The Unfolding Story of a Genius - Haydn’s String Quartets

The quartet we are playing in the Festival (Event Two) is the last but one of Haydn’s quartets (Op. 76 No. 5). He was in his mid-60s and brought to the Op. 76 quartets all his long, mature understanding of the inner life of the string quartet, played by virtuoso professional musicians and a heightened sense of musical emotion. These quartets defined the future of the string quartet for years to come and are the pinnacle of Haydn's lifetime’s output of 68 string quartets. Even the super-confident Beethoven held back (not for long) from writing string quartets respectful of Haydn’s gift.

The Haydn String Quartet Legacy

Haydn's string quartet legacy comprises 68 works written over the span of nearly fifty years and includes at least twenty-five unequivocal masterpieces. They were generally published in groups of six (or three) of which there are several landmark sets, each with its own personality, ingenuity and style. They transformed the genre shaped by the stirrings of the Romantic movement as a reaction against Enlightenment rationality.  Haydn was very tuned into the changing cultural and political landscape he lived in, despite being ensconced for many years at the Esterházy court.

In 1766, age 34, Haydn was appointed Kapellmeister at the amazing palace of Prince Nicholas Esterházy. The prince lavished his considerable wealth on creating an architectural masterpiece and artistic hub; a haven with expansive gardens, an opera house, a museum and much more. His staff included a 25-piece orchestra. Haydn directed the musicians and composed prolifically for them. Among the musicians and friends with Haydn at Esterházy were two excellent cellists, Joseph Weigl and an internationally famous player Anton Kraft. The orchestra’s virtuoso leader, Luigi Tomasini, was also a great friend. Having such high-class musicians meant that there was little technical constraint on Haydn’s compositional genius.

In the course of the five years from 1768 to 1772 Haydn published three sets of quartets, Op 9 and 17 culminating in the six of Op. 20. Haydn’s genius at this time was his discovery of what is obvious to us now but was entirely new then; that a string quartet has four independent voices, liberating the cello thanks to the virtuoso cellists in the orchestra, notably Anton Craft. The technical facility of the players, Haydn’s extraordinary structural genius, his willingness to experiment, and a continuing maturing of his creative powers enabled him to explore the subtle development of his thematic material and above all its emotional implications. The Op 20 quartets transformed the idea of the string quartet for ever.

But then, he wrote no more quartets for a decade, until the Op 33 set was published in 1782. Probably all his energies were used directing the music for 50 operas (5 his own compositions) and various marionette theatre productions and hundreds of chamber music works for Prince Nikolaus to join in with at the Esterházy palace.

His return to writing symphonies and quartets may partly be due to an affair the unhappily married Haydn had with an attractive but not very good singer Luigia Polzelli. Prince Nikolaus retained her and her equally mediocre violinist husband for Haydn's sake. By 1780 energy flowed back and he started to compose symphonies and string quartets again. Haydn was now fifty years old.

There is another important reason for the return to the quartet genre. For the first time in his long tenure at Esterházy Haydn was given the right to publish his music independently, on the open market. This historical moment corresponds with the growth of a nascent publishing industry in Vienna. The Op.33 quartets, written in the summer and autumn of 1781, were published by one of the Viennese publishers Artaria who would join the league of other international publishing houses in London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc. creating an international media network for new printed music.

Within a short time, Haydn's quartets were on music stands all over Europe as exemplars of Viennese classical chamber music. Perhaps with widening his marketing appeal in mind Haydn dedicated the set to the Grand Duke Paul of Russia (the son of Catherine the Great) – hence the common soubriquet for the set of six, the Russian quartets. Many (if not all) of the quartets were premiered on Christmas Day, 1781, at the Viennese apartment of the Duke's wife, Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna.

What clearly is ‘new’ about the Op.33 is that Haydn created music that toyed with convention, surprised expectation, engaged players and listeners with fresh delight and made music that was more self-aware. These are the first quartets in which Haydn uses the title "Scherzo" for his minuet-derived dance movements, an Italian word meaning "joke". There is indeed a lot of humour in these quartets making the music naturally somewhat lighter, less serious and studious than the Op.20s. The tempi, particularly for most of the opening movements, are more moderate, even relaxed. There is time to converse, argue, sing, dance and play. Each movement of each quartet is a unique creation spanning the gamut of emotion, character and technical ingenuity while also maintaining a sense of balance within each quartet as a whole.

String Quartet Op. 76 No. 5 ‘Largo’

Fast forward to 1790. The Opus 76 set of six quartets which were the last and arguably the greatest of Haydn’s quartets moving the genre forward in scale and virtuosity, all six quartets unequivocal masterpieces.

