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Technical Notice
| Classical Composer: | Dvořák, Antonín |
|---|---|
| Work: | String Quartet No. 2 in B-Flat Major, B. 17 |
| Year Composed: | 1870 |
| Instrumentation: | 2vn, va, vc |
| Publishers: |
Supraphon Music Publishing Manuscript Bärenreiter Verlag |
| Duration: | 00:48:00 |
| Period: | Romantic |
| Work Category: | Chamber Music |
Work Information
Available Recording(s)
Between 1869 and 1870, 'at the height of his strongly [ chromaticized ] Wagnerian phase' (Clapham), Dvořák drafted three string quartets: B17-19, in B flat major, D major and E minor respectively – Nos. 2-4 in the overall canon of his 14 works for the medium. He didn't think much of them – 'all prolix to a degree', remarked Paul Griffiths 40 years ago – burning the scores. But the parts (those of the B flat in another hand albeit corrected by him) survived, discovered after his death in the possession of the violinist and retired director of the Prague Conservatoire, Antonín Bennewitz (teacher of Léhar and Dvořák's son-in-law Josef Suk). Published in 1962, the first known performance of the B flat was undertaken privately in Prague by the Ondříček Quartet on 16 November 1932.
Among the longest of Dvořák's chamber works, the transiently unified B flat favours a largely open-ended, through-composed, broadly monothematic stance, eschewing Classical sonata design, at its best foreshadowing later developments in the output of others. Ondřej Šupka (www.antonin-dvorak.cz) suggests that in its course Dvořák 'appears to have attempted to create … a kind of chamber counterpart to the monumentalism of Wagner's scores: none of the movements are written in traditional form, but instead represent an unending stream of music without clear divisions or the reappearance of previous passages … more characteristic of sections of improvisation with no points at which a listener can find bearings in the overall structure. The nature of thematic treatment is such that we have difficulty identifying the kind of clearly arranged and distinctive melodies Dvořák would produce later in his career.' A highlight is the E flat Largo, the melody of which was to seed the slow movement of the Sixth Symphony ten years hence.
Writer: Ateş Orga
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