Ernst Toch
      String Quartets

* String Quartet No. 6 op. 12
* String Quartet No. 12 op. 70

Verdi Quartet
cpo 999 776-2 {DDD} TT: 65:40

Summary for the Busy Executive: Lost and found.

Ernst Toch, with more than a little self-dramatization, called himself
as "the lost German composer" of the Twentieth Century.  Actually, he
was one of many.  After all, how many know the work of David, Distler,
Pepping, or Krenek, to name just a few?  Weill hangs on mainly by his
Broadway work rather than by his considerable achievement in the concert
hall and on the opera stage.  Hindemith's huge output has dwindled to
less than half a dozen pieces, as far as the general public is concerned.
Berg lives mainly by his violin concerto and Wozzeck, Schoenberg by his
Verklaerte Nacht and Gurrelieder.  Webern, undoubtedly the most influential
German composer after the war, remains a recherche taste.  If we consider
live performances as an important indicator of a composer's reputation,
then most Twentieth-Century front-rank German composers are lost.  Indeed,
Mahler and Richard Strauss seem the only two with a really firm grip.

Toch was, as they say, a natural.  Despite strong parental opposition,
he turned himself into a composer by a remarkable series of self-imposed
exercises.  Among other things, he taught himself to read music and did
manage to get his parents to spring for piano lessons.  But they were
still set on him to study medicine or law.  One day, while window shopping,
he saw a pocket study score of a Mozart string quartet and bought it.
He was overwhelmed.  To get to know it better, he copied it out in secret,
working at night so his parents wouldn't find out.  The compact size of
the study score made it easier to hide (some boys hide Playboy; Toch hid
Mozart).  He also noticed that the publication was part of a series of
"Ten Famous String Quartets by Mozart," and he bought another.  He began
to copy it out but decided as an experiment to take only the first eight
bars and then to supply eight more bars of his own.  He compared his
"solution" to Mozart's and, in his own words, he was "crushed." Mozart's
eight were way beyond his.  However, Toch decided to stick to it, always
referring his results to Mozart's and taking the "correction," learning
from the differences.  The regimen succeeded.  Toch suddenly won a
prestigious prize for young composers (he had submitted his entry without
his parents' knowledge).  Part of the award was formal study.  Toch
arrived at his teacher's office, excited at the prospect of his first
"real" lesson, only for the professor to tell him, "I was hoping, if you
didn't mind, to study with you." To the end of his life, Toch took an
unorthodox approach to composition.  You can get glimpses of it in his
book The Shaping Forces of Music, one of the most valuable texts for
composers I've yet come across.  Most composition texts tell you technique.
Toch teaches musical rhetoric.

Musically, Toch came of age in the Teens and Twenties, part of that
heady Austro-German mix of Schoenberg, Reger, and Mahler.  Richard Strauss
never seemed to exercise all that much sway over him, as he did, say,
over Schrecker and Korngold.  That revelatory first encounter with Mozart
probably immunized him as well as gave him a love for writing string
quartets.  From his earliest known works (his first pieces were lost in
the chaos of the Holocaust and the modern Jewish diaspora), he exhibits
a "rage for form" and clarity of idea.

We see this in the sixth quartet, the earliest surviving quartet and
written at age 18.  The composer was still in high school.  It shows
Toch's mastery of the Brahms idiom.  It takes not only musical talent
but also musical brains to do Brahms.  The string writing is expert,
even at this early stage, the textures inventive and surprising without
descending into the bizarre, and the young composer's grasp of his musical
argument (over, incidentally, over a very long span -- four movements
take thirty-seven minutes) firm and confident.  This score would have
done most composers of any age proud.  However, you do see the adolescent
in the slow third movement -- not technically, but emotionally.  Marked
"Andante doloroso," it lacks a certain weight of experience, as if the
composer doesn't really know what sadness is, and it consequently falls
back on certain chromatic tropes of sadness, in lieu of the real thing.
That demur aside, the quartet impresses on many fronts.  For example,
the second movement, "Andantino amabile," successfully sandwiches a
"gypsy" scherzo between a Brahmsian intermezzo.  The scherzo seems to
move twice as fast as the intermezzo, but because it's twice as fast,
the basic underlying pulse remains unchanged.  A wonderful rhythmic
ambiguity hovers over the movement, its power due in no small measure
to its simplicity.  Equally noteworthy is Toch's very early realization
that all four instruments don't have to play all the time.  But then,
young though he might be, this is his sixth quartet.  He has the experience
of five others behind him.

