About Our Final Evening Concert

How could we decide what to play for our final concert of Intimate Voices? My dear colleagues Renée Jolles (violin) and James Wilson (cello) were able to join me for this concert; they had played virtually every Intimate Voices series concert since 2009, as well as so many outreach events! And we would be joined by our friend, violist Ramón Carrero-Martínez, who had been an active Intimate Voices participant over the prior several years. Of course, our outreach activities would continue throughout the season -- but what should we play this on special final evening, after playing together in this lovely venue for our wonderful audiences since November 2009?

We turned to what has guided our programming over the years: we would present masterpieces of the past along with great, less well-known works by both past and current composers, with a special interest in recent years in presenting music by composers who perished or suffered greatly in the Holocaust. In addition, we knew we could not pass up an opportunity to once again play one of Haydn’s 68 string quartets, any one of which would be a total delight for all four of us!

But which masterpieces? So many choices! We could revisit a great work we had played in past seasons: a lush, tuneful Dvorak? an elegant yet passionate Mendelsohn? But we realized we had never programmed any of Beethoven’s "late quartets", and suddenly we knew that Beethoven’s Op. 135, his last quartet, would be the one for this occasion. Beethoven titled the final movement Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß, “The resolution reached with difficulty”. And under the title, he wrote the two themes of the final movement: “Must it be?” answered by “It must be! It must be!”

Scholars have debated the meaning of this unusual feature, with interpretations ranging from the literal comical origins of these words (an incident which led Beethoven to write a funny 4-part canon for male voices on this phrase earlier the same year) to theories connecting it to Beethoven’s spiritual state at this difficult time in his life. But in any case, the wonderful affirmative music of this quartet truly expressed the range of emotions we felt as we came to our difficult decision to close this concert series.

With the Beethoven in place, we turned our thoughts to the rest of the program. Ending the program with Beethoven’s final complete work, which culminated years of composing in the quartet medium, made us think - in contrast - of Haydn’s early pioneering compositions. And his quartet Op. 20 No 2, one of the earliest of his 68 quartets, stood out as a work in which Haydn clearly played around with earlier Baroque compositional techniques, delighting us with his transformations, sometimes moving, sometimes humorous, and pointing the way to a new language for string quartets.

And finally, we thought of Schulhoff’s Quartet #1, written in 1924. Schulhoff was an indefatigable experimenter, composing in every style that was circulating in the heady music world of the 1920s, and each movement of this remarkable work reflects a totally different approach. The quartet was introduced to New York audiences in 1928 by the ground-breaking New York-based Flonzaley String Quartet. They included the quartet in the final concert of their final regular season in Town Hall, sandwiched between quartets by Beethoven and Brahms. But Schulhoff was a Czech Jew and a Socialist, and having been arrested by the Nazis, he died in a labor camp in 1942, and his music was forgotten until recent years. We were eager to share this quartet almost a century after the Flonzaley Quartet programmed its premiere in their final New York season.

And so the concert was set. We would open with Haydn’s string quartet in C Major, Op. 20 No 2, followed by Schulhoff’s Quartet #1, and after intermission we would end our series with Beethoven’s last complete composition: his playful, poignant, heartbreakingly beautiful and ultimately affirmative string quartet in F Major, Op. 135. The time had come, “Es muss sein.”