Joseph Haydn Quartet in D Major, Op. 64, No. 5, "The Lark" Haydn wrote his Op. 64 Quartets in 1790, just as he was about to embark on the pivotal journey of his career. He had spent most of his life in the service of the Esterházy princes and, while working for them, had produced an astounding amount of music, all of it highly competent and most of it superb. But his old employer had just died, the new prince was unsympathetic, and the English impresario, Peter Salomon, had been opportuning Haydn for some time to leave Vienna and visit London. Haydn must have had some trepidation about such a grand undertaking. Certainly his friends thought he should. At a dinner just before Haydn left for London, Mozart cautioned the older composer, You have no education for the great world, and you speak too few languages. But what Haydn lacked in experience he made up in confidence. Oh! he replied, my language is understood all over the world. That confidence was not unfounded; certainly Haydn s name would have already been familiar to London audiences. Critics and journalists like the renowned music historian Charles Burney had sympathetically introduced Haydn s music to British concert-goers and prepared them for what might be unfamiliar about the composer s work. Burney conceded that Continental listeners were sometimes baffled by Haydn s innovations, by his mixture of the serious and the comic, and those audiences were sometimes unable to keep pace with his inspiration. But Burney argued that familiarity would reveal to listeners how skilled a composer Haydn actually was, and even professors would respect him for his science just as for his invention.
Burney s introduction must have worked because Londoners took up Haydn with all the fervor they could muster. He was fêted, and interviewed, and traveled around to the point that he feared for his health. But even with all this acclaim, he retained the working habits that had been a character trait since his youth, and he continued composing as part of his daily routine. As he said, Except for the nobility, I admit no callers until 2 o clock. Those work habits served Haydn well in England. He and Salomon had promised that the public would be treated to a New Piece of Music at every concert they put on during the 1791 season. Not all of the music was as new as advertised. For some concerts, Haydn recycled a few of his so-called Paris symphonies; though not strictly speaking new, they were unheard as yet by British concert-goers. But the Op. 64 quartets were genuinely fresh work. Still in manuscript and promised to a British publisher, Haydn had brought them with him from Vienna and premiered at least some of them during the concert series. The Op. 64 string quartets were not just new but also very good, with the fifth quartet of the group generally regarded as the best of the excellent lot. The work follows the standard fourmovement form of the late eighteenth-century string quartet. The first movement opens with an almost banal, march-like introduction in the three lower strings before the first violin comes in with a beautiful, chirping tune in its upper register, a tune which serves to introduce the rest of the movement and whose avian quality incidentally gives the whole quartet its nickname, the Lark. The second movement is much more lyrical and leisurely paced. The opening theme, in A Major, has a graceful melodic quality and is contrasted by the middle section in A Minor. The initial section returns and finishes the movement with a more decorated version of the opening melody.
The third movement is a minuet-trio and features that mixture of serious and comic that Burney mentioned, while the last movement is a breathless perpetuum mobile. Fast and brief the movement brings the quartet to a quietly spectacular close. --Dennis Loranger, Lecturer in Music, Wright State University
Leoš Janáček String Quartet no. 1 Leoš Janáček was a Czech composer mostly known for his operas, though he composed in many genres. Born in 1854 in Moravia (one of the historical Czech lands) and educated in Czech schools he worked as both an educator and an organist. As a young man he had devoted himself assiduously to the study of composition, but his efforts in that line were relatively unsuccessful, and he came close to almost completely relinquishing the discipline. Though he slowed his compositional practice he still continued to study music. He was particularly interested in folksong, and he both collected and arranged thousands of examples of central European folk music. And, even when he was not actively composing, he must have still been subconsciously thinking about music for he developed a technique he called speech melody. He would take down in musical notation little bits of conversation he overheard, and he would use those scraps to understand, or at least discern, the thoughts of the people speaking. But, despite those efforts, his career lay fallow. By the time he was 60 years old he was only an obscure composer, respected in Moravia, but little known elsewhere. And that was when his career really took off. Through the persistence of friends, and careful editing by the musicians of the Prague National Theatre, his opera Jenůfa was premiered in Prague in 1916. And it was an instant sensation. His success in Prague led to a remarkable burst of creative activity. He wrote patriotic orchestral works celebrating Czechoslovakia s independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And he continued to write operas, the most successful of which was The Cunning Little Vixen, begun in 1922 and completed a year later.