Chamber music in general and the string quartet in particular run through
Toch's output like a spine.  They have the same central importance to
his other work as Bartok's and Shostakovich's quartet cycles do to their
catalogues.  Nevertheless, it took Toch nearly twenty years to compose
the String Quartet No.  12.  Indeed, Toch suffered from a long-term
creative block, arising from his depression, frustration, and guilt over
his survival during the Holocaust and his failure to get relatives and
friends away from the Third Reich.  Apparently, this string quartet broke
his creative silence, and significantly it appeared in 1946.

Forty years and six quartets later, Toch has moved from astonishing
talent to great composer.  The technical assurance of 1905 has become
strong enough to lead the composer to take considerable risks.  Much of
this quartet -- the first movement especially -- runs to two, occasionally
three, parts.  At certain points, it strikes the ear as a series of duos.
It's leaner and meaner than the earlier work and, as Job says, "full of
trouble."

The first movement begins with a highly chromatic line in quick notes,
functioning, for the most part, as accompaniment and rhythmic motor
carrying the music on.  It becomes apparent, however, that this chromatic
line has great thematic importance throughout the movement, even to the
point of taking center stage.  One can't call it an accompaniment any
longer.  Indeed, much of the quartet takes up with this kind of scurrying
figure, often in secondary lines beneath snatches of broader melodies.
The prevailing image to me is subsurface rot or termites burrowing under
a parquet floor.  It imparts a pall over the entire work.  In the slow
second movement, the writing becomes bleaker and thicker, with odd
passages of noble, even radiant chorale breaking in once in a blue moon,
kind of like a hope against hope.  The third movement ("Pensive Serenade")
takes off from the Brahmsian intermezzo.  The main theme, considered all
by itself, sings graciously -- "Viennese-y," in the words of Ira Gershwin.
The supporting harmonies, again in scurrying short notes, are rather
queasy, off-balance, and the suave serenade gives way to an acerbic march
for the second main idea.  The serenade returns without reaching psychic
resolution.  Toch saves the best for last.  The finale begins as an
aggressive march, of which the previous movement's march was a mere
shadow.  I can't say exactly how, but the emotional stakes seem raised,
as we seem to revisit old psychic neighborhoods with greater depth.
Forty years older, Toch knows what sorrow is, and he also knows that he
can't wallow in it.  What we get is an heroic perseverance in the face
of trouble, without settling for easy, pre-fab transcendence.

Because I like to know what's under the hood, I'll point out certain
felicities of composition.  Aside from the virtuosic textural variety,
Toch's handling of rhythm impressed me no end.  The liner notes indicate
that Toch uses odd meters like 11/8, 5/8, 18/16, and so on.  Yet one
never feels the short unit.  Everything proceeds in long, logical phrases.
Indeed, if the liner notes hadn't told me, I doubt I would have cottoned
to the metrical games.  Also, the ends of the movements offer poetic
surprises, without stepping into the shock of the arbitrary.  I don't
give away surprises if I can help it.  You'll have to listen for yourself.

The Verdi Quartet is outstanding.  Intonation, balance, artistry over
the single line, beauty of tone, architectural smarts, emotional maturity
-- they have it all.  I've never heard these pieces played any better.
In fact, I've never heard a better performance of any Toch work.  They've
also recorded Toch's eighth and ninth quartets on cpo 999686.  I've
already ordered my copy.

One of cpo's best.

Steve Schwartz