Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867-1944)

Quartet, op. 89 (composed 1921-1929)

By the age of one, Amy Marcy Cheney, born in Henniker, New Hampshire, was able to sing with an accuracy that belied her youth. By four, she was studying piano, premiering her own waltzes by the age of seven. Although she studied harmony on a formal basis, she was self-taught in composition, orchestration, and counterpoint, for which she reconstructed from memory much of J.S. Bach’s "Well-Tempered Clavier" to compare it with the published version. In the years between her professional debut at sixteen and her marriage to the surgeon Henry Harris Aubrey Beach in 1885, she frequently performed alone and as a pianist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. When she adopted her husband’s name, she also curtailed her performing schedule and instead devoted her creative energies to composing.

Throughout her life, she insisted that her compositions be published under the name "Mrs. H.H.A. Beach." Premieres of her "Mass in E-flat, op. 5" by Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, and of her concert aria "Eilende Wolken, op. 18" ny the New York Philharmonic, both in 1892, were the first performances of works by a woman for each of those organizations. After Dr. Beach’s death in 1910, Amy Beach resumed her own career on the piano, embarking on an extensive tour of Europe. She remained active until her death on December 27, 1944.

Beach began writing her "Quartet, op. 89" in 1921 during the first of her many stays at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She did not complete it until the Spring of 1929 on a visit to Rome. In a 1943 letter, she wrote, "I have not heard a real performance of it, only some ‘try-outs’ and I have hoped that real artists might bring out something of what I meant to say." It had in fact received several (often informal) performances during the 1930s, at least a few of which Beach attended. Its first professional public performance was on November 28, 1942, at a festival celebrating Beach’s 75^th birthday at Washington’s Phillips Gallery, which she was unable to attend. The work was first recorded in 1981 by the Crescent String Quartet, but was not published until 1994.

The one-movement quartet is in arch form, opening and closing with a slow dissonant passage marked "Grave." In the course of the work, Beach employs three Alaskan Inuit melodies she found in Franz Boas’s "The Central Eskimo," published by the Smithsonian in the mid-1880s. Solo viola introduces the first Inuit melody ("Summer Song"), then the remaining strings join in to sound the second melody ("Playing at Ball"). The "Allegro molto" section uses the third melody ("Ititaujang’s Song"), which also serves as the basis of the fugue at the quartet’s center.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Quartet no. 1 in B minor, op. 50 (composed 1930)

In his autobiography, Sergei Prokofiev acknowledged that after receiving the commission for a string quartet from the Library of Congress in 1930, he began intense study of the quartets of Beethoven. At the time, Prokofiev was on a concert tour of the United States, Canada, and Cuba, partaking of his studies and jotting down sketches of the work-in-progress during long train rides. By then, he had been absent from the Soviet Union for a decade, having left for his first U.S. tour in 1918, not very long after the Revolution. That first tour found audiences lukewarm to the enfant terrible but in the intervening years, his reputation as an interpreter of his own works had grown. The 1930 tour turned into a personal and artistic triumph.

Although composition of the "Quartet no. 1" was begun in the U.S., the bulk was actually written in Paris. It was first performed by the Brosa Quartet at the Library of Congress’s Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Festival on April 25, 1931. The Budapest Roth Quartet premiered it in Moscow later that same year on October 9. No key designation was to be found on the first edition published the next year, but subsequently, Prokofiev himself would point out the rarity of quartets in the key of B minor. As it happens, B minor is half a tone below the range of both the viola and the cello. Prokofiev, skillful chess player that he was, delighted in working out the resulting technical puzzle.

In the context of Prokofiev’s output, the "Quartet no. 1" is an unusually serious piece, though there are moments of his accustomed and celebrated wit. The polyphonic texture owes much to Beethoven. The melodic material exhibits more lyricism, less angularity than we usually associate with Prokofiev. Also worth noting are the three-movement structure and the slow finale.

The sonata-form "Allegro" is spare yet sweet, with an emphasis on development; it concludes abruptly. Marked "tranquillo," the fourteen bars of "Andante molto" serve multiple purposes: as a contrast to the first movement; as a truncated version of the "missing" movement; and as both introduction to, and thematic germ for, the scherzo-like "Vivace" that follows.

Prokofiev considered the folk-flavored "Andante" finale to be among the best single movements he ever wrote: "I ended the quartet with a slow movement because the material happened to be the most significant in the whole piece." Aside from this original quartet version, Prokofiev orchestrated it (but did not publish it, as he felt it worked better as a quartet), and arranged it for piano as the fifth of his "Six Pieces, op. 52." The lyrical theme sounds first in the viola as the music gradually unfolds toward its ambiguous final notes.