Arriaga:  String Quartet No.2 in A major (1824)

Allegro con brio
Andante – Lento – Tempo I
Menuetto – Scherzo
Andante ma non troppo – Allegro

It would be unfortunate if Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga y Balzola’s reputation were to rest solely on his membership of a group of composers whose potential genius was cut off at an early age; he was allotted even fewer years than Lekeu (22), Reubke (24), or Pergolesi (26), making the likes of Mozart and Schubert seem positively middle-aged in comparison. Yet it is the last-named who appeared to exert the stronger influence, and in the A major quartet the spirits of Weber and Mendelssohn (neither of whom reached the age of 40….) are still more to the fore (remarkably so with the latter, who was actually three years his junior). Perhaps this is no surprise, since in Paris he studied harmony and counterpoint with the renowned pedagogue F. J. Fétis, under whose influence he absorbed the central European styles of Haydn and Beethoven – as can clearly be heard in his last and finest work, the stormy but lyrical Symphony in D minor. 

He also studied the violin under Baillot (whose teaching and writing has had such an impact on performing styles right up to the present day). If Arriaga played his quartets himself, he must have been singularly well taught, to judge by the demands made on the first violinist. These three string quartets were the only music he managed to publish in his lifetime. The second of them displays a cheery sunniness which suggests that Fétis did not totally dampen his Latin spirit. Whether or not they approach the quality of such astonishing teenage creations as A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture or Gretchen am Spinnrade, Arriaga could in no way claim to have been as prolific as Mendelssohn or Schubert at a corresponding age (not to mention Mozart); yet at the same time the nostalgia of hindsight and the mystery of what-might-have-been tempts us once more to think of him alongside such consumptive Romantics as Weber himself, Chopin, Keats, and the Brontës, even if he could hardly have matched their actual achievements by the age of nineteen.

© Alan George
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