String Quartets and Elegy

The string quartet has played an important part in Slovak art music, from its professional beginnings. With his four quartets and string quintet, Ján Levoslav Bella laid a notable foundation. Alongside Bella and Mikuláš Moyzes, further works were contributed by Frico Kafenda (String Quartet in G Major) and Alexander Albrecht (String Quartet in D Major, Christmas Quartet, Slovak Quartettino). For the following generation of composers, the quartet underwent a shift in terms of significance and function. Rather than a piece for domestic music-making, it became almost a “laboratory” material on which the composer might try out new procedures and techniques. The three string quartets by Ivan Hrušovský (1927 – 2001) fall into this context. At first glance, it may seem that of this composer’s legacy what has most resonance today is the choral works, which have made their way onto podia all over the world, and the major vocal-instrumental works with spiritual themes (the composer, a practising Lutheran, was enabled to work on these freely only after November 1989). However, the intimate character of chamber music, with its space for experiment, was very important for someone of his intellectual and artistic nature. Ivan Hrušovský (like Ladislav Burlas, his contemporary and classmate in Moyzes’s composition class) was professionally “an artist in two disciplines”, i.e. simultaneously composer and theoretician. Undoubtedly there was an impulse towards this in his family background: his father Ján Hrušovský was a writer, his cousin Igor a philosopher. Hence alongside his study of composition at the Conservatory and later at the Academy of Performing Arts (VŠMU) in Bratislava, he also studied at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University, where his subjects were musicology, aesthetics and philosophy. Likewise distinguished by clarity and concision is Hrušovský’s compositional language, which began to break free from his teacher’s influence at the end of the 1950s; it inclined towards the then-current avant garde trends, though the links with the past were not severed entirely. Ultimately, alongside the novelties that Hrušovský might have met with at the Warsaw Autumn Festival (1962) or the summer courses in Darmstadt (1965), indelibly in the background there were composers such as Claude Debussy, Karol Szymanowski, and indeed also Antonín Dvořák, whose music he loved and knew thoroughly. New techniques, among them dodecaphony, the sonorism of the “Polish school”, and above all aleatoric music, found their way into such works as Combinazioni sonoriche (1963), Sonata for Piano (1965) and Three Piano Pieces (Sonata No. 2, 1968), where in places they are presented with a quite didactic visuality. They are not, however, a single and exclusive mode of working: Hrušovský liked to return to his roots and he repeatedly resorted to his favourite toccata form. In the 1970s he composed works in the old style, canons, variations… Indeed, he returned to the chamber genre with retrospective tendencies even at the end of his life, when he created his String Trio and Piano Trio In memoriam J. S. Bach AD 2000, his last completed composition.