Three new works inspired by poet T.S. Eliot’s lyrical meditations on time and humanity’s relationship to it are presented alongside four movements from Beethoven’s exquisite and profound string quartets (the very same which were said to have inspired Eliot to write his Four Quartets). Through the Art of the Piano Foundation, acclaimed pianist Awadagin Pratt commissioned seven composers—including Montgomery, Singleton, and Prestini—to create works for piano and string orchestra or piano, string orchestra and vocal ensemble, based on Eliot's Four Quartets. Pratt, A Far Cry, and Roomful of Teeth recorded these works and released Stillpoint, from New Amsterdam Records.

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)
String Quartet in F Major, Op. 18, No. 1 I. Allegro con brio, arr. Irons

Because we tend to think of Beethoven as the fully-matured master of art music in the 19th century, the fact that he waited until he was nearing his thirties to write his first string quartets is often glossed over or forgotten. By the time he commenced working on them in 1798, he had been living and working in Vienna for six years, was highly sought-after by various patrons, flooded with requests for commissions, could demand top dollar for lessons, and was published by multiple houses who accepted his fee without haggling. Additionally, he had written numerous piano sonatas, several chamber works for piano trio or configurations of quintet and was working on his second symphony. As Maynard Solomon observed, he was clearly at a point of mastering the various classical forms, but he left the string quartet for last.

Beethoven was acutely aware that the string quartet was highly esteemed, and that the form had been elevated to new heights by Mozart and Haydn, the latter of which was not only Beethoven’s teacher, but would come to be known as the “Father of the string quartet” for his expansion of the genre. Displaying some apprehension around his first quartets, Beethoven wrote and re-wrote the opening of the String Quartet in F major nine times, and asked his friend, Karl Amenda not to share earlier drafts he had sent for perusal, writing, “…I have made some drastic alterations. For only now have I learnt to write quartets; and this you will notice, I fancy, when you receive them.”

In the end, Beethoven completed a set of six by 1800, published them as Op. 18 in 1801, and made a very specific and choice with the debut: he elected to have the String Quartet in F published as No. 1, even though it was written second. Haydn’s own final two string quartets, Op. 77 were published just prior in 1799 and dedicated to Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz. Haydn’s last completed quartet, was in the key of F major. Beethoven, who also dedicated his Op. 18 quartets to Prince Lobkowitz, was making a clear statement that he intended to be Haydn’s successor in Vienna. As if to underline the point, the opening notes of Beethoven’s F major are nearly identical to Haydn’s. This simple opening gesture is a main building block to the entirety of the first movement—listen for how many times it appears.

Joseph Kerman has noted that collectively Beethoven’s 16 string quartets, perhaps more than almost any of his other works in a single genre aside from the piano sonatas, are representative of the early, middle, and late periods of his oeuvre. They demonstrate everything from his mastery of the Viennese classical style through to his most experimental, avant-garde, writing, and whilst listening to them individually is enjoyable, to understand them as a whole provides a unique insight. He writes, “The sense of the whole depends on the individual pieces, but it is also true that the sense of the individual piece is illuminated by the cumulative light of the totality,” bringing to mind the opening of T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets, “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future.” As it happens, Beethoven’s final completed work was a string quartet, finished in 1826 and premiered by the Schuppanzigh Quartet in 1828, the year after the composer’s death. It is also in the key of F major, bringing his contributions to the genre full circle, from the end to the beginning

Alvin Singleton (b. 1940)
Time Past, Time Future

Alvin Singleton has remarked on Time Past, Time Future, saying, “What inspired me about T.S. Eliot’s poem was his discussion of time, its elasticity, and that it belongs to no one. I felt strong musical implications: How long should the sound of a musical note last—or the length of a phrase, its tempo. And should it be dynamically loud or quiet? The title of my work Time Past, Time Future paraphrases the Eliot text, and at the same time it raises questions about my own work’s relation to time and timing.

The work, which dynamically explores the experience of time in music, begins with elongated note values, seemingly drifting in space without a beginning or end. The pace begins to quicken, as a multiplicity of rhythms and styles pass by in time, taken in by the listener as the still point. Evoking an ABA structure, the sustained hovering from the beginning returns, and ends with a whisper on an unresolved dissonance.

Beethoven
String Quartet No. 7 in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1 II. Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando, arr. Rabbat

1801, the year that Beethoven published his first set of string quartets, Op. 18, coincided with a pivot point in both his personal life and the political environment. It was the year he began to disclose to his closest friends that he was losing his hearing after several years of hiding his condition. The following summer into the fall he retreated to the spa town of Heiligenstadt, where he wrestled to come to terms with his circumstances, writing the now famous “testament” letter to his brothers in which his emotions vacillate between devastation, defiance, and ultimately lands on acceptance. Beethoven emerged from this trial resolved to commit himself fully to his art, resulting in an astonishing trajectory of passionate innovation. Invigorated by an urgency to create works that were unmistakably his own, he pushed the boundaries of genre and style established by his predecessors—particularly Mozart and Haydn—producing some of his best-loved works, including the Third and Fifth Symphonies.

