Greg Stepanich

Weekend: A painful story in sound

This weekend, the Delray Beach String Quartet gives the last concert of its second season, and they’ve programmed a beautiful piece of Romantic writing that has one of the saddest back stories I know.

The Delray has programmed the String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, subtitled From My Life, by the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana. Smetana is one of the great heroes of Czech music, and he wrote this quartet, one of two he composed, in 1876. The piece takes a journey through the high points of the composer’s life: his youth, his enjoyment of dancing, his first love — but then in the finale, something extraordinary happens. The music stops dramatically, and there is a high, whistling sound in the first violin.

This is the sound that was going on Smetana’s ears at this time in his life, as the syphilis he had contracted started to take its toll on his hearing. The disease — so common among musicians and writers in the 19th century — was to kill him eight years later in a madhouse in Prague, after he’d lost his ability to concentrate, and temporarily lost his memory and ability to speak.

It’s hard not to think of this story when listening to the quartet, which I’m sure was at least part of Smetana’s intent. Always an artist, he thought it was important to describe his life through the medium of music as honestly as he could. If that meant the sound of his hearing deteriorating, so be it.

In his article for the 1980 New Grove on Smetana, the musicologist John Clapham quotes from a letter Smetana wrote to one of his opera librettists in 1877 about how miserable he was:

But how could I be cheerful? Where could happiness come from when my heart is heavy with trouble and sorrow? … Nevertheless please send me the second act soon. When I plunge into musical ecstasy, then for a while I forget everything that persecutes me so cruelly in my old age.

Smetana had only just passed his 60th birthday when he died in 1884. He had been in failing health for years, and it’s amazing that he was able to keep composing as long as he did. But he soldiered on, and he shared his pain with his listeners.

It’s a beautiful piece anyway, and well worth hearing, back story or no. Perhaps it’s a little too revealing for some, and if you don’t know what the sound means, it just sounds like a short bit of experimentation with string harmonics.

But I find it a remarkable act of artistic courage, and being an admirer of Smetana’s music in general, I’ll be hoping to stop by the Colony Hotel in downtown Delray on Sunday afternoon and hear it live. (This group has an unusual Web site that I can’t get to work for me. The program also contains waltzes by Dvorak and Brahms, and the Second String Quartet by Luigi Boccherini.)

String quartets are hot: The April edition of The Gramophone features a cover piece on string quartets, contending that things have never been better for foursomes. I certainly have seen a lot more activity in this field over the past few years than I used to. I’d say the Kronos Quartet is probably the primary reason for that, but in any event it’s good to see so many quartets making a go of it these days, and performing plenty of new pieces.

The Gramophone cover featured the Pacifica Quartet (pictured at right).