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Dvořák String Quartet in G Major, opus 106

The year in which Dvořák wrote his Quartet in G Major, Op. 106, 1895, also saw the publication of an important work heralding the emergence of the Czech social democratic movement and renewed sense of national identity: The Czech Question by Tomáš Masaryk. Dvořák’s return to his homeland after having spent time in the United States, both in Iowa and as head of the National Conservatory in New York, parallels Masaryk’s description of a return to a true Czech self-image. Masaryk speaks of the reclamation of the national language as a class struggle, as well, and Dvořák was, at heart, a man of the people. He had grown up in a Bohemia where German was the daily spoken language, and, indeed, in a European musical environs in which Germanic music reigned supreme. As a young boy, he had played the viola in dance bands in his native Bohemia, and thus was well steeped in his native folk music, its rhythms and gestures an intrinsic part of his musical vernacular. His return to Bohemia also coincided with a renewed interest in Czech folklore, his exploration of the folktales collected and versified by Erben, several of which provided inspiration and material for the set of orchestral tone poems with which he occupied himself immediately following the completion of the G Major and A-flat Major string quartets.

Perhaps time away bolstered Dvořák’s sense of national and artistic identity, much as he had attempted to convince Americans of the necessity of looking at their own native musics as a template for a national style. Certainly, he had been homesick during his time in the United States, and his return was a relief. In Ignorance, the great Czech writer Milan Kundera writes:

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages … Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence").

Nostalgia seems a strong presence in the G Major quartet, expressed by musical ideas perforated by silences which yearn to connect, and, most strongly, by the reemergence of ideas from the first movement in the last, where they become transmogrified, drifting through memory, hazy in recall, untethered from the logic of narrative progression. In fact, the piece as a whole gives the impression of a loose set of impressions, digressions, and suprarational associations. Next to its sister work, the exquisite, jewel-like quartet in A-flat Major, Op. 105, it seems a big sloppy puppy, full of love, enthusiasm and, at times, unpredictable and charmingly volatile behavior.

Contemporaneous with Dvořák’s composition of this work was a movement in the world of visual art known as Art Nouveau, which advocated for the inspiration of nature in all of its unruly, native variations of pattern and line. Primary among its inspirations were botanical and deep-sea imagery. Dvořák too, moved to the core by the designs and charms of the natural world, evinces textural imagination here that is endlessly endearing, a true cornucopia of delightful, kaleidoscopic patterning.

Dvořák’s great love for Schubert’s music also casts a spell on this work. Whereas Dvořák’s generally blithe spirit contrasts strongly with Schubert’s more saturnine character, his admiration of the earlier composer is apparent and striking here. Dvořák wrote a laudatory article on Schubert, published just one year prior to the composition of this quartet, He is especially glad to find Slavic traits in Schubert’s oeuvre:

In Schubert’s pianoforte music … we find a Slavic trait which he was the first to introduce prominently into art-music, namely the quaint alternation of major and minor within the same period. Nor is this the only Slavic or Hungarian trait to be found in his music. During his residence in Hungary, he assimilated national melodies and rhythmic peculiarities, and embodied them in his art, thus becoming the forerunner of Liszt, Brahms and others who have made Hungarian melodies an integral part of European concert music. … if the poet and the painter base much of their best art on national legends, songs and traditions, why should not the musician? And to Schubert will belong the honor of having been one of the first to show the way.

One of the most astonishing recapitulations (the moment in a so-called sonata form movement when the opening material is rediscovered, following a developmental, exploratory section of music) is in the first movement of Schubert’s Quartet in G Major, D 887, which must, surely, have been in Dvořák’s ear and heart here. In that work, the return to the opening idea is clearly felt, and yet nothing is identical in terms of harmonic flavor, texture, or affect, an exploration of dueling polarities within a single, ambiguous phrase. Dvořák, too, in his quartet in the same key, brings back the opening material in a way that is palpably a return, but in which all jagged edges are smoothed, presenting a gentler face than at the start, and paving the way for one of the most affecting moments in the work, where the opening idea will return in the final movement as if from afar, fully debarbed, glowing with a radiant luminescence. Dvořák also revels in the contiguity of major and minor versions of the same idea. This doubleness appears in the opening of the poem by Hálek that Dvořák set as the first of his cycle In Nature’s Realm:

Songs fell into my soul,

unsummoned, suddenly,

like dew appears

on a hill covered with kale stalks.

Pearls flicker about,

I feel so young, healthy,

that I don’t know if it’s my joy,

or the cry of my forlorn soul.

This juxtaposition of major and minor, of open generosity and severity, is the generating principle of the slow movement of the work. Doubleness of meaning permeates Schubert’s works, and also is found in the folktales of Erben. Some writers speak of the second movement of this quartet as having two themes, but, in fact, they are one and the same, each contained within the other. One of the folktales that Dvořák used as the basis for a symphonic poem, the Noon Witch, has a mother attempting to protect her child from the clutches of a witch with her embrace, and ends with this protective embrace strangling the child, safety and danger, care and cruelty, ultimately beyond distinction. And the acceptance of this duality ultimately invites a certain sense of fragile peace. One of the most touching moments is just toward the end of the movement, following two ardent and fervid climaxes, when the two violins trade sweet nothings, a small motive winnowed from the main theme, having been distilled out of the crucible of intensity, seen clearly for the first time, a reclaimed innocence.

The third movement is a vigorous furiant, a Bohemian dance often favored by Dvořák, with alternating contrasting sections. The first of these may hearken back to the composer’s time in the United States, with its characteristic pentatonic (five notes in a sort of gapped scale, as opposed to the usual seven) inflections suggesting native American melodies, and the other perhaps a nod, again, to Schubert, a sort of Austrian ländler, a more relaxed, gemütlich dance favored by the earlier composer. And so the movement collects places, and national characteristics, and juxtaposes and puts them in conversation with each other, nostalgia for a possible ur-world where the essence of dance and the vitality of visceral rhythm transcends national boundaries.

The final movement begins with an eerie, etiolated pre-echo of the rustic, folk-inflected melody that will be its main theme, as if the present has been enshrouded, concealed, before rather quickly coming into focus and releasing into dance. The vigorous and high-spirited music eventually gives way to expressions more anxious and trepidatious, which usher in a revisitation of one of the main themes of the first movement, an idea taken into a new context as an image in a dream, in guises both sternly forbidding, and more gently meandering, memory and imagination coloring recall. (And, again, a doubleness of ambiguous identity.) When the material from the opening of the piece is at long last revealed, bathed in a comforting, womb-like C Major, open and resonant with the lowest, fundamental note of the cello, there is the sense of a regained connection with original genesis, a nostalgia for the innocence of emergence: fresh, prelapsarian. There is wandering and exploring still, but with something essential now having been realized, attained, integrated. And when Dvořák closes the work with an inversion of the final gesture of the first movement, the same rhythm now plunging downward rather than reaching up, there is a sense of celebratory fulfillment and of having been satisfied and liberated by the nostalgia of joyous remembrance. The composer, and thus the listener, is, at long last, home.

Note by Mark Steinberg