Since 2006, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga, a lot of scholarly energy has been expended on re-evaluating the contribution of this short-lived composer. That work and the imaginative interpretative capabilities of a new generation of musicians in Spain, schooled in period performance techniques, bears fruit now with a new recording from La Ritirata of the three string quartets dating from the first half of the 1820s (and coupled with the earlier Tema variado en cuarteto).
The result is to place Arriaga’s quartets much more in the vanguard of the early Romantic movement (wresting him away from his epithet as the “Spanish Mozart”, beloved of Spanish music textbooks; it is no disgrace to be compared to the Salzburg genius, but it has rather muddied modern views of Arriaga, who was born half a century later than Mozart), written as they were by a composer clearly aware of the radical changes in musical thought being wrought by Beethoven.
For its second Glossa recording La Ritirata comprises Hiro Kurosaki and Miren Zeberio, violins, Daniel Lorenzo, viola and Josetxu Obregón, cello, all reflecting the contemporary Spanish musical environment. The three Spaniards in the quartet reflect the continuing urge of Spanish musicians to travel abroad to study and expand their horizons, a tradition which has been in existence at least since the time of Arriaga himself (born in Bilbao, but who came to maturity through his studies in Paris; a development sadly curtailed with his death before reaching the age of 20). Kurosaki, though an Austrian of Japanese origin, and with a wealth of performing experience with the likes of William Christie and John Eliot Gardiner behind him, currently is to be found teaching in Madrid.
To find out more about the modern day approach to the string quartets of Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga and his inspiration, we turned to Josetxu Obregón, born in the same city as Arriaga, and director of and driving force behind La Ritirata.
What is La Ritirata’s overall attitude to music, which has allowed you to move from the early Baroque dance music on your last disc of Il Spiritillo Brando to the early Romantic world of Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga in the first decades of the 19th century?
From the outset of my career as a cellist specializing in period performance I wanted to be able to create a group capable of performing all the repertoire in which this instrument is involved, from the 17th century, when it first started to appear as a solo instrument, up to the time when the difference between the historical and modern cello is not so obvious.
Even in the age of Arriaga (let us say, 1823), the cello still used gut strings and was held without an endpin, so there was a very big difference with the modern cello; it was not in fact until the time of Richard Wagner that this “historical” instrument turned into the modern cello. Naturally, this demands from me to play on different instruments (of course, I don’t use the same cello when I am playing early baroque or high baroque works, or when I am playing classical or romantic music) and to change completely the setup of the strings according to the music that I perform.
For the time being then, my aim is to try and show all this music that can be played with the cello whilst still adhering to period performance concerns.
Does this breadth of repertoire that the group encompasses demand significant changes in the configuration of La Ritirata?
Across these periods of music there is a big change in the instrumentation for the ensemble: when we are playing Baroque music we always have such a big continuo section, which makes call on instruments that disappear for when we play later repertoire. Some instruments that we use however, like the violin, have a similar development to that of the cello.
I named the group after a piece by Luigi Boccherini called La Ritirata, because I thought that what he achieved would provide suitable inspiration for us: his early works, such as the Cello Sonatas were very much in the manner of Baroque music, with one cello plus another as part of the continuo group, whilst later chamber pieces demonstrate a clear transitional move to the classical and rococo styles.
What attracted you to the string quartets of Arriaga for this new recording?
To start with, the setup of the string quartet offers a form of music-making which I have always respected because it provides for the most ideal way of uniting the family of string instruments. There is also the clear fact that so many of the great composers have dedicated such a lot of inspiration to this form.
For us, as period performance musicians, it is a difficult step in approaching a string quartet because there is so much modern practice already in existence, so many things that you take for granted and which we have to rediscover and reinvent. This involves a lot of work! However, it was very clear to me from the beginning that the music of Arriaga is that of a genius and the more that our quartet rehearsed and played these pieces the more that view was validated.
It is a fact that Arriaga died at such an early age, leaving us with so little music, but it is clear that he had a mastery of the string quartet ensemble in the way that he directs the notes of each of the instruments, with every part being extremely well written.
This music is also, perhaps surprisingly, very demanding both in individual and ensemble terms and some of the inspiration that Arriaga comes up with for the thematic material is amazing.
The second movement of the Second Quartet, marked Tema con variaciones, is very inventive, with each variation being given over to a separate instrument, very much in the difficult classical style.
The slow movement in the Third Quartet is like a tempest: this is incredible, because on the one hand, it is descriptive music about the storm, but then on the other hand, and sometimes harmonically full of chromaticisms, it is already like music that comes from much later.
What is worth mentioning here in terms of how Arriaga was making innovations in his music is that in this Andantino movement (the “Pastorale”), he makes use of tremolo as a dramatic resource, and this is the first time in the history of music that tremolo is used in a string quartet. The next time that it was similarly used would be in Schubert’s String Quartet, D887, written in 1826, therefore three years after Arriaga’s. (I am grateful to the music writer Joaquín Pérez de Arriaga, a descendant of our composer, for pointing me in the direction of Bernard Fournier’s Histoire du quatuor à cordes, Vol 1 for this insight.)
