David Finckel sits in his office perch above the Lincoln Center, flipping absorbedly through the score of Mozart’s Prussian Quartets on a sultry September morning. Hazy sunshine turns the pages a dusty yellow. ‘It’s fantastic,’ muses Finckel.
‘There’s nothing like these quartets in the entire quartet literature; there’s nothing on this high a level that uses the cello in this way.’
The Emerson Quartet recently recorded these last three of Mozart’s quartets. Composed expressly to please the cello-playing King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, they all make prominent use of the instrument. ‘You’ll often hear cellists play these pieces badly,’ Finckel says, ‘and I’m including myself here, by the way. Normally, in the context of a standard string quartet concert, you’re a supporting player, and now suddenly you’re a leading player. It’s especially challenging because the range of the solos in these works usually lies in the most problematic area of the instrument, technically speaking, which is between third and sixth positions – a kind of no-man’s land between the low and high positions. Now, the cello sounds fantastic in that register; you can cut through anything, and if you’re going to play the solo repertoire, you absolutely need to feel comfortable there. But some days it does feel like you’re facing the Berlin Wall to get successfully from one side to the other.’ Finckel laughs, then returns to the score. ‘Here’s an example of a passage in that range.’
He stops and points to the exquisite, aria-like cello solo that opens the slow movement of K589. ‘This is a real place of honour for us cellists – but talk about an obligation!’ He inspects my Dover reprint edition more closely. ‘I meant to bring the facsimile of the manuscript to show you. There’s always something to be learned from studying them. I try to impress this in my teaching, too, along with the importance of using the best possible edition.’ He pulls a copy of the cello part from his briefcase. ‘This Bärenreiter edition is exactly what you see in Mozart’s manuscript. You know, older editions did not go to the trouble of distinguishing between a “carrot” and a dot [staccato mark], though these two symbols indicate different types of articulation. According to Mozart’s father, in his treatise on violin-playing, the “carrot” meant you were to lift the bow from the string; dots mean that the note is shorter and not connected to the next.’
We compare the two editions. Lo and behold, in the third bar there’s a dot in my Dover score and a ‘carrot’ in the Bärenreiter. He points to the latter. ‘Look at that little note stuck in the middle of a legato melody. It gives a different feeling when you remove the bow from the string – like an intake of breath.’ Finckel sings the phrase, varying the articulation to make his point. ‘If you’re using the older edition, you’re not seeing what Mozart wanted – that drives me crazy.’ Flipping ahead, Finckel reaches the finale of K590, Mozart’s last quartet. He grins. ‘The development section of this movement is filled with seeming impossibilities. The awkwardness in the writing presages Beethoven. Take those rolling passages of descending sixteenth notes in sequence: it’s a pianist saying “I can play this with my left hand, no problem.” It doesn’t matter what the key is. Well, on a violin, viola or cello, as soon as you start to move to a key with flats, you’ve lost the open strings along with the opportunity to change strings smoothly.
‘I actually try to play some of these long sequences in a single bow stroke with the idea of following what the composer heard in his imagination. Although this is a challenge, at least you’re visually showing the audience that this is meant to be delivered in one breath, just as a singer wouldn’t breathe in the middle of a phrase.’
Is this one of the ‘Everests’ of the string quartet repertoire, then, as far as the cellist is concerned? ‘It’s a struggle, yeah,’ Finckel concedes. ‘But, somehow, Mozart had gone beyond that in this work; he didn’t seem to care how difficult it was. In my mind, at least, this final movement is as virtuosic as quartet writing gets.’
by Andrew Farach-Colton
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