Stylistic and Aesthetic Aspects of the String Quartet in Wilhelm Georg Berger’s View
Stylistic and Aesthetic Aspects of the String Quartet in Wilhelm Georg Berger’s View

Summary/Abstract: In a time when “the Romanian feeling, the love for culture and musical intelligence have found ideal ways of organization” (Laura Manolache) (our translation), Wilhelm Georg Berger establishes himself as a complete musician, combining his experiences as a performer with the dimensions of his compositional universe and with his analytical, musicological pursuits. As a result, Berger’s musicological universe, whose main characteristic is the musicologist's tendency to avoid the predominantly technical language and the strict musical analyses, brings to the fore highly individualized ideas and concepts. It is this aspect that this paper will focus on, by proposing a journey into the universe of the string quartet, which Berger approached not only from a historiographic perspective, but also from an aesthetic and analytical one. Based on these elements, we have tried, as far as possible, to follow the way in which the musicologist determines the major directions of the WesternEuropean quartet writing up until the early decades of the 20th century. In this context, Berger suggests that broadening the range of the string quartet typologies represents a means of capturing the ethos of the modern Romanian string quartet literature, which is “eloquent and extremely varied in terms of issues approached and specific ways of realization”, as well as aimed at demonstrating that “beyond its precise classification as a genre, the string quartet can be regarded as a vast stylistic area, in which the main ways of shaping and arranging the musical material are meticulously and gradually chained together”.

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