Quatuor Arod’s Context for Schoenberg’s Music

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

This past October Erato released an album that seems to have been inspired by the social context in which some of the most fascinating works of the early twentieth century were composed. The performances are by Quatuor Arod, whose members are violinists Jordan Victoria and Alexander Vu, violist Tanguy Parisot, and cellist Samy Rachid. The title of the recording is The Mathilde Album; and readers may be forgiven for associating that name with Mathilde Wesendonck, one of the more influential characters in the biography of Richard Wagner. This would be a mistaken assumption, since the title refers to Mathilde Zemlinsky. Arnold Schoenberg had been studying with her brother, Alexander von Zemlinsky, since 1894; and he married Mathilde in October of 1901.

A more appropriate title might have been Of Teachers and Pupils, but that would have overlooked the social context of Schoenberg’s life. This would have included Mathilde’s brief affair with the young Austrian painter Richard Gerstl (who would commit suicide after she returned to Schoenberg) and Schoenberg’s intense reaction to her own death in October of 1923. (That intensity was short-lived; in less than a year he had married Gertrud Kolisch, sister of violinist Rudolf Kolisch, who was studying with Schoenberg at the time. However, those events took place much later than the time-frame of The Mathilde Album.)

The music on The Mathilde Album was composed between 1905 and 1915, and the three selections are ordered chronologically. The centerpiece (so to speak) is Schoenberg’s Opus 10 (second) string quartet in F-sharp minor), which was composed in 1908. It was dedicated “to my wife,” even though it was written at the time of Mathilde’s affair with Gerstl. It is not, strictly speaking, a string quartet because the last two of the four movements include an obbligato part for a soprano (Elsa Dreisig on this album), who sings the texts of two poems by Stefan George, “Litanei” (litany) and “Entrückung” (rapture). The ordering of those texts can be interpreted as a reflection on Matilde’s infidelity, but I am not sure there is any hard evidence that Schoenberg had that connotation in mind.

The Schoenberg quartet is preceded by one of the first compositions written by Anton Webern at the beginning of his studies with Schoenberg in 1905. This was a single-movement composition for string quartet, which was only published after Webern’s death with the title “Langsamer Satz” (slow piece). The final selection on the album is by Zemlinsky himself, his Opus 15 (second) string quartet, composed between 1913 and 1915. There is much to be gained from listening to this piece juxtaposed with with Schoenberg’s Opus 10. Not only do the two quartets share the same rhetorical context, but also the appearance of a few of Schoenberg’s motifs is almost certainly more than coincidence.

This album provided my “first contact” with Quatuor Arod; and it left me hoping that one of our local impresarios would make arrangements for them to give a recital here in San Francisco. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that this is far from a sit-back-and-listen album. Considerable attention went into the creation of each of the three pieces on the album, and it is clear that the same level of attention was engaged in the acts of performance. However, that sort of attention matters. Any account that does not get beyond providing a dutiful account of the notation will miss out on the full extent of rich rhetoric, even in Webern’s earliest efforts as a composer. Still, recognizing and appreciating that rhetoric calls for focused listening; but those willing to make that effort will definitely be rewarded for doing so.