They have their origin with the death of his patron Prince Nicholas Esterházy. Haydn was free to accept the impresario Salomon’s offer to spend a year in London. What Haydn discovered there was nothing like the rarefied, intimate salon of the Esterházy court but an 800-seat hall buzzing with all sorts of people, attentive and excited. Responding to the London crowd and its vibrant musical scene Haydn’s six new ‘London’ symphonies, were written – during the visit - for a larger orchestra, bigger hall and much bigger audiences than at Esterházy, and were a sensation.

Concert in Vauxhall Gardens 1779

He immediately planned a second visit for 1794-95. Inspired by the enthusiastic, forward thinking London audiences. This time he composed more symphonies, beautiful neo-Romantic piano sonatas, two sets of string quartets (Opus 71 and Opus 74) and much more. For his quartets, Inspired by this more public, upbeat context - and because they were programmed alongside the symphonies - Haydn conjured music with clear textures, virtuosic playing - especially the first violin – brilliant and wonderfully tuneful; attention grabbing!

War against the French and the “Erdödy” Quartets (Op 76)

After the French Revolution the European monarchies were at war with the new Republic. 1796, Vienna faced a political crisis. The French aimed to encircle Vienna through a three-pronged invasion.. While the French armies initially achieved some success, they ultimately faced setbacks, including the defeat at Sambre-et- Meause, Amberg and Würzburg. A third army, commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte approached Vienna through northern Italy but the Republican forces were too thinly spread which weakened the overall French position and ultimately averted a direct threat to Vienna.

Haydn, on his return to Vienna from London, found himself in the middle of this political crisis with the city under threat of invasion. Vienna was in a state of emergency, and a civilian militia had been mobilized to protect the city. In England Haydn had been exposed to a newly emerging genre: ‘the national anthem’. Haydn suggested the idea of an anthem to rally patriotic hearts and spur military recruitment the way “God Save the King” did in England. A state commission followed and Haydn, contributed a beautiful, heartfelt national song to the cause. “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” (“God Protect Emperor Franz”) It was a bold challenge to the “Marseillaise. The “Kaiserlied” was an instant success. 30 years later  it morphed into “Deutschland über Alles” and became the national anthem of the now unified German state.

Despite all this turmoil, or perhaps because of it, Haydn’s creative energy carried forward to the quartets of Op. 76, written between 1796 and 1797. The so called Erdödy” Quartets were named after Count Joseph Erdödy who commissioned them from the now wealthy, international celebrity.

The quartet we are playing in the Festival (Event Two) is the last but one of Haydn’s 68 quartets. Haydn was in his mid-60s and brought to the Op. 76 quartets all his  long, mature understanding of the inner life of the string quartet, played by virtuoso professional musicians and a heightened sense of musical emotion. These quartets defined the future of the string quartet for years to come and are the pinnacle of Haydn's lifetime’s output of 68 string quartets. Even the super-confident Beethoven held back (not for long) from writing string quartets respectful of Haydn’s gift.

Op.76 No. 5 has been nicknamed ‘Largo’ after the particularly affective slow movement. Placed second following the well-established standard essentially after Haydn’s own examples, it amply lives up to the tempo and character directions in its title “Largo. Cantabile e mesto.” What might initially seem like a contradiction, “singing and melancholy” is perfectly and poignantly reflected in music that sings heartfelt and hymn-like in a major key but then darkens into a minor key by turns of phrase in a musical chiaroscuro. “Simple” yet profound, it is surely one of Haydn’s greatest creations and it follows that the quartet’s nickname would highlight this movement.

Op.76 No. 5 opens with a surprise: rather than a dramatic introduction or a terse theme, Haydn begins with moderately-paced lyrical “song” in a text-book two-part form initially sounding more like a slow movement placed first. Extremely unusual for Haydn’s string quartets, the movement turns out to be a loose and fanciful theme and variations. The little song becomes the vehicle for some of the finest quartet writing to date with elegant polyphony, classical panache and an accelerating, frothy, champagne-like energy.

A short third-movement minuet and trio follows. The minuet marked as allegro with the qualifier “not too much” seems consistent with the first two movements in sustaining a kind of elegant gentility, so the minuet gives way to a slightly sinister trio featuring a rumbling wave in the cello and a surprisingly complex texture made from a diversity of independent figurations.

Any sense of moderation, Largo, or genteel restraint is immediately obliterated by the hijinks of the finale, a relatively brief but action packed romp that is a unique and freewheeling design somewhere between a condensed sonata and a rondo. The violin and cello take off in a dashing call and response racing up and down scales, around cadences and leaping with surprising modulations in a breathless chase that even mimics hunting horns. As he proved over and over again, Haydn knew how to write an ending. Moreover, this, his penultimate quartet, could hardly be further away from the gentilities of the Esterházy court where it all began over three decades ago.