The String Quartet
sun 1 jun 2025 12:00 hrs
Today, we will focus on the fourth and final string quartet by the French composer Olivier Greif, who died young. In this quartet, the experiences of his father in Auschwitz and the murder of a large part of his family are clearly audible. But also, a total surrender to every idea, whatever the style and whatever the technique may be; old and new, tonal and atonal are thrown together.
Greif has given his Fourth Quartet the subtitle ‘Ulysses’, referring to the novel of the same name by James Joyce. The role of anti-Semitism in it, as in the 18th-century song The Jew’s Daughter, must have struck him. The results are audible in the first and last movement. In the final movement, Greif combines a sixteenth-century madrigal with a Kaddish for the dead.
