TATIANA MAKUSHINA (Soprano)
THE KUTCHER STRING QUARTET:
SAMUEL KUTCHER ( Violin), FREDERICK GRINKE (Violin), RAYMOND JEREMY (Viola), DOUGLAS CAM-
ERON (Violoncello)
IT is not easy to describe in words, as a listener recently asked the B.B.C. to do, what is
. meant by 'Romantic' music. To anyone who listens attentively, Schumann's music itself answers the question much better than words could do, and nowhere more convincingly than in the string quartets. They are full, even fuller than most of Schumann's music, of those poetic qualities for which no better term could easily be found than Romantic,' and they had a good deal to do with enhancing his reputation when they appeared in 1842, as practically his first essay in writing chamber music. They were clearly composed under genuine impulse; all three were written within a month, and the last two movements of the third occupied Schumann only one day each. They are dedicated to Mendelssohn, and the Leipzig world of music took them up with enthusiasm.
DEBUSSY'S one String Quartet is an early work, and is almost the only chamber music ho wrote until his last years. While he was writing the quartet he was already busy with the opera Pelleas and Melisande, though it was not completed until long afterwards ; it was at that period, too, that his enthusiasm for the poet Mallarme, who inspired The Faun's After. noon, had a big share in developing the turn of mind which his music reflects so very much better than any words could describe. The quartet is pervaded throughout by that vague and shadowy atmosphere of beauty which Debussy knew better than anyone else how to achieve in mere tones. He himself once declared that in it he had said all he had to say in that form, but there are many of his admirers who feel quite sure that if he had given us others, or even one other, in his later years, it might have been even richer in those qualities of poetic beauty of which he was master. There are four movements, which all follow the classical models more faithfully than on a first hearing they seem to do. The use of the whole tone scale, and an inclination towards old church modes, are the two chief features which were novel when the quartet first appeared, though everybody knows how familiar Debussy afterwards made them.