There are several places within these quartets which, if you listen to them separately, you will never believe that these are by Arriaga in 1823, because here is a composer who is looking forward so much to the future.
Has the considered view about Arriaga and about his short life changed in recent years?
I think it has, because when I was a young music student – and I was born in Bilbao – he was always considered as the “Spanish Mozart”. Such an approach was always a very metaphorical and a very “Romantic” view of him, with him dying very young, and that maybe because he was so creative and had so much potential in him, that he succeeded in destroying his own life.
This was the prevailing view until more recent times, when – especially since the bicentenary of his birth in 2006 – a lot of scholars (including the very interesting thesis by Marie Winkelmüller) – have started taking all these questions more seriously. I think that the image we have of Arriaga is now a lot clearer and places him in his surroundings more appropriately: he was a virtuoso violin player who went to study composition in Paris and was clearly involved in the musical scene in Paris of the time. The lasting shame of the present situation is that most of Arriaga’s manuscripts were lost in the great floods in Bilbao in 1983. We therefore don’t have the original manuscript for the string quartets, and for our recording we have needed to use the princeps edition.
As well as clarifying many aspects of Arriaga’s life, Winkelmüller’s work has also postulated something with which we, as a quartet, are very much in agreement: that Arriaga was closer to the world of Beethoven than he was to that of Mozart. Although it is true that his first pieces sound somewhat like Mozart, the moment you reach the quartets you have to bear in mind that by 1823 Beethoven had already composed a number of string quartets, including the Rasumovsky series. Also, by 1823, Beethoven’s music was being actively performed in Paris and we think that Arriaga was very much involved in all this. Consequently, it is plausible to say that his own music sometimes reminds one very much of this new style, that of Romanticism.
What musical environment did Arriaga come from in the Bilbao at the start of the 19th century?
Whilst there is little detailed evidence regarding Arriaga’s early musical activities, we tend to think that he was something of a virtuoso on the violin and it is likely that he would have played in string quartets himself: this was the usual practice at the time in meetings between students and teachers. We can see that he became interested in the string quartet form at an early age, in that he composed the Tema variado en cuarteto (which we have recorded) when he was only 14.
I think that in Paris this concept of string quartets playing during musical evenings was a lot more important than it was back in Bilbao. However, there had been string quartets in Spain since the time of Luigi Boccherini and Gaetano Brunetti. Manuel Canales also wrote some very attractive music, as did Enrique Ataide, although that of the latter was somewhat simpler. Quite possibly Arriaga’s Tema variado en cuarteto was conceived in this earlier classical style.
Then there was this big jump in Arriaga’s conception of string quartet music when he went to Paris. It is clear from the way that he wrote the three quartets that he knew the great composers of the time in Paris. In preparing for our recording we made use of the treatise by Arriaga’s teacher Pierre Baillot (L’art du violon, 1834), which refers to the fact that at the time musicians were reading music by Boccherini and others – all very powerful and evocative for me!
What we shouldn’t forget also is the very close bond that existed between Arriaga and his father – also a musician – because the latter was the one who really pushed his son both in Bilbao and then on to Paris when he realized that he really had the capacity to be a great musician. Arriaga’s three string quartets were dedicated to his father (maybe this was another thing which prompted commentators in the past to say that Arriaga was the “Spanish Mozart” – because of his father’s influence).
In what ways does the use of period instruments on your recording alter the performing considerations of these quartets?
Maybe the first thing that will be identified by the listener is how the distribution or layout of the instruments affects what is being heard. In Arriaga’s time – and this comes from concertos in the Baroque era through to string quartets in the Classical period – the violins sat one in front of the other, as opposed to having the two violins on one’s left.
The next thing to notice is that the cellist sounds, as was the case, as though sitting next to the first violin. When one looks at paintings from the time you find the cellist sometimes next to the first violin, sometimes somewhere else, because very often the quartet used to sit in a circle around a table. However, most such paintings show the cello next to the first violin, and sat on a little platform or dais.
We have tried to reproduce all this for the recording: in this kind of music which very often centres on the first violin with the accompaniment of the cello with other two instruments doing things in the middle it is quite interesting to listen to this different approach. Even when we play Boccherini chamber works we have this layout and we find this helps. We believe that this idea of the violins in front of each other lasted long enough, even unto the early Beethoven string quartets.
Does the layout of the musicians when playing the quartets affect the way that you listen individually to each other and is there a greater level of complicity between the first violin and the cello?
I think that in every group when you put the bass line next to the highest line, it helps a lot not just in terms of complicity, but in terms of tuning, in having the melodic tuning of the violin depending on the bass line.
