JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)
Quartet in G, Op. 64 No. 4 (Hob.III:66) (1790)
Allegro con brio
Menuetto: Allegretto
Adagio cantabile sostenuto
Finale: Presto
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 18 No. 6 (1798-1800)
Allegro con brio
Adagio ma non troppo
Scherzo: Allegro
La Malinconia: Adagio - Allegretto quasi Allegro - Prestissimo
ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)
String Quartet in A minor, Op. 41 No. 1 (1842)
Introduzione - Andante espressivo - Allegro
Scherzo - Presto - Intermezzo
Adagio
Presto - Moderato
JOSEPH HAYDN (1732-1809)
Quartet in G, Op. 64 No. 4 (Hob.III:66) (1790)
By 1790, Haydn had been a musical servant to the Esterházy family for nearly 30 years. An
increasing irritant was a restriction on his ability to travel. He had spent the past decade composing
with an eye to his reputation as the finest living composer in Europe. He was able to accept
commissions from Paris, London, Naples, Cadiz as well as nearby Vienna, making sure that the
resulting compositions would also be useful to his employer. He dealt with publishers from far and
wide. He was 58. At the beginning of the year, the Esterházy court was, as usual in Vienna, and
Haydn was able to attend rehearsals of Mozart’s Così fan tutte and play string quartets with its
composer and the composers Dittersdorf and Vanhal. In February, however, he was back at
Esterháza missing the comforts of Vienna – chocolate, sliced beef and strawberry ices in particular.
A letter to his close friend, the Viennese aristocrat Maria Anna von Genzinger is full of the woes of
life: “Here I sit in my wilderness, forsaken, like a poor waif, almost without any human company,
melancholy, full of the memories of past glorious days . . . and who knows when these days will
return again?”
It was at this time that Haydn began work on the six quartets of Op. 64. His thoughts turned inward
as he began the collection, writing for the small, private audience at court. His employer, Prince
Nicolaus Esterházy was ill and Haydn felt unable to break his contract. At the end of September, the
Prince died. His successor dismissed most of the court musicians but retained Haydn on a pension,
confirming his ability to accept outside commissions. Haydn completed his Op. 64 in Vienna,
knowing that his first appearance in London had already been announced. With it, intimate
conversation between the four instruments would give way to a need to reach out and command
public attention – and the change can be heard as work on the six quartets of Haydn’s Op. 64
progresses.
There’s a wealth of ideas and musical invention in the opening movement of the G major quartet.
Three main musical themes and several briefer motifs vie for our attention, with the customary
second theme (in the key of D major) mischievously delayed until the last possible moment. It then
forms the backbone of the central development section and makes only a fleeting appearance at the
end of the movement. The minuet has the character of a ländler dance, or one of the short social
dances that Mozart was writing at the time. The slow movement, with its elegant variations
developing a broad, sustained melody from the first violin, possibly gives a glimpse of the musical
character of the violinist to whom the Op. 64 collection is dedicated. He’s Johann Tost, the principal
second violinist at the Esterházy court, later a business entrepreneur. The richly developed, sonataform finale is full of energy and good humour, with a number of whimsical changes of direction in its
central section.
The MusicTORONTO blog
www.music-toronto.com/blog
Haydn wrote many of his string quartets while serving as Kapellmeister to the Esterházy family. In
a recent blog post, Keith Horner travels to Eisenstadt, the picturesque town in the Austrian
Burgenland, and visits locations that formed an important part of the life of the composer – his
house, the Esterházy palace, the Bergkirche where he directed performances and where his
remains now lie. On the trail of Joseph Haydn in Eisenstadt on the MusicTORONTO blog
http://music-toronto.com/blog
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 18 No. 6 (1798-1800)
When Beethoven wrote his earliest collection of quartets, Vienna considered itself the string quartet
capital of the world. Mozart had already written many of his greatest quartets while living there.
