From my life

Ever since Beethoven, at the very latest, the symphony has been regarded as the grand, public genre. The string quartet, something of a younger sister to the symphony, offers a far more intimate setting by contrast. It was therefore only natural that Bedřich Smetana should choose this small-scale chamber music genre for his musical, autobiographical retrospective ‘From My Life’. In it, he set to music not only the merry life of his youth and the happiness of his first love, but also the ‘moment of sudden interruption by the ominous catastrophe: the onset of deafness’. Already foreshadowed in the first movement, the “whistling in the highest notes” manifests itself in the finale as a sustained high note played with four bows. It was indeed a personal experience that inspired the American composer Caroline Shaw to write “Entr’acte” for string quartet: namely, her encounter with Haydn’s last complete string quartet, Op. 77/2, or, to be more precise: the transition into the trio of the minuet at a concert by the Brentano Quartet. Shaw found this so moving that she conceived a work consisting of numerous such ‘absurd, subtle, colourful transitions’. Haydn’s string quartet output was also of central importance to Beethoven. This is evident not least in the scherzo of the sixth string quartet of his Opus 18, which is full of rhythmic and motivic ambiguities. The final movement, which Beethoven titled ‘La malinconia’, strikes a deeply personal note, although it remains a matter of debate whether this melancholy is in fact autobiographical, linked to the composer’s onset of deafness.