bookends

This is the final post on the Bartók String Quartet No. 4.  Enjoy!

Bookends are sually two fairly massive objects which hold a row of lesser books upright.  This would be an apt description of the two outer movements of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet.  They are large in scope (at least in comparison to the rest of the movements), at more than 5 minutes in length each, and very dense in their construction.  Now that we’re talking about these movements, it’s appropriate to look at the overall form of the quartet.  As noted before, there is a central movement which serves as the emotional heart of the piece, the third movement, Non troppo lento.  This movement is encased by the Prestissimo con sordio second movement and the Allegretto pizzicato fourth movement, which are variations of each other.  Finally, these three inner movements are enclosed by the Allegro first movement and Allegro molto fifth movement.  Here is a diagram to better show what we’re getting at here:

[click to enlarge]

So we have a prime example of arch form – which Bartók would revisit in his Fifth Quartet as well.  In addition, the whole arch is anchored by these bookends (or piers, to stay with the bridge/arch analogy), which in turn are anchored to each other by the same thematic basis (see below).  Moving inward, the second and fourth movements are linked by melodic contour, the second movement being chromatic and the fourth movement diatonic, as noted in the previous post.

The first movement is a brilliant example of continuous thematic development.  The entire movement (and for that matter, much of the rest of the entire quartet) is all based upon the interval relationships heard in the opening of the quartet, scattered amongst the instruments:

[click to enlarge]

These intervals become explicit when voice in a single instrument, first in the cello:

and then in the first major cadence of the movement, by all four instruments:

Here’s the first major section of the first movement, so you can hear how things develop:

[audio:http://www.nobleviola.com/wordpress/audio/bartok/mvt1.mp3]

and here is where the first theme of the first movement starts to evolve back in to the fifth movement (listen to the cello about 10 seconds into this clip):

[audio:http://www.nobleviola.com/wordpress/audio/bartok/mvt5.mp3]

There are some excellent resources on the web which delve more deeply into the musicological aspects of this piece, concerning pitch cells, rhythmic cells, etc., and I won’t go into those here, mostly because that stuff just mystifies the hell out of me!  A good site to look at for more info on this is located here.  There is a bit of conflicting information on whether Bartók consciously used the Golden Section as a means of musical organization, but the site cited above has a bit of information about that as well as the Wikipedia entry on the Golden Section and music.

The audio examples are from EMI’s excellent recording of the Belcea Quartet.

All of this aside, the Bartók Fourth Quartet is one of the reigning achievements of 20th century music, and I hope that it becomes one of your favorites as well!