Takács Quartet at the Perelman

A piano trio, let us say, can be played by a pickup group of virtuoso musicians who may or may not ever play together again. But string quartets are performed by four players who are musically married, often stay together for decades, and, if they’re good enough, are remembered for generations after. Great symphonic ensembles represent their cities — Vienna, Berlin, New York, Philadelphia — but string quartets, even when they have civic associations (Budapest, Tokyo, Jerusalem), are peripatetic entities that perform around the world, ambassadors of music alone in its best and purest sense. And the reason is that what Haydn created — the ensemble of two violinists, a violist, and a cellist, playing with, off, and sometimes against one another — is the most perfect expression of human communication ever devised.

You can make music with one, two, or three performers; you can make it with hundreds. But four is the ideal number — four strings, that is — because they converse as can no other combination.

Unofficial national anthem

For this reason, no one could properly object if Haydn showed up on every quartet recital, and no one does when he appears. Such was the case with the Takács Quartet, which opened its recital at the Perelman Theater this month with the Haydn Emperor Quartet, Op. 76, No. 3.

The six quartets that comprise Op. 76 are the summit of Haydn’s achievement in the form, and the third of the set is distinguished by its setting of Haydn’s recently composed song, God Protect Emperor Franz, which, written as Napoleon’s army threatened Austrian territories, was quickly taken up as a national anthem. Not only is its slow movement a series of variations on this theme, introduced by each of the instruments in turn, but it appears in the opening Allegro as well— an early example of the idea of a musical leitmotif that structures an entire composition. The Emperor Quartet is also one of four significant works influenced by Napoleon, the other three being by Beethoven: the Eroica Symphony, the Emperor Concerto, and Wellington’s Victory.

Skimpy French tradition

The Takács Quartet’s performance of the Haydn went well after a shaky start, with lapsed connections between the first and second violins. The problem recurred at the beginning of the next work, Debussy’s Quartet in G minor. The French string quartet tradition is much skimpier than the Austro-German one; it was almost devoid of impressive examples before Debussy wrote his Quartet at the age of 31 in 1893 — roughly a century after Haydn’s Emperor. The only substantial French precursor was César Franck’s late Quartet in D, which came only a few years before the Debussy, and, though Debussy clearly envisioned a successor in calling his work Quartet No. 1, he left it a unique specimen. It is, like the Haydn, a work whose material largely derives from its opening measures — a device employed by Franck, and of course popularized by this time in the work of Wagner.

The Franck Quartet is indeed Wagnerian in scale as well as structure, but Debussy, despite traces of indebtedness to Wagner that are more pronounced in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande, was already going his own way. There is nothing quite like the glittering, all-but-seamless tapestry the Debussy weaves in the quartet literature, despite its superficial resemblances in Ravel’s Quartet in F, composed nine years later. After the initial false start, the Takács gave it a superlatively nuanced and integrated reading, with particularly fine and warm playing by the cellist András Fejér.

New kind of man

Beethoven’s First Rasoumovsky Quartet, the Op. 59, No. 1, concluded the concert. The Haydn quartets achieve a perfection of form and expression that are as fully satisfying today as they were when they were first played; Beethoven explodes this perfection in the Op. 59, No. 1 and creates a sonic and emotional world never experienced before. “Romanticism” is the name casually given to it, but no description captures its revolutionary thrust; it is a new music written by a new kind of man. One hears it also in the Eroica Symphony and the Kreutzer and Appassionata sonatas, where Beethoven simply overturns old forms, and in his late quartet and piano music, where he reinvents himself once again. I might say, almost all over again, for the Adagio of the First Rasoumovsky would not be out of place in any of Beethoven’s late Quartets, and its profundity is already of a piece with theirs.

You can play Op. 59, No. 1 either backward or forward; that is, as a work shattering all previous conceptions of the quartet form or as part of the long tradition that would succeed and incorporate it — insofar as anything incorporates Beethoven. The Takács chose the latter route, with softer attacks and more rounded phrasing than in many other performances, as if to place the music in dialogue with the Debussy Quartet.

This is a legitimate choice, and one that probably needs to be made at least periodically. It is not, moreover, to suggest any lack of force or drive in the performance, but, let us say, a certain burnishing. This time, there were no tonal lapses, but masterful playing throughout.