String Quartet No. 5

For many, Bartók’s Fifth String Quartet (1934) is the most approachable of the six, but that doesn’t mean it is any less original or exploratory. Like the Fourth Quartet, No. 5 is in five movements, together comprising a large-scale arch structure, but this time it is the second and fourth movements that are slow, each one a profound study of that haunted world Bartók called “night music”. The sounds of the night, especially bird and insect calls, are imitated with great subtlety and ingenuity, but both movements also feature a hymn-like idea (more spectral in the fourth). Though a declared atheist, Bartók admitted that the sounds of nature at night filled him with something close to religious feeling. Between these two weirdly wonderful soundscapes comes a dance movement (“Scherzo. Alla bulgarese”) based on the kind of complex rhythms Bartók had heard while collecting Balkan folk music: bars of 4+2+3 beats in the outer sections, 3+2+2+3 in the central Trio section. Framing all this are two thrilling, driven allegros, in which Bartók’s reverence for the folk musicians he heard and met is almost palpable. Yet near the end, something strange happens: briefly, the strings imitate the robotic, inexpressive sounds of a hurdy-gurdy, which then go horribly awry. Is this primal, vital folk music being threatened by soulless mechanical reproduction? Bartók was not inclined to optimism, but here it is the “authentic“ spirit that triumphs.