PhilPaine.com

A Scar­let Tanager

I love string quar­tets. Com­posers seem to put their hearts and minds into them in a way that they don’t reli­ably do for oth­er forms. Since they have lit­tle com­mer­cial val­ue, they are usu­al­ly com­posed with nobody look­ing over the composer’s shoul­der, and no box-office con­sid­er­a­tions. The stark sim­plic­i­ty of the com­bi­na­tion of two vio­lins, vio­la, and cel­lo, which nev­er­the­less allows for a full tonal range and the inter­play of indi­vid­ual and com­bined voic­es, attracts the com­pos­er who wants to put across seri­ous thoughts.

Antonín Dvořak wrote four­teen string quar­tets, but the twelfth, nick­named “Amer­i­can”, is by far the most pop­u­lar and mov­ing. It has a sweet­ness of melody and an inven­tive­ness, from moment to moment, that links it with his won­der­ful “New World” sym­pho­ny. It was, in fact, writ­ten at the same time, while Dvořak was vis­it­ing a small town in Iowa (set­tled by Bohemi­an and Mora­vian immi­grants). It’s easy to find the influ­ence of African-Amer­i­can spir­i­tu­als in it, while its Czech ele­ments are just as sol­id. The first vio­lin motif in the third move­ment echoes the song of the scar­let tan­ag­er, a bird he heard often in Iowa. Like the pop­u­lar ninth sym­pho­ny, it’s a pro­found­ly human­is­tic and opti­mistic work. This was the hap­pi­est time in Dvořak’s life, and he was by nature a gen­tle and com­pas­sion­ate man. Those ele­ments infuse the work, which was writ­ten, as I under­stand, most­ly out­doors, on the banks of a stream near an Iowa farm. This spot must have been, for him, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly the pio­neer-bro­ken prairies of a “new world”, and the left bank of the Vlta­va at Nela­hozeves. Com­fort­ing tra­di­tion and wild free­dom, age and youth, wis­dom and inno­cence all com­bined, with­out con­flict, with­out con­tra­dic­tion. When I feel that things are basi­cal­ly all right in the uni­verse, that the forces of dark­ness must in the long run be over­tak­en by the light, then this is the music for me.