The String Quartet no. 1 was written about the same time as The Cunning Little Vixen. It had been written at the request of the Czech Quartet, an ensemble centered in Prague and whose reputation was international in scope. The quartet is subtitled Kreutzer Sonata after the Tolstoy novella of the same name. Tolstoy s novella, in turn, was itself named after Beethoven s Violin Sonata no. 9, sometimes referred to as the Kreutzer Sonata after its dedicatee, the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. The Tolstoy novella tells the story of an ill-fated marriage in which the wife, bored with her life and her spouse, takes up the piano and falls in love with a violinist after they play the Beethoven sonata together. Her husband, in a fit of jealous rage, kills his wife. Something in the story spoke to Janáček and he wrote a piano trio based on the novella. The trio was first performed in 1909, but Janáček never published it. Perhaps he saw the trio form was not right for the material; at any rate he later reworked the trio into the String Quartet no. 1. The first movement has two short themes, sounding almost simultaneously. The first is a lovely and haunting melody in the violin, a melody answered by a carping theme first heard in the cello. That contrast in themes is apparent in the second movement as well. There a dance melody is interrupted a wispy tremolo played by the viola. The third movement opens with another lovely duet between the violin and cello, a duet obviously intended to evoke the music-making of the wife and her violinist friend, but that duet is continually interrupted by a shrieking violin and viola.. The fourth movement opens with a theme reminiscent of the first movement s melody, but much more subdued. The music s motion accelerates, growing more and more agitated until it fades away into an echo of the work s introduction.
--Dennis Loranger, Lecturer in Music, Wright State University
Ludwig van Beethoven Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 127 Ludwig van Beethoven s last five string quartets are considered by many the pinnacle of his work as a composer. In them he took music to a new level of artistry, and accordingly influenced other composers and musicians down to our own day. The Quartet in E-Flat Major, as well as the next two quartets Beethoven wrote, had been commissioned by the Russian nobleman and amateur cellist Nikolai Galitzin. Galitzin had first contacted Beethoven about the commission in 1822, while the composer was in midst of preparations for his Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony. Despite some dithering on Beethoven s part, the nobleman kept at him and the E-Flat Quartet was finished in early 1825. The quartet was premiered by an ensemble led by the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh. Schuppanzigh had worked often with Beethoven and had premiered several of the composer s earlier quartets. And he was not just a competent performer; he was sympathetic to Beethoven s vision, and strove to provide a good hearing of the work. But, despite his efforts, the first performance was a failure and, as happened all too frequently with the irascible composer s friends, Schuppanzigh found himself in Beethoven s bad books. Some of that poor initial reception may have indeed been Schuppanzigh s fault. Perhaps he under-rehearsed the piece, or perhaps he and his ensemble were simply not up to the challenges of Op. 127. However, it may be that the work failed, initially anyway, not because it was a challenge for the performer, but because it was difficult for its audience. Certainly Beethoven appears to have entertained that idea. In subsequent concerts featuring the E-Flat Quartet, he programmed two complete, consecutive performances of the work so that audiences
would have a second chance, in one evening, to absorb and assimilate both the quartet s complexities and its musical beauties. Although the work may have puzzled its first audiences its broad outlines were not new. Beethoven lays the quartet out in a four-movement form, typical of the era. The first movement even follows, more or less, a standard sonata-allegro pattern. Beethoven opens the movement with enormous chords played by the whole ensemble, chords he asks to be played Maestoso majestic and then follows those chords with a beautiful and lighter contrapuntal texture that he asks to be played teneramente, tenderly. This contrast between majesty and tenderness informs the rest of the movement. The second movement is enormous, usually taking something like fifteen minutes to perform. The movement s length surely must have been a surprise to the quartet s first audiences, who would have expected something more terse, but, if we can pace our expectations, the leisurely gait of this movement, a set of variations on the lovely opening theme, has many charms. The third movement is a scherzo filled with rhythmic surprises and is more contrapuntal than the preceding movement. The skipping rhythm of the main tune is contrasted by the breakneck scurrying of the trio. The fourth movement begins with another allegro section, such as one might expect in a final movement, but that allegro suddenly becomes something almost ethereal, an abrupt contrast that points toward a different way of thinking about music. --Dennis Loranger, Lecturer in Music, Wright State University