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James Huneker observed that "it easily ranks with any modern work in this form. Dramatic in feeling, moulded largely, and its themes musically eloquent, it sounds a model of its kind the kind which Johannes Brahms gave the world over thirty years ago in his D-minor concerto."
And it is he one encounters almost solely in the music of the third period, the enigmatical little pieces for orchestra and piano. It is he who has emerged victorious from the duel revealed by the D-minor Quartet.
Vagabond harmonies, in which the remotest keys lovingly hold hands, do not prevent the sensation of a central tonality somewhere in the cellar, on the roof, in the gutter, up in the sky. The inner ear tells you that the D-minor quartet is really thought, though not altogether played, in that key.
Beside this he had written the "D-minor Violin Concerto" for Brodsky; the "Liturgy of Joseph of Arimathea," for four voices with organ accompaniment; half a dozen of the melodious songs that were his special delight: and, lastly, the little, one-act opera "Iris," for which he had written both libretto and score, and which created a furore on its performance in Petersburg, the winter after his death.
First came out an adagio D-minor, only four measures; then a second, with five. 'There will be an extraordinary effect in the theatre, thought I, 'when the strongest wind instruments accompany the voice. Now you shall hear it, as well as it can be done without the orchestra."
D-minor, therefore, had for the ear of the ancient world about the same character that C-major has for us. That is indeed a jump a dorio ad phrygium. What, however, was for the ancients not proverbially, but literally, a jump a dorio ad phrygium namely, the contrast between D-minor and E-minor is for us no longer such a very astonishing antithesis.
And in revealing him, the work demonstrates how theoretical his intelligence is. No doubt, the D-minor Quartet is an important work, one of the most important of chamber compositions. Certainly, it is one of the great pieces of modern music.
In the seventeenth century Prinz finds the same Dorian key which for Aristotle bore the stamp of dignity and constancy as D-minor, not only "grave" but also "lively and joyous, reverent and temperate." This key conveys to Kircher's ear the impression of strength and energy.
The same year was marked by the completion of the second concerto in D-minor, begun at Frankfort in the previous winter, and the publication by Breitkopf and Härtel of the full score of "Hamlet and Ophelia," with a dedication to Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, from whose performances in London MacDowell had caught the suggestion for the music.
If I had begun by listening to the comparatively mellifluous D-minor string quartet, played by the Flonzaley Quartet, as did my New York colleagues, instead of undergoing the terrifying aural tortures of Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire, I might have been as amiable as the critics. The string sextet has been received here with critical cordiality. Its beauties were exposed by the Kneisel Quartet.
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