Bartók: String Quartet No. 4

The Fourth String Quartet by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881–1945) is one of his most overtly “modernist” works. Its composition took place in 1928, when he was in close touch with the music of his contemporaries Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Alban Berg—some of the most recognizable figures in all of modernism. At the same time, the quartet has a thoroughly Central European sound, influenced by Bartók’s study of folk music from Hungary and the surrounding regions.

Introduction

In his Fourth String Quartet, Bartók instituted a five-movement “arch” form, in which correlations between the first and last movements and the second and fourth movements make an overall structural palindrome: ABCBA. Scales derived from folk music clash—and mesh—with the chromatic (12-note) scale to give the work an exuberant dissonance. The cross-references of the movements help to clarify the form, as does Bartók’s use of small, memorable motives (series of notes) to articulate certain ideas within the music. The result is a work that, however harsh at times, remains dynamic and vivid throughout.

History

Bartók composed his Fourth String Quartet between July and September 1928, and, perhaps deliberately, turned away from the complexity of his single-movement Third String Quartet, which he had written only a year before. Originally he was planning to create a work with the usual string quartet structure of four movements, with the last related to the first. He then realized that adding an extra movement in fourth place, related to the second, would complete a palindromic pattern.

The first performance of the quartet was given by one of the leading Hungarian chamber music ensembles of the day: the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, which had premiered all Bartók’s preceding string quartets. Most sources give the place and time as Budapest and March 20, 1929, but a month before, on February 22, the musicians had performed the work for a broadcast from the BBC’s Daventry radio station. This performance, however, may have lacked the fourth movement because the parts had not yet been amalgamated.

Bartók: Quartet No. 4 for Strings, BB 95

Form

Bartók himself gave a succinct description of the piece’s overall form: “The slow movement is the nucleus of the piece, the other movements are, as it were, bedded around it: the fourth movement is a free variation of the second one, and the first and fifth movements are of the identical thematic material. Metaphorically speaking, the third movement is the kernel, movements I and V the outer shell and II and IV, as it were, the inner shell” He returned to this five-movement structure in the Fifth String Quartet (1934) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1945).

The Fourth String Quartet does not have a key (like C major), but instead has a tonal center—a pitch around which the notes are organized, like planets orbiting the sun. This compositional method was by no means conventional at the time, and in this work the tonal center, strongly affirmed as a point of arrival at the close of both the first and last movements, is C

Analysis

The first movement has the characteristic exposition–development–recapitulation sequence of sonata form, with symmetry around the midpoint of the movement—a climax that is marked by an avalanche of assertive glissandos (finger slides between notes), which all four instruments play together. However, the main conflict is between seething continuity and interruptions from a short motive that never changes, except to transpose itself (move the starting pitch up or down and keep the same intervals between notes) or flip itself upside down. This motive, quickly stepping up through three adjacent notes before climbing down again, pushes the movement into the realm of a march, though its final victory is ambiguous, coming as it does after the motive has stamped itself to pieces.

Longer chromatic scales, running up and down through the interval of a fifth, swarm through the first scherzo (second movement), which again has a symmetrical shape, with a middle section whose material is added onto a reprise of the movement’s opening. Throughout the scherzo, all the instruments play with mutes on the strings (con sordino).

The slow middle movement begins as a cello lament against a backdrop of sustained harmony. The style is that of Bartók’s “night music.” As the music becomes faster and more agitated, activity moves into the violins, with sounds suggestive of insect noises. These two musical atmospheres then combine, with a night-music haze still lingering in the background. At the end of the movement, the haze lifts.

The ascending/descending chromatic scales of the second movement become rising and falling major/minor scales in the fourth, which makes for a more open sound of swarming, while dissonant chords provide accompaniment in the background. Both movements are scherzos, and are further linked by having a special string effect in each movement: muted in the second and pizzicato (plucked) in the fourth. However, among the traditional pizzicato sounds, Bartók introduced a new type, one in which the string is pulled so hard that it strikes back percussively against the fingerboard—an effect known thereafter as the “Bartók pizzicato.”

Excited, dissonant chords set the scene for the finale, in which, parallelling the change from the chromatic second movement to the more consonant fourth, the intervals of the first movement’s invasive motive are opened up to make a vigorous dance theme. However, in the middle section, the motive returns in its original form to steer the music towards an ending almost identical to the opening movement’s.

Critical Thoughts

In the Fourth String Quartet, as in the Third, Bartók used string effects that were, at the time, unusual: not only glissandos and pizzicatos, but also harmonics and sul ponticello (playing with the bow so close to the bridge that it produces a nasal sound). In fact, both these techniques show up in the slow movement’s middle section. Their appearance in the quartet has often been ascribed to the influence of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite (1925–26), which Bartók had heard at a performance in 1927. However, his consummate, inventive writing for strings owed a lot to his sessions with the Hungarian musicians of the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet. 

He also could have incorporated techniques from the fiddle players he encountered on his tours recording the folk music of Hungary and its surrounding regions. By this time, his summers in rural areas of Central Europe were over, but in the early 1920s he had been studying his recordings intensively as he put together collections of Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak folk music for publication. That analytical work could have been creatively important to the manipulation of small motives that characterizes the Fourth String Quartet, and it surely contributed to his creation of a tangy, distinctly Central European harmonic style. Only in the finale does Bartók deliberately write something that sounds like folk music in its rhythms and melodic shapes. 
And thus, an abstract, modernist composition discovered its roots.

Legacy

Along with the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, the Pro Arte Quartet of Brussels promoted Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet during the decade following its composition, introducing it in 1929 to Munich, Vienna, Brussels, Milan, and Bern, and giving the U.S. premiere in New York on February 2, 1930. In fact, Bartók dedicated the work to them. The first recording, however, did not come out until 1950, when the Juilliard String Quartet released an album of all six Bartók quartets. By then, these works were highly regarded, taking their rightful place among the string quartets of Beethoven.

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Article by Paul Griffiths