The music comes from the 19th Century. From old world Bohemia, in what’s now the Czech Republic. A Romantic Era string quartet straight from the heart of composer Bedřich Smetana.
It begins with two violins and a cello sounding an introductory note – then the viola dramatically seizes center stage to lead the ensemble into Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1. It’s an intensely personal piece for the composer, full of earthy tones, busy city notes and even a pleasant polka from the Bohemian countryside. The composer, just 56, but sensing his life slipping away, gave his quartet the title “From My Life," and handed the viola the lead.
And violist Jon Mueller is glad he did.
“It makes you feel really alive and free to be able to play a big solo, especially right off the bat,” says Mueller, who teams in quartet with violinists Dillon Welch and Heather Thomas, and cellist Cecilia Huerta-Lauf in a NouLou Chamber Players concert February 2nd at Oxmoor Farm.
“Usually, these opening solos are given to the cello or first violin, but it’s nice to have the ownership of the solo all to yourself,” says Mueller. And he thinks he understands what the composer was aiming for.
“The viola is prominent because it brings a kind of warmness, a kind of melancholy, to the music,” the violist explains. “There’re a lot of meaty viola melodies and figures going on throughout the piece that bring that warmness that make the piece so personal.
“If you read a little about it,” Mueller continues, “Smetana offered some thoughts about each movement and how they relate to his life. The first movement is supposed to be about his upbringing and happy early life. But it may also foreshadow some of the hardships he would face later.”
Certainly, there were hardships and heartbreak. To begin with, the politics of central Europe are forever difficult for its people. Just as Smetana’s musical career was blossoming, he found himself on the wrong side of the Prague Uprising against Austrian Hapsburg rule and was forced to skip to Sweden. When he returned to his homeland, financial problems stifled his ambition to create a Czech national school of music. Then came family tragedies, and finally, later in life, he contracted diseases that left him deaf.
“I had no idea Smetana went deaf, just like Beethoven,” says Mueller. “You can imagine he and Beethoven were probably doing all sorts of quack medicines and dangerous electronic treatments to rid themselves of the venereal diseases that were so common then.”
Slowed, but not stopped, Smetana plunged ahead in music, and his later compositions are the composer’s most memorable. He followed the quartet “From My Life,” with a cycle of six tone poems he called “My Country.” All were written after he had gone deaf. The best known of those is Smetana’s signature work, The Moldau, which picturesquely depicts the Bohemian river Vlatva. The river flows from the mountains, courses through central Czechoslovakia, and its largest city, Prague, before joining the Elbe and on to the sea. The music paints a visage of the beautiful river and verdant fields of deep greens and purples. A land and river imbued with the same warmth and melancholy Mueller hears in the quartet.
Mueller also notes Smetana’s connection with Antonín Dvořák, who always credited Smetana as the creator of Czech “national” music. Interestingly, Dvořák played the viola in the first performance of Smetana’s quartet in 1878. Later, Mueller says, Dvořák opened his “American” quartet of 1893 with the viola again sounding a similar dramatic melodic lead.
The composer’s own program notes
Writing for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, musicologist John Henken says Smetana was devoted to creating a “national” sound for his country. The composer was also unapologetic that his String Quartet No. 1 deviated from standard classical style. Henken says Smetana’s quartet is “programmatic,” meaning it is about something. And that something is Smetana himself: “From My Life.”
Henken cites a letter Smetana wrote to music critic Josef Srb-Debrnov in 1878:
Concerning the style of my quartet, I shall gladly leave judgement on this to others, and I will not be angry at all if they do not like it, for it is contrary to the conventional style of quartet music. I had no intention of composing a quartet according to a formula or according to the usual conception of the form … I wanted to picture in tones the course of my life.
In the second movement, Smetana goes dancing:
The Polka carries me back in retrospection to the happy life of my youth when, as a composer of dance music, I frequented the fashionable world, where I was known as a fashionable dancer.
The third movement, he wrote:
...brings to mind the bliss of my first love for the girl who later became my first wife.
Of course, one wonders if listeners would ever pick up on any of this without Smetana’s program notes.
Probably not — except maybe in the final movement when the composer brings back themes from previous movements. Like looking back. Then culminating the quartet with a very soft and diminishing ending. Perfect for an old guy folding up his tent. But definitely not the norm for a concert quartet.
“You really have to sell it,” says Mueller.
“Usually, people are excited because they think the end of a quartet is going to be boisterous and full of flourishes. But this one ends without all that. You don’t want people to feel like they’re walking away without getting their money’s worth. But if it’s set correctly by the players, then I think people will understand that this is a reflective piece.
“For me,” Mueller says, “it’s going to be about finding that same color that I did at the very beginning and then give people a sense of finality.”
The players wind down the quartet with quiet closing notes. A soft chord, another…then one they softly pluck.
Not going out with a shout, but leaving on a whisper.
From far-away Faroes
Also on the program, the NouLou Chamber Players perform a small selection from a piece composed by the Danish String Quartet.
The Sønderho Bridal Trilogy - Part II is created from folk music the players came across in a remote village in the Faroe Islands, a self-governing group of islands that is way, way up in the North Atlantic. A part of the Kingdom of Denmark – like Greenland, only smaller.
One of the Danish Quartet players – they’re young guys like you’d expect to see in a coffeeshop — in Copenhagen, maybe — is from the Faroes and the group visits there to retreat and rehearse. It’s a land of cliffs and fjords, grass blanketed valleys and tiny villages. Hearing the music, a first thought was old Appalachian fiddle. But the Faroe Islands harmonies are even more beautifully spare. Maybe Viking.
The piece is only a few minutes long, and almost totally unknown. One imagines the NouLou players will be as interested as anyone to hear what they do with it.