Fuchs String Quartet no 1

 Day 93

Fuchs String quartet no 1 in E major op 58

Minguet Quartet

Robert Fuchs' name appears in the literature fairly frequently because of his long career as a teacher in Vienna. Among his pupils are Enescu, Korngold, Mahler, Schreker, Sibelius, Wolf and Zemlinsky. The sources differ as to who exactly were his pupils and I suspect that some of these may have attended composition classes as junior students rather than had one-to-one personal study session. That list gives a good indication of Fuchs' time and place. He was born in 1847 and lived on until 1927, by which time he must have seen a relic of another age.

One of my tutors at university, the late Robert Pascall, was an expert on Fuchs and wrote the article on him in Grove. So we were exposed to some of his music during our time at university but I hadn't heard this string quartet.

It is the first of four and dates from 1897. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it. It is a late-romantic style as one would imagine but is generally quite gentle and not as overblown as much chamber music of the period: you can easily imagine four talented friends sitting down in a large drawing room in a house in Vienna and playing this music for their own enjoyment - it doesn't make bold statements and never puts too much strain on the medium.

There is certainly a Brahmsian feel to some of the music - Brahms was a great admirer of Fuchs - but the textures are generally less dense that those of Brahms - to me that is a real plus. I also sense the presence of Bruckner from time to time, particularly in the rustic second movement where the trio section could fairly easily have fitted into an early Bruckner symphony. Perhaps the slow third movement was rather unmemorable but the lively finale brought the piece to a spirited conclusion.

By all accounts Fuchs was self-effacing and didn't go out of his way to drawn attention to his own music. But I would certainly be happy to encounter the other string quartets and perhaps the serenades, which seem to have been the most popular of his pieces during his lifetime.