Tetzlaff Quartet - Mendelssohn: String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13 - Berg: Lyric Suite (2014) [Official Digital Download]

Mendelssohn’s Op.13 and Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite: why did you choose this programme? The first, obvious reason is that we’ve been performing these two works for a long time, with the greatest imaginable pleasure. They challenge us as musicians. In Berg’s case the challenge takes us to the farthest frontiers, and in Mendelssohn it is just as formidable. That would be the outer motive.

And there are inner motives as well: each of these works has a connection with a hidden love story. I wouldn’t want to lay too much emphasis on this, however. It’s obviously interesting to know the background, particularly in the case of the Lyric Suite. But we shouldn’t forget that Alban Berg never revealed the work’s hidden programme to the public. In the score he encrypted what the individual sections and passages meant to him, but you can enjoy the piece just as much without being aware of every detail. Of course we find it interesting that the piece is about intimate, sometimes terrible things. From your own experience you can recognize every emotion evoked in every single page of the score.

Berg wrote a series of detailed notes for violinist Rudolf Kolisch and the quartet that premièred the Lyric Suite. But the comments he wrote in the score for his great love Hanna Fuchs-Robbetin were quite different. Was Berg a man with two faces? Of course he wanted Hanna to know that he still loved her. The musical score he gave her intended to remind her of all that had gone on before in every detail, of how Berg felt after the relationship ended and what he felt for her up to the end of his life, as we know from his letters. He just needed Hanna to know it! Obviously he didn’t send the same type of comments to Kolisch.

I also see a great danger in this, especially now that the score Berg intended for Hanna Fuchs has been made publicly available. There’s too much sensationalism involved if you analyze the music while you imagine: “Here’s what happened at this spot, here’s what happened there!” We might be robbing abstract music of something essential.

Tracklist:
01. String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13: I. Adagio-Allegro vivace
02. String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13: II. Adagio non lento
03. String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13: III. Intermezzo. Allegretto con moto-Allegro di molto
04. String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13: IV. Presto
05. Lyric Suite: I. Allegretto gioviale
06. Lyric Suite: II. Andante amoroso
07. Lyric Suite: III. Allegretto misterioso-Trio estatico
08. Lyric Suite: IV. Adagio passionate
09. Lyric Suite: V. Presto delirando-Tenebroso
10. Lyric Suite: VI. Largo desolato

Recorded in March 2013, Sendessal Bremen, Germany
Produced, edited and mastering by Christoph Franke