Musical Brilliance That Can Only Be Followed By Silence

By Wendy Wipprecht

Two years ago, almost to the day, Newtown Friends of Music brought the Hugo Wolf Quartett to Edmond Town Hall, where they presented a carefully crafted program of one early and one late Haydn string quartet. That performance framed a piece by the contemporary composer Wolfgang Muthspiel that was so new it hadn’t been named when the program notes went to press.

For an encore they played an entirely different kind of work, a delightful arrangement of themes from Die Fledermaus. The elegance and panache of the program, and of the quartet’s performance, made such an impression that they were quickly invited to return.

A concert presented at Edmond Town Hall on Sunday, March 20, was another all-Viennese program (hardly a restriction considering composers who lived and worked in Vienna include Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Wolf, Bruckner, et al). The Hugo Wolf Quartett is named for a Viennese composer, and the group was founded at the Vienna University for Music in 1993. Its members are Sebastian Gurtler (first violin), Regis Bringolf (second violin), Gertrud Weinmeister (viola), and Florian Berner (cello).

The Quartett established itself as an ensemble to watch very soon after it was founded, by winning many prestigious awards in Europe. In recent years it has moved from being an insider’s pick to one of the most respected quartets of its generation. Those in the audience who were unaware of the performers’ reputation soon realized they were listening to masters.

The concert began with Haydn’s String Quartet in B Major, Op. 76, No. 4, a work composed in 1797, published in 1799, and one of six quartets dedicated to Count Erdody. This late work, considered by many to be the finest of Haydn’s 83 quartets, is nicknamed “Sunrise” because of the way the first violin emerges from and rises above the other voices in the opening Allegro movement.

Because the first violin also tends to dominate one of the movement’s alternating themes, Sebastian Gurtler is given a chance to display some sensitive, almost luminous playing; the other theme, louder and faster, calls for more ensemble playing in a different style

The second movement, Adagio, is shaped and directed by the cello, which gave Florian Berner a chance to shine and the other musicians a chance to demonstrate their beautiful dynamic control and their clear distinction of detached and legato playing, all in the service of a truly lovely sound.

The next movement, Menuetto, is a country rather than a courtly dance, in which the cello grounds the rustic rhythms, and the other instruments provide the fast and light playing that shows high spirits.  The finale pulls out all the stops: it is energetic and lighthearted from the start.

Musical joking is definitely in progress: a teasing little first-violin solo leads to a thematic return, then the tempo slows down markedly, a fast fugal part begins, and the theme returns again, getting faster all the time. And the punch line? Some incredibly precise unison playing from all four musicians at warp speed, ending with a flourish.

Closing the first half of the program was Intermezzo for String Quartet in E-flat Major, a brief work by the quartet’s namesake. It has just one movement and lasts about 15 minutes, but it seems like a larger work. Listeners know right away that they are in “experimental” territory, if only because they can’t predict what will happen next — or rather, what happens takes them by surprise.

Thus the beautiful opening theme is suddenly interrupted by sounds that must have struck early listeners as harsh and very strange. To play this kind of disorienting music, in which “things seem to come at you from out of nowhere,” as a friend put it, demands another set of skills and sensitivities. Dissonances were thoughtfully explored, pizzicato sections played with amazing precision (at one point I believe I heard all four voices having a stichomythic exchange), and more melodic passages rose and fell with delicacy and sweetness. What a treat it was to hear a seldom-performed piece played with such artistry!

The Hugo Wolf Quartett took the stage after intermission to play only one work, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131. There was a practical reason for this decision: the quartet’s seven movements are played without break, and it takes about forty minutes to play.

Then there’s the quartet’s reputation. Beethoven’s late quartets are considered masterworks; the 14th was the composer’s favorite; and many consider it his greatest quartet.  Its music is intensely structured, highly emotional, almost experimental, and, above all, difficult.

But if difficulty were the only thing to listen for in music, only musicians and musicologists would attend concerts. We are often moved most deeply by what we do not understand. In the first movement’s fraught opening, one listener might note its fugal structure, harmonics that sound unusual for Beethoven and also far ahead of their time, and the musicians’ very subtle dynamic control. Another listener might say, with Wagner (who doubtless could have analyzed this movement to death), that it was the saddest music they knew.

The quartet’s lack of pauses between movements denies the listener that little break in which to cough, change position, check the program for the tempo of the next movement — in other words, to withdraw from the music. This is only the beginning of the disorienting surprises the quartet has in store. Movements can run from less than one to more than fifteen minutes in length; variations on a theme are based on harmonics rather than the melody; changes of tempo can mean the end of a movement or the start of a new variation; and so on. The listener is kept off-balance so that he or she is more open to—or at the mercy of—the powerful emotions that seem to be everywhere in this work.

But no amount of great writing alone will move an audience. The music must be performed so as to convey what is written on the page (and also the distinctive way in which the performers interpret what is written) to the listeners.  Can the musicians balance their instruments’ voices? Can one or all shape a line, or even the dynamics of one note, so as to bring out all the emotion it contains? Can they make their instruments seem to laugh, cry, run around in circles, or, hardest of all, to think? And, however beautiful or powerful each individual’s playing is, is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?

Answer those questions with a resounding yes, and you will begin to know what it was like to hear the Hugo Wolf Quartett play that formidable Beethoven quartet on that Sunday afternoon. There was a standing ovation but no encore; where could they have gone from there?

I thought of Schubert’s reaction to the piece: “After this, what is there left to write?” Then I walked to my car and made sure the radio was off before I turned the ignition key. The rest just had to be silence.