David Matthews – Quartets 8, 16, 17, and a Bach Arrangement

A personal note from Peter Sheppard Skærved

I have played David Matthews’s String Quartets for nearly all of my adult life, alongside my  exploration of his solo works: I am writing this just a few days after premiering his ‘Arctic Suite’ for solo viola in Zagreb.

A few weeks ago, during a performance of some of his works for solo violin in Oxford, the composer, speaking from the stage, observed that our collaboration, more-or-less constant for the past 25 years, has the effect of making the works ‘like a diary’. For me, whilst I am not the composer, the works that I have explored with him, whether written for me or not, have felt like a journal of my personal Journey. When my son Marius was young, David wrote masterly duos for us to play together, and these also reflected on our shared adventure and experiences: playing Paganini’s violin in Genoa, a trip to northern Finland, or just walks around London’s East End (where both David and I grew up), or time spent at  our respective dinner tables.

The point is that shared music-making is special because it is habitual. The great South African pianist, Daniel-Ben Pienaar, calls this our ‘daily bread’. We can’t live without it, and our need for its nutrition is equally as simple, and fundamental.

But there’s something more: spending a lifetime in dialogue with this great composer, I can say that he has profoundly influenced the way that I hear, and see, the musical world. Immodestly, his musical voyage is one on which I am, perhaps, a stowaway. Just considering the question of writing for string quartet, his approach has changed, just as his (always profound) understanding and command of this most demanding medium, has deepened and metamorphosed. The very first quartet of his that we performed, many years ago, was the fourth , written in 1981, when I was still in short trousers! If one was to observe similarities, as well as differences between that and his most recently completed quartet (No. 17), which we premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2023, one could observe the same fiery lyricism (which permeates all of his string writing), alongside a most laconic means of expression, which, far from being remotely Spartan, is of such sophistication that it is difficult to comprehend, from the apparent austerity of the scores, where the richness, the energy, the anima, comes from.

Composer David Matthews at our shared work desk , London 10 9 22

Even the composers closest to David, are thunderstruck at his ability to achieve the maximum intensity, energy, with the bare minimum of means. After the Aldeburgh premiere mentioned above,  talking backstage, I showed the score to David’s brother, the wonderful composer Colin Matthews. Holding it, he looked up and said:

‘I don’t how he does it … where is all the music that we just heard.’

Of course, there isn’t a simple answer to this question. One answer is experience.  David’s cycle of quartets is one of the most substantial in modern times: Nielsen wrote four, Sibelius five (sort of!), Elliott Carter five, Bartok six, George Rochberg six, Hindemith seven, Shostakovich fifteen, Milhaud (as he promised sixteen) Wolfgang Rihm is on twelve … as for composers from the British isles, Benjamin Britten wrote three (and change), Michael Tippett five,  John Mcabe and Edward Cowie seven,  Elisabeth Maconchy thirteen, Robert Simpson fifteen. David Matthews is on seven,  and working on  number eighteen as I write this! He is one of the most consistently prolific composers for the medium, and with his vigour and commitment to the quartet,  has come mastery.

How does this mastery reveal itself? I would draw a comparison with the last three quartets which Mozart completed, his D, B flat and F Major ‘Prussian’ Quartets (K 575, 589, 590). These three are distinguished, not only by the exceptional control and virtuosity they demand of the players, but by their economy of means. By his mid-thirties, Mozart had reached a command of the quartet , which enabled him to suggest the most striking musical outcomes whilst rarely using more than three lines at any one time. This put clear water between his approach and that of Haydn, whose mature Quartets 0pii 76-77, and Op 103,  rarely ‘strip back’ the material in this way’. David’s most recent quartets take the Mozart-ean trust in the line to new heights: all three works  heard here include striking moments of monody,  often shared out between the players. This can be heard, to great effect, at the opening of the 17^th quartet, and in the extraordinary ‘per ardua ad astra’ covering  the whole gamut of the instruments, from the bottom of the cello to the heights of the first violin’s E  String, which sets up the work’s envoi.

This command does not come from nowhere: in my work with David, I can say that one source of this ‘linear eloquence’, is his deep love for counterpoint, and for fugue.

Here, I must declare an interest: David and I have been talking about fugue since 1999, when he completed the first of what would become his Fifteen Fugues for violin alone, and which I first played in London for his 60^th birthday celebrations in 2004. This work emerged from our conversations about Bach, but along with these discussions, we talked about the form’s more vexed presence in and out of the quartet medium. Over the years our conversations ranged from Haydn’s fugal finales to be found in his Quartets Op 20, to the Mozart’s pointed eschewal of the medium, with a few notable exceptions, such as the finale of the G Major Quartet K387.

Of course, we talked about Beethoven: I would say that a turning point in our discussions, which have always been as musical as they are verbal, was the beautiful arrangement David made for the Kreutzers of Beethoven’s A Major  Piano Sonata Op 101. This piece features a remarkable four-part ‘fugato’ ( which I would define as a ‘bit of fugue’, ‘an unfinished fugue’) in its last movement: a huge challenge for a solo pianist, but simplicity itself, even ‘Handel-ian’ for four string players. From thence our conversations  naturally turned to Beethoven’s ‘big fugue’, his Grosse Fuge Op 133, and, after a number of performances where we paired David’s earlier quartets , with this work alone, and in its ‘full manifestation’ as the peroration of the B flat Major Quartet Op 130, David wrote us his largest single quartet to date (No. 12), which became a companion piece for Beethoven’s ‘monster’ in either form. David’s quartets now are full of fugues, of ‘fugati’ and hints of fugues to come, fugues as yet unheard, counterpoint dances from his pencil, seemingly, without effort.

In order for a composer to successfully write fugue for four string instruments, every single line must not only have its own autonomy. But, in addition, each must also have the ‘spine’ to stand, to sing by themselves. After all, in pure counterpoint writing, the only ‘permissible’ accompaniment to a line, to a voice, is another line or voice (not a mere chord, or  harmonization).  In this particular, the sort of orchestral ‘stuffing’ which fills  out the (very energetic) fugato in the last movement of Gustave Mahler’s Symphony No 5, can be described as a betrayal of the medium (however exciting or impressive it is in concert!). The success  of David’s melodic counterpoint, is, at least in part, what gives his ‘pared down’ quartet texture such eloquence.

Only a composer with Matthews’ command of voices, of counterpoint, would countenance an arrangement of the penultimate work from Book 1  of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier , one of the wonders of Western music history. This B minor Praeludium & Fuga, although one of Bach’s longest, is a miracle of understatement and even humour. Every line is a wonder and there’s even a  deliberate mistake: the line David gives to the 2^nd violin, brings the first subject in two bars early at the beginning of the development section of the fugue.

David treats the Bach with great respect, but nonetheless, as his own material. After all, one of our favourite topics of musical conversation over the years, is the permeable membrane between the act of composition and the act of transcription. Like Ferruccio Busoni, David is of a mind that the two are, to great deal, mutually interdependent, that one can almost be the other. And at the end of the first and second sections of Bach’s three-part prelude, Matthews ‘lends a hand’, he steps forward from being purely an arranger, to a composer, adding a fourth line (practically, something for the viola to do). This is utterly Matthews; quietly confident, even laying down the law. It is this assurance that underlines the lyrical, burning economy of his quartet writing, and answer’s his brothers’ question to me: ‘How did he do that?!’

Peter Sheppard Skærved – London. Spring 2024