Artis Quartett Wien

The Fourth Quartet by Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952) was written in 1981, the year in which he was able to abandon his earlier statement that to him, composition was about continuing the tradition from around 1900, enriching it with his individual type of expression. Now the past became a legacy onto which Rihm could graft his own innovations, in combination with his free, spontaneous, intuitive and 'wild' style of composing. Although he dedicated his 'Lyric Suite' to Zemlinsky, Berg (1885-1935) wrote in a letter to Hanna Fuchs that the work was actually meant for her: as a declaration of love to his platonic ideal, as a testament to love, meditation, ecstasy and death. Before Webern (1883-1945) arrived at his aphoristic method of composition, he first wrote a number of classical compositions that were of average length and had Romantic performance directions. The one-part String Quartet from 1905 is bursting with extreme dynamic marks such as 'dark and ponderous' and 'with great warmth'. Webern very often chose to exaggerate: extremely slow, very moving, very fast. This characterizes opus 5, his farewell to the nineteenth century.