Dvořák, Piano Quintet

In an interview made in 1996, the eminent spectralist composer Gérard Grisey said, “I would tend to divide music very roughly into two categories. One is music that involves declamation, rhetoric, language. A music of discourse. The second is music which is more a state of sound than a discourse … [Music] which says ‘This is the world.’”

The ‘music of discourse’ does not concern us here, hence let us indulge in some more categorizing and explore the variety of ‘states’ that can be evoked by ‘sound’, using the extremely malleable music of Bach as an example: Busoni and Stokowski’s transcriptions invoke a state of wonder, of something monumental; the digital clarity of Gould is associated with the state of mind; and, the fluidity and eloquence Schiff’s playing produces a façade of ‘style’. For Dvořák’s piano quintet (composed in 1887), perhaps we can call it a state of contentedness-in-being-surrounded-by-novelties.

Much of this novelty comes as a result of having the exoticness of folk idioms put into the frame of the orthodox German chamber music genre. (The other important factor would be the unassuming and amicable aura that Dvořák gives off, possibly due to his humble upbringing or maybe to a simple matter of personality.) Right from the very start of the first movement, we are treated to unconventional shifts of the major and minor modes. The cello first presents the subject in the major and then repeats it in the minor but interestingly, even in the minor statement the piano still retains a hint of the major. Then, after the brief outburst in the minor, just like the flipping of a coin we switch to the relative major. These changes in mode carry none of the emotional intensity attached to passages say in Bach’s or Beethoven’s music; the inflections we find here simply provide a splash of colour. Of course colour can also be sought by utilizing the specific timbre of the instruments, and just as the other prominent Czech composer Smetana did in his string quartet “From My Life” (1876), a good portion of the thematic material here is delivered by the viola, especially in the 2^nd movement (the Dumka). Also found in the Dumka is a rather peculiar imitation of the Alberti Bass figuration—the default accompaniment in Mozart and Clementi—concocted between two of the instruments in pizzicato.

January 2013