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About the Music.

At a Glance

The centerpiece of today’s program is a freshly minted string quartet by Saad Haddad, a young Arab American composer known for his imaginative hybridizing of Western and Middle Eastern musical traditions. Haddad’s String Quartet No. 2 is sandwiched between two masterpieces of the so- called First Viennese School: the first of Haydn’s six Op. 20 Quartets, which bedazzled audiences in the 1770s with their prodigal display of formal and melodic invention, and Beethoven’s Third “Razumovsky” Quartet of 1806.

Known as the “father” of the string quartet, Haydn occupied a pivotal place in music history. In 1732, the year of his birth, the Baroque masters Bach and Vivaldi were still in their primes. By the time he died, 77 years later, his erstwhile pupil Beethoven was ushering in the Romantic era. Haydn’s music reflects the “classical” virtues of equilibrium, clarity, and seriousness of purpose, tempered with a playfulness and often earthy humor that have delighted audiences ever since. Beethoven’s Romanticism posed greater challenges for his contemporaries. The three great quartets that he composed for the Russian count Andreas Razumovsky marked a turning point in his stylistic development. From its somberly mysterious choral introduction to its sparkling fugal finale, the C-Major Quartet holds listeners on the edges of their seats.

The Program

JOSEPH HAYDN

(1732–1809)

String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 20, No. 1

About the Composer

One of Haydn’s early biographers, Georg August Griesinger, relates how the composer first tried his hand at writing string quartets in the early 1750s. The future “father” of the string quartet was then teaching music lessons to the children of Baron Carl Joseph Fürnberg in Vienna. According to Griesinger, the baron “had an estate in Weinzierl, several stages from Vienna; from time to time he invited his parish priest, his estate manager, and Albrechtsberger (a brother of the well-known contrapuntist) in order to have a little music. Fürnberg asked Haydn to compose something that could be played by these four friends of the art. Haydn, who was then 18, accepted the proposal, and so originated his first quartet, which, immediately upon its appearance, received such uncommon applause as to encourage him to continue in this genre.

About the Work

The 68 quartets that Haydn went on to compose over the next halfcentury offer a capsule overview of his artistic development. The earliest quartets, such as the one that beguiled Baron Fürnberg and his guests, were closely related to the string sonatas, sinfonias, and lightweight divertimenti that were popular with European

audiences in the Rococo period. In these works the cello was still largely confined to continuo-style harmonic accompaniment, but in Haydn’s hands both the bass line and the quartet’s two inner voices became increasingly independent. By the time he wrote the six Op. 20 Quartets in 1772, the year of his 40th birthday, he was working out a style in which all four instruments were more or less equal partners, thereby laying the foundation for the quartets of Mozart and Beethoven.

A Deeper Listen

Although the E-flat-Major Quartet is less conspicuously innovative than its five companions, there is plenty of evidence that Haydn was determined to loosen the bonds of convention. In the opening Allegro moderato, for instance, the cello quickly sheds its traditional supporting role: listen for its rambunctious dialogue with the first violin in the movement’s minor-key midsection, as the two instruments volley ricocheting 16th-note figures back and forth against a static backdrop of slowly shifting harmonies. The Menuetto’s jovial bounciness contrasts with the suave, hymnlike solemnity of the slow movement (marked “with feeling and sustained”), though both movements are in lilting triple meters. The zesty Finale is notable for its light, transparent texture; the music’s rhythmic buoyancy is accentuated by chains of syncopations that pit the two violins against the lower strings.

SAAD HADDAD

(b. 1992)

String Quartet No. 2

World Premiere, Vol. 22 of Caramoor’s commissioning project: A String Quartet Library for the 21st Century

About the Composer

Born in Georgia to a Lebanese mother and a Jordanian father, Saad Haddad embodies the fertile fusion of cultures that has enriched America’s classical and popular music scenes in recent decades. The 29-year-old composer grew up in the musical melting pot of southern California, in a household where Michael Jackson figuratively rubbed shoulders with Mozart and the traditional musicians of the Arab world. Now based in New York, where he is a Dean’s Fellow at Columbia University and a Young Concert Artists Composer-in-Residence, Haddad has long made a specialty of grafting Arabic compositional and performance idioms onto Western instruments. A case in point is the String Quartet he wrote in 2017 for the Lydian String Quartet, which incorporates elements as diverse as Middle Eastern drumming technique, a fugue from Bach’s WellTempered Clavier, and the microtonal scale patterns associated with the traditional Arabic melodic modes.

In the Composer’s Words

In writing my second string quartet, I looked back to a movement of my first string quartet, Fugha, which superimposed the Arab maqamat (modes) over the harmonic motion of a fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier by J. S. Bach. As I composed, I quite enjoyed this process of ruminating