Early Bulgarian String Quartets

​Lyubomir Pipkov (1904-1974)

on the genesis of his String Quartet No.1 (1928)

Engulfed in such feelings I said to myself: “There is not going to be counterpoint in [the quartet], nothing like that. Just these “eights” and “nines” [Bulgarian folk rhythms]… Neither can I reveal in there what seems to be the problem of the day… People are looking for a counterpoint even more complex than Bach’s counterpoint. I can’t match Bach’s counterpoint, let alone a more complex one… Just do what your heart tells you to!” So I decided to write this musical idea as a letter to my father [composer Panayot Pipkov]…like a musician to a musician. I started writing and I got carried away. Everything happened quite unintentionally, outside of any aesthetical considerations – I found a direction from purely human concerns. I was looking for an exit from these contradictions, which were incited by Nadia Boulanger’s questions/1/ and [Paul] Dukas’s trust in me, which I could still not justify even for myself. I believed that understanding is accompanied by such an in-depth knowledge of things, following concerts, possessing books, money, all that I couldn’t come by. What could I do but write a letter to my father? So I started composing this quartet…​

I was afraid to show it to Dukas [Pipkov’s composition teacher at the Ecole Normale in Paris] – sometimes he loved being ironic. I had the feeling that if I showed it while I was still working on it, it would immediately become obvious how far I was from any kind of aesthetical views, if such are required. I felt as if I would come out as a person in whom something is beating, but it is so naive, simple and ordinary that maybe is not part of art at all. That’s what I thought. I wrote the first three movements of the quartet and decided to show it to him only when I had finished it: even if he said something ironic, I would not stop working because I would have written it already. Otherwise I would stop working – if he said even one discouraging word I would throw it away immediately, as I had done many times.

So until the summer I never showed my quartet to Dukas… Then I left for Bulgaria for the break. We got together [in Sofia] with Sasho Popov, Kosta Kirov, Spas Stanulov, Kosta Kugiyski and we started to have rehearsals – that was June, July 1928. Sasha Popov wanted to do me a favor, we still kept in close contact because I used to accompany him, and he was still playing the violin, he hadn’t switched to conducting yet… At the first rehearsal, when they saw the music and began reading it they created such a chaos, such cacophony that I felt like taking the parts and putting them in the fire and saying “Sorry to bother you, gentlemen!” I turned pale, mumbled something and Sasho said: “Look, it is too early to talk. I don’t know what you have written, but the truth is that we didn’t play anything. This is the first truth, and what you have written we shall see later!” And they started writing in bowings note by note, and they didn’t know how to play 8/8, 9/8 – they didn’t have ready bowings for the unevenly subdivided measures. And they started “crawling” step-by-step and saying: “You’ll be quiet, you will not say a word, you will just go downstairs to get coffees and pretzels!” And I would go downstairs to buy coffees and pretzels and bring them upstairs…​​

We did 24 rehearsals. [Then] I announced my concert in “Alliance Francais.”

I showed the quartet to Dukas after I wrote the last [fourth] movement — in Paris, encouraged by the success in Sofia. The concert at the Alliance passed at a very high level–everything was very well done…all the [critics] wrote marvelous things… After I heard the quartet I had a different self-confidence. I was also a little cocky — I knew that whatever Dukas said, nobody could convince me that my quartet was all that bad. And when we started the semester, I wrote the last movement in about 15 days. Then I took it to the class and Dukas liked it exceedingly well. He said to me: “Have you seen the Madonna of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel?” I wasn’t sure I had so I went later and found a reproduction. “When it was done, Michelangelo was 24 years old,” continued Dukas. “One day you will have the mastery, you will compose perhaps many good works, but such things [as the quartet] are written only when a person is at your age. You will always be able to look on this quartet with envy because of the freshness which we associate with this age.” …And when he said I had found my way …when he gathered my bewildered colleagues…They all stared: What’s going on with Lyubo?… I became a kind of persona grata–when Dukas spoke with me, when he criticized me, he talked as with an equal, as with a person whose opinion he respected.

(from Conversations at Pancharevo, recorded by Ivan Hlebarov, pp. 51-8. Sofia: Heini, 2004.

This excerpt translated from Bulgarian by Iliyana Vishanova.)

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/1/ Elsewhere Pipkov relates that after he performed one of his piano compositions on concert of Paul Dukas’s composition class, Nadia Boulanger congratulated Pipkov afterwards and asked him: “Does all of this happen under your sky?” And Pipkov thought: “Ah, there, you see? This is a complicated question… Under our sky… So they expect from me after all some specific sky, not theirs.” Pipkov continues: “And then the question grew more imperative: a search for individuality, more exactly a longing for individuality…” [Conversations at Pancharevo, pp. 47-8]