#52: Function and timing in final imitative entry
Section 7: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka
The passage b.14-21 offered a useful case study in this distinction between ‘having time’ and ‘taking time’. In b.18 the viola has the final entry of a short gesture that has already been passed around the whole group in exact repetition, and so combines restatement and continuation through another ‘dovetail’ (#21). In our own style, we would generally de-emphasise the final entry in situations like these: a listener has already witnessed it enough for an ‘overt’ characterisation to be redundant or nonsensical. It made sense to ‘lean in’ to the idea of continuation here, then, because the viola’s contribution would have already been subsumed underneath the new, more ‘ear-catching’ material now unfurling in the violins above.
This is vital context for appreciating the subtlety of the Czechs’ approach. They treat the top A in the first violin as a high point which essentially ‘generates’ both the individual unit and the phrase as a whole. Hoffmann lengthens this note, as we would also have been inclined to do; and as the next two instruments respond, they treat the first note similarly, as the main propulsive force of the gesture. Slightly rushing through the demi-semiquavers then compensates for that liberty. But the viola’s version is ingeniously different, both in timing and accentuation. The gesture begins slightly early, relative to the other parts, and he does not follow them in placing an agogic stress on the first note (A). Nor does the violist wait politely for the cellist to conclude his gesture, but anticipates (and ‘treads on’) it. The effect of this combination – of an early entry, but with the first note de-accented – is to dovetail the conversational, slightly fragmented exchange which the violist inherited, into the new phrase.
In order to copy this interaction, we had to look for more intuitive ways of describing it. For instance, we imagined that the viola’s gesture ‘looked’ further forwards: it ‘aimed’ towards b.20, and had to ‘spin towards’ that target, rather than sitting back on its own thoughtfully contained shape, as the others had. Such indirect heuristics were often the only way in which could ‘live’ the specific qualities of their relative timing. Moreover, understanding this moment certainly depended on transcending the aesthetic of permanent synchronisation; and yet it should be easy to see that this passage was not remotely ‘about’ asynchrony at all.