Another thing that I am completely convinced about is – and I have discussed this with Hiro Kurosaki, our first violin – that when you have two violins playing in unison or octaves or thirds, for example, when they are sat next to each other it is sometimes to get the whole picture or a togetherness feeling. Somehow, when they are in front of each other the outcome of, say, parallel thirds is much more attractive for the audience.
What decisions did you take regarding the instruments themselves?
For the instruments we are talking about models from the Classical period. In the case of the cello, this is still very close to the Baroque version, although the nature and manufacture of the strings themselves was developing quite a lot at this time. Instead of only having open gut strings, we very often use wound strings (covered by copper, whilst still gut inside), although the lower strings will covered by copper or silver while the upper strings will be open gut. The violins and the viola will use three open gut strings and the others covered by metal. This gives a completely different sound to that of modern instruments in that it is a lot warmer.
In our experience, we find that this helps a lot in allowing the four instruments to sounds as one, to reach this common sound between all the instruments. It also helps us a lot in performing music by Beethoven (which we have toured a lot) and that the sound of the quartet, with strings all mounted in gut is really interesting.
As to the bows that we use, there are very close to their modern equivalents.
In what other ways else do your performances of the Arriaga quartets differ from those given by modern instruments?
Possibly, the biggest difference comes in the interpretation, how you play this music, in that there perhaps isn’t so much of a big difference with tuning. Even modern quartets never play equal-tempered like a piano. With quartets we have always had a natural form of tuning which works between the four instruments.
However, with articulation and vibrato there are many changes. We are always trying to come closer to what we believe what was done in the past and a lot has been written on the subject of vibrato in the period of Arriaga. Essentially, it was not used very frequently, and instead was always reserved for special moments in the music.
We find today with modern string quartets that vibrato is just a part of the overall quality of the sound, and maybe at a special moment a quartet decides to play a passage without vibrato in order to make a difference, but the normal sound will be constant vibrato. In our case, this will be a little different for the listener: our normal sound doesn’t necessarily have vibrato, there are very long passages which don’t have it at all, but then there will be places with it. Therefore, we have gone for the option of whether to use vibrato or not, and not just take its interpretative possibilities for granted.
Do you think that the presence of the Tema variado en cuarteto on this recording changes the way one listens to the quartets themselves?
We thought a lot about how to approach this piece that is so different in style to the three string quartets. Of course, it was very clear from the beginning that it could not be the opening piece of the CD. Though it was the earliest piece composed it is not representative of Arriaga’s later style. But I thought it would be very interesting to demonstrate to listeners how, in such a small space of time, Arriaga grew as a musician. I think that the contrast is a very strong one.
In the end, we decided to place it after the main works and following a short silence, in order to enable to the listeners to hear what Arriaga was doing as a child, but which already shows many things that he was going to go on and do later; when you listen to the beginning of the coda it is very simple, but after the variations the coda comes over as showing some capacity of composing that is very interesting and which will develop with the string quartets.
The music of Luigi Boccherini has always been a big favourite of one of your teachers, Anner Bylsma. What did you learn from him in terms of Boccherini?
The first thing that I learned from Anner about Boccherini was his most profound admiration: he believes him to be a spectacular musician who deserves to be much better known. He has a very clear idea about how his music should sound, with its own form of poetical easiness. Boccherini was able successfully to combine Spanish rhythm and its popular music of the time with this really subtle, poetical and magical sound where the performer should never be aggressive, but just the opposite. Anner was very clear about this and I was privileged to work on the chamber music of Boccherini with him.
And do you believe that Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga was also “a spectacular musician who deserves to be much better known”?
Very much so, especially to make him better known outside our country, because his quartets really are masterpieces. Although the bones of his life story may be known by more general audiences his music, such as the quartets, tends to have something of a hazy reception – more of another Mozart in the classical style rather than he was very forward looking and Romantic in spirit.
Although his small number of works have often been recorded, what we are trying to do with the string quartets here is to provide them with this historical approach, by recording the Tema variado en cuarteto and also to follow what we believe to be the order of composition – rather than the order of publication. Here, for stylistic reasons, it looks very much as though the second published quartet was composed before the first one. For some reason, the publisher may have decided to change the order, as was often done – Beethoven’s Op 18 quartets an example of this. With the Arriaga quartets I think that this changes the way you listen to the works and maybe one can see a greater sense and line of development in his compositional process.
After Arriaga’s death there was a very big gap in terms of string quartet writing from Spain and we can say that for the Basque Country he was one of its greatest ever composers, whilst for the whole of Spain, definitely with the string quartet he was by far one of the most important contributors to this form. This is what, perhaps, makes him even more important; it is not just the quality of the music by itself, but when you appreciate what was going on in the country at the time and what happened later, he really was something special.
MARK WIGGINS© 2014 Note 1 Music / Glossa Music photographs © Manuel Prieto