Guarneri at the Met I
Perhaps Arnold Steinhardt doesn't like Mozart. The thought crossed my mind as the Guarneri Quartet, of which Mr Steinhardt is the first violinist, made its way through Mozart's Quartet in A, K. 464. The top note was never exactly flat, but it usually sounded tired, as though the air had been let out. Of all the quartets that I know, the Guarneri sounds most like the old Budapest Quartet, which resorted to a similar style when it meant to be sweet. But this sagging tonality tightened up during the Mendelssohn that followed, and not in evidence when, after the interval, the Guarneri was joined by violist Steven Tenenbom for a performance of Dvorak's American Quintet.
The thought crossed my mind because I have not forgotten, and will never forget, a perfectly maddening performance of Mozart's Divertimento in E-Flat, K. 563, at Caramoor one summer afternoon years ago. Yes, the trio that I've written about at some length. It was a painful hour. I concluded that it must have been an "off" day for Mr Steinhardt, but there it was again on Saturday at Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, a manner of playing all the high notes as if they were suffering from anemia. Nor did Mr Steinhardt appear to want to keep up with his colleagues' tempo. He never lagged, of course, but a certain resistance could be sensed. Second violinist John Dalley, violist Michael Tree, and cellist Peter Wiley, in contrast, seemed to like what they were playing. Mr Wiley was brilliant in the demanding Andante, a theme-and-variations that ends with a lesson in species counterpoint that puts the cellist to work.
If I set these annoying factors aside, something that became increasingly easy to do as Mr Steinhardt played with increasing enthusiasm, I could hear the firm and supple suggestion of a group of old Viennese gents playing at the rear of some-out-of-the-way coffee house - playing as if for themselves. Mozart's Vienna, in short. The minuet was particularly captivating. Charmed by the performance into not judging it, I found myself wondering how anybody could mistake this music for Haydn's. There is a musical handwriting, unique to each composer that, the more beautiful it is, the more difficult it is to copy, and in the great composers' music it is plain in every bar. Learning to hear this handwriting as it were means learning not to hear the composer's period, and that's very hard, at least for those of us who don't learn about music by performing it. Period style is simply the collection of tics and riffs that composers have in common with their contemporaries; to continue the handwriting metaphor, the current vogue in letter shapes and punctuation. Period style is easy for beginning listeners to grasp, and soon the composers can be sorted in something like this fashion:
Vivaldi/Bach/Handel
Mozart/Haydn
Beethoven/Schubert
Schumann/Mendelssohn/Chopin
Brahms/Dvorak
Tchaikovsky/Grieg/Sibelius
Debussy/Ravel
Prokofiev/Shostakovich
The beginning listener will soon be able to distinguish these groups, but distinguishing the composers within them will remain difficult precisely because of the emphasis placed upon common elements. It's only when you stop listening for these that the handwriting becomes apparent. Consider Mozart and Haydn. Notwithstanding their warm mutual regard, two more unlike composers never existed. Mozart was prodigiously gifted with melody, and never had to develop Haydn's skill at (or interest in) exploring the possibilities of a tune. Mozart was much more interested in spinning plates: balancing a little motif like this against another like that. Just hum the opening bars of the Jupiter Symphony and you'll see what I mean. Balance and contrast are everything in Mozart, and it's the juggling that can lead the inattentive ear to judge that there are "too many notes," as Kaiser Josef is said to have complained (of Figaro). Haydn couldn't be more straightforward, more singleminded, and many of his finest works are entirely built on scraps of tune that Mozart would have used once and tossed.
Nobody sounds like Mendelssohn, either. I didn't know the Quartet in E-Flat, Op. 12, but the performance changed that, and now I want to get to know the work better. My feeling about Mendelssohn is that he was the greatest prodigy ever to write music; Mozart certainly wrote nothing on the order of the Octet or the "Midsummer Night's Dream" Overture when he was in his teens. Maturity, unfortunately, inclined Mendelssohn toward ponderousness. He never entirely lost his light touch, but his attempts at the somber and weighty are not successful. The Quartet, Op. 12, which despite its opus number was written after the Octet, catches Mendelssohn right as the bloom has begun to fade. It is beautifully fleet. But the spark is ebbing.
Dvorak's American Quintet, like his American Quartet, is a souvenir of the composers 1893 sojourn in Iowa, and, once again, the Guarneri Quartet played it as if they were channeling down-home musicians, only this time in a barn, not a café. Or perhaps under a bank of willows: what composer seems more at home in the breezy, sunny outdoors than Dvorak? If the performance of the opening Allegro non tanto had been any more exuberant, the hundred-odd listeners seated on the stage would have been in danger. There was something almost comical about sitting as we all did, politely, motionlessly listening to black-suited gentlemen earnestly playing what the Allegro vivo essentially is: a square dance; the gentle trio is really nothing but a breather, a moment of stillness that does not even last as long as the trio itself. Only with the Larghetto did the music really slow down. Although this music slips back and forth between major and minor, its wistfulness is open and rural, something that a gathering of farmers - American or Czech - could grasp at once. It made an interesting parallel to the Mozart, in that both "slow" movements are sets of variations on themes, and while the Dvorak is not noticeably less expert than the Mozart, it will send any mind into daydreams variously pleasant or moving. The Mozart will sound no more than agreeably pleasant to a listener less interested in music than in music's powers. The concluding Allegro giusto returns us to the dance, but to a dance in which the gentry might join.
The musicians were wildly applauded when the final echoes of the Quintet died out. There were baseball-field whistles as well as shouts of "bravo!". I'm hearing the whistling, which would have been unthinkable when I was a boy, more and more, and I take it as a good sign. Writing about it, I realize that I never felt that I was at a "chamber music concert" in the old austere-serious-cerebral mold, full of people radiating a personal superiority to the vulgarities of tone poems. The crowd last Saturday night would have been more inclined to ask, "What orchestra?"