The String Quartet Op. 59, No. 1 is often viewed as one of the works heralding the expansive and adventurous late works yet to come. It is massive in scope, symphonic in its proportions that pack nearly 40 minutes of music into a standard structure of four movement. It was written for Count Andreas Razumovsky, the Ambassador of the Russian Tsar to Vienna during the Napoleonic wars, who was a talented amateur violinist known as an “enemy of the Revolution but a friend to the fair sex.” Thanks to his love of the arts, Razumovsky’s extraordinarily expansive palace also became a center for music where he maintained a personal string quartet headed by violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh. In Schuppanzigh and his quartet, Beethoven had the rare advantage of a close working friendship with a virtuoso who would become a lifelong personal advisor on writing for the genre—the ensemble, for all practical purposes, became Beethoven’s personal quartet, too (not unlike Haydn and his virtuosos at the Esterházy estate).

It is partly thanks to this arrangement that Beethoven had the practical means to venture so intensively into uncharted creative territory through his middle to late quartets, an ambition fueled emotionally by the urge to transcend the limitations of his hearing. Amongst his sketches for the three quartets for Razumovsky published as Op. 59, Beethoven wrote, “Let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art.” Public reaction to the works was a mix of admiration and skepticism for their inventiveness. A critical response noted, “three new, very long and difficult Beethoven quartets… are attracting the attention of all connoisseurs. They are profoundly thought through and admirably worked out, but not to be grasped by all.”

The second movement of the F major quartet of Op. 59 is characterized by a sparsely accompanied, bouncing rhythm the corresponds to a fleeting snippet of what sounds almost like a good natured country dance melody. Joseph Kerman notes an amusing personal anecdote to illustrate the power of Beethoven’s distinctive use of rhythmic patterns: “I know a man who lives on a small island off the Maine coast, and to signal him that he is to row across the channel to the mainland and pick you up, you blow the pattern [of Op. 59, No. 1]…on your car horn. He could have picked nothing more distinctive or unlikely to be tapped out by chance.”

Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981)
Rounds

Rounds for solo piano and string orchestra is inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets. Early in the first poem, Burnt Norton, we find these evocative lines:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

-Text © T.S. Eliot. Reproduced by courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd

In addition to this inspiration, while working on the piece, I became fascinated by fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales) and also delved into the work of contemporary biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber who writes about the interdependency of all beings. Weber explores how every living organism has a rhythm that interacts and impacts with all of the living things around it and results in a multitude of outcomes.

Like Eliot in Four Quartets, beginning to understand this interconnectedness requires that we slow down, listen, and observe both the effect and the opposite effect caused by every single action and moment. I’ve found this is an exercise that lends itself very naturally towards musical gestural possibilities that I explore in the work – action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift.

Structurally, with these concepts in mind, I set the form of the work as a rondo, within a rondo, within a rondo. The five major sections are a rondo; section “A” is also a rondo in itself; and the cadenza – which is partially improvised by the soloist – breaks the pattern, yet, contains within it, the overall form of the work.

To help share some of this with the performers, I’ve included the following poetic performance note at the start of the score:

Inspired by the constancy, the rhythms, and duality of life, in order of relevance to form:

• Rondine – AKA Swifts (like a sparrow) flying in circles patterns

• Playing with opposites – dark/light; stagnant/swift

• Fractals – infinite design

I am grateful to my friend Awadagin Pratt for his collaborative spirit and ingenuity in helping to usher my first work for solo piano into the world.

-Program note by Jessie Montgomery, February 2022

Beethoven
String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 95 IV. Larghetto espressivo; Allegretto agitato; Allegro, arr. A Far Cry

In the String Quartet Op. 95, Beethoven changes the pace dramatically. Clocking in at half the time of the String Quartet No. 7, it is an exercise in compression and efficient communication through an economy of means. Moods change at a rapid-fire pace, and musical ideas are introduced and paused with abrupt silences. It is the only string quartet to which Beethoven attached a subtitle, “Serioso” joining only a handful of other works that also share the distinction of being named (more often, the subtitles were applied later by publishers or audiences).

The work was dedicated to Baron Nikolaus von Zmeskall, who worked as an official in the Hungarian chancellery. He was one of Beethoven’s long-time friends in Vienna, having met during the composer’s establishing years in the city at the home of one of his first important Viennese patrons, Prince Karl Lichnowsky (it was at these gatherings where he also first met Ignaz Schuppanzigh). The jovial nature of their relationship is evidenced through the amusing salutations Beethoven used in letters, addressing him variously as “Most Excellent Count of Music,” “Baron Muck-Driver,” and “Plenipotentiary of Beethoven’s Kingdom.” Zmeskall was also an amateur cellist and was the recipient of one of Beethoven’s novelty works, Obligato for Two Pairs of Spectacles (WoO32) when they both needed glasses to see the music.

