String Quartet No. 1

Bartók completed his String Quartet No. 1 in January 1909. It was his first major work to move beyond the late-Romantic influence in his earlier music and explore a modernist, increasingly dissonant harmonic language, and the terse melodic style of the Hungarian folk music that he was collecting and studying. At this time Bartók was emerging from his one-sided love for the young Hungarian violinist Stefi Geyer. He wrote to her that the slow first movement of String Quartet No. 1—evidently an expression of his despair at her rejection of him—was a “funeral dirge”. An additional influence is unmistakable: The writing for the four solo string instruments, at once closely worked and remarkably spacious, recalls the opening movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14. A short linking section introduces the more relaxed, Intermezzo-like second movement; another transition leads into the finale, which has the strong rhythmic drive of a Hungarian folk dance.