String Quartet No. 6

Once one gets past the dazzling, innovative brilliance of so many of Bartók’s works, it becomes increasingly clear that this was also an acutely sensitive mind. As in life, Bartók rarely showed his more tender emotions in his music, but the Sixth Quartet is a startling, even disturbing exception. Bartók wrote it in 1939, at a time when the emotional foundations of his life were beginning to crumble. His mother’s health had gone into sharp decline (she would die later that year), while the political situation in Europe was increasingly grim. The Hungarian government’s overtures towards the Nazis disgusted him, and he soon fled his own country for a very uncertain future in New York. Emotionally specific headings are rare in Bartók, but in the Sixth Quartet all four movements are marked “Mesto” (“Sad”). In the first three, this seems only to apply to the slow introductions, all based on the same keening, falling melody. In these cases contrast follows immediately: lighter lyricism in the first movement, resolute determination in the “Marcia” second, savage humour in the “Burletta” third. But sadness bordering on despair dominates the slow final movement. Bartók had originally intended a lively folkish finale, but it seems the implications of that “Mesto” theme had to be faced. The ending is almost unbearably poignant. In the 20th century, only Shostakovich’s quartets match it for painful self-revelation.