Britten: String Quartet No. 3, Op.94 (1975)
Duets With moderate movement
Ostinato Very fast
Solo Very Calm
Burlesque Fast – con fuoco
Recitative and Passacaglia (“La Serenissima”) Slow – slowly moving
Britten’s third quartet was completed in November 1975 in Venice (hence the title of the last movement), and dedicated to Hans Keller. It was performed for the first time at The Maltings, Snape, in December 1976 – fifteen days after the composer’s death. The players were the Amadeus Quartet, who had been honoured with exclusive rights to performance for one whole year. During that time the Fitzwilliam Quartet was fortunate to be able to study the work with the eminent composer Colin Matthews, who had latterly acted as Britten’s amanuensis, assisting with the composition of this quartet and the writing down of the score. It was touching to hear his poignant account of the two of them trying out the passacaglia at the piano, the frail composer contributing only the two oscillating notes of the cello part, representing the two bells which regularly tolled outside his window in Venice – just one of a number of instances in the work where Venetian bells are depicted. The Fitzwilliam actually features in private correspondence between the two great composers Britten and Shostakovich, towards the end of their lives (Shostakovich predeceased his friend by a year), and so there was a certain inevitability in their championing of the very last quartet composed by either of them – happily resumed in Britten’s centenary year. And so it was that by the beginning of 1978 the FSQ players were well prepared to give the work’s first non-Amadeus performance, in London’s Conway Hall, followed by nearly twenty further airings that same year, including premières in North America and the USSR (at the Union of Soviet Composers), and a special rendition at the Camden Festival which attracted a large contingent of the Britten circle – including Colin Matthews himself, who also provided the following note on the quartet:
The main weight of the work is borne by the outer movements, with a central episode of complete repose framed by two scherzos. This divertimento-like structure is enhanced by the titles given to each movement, yet the quartet’s substance is far from divertimento-like. Its starting point is, rather, the fantasy and virtuosity of the suites for solo cello – the only other large-scale chamber works of Britten’s last ten years – and it belongs to their essentially serious world.
The first movement is an elegiac Andante, with an agitated central section, briefly recalled before the coda. The title derives from the fact that the instruments play mostly in pairs. An ostinato strides purposefully through the second movement, at first accompanied by virtuoso solos, then as part of a more relaxed ‘trio’; but after a fantastic restatement it simply peters out. The mood of the fourth movement is similar, but fiercer and more sardonic: its trio takes the form of a bizarre waltz, with instruments playing with the wood of the bow and behind the bridge.
Between these two scherzos comes the still centre of the work – a serene and translucent ‘Solo’ for the first violin, above the simplest of accompaniments, with a central bird-song-like cadenza. The limpid tonality of the closing bars finds its apotheosis in the finale, a relaxed and slow-moving passacaglia – prefaced by agitated echoes of the opera Death in Venice and the bells of Venice itself. In spite of the passacaglia’s gentle progress, the anxiety of the introduction is never entirely left behind, and the work ends with a question, though not an apprehensive one.
© Alan George
