet was first published in 1920 by Boosey and Hawkes.
Bartók’s string quartets serve as useful stylistic markers of his compositional output and give us great insight into Bartók’s compositional mindset at various stages of his career. Amanda Bayley writes in The Cambridge Companion to Bartók that“[t]heir stylistic development is such that each Quartet is the culmination of a different phase of his artistic growth, focusing almost all his creative ideas and compositional techniques into a single genre. On the one hand they represent the continuation of a Classical tradition through an intensity of motivic writing that parallels Beethoven’s, while on the other they reflect developments in musical language and a changing aesthetic during the first half of the twentieth century.”
Bartók had participated in folk-music collecting tours since 1906. In lieu of military service during World War 1, Bartók, along with his countryman and fellow composer Zoltan Kodály, was entrusted with the collection of folksongs from soldiers which culminated in a patriotic concert in Vienna in January 1918. The influence of these tours on Bartók’s style starts to find full fruition in the String Quartet No. 2. The outer movements display the introspective nature found in the String Quartet No. 1, but it is in the middle movement, Allegro molto capriccioso, that folk elements are found. According to Malcolm Gillies in his Grove Music entry on Bartók, the second movement was inspired by material Bartók collected from north Africa “in the limited range of its harsh tune, in the drumming accompaniment and in the exaggerated embellishments.” Folk elements also provided Bartók with unusual scale structures which Bayley says “provided him with new melodic and harmonic formations to explore in response to the general weakening of tonality at the beginning of the twentieth century.”
Kodály charactarized the three movements of this quartet as “1. A quiet life. 2. Joy. 3. Sorrow.” The first movement of this quartet is in sonata form, and the complexity of motivic development in this movement shows the influence of Bartók’s study of Beethoven’s late quartets. The second movement is, as mentioned earlier, based on folk elements and centered around the interval of a tritone. In the slower parts of the movement one can also hear aspects of cabaret music. The third movement is a slow movement full of plaintive gestures, some motivically related to material from the first movement, that serves as a foil to the intensity of the second movement. Here we see the introspective Bartók, examining the bleakness that the ensuing war created.
-Program notes by Dr. Daniel Doña