String Quartet No. 2

Bartók wrote his Second String Quartet between 1915 and 1917, at a time when his home country, Hungary, was deeply embroiled in the First World War, and the situation at home was becoming more and more unstable. Whether this directly impacted on the character of the Second Quartet is hard to say, yet it is striking how the mood darkens progressively throughout the three movements. The first opens as a lilting, slightly hesitant dance. Bartók’s friend and compatriot Zoltán Kódaly heard in it a depiction of “peaceful life”, yet the ambiguous, shifting harmonies and abortive impassioned outbursts leave a sense of unease. Next comes one of Bartok’s wildest and most daring dance movements, “Allegro molto capriccioso”, full of the dynamic rhythms and harsh colours of Balkan folk music but also, as its marking suggests, “very capricious”. Hardly has the dancing stabilised into some kind of pattern than it dislocates, or lurches forward into some new kind of obsessive movement, eventually mounting to a frenzy. But the most remarkable movement is the final “Lento” which, in contrast to the preceding “Allegro”, hardly seems to move at all. A great deal of it is hushed, and at the end it remains impaled on its own private suffering, rather like the character of Bluebeard at the end of Bartók’s 1911 opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. After this, moments of such direct self-revelation in his music are very rare.