#50: Handovers and personae
Section 7: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka
In b.22-26 of the Dumka first violinist Hoffmann gives the impression of ‘handing a phrase over’ to a colleague — but in the event he continues to play. This capacity for transformation resembles an aural illusion. Superficially, it is related to Waterman’s (2003: 103) exhortation that a quartet player “must recognise his role in the texture at each moment”; yet we felt that the motivations underlying this effect were considerably more embodied, and not captured by extrinsic or cerebral description. It is an imaginative gesture of a kind that cannot truly be ‘derived’ from an analytical ‘reading’: it is practically meaningless, I think, to decree it ‘latent’ in the score.
In b.23-24 Hoffmann gently releases the slurred quavers F#-D (b.23), as though that character’s utterance has been completed – but he does so in an open-ended manner, as if providing others with an opportunity to join or continue what he has offered. But it is he who then fulfils that offering. He sets out on the answering gesture without disturbing the phrase’s timing, while making it sound as though that invitation has been taken up by another character entirely. Upon the viola joining, less than a bar later (on the second quaver of b.24), his entire being seems to change again: he plays the C#-D-C# figure in so hushed a tone that it is barely audible, shadowing the gestural exchange between the two lowest voices.
This character change happens very quickly, but it is anything but flippant. Our attempts to copy this moment also provided some evidence that, at least in terms of interaction, their manner was often a long way from a caricature of pre-modernity: of un-grammatical, un-structured, essentially spontaneous renditions. Each moment of this passage felt laden not just with intention and intensity, but with notably structured progressions of feeling states.
Focused Examples
Waterman, David. 2003. 'Playing Quartets: A View From the Inside.' in Robin Stowell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet, 95-126. (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge)
