Elliott Carter

3. Maturity (1950-80)

3 Maturity (1950–80) carter’s string quartet no. 1 was written over a tenmonth period in 1950–51 during which the composer was supported by a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Work on his 1945–46 Piano Sonata had been funded by the same philanthropic organization, and in 1950 Carter benefited not just from the second Guggenheim Fellowship but also from a small grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Along with these awards, Carter at midcentury had several composition prizes to his credit: his 1937 choral piece To Music earned top honors in a competition sponsored by the WPA Federal Music Project in cooperation with the Columbia Broadcasting Corporation, the Columbia Phonograph Company, and the publisher Carl Fischer, Inc.; the suite from his 1939 Pocahontas ballet received the Juilliard School of Music’s publication prize; and his 1944 Holiday Overture won first prize in an Independent Music Publishers’ Association contest. By September 1951, when he completed the landmark string quartet that he said was conceived and executed to satisfy no one but himself, Carter already owned a résumé that included not just prizes and awards but also favorably reviewed performances, commissions, publications, and even recordings. Because of these various successes, combined with the regular appearance over a ten-year period of his byline in the journal Modern Music, Carter in the early 1950s hardly 51 lacked for recognition.Yet as impressive as all this might have seemed to a middleaged composer who felt that he had only recently discovered his “true voice,” the sum total of accolades that Carter had acquired up to this point counts almost as nothing compared to the recognition that would come his way shortly after the quartet’s European premiere. As noted in the previous chapter, Carter doubted that his String Quartet No. 1 would ever be performed. It was to his surprise, then, that the piece was taken up by the Walden Quartet and given a first performance at Columbia University ’s McMillin Theatre on 26 February 1953. Doubtless it was even more to his surprise when a few months later the piece was awarded first prize in the Liège Concours international de composition pour quatour à cordes. Since the Liège competition was limited to works that had yet to be performed, Carter had to turn down both the honor and the cash prize. This peculiar circumstance was newsworthy, and so were the facts that Carter’s piece was apparently so difficult that its private reading in Liège necessitated the use of a conductor and that the Boston-based Koussevitzky Foundation, which sponsored the Liège competition, made up for Carter’s loss of the prize money (40,000 Belgian francs) not just by writing him a check for $800 but also by granting him a commission.1 As a result of widespread press reports,European aficionados of contemporary music had heard quite a bit about Carter’s piece before any of them actually heard it—in the expert hands of the Paris-based Parrenin Quartet—in Rome on 11 April 1954 during a concert that was part of the“Music in theTwentieth Century”festival sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom in cooperation with the Italian national radio system and the Geneva-based European Center of Culture.2 The 1954 Rome festival was instigated and managed by Carter’s old friend Nicolas Nabokov. By the time of the festival Carter had been living and working in Rome for more than a half year as a result of his being awarded the American Academy’s prestigious Prix de Rome by a jury that included not just Nabokov but also Carter’s longtime supporter Aaron Copland and his former teacher Walter Piston, and for months in advance of the festival Carter had taken full advantage of the opportunity to forge personal relationships with many of Europe’s most prominent composers and critics. This is not to suggest that Carter’s success in Europe had anything to do with pulling strings by him or anyone else. It is simply to say that Carter, ever since his return to the United States after his studies with Boulanger, had the good sense to play his cards smartly and that in the spring of 1954 he had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time with what seemed to be exactly the right kind of music. [3.141.31.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 00:05...