Elizabeth Maconchy’s Fifth String Quartet
When someone has written an opera about a man who gets turned into a piece of furniture (The Sofa, 1957, to Ursula Vaughan Williams’s libretto), it might seem a shame to write instead about their string quartets. And yet, and yet. Once heard, Elizabeth Maconchy’s cycle of thirteen quartets make an indelible, enthralling mark upon the listener every bit as intriguing as couch-based singing dramas. They span fifty tumultuous years: number one arriving when Dmitri Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto and Richard Strauss’s Arabella were first heard (1933), number thirteen a product of the same year as Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise (1983). From Hitler to Thatcher, from the New Deal to the Mario Bros, from King Kong to The Return of the Jedi – half a century of fracture, regression and progress.
It can sometimes seem unfair to characterize composers in terms of other people’s music; yet with composers likely to be unfamiliar to many, this can be a useful way to capture some of their sound-world, to entice newcomers into the fold. Accordingly, we might suggest Maconchy’s sonic cosmos often recalls those of her fellow music-dramatists who were also composers of extraordinary string quartets: Béla Bartók, Leoš Janáček, Alban Berg (who all wrote some pretty peculiar operas, but not one nearly so brilliantly barmy as The Sofa). You can sometimes hear their influence, though it’s not well-defined exactly how intimately Maconchy knew their work – and in any case, all are absorbed into her entirely unique musical dialect, just as she admitted so many other stimuli, and her own musical progression, into her great developing cycle.
But what is so remarkable about Maconchy’s baker’s dozen of string quartets is their consistency, their magical ability to maintain a continuous voice found early that endures, even with a big gap of twelve years between the seventh (1955) and eighth (1967), yet is never monotonous, repetitive or dull. The thirteen are distinctly interrelated, gradually metamorphosing over time, gaining in contrapuntal sophistication, acquiring a sometimes sterner, tougher harmonic style, but always indisputably from the same pen, the same mind. Little tonal motifs, patterns of intervals, even fragments of melody drift and reappear across the cycle, giving a thrilling unity to it all. In some ways, and if it didn’t do a disservice to the honour and integrity of each, the whole sequence subsists like one gigantic three-hour quartet.
Their variety despite, or perhaps because of, such constancy and stability is astonishing, as is their fervent desire to entertain new ideas and explore new terrain, so much of which derives from their fundamental belief in the electric, elastic possibility of the string quartet form. Even when they court, say, more dissonance or rhythmical austerity, as the quartets of the ’60s and ’70s do, they never dissolve their ties from the more romantic, melodic works of earlier decades. For this reason, we might have chosen any of the thirteen as a suitable subject for promotion. Dip your hand into the Maconchy hat and you’re bound to pick a winner. But there is something particularly special about the Fifth, from 1948.
So much of Maconchy’s music grows from sonic cells, from innocuous, even bland, little germs that cultivate to structure the pieces, flourishing in depth, meaning, fascination and independence yet always tenderly tied to their parent source. In the Fifth, a slow four-part canon will come to shape and characterize the entire quartet. It opens the work and reappears in various guises and disguises throughout, broadening into more spacious melodies, cresting, dipping and plunging as it sees fit in the first movement.
This same canon preoccupies the second-movement scherzo, the material accelerated almost to breaking point before gradually slowing only to repeat its incessant drive. Such dexterity hands over to a lento espressivo of exquisite lyrical charm, the music passed lovingly, devotedly, around the four players of the quartet, weaving a musical web that is delicate, intricate yet intensely strong. The finale is full of vigour and variety, the material pushed forward through a range of contrasts and divergences, though with some poignant, reflective episodes which prevent the energetic momentum from losing its connections to the start. And, indeed, it is to the beginning that the quartet ends, with a return to the original material, utterly altered but linked by a silver thread.
Maconchy’s thirteen works match any string quartet cycle of the twentieth – or any other – century. They have the piquancy of Bartók, the diversity of Villa-Lobos, the profundity of Shostakovich, the reach of Robert Simpson. Yet what they have most of all is their distinction, their individuality, their uniqueness. Powerful intellectual expressions and passionate emotional messengers, they are full of mystery and exultation, subtlety and self-restraint. They’re not often played and have hardly been recorded, though they deserve all our time and far more attention.
But don’t forget The Sofa.
Recommended Recording:
Maconchy: Complete String Quartets / Hanson, Bingham & Mistry Quartets (Unicorn Records)
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies and Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels is planned for 2026.