From Court to Salon String Quartets by Haydn, Hensel, and Schubert
Har r y Haskell
Written over a span of some 50 years, the three works on tonight’s program bridge the transition from the Classical to the Romantic eras, when the court-centered musical culture of the 18th century gradually gave way to the salons and public concerts associated with the growing middle class of the early 1800s. Significantly, all three composers had the luxury of not having to cater either to the demands of capricious patrons or to the fickle fancies of the paying public. Joseph Haydn’s sinecure as house composer to Hungary’s noble Esterházy clan left him free to pursue his interest in the emerging string quartet genre, so long as he fulfilled his other obligations to his employer. The bourgeois environment in which Franz Schubert and Fanny Hensel worked was quite different. A free-lance musician who lived largely hand to mouth, Schubert premiered many of his works at private house parties in Vienna known as “Schubertiades.” Hensel, born into a prominent German Jewish family and married to a painter on the royal payroll, had no such financial worries. Yet she too unveiled most of her music at soirées in the privacy of her own home in Berlin—after first seeking the approval of her younger brother, Felix Mendelssohn.
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