Haydn was still writing his magnificent final works in a medium that had absorbed him for half a
century. Beethoven waited until his late twenties before making a bid to join their ranks and was 30
by the time he completed a set of six quartets in 1800. He had carefully prepared the way with his
earliest publications, the majority of which included the piano, the instrument he played the best.
When the time came to publish the Op. 18 collection of quartets, carefully bookended with the most
adventurous and striking works, Beethoven also released his impressive First Symphony and the first
two piano concertos which he had been revising and polishing for some years. These publications in
1801 catapulted the young man from Bonn as a worthy successor, if anyone then doubted it, to his
revered Viennese predecessors.
The sixth quartet of the collection begins with a movement of disarming simplicity, with no hint of
the drama to come. The slow movement begins to reach deeper, with a turn to the minor key. With
the Scherzo, however, Beethoven enters new territory and uses rhythmic devices that were to
fascinate him throughout his life. Viola and cello, for the most part, provide a rhythmic anchor while
the violins chase one another on off-beats, pausing from time to time to bring themselves into sync.
The trio continues the note of humour for everyone but the first violin who has to contend with
fiendishly difficult leaps and turns. Slow, hushed chords introduce the finale and the tonality
becomes uncertain; the music's sense of direction unclear. Dramatic key changes plunge the music
into ever more remote terrain. Beethoven calls this movement La Malinconia – melancholy – and its
mood is traditionally associated with his increasing deafness. He asks for it to be played ‘with the
utmost delicacy.’ Without pause, the extended introduction launches into a rustic German dance
and the tension is temporarily relieved. The melancholy returns abruptly as the slowly shifting
chords and wildly lurching harmonies of the introduction begin to intrude on the dance. This is the
most dramatic movement in the six Op. 18 quartets and its contrasts in mood bring ambiguity and
more than a hint of the Beethoven to come.
ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)
String Quartet in A minor, Op. 41 No. 1 (1842)
Schumann wrote all three quartets of his Op. 41 during an intense seven-week period in the summer
of 1842. His characteristically short and often feverish cycles of composition are generally explained
as the result of a manic-depressive illness, a bipolar disorder that troubled him throughout his life.
First came a flood of piano music. His ‘year of song’ followed, then an outpouring of orchestral
music. In June and July 1842, he turned to the string quartet. “The thought of the quartets gives me
pleasure,” he had written several years earlier. “The piano is getting too narrow for me. In
composing now I often hear a lot of things that I can barely suggest.” After analysing the great
classical quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven often playing them through in four-hand versions
with Clara Wieck, he offered his lodgings to Ferdinand David and three string players from the
Gewandhaus Orchestra for private ‘quartet mornings’ when they would read through the latest
quartets of the day. Schumann then wrote about the quartets for his periodical the Neue Zeitschrift
für Musik. He set the bar high, viewing the medium as a “by turns beautiful and even abstrusely
woven conversation between four people.”
The A minor quartet is the first of the three completed quartets from 1842. Its austere, contrapuntal
opening reflects Schumann’s on-going interest in the music of Bach and his study of the Welltempered Clavier in particular. Once the first movement proper gets underway, its two themes are
closely related, recalling a favoured technique of Haydn. Through its taut musical forms and close
musical arguments Schumann reveals his awareness of the legacy of the classical quartet. “I love
Mozart dearly,” he wrote in an entry in his diary around the time he was composing the quartet,
“but Beethoven I worship like a god.” The galloping Scherzo is cut from the same cloth as are the
mercurial scherzos of Mendelssohn. Schumann revered Mendelssohn and he dedicated all three
quartets to him when they were published in 1843. The radiant slow movement has the nobility of a
slow movement by Beethoven. The finale opens with a vigorous, scurrying theme, with something
of the exuberance of Schumann’s own Spring Symphony, and this single, driving theme propels the
quartet to a fiery conclusion.
— Program notes © 2017 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: [email protected]