String Quartet No. 4 (Bartók)

The String Quartet No. 4 by Béla Bartók was written from July to September 1928 in Budapest. It is one of six string quartets by Bartok.

The work is in five movements:

This work, like the String Quartet No. 5, and several other pieces by Bartók, exhibits an "arch" structure — the first movement is thematically related to the last, and the second to the fourth with the third movement standing alone. Also, the outer four movements feature rhythmic sforzandos that cyclically tie them together in terms of climactic areas.

The quartet shares a similar harmonic language to that of the String Quartet No. 3, and as with that work, it has been suggested that Bartók was influenced in his writing by Alban Berg's Lyric Suite (1926) which he had heard in 1927.

The quartet employs a number of extended instrumental techniques. For the whole of the second movement all four instruments play with mutes, while the entire fourth movement features pizzicato. In the third movement, Bartók sometimes indicates held notes to be played without vibrato, and in various places he asks for glissandi (sliding from one note to another) and so-called Bartók pizzicati (a pizzicato where the string rebounds against the instrument's fingerboard).

The work is dedicated to the Pro Arte Quartet but its first public performance was given by the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet in Budapest on March 20, 1929. It was first published in the same year by Universal Edition.

A study of the manuscript sources, as published by László Somfai finds that Bartók originally intended the quartet to have four movements, not five.

Bartók’s musical vocabulary, as demonstrated in his string quartets particularly, departs from traditional use of major and minor keys, focusing more on the chromatic scale and attempting to utilize each note equally. Regardless, Bartók doesn’t follow any form of serialism, instead dividing the semitone scale into symmetrical units, with tonal centers being based on “axes of symmetry”. He also incorporates whole-tone, pentatonic, and octatonic scales — as well as diatonic and heptatonia seconda scales — as subsets of the chromatic scale.

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