Notes for: August 10, 2010
Over a period of 40 years Haydn wrote nearly 70 string quartets, transforming the light-weight divertimento, designed more for entertainment than serious music-making, into the challenging core form of the chamber-music repertory. The “Quinten” quartet was the second in that remarkable series of eight quartets – six published as Opus 76 and two as Opus 77-- that constituted Haydn’s final word on the form.
The eight quartets were composed in the 1790s after Haydn had returned to Vienna from two extended visits to London. His experiences in England had been the most rewarding of his life, artistically and financially. He had been honored at court, lionized in the concert halls and ballrooms, awarded an honorary degree at Oxford, and compensated generously for his music. In response, he had composed and conducted his twelve greatest symphonies, those numbered from 93 through 104, and soon they were in demand throughout the continent.
Haydn was now the most famous composer in Europe, and his international earnings assured him an unprecedented degree of economic security. But he was not content to rest on his laurels. For one thing, he had been overwhelmed in London by the oratorios of Handel, and soon he was at work on his own oratorio masterpieces, The Creation and The Seasons. For another, Haydn’s reputation inevitably led to a brisk business in teaching and free-lance composing.
Among his commissions, in 1796, was one for six quartets from Count Joseph Erdödy, a Hungarian aristocrat and the brother-in-law of Haydn’s patron, Prince Anton Esterhazy. The quartets were written the following year and initially performed in the count’s drawing room, and in 1799 they were published as Opus 76. These works set still new standards of subtlety and originality, and rank among the greatest works in the chamber-music literature.
The second quartet of Opus 76 is, in many ways, the most remarkable in Haydn’s total output. The work is, first of all, a continuing demonstration of the power of contrast between the major and minor modes. In the first movement, the first theme is in D minor, the second in F major. The second movement consists of a section in minor sandwiched between two major sections, with a coda combining both elements. The main section of the minuet is in the minor, with the trio in a startling major. The fourth movement is predominantly minor, but there is an abrupt shift to the major after the restatement of the main theme.
Even more noteworthy is the structure of the first movement – an astounding demonstration of what a resourceful composer can do with the simplest of materials. In this instance, the building block is the downward fifth – the interval between so and do. Both the first and second themes are based on that interval, and the working out of the themes leans heavily on its repetition, upward as well as downward, in a variety of guises but always with clarity and power. This, of course, is the source of the quartet’s nickname, German for “The Fifths.”
After so forceful a first movement, the second provides some relaxation – it is, in fact, a throwback to the violin-dominated divertimento of Haydn’s early days. With the third movement, however, Haydn ventures to the frontier in what musicologist Donald Francis Tovey termed “the most imaginative minuet before Schubert.” The main section is a two-part canon (that is, a round with overlapping entrances) between, on the one hand, the two violins playing in octaves, and, on the other hand, the viola and cello, also in octaves. This structure and the resulting tonal coloration were unprecedented in quartet-writing, and with the vigorous rhythm earned for the movement the subtitle “witches minuet.”
The finale suggests a Hungarian folk dance in its use of syncopation and the sustained harmonic with which the first violin ends the opening phrase. The high point of the movement comes in the coda when the first violin returns with the main theme, transformed from minor to major and with the cessation of all rhythmic movement in the accompanying second violin and viola. This somber change of mood is short-lived, and the quartet builds to an exuberant ending.