Composed 1927; 12 minutes

Henriëtte Bosmans should be far better known. She was one of the most accomplished Dutch musicians of her generation – and history cut her off mid-sentence. Born in Amsterdam into a formidable musical family – her father principal cellist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, her mother a long-serving piano professor – Bosmans emerged in the 1920s as a first-rank pianist. She appeared repeatedly with the Concertgebouw, working with such conductors as Monteux, Mengelberg, and Ansermet, and built a wide repertory that ranged from Mozart to Debussy.

As a composer, her path was harder. Early resistance to women composers was followed by something worse: in Nazi-occupied Holland she was classified as a “Jewish case.” She refused to register with the Kultuurkamer. In 1942, all public performances of her music – and of her own playing – were banned. She survived by giving clandestine house concerts. Bosmans’s music evolved from lyrical late-Romanticism toward a lean, color-conscious language influenced by Debussy and Ravel. After the war, ill and exhausted, she turned largely to song, producing some of her most intense work. Official recognition came in 1951 with a royal honor – too late. She died the following year, her career silenced twice: first by persecution, then by an early death.

Bosmans’s short String Quartet was composed in 1927, the year in which she began advanced studies with Willem Pijper, one of the more progressive Dutch composers of the day. With its dedication to Pijper, the quartet leaves behind the rich late-Romantic style of Bosmans’s early works. The opening movement begins with a hushed, questioning two-bar pentatonic theme from the viola. This is answered by the quartet with its inversion, pianissimo and in unison, together generating the material from which the monothematic movement is built – and, indeed, from which the entire quartet is largely derived. The mood is generally subdued, even misterioso as the cello introduces another, now quicker variant on the theme. Bosmans continues to develop the material, moving through many changes of meter and restless shifts of tonality, while building to a fortissimo climax. The movement ends quietly with a backwards glance to the opening statement, securely anchored in its D minor modality.

The central slow movement is reflective and slow moving, its long lyrical lines, primarily on violin and cello, frequently anchored by double-stopped drone-like chords. (The cello was a favored instrument for which Bosmans wrote many works, though her father died when she was only months old). The texture is transparent and clear, reminiscent of late Debussy or Ravel. Propelled by a driving rhythmic figure, the finale vigorously and contrapuntally works a variant of the opening theme either side of a central lamenting, sighing section whose expressivity is kept in check by the forward-moving rhythmic figure. Bosman’s short, structurally innovative quartet drives to a forceful conclusion.