Chiaroscuro Quartet

From Court to Salon

String Quartets by Haydn, Hensel, and Schubert.

Harry 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.

Haydn’s reputation as the father of the string quartet reflects not only his exceptional productivity—he wrote no fewer than 68 quartets, as well as a number of quartet arrangements—but also his pivotal place in music history. In 1732, the year Haydn was born, Bach and Vivaldi were still in their primes. By the time he died, 77 years later, Beethoven was industriously ushering in the Romantic era. Haydn’s lifetime thus neatly encapsulated the Classical era, and his music reflects the “classical” virtues of equilibrium, clarity, and seriousness of purpose, tempered with a playfulness and often earthy humor that have delighted listeners ever since.

Haydn’s influence was felt throughout Europe, although he spent virtually his entire career either in Vienna or in the idyllic seclusion of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s country estate near Eisenstadt. His earliest quartets, dating from the 1750s, are closely related to the popular string sonatas, sinfonias, and divertimenti that beguiled midcentury audiences. In such works the cello was largely confined to continuo-style harmonic accompaniment, but in Haydn’s hands both the bass line and the two inner voices became increasingly independent. In the Quartet in E-flat major, written in 1781 and dedicated to Grand Duke Paul of Russia, the cello still plays a mostly supporting role. But Haydn turns convention on its head in the slow movement by allowing the two lower instruments to introduce the sweetly majestic theme.

The first violin starts the ball rolling with an amiable melody in the home key whose signature motif—a brisk upbeat figure comprised of two rising sixteenth notes—underpins the entire Allegro moderato. With characteristic economy, Haydn ingeniously varies and extends this simple thematic idea, transferring it from one voice and register to another in a lighthearted game of hide and seek. The jovial Scherzo is equally sophisticated in its unassuming way: Haydn plays with the eight-bar phrase structure by repeatedly inserting “extra” bars that thwart the listener’s expectation of predictable regularity. The Largo sostenuto, in B flat, picks up the triple meter of the Scherzo, but this time in a radiantly lyrical vein, with sudden dynamic contrasts and sharply accentuated syncopations providing a hint of drama. Listen for the half-step oscillations in the accompanying voices, another subtle thematic link to the Scherzo. The high-spirited Finale is the first violinist’s show from start to finish, right up to the whimsical false endings that gave the quartet its nickname, “The Joke.”

The Other Mendelssohn

Long overshadowed by her brother Felix, Fanny Hensel has belatedly come to be recognized as an estimable composer in her own right. Unlike Clara Schumann, who subordinated her composing career to that of her husband, Robert, Hensel produced a steady stream of works both before and after her marriage to the Prussian court painter Wilhelm Hensel in 1829. The fashionable musical salon that she established at their home in Berlin provided a venue for performances of her music, sheltered from the harsh glare of publicity. The fact that Fanny’s earliest songs appeared under Felix’s name—in the Mendelssohns’ social circle it was considered unseemly for a woman to pursue a professional career—fostered a lingering perception of her music as derivative. Indeed, the majority of her works remained unpublished long after her untimely death in 1847: the first edition of her 1834 String Quartet didn’t appear until 1988, by which time the Hensel revival was in full swing.

The intimate emotional bond between sister and brother was fortified by mutual respect. As Fanny once put it, Felix “has no other musical adviser than me, and he never commits anything to paper without showing it to me first for my examination.” Equally solicitous of his good opinion, she showed Felix the manuscript of her freshly minted Quartet in E-flat major, which emulated the two quartets he had already written without slavishly imitating them. In a characteristically candid appraisal, Felix urged his sister “to pay greater heed to maintaining a certain form, particularly in the modulations—it’s perfectly all right to shatter such a form, but it is the contents themselves that must shatter it, through inner necessity. Otherwise, through such a new, unusual treatment of form and modulation the piece only becomes more vague and diffuse.” Fanny reacted to the criticism by adding a confession of her own, claiming—not without bitterness—that she lacked “the ability to sustain ideas properly and give them the needed consistency. Therefore lieder suit me best, in which, if need be, merely a pretty idea without much potential for development can suffice.”

Not for the first time, Fanny did herself an injustice, for although the Quartet abounds in the kind of “pretty ideas” that served her well in her art songs and small-scale piano pieces, her ability to sustain and develop them in interesting ways is never in doubt. Structurally, the four-movement work is divided into two symmetrical halves, each consisting of a plangent, harmonically wayward slow movement (hence Felix’s objection to “unusual” modulations) followed by a brisk allegro of more clear-cut tonality. If the breezy triplets and gossamer textures of the Allegretto call to mind one of Felix’s elfin scherzos, the long-breathed cantabile of the ensuing Romanze is charged with an emotional intensity that his music often holds at arm’s length. The energetic finale, characterized by racing chromatic passagework and a general spirit of derring-do, definitively gives the lie to the image of straitlaced domesticity that corseted many creative women of Fanny’s generation.

Intimations of Mortality

In the two great string quartets that he composed in early 1824, known as “Rosamunde” and “Death and the Maiden,” Schubert moved far beyond the precocious facility of his teenage years. (According to his own annotation on the manuscript of the B flat–major Quartet, written in 1814, he dashed off the first movement in a mere four and a half hours—a rate of roughly one bar per minute.) When one considers that he also produced his masterful Octet for strings and winds in the first few weeks of 1824, it is apparent that Schubert’s capacity for work and concentrated inspiration remained undiminished in spite of the deteriorating health, bouts of depression, and financial worries that had plagued him since he contracted syphilis in late 1822.

“Give me your hand,” whispers Death to the frightened Maiden. “I am not rough. You shall sleep gently in my arms.” Whether intimations of his own mortality inspired Schubert to base the slow movement of his next-to-last quartet on his song Der Tod und das Mädchen, written seven years earlier, is a matter for conjecture. Yet there is no mistaking the morbid sense of doom and impending loss that suffuses the score. And it is surely no accident that all four movements, unusually for Schubert and his contemporaries, are in the minor mode.

The opening Allegro, with its explosive outbursts and typically Schubertian major-minor instability, sets the tone for the entire work. Driving, insistent rhythms convey an air of grim inexorability.

The movement culminates in one of Schubert’s most vividly dramatic codas, which builds to a frenzied climax before fading into silence. The veiled, chorale-like opening of the Andante con moto is borrowed from the piano accompaniment of Schubert’s lied. Formally, the slow movement is a set of richly imaginative variations. But even absent the poetic association, it would be tempting to hear a dance of death in the first violin’s angular gestures and acrobatic leaps. By the same token, the tug-of-war between first violin and cello in the third variation suggests the Maiden’s frantic struggle with the Grim Reaper. And what does the movement’s epic journey from G minor to G major signify if not a passage from fear to submission?

The savage intensity of the Scherzo, with its lacerating crossaccents, is tempered by the D-major radiance of the middle trio section. Listen for the dotted-rhythm motif that runs through the entire movement; it will reappear, in slightly elongated form, in the main theme of the Presto—one of many subliminal threads that bind this mighty musical canvas together. After its initial headlong gallop, the finale proceeds by fits and starts. Often the music seems to wander off on a tangent, only to pick itself up and plunge forward again. Then, just as one feels the four players have exhausted their energy, they make one last prestissimo sprint to the finish line.