Vivace assai
Lento e cantabile
Scherzo: Allegro
Finale: Allegretto
After the op. 20 quartets, there was a gap of nine years before Haydn returned to the genre with the op. 33 set. The theatre had suddenly become Prince Nicholas's great interest and Haydn had to write five operas of his own and be responsible for the production of over fifty others to cater for his employer's new found passion.
On 3 December 1781, however, Haydn wrote to potential patrons announcing the publication of six "brand new a quatro… written in an entirely new and special style". Although it is often suggested that this claim was little more than a selling point, the new quartets do show a new style of thematic development and texture, a style which, in the words of Charles Rosen "respects the distinction of melody and accompaniment and then transforms one into the other". It is a neat summing-up which, though generally true, is definitely not applicable to the slow movement of the present quartet which consists of a long, ecstatic aria for first violin with the other instruments kept firmly in their place, with each allotted a single accompanimental figure which they maintain - almost unbrokenly - throughout.
Although each of the Haydn quartets is unique - Haydn is the most structurally inventive all the great composers - the op. 33 set contains a number of features that he will explore again in the later quartets. Thus, the first (sonata form) movement of the present quartet - remarkable for the amount of development that takes place in the recapitulation - opens with an ending: a cadential figure that will eventually do the decent thing and fulfil its proper function in the last bars of the movement. It is a trick that Haydn will use again in the finale of op. 76 no. 5. Here, however, the opening cadence is eventually and subtly integrated into the material of the Finale itself, a set of variations that gives every instrument (except the second violin), a chance to shine.
The second innovation in the op. 33 quartets is the replacing of the traditional Menuetto movement with a movement that is now entitled Scherzo. The third movement of op. 33 no. 5, with its habitually asymmetric five- and ten-bar phrase structures, again looks forward to something that will become a feature of many of the later quartets by exploiting the rhythmic ambiguity of having 2/4 patterns in a 3/4 metre.
The whole set of op. 33 quartets received its first - command - performance on Christmas Day 1781 before the Grand Duke Paul of Russia and his wife who were visiting Vienna. The Pressburger Zeitung reported on the occasion, noting that the performance was "received with gracious applause by the illustrious audience who were pleased to present Herr Haydn with a magnificent enamelled golden box, set with brilliants, and each of the other musicians with a golden snuff box".
© Douglas Jarman
Andante
Agitato
Pesante
Like so many Russian composers of his generation who had to compose under the restrictions of an artistic policy determined by the Soviet State, Schnittke was forced to compose in isolation until the mid-1980s and it was only in the last fifteen years of his life that he became well-known in the rest of Europe.
A feature of much of Schnittke's music is the extent to which it draws on, quotes or mimics the music of the past - not, as in the neo-Classical Stravinsky, to dissect and objectify its conventions but to create a deliberately poly-stylistic music that explores a security that has disappeared; to "create a tragic quality" by its references to what, according to the composer, is "a beautiful way of writing that has disappeared and will never come back."
The Third String Quartet, written in 1983, is a striking example of Schnittke's use of the past. The first movement opens with three quotations: the beginning of a setting of a Stabat Mater of Lassus; the theme of the Grosse Fugue of Beethoven, and the D-E flat-C-B motif, the musical cryptogram, based on the letters of the composers' own name, that permeates so many of Shostakovitch's quartets. The work as a whole is a progression from this musical past to a more obviously contemporary idiom. In the first movement, the three themes are explored in a stylistically heterogeneous, but essentially backward-looking, context; in the second movement the themes, although still present, undergo a progressive metamorphosis as the retrospective elements gradually weaken. By movement three, the transformation is complete.
© Douglas Jarman
Mesto - Vivace
Mesto - Marcia
Mesto - Burletta. Moderato
Mesto
Bartók composed the Sixth Quartet in 1939, thirty years after he had completed the First. Although he left fragmentary sketches for a seventh quartet at this death, the Sixth was to be his last work in the medium. To claim that the position of each quartet within Bartók's career defines it as a resumé of a particular phase in his creative development has become a cliché of criticism, but like all clichés it contains an element of truth. The relative simplicity of the Sixth Quartet, the last work Bartók was to compose on Hungarian soil before his self-imposed wartime exile in Switzerland and America, has a directness missing from its two immediate predecessors, complementing the move towards a new simplicity as revealed in late works like the Concerto for Orchestra or the Third Piano Concerto. Although it would be overstating things to say it marks a return to the world of the first two quartets, there is something to be said of seeing the cycle as outlining the sort of arch that Bartók had turned to as a structural device within some of them, a progression towards and away from the complexities of the Fourth Quartet.
Bartók does not use arch from here. The Quartet's structure underwent quite considerable revision during the course of its composition. Bartók conceived it in four movements, but with a different, quick moto perpetuo as the fourth, and without the Mesto introductions to the first three. Mesto literally means sad, a reflection no doubt of the composer's feelings at having to leave Hungary, perhaps sensing in his heart that he would not return. The introductions were added before the original finale was abandoned. The changes were undoubtedly for the better, since in the Quartet's definitive form the last movement acts as both the slow movement and as an extended recapitulation of the thematically linked Mesto sections. The first movement is a sonata form, with an abridged recapitulation as part of the movement proper, the principle ideas of which reappear in the finale, thereby echoing the delayed recapitulation techniques of the Third Quartet. Both of the middle movements are ternary forms, the first a march and the second a burlesque whose middle section affords no real respite from its overall sardonic humour.
What of the Mesto introductions themselves, and the finale which they anticipate? One motivating factor has already been mentioned. It is also true that the Quartet was written while the composer's mother was dying. If we wanted to reduce the work to its simplest level, we could see it as three movements which try with difficulty to maintain a mood of vitality and exuberance in the face of an every-present element of tragedy, followed by one in which the attempt is given up and escapism yields to resignation.
© Geoffrey Thomason