As much as the two shared laughter, they also shared sorrow and frustration. Beethoven often poured out his feelings of distress and disappointment over personal and professional calamities. Perhaps it was the particular closeness of Beethoven and Zmeskall’s friendship that motivated the former to dedicate a work of such brutal emotional honesty. The fourth and final movement of the No. 11 quartet is unique in the whiplash inducing switches between expressive lament, agitation and triumph. Harkening back to a motif from the first movement, the finale transforms razor-sharp octave jumps from the beginning of the work into deep, soft, sighs that become truncated into sharp exhales as the pace quickens and the urgency grows. Most shocking is the unprepared shift to the major key that turns on a dime into a rapid-fire bustle that races merrily to the conclusion.

Paola Prestini
Code (Version for Piano and Strings) arr. Prestini

On January 2, 2020, the most famous sealed correspondence, totaling 1,131 letters, was finally opened after the prescriptive 50 years period after the death of Thomas Sterns Eliot or Emily Hale. The two met during his Ph.D. student years at Harvard College and developed a relationship that turned into a long-standing (if somewhat turmoiled) bond. Though Eliot, or “Tom” as he signed his letters to her, would eventually marry and remarry to other women, Hale remained as his muse. Prestini’s note for Code, follows.

“There would be no dance, and there is only the dance”

–T.S. Eliot

Inspired by the relationship between T.S. and Emily Hale, this pianistic ode is dedicated to an invented love with an 8 letter name. Each section is led by different motives that are built on musical depictions of the letters of the name translated into notes. It is in essence a love poem in 8 takes, that in its culmination, mirrors the relationship between T.S. and Emily, and fails.

However, the work is also inspired by the idea of a frozen moment in time in terms of the feeling of being in love-how love dances in those moments in frenzied freedom- and how in retrospect it allows for great moments of self clarity.

The piece is further enveloped in an arc of ascension, as these frozen moments actually exist in the framework of a life and societal movements. And I believe that our current moment is upward in its trajectory in terms of goodness and clarity.

Beethoven
Heiliger Dankgesang, from Quartet Op. 132, arr. A Far Cry

Beethoven’s “Holy Song of Thanks by a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode” (Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lycischen Tonart) is the expansive middle movement of the String Quartet op. 132, completed in 1825, as part of the “Galitzen Quartets” (including opp. 127 and 130) commissioned by Prince Nikolas Galitzen. Always one to experiment and push the boundaries of a given musical form, the Quartet Op. 32 has some unique features. Proportionally, the Heiliger Dankgesang is the undeniable centerpiece, nearly as long as the first two movements combined and is twice as long as the last two, following. Structurally, it is divided into five distinct parts, perhaps reflecting overall structure of the Quartet’s five movements, with three hymn-like sections of a “holy song of thanks” (Heiliger Dankgesang) interpolated with two shimmering melodic segments of “feeling new strength” (Neue Kraft fühlend). Together, they form a set of double variations as each repeats with increasing elaboration. The song of thanks likely refers to Beethoven’s recovery from an abdominal illness, and perhaps also (as suggested by Maynard Solomon) the general idea of the healing powers of music for a beleaguered spirit. After all, in times of celebration or distress, we inevitably turn to music. It organizes and gathers the invisible murmurings of our hearts for contemplation, facilitates release, strengthens our resolve, and refreshes us with hope. It is this aspect that drew T.S. Eliot to the quartet, writing to a friend in the spring of 1931, “I have the A minor Quartet of Beethoven on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.” The Four Quartets, originally published as separate poems beginning in 1936 (conceived of as a whole part way through the writing of them), are thought, by some scholars, to be the culmination of Eliot’s literary response to his reaction to the music of Op. 132.

What immediately confronts the listener is an opening gesture that expands and contracts like quiet breathing, which is strikingly similar in shape to two other seminal works written within a year or two of each other: the Adagio from the Symphony no. 9, and the String Quartet op. 130. The Heiliger Dankgesang commences reverently in one of the old church modes, Lydian, which, according to Renaissance music theorist Zarlino, “...is a remedy for fatigue of the soul, and similarly for that of the body.” There is very little dissonance, lending a floating, otherworldly quality to its sound. Then, with three declamatory unisons that grasp the listener as if to say, “Pay special attention here!” the work shifts in D Major for the first of the two Neue Kraft fühlend sections. In all his works, Beethoven tends to use trills as a kind of asterisk noting an important shift, and here, the first violin trembles with the onset of joy. Each subsequent restatement of Heiliger Dankgesang and Neue Kraft fühlend gains confidence, strength, and resolve. Heightened passion evoked through the increasing use of suspended dissonance is infused into the second Heiliger Dankgesang, whilst the intervallic jumps and increased energetic motion of the parts imbues the second Neue Kraft fühlend with enhanced exuberance. Finally, the work concludes with the use of sforzandos for sonic emphasis as if pledging to go forward with conviction and purpose, buoyed by spiritual and physical renewal, feeling new strength.

Kathryn J. Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/harpsichordist, musicologist, music and cultural critic, and freelance writer. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.