STRING QUARTET IN A MAJOR, OP. 20, NO. 6, HOB III: 36
Josef Haydn (b. Rohrau, Lower Austria, March 31, 1732; d. Vienna, May 31, 1809)
Composed 1772; 17 minutes
That the Hungarian noble family Esterházy played a significant role in Josef Haydn’s life seriously understates the value of their patronage. He was first hired by Paul Esterházy in 1761, and after Paul’s death in 1762, Haydn spent the succeeding decades until 1790, his most productive years, living and working in the employ of Paul’s brother Nicholas. The family spent winters at their primary residence in Eisenstadt, and beginning in 1766, at their summer estate, Esterháza.
The music-loving Nicholas provided Haydn with a generous income and an elegant environment in which to work and compose. At Esterháza, Haydn occupied a suite of four rooms in a building that housed the estate’s other resident staff. In return, Haydn provided Nicholas with a staggering amount of music for the entertainment of the family and their many guests. (The magnificent Esterházy estate drew a constant stream of elite visitors, nobility and royals, who held it in the same high regard accorded the Imperial Palace at Schönbrunn in Vienna.)
In Esterháza’s concert rooms and two opera houses, the resident orchestra of 25 musicians performed a variety of Haydn works ranging from instrumental and vocal solos and chamber music to operas and symphonies, all of which Haydn composed to order. They included dozens of string trios and the early string quartets.
Haydn has been called “Father of the String Quartet” with good reason. The String Quartet in A Major was one of a set of six that Haydn composed and performed at Esterháza in 1772 and sold to the publisher Hummel. Hummel released them as Opus 20, Nos. 1-6. The handsome publication opened with a striking frontispiece featuring an etching of the rising sun. Since that time, the six have been known as the “Sun Quartets.” The Dutch musicologist Anthony van Hoboken (1887-1983) followed that nomenclature in his catalogue of Haydn’s compositions, continuing to call them the “Sun Quartets” and assigning them the Hoboken Nos. III:31-36. Recognized as an important turning point in Haydn’s string writing, the Sun Quartets demonstrate his increased confidence in creating balanced roles for the four parts, while capitalizing on the individual sounds of the four stringed instruments.
Thanks to Nicholas Esterházy’s appreciation for music, he hired top-rate instrumentalists for his chamber music and orchestra concerts. Haydn took full advantage of having excellent resident string musicians at hand, which allowed him to include complex contrapuntal passages. The first violin gained prominence, and the entire ensemble acquired a structure and coherence, evident in all the Sun Quartets.
STRING QUARTET NO. 1 (LES SIX RENCONTRES)
Sir Stephen Hough (b. Heswall, United Kingdom, November 22, 1961)
Composed 2021; 21 minutes
Sir Stephen Hough dedicated his String Quartet No. 1 to the Takács Quartet, who gave the first performance on December 8, 2021. The composer has provided the following program notes about his String Quartet No. 1, which is subtitled, “Les six rencontres,” or “The six meetings”:
This piece was conceived after an invitation from the Takács Quartet to write a companion work for a recording of the quartets of Ravel and Dutilleux. It was a thrilling if daunting challenge and it gave me an immediate idea as I considered these two colossi who strode across the length of the 20th century—not so much what united their musical languages, but what was absent from them, not to mention the missing decades between the Ravel Quartet of 1903 and Dutilleux’s Ainsi la Nuit from the mid-1970s.
The term “Les Six,” referring to the group of six French composers most prominently active around the interwar years, evokes a flavor more than a style—and it’s a flavor rarely found in the music of Ravel and Dutilleux. In Les Six it’s not so much a lack of seriousness, although seeing life through a burlesque lens is one recurring ingredient; rather it’s an aesthetic review of the world after the catastrophe of the Great War. Composers like Poulenc and Milhaud were able to discover poignance in the rough and tumble of daily human life in a way which escaped the fastidiousness of those other two composers. Stravinsky, one of the godfathers of Les Six, supposedly referred to Ravel as “the most perfect Swiss watchmaker.” Poulenc and his party could never be accused of being clock-watchers; their social hours were dimly lit by sputtering candles as the parties continued through the night, with Jean Cocteau or Picasso (other godfathers) opening yet another bottle of Bordeaux.
The subtitle for my Quartet No. 1 has in it a pun and a puzzle: the six movements as an echo of “Les Six,” although there are not quotes or direct references from those composers; and “encounters” which are unspecified, their phantom occurrence leaving only a trace in the memory of the places where the meetings might have taken place.
