String Quartet (youthful work)
Grażyna Bacewicz realised at a very early age that her main purpose in life was to compose music. Already during the 1920s, as a student of Łódź Conservatoire, as part of her lessons in harmony and counterpoint, she made attempts at composing, in which she tried to resolve nagging technical problems and impart an artistically satisfying form to them. She grew up in an atmosphere of anti-romantic tumult and the emerging neoclassical style. She assimilated the main attributes of that current in a natural way: the need to forge logical formal constructs based on new harmonic principles, not determined by the major–minor system, and also a freedom in the shaping of textures, a fixed element of which was the combining of homophony with more or less strict polyphonic forms.
One example of such a strategy is the String Quartet from her student years, signed with the date 1929–1930, which the composer did not include in her official catalogue of works. In the first movement (Allegro moderato), one can distinguish two principal subjects, served in the form of the incomplete exposition of a fugue. The chromaticised first subject, with its strongly highlighted head motif, appears in the cello, with an answer coming four bars later in the first violin. After a short bridge, the first violin intones the second subject, of a different character (dolce), and the answer appears a bar later and an octave lower in the viola. Both subjects can be heard also in the closing coda, and the space between them is filled by counterpoints based largely on ostinato figures of various sorts – a technique that Bacewicz would hone to perfection in her later work.
The middle fughetta (Molto adagio), with a subject stated just once, and in only three parts (cello, first violin, viola), acts as an intermezzo.
The third movement (Allegro molto moderato) is a double fugue with strongly contrasting subjects. The first subject, in the form of a chromaticised melodic continuum, exposed by the cello, is initially shown with the traditional arrangement retained (answered by the viola and second violin at a fifth, and by the first violin an octave above). The second subject (energico) is a structure shaped by the opening repetition of a motif of perfect fifths, then octaves combined with staccato-tremolo figurations. As the work unfolds, the two subjects appear simultaneously in original and inverted form, coming together in the closing Cadenza in a uniform idea crowned by strong (fff) chords repeated towards the end. - Małgorzata Gąsiorowska
- Cover Design: Marcin Hernas
- Series: Camera
- ISMN 979-0-2740-3104-6
- Language of edition: pol, eng
- Cover: softcover
- No. of edition: 1
- Published: 2021
- Type: score and parts
- Size: N4 vertical (235x305 mm)
Other titles in the series
Grażyna Bacewicz
String Quartet No. 4
Buy in the new PWM bookstore35,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Grażyna Bacewicz
String Quartet No. 5 (score and parts)
Buy in the new PWM bookstore45,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Grażyna Bacewicz
String Quartet (youthful work)
Buy in the new PWM bookstore29,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Zbigniew Bargielski
String Quartet no.5 'The Time that Has P
Buy in the new PWM bookstore45,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Ignacy Feliks Dobrzy
Souvenir de Dresde
Buy in the new PWM bookstore15,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Other author's publications
Grażyna Bacewicz
Partita (youthful work)
Buy in the new PWM bookstore15,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Grażyna Bacewicz
Violin Concerto No. 7
Buy in the new PWM bookstore12,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Grażyna Bacewicz
Humoresque; Cradle Song
Buy in the new PWM bookstore6,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Grażyna Bacewicz
The Stained-glass Window
Buy in the new PWM bookstore3,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
String quartets
Józef Władysław Krog
Quartetto in G major
Buy in the new PWM bookstore42,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Ryszard Bukowski
String Quartet No. 3
Buy in the new PWM bookstore10,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Grażyna Bacewicz
String Quartet No. 1
Buy in the new PWM bookstore40,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Zbigniew Bargielski
String Quartet no.5 'The Time that Has P
Buy in the new PWM bookstore45,00 EUR Suggested retail price.
Eugeniusz Knapik
String Quartet no. 2
Buy in the new PWM bookstore35,00 EUR Suggested retail price.