Darius Milhaud (4 September 1892 - 22 June 1974) was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six-also known as The Group of Six-and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and Brazilian music and make extensive use of polytonality. Milhaud is considered one of the key modernist composers.
String Quartet No. 5, Op. 64 (1920)
Dedicated to Arnold Schonberg
1. Chantant, très expressif d'un bout à l'autre
2. Vif et léger (5:54)
3. Lent (8:42)
4. Très animé (15:20)
Quatuor Parisii
Description by Joseph Stevenson [-]
This is one of the most intellectual and difficult of Milhaud's string quartets, both to play and to listen to. It is one of the composer's most detailed explorations of the possibilities of polytonality. Milhaud used the string quartet, a medium built around the concept of four equal, independent, and (usually) cooperating voices, as his primary medium for polytonality. It is possible for a listener to feel the simultaneous pulls to different tonal centers, and thus continue to hear the music as a structure with tonalities. However, the denser and more complex the texture, the more different keys are used at once; and the more unrelenting the use of polytonality is, the harder it becomes to perceive any home tonality. Thus, polytonality can easily turn into a form of atonality. It is more than incidental that this quartet is dedicated to Arnold Schoenberg, who at that time was in the midst of a long compositional silence while he was struggling with the entire issue of atonality, on the way to devising his twelve-tone system.
The opening movement's initial tempo marking, "Singing, very expressive," seems to contradict the actual quality of the music, which is severe and intellectual, almost theoretical, in the impression it makes. This quality persists through the rich, fast-moving second movement, the serene slow movement (which develops from a single four-note motive, and the vigorous conclusion in 5/4.
After writing this movement, Milhaud was asked about his future plans for the string quartet genre. He replied that he would write eighteen of them. This was taken as an ambitious statement for a "new" composer (despite his decade of experience as a professional composer he was considered a newly emerged figure in French music), and a statement of intention to write more quartets than Beethoven was taken as audacious. However, Milhaud actually had devised plans to write eighteen quartets, and in fact wrote exactly that number.
15 сен 2024
