Practically every commentator on Wolf has praised his early String Quartet to the skies, but it remains obstinately ignored; off hand I can only recall one previous recording, and I have never heard a concert performance of it. It is long (40 minutes) and hugely difficult to play, and I suppose one could understand a hard-working string quartet's reluctance to spend the considerable amount of time needed to study such a complex but 'marginal' work, when perhaps they still have a couple of Beethovens or one of the Bartoks to add to their repertory. There could be another reason, too: several writers have expressed alarm as well as astonished admiration at the Quartet's extraordinary intensity and fertility of invention: Ernest Newman thought that one could almost have predicted Wolf's eventual mental collapse from the prodigious cerebral effort this work must have cost him.
I see what he meant, but I must say that I find the piece far more exhilarating than worrying. It is nothing short of amazing that a composer not yet 20 (though the finale was added later) should have not only such assurance but such a breathtakingly skilful technique. The ideas and the passionate seriousness are post-Beethovenian (a couple of almost literal quotations in the first movement), occasionally post-Wagnerian, but the way the ideas are used is consistently original, consistently challenging and surprising. The closeness and ingenuity of the thematic working, the arresting sense of drama and the remarkable command of extended structure suggest that if Wolf had not found a more comfortable metier in song (certainly a less frustrating one: the Quartet had many rebuffs, including a contemptuous refusal by the Rose Quartet, and was not performed until the year of his death) he could have become the greatest master of the quartet form since Beethoven. And if my description so far makes it sound like a frowning intellectual exercise, try the enchanted, yearning lyricism of the scherzo's trio section, the exquisite second subject of the slow movement or the sheer exuberant optimism of the work's conclusion.
A masterpiece, I think, and we owe the Artis Quartet a great deal for restoring it to the recorded repertory with such ardent virtuosity. To have added not only a charming account of the Italian Serenade but the Intermezzo as well (in which Wolf challenges even his resourcefulness by using only a single insinuating little theme for a movement lasting over ten minutes, holds our absorbed interest without the slightest difficulty and sends us away at the end with a delighted smile—I defy the blackest of depressives not to be cheered up by that coda) is pure generosity. The Artis Quartet are quite a discovery themselves, if it comes to that: their technique is brilliant and they have the expressive resource to convey the grandeur and the emotional complexity of this music. Excellent recorded sound, too: imperatively unmissable.'