String Quartet No. 4

By 1928, when he wrote the Fourth Quartet, Bartók’s feeling for and understanding of the string quartet and its capabilities fully equalled that of pioneers Haydn and Beethoven. Like No. 3, the Fourth is rich in exciting sound effects, some of them new—“snap” pizzicatos (the string plucked so hard that it bounces off the fingerboard), extravagant glissandos, and the second movement is muted throughout, the fourth entirely pizzicato. Meanwhile, the overall structure is a carefully calculated “arch”—a form Bartók returned to in several other masterpieces. The first movement reflects and echoes the fifth, while the rapid muted second shares motifs with the more measured pizzicato fourth. While much of the Fourth Quartet is acerbic, aggressive or demonically playful, its centrepiece is an exquisite example of Bartók’s “night music” vein, in which the atheist composer’s reverence for nature takes on an almost mystical quality. For Bartók, the Hungarian, Slavic and Balkan folk music he researched so painstakingly was also an aspect of nature, before modern “civilised” humans grew increasingly estranged from it; so much of the radical experimentation of the outer movements is rooted in the wild, complex rhythms, harmonies and colours he found on his research tours. This gives the music extraordinary vitality, compelling even when the levels of dissonance reach rarely paralleled peaks of intensity. It is one of the most enthralling and successful examples of musical modernism.