Dora Pejačević

String Quartet in C Major op. 58

Dora Pejačević (1885 - 1923) is one of the most talentet female composers at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. She studied at the Croatian Music Institute in Zagreb then briefly in Dresden with Sherwood and in Munich with Courvoisier. For the most part, however, she was self-taught and developed her musical talents through contact with other artists and intellectuals, such as Karl Kraus. Her ancestral home was at Našice (near Osijek), but she also travelled extensively to Budapest, Munich, Prague and Vienna. After 1921 she lived mainly in Munich. Her works were performed most frequently outside Croatia; part of her Symphony, for example, was first given in Vienna (25 January 1918) and the complete work was performed later in Dresden. Her late Romantic idiom, enriched with Impressionist harmonies and lush orchestral colours, evolved as she strove to break free from drawing-room mannerisms and conventions... After the lost String Quartet in F Major dating from 1911, Dora Pejačević tried her hand only once more at this most strict and demanding chamber music form: in the String Quartet in C Major (1922), which is her last major completed work. She did not live to hear it performed in public. This most mature of Dora PejaËeviÊ's chamber works is characterised by a nurtured quartet style, and originality of the ideas and formal solutions. The dense, polyphonic texture, the saturated sonority and the complete independence of all four parts attain that level of chamber quartet style which was the ideal after Beethoven. All rhetoric is repudiated in this work, and there is no sign of effective movement endings. In this respect, the final movement of the quartet is particularly characteristic. Abandonment of the usual animated and relaxed finale stands here symbolically at the final point of a creative development, which was continually led towards an intensification of expression and introspection. Dora Pejačević last completed work ends in the style of departure from the creative stage, becoming tranquil in the solemn and serious utterance of the pure C major chord which acts like an illumination after all the tension and disquiet... (Koraljka Kos)