Au boulevard
Stravinskian spikes elbow across the four instruments with jagged accents, darting arpeggios and bracing white-note harmonies. No sharps or flats appear until bar 35 when the main theme is suddenly transformed into technicolor for the central section, blushed with sentiment and exactly half tempo.
Au parc
Under a pizzicato accompaniment a gentle, melancholy melody floats and is passed around the players in a haze of decorative variations, the central section warming the trope like vermouth around a bitter olive.
À l’hôtel
A bustling fugato, its short subject incorporating repeated notes, an arpeggio and a scale, patters in metronomic conversation until it suddenly finds itself swept off its feet on a decadent dance floor. It is soon exhausted and the opening material returns, now inverted and condensed, until a hectic coda hurries the theme through many keys with offbeat, snapping chords in pursuit.
Au théâtre
A spiccatissimo skeleton of a motive dances in a recurring harmonic sequence, decorating each repetition in more and more lurid colors. Then comes a sudden change of mood with the viola’s plangent amoroso melody pushing the music forward to a splashing climax. The swirls of arpeggios segue to ferocious tremolo underneath the first violin’s piangendo statement of the opening theme. As the music totters on the edge of despair, there is a meltdown into a coda of consolation where the viola reimagines the opening theme in smooth, consoling D-flat Major.
À l’église
We remain in D-flat Major for this serene hymn which is sewn together into one four-part seam across the muted instruments—with a glance perhaps back to Ravel’s teacher, Gabriel Fauré.
Au marché
This whole movement energetically tosses material from one player to the other in a moto perpetuo of exuberance. Material from the rest of the piece reappears (most prominently the harmonic progression in the middle of the second movement) until the work ends as it began with the first movement’s Stravinskian spikes, interrupted in the penultimate bar with a feroce quote of the opening of the third movement.
QUINTET FOR PIANO AND STRINGS IN F MINOR, OP. 34
Johannes Brahms (b. Hamburg, May 7, 1833; d. Vienna, April 3, 1897)
Composed 1861, 1864; 40 minutes
In the three years prior to his permanent move in 1865 to Vienna, Johannes Brahms continued to make Northern Germany his home. In Hamm, a suburb of Hamburg, he began composition of a piano quintet in 1861. Like many of Brahms’s compositions, his Piano Quintet in F minor came to life only after a long gestation period, during which the work changed form several times. This Piano Quintet originated as a composition for strings alone—a string quintet that featured two cellos.
In 1862, Brahms took his new string quintet to his close friend and musical confidante the violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907). Having toured extensively with Joachim, Brahms respected his friend’s opinions, particularly in writing for strings. Upon reading through the new work with Brahms, Joachim suggested some changes to “mitigate the harshness of some passages.”
When more tinkering failed to create the work he wanted, Brahms abandoned the string quintet and re-wrote the piece as a sonata for two pianos. In this form, Brahms performed it publicly in Vienna with the great pianist Carl Tausig (1841-1871), and he saw the Sonata through to publication (available today as Op. 34b).
A few months later in the summer of 1864, Brahms returned to these materials and once again recast them. This attempt, in the form of a piano quintet, finally pleased him. He allowed its publication in 1865. The Erard Quartet and the pianist Louise Langhans-Japha played the premier performance on June 22, 1866 in Leipzig.
Brahms was an outstanding pianist himself (albeit increasingly reluctant to perform publicly), so it is not surprising that he composed so frequently and so well for the instrument. Out of his 24 chamber music pieces, all of them large-scale works, 17 have a part for piano. The work we now call the Piano Quintet is often called the strongest and most successful of them all.
From the grand beginning of the drama, the ensemble declares in unison, that they will tell a serious, even tragic tale. They allow little relief from the stormy mood; even the first movement’s calmer moments are unrelentingly sorrowful. The sweet Andante, with its preponderance of thirds and sixths, gives respite, but the agitation of the strings’ entrance in the third movement recalls us to the tragedy. The Scherzo has grim energy, which gives pause only momentarily in the lyrical trio section. A poignant search for a harmonic home sets the final movement in motion. The piano and the strings reinforce a sense of bewilderment. Moments of repose cannot forestall the eventual conclusion, a coda of explosive F minor energy.
— Program notes by Sandra Hyslop