Bartók - String Quartet No. 3, Sz 85

String Quartet No. 3 in C sharp major, Sz. 85, BB 93 (1927) I. Prima parte. Moderato II. Seconda parte. Allegro III. Ricapitolazione della prima parte. Moderato IV. Coda. Allegro molto Novák Quartet Bartók's String Quartet No. 3 shared first prize with a quartet by Alfredo Casella at the 1927 Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia Competition. Its striking qualities could not have escaped the judges' notice. Of Bartok's six quartets, the third is the most concentrated in thematic material and structure. In this quartet, Bartók subjected folk-style themes and motifs to a technique he called "expansion in range," wherein melodic shape and intervallic relations were stretched to produce themes that develop freely without compromising musical unity. Bartók scholar Elliott Antokoletz suggests that this new approach was partly due to the Treaty of Trianon, signed in 1920 by the Allied forces and Hungary. The Treaty's punitive partition of Hungary effectively moved much of Bartók's folk-music hunting grounds outside the borders of Hungary (which in fact lost two-thirds of its land and population under the Trianon terms). With his primary source cut off, Bartók integrated folk material into a more cosmopolitan style, such as he had encountered during his tours of post-war Europe. The String Quartet No. 3 is in a single movement, lasting a little more than a quarter of an hour. It is divided into two main parts, marked respectively Moderato and Allegro, plus a recapitulation of the first part and a short coda that reprises material from the second part. While the structural integration is inherited from Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor, the contrapuntal technique is a legacy from the late string quartets of Beethoven. The "Prima parte" begins with a short-breathed parlando-style theme on violin over a tightly-spaced, dissonant chord centered around C sharp. The mood is desolate, though the folk-like themes are clear and immediately comprehensible. Subsequent development extends the short motives in length and explores tightly integrated counterpoint in increasingly arduous rhetoric. A technical feature that will grow into an important dramatic device first appears here; glissandi that function as stylized portamenti add an inquisitive quality to the proceedings. A return of the initial parlando motif, now on the cello, launches the "Seconda parte" where the folk-like material drives the proceedings into a wild episodic dance. Here Bartók employs unusual techniques that would subsequently become regular features of his string writing, including sul ponticello (playing close to the bridge), jeté (bouncing the bow off the strings), col legno (playing with the wood of the bow), and the so-called "Bartók pizzicato," in which the string snaps back audibly on the fingerboard. Bartók uses these devices for more than color; they underscore the expression of the movement's high spirits and punctuate the proceedings in a percussive way. Toward the end of the second part there is a nervous fugato that is brought to a full stop by a series of glissando chords, followed by a vigorous stretto of double and triple-stopped chords. The recapitulation of the first part is, if anything, even more desolate than the original, with a Pierrot-like sadness created by the glissandi, which recur like question marks. A tender lament from the violin leads to an anguished outcry of dissonant chords before the coda swirls in, ghostly and fugitive at first, then with full force and vigor. Some precipitous, downward swooping glissandi in the lower strings lead to a fierce stretto on the first violin in primitive open fifths. Brutal chords end the work brusquely. [Allmusic.com] Art by Francis Bacon

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