Grażyna Bacewicz’s Fourth String Quartet
Intense emotion, furious intellect, fertile imagination and superb technical mastery are the hallmarks of great string quartet cycles, and Grażyna Bacewicz’s has all these aspects in abundance. Spanning 1938 to 1965, some of the most tempestuous, tumultuous years in Poland’s history, Bacewicz’s seven string quartets form one of the great bodies of chamber music, equal in mastery to those twentieth-century wonders from Shostakovich, Bartók, Nørgård, Britten, Tippett, Maconchy and Villa-Lobos.
An absorbing portrait of the artist, they present a persuasive picture of a highly original musician, one whose astonishing creations are now finally receiving the attention due to them. A prolific composer and world-class solo violinist, her seven violin concertos, two cello concertos and four symphonies, along with extensive music for ballet, film and radio, plus much else besides, reveal a musical mind able to work on the broadest canvases and within the largest structures. But it is amongst the impertinent demands and intimate surroundings of the string quartet that we tend to find her most authentic and unique voice.
The string quartets brilliantly showcase Bacewicz’s evolving style and her developing musical language, and disclose elements of personal history – though the fact that the untroubled merriment and neoclassical delights of the Second (1943) come from the darkest days of the Second World War should warn us against reading this music too strictly biographically. It’s more complicated than that. Bacewicz knew that music – especially chamber music – needed to exist on its own terms: pure, untouched and unsullied by dogma, dictum or external distraction. She knew, too, that music was an admirable mechanism for escape, from the external trauma of war and political oppression as well as a means into the self, a diversion into the mind. The quartets show us private persecutions and subjective wars of the soul, and are a particular and personal agency for evading the ordeals of the century, asserting individuality.
Bacewicz’s quartets contain both lyrical melodic warmth and sinister jagged dissonances. They can dance and sing – rhythms frisky, spontaneous, life-affirming – and with some excellent Haydnesque comic timing, but the momentum can linger too, an arctic tranquillity invading the scores. Glissandos that slide, glide and sigh, weep and wander, are characteristic of Bacewicz’s musical vocabulary. So, too, are swaying motifs – lullabies that can haunt or propel a work. Her marvellous string pizzicatos can be very percussive indeed, sending metallic shivers down the spine. Finales are usually witty wonders, electric and inspired. Bacewicz’s music for string quartet has immense clarity in both texture and form, allowing moods to shift and swing with beguiling ease – unpredictable and impulsive – yet always convincingly and within the neat requirements of formal concerns.
In 1950, the Polish Composers Union commissioned a new quartet from Bacewicz, which became her Fourth – and won the International String Quartet Competition the following year in Liège. It remains the most popular of Bacewicz’s quartets and perhaps the best known of all her compositions.
Cast in three movements, it is a structural and emotional masterpiece, opening with a Romantic, somewhat folkloric, atmosphere that will characterize much of the music: a long and slow sequence, with tensions that intermittently erupt the score before the music develops into an airborne allegro molto. This theatrical opening is contrasted, via classical sonata form, with more laid-back secondary material featuring Bacewicz’s distinctive ‘lullaby’ rocking pattern (here slightly Spanish in its colourful insignia).
The second movement, andante, maintains this rocking idea but softens the soundscape to more pastel hues. All of it is conveyed via some extraordinary polyphonic writing and harmonic sophistication: animated fugatos take the music on a complex and highly involved journey, mixing lyricism with more demonstrative outbursts of anger and pain.
For the finale, we meet Grażyna Bacewicz in unbuttoned and ebullient mood. Jolly and neoclassical, it is an agreeable sonata-rondo with a mission, but one constantly interrupted by a range of vibrant episodes – there are flashes of Debussy-like chic and Ravel’s sophisticated charm, as well as Polish folk phrases – though we always make a return to the courteous and delightful rondo material. The variety of textures and idioms expressed across the movement is astounding, as is this composer’s always exquisite sensitivity to diverse instrumental colours. A humorous musical joyride full of well-placed jokes, especially concerning note sequences as well as the movement’s rhythm and metre, this is Bacewicz on fire, and the work ends with an energetic acceleration to an emphatic G from all the musical voices.
In the Fourth String Quartet, Bacewicz’s playful and poetic sides are both on marvellous display, as is her technical and formal prowess – which wonderfully serves her expressive desires rather than any dour logical exercise. Effortlessly harmonizing structural complexity with amenable themes and an unfussy musical erudition, it is one of the great quartets of the twentieth century.
Recommended Recordings:
Grażyna Bacewicz: Complete String Quartets / Silesian Quartet (Chandos, 2 CDs)
Grażyna Bacewicz: String Quartets / Lutosławski Quartet (Naxos, 2 CDs)
The Lutosławski present these works as raw and violent interventions, showcasing the extraordinary power and vivid energy Bacewicz produces from the modest forces of the string quartet. The Silesian offer a more balanced, self-assured and formal view of Bacewicz, emphasising her structural brilliance and unified vision – though they are never dull for a moment. Quite the reverse: they seem to serve Bacewicz even better than the Lutosławski, allowing the music’s passion, tenderness and complexity to speak for itself. Both are essential sets.
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 2025.