String Quartet No. 2

Suffolk-born composer Benjamin Britten (1913-76) produced an amazing amount of music as a youth, roughly 800 pieces prior to his published opus 1! Talent was clear from the beginning and brought him into contact with influential teachers and performers from a young age. He had already mastered the viola and begun writing numerous chamber works for all combinations, including string quartet. Thus when considering his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 36, it is useful to remember that this was hardly his second effort in the genre. It was composed in waning days of the Second World War contemporaneously with two other masterpieces: his opera Peter Grimes, which thrust Britten to international fame, and the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. The latter, based on a theme by English composer Henry Purcell, shows Britten’s interest in Baroque music. In a larger sense, by writing Peter Grimes, Britten pays homage to Purcell, who was still regarded as the country’s only native opera composer. To enter that arena was to invite comparisons with the author of Dido and Aeneas.
These Purcell connections spill over into the String Quartet No. 2, which premiered in 1945 on a concert celebrating the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death. The Quartet’s final movement, lasting as long as the other two movements combined, takes Purcell’s idiomatic title for a chaconne: Chacony. Britten’s end-weighted structure will likely call to mind Bach’s titanic chaconne for solo violin, which concludes his Partita in D Minor (more on that this Wednesday evening!). Throughout the Quartet Britten navigates the boundary between conflicting identities, in this case between the string quartet medium as a unified, homogenous entity and the tendency for the four players to break apart into individuals.
The first movement offers taut motivic structure (the interval of a tenth is important), but it also relaxes at beginning and end into a Purcellian antique mood of lush, sustained harmonies. The second movement turns modernist and mechanistic, and one easily associates the violent gestures and feverish energy with the spirit of the war years. The finale, as mentioned, is a massive chaconne: 21 variations on a theme with periodic violin cadenzas interspersed. But rather than tracking or listening for each distinct variation, we are swept along by the overall arc that leads to quasi-heroic C major chords at the end—a sense of struggle overcome, of tension released, that recalls the close of Beethoven’s monumental Fifth Symphony. At the time of composing this Quartet, Britten and violinist Yehudi Menuhin were touring Germany to offer concerts to survivors of the death camps. What he witnessed there, and the emotion of performing for these people, forever changed his approach to music. The first response to such trauma was this heartfelt Chacony.

(c) Jason Stell