String Quartet in C, Op 54 No 2 Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) 1. Vivace; 2. Adagio - 3. Menuetto. Allegretto; 4. Finale. Adagio - presto - adagio.
The twelve quartets that comprise Haydn’s Ops 54, 55, and 64 were written between 1788 and 1790, in the last years of his long first period of service to the Esterházy family. He originally conceived Ops 54 and 55 as a single set of six quartets but they were divided into two sets of three by the Paris publisher Jean-Georges Sieber, something that was becoming increasingly common towards the end of the 1780s.
The three sets are usually known, collectively, as the ‘Tost’ Quartets. Johann Tost was a violinist in the Esterházy orchestra from 1783 to 1789; he is thought to be the same person as the Johann Tost who established a prosperous business in Vienna in the 1790s and gained a considerable reputation as an amateur musician. Haydn entrusted him with selling the quartets, together with his Symphonies Nos 88 and 89, to publishers in Paris when he went to live there for a few years in 1788.
Op 54 No 2 is one of Haydn’s most remarkable quartets. The bold opening sets the tone, with abrupt silences separating its opening phrases, and a sudden plunge into A flat, from which the music returns to C almost casually, as though nothing had happened. When the opening returns at the recapitulation, those silences are artfully filled in by the first violin, and the second main theme swings off on a new development of its own.
The short adagio begins in a mood of measured solemnity. This, though, scarcely prepares us for the rhapsodic, improvisatory solo for the first violin which suddenly breaks loose and continues for the rest of the movement. This is one of the more extreme examples of the kind of wildness which often shows through the urbane, polished exterior of Haydn’s music. The minuet follows without a break after a half-cadence. It is deceptively uncomplicated, except for the kind of irregular phrasing which is a frequent feature of Haydn’s minuet movements. The central trio section comes as all the more of a shock as a result. Normally this would be the most relaxed section of a classical four movement work, the last place you would expect to find music of such powerful harmonic and emotional intensity as this.
And so this extraordinary quartet gets more and more extraordinary as it goes on. The finale begins with a slow introduction - except that it is too long and wide-ranging to be just an introduction. The presto, when it finally arrives, is over in a moment, and the slow music returns to close the quartet in a pensive mood, worlds away from the exuberance we normally associate with Haydn’s instrumental finales.
String Quartet No 3, Op 94 Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
1. Duets; 2. Ostinato; 3. Solo; 4. Burlesque; 5. Recitative and Passacaglia (La Serenissima).
Britten composed his Third String Quartet, thirty years after the Quartet No 2 of 1945, partly as a result of persistent prompting by the writer and broadcaster Hans Keller. The heart operation which Britten underwent in 1973 was only partially successful and left him physically weakened. When he complained that he could scarcely move his arm to reach the top staves of an orchestral score, Keller half-jokingly replied that now was the time to work on only four staves again. The quartet, dedicated to Keller, was written for the Amadeus Quartet, who gave the first performance on 19 December 1976, two weeks after Britten’s death.
Britten had delayed his operation in order to complete the score of his last opera, Death in Venice, based on the novella by Thomas Mann. The quartet’s links with the opera are suggested by the last movement’s subtitle - La Serenissima- a traditional name for Venice, a city Britten loved. He was able to visit it for the last time in November 1975, and the quartet’s finale was written during that visit. The Recitative section makes a number of references to the opera, and the E major of the Passacaglia is the key most closely associated with the central character, Gustav von Aschenbach, the writer whose search for beauty leads to his death.
The second violin and viola set the first movement in motion with a gently oscillating pattern whose characteristic interval will make its presence felt throughout the quartet. The music explores every possible pairing of the four instruments as it moves through its central climax to the return of the opening. The second movement, vigorous, energetic, and marked ‘very fast’, is unified by the chordal figure with which it begins. Opening out rapidly from a unison E to a nine-note chord spanning nearly five octaves, this recurs several times during the course of the movement as a kind of punctuation point.
‘Solo’ is a long cantilena for the first violin, high-lying and ethereal, against slowly rising arpeggio phrases for the cello, viola and second violin in turn. In the contrasting central section it turns into a sequence of virtuoso cadenza-like passages, over freely-repeated patterns on the other instruments, before the serenity of the opening returns.
‘Burlesque’ is a second scherzo, propelled by a ferocious energy, with something of a Shostakovich-like sardonic edge. Britten began work on the quartet in October 1975; Shostakovich, a good friend of his since their first meeting in 1960, died the previous August. Michael Kennedy, in his book on Britten, suggests that this movement may have been a conscious tribute to his late colleague, and that behind the main theme of the central section – the opening theme turned into more of a waltz - stands a third figure who influenced them both, Mahler. A comic-grotesque atmosphere is created in this part of the movement by the dry, rattling sound of the second violin playing col legno (using the wood of the bow) and the viola producing a ghostly whistling by bowing on the wrong side of the bridge.
As mentioned above, the Recitative section that opens the last movement contains a number of direct quotations, for each instrument in turn, from Death in Venice. It moves without a break into the Passacaglia, in which Britten turned for the last time to a favourite technique of his, that of variations over a repeating phrase in the bass. The first violin plays the main theme over the cello’s bass pattern, from which Britten builds a radiant contrapuntal web of lines, settling eventually on an unresolved final cadence. As he said to the composer Colin Matthews, who was working as his assistant at the time, ‘I want the work to end with a question’.
© Mike Wheeler, 2011