Hans Winterberg

4. String Quartet

Hans Winterberg's four string quartets were composed over a period of four decades between 1936 and 1961 and reflect the four stages of his eventful biography. He composed the first in what were probably the happiest moments of his life in his native city of Prague, the second under great hardship in the terrible war year of 1942, the third in 1957 during a phase of great compositional success in his adopted home of Munich, and the fourth in another dramatic phase of his life. It came at a moment of renewed doubt and uncertainty, when a young generation of composers in Europe was vehemently asserting itself, breaking with all traditions because it considered them obsolete and corrupted by fascism. Winterberg, a survivor of the Shoah, did not break with the past, but rather tried to continue the Czech-German-Jewish cultural symbiosis in his compositions after the war. The fourth quartet marks the beginning of a new creative phase in which he succeeded in combining the very different influences that shaped him - the Bohemian-Moravian, folk-inspired tradition as a successor of Janá?ek and the achievements of the Second Viennese School, imparted by his teacher Alexander Zemlinsky - into a homogeneous, rhythmically pointed